Its basically a bunch of bullshit, shame on Slashdot for posting about a story that was a non-issue weeks ago.
And if you read the article that I linked to from Space.com, the topic was the fact that this is BS causing NASA problems. I posted this story to raise the discussion and awareness of misinformation causing problems for NASA despite their rigorous methodologies (which I also linked to).
I apologize if you and anyone who feels like I propagated FUD, I only meant to draw attention to the fact that it was mere rumors causing a severe amount of fall out that should never have happened. Hence my final sentence in the submission.
This isn't evolutionary adaptation - it's much more simple than that. If you start killing all of the lizards with long legs, the ones with short legs are going to mate and have offspring with short legs. There is nothing new or "adapted." Also, if the short-legged ones get away and the long-legged ones don't, isn't that going to inherently affect how many have long legs and how many have short, by proportion?
If you read the article, maybe you would wonder why the lizards didn't just keep growing longer legs to outrun the predators. After all, they just introduced a predator slightly bigger than the lizards. Instead the lizards took to the trees and short legs were the better feature. If the species hadn't taken to the trees, they may have grown longer and longer legs as the predators killed the shorter legged animals. So while the predators killed the lizards, they made a choice to escape by running up trees. Had they not climbed trees, evolution may have taken a different route and they might have become longer legged animals. The study pushes for the reader to realize that these animals had to evolve one way or another to stay alive--but they made a behavioral choice to live in trees.
Well, as I am the poster of this story and enjoy many things about evolution (book recommendation), I'll give you the best answer I can though I am not an evolutionary biologist. First off, anything about evolution is controversial. Second, it's controversial because if these animals didn't become tree-born, this quick evolution of short legs never would have happened. A lot of evolutionary theory revolves around evolution not by choice (example of the brown moths becoming dominant over white moths during the industrial revolution when smoke and carbon on trees and buildings hid them). But this almost suggests that the decision to take to the trees is in and of itself a factor in evolution. So it appears that there is evolution by way of behavior in addition to random mutations. I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of people consider evolution to be purely random... but this study suggests that behavioral choices influence that.
Maybe you can argue that it was only natural for them to seek safety in the trees but I think that this study addresses something we must face. If you believe in evolution, you have to acknowledge that it's not only random genetics but also influenced by the behaviors of the animals granted those random mutations. If the lizards had behaved differently and not gone to the trees, perhaps longer and longer legs would have been developed until they were fast enough to outrun their predators. Or perhaps the species just would have been eradicated on the island.
Controversial because it implies that species may be able to subconsciously choose which feature is 'evolved' to be the dominant factor.
If you want to apply this to human evolution (as one is naturally only concerned with their own species), then I suggest you read Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. What I found interesting is that in some places, humans began a farming lifestyle earlier than other hunter-gatherers. It was this decision by way of discovery that led some civilizations to outpace others. In fact, the choice or 'discovery' of planting seeds and harvesting them periodically eventually led to some regions invading and 'colonizing' other regions. Can we call this evolution? Can we say that some evolution hinges on behavioral choices? I think we can, but that's why it's controversial because it has traditionally been thought that the dominant feature was only influenced by the environment--not by a choice made by the animal.
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News flash, this site is about discussions. People set anonymous cowards to -7 so they don't have to read bullshit like the above. It isn't about being a karma whore, it's about making trite arguments invisible. It's also about being able to tell someone to go fuck themselves when they called you pathetic.
Understand genius?
Honestly, what did the above comments (or your own even) add to the fucking relevant discussion?
My God but you are a karma whore. You resort to posting anonymously for follow-ups? Is there some prize for having a high karma history that I don't know about? Pathetic.
My God but you are stupid. You resort to replying to anonymous follow-ups? Is there some prize for taking the conversation off-topic? Pathetic.
"Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered," Ballmer said. This "is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability."
Do me a favor, disclose your 'undisclosed balance-sheet liability' and then we'll listen to you bitch about Linux.
I haven't seen patent one infringed upon let alone a whole balance sheet's worth so you'll have to excuse me if I seem a bit pessimistic about you strong arming me into using SuSE.
