- something in the way memory access it done makes it more difficult on the Mac?
This is likely true. Allowing outside access to a processes memory space is a good way to introduce virus infection vectors, so solid OS design will tend to make this difficult.
- most people wanting to cheat are running Windows?
You missed the point. Most people are running Windows PERIOD. But if it's easier to cheat on a Mac, wouldn't the cheaters simply switch? It's big business, after all.
Your analysis falls down when you consider that there have been no reports of any Mac users being targeted by this. There is no Warden process or anything resembling a rootkit on my system when I start up the client. Just one process: World of Warcraft. I suppose they could just be excepting any client that reports as being run on a Mac, but if that were the case, all of the people working to hack the system would just switch to running on a Mac. I suspect there is a bit more to the method that they're using and have heard rumors of them using things like 'multiple logins to the same account from different IPs' and other indicators. Perhaps the linux emulators are doing something that trips one of these other detection mechanisms.
I believe that for the most part Blizzard is handling the cheating by making the client as dumb as possible and not trusting it for anything other than 'requests'. The design philosophy is centered around the client 'asking' to do something and the server saying 'yes' or 'no'. There isn't a way for the client to say 'Put this character at position x,y', there is only a way for a client to request to move along a vector. The server then reports the current position back to the client. That doesn't mean that hacks haven't ever happened - but those have been cases of the server not strictly following this model and are subsequently patched.
Of course, this doesn't stop anybody from writing their own client that allows them to automate the request process given they were good enough to spoof being a 'real' client to the server.
There is one aspect nobody is seeing with this - and it's the real advantage as far as I'm concerned.
Women have terribly complex hormonal systems. The female pill works by fiddling with that normally balanced system. Fiddling with the hormonal balance of a woman is generally not a good thing. In addition to the physical side effects and possible health risks involved, there are a whole raft of psychological repercussions.
On the other hand, male hormonal cycles are much less complex - and it doesn't even sound like this particular treatment is hormone based at all. For the sake of my relationship with my wife, I will happily be the one to submit to side effects rather than her taking the pill and possibly losing all desire for sex anyway.
As someone else posted, this kind of thing is intended for long term relationships that require contraception - not necessarily for casual accident prevention. For that, I recommend my Mandatory Vasectomy At Birth program (you're free to reverse the procedure with your own money at any time).
Apparently, my microwave uses the Microsoft method of bug popping. It goes directly from warm fluffy profit with some unpopped bugs to scorched, terrible tasting profit with the same number of bugs. Then it just tells me to shut up and enjoy anyway because nobody ever got fired for eating Microsoft.
No kidding. I was hoping that here, of all places, somebody with a rational head on their shoulders would offer some objective and intelligent commentary on the differences between SF and this service. God, was I wrong - even with a threshold set at 2!
For a vast majority of small open source projects, SF is far from ideal. I can't count how many times I've been lost in the myriad-yet-always-included tabs of non-information. Most people with small open source projects do not need the level of complexity SF forces on you - they simply need an issue tracker, a repository and a way to handle some basic delegation.
Yeah, you could get that done with some off-the-shelf packages installed on your own web host. But just because you write software doesn't mean you want to spend a lot of time stitching a bunch of disparate web widgetry together into a working system. Worse, you end up with a system that looks and works an awful lot like... SourceForge.
And this is all from a developers point of view. Sending users to SF for bug reporting and feature requests is effectively telling them that you're not interested in their feedback.
After actually signing up and looking at what Google is offering, I'm impressed. It's exactly enough to handle the busywork of project management and it leaves the 'marketing' side of writing up web pages to you. Could it be more feature rich? Of course. But I like the whole idea of integrating smaller, special purpose applications rather than the whole monolithic design philosophy inherent in SF.
I agree completely. Consider how many transactions happen over the internet with a web site you don't know at all:
You search for Product A - Google returns several relevant companies that sell Product A.
You browse through each of those companies, comparison shopping.
You decide to purchase from Company G (for whatever reason - you may or may not have heard of them).
You notice a little lock icon and feel secure in your knowledge that your transaction is 'secure'.
