So proprietary code stifles the advancement of hardware....
No, proprietary code stifles the support of legacy hardware. New hardware, conversely, tends to be supported by proprietary software first, and the FOSS comes later.
And niche hardware tends to be exclusively supported by proprietary software, and FOSS never gets around to adding support. (Think medical instruments, etc...)
Meanwhile, open source drivers for linux and bsd have been ported to 64bit hardware years ago.
Yup, exactly. Your old 10 megabit network card will have 64-bit latest kernel support on OSS while the windows drivers haven't been updated since windows 98. But the latest nvidia graphics card? Proprietary drivers are way ahead of the OSS stuff, and it will be years before the OSS stuff catches up.
Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?
Of course they can, and do. Vista x64 runs 32 bit apps just fine.
Unfortunately MS doesn't have the source for all the devices out there, and can't just recompile all of those to be 64-bit, and the 3rd party vendors that can do it, would rather not spend the effort -- hell, they kicked and screamed and did a half-assed job of updating their drivers to work with Vista in 32 bit (the main source of most real Vista woe).
Yes, it would, if we did not routinely speak out and act against the KKK in this country.
Do we? Is the grand wizard of the KKK behind bars? No? Is he being sought after by police? No? Well, surely the ACLU is upset? What... the ACLU has gone to court -defending- the KKK's rights?
It wouldn't be hard for a foreign media to cherry pick plenty of soundbites that make it seem like America not only supports the KKK but is actively protecting it, and its members.
But that would be a distortion, now wouldn't it. The fact that we respect first amendment rights to free speech, and so on leads us to defend individuals we don't like and all that, but that sort of nuance is easily lost in a biased newscast.
And with that in mind, do you really think the vast majority of muslims, especially of those who are American citizens aren't speaking out against terrorism? They are. Despite the controversial ratings getting idiots the networks dig up and give too much mic time too.
That being said, as the years go on and I see how much we are being robbed blind in this country, I am starting to think, maybe I should never have, and in the future may not, speak out against the KKK. Maybe I'll join them.
Fuck, I wish I hadn't already contributed to this article or I'd mod you up. You hit the nail on the head. For the record, it's reasonable and logical to profile based on culture. Our society takes it to the extreme (and beyond) and that is a definite problem. But the underlying idea(l) behind it is sound and perfectly reasonable.
The trouble here is that these people were only dressed up like Muslims. As an overall "culture", they are perfectly reasonable, calm, rational people, that make up 20% of the global population. I've encountered thousands and never encountered an elevated level of problems or violence levels.
Bottom line, fearing "Muslim's" is irrational. Muslim's aren't a "problem culture". Your stereotype is wrong or at least so overly-broad as to be meaningless.
And THAT is the problem here. Your applying your stereotype too broadly because you don't know how to identify the actual 'problem culture'.
Suppose a few Chinese men came to the US and were violently accosted by neonazi skinheads... and then returned to China and told their tale, and from then on, every white person who goes to china gets treated with "extra prudence" because they've identified "white people" as a "problem culture".
Would that be warranted? Of course not!
What's the difference?
Sure, to you and I a Nazi Skinhead might stick out in a crowd... but perhaps to someone from another culture, we're all just homogeneous white guys. Or what if the skin heads were KKK instead -- and truly inconspicuous amongst us? Would that make it ok for every non-white to treat all whites as as problem culture, due to KKK violence?
A reasonable level of prudence is required
No a reasonable sense of perspective is required. The odds that the guy next to you adorned with nazi symbols and a shaved head is a nazi skinhead and is likely to be belligerent and racist and is from a 'problem culture' is reasonably high, and you are justified in being extra prudent. The odds that the person dressed in traditional muslim attire next to you is affiliated with terrorism are a million to one - the odds that the normal looking white guy on your other side is going to mug you are probably significantly higher.
The one thing these articles miss out is the massive costs involved in switching over and training staff. The old adage of "Linux is free only if your time is worthless" is especially relevent to the corporate world.
Office 2007 is both expensive and different. OpenOffice is free and different (some would even argue less different).
That makes it potentially a good value proposition, unless of course you can stay on Office 2003 which is already bought and paid for. But I know companies still on Office 2000 and Office XP and those aren't fully compatible with Vista (and Windows 7) and while they can hang onto WinXP for a bit yet, they can see the end is near.