That's right, you can spin it anyway you want... but what I see is that Novell just lost all their street cred by selling out to you. What they sold was their future in the open source community. Why do I have this strange view of it all? Well, because I have this sinking feeling that a year or two from now you're going to package some form of Linux (maybe with Windows maybe separately) and you aren't going to release the source code & you're going to earn a profit on supporting it. And people will be pissed and there will be a court case. But you'll hire a thousand and one lawyers and they'll show up and they'll point out to the judge that Linux kernel "infringed upon Windows anyway" and the deal you made with Novell only confirmed it and admitted that they were facing lawsuits from you. The whole time, there won't be any patents cited, no logic will be used but at the end of the day the judge, bless his computer ignorance, will probably agree with you and allow you to continue to release & profit from Linux. But that won't be enough, you'll go after ever user using non-Microsoft-mutated-SuSE Linux and sue every other Linux distro. If that's not your motive, why are you already issuing warnings to users of other distros?
It's not just any old regular FUD, it's new improved Microsoft FUD.
Doesn't anyone else remember marking a slew of downloads from a BBS, FTP, Usenet, or even the old Napster back in the day? You'd start your dialup modem chugging away and go off to school, work, or sleep while it ran. Same crap, different scale.
Not only do I remember that but I still use BitTorrent in the same fashion. I don't gobble up bandwidth and I'm fine with getting a fairly high quality video of unlicensed anime in about a day or two. It's kind of the same crap except it's much nicer to the rest of the internet community in how big a bandwidth hog I am.
The article goes on to say buying movies online isn't there yet.
I whole heartedly agree with that.
Disclaimer: I haven't tried online videos through iTunes or any other service but I am a user of Netflix.
I was watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for Vongo. It almost seemed too good to be true. And it was.
The commercial lead me to believe that I was going to open an account on a site and that I would be able to pay $10/month and download any movie I wanted to my hard drive. What a naïve idiot I was.
The problems I had with Vongo:
They needed my e-mail address just so I could download the client. So even if I didn't like it or join their service, they still had contact info.
You'll notice their site is in complete Flash--so is their client. And, much to my chagrin, all the movies are viewed through Flash & it's required. I had problems accessing the site with mozilla.
Not only are the files encrypted (this was expected) but they're of Flash quality meaning that they're bulky and low quality.
You don't get any movie you want, you get to pick from a selected list. But be careful, only some of those titles are free.
Of those select titles, the only one I wanted to see was The Devil & Danial Johnston. But when I wanted to download it, Vongo wanted $4 USD for it.
Two hours later, after D&DJ was finally on my laptop, I tried to watch it only to have a warning pop up informing me that once I started playing it, I had 24 hours to watch it before it deleted itself.
I could continue bitching but I think you get the idea. I was dissatisfied with Vongo & and heavily recommend everyone to stay away from it. The fact that I have to read the fine print in order to understand how their service works should have been a big warning sign. But in my opinion, the free 14 day trial isn't even worth it.
Oh, and one more thing, there was a freaking client application that was set to default start when Windows starts as a service on my laptop. Annoying and invasive.
As we learned a short while ago, this initiative will make it that much easier for bots to detect what content a site has to offer. Is this good or bad for the end users of the internet--will it just increase the incentive for spiders and bots to crawl sites? What is the real purpose of this collaboration? To me it looks like an attempt for the search engines to get content providers to make the search engine's job that much easier.
Well, I went to the sitemaps.org site & looked around for the people owning/running/maintaining the page. In the TOS, I found it to start with:
Terms of service
This is a contract between you and each of the sponsors of Sitemaps.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation (referred to collectively in this agreement as the "Sponsors," "we," or "us"). By using the Sitemaps.org website (the "Website") you agree to be bound by the following terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service").
Scope of Terms of Services; License
These Terms of Service govern your use of the Website. The Sponsors' copyrights in the sitemaps protocol specification, as published on the Website (the "Specification"), are licensed to you under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). Other than the Sponsors' copyrights in this Specification, no intellectual property rights of any kind are granted or may arise under these Terms of Service, whether express, implied or otherwise.
So as you can see, Microsoft is also involved in a project under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 2.5). Which is in and of itself something newsworthy in my opinion--since they're so often played as the bad guy on Slashdot. Frankly, the article states:
"The quality of your index is predicated by the quality of your sources and Windows Live Search is happy to be working with Google and Yahoo! on Sitemaps to not only help webmasters, but also help consumers by delivering more relevant search results so they can find what they're looking for faster," said Ken Moss, General Manager of Windows Live Search at Microsoft.
