Actually, you don't need to normalize the differences. You could just randomize the watermarked areas. Presumably they're either inaudible or imperceptible, so the difference between a watmark and garbage only matters to watermark verification programs.
Or get your hands on the verification code, and reverse engineer the algorithm. Now you can generate your own watermarks that are indistinguishable from those sold legally.
Of course, MS will probably release a "feature pack" for Vista that enforces watermarked media. And Intel will probably have a new "multimedia chip" in their next chipset. And even should piracy actually be averted, it's not like the cost will ever go down for the comsumer.
Consumers see absolutely no benefit to the prevention or elimination of piracy.
True enough, but it is obvious that science has limitations.
1. Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed. 2. Science can only be meaningfully applied to things that can be measured and repeated. 3. Science can only be absolutely applied to things that can be understood by humans.
To presume that all knowledge and all truth must necessarily be confined by the above set of restrictions is ludicrous. And, of course, completely unprovable. If you honestly believe that science and humanity are capable of understanding and knowing everything, then you have trapped yourself by faith in science. That is, welcome to your pseudoreligion.
Ultimately, science is all about answers. Religion is all about questions.
And what kind of intensive care unit is "shut down" when they can't use computers? It's not like their work would have to grind to a stand still. I don't want to sound like a luddite but are we really that dependent on computers? They're medical professionals, I hope they did just shut down and stop working when the computers crashed.
I work at a hospital that is very computerized. Particualrly the ICU's. We do have regular downtimes so it's not impossible for them to function, but it is much more difficult.
There's several problems:
1. HIPPA regulations require that certain things are documented and maintained. In our hospital, we have computer systems that aggregate data from all medical instruments. Specificaly, it is required that data be collected (charted) on at least an hourly basis for every patient. Computers collect our data in a constant stream. Nurses are required to review it and document what went on every hour, but the actual data collection is largely done automatically.
2. Nurses, particularly the younger ones, are not used to paper charting. It takes much, much longer to chart on paper for them. Even the fact that they're reduced from a textbox of unlimited size to a tiny little box on a one page paper form. I know the nurses do have simulated computer downtimes that they train with, during which time they do computer charting for real and paper charting for practice, but it's still much more time consuming.
3. Admits and discharges are all through computers. Due to a number of legal requirements like HIPPA, you can't treat someone who isn't admitted or let someone leave who isn't discharged.
4. All medication orders to the inpatient pharmacy are through computers. I imagine there is still a backup paper method, but I've never seen it used. I wonder if anybody on the floor would know how to use it very well.
5. All medical imaging is digital now. The days of giant films are gone. No network means no x-rays, no MRI's, no nothing.
6. Similarly, patient records are all electronic now. This is a HIPPA requirement. No netowrk, and suddenly it really difficult to see patient records that contain things like drug allergies. I think they make paper copies of patient records for every patient in each unit, but I'm not a nurse so I don't know.
Every system we have has redundancies and backups. Even our high end Cisco concentrators are all redundant. Having an entire network go down is a nightmare I hope I never have to see. It wouldn't bring patient care down, but it would greatly hinder the efforts of doctors and nurses. It's bad enough when a unit printer goes down.
Erm, once you begin travelling faster than about one-tenth the speed of light, mass is no longer constant. As your velocity increases, so does your mass, so you require more and more energy to continue accelerating at the same rate. At the speed of light, objects approach infinite mass. In order to overcome such an object's inertia and accellerate this infinite mass, you need infinite energy. In all the universe there is not infinite energy.
This was actually the intended purpose for including these particular games.
Solitare is designed to teach you point and click, drag and drop, and double-click.
Minesweeper is designed to teach you point and click, and right and left click.
No, no, you don't understand. Your 21st century mind is interfering with the original definition of "computer".
The job title was computer. Say you go up to one of these math people and ask them what they do:
"I'm a computer. I am one who computes. I compute the answers to complex formulas for use in various tables."
Much like one who drives is a driver, and one who monitors is a monitor. We generally don't confuse NASCAR with software that handles communication between OS and hardware, or confuse mall security officers with a CRT display, right?