Note that the purpose of a certificate is to guarantee that the site you are visiting belongs to the domain that you are at as well as to encrypt the connection. The encryption keeps prying eyes out - which is a great feature.
The identity verification is completely useless in this case, though. You gain no additional safety or security if Verisign says that companyg.com belongs to Company G. For all you know, Company G is a front set up by an international ring of criminals - with a secure certificate signed by Verisign. All that proves is that they're willing to invest about $500 to prime the pump.
In the meantime, small businesses and personal domain holders can't afford this type of 'security'. Instead, they must resort to generating self-signed certificates just to get an encrypted channel.
I'm always amazed when I see an article about building a MythTV system and discover they recommend using high performance processors and video cards. The only reason in the world you'd need muscle in the processor is if you're using cheap tuner cards that don't have the encoding chips on them.
But if you're buying a faster processor and the various other bits it takes to make it go, the cost difference pays for the better tuner card. All you get is more noise since your processor needs a gargantuan fan, your case needs an extra fan, your power supply needs a bigger fan, your video card needs its own fan and you motherboard needs its own fan. And it cost you more to build than it would have if you'd just picked up a decent tuner card for an extra $50 and stuck with the 2Ghz Celeron.
It seems that the people who do this fall into one of several camps:
Plan on playing heavy duty games or something on their PVR
Fall victim to the marketing machine and just don't know better
Are 'compensating' in the same way as a 50 year old with a new Porsche
Personally, I built my setup with a low end bare-bones system from Asus, plopped a 2Ghz Celeron in it, slapped in a pair of cheap Hauppauge MCE150 tuner cards and an SATA drive. The thing never goes over 40% CPU utilization, barely makes a sound and sits right next to my tuner looking wonderful. I didn't go for HD, otherwise you're going to be better off with better tuner cards.
Total cost: about $400 or the equivalent of a TiVo + two years of service. Total setup time: most of a weekend - and most of that was getting the IRA-3 remote receiver working with lircd. Hell, I spent more time researching the hardware before purchase than I did building the thing! Except for the remote, that is - and I got what I deserved...
No - you missed the point entirely. Mac OS X will not run an executable on a disk automatically. It will do the following things upon a disk being inserted into the optical drive:
If it sees that the disk is formatted as an audio CD, it will open iTunes for you. Depending on your iTunes preferences, something further may happen (ie, importing the tracks into your library).
If it sees that the disk is formatted as a movie DVD, it will open DVD Player for you.
If you insert a disk that is formatted as a Photo CD, it will open iPhoto for you. Depending on your iPhoto preferences, something further may happen (ie, importing the images into your library).
Anything else is mounted and displayed in the Finder.
Of particular note is the fact that the only time an automatic action takes place is when it recognizes the format of the disk as a particular type. At that point, it passes control to a bundled application (or one the user has explicitly set in the CDs & DVDs system pref panel). At no point is any code on the disk looked for - let alone run.
4: Mix DVDs. I have the entire Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD - all 14 disks. Trouble is, I never watch the damned things because I usually think to myself "I'd like to see the parrot sketch" - and then I have to figure out which disk it's on, which episode it's in, then where in that episode it is (thanks for the abysmal TOC, guys). Why am I not allowed to make a 'best of' disk for myself? I could do it if I had the VHS version, but for some reason attempting that with the DVD version is a criminal offense.
Why don't they throw PostgreSQL in there and see how it performs?
Actually, if you have the Apple Remote Desktop Admin tools installed, you do have PostgreSQL installed. Only you don't have full access to it!. ARD uses it to store any collected stats you've pulled from your ARD clients - and they even provide you with directions on how to access that DB from outside ARD (eg, from a command line script). So far, pretty cool.
Unless, that is, you actually want your own installation of PostgreSQL for other purposes. I've had it installed on my laptop for years as I do web development with it. It suddenly stopped working after I installed the latest ARD tools. You see, Apple installs PostgreSQL configured to listen on the default port, and then doesn't allow you 'root' access to it. They give you the password for the ARD account, and you can change that database - but if you need to create your own database with your own users, you're out of luck. And since they're using the default port, you have to change your port to get an alternate installation up and running.