So why is Microsoft omitted from the summary & title of this news? Surely their Windows Live Search is contributing just as much as Yahoo!'s search or Google's search engine.
I'm confused--when Microsoft does something good, do we just ignore it? You know, I'm all for criticizing their evil plans for world domination in the software market but shouldn't news be subjective not objective even if it is only for nerds?
Let me get this straight, essentially Microsoft has successfully divided the Linux community in twain by making some sort of psuedo-deal with Novell. The details of which are pretty shady and the specifics are hard to find. Both companies are using generic speak to describe the deal they've sealed. Except that it's not sealed yet as there's still some tweaking yet to be done. And now people are spreading all kinds of rumors and the SAMBA group is upset at Novell and suddenly it's like I'm back in high school again and Microsoft asked Novell to go to the senior prom--but we all know he only did that because Novell will put out in the back seat of Microsoft's dad's Cadillac. Everyone else is pissed.
The "alternative to Microsoft" community is divided and all Microsoft had to do was dump $500 million on Novell & play some mind games with them about possible suits if they didn't take this deal. Masterfully done, Microsoft. Once again, your business strategy is state of the art while your technology doesn't really have to be.
Well, I've talked with someone who does a lot of this sort of stuff and he explained to me that long ago when Blizzard first debuted WoW, it was an instant success. And there were many people that had developed scripts (duping, afk farming, etc) for games like Diablo that wanted to to do the same thing for WoW.
The art of doing this successfully lies in knowing what addresses of memory that your client application is using to store data. You change these memory addresses & your client's state is altered. But there's some things you can't change because they're located on the server. Realistically, the client has to do some of the computation and storing itself (and with WoW being some huge multi-gigabyte client, there's a lot to investigate). Obvious, you want to reduce network traffic and give your servers a break so you design this to have minimal communication.
The problem then becomes that users will write applications to modify the data & memory that their client applications are using. What results is signals sent back to the server which aren't true and give that user an advantage. Solution? Enter Warden to check these memory spaces and files for any potentially unauthorized changes (checksums, whatever method they want to use or seeing which threads are accessing that memory). And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
My guess is that before, they were checking if there were any known scripting or programs that were unauthorized and changing this data. And they were banning those and only those accounts. I fear that it now does a verification on the memory space, files & system registry to ensure that it is not being molested by another application or tweaked at all. I am guessing that they have changed the ban notice to ban whenever this verification stage fails and that Cedegra does not emulate Windows to the point of their verification satisfaction or to the point of Warden being able to query all other running applications. Worse yet, I fear they may look to integrate this with the WGA with Windows & some other means with Macs--though that is pure speculation on my part.
The irony of it all? The fact that a talented programmer with burp or some other styled network tool and use linux on a routing box to intercept packets and change them to give him position hacks. Unfortunately, if you use this too much, I believe that random server side verification checks will eventually catch up with you but I can't say I've ever implemented this or been caught using it.
Which brings me to one last point I'd like to make on this topic. I think that this cat n' mouse game of Blizzard versus the cheaters is good for AI. The last possible domain we have is people writing applications that extract data from video memory and use computer vision algorithms to write if-then-case bots. Yes, bots are bad but this is driving people to a corner where they essentially strive to pass the Turing Test... after all, you don't want a GM messaging your bot as he sits idle doing his repetitive task, do you?
Well, I recall the FBI's Virtual Case File system that took 2-3 years to develop and costed $170 million to produce an absolute failure. In the end, they found a "suitable commercial replacement." Probably at a fraction of the price.
So, $170 million/3 years = $55 million/year while the article seems to imply an oversight of one billion per year on the NPfIT which is outrageous. I'm confused how one would even spend that much money on an IT project for a country the size of England--were they laying expensive new shiny fibre wire devoted for medical records only to every facility?
Yeah, IBM did win. But every time a technological war is waged between two competitors in the United States, the default winners are the companies in the Philippines and other silicon producing countries. I mean, there's probably a lot of companies with really bland names that jump for joy when this stuff happens. IBM is cashing in but I'm sure everyone along the way from basic elements to full fledged product enjoys it too.