Before the day of computers and pocket calculators, all mathematics was done by hand. Great effort was expended to compose trigonometric and logarithmic tables for navigation, scientific investigation, and engineering purposes.
The job title of the people who did all the math? Who got up and all day every day did these same calculations over and over and over to build these tables?
Computers.
Note also that ENIAC's inended design purpose was to produce ballistic firing tables for Army artillery during WWII.
The jargon "descope" refers to dropping of features in release scope sessions where the team leads, system architects, analysts, and project managers decide which features are necessary and which are not for a release. That decision is based on consultation with the key stake holders of the project who provide priority for each element of functionality they would like to see. Due to time constraints, not all features they would like can be included within a release so a decision must be made to only include the higher priority items.
"The customer tells us what they need, and we tell them what we can do in the time given to us. Then we decide what to do." See, that's what someone who speaks English should say. It's clearer and more consise.
I have a great deal of experience with project scope meetings. Do you think all developers work on fully defined specifications? I'm afraid that it is you that has ruined your credibility as anything more than a code monkey.
I'm not a developer at all. I'm a mid-level sysadmin and desktop analyst at a midsize company with about a 100 person IT department. We have a handful of in-house developers, and about two-thirds of the department are system analysts of some kind (we have a lot of highly specialized systems). IMX, people who speak like you do tend to be all-fluff-no-buff. I'm sure you have lots of experience with project scope meetings. It certainly sounds like exactly that.
I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to insult you personally. It just irritates me that I have to spend extra time decoding what people standing right in front of me are actually saying. It's bad enough when I have to decode some poorly written documentation written by someone who speaks English as a second language. I shouldn't have the same problem with someone who grew up 20 miles from me.
Sometimes the jargon is a necessary element of the conversation because it is more precise about the topic, but jargon shouldn't be used just because it exists. Adding technical BS to what you're saying serves only to obfuscate your meaning, and communicating meaning is what we're trying to do, right? Try asking some of the code monkeys you work with to define "scope". If they can't, then everytime you say that word to them, you're speaking nonsense to them. You sound like one of Charlie Brown's teachers.
For example, my team is currently short staffed. Me and my team members have heard the word "priority" from our boss so often in the past six months that it no longer makes any sense. Everything is a priority, and so now nothing is a priority. Priority is a joke, now.
I'm using "wet" as per the most common usage per the standard English dictionary. If you have to, you may in fact look it up to see that water is, in fact, wet. For that matter, I'm using the standard English dictionary for the most common usage of "water".
Standard Oil -- the company that inspired anti-trust legislation -- had a 64% market share at it's peak. Microsoft would have to lose something on the order of 20-30% of their market share of desktop PC OSs and Office apps, and 15-20% of the browser market in order to approach that level of competitive monopoly.
And while you may, in fact, have found someone who claims to enjoy paying taxes, that means very little. I can find people who enjoy much less desireable things. Nevermind that the article actually means the person enjoys the benefits of taxation, rather than actually being required to pay money to tax collectors.
My God, this isn't about gay rights. It's about maintaining an enjoyable playing experience for the whole user base.
The problem with allowing a group -- any group -- to have real-world connections to any political or social issue is that it is discriminatory if you don't allow all of them. They're not barring GLBT-friendly groups. They're banning any group with any connection to any hotbed issue.
If they allow GLBT-friendly groups, then GLBT-unfriendly groups must also be allowed to exist. It would be wholly unfair and unequal to do otherwise.
"Oh, but what about the Christian-friendly guilds..."
What Christian-friendly guilds? The only Christian-friendly guild I've seen was broken up by Bliz, although I think they were told it was because of their guild name. All the recruitment requests for these kind of guilds I used to see on the official forums got locked/deleted. If there are Christian-friendly guilds -- or anything of the sort -- I suspect they go out of their way to obfuscate that fact from Blizzard.
Please show me any direct evidence of Blizzard blatantly ignoring their policy on social and political hot topics in character names, guild names, or in realm chat.