This just irks me. If they want to start including PostgreSQL in the standard installation, that'd be cool. But there damned well better be a way for me to manage it. If they're going to install it buried inside the ARD Admin bundle, then run it on a private port.
No - her lawyer will not adviser her to do that. They've set up a blog for all the various bits of information and court documents. On that page:
We are lawyers in New York City. We practice law at Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.
Through the Electronic Frontier Foundation we and our firm have undertaken to represent people in our area who have been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for having computers whose internet accounts were used to open up peer-to-peer file sharing accounts.
We find these cases to be oppressive and unfair, as large law firms financed by the recording industry sue ordinary working people for thousands of dollars.
Sounds to me like she's got the right folk on the job...
- Have dedicated yourself to something for an extended period of time (and are therefore somewhat dependable).
- Can handle being tested on knowledge that you were supposed to learn during the time you dedicated yourself to something (NOT that you know it, but are comfortable being tested on it).
You forgot an important one:
Have the money to attend an accredited institution for four years.
The first two are relatively simple in comparison for a majority of people out there.
Also keep in mind that the 'four year' curriculum is an idealistic goal for those people who don't have to work while attending. I am neither poor nor affluent and as a consequence, college is a pipe dream.
it seems unlikely that Vista will ship without support for all three, if it does then that will give Apple something else to crow about since Safari supports RSS, Atom and RSS
Internet Explorer 7 - Supports six syndication formats: RSS, Atom, Atom, RSS, Atom and RSS. That's twice as many as Safari!
The most valuable things about having friends is not that you all have similar opinions. It is instead that you know them well enough to interpret their opinions accurately with respect to your own world view. The better I know somebody, the more useful their opinions become to me - even if I never agree with them.
I don't get any of that with television, but I sure do with the handful of RSS feeds I keep tabs on.
Please, please, please - do not advocate shit like this.
Ten years ago, we were promised that JavaScript, HTML and friends were going to provide an amazing and interactive environment - free of client downloads. Then the browser wars broke out and the pissing contest between whose blink tag implementation was better laid ruin to the entire landscape.
We are just now recovering from this, and only because the few surviving web developers (as opposed to the mutated spawn of radioactive Internet Explorer fallout) have stuck with the standards. Years went by with IE dominating the horizon, yet the standards groups continued on - seemingly in the face of insurmountable odds.
In a way, the.com burst was the best thing to happen to the web. It was a thinning of the herd, as it were. A lot of the IE only web-zombies made a lot of money during the boom, and they began calling the shots. This was absolutely detrimental to the web as originally envisioned. As the burst caused cutbacks and layoff of those who didn't really belong there, the cackling influence of the IE only web-zombies began to fade.
Today, with Firefox and Safari claiming a growing share of users and cooler, more informed heads calling the web development shots, we're finally getting to where we were promised ten years ago with the web. The last thing I want to do is watch another apocalyptic war break out over some silly HTML tag.
Slashdot Mirror
This is likely true. Allowing outside access to a processes memory space is a good way to introduce virus infection vectors, so solid OS design will tend to make this difficult.
You missed the point. Most people are running Windows PERIOD. But if it's easier to cheat on a Mac, wouldn't the cheaters simply switch? It's big business, after all.
Your analysis falls down when you consider that there have been no reports of any Mac users being targeted by this. There is no Warden process or anything resembling a rootkit on my system when I start up the client. Just one process: World of Warcraft. I suppose they could just be excepting any client that reports as being run on a Mac, but if that were the case, all of the people working to hack the system would just switch to running on a Mac. I suspect there is a bit more to the method that they're using and have heard rumors of them using things like 'multiple logins to the same account from different IPs' and other indicators. Perhaps the linux emulators are doing something that trips one of these other detection mechanisms.