Well, you were probably joking, but I'll open up a discussion to "whats next?" because this is something I feel the chip makers have kind of lost their way on.
First off, I'm not criticizing only AMD or Intel, I think they're both guilty of concentrating on perceived performance on desktop CPUs. They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance. To me, performance can be multiple things and considering that you could fry an egg on my P4 no matter how big the heat sink is... I don't think I'm going to get many years of use out of it. So heat & power consumption are steadily growing concerns of mine. I had an Athlon XP 2800 break after one year of use--last time I use the heat sink that comes with the processor!
What's next is simply that which is cheapest to research and develop while giving the user a higher number in some category that Dell or the sales people are sporting as bigger/better/faster/stronger. This is alright but I don't think the average consumer ever stops and asks themselves what the power consumption will be for such a CPU or what its expected time to failure is. I really hope that at some point, the chips are fast enough to run your basic operating system and the manufacturers split into two lines where one is aimed for longevity and power consumption (like some laptop model processors) instead of just speed.
What is amusing is that in answering the question, he refuses to use the word 'free' or anything close to it.
Quite amusing. Yes, I hate Microsoft just as much as you do. Utterly loath and detest those despicable bastards.
Although, there is one minor thing I would like to point out. Back in September of 2006, they started to offer the Express Editions of a lot of their development tools for free. So I've actually been tempted to use them and I've also noticed that my Windows XP Professional CD allows me to install I2S on my machine and start hosting ASPs.
Oh, ugh, disgusting! I'm wasting my time! I should be learning Spring & Hibernate or Ruby on Rails. But, you know, there are a lot of people out there that use the.NET framework. I'm well versed with the J2EE framework already.
I know it's not open source and the license I got from them was super flaky. But in the interests of being able to use every technology available to me, I'll learn.NET. I'm more marketable to employers and, hell let's face it, even coding Microsoft libraries can be fun.
So you'll find some of their free (yes, free) software on my machine. Now, I had to pay for XP to be able to install that... but I still feel like I paid for XP & not the Express tools.
Granted, you'll find OO.o instead of MS Office and I'll be using The Gimp 2.0 instead of... well whatever MS's "Photoshop Killer" is... but you must admit they're coming around as far as the term 'free' is concerned and they have to otherwise the community will simply leave them behind. Utility software should be free, in my opinion. And if it's not, we'll simply develop it ourselves. Why are there no amazingly fun open source or free games? Because necessity breeds innovation and there's no real need for games. From now until I die I'll probably have to pay a monthly subscription fee for my games.
I believe there exists for every software company a good middle ground between free open source software & proprietary cost you money software. If you develop software, draw a line where you want everyone (even competitors) using your framework or underpinnings but the real premium price mark comes in on the serious development effort or application specific software. Maybe it's just libraries but Adobe & Sun have shown us that making things free is a great way to cement yourself in the community no matter what happens to your stocks. Ballmer can't deny this even though his (lack of) heart & soul probably loath the apparent loss of green in the beginning.
You can now accomplish a lot with their standards and languages--a hell of a lot more than before when Visual Studio costed a kidney.
The War of the News & Products
on
The Zune Cometh
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
... and also calls out what they called a "Digg Fraud Campaign".
I also heard from somewhere that they're flanking that with something called a "Slashvertisement."
You know what's funny? It's easy to say bad things about a large company because they have marketing departments & businessmen running them. Oftentimes, marketing and business involve areas of questionable ethics & integrity--or the sheer will to sell your product at any cost since that's your paycheck. Is a "Digg fraud Campaign" really that surprising?
Microsoft is doing horrible things here... fraud on Digg, tsk tsk! But every time I try to watch TV, I have two men standing in front of me--one a suave young man and the other an older idiot who's often being upstaged or somehow better than the younger man. The young man is Apple of course. What the hell that has to do with my computing needs, I'll never know. Do I call that a "National TV Fraud Campaign?" No, I call that marketing and advertising--some of the worst forms of human behavior (both the stimulus and the response disgust me).
You know what is also funny? It's easy to say good things about a large company because they have a lot of resources and can accomplish a lot for the consumer. Stand back, I'm about to say something that will ensure this post hits rock bottom on the karma: Microsoft has done good things for computing. And you know what? So has Apple. I've used products of both of them to varying levels of success in my past--and that in and of itself is something.