For them, OOo is genuinely a good value proposition.
Did you skim the Commons Deed (no legal force) or the actual license? Please search for the words "upon notice from any Licensor" in the license.
Thanks. I did skim the actual license, but the operative word is "skimmed". Legalese and skimming aren't exactly compatible; and the offending restriction is at the tail end of 4(a) which is mostly about something else.
It's still technically an extra restriction on downstream users, which is incompatible with the GPL's ban on adding extra restrictions for the same reason that the BSD licenses with the advertising clause were incompatible with the GPL's ban on adding extra restrictions.
Oh, I see what you are saying now.
That said, I notice that CC-SA v3.0 (creative commons share alike 3.0) is considered DFSG-Free. Does that mean its also now compatible with the GPL?
I skimmed it, but didn't see anywhere where the author could request a -change- in attribution. Merely that you had to honor the authors attribution requirements as specified in the work when you got it.
Have I missed something, or is CC-SA 3.0 now GPL friendly?
Remember, there are 2 factors working in my favor:
1) I have to receive notice from the licensor. I don't have to worry about being sideswiped by a licensing change I don't know about. And if the licensor doesn't notify me then I don't have to do anything.
2) Upon receiving notice, I only have to remove attribution to the extent practicable. I can't go back in time and retroactively undo what is done, and therefore I am not required to do that. I am required to do what I can, which is remove it 'going forward'. That really doesn't seem unduly onerous.
It doesn't strike me as really that big of a problem, especially if it doesn't happen all that often... which in actual practice I don't think it does happen much. Has anyone here ever actually received a notice from the licensor to remove attribution? (And if someone actually has, how much trouble was it to deal with?)
I would guess half of all avoided collisions resulted from the gas pedal and steering wheel instead of the break.
Citation?
Seriously. I don't believe that for a second. I'd guess less than half of one percent of all avoided collisions resulted from hitting the gas pedal.
I'd concede that a significant number involved the steering wheel, usually in conjunction with the brakes. I've been driving for 20+ years, and I've avoided a lot of collisions; the number of times I've used the brakes utterly and completely dominates the number of times I've hit the gas.
The few times I've actually been rear ended and saw it coming enough in advance to do anything about it, I was stopped at a light. (usually behind someone else also stopped). There is no -good- evasion strategy. Even if there is no one stopped in front of you, accelerating into an intersection on a red is asking for an even worse incident, especially since there isn't time to ensure its clear. Alternatively swerving to a lane on the side (again without checking) is also a recipe for disaster - there may be traffic there, or cyclists or pedestrians - and flooring your car into a pedestrian to avoid being rear ended isn't going to put you ahead of the game. Plus there is a high probability that is where the sliding driver will try to go too -- after all if I'm sliding towards another car and don't think I'll be able to stop, the obvious course of action is to try to go around him... the last thing I need is for him to cut me off.
Finally, provided the rear-end accident will be minor enough that your life isn't threatened -- in terms of insurance, being rear ended while legally stopped is about as good as it gets. Having a collision while attempting some illegal evasive maneuver is likely to bring some significant liability your way, even if it was really the other guys fault.
So, really, its only worthwhile even trying if you are about to be rear ended by an out of control speeding vehicle that will hit you going full tilt -- that you can also see coming and have enough time to properly react to... this doesn't happen often.
The sales numbers are on new SALES, not on units manufactured.
Not necessarily.
MS replaces RRoD machines for free, so those don't get counted in the sales numbers.
You'd be surprised. You are right if the unit gets sent directly to microsoft those won't be counted as sales.
But a lot of defective units are simply brought back to their place of purpose and exchanged their. And at that point it depends entirely how the individual retailer does the accounting for the exchanges and how it does the reporting, and whether it goes to the trouble of adjusting the reporting.
However, in normal password routines, you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the encryption starting with a Trim. So no problem.
If you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the trim, then yeah, it will be accepted, and it will work transparently for the users, but you've failed to enforce the rule. Suppose someone set their password to be:
"[space][space][space]123"
And then in future, when logging in, they could login just using "123", since that is what is actually been hashed and stored. So you've got a 6 character rule in place, and someone's bypassed it... that's no good.