I believe that for the most part Blizzard is handling the cheating by making the client as dumb as possible and not trusting it for anything other than 'requests'. The design philosophy is centered around the client 'asking' to do something and the server saying 'yes' or 'no'. There isn't a way for the client to say 'Put this character at position x,y', there is only a way for a client to request to move along a vector. The server then reports the current position back to the client. That doesn't mean that hacks haven't ever happened - but those have been cases of the server not strictly following this model and are subsequently patched.
Of course, this doesn't stop anybody from writing their own client that allows them to automate the request process given they were good enough to spoof being a 'real' client to the server.
There is one aspect nobody is seeing with this - and it's the real advantage as far as I'm concerned.
Women have terribly complex hormonal systems. The female pill works by fiddling with that normally balanced system. Fiddling with the hormonal balance of a woman is generally not a good thing. In addition to the physical side effects and possible health risks involved, there are a whole raft of psychological repercussions.
On the other hand, male hormonal cycles are much less complex - and it doesn't even sound like this particular treatment is hormone based at all. For the sake of my relationship with my wife, I will happily be the one to submit to side effects rather than her taking the pill and possibly losing all desire for sex anyway.
As someone else posted, this kind of thing is intended for long term relationships that require contraception - not necessarily for casual accident prevention. For that, I recommend my Mandatory Vasectomy At Birth program (you're free to reverse the procedure with your own money at any time).
Apparently, my microwave uses the Microsoft method of bug popping. It goes directly from warm fluffy profit with some unpopped bugs to scorched, terrible tasting profit with the same number of bugs. Then it just tells me to shut up and enjoy anyway because nobody ever got fired for eating Microsoft.
No kidding. I was hoping that here, of all places, somebody with a rational head on their shoulders would offer some objective and intelligent commentary on the differences between SF and this service. God, was I wrong - even with a threshold set at 2!
For a vast majority of small open source projects, SF is far from ideal. I can't count how many times I've been lost in the myriad-yet-always-included tabs of non-information. Most people with small open source projects do not need the level of complexity SF forces on you - they simply need an issue tracker, a repository and a way to handle some basic delegation.
Yeah, you could get that done with some off-the-shelf packages installed on your own web host. But just because you write software doesn't mean you want to spend a lot of time stitching a bunch of disparate web widgetry together into a working system. Worse, you end up with a system that looks and works an awful lot like... SourceForge.
And this is all from a developers point of view. Sending users to SF for bug reporting and feature requests is effectively telling them that you're not interested in their feedback.
After actually signing up and looking at what Google is offering, I'm impressed. It's exactly enough to handle the busywork of project management and it leaves the 'marketing' side of writing up web pages to you. Could it be more feature rich? Of course. But I like the whole idea of integrating smaller, special purpose applications rather than the whole monolithic design philosophy inherent in SF.
For anybody that cares: My Project.
Holy crap - are you in my guild or do all tanks do this?
Hell - if you can write the phrase "Screw Flanders" repeatedly and have it total 595 words, you get more than his job.
You seem to have misspelled DPS...
I agree completely. Consider how many transactions happen over the internet with a web site you don't know at all:
Note that the purpose of a certificate is to guarantee that the site you are visiting belongs to the domain that you are at as well as to encrypt the connection. The encryption keeps prying eyes out - which is a great feature.
The identity verification is completely useless in this case, though. You gain no additional safety or security if Verisign says that companyg.com belongs to Company G. For all you know, Company G is a front set up by an international ring of criminals - with a secure certificate signed by Verisign. All that proves is that they're willing to invest about $500 to prime the pump.
In the meantime, small businesses and personal domain holders can't afford this type of 'security'. Instead, they must resort to generating self-signed certificates just to get an encrypted channel.
The only one who wins in this case is Verisign.
Preach it, brother.
I'm always amazed when I see an article about building a MythTV system and discover they recommend using high performance processors and video cards. The only reason in the world you'd need muscle in the processor is if you're using cheap tuner cards that don't have the encoding chips on them.
But if you're buying a faster processor and the various other bits it takes to make it go, the cost difference pays for the better tuner card. All you get is more noise since your processor needs a gargantuan fan, your case needs an extra fan, your power supply needs a bigger fan, your video card needs its own fan and you motherboard needs its own fan. And it cost you more to build than it would have if you'd just picked up a decent tuner card for an extra $50 and stuck with the 2Ghz Celeron.