Now consider the fact that both Microsoft & Apple are very large companies. This Zune/iPod crap is always going to happen and they love that it's in the public's eye.
I'll probably be modded as flamebait but I don't think that shirt was actually controlling that sound. I think this video was intended to be a viral internet video to garner venture capital for developing that kind of technology.
I assume this is intended to only play power chords and on top of that there is no way the machine can determine if you intend the third to be major or minor in the chord. Which is interesting because in the video, the chord changes from major to minor with no change in the performer. That's fine, let's then assume that you can select a key and it will adhere to the chords in that key.
At several points in the video, he strums by flicking his wrist instead of moving his whole arm. That's pretty standard for guitarists but doesn't explain how the shirt (with sensor fibres in the elbow) would recognize the motion. Also, near the end, the guitar that I assume he is playing strums multiple times without him doing anything.
I read the article and, if it has been developed, this short short video did not do a good job of showing it off or selling me on it actually working. I'd rather see an average guy just messing around with it with no back track. I don't care if it's not perfect, it's just that I could make that video with crappy acid trip effects in my basement and my friend on guitar watching me move my arms.
You're right, it is. However, there must be some mechanism in there that keeps everything synced. Since the time that various controllers & components execute is most likely of critical importance, don't you think they would have a scheme such that one component controlled the time?
It would probably be necessary only to make modifications to the component that controls the relative time and accounts for network drift. I don't know first hand that they have a scheme that works this way but I would almost wager they would have to have something like this in effect.
It's controlled by multiple computers. Test cases aren't just typing some stuff in and clicking on a few menus.
You're right, but we're talking about an agency that put a man on the moon in 1969. To say that today they lack the creative imagination to test a set of computers and electronics for a date-time problem is pretty much a slap in the face.
Test cases aren't just typing some stuff in and clicking on a few menus.
Then perhaps it's time they rewrote the test cases & the software that executes the test cases if they want to be using this in the future and at the risk of human lives?
sit in one on the ground and have it turned on that night.
I agree with you but it's not even that hard to do. I mean, they should have test cases and simulation already to test the software, you'd think they could devote some of their time to have someone simply set all the clocks on all the hardware for the time of that night's transition... or point the software at an NTP server and set that to the time it transitions.
No need to make some poor souls work on New Years...
You really shouldn't even need to sit one on the ground given you've got thorough enough testing and integration set up. I would certainly hope they do. If there's ever been a time to actually follow the book on testing, it's when human lives hang in the balance while the software's in action (pacemakers, nuclear power plants, etc).
For those of you who claimed that the porn industry would decide this war (as was speculated in the beta max/VHS war), they've decided to choose bothtechnologies. So that is no longer really the deciding factor. Are we going to see movies and studios side with the separate technology and the consumer simply use both?
I know this is slightly off-topic but I would like to point out NewYorkCountryLawyer's donations of legal stories and advice to Slashdot.
Recently, the user NewYorkCountryLawyer has provided us with many stories (bottom of the user page) that revolve around the RIAA & music suits. On top of that, oftentimes whenever a legal issue is being discussed, they reply with often insightful/interesting/informative posts (300 since July of this year) from someone who actually spends their entire day dealing with the RIAA & law.
On behalf of Slashdot, I would like to thank NewYorkCountryLawyer for bringing to light some of the cases that might not make it in mainstream news & providing us with a realistic view of how things work in the legal world. All too often it is an alien landscape to me that I cannot comprehend.
Slashdot Mirror
I apologize if you and anyone who feels like I propagated FUD, I only meant to draw attention to the fact that it was mere rumors causing a severe amount of fall out that should never have happened. Hence my final sentence in the submission.
Maybe you can argue that it was only natural for them to seek safety in the trees but I think that this study addresses something we must face. If you believe in evolution, you have to acknowledge that it's not only random genetics but also influenced by the behaviors of the animals granted those random mutations. If the lizards had behaved differently and not gone to the trees, perhaps longer and longer legs would have been developed until they were fast enough to outrun their predators. Or perhaps the species just would have been eradicated on the island.