Bigoted is as bigoted does. An "aryan-friendly guild" and a "GLBT-friendly guild" are both discriminatory and bigoted. Just because one of those groups doesn't offend you personally -- that is, you are personally tolerant of that group -- doesn't make it any less bigoted.
Blizzard is entirely in the right. It is a ToS violation to recruit people based only on their association to any one out-of-game group.
I only worked with one outsourced IT department, and it was to somewhere in Indonesia, I think, not India. In any case, they were the most useless bunch of people I've ever had to work with. They had no understanding of the environment, and I constantly had to explain the most basic components to them and repeat myself over an over -- even in emails. If you don't even know what I mean when I say "method" or "object", I don't really have time to explain that to you.
It usually took about an hour (or half a dozen emails) to actually convince them that something was wrong and they needed to do actual work, and weeks to get basic documentation. I constantly got the impression that they neither cared about the problems in the applications they supposedly supported, nor understood what I was saying. I had to rewrite major sections of code just to get their revisions to properly execute and interface properly with the database.
The entire experience soured me on ever working with outsourced developers or tech support -- particularly, I guess, if they are foreign. I hate it because I know it's a rather bigoted view, but since it's my only experience with it it's all I know. I suspect that the job actually did go to the lowest bidder, since I certainly can't imagine paying anybody actual money for the time they wasted. A co-worker of mine who worked on the project with me and still works at that company tells me they finally scrapped the entire application a year or so after I left and hired some in-house developers to do it right and have some accountability.
Part of the problem -- most of the problem, I'd say -- was also that management just didn't care that these developers were useless. They hired them, and they were going to get them to develop this tool or die trying. So with no real application development knowledge base, only two guys who had their own projects to handle, and management that wasn't willing to pay for the results they demanded it was just an ugly, ugly situation that I was glad to get out of when I did.
Why was parent modded Offtopic? The Malicious Software Removal Tool is not a patch. Kama Sutra is a mass-emailed trojan that executes a destructive virus on February 3rd. There is nothing for MS to patch!
You're missing the obvious: If source code is stolen, then primarily only the black hats will get it. Legitimate users, which 99% of people who look at FOSS code are, basically don't exist in the black market. The code is closed. It's not like Mr. Russinovich is going to submit a bug fix because he read stolen code.
We buy HP desktop systems at work. We buy a lot of them. Something like 400-500 a year. The systems used to come with 40 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 8 hard drives. We experience about a 25% failure rate in the first 12 months with these hard drives. Curious at this high failure rate, I did some reasearch. I discovered that this particular model of hard drive corrupts it's own firmware.
My rights that the Constitution prevents the government from infringing upon do not end just because I leave my country or contact someone outside my country. My country's government is still bound by them regardless of where I am, it's just that their jurisdiction for enforcing their laws ends at the border.
I have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. It is illegal for the US Government to deny me that right.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you don't need to normalize the differences. You could just randomize the watermarked areas. Presumably they're either inaudible or imperceptible, so the difference between a watmark and garbage only matters to watermark verification programs.
Or get your hands on the verification code, and reverse engineer the algorithm. Now you can generate your own watermarks that are indistinguishable from those sold legally.
Of course, MS will probably release a "feature pack" for Vista that enforces watermarked media. And Intel will probably have a new "multimedia chip" in their next chipset. And even should piracy actually be averted, it's not like the cost will ever go down for the comsumer.
Consumers see absolutely no benefit to the prevention or elimination of piracy.
True enough, but it is obvious that science has limitations.
1. Science can only be reasonably applied the things that can be observed.
2. Science can only be meaningfully applied to things that can be measured and repeated.
3. Science can only be absolutely applied to things that can be understood by humans.
To presume that all knowledge and all truth must necessarily be confined by the above set of restrictions is ludicrous. And, of course, completely unprovable. If you honestly believe that science and humanity are capable of understanding and knowing everything, then you have trapped yourself by faith in science. That is, welcome to your pseudoreligion.