It seems that the people who do this fall into one of several camps:
Personally, I built my setup with a low end bare-bones system from Asus, plopped a 2Ghz Celeron in it, slapped in a pair of cheap Hauppauge MCE150 tuner cards and an SATA drive. The thing never goes over 40% CPU utilization, barely makes a sound and sits right next to my tuner looking wonderful. I didn't go for HD, otherwise you're going to be better off with better tuner cards.
Total cost: about $400 or the equivalent of a TiVo + two years of service. Total setup time: most of a weekend - and most of that was getting the IRA-3 remote receiver working with lircd. Hell, I spent more time researching the hardware before purchase than I did building the thing! Except for the remote, that is - and I got what I deserved...
I accidentally modded this troll instead of insightful, so I'm posting so it'll undo my mess. Sorry 'bout that.
No - you missed the point entirely. Mac OS X will not run an executable on a disk automatically. It will do the following things upon a disk being inserted into the optical drive:
Of particular note is the fact that the only time an automatic action takes place is when it recognizes the format of the disk as a particular type. At that point, it passes control to a bundled application (or one the user has explicitly set in the CDs & DVDs system pref panel). At no point is any code on the disk looked for - let alone run.
4: Mix DVDs. I have the entire Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD - all 14 disks. Trouble is, I never watch the damned things because I usually think to myself "I'd like to see the parrot sketch" - and then I have to figure out which disk it's on, which episode it's in, then where in that episode it is (thanks for the abysmal TOC, guys). Why am I not allowed to make a 'best of' disk for myself? I could do it if I had the VHS version, but for some reason attempting that with the DVD version is a criminal offense.
Unless, that is, you actually want your own installation of PostgreSQL for other purposes. I've had it installed on my laptop for years as I do web development with it. It suddenly stopped working after I installed the latest ARD tools. You see, Apple installs PostgreSQL configured to listen on the default port, and then doesn't allow you 'root' access to it. They give you the password for the ARD account, and you can change that database - but if you need to create your own database with your own users, you're out of luck. And since they're using the default port, you have to change your port to get an alternate installation up and running.
This just irks me. If they want to start including PostgreSQL in the standard installation, that'd be cool. But there damned well better be a way for me to manage it. If they're going to install it buried inside the ARD Admin bundle, then run it on a private port.
Sounds to me like she's got the right folk on the job...
- Have the money to attend an accredited institution for four years.
The first two are relatively simple in comparison for a majority of people out there.Also keep in mind that the 'four year' curriculum is an idealistic goal for those people who don't have to work while attending. I am neither poor nor affluent and as a consequence, college is a pipe dream.
Correct - Oregon is just like Iowa. Do not come here.
The most valuable things about having friends is not that you all have similar opinions. It is instead that you know them well enough to interpret their opinions accurately with respect to your own world view. The better I know somebody, the more useful their opinions become to me - even if I never agree with them.
I don't get any of that with television, but I sure do with the handful of RSS feeds I keep tabs on.
Damn straight - the only two days we need to celebrate are Talk Like A Pirate Day and Fuck You Friday.
Damn, where's the '+1 You Go Girl' moderation option?
Please, please, please - do not advocate shit like this.
Ten years ago, we were promised that JavaScript, HTML and friends were going to provide an amazing and interactive environment - free of client downloads. Then the browser wars broke out and the pissing contest between whose blink tag implementation was better laid ruin to the entire landscape.
We are just now recovering from this, and only because the few surviving web developers (as opposed to the mutated spawn of radioactive Internet Explorer fallout) have stuck with the standards. Years went by with IE dominating the horizon, yet the standards groups continued on - seemingly in the face of insurmountable odds.
In a way, the
Today, with Firefox and Safari claiming a growing share of users and cooler, more informed heads calling the web development shots, we're finally getting to where we were promised ten years ago with the web. The last thing I want to do is watch another apocalyptic war break out over some silly HTML tag.