Controversial because it implies that species may be able to subconsciously choose which feature is 'evolved' to be the dominant factor.
If you want to apply this to human evolution (as one is naturally only concerned with their own species), then I suggest you read Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. What I found interesting is that in some places, humans began a farming lifestyle earlier than other hunter-gatherers. It was this decision by way of discovery that led some civilizations to outpace others. In fact, the choice or 'discovery' of planting seeds and harvesting them periodically eventually led to some regions invading and 'colonizing' other regions. Can we call this evolution? Can we say that some evolution hinges on behavioral choices? I think we can, but that's why it's controversial because it has traditionally been thought that the dominant feature was only influenced by the environment--not by a choice made by the animal.
Understand genius?
Honestly, what did the above comments (or your own even) add to the fucking relevant discussion?
My God but you are stupid. You resort to replying to anonymous follow-ups? Is there some prize for taking the conversation off-topic? Pathetic.
It's clear that some people are just so into the giving spirit that they will do anything for the perfect gift.
I haven't seen patent one infringed upon let alone a whole balance sheet's worth so you'll have to excuse me if I seem a bit pessimistic about you strong arming me into using SuSE.
That's right, you can spin it anyway you want
It's not just any old regular FUD, it's new improved Microsoft FUD.
Enjoy your $500 million, Novell.
I started this morning by talking to everyone in XML.
I hope the black eye my coworker gave me heals before my presentation to the CTO tomorrow morning
Disclaimer: I haven't tried online videos through iTunes or any other service but I am a user of Netflix.
I was watching TV the other day and saw a commercial for Vongo. It almost seemed too good to be true. And it was.
The commercial lead me to believe that I was going to open an account on a site and that I would be able to pay $10/month and download any movie I wanted to my hard drive. What a naïve idiot I was.
The problems I had with Vongo:
- They needed my e-mail address just so I could download the client. So even if I didn't like it or join their service, they still had contact info.
- You'll notice their site is in complete Flash--so is their client. And, much to my chagrin, all the movies are viewed through Flash & it's required. I had problems accessing the site with mozilla.
- Not only are the files encrypted (this was expected) but they're of Flash quality meaning that they're bulky and low quality.
- You don't get any movie you want, you get to pick from a selected list. But be careful, only some of those titles are free.
- Of those select titles, the only one I wanted to see was The Devil & Danial Johnston. But when I wanted to download it, Vongo wanted $4 USD for it.
- Two hours later, after D&DJ was finally on my laptop, I tried to watch it only to have a warning pop up informing me that once I started playing it, I had 24 hours to watch it before it deleted itself.
I could continue bitching but I think you get the idea. I was dissatisfied with Vongo & and heavily recommend everyone to stay away from it. The fact that I have to read the fine print in order to understand how their service works should have been a big warning sign. But in my opinion, the free 14 day trial isn't even worth it.Oh, and one more thing, there was a freaking client application that was set to default start when Windows starts as a service on my laptop. Annoying and invasive.
I'm confused--when Microsoft does something good, do we just ignore it? You know, I'm all for criticizing their evil plans for world domination in the software market but shouldn't news be subjective not objective even if it is only for nerds?
Side note, I'll bet this post hits rock bottom like any other post that says something positive about Microsoft.
Let me get this straight, essentially Microsoft has successfully divided the Linux community in twain by making some sort of psuedo-deal with Novell. The details of which are pretty shady and the specifics are hard to find. Both companies are using generic speak to describe the deal they've sealed. Except that it's not sealed yet as there's still some tweaking yet to be done. And now people are spreading all kinds of rumors and the SAMBA group is upset at Novell and suddenly it's like I'm back in high school again and Microsoft asked Novell to go to the senior prom--but we all know he only did that because Novell will put out in the back seat of Microsoft's dad's Cadillac. Everyone else is pissed.
The "alternative to Microsoft" community is divided and all Microsoft had to do was dump $500 million on Novell & play some mind games with them about possible suits if they didn't take this deal. Masterfully done, Microsoft. Once again, your business strategy is state of the art while your technology doesn't really have to be.
Well, I've talked with someone who does a lot of this sort of stuff and he explained to me that long ago when Blizzard first debuted WoW, it was an instant success. And there were many people that had developed scripts (duping, afk farming, etc) for games like Diablo that wanted to to do the same thing for WoW.