Ultimately, science is all about answers. Religion is all about questions.
I work at a hospital that is very computerized. Particualrly the ICU's. We do have regular downtimes so it's not impossible for them to function, but it is much more difficult.
There's several problems:
1. HIPPA regulations require that certain things are documented and maintained. In our hospital, we have computer systems that aggregate data from all medical instruments. Specificaly, it is required that data be collected (charted) on at least an hourly basis for every patient. Computers collect our data in a constant stream. Nurses are required to review it and document what went on every hour, but the actual data collection is largely done automatically.
2. Nurses, particularly the younger ones, are not used to paper charting. It takes much, much longer to chart on paper for them. Even the fact that they're reduced from a textbox of unlimited size to a tiny little box on a one page paper form. I know the nurses do have simulated computer downtimes that they train with, during which time they do computer charting for real and paper charting for practice, but it's still much more time consuming.
3. Admits and discharges are all through computers. Due to a number of legal requirements like HIPPA, you can't treat someone who isn't admitted or let someone leave who isn't discharged.
4. All medication orders to the inpatient pharmacy are through computers. I imagine there is still a backup paper method, but I've never seen it used. I wonder if anybody on the floor would know how to use it very well.
5. All medical imaging is digital now. The days of giant films are gone. No network means no x-rays, no MRI's, no nothing.
6. Similarly, patient records are all electronic now. This is a HIPPA requirement. No netowrk, and suddenly it really difficult to see patient records that contain things like drug allergies. I think they make paper copies of patient records for every patient in each unit, but I'm not a nurse so I don't know.
Every system we have has redundancies and backups. Even our high end Cisco concentrators are all redundant. Having an entire network go down is a nightmare I hope I never have to see. It wouldn't bring patient care down, but it would greatly hinder the efforts of doctors and nurses. It's bad enough when a unit printer goes down.
Erm, once you begin travelling faster than about one-tenth the speed of light, mass is no longer constant. As your velocity increases, so does your mass, so you require more and more energy to continue accelerating at the same rate. At the speed of light, objects approach infinite mass. In order to overcome such an object's inertia and accellerate this infinite mass, you need infinite energy. In all the universe there is not infinite energy.
This was actually the intended purpose for including these particular games. Solitare is designed to teach you point and click, drag and drop, and double-click. Minesweeper is designed to teach you point and click, and right and left click.
Indeed. They installed the solitare software, then, didn't they? They provided the software, and the required rights to use it.
It's akin to giving a deck of cards to every employee as they are hired and then firing anybody who uses them at work.
The job title was computer. Say you go up to one of these math people and ask them what they do: "I'm a computer. I am one who computes. I compute the answers to complex formulas for use in various tables."
Much like one who drives is a driver, and one who monitors is a monitor. We generally don't confuse NASCAR with software that handles communication between OS and hardware, or confuse mall security officers with a CRT display, right?
Computers.
Note also that ENIAC's inended design purpose was to produce ballistic firing tables for Army artillery during WWII.
I'm sorry, I'm really not trying to insult you personally. It just irritates me that I have to spend extra time decoding what people standing right in front of me are actually saying. It's bad enough when I have to decode some poorly written documentation written by someone who speaks English as a second language. I shouldn't have the same problem with someone who grew up 20 miles from me.
Sometimes the jargon is a necessary element of the conversation because it is more precise about the topic, but jargon shouldn't be used just because it exists. Adding technical BS to what you're saying serves only to obfuscate your meaning, and communicating meaning is what we're trying to do, right? Try asking some of the code monkeys you work with to define "scope". If they can't, then everytime you say that word to them, you're speaking nonsense to them. You sound like one of Charlie Brown's teachers.
For example, my team is currently short staffed. Me and my team members have heard the word "priority" from our boss so often in the past six months that it no longer makes any sense. Everything is a priority, and so now nothing is a priority. Priority is a joke, now.
Oh, right. Sega died.
If, on the other hand, you wish to pick nits in order to defend RMS from an obvious joke, bravo.