Unless you again validated the supplied password strength for validity before logging in, each time verifying that they did at least enter 6 characters before submitting it to be trimmed and hashed and validated against the stored version...but that leads to other problems.
For example, if the strength rules were changed since you last logged in, you could no longer log in, as the pre-login password check would reject your password before even trying it. (e.g. suppose you had a 6 character password and the minimum was raised to 7, existing users with 6 digit passwords would be unable to login, because the pre-login check would require that they enter 7. (Which they could ironically defeat by entering their 6 digit password with a leading or trailing space...)
No, I think that route just leads to all kinds of defects and madness in general.
I think you should either trim the password -before- you check it for strength validity (and if you do that, let them know that their spaces were trimmed when you reject their password) or allow spaces and don't trim passwords (with the disadvantage that some users are going to inadvertently lead or trail their password with spaces and then not be able to login) -- so I'm leaning towards agreeing with banning leading or trailing spaces from passwords, which is what the designer in the example case did.
Yes. This solution is so glaringly obvious that there must be some sinister reason they are ignoring it. I mean, seriously? You're going to go with a fancypants expensive satellite-based high-tech solution requiring lots of new legislation, training, infrastructure, and other costs, not to mention the overwhelming privacy violation -- instead of just raising the tax a little bit? What, seriously? I call shenanigans.
Yes. If by "glaringly sinister" you mean simply that the systems hardware and software manufacturers contributed handsomely to someone's campaign fund.
So you walk up to your nearest bank or travel agency and buy a $1 US bill.
Your idea would fail, as most people would take offense to having to pay $5 to register for a forum.
I think most people would take offense at having to pay $1 to register for most forums -- especially to leave a message on some random blog they drove by. It would work for the really big forums... maybe... I say maybe because it might actually be worth it for the spammer to pay a buck to spam on it.
And for the equally questionable counter-example; Let's say we're playing a game of tennis which I suck at. Each time I miss a point I can just say "oh no, that didn't count" and we continue the game as if nothing happened.
I happen to have a tennis game. Here's how it works:
When you miss a point: the game CONTINUES -gasp-. You don't have to go back and restart it from the beginning!
You can even lose a game or two, and still win the set. And win or lose the set, you are assigned a score and rank. The point of the game is to play more sets of tennis to improve your score and rank, and unlock additional courts, players, uniforms, etc...
To actually win requires skill. But it doesn't prevent you from finishing a match if you suck.
I actually quite enjoy it. I would enjoy it a lot less if every time I dropped the ball I'd have to go back and restart the entire fucking game.
No matter how much I suck or how good you are I will still beat you easily because there is no punishment or even possibility in losing.
Only if you define winning as "getting to the end". That doesn't define "winning" in tennis, now does it? The fact that a game of tennis was played to completion doesn't imply that you won it.
It doesn't define "winning" in mountain biking either - when riding solo a win would be a clean run, or even a clean run within a time limit. Its generally assumed you'll reach the end.
Similarly 'story games' and 'platformers' shouldn't be about 'reaching the end'. Winning is doing it clean and/or fast, but anyone should be able to reach the end. Mountain biking is little more than a real world platformer after all. Game devs should look how people approach that, and model games the same way.
My shelves are full of games that I've never seen the end of, because I got bored of doing level 1 to see level 2, then doing level 1 and 2 to see level 3, then doing level 1,2,3 to see level 4... the more I played the worse it got. I had to keep repetitively replaying increasingly more of the game to see just a little more of it, until it just wasn't fun anymore to keep going. Playing for 10 minutes that you've seen 100 times for a chance at seeing another 15 seconds of new content... ? forget it.
Would it be too hard to allow the Hardcore mode from the beginning? No, and that's what bothers me.
I actually agree with you here to a point. Some games I enjoy enough that I =do= want to go straight to the hard mode, especially if I'm coming back to it. I didn't like that after I bought a new computer and reinstalled Doom that I was supposed to replay the entire game over again just to unlock 'nightmare' difficulty. That irritated me.
But take a game like super monkey ball that has all the fun and silly easy little multiplayer minigames as un-lockables that you get from completing the much harder single player game. That's worse. My kids (4 and 5 love the monkeyball minigames, but don't have a hope in hell of beating the single player game... so I have to spend hours doing the single player stuff just to unlock the parts they'll like. Luckily they have me around... if I wasn't a gamer myself, they'd have this game full of stuff they'd love to do that they simply wouldn't ever be able to unlock.