... after all, you don't want a GM messaging your bot as he sits idle doing his repetitive task, do you?
The art of doing this successfully lies in knowing what addresses of memory that your client application is using to store data. You change these memory addresses & your client's state is altered. But there's some things you can't change because they're located on the server. Realistically, the client has to do some of the computation and storing itself (and with WoW being some huge multi-gigabyte client, there's a lot to investigate). Obvious, you want to reduce network traffic and give your servers a break so you design this to have minimal communication.
The problem then becomes that users will write applications to modify the data & memory that their client applications are using. What results is signals sent back to the server which aren't true and give that user an advantage. Solution? Enter Warden to check these memory spaces and files for any potentially unauthorized changes (checksums, whatever method they want to use or seeing which threads are accessing that memory). And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
My guess is that before, they were checking if there were any known scripting or programs that were unauthorized and changing this data. And they were banning those and only those accounts. I fear that it now does a verification on the memory space, files & system registry to ensure that it is not being molested by another application or tweaked at all. I am guessing that they have changed the ban notice to ban whenever this verification stage fails and that Cedegra does not emulate Windows to the point of their verification satisfaction or to the point of Warden being able to query all other running applications. Worse yet, I fear they may look to integrate this with the WGA with Windows & some other means with Macs--though that is pure speculation on my part.
The irony of it all? The fact that a talented programmer with burp or some other styled network tool and use linux on a routing box to intercept packets and change them to give him position hacks. Unfortunately, if you use this too much, I believe that random server side verification checks will eventually catch up with you but I can't say I've ever implemented this or been caught using it.
Which brings me to one last point I'd like to make on this topic. I think that this cat n' mouse game of Blizzard versus the cheaters is good for AI. The last possible domain we have is people writing applications that extract data from video memory and use computer vision algorithms to write if-then-case bots. Yes, bots are bad but this is driving people to a corner where they essentially strive to pass the Turing Test
Well, I recall the FBI's Virtual Case File system that took 2-3 years to develop and costed $170 million to produce an absolute failure. In the end, they found a "suitable commercial replacement." Probably at a fraction of the price.
So, $170 million/3 years = $55 million/year while the article seems to imply an oversight of one billion per year on the NPfIT which is outrageous. I'm confused how one would even spend that much money on an IT project for a country the size of England--were they laying expensive new shiny fibre wire devoted for medical records only to every facility?
Yeah, IBM did win. But every time a technological war is waged between two competitors in the United States, the default winners are the companies in the Philippines and other silicon producing countries. I mean, there's probably a lot of companies with really bland names that jump for joy when this stuff happens. IBM is cashing in but I'm sure everyone along the way from basic elements to full fledged product enjoys it too.
First off, I'm not criticizing only AMD or Intel, I think they're both guilty of concentrating on perceived performance on desktop CPUs. They don't care how much power the chip consumes or how much heat it dissipates, they only care about what the average consumer sees as immediate performance. To me, performance can be multiple things and considering that you could fry an egg on my P4 no matter how big the heat sink is
What's next is simply that which is cheapest to research and develop while giving the user a higher number in some category that Dell or the sales people are sporting as bigger/better/faster/stronger. This is alright but I don't think the average consumer ever stops and asks themselves what the power consumption will be for such a CPU or what its expected time to failure is. I really hope that at some point, the chips are fast enough to run your basic operating system and the manufacturers split into two lines where one is aimed for longevity and power consumption (like some laptop model processors) instead of just speed.
Although, there is one minor thing I would like to point out. Back in September of 2006, they started to offer the Express Editions of a lot of their development tools for free. So I've actually been tempted to use them and I've also noticed that my Windows XP Professional CD allows me to install I2S on my machine and start hosting ASPs.
Oh, ugh, disgusting! I'm wasting my time! I should be learning Spring & Hibernate or Ruby on Rails. But, you know, there are a lot of people out there that use the
I know it's not open source and the license I got from them was super flaky. But in the interests of being able to use every technology available to me, I'll learn
So you'll find some of their free (yes, free) software on my machine. Now, I had to pay for XP to be able to install that
Granted, you'll find OO.o instead of MS Office and I'll be using The Gimp 2.0 instead of
I believe there exists for every software company a good middle ground between free open source software & proprietary cost you money software. If you develop software, draw a line where you want everyone (even competitors) using your framework or underpinnings but the real premium price mark comes in on the serious development effort or application specific software. Maybe it's just libraries but Adobe & Sun have shown us that making things free is a great way to cement yourself in the community no matter what happens to your stocks. Ballmer can't deny this even though his (lack of) heart & soul probably loath the apparent loss of green in the beginning.