I'm using "wet" as per the most common usage per the standard English dictionary. If you have to, you may in fact look it up to see that water is, in fact, wet. For that matter, I'm using the standard English dictionary for the most common usage of "water".
Standard Oil -- the company that inspired anti-trust legislation -- had a 64% market share at it's peak. Microsoft would have to lose something on the order of 20-30% of their market share of desktop PC OSs and Office apps, and 15-20% of the browser market in order to approach that level of competitive monopoly.
And while you may, in fact, have found someone who claims to enjoy paying taxes, that means very little. I can find people who enjoy much less desireable things. Nevermind that the article actually means the person enjoys the benefits of taxation, rather than actually being required to pay money to tax collectors.
In other news, water is still wet, Microsoft is still a monopoly, and people dislike paying taxes.
My God, this isn't about gay rights. It's about maintaining an enjoyable playing experience for the whole user base.
The problem with allowing a group -- any group -- to have real-world connections to any political or social issue is that it is discriminatory if you don't allow all of them. They're not barring GLBT-friendly groups. They're banning any group with any connection to any hotbed issue.
If they allow GLBT-friendly groups, then GLBT-unfriendly groups must also be allowed to exist. It would be wholly unfair and unequal to do otherwise.
"Oh, but what about the Christian-friendly guilds..."
What Christian-friendly guilds? The only Christian-friendly guild I've seen was broken up by Bliz, although I think they were told it was because of their guild name. All the recruitment requests for these kind of guilds I used to see on the official forums got locked/deleted. If there are Christian-friendly guilds -- or anything of the sort -- I suspect they go out of their way to obfuscate that fact from Blizzard.
Please show me any direct evidence of Blizzard blatantly ignoring their policy on social and political hot topics in character names, guild names, or in realm chat.
No, no. Real world groups.
Bigoted is as bigoted does. An "aryan-friendly guild" and a "GLBT-friendly guild" are both discriminatory and bigoted. Just because one of those groups doesn't offend you personally -- that is, you are personally tolerant of that group -- doesn't make it any less bigoted. Blizzard is entirely in the right. It is a ToS violation to recruit people based only on their association to any one out-of-game group.
It usually took about an hour (or half a dozen emails) to actually convince them that something was wrong and they needed to do actual work, and weeks to get basic documentation. I constantly got the impression that they neither cared about the problems in the applications they supposedly supported, nor understood what I was saying. I had to rewrite major sections of code just to get their revisions to properly execute and interface properly with the database.
The entire experience soured me on ever working with outsourced developers or tech support -- particularly, I guess, if they are foreign. I hate it because I know it's a rather bigoted view, but since it's my only experience with it it's all I know. I suspect that the job actually did go to the lowest bidder, since I certainly can't imagine paying anybody actual money for the time they wasted. A co-worker of mine who worked on the project with me and still works at that company tells me they finally scrapped the entire application a year or so after I left and hired some in-house developers to do it right and have some accountability.
Part of the problem -- most of the problem, I'd say -- was also that management just didn't care that these developers were useless. They hired them, and they were going to get them to develop this tool or die trying. So with no real application development knowledge base, only two guys who had their own projects to handle, and management that wasn't willing to pay for the results they demanded it was just an ugly, ugly situation that I was glad to get out of when I did.
It boils down to this: you get what you pay for. Thinking otherwise is foolish.
Outsourcing only ensures that you and your IT department share no common language.
Why was parent modded Offtopic? The Malicious Software Removal Tool is not a patch. Kama Sutra is a mass-emailed trojan that executes a destructive virus on February 3rd. There is nothing for MS to patch!
It's obviously part of their evil plan to overthrow Google.
You're missing the obvious: If source code is stolen, then primarily only the black hats will get it. Legitimate users, which 99% of people who look at FOSS code are, basically don't exist in the black market. The code is closed. It's not like Mr. Russinovich is going to submit a bug fix because he read stolen code.
Die, Maxtor, die.
I have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to privacy. It is illegal for the US Government to deny me that right.