You can now accomplish a lot with their standards and languages--a hell of a lot more than before when Visual Studio costed a kidney.
You know what's funny? It's easy to say bad things about a large company because they have marketing departments & businessmen running them. Oftentimes, marketing and business involve areas of questionable ethics & integrity--or the sheer will to sell your product at any cost since that's your paycheck. Is a "Digg fraud Campaign" really that surprising?
Microsoft is doing horrible things here
You know what is also funny? It's easy to say good things about a large company because they have a lot of resources and can accomplish a lot for the consumer. Stand back, I'm about to say something that will ensure this post hits rock bottom on the karma: Microsoft has done good things for computing. And you know what? So has Apple. I've used products of both of them to varying levels of success in my past--and that in and of itself is something.
Now consider the fact that both Microsoft & Apple are very large companies. This Zune/iPod crap is always going to happen and they love that it's in the public's eye.
I'll probably be modded as flamebait but I don't think that shirt was actually controlling that sound. I think this video was intended to be a viral internet video to garner venture capital for developing that kind of technology.
I assume this is intended to only play power chords and on top of that there is no way the machine can determine if you intend the third to be major or minor in the chord. Which is interesting because in the video, the chord changes from major to minor with no change in the performer. That's fine, let's then assume that you can select a key and it will adhere to the chords in that key.
At several points in the video, he strums by flicking his wrist instead of moving his whole arm. That's pretty standard for guitarists but doesn't explain how the shirt (with sensor fibres in the elbow) would recognize the motion. Also, near the end, the guitar that I assume he is playing strums multiple times without him doing anything.
I read the article and, if it has been developed, this short short video did not do a good job of showing it off or selling me on it actually working. I'd rather see an average guy just messing around with it with no back track. I don't care if it's not perfect, it's just that I could make that video with crappy acid trip effects in my basement and my friend on guitar watching me move my arms.
It would probably be necessary only to make modifications to the component that controls the relative time and accounts for network drift. I don't know first hand that they have a scheme that works this way but I would almost wager they would have to have something like this in effect.
You're right, but we're talking about an agency that put a man on the moon in 1969. To say that today they lack the creative imagination to test a set of computers and electronics for a date-time problem is pretty much a slap in the face.
Then perhaps it's time they rewrote the test cases & the software that executes the test cases if they want to be using this in the future and at the risk of human lives?
No need to make some poor souls work on New Years
You really shouldn't even need to sit one on the ground given you've got thorough enough testing and integration set up. I would certainly hope they do. If there's ever been a time to actually follow the book on testing, it's when human lives hang in the balance while the software's in action (pacemakers, nuclear power plants, etc).
I submitted that article yesterday but it wasn't accepted--must be my crummy authoring skills.
On a related topic, mother board sales have been falling and a lot of people are blaming the impending release of Vista.
For those of you who claimed that the porn industry would decide this war (as was speculated in the beta max/VHS war), they've decided to choose both technologies. So that is no longer really the deciding factor. Are we going to see movies and studios side with the separate technology and the consumer simply use both?
I know this is slightly off-topic but I would like to point out NewYorkCountryLawyer's donations of legal stories and advice to Slashdot.
Recently, the user NewYorkCountryLawyer has provided us with many stories (bottom of the user page) that revolve around the RIAA & music suits. On top of that, oftentimes whenever a legal issue is being discussed, they reply with often insightful/interesting/informative posts (300 since July of this year) from someone who actually spends their entire day dealing with the RIAA & law.
All this despite the shameless way we treated him when they answered questions we had about RIAA suits.
On behalf of Slashdot, I would like to thank NewYorkCountryLawyer for bringing to light some of the cases that might not make it in mainstream news & providing us with a realistic view of how things work in the legal world. All too often it is an alien landscape to me that I cannot comprehend.