So in my opinion if you are going to have unlockables, it makes more sense to unlock progressively 'harder stuff' than to do hard stuff to unlock 'fun stuff'. Because at least the players that would enjoy the unlockables can unlock them.
Maybe you should learn to do those 6 minutes quicker? I've seen a friend of mine complete the first map of Duke Nukem 3d in 18 seconds.
Maybe I have no interest in doing that.
I have nothing against speed runs, and in games I really like I have taken to that level. But that shouldn't be mandatory. Plus for a lot of games, that simply isn't an option - shmups for example typically scroll at one speed. I've been playing R-Type on the Wii Virtual Console, and I quite enjoy it... I get to the 5th level unfailingly every time I play now, and then promptly die. Its a game of learning the attack patterns.
It took me quite a while to master the the level 4 boss. But primarily because I could only try a couple times an hour. It takes 10-15 minutes to play through the first 4 levels of the game to reach the level 4 boss, and after you die you lose all your power ups, making the battle that much harder, and then after a couple deaths you have to restart the ENTIRE GAME, not the level, the entire game. And its a fixed rate scroller so there's no 'going faster'.
So now I've beaten the level 4 boss, and can reliably reach level 5 on one or two lives with both my 'continues' available, and die before reaching the level 5 boss.
I really just need to practice level 5. Having to replay levels 1 through 4 every half dozen deaths just sucks back a lot of time. I've played level 1 probably hundreds of times now. I really don't want to have to play it over and over again just for the privilege of taking another crack at level 5.
Well, that, and most of the time when I first reach the boss, I already have lost hit points. So I need to do the level again without losing HP that I need against the boss.
Yep, if I reach the boss and think I need to go back and redo the level to reach him with more ammo and health, by all means I should have that option. But it should be an OPTION.
You don't master a game just because you passed a level.
Perhaps not, but after repeating the level 7 times without taking so much as a scratch to get to the part I'm stuck on, I'm comfortable saying I've mastered that part of the level. And I certainly don't need to do it 13 more times for the privilege of trying the part I actually am stuck on.
You think people doing speed runs just did the level once?
You think people doing speed runs have any bearing on the conversation at all? Those people practice the level endlesslessly, analyzing it for shortcuts and optimum routes. They aren't even part of the discussion.
You're also talking about reducing the total number of hours spent on a game.
So? I reduced it by removing the hours I had no interest in. And their is nothing stopping them from having a 'challenge mode' where you have to do the entire game on a single life to soak up the hours from the hardcore players.
Let's face it, people buy a game based on hours of gameplay - why else would it be splashed across the box?
People buy games on the expectation that those hours of gameplay are actually new content. Making people play through the same level 140 times doesn't count as more gameplay. Otherwise Pac-Man has infinite hours of gameplay.
If games are trying your patience, then you've probably outgrown them, and need to move on to more mature pursuits.
Or they are poorly designed games, and I'm mature enough to recognize this.
Playing games is about playing the games...not getting frustrated because the game you're playing requires you to play the game.
I find it odd that you have made no provision for recognizing badly designed games. I guess no matter how arbitrary and stupid the game is, the developers are always right, and if you don't enjoy it then you've outgrown games?
I haven't played the game, but that said, how much of the heart of great games was the thrill of just squeaking by? If you know that there isn't any way to loose, what you're left with is a empty shell.
I liken it to mountain biking. When I run a trail and have trouble with a section, I back up a bit and repeat the section. I don't restart the entire 10km trail. That would be stupid. Just getting to the end is satisfying.
Eventually I master a trail, and can do a clean pass, and that's even more satisfying. But I would NEVER reach that point, if, after every time I had to put a foot down, I had to go back and restart the entire trail.
Nice to look at, and shows you some neat tricks, but nothing else later.
Huh?
Putting training wheels on a game isn't the future, it's just a gimmick to try and make a bland game that offends no one, and doesn't really try to solve the problem of playability. My 2c.
Realizing that most people who want to play a game aren't aiming to prove they can do a flawless run IS the future. If they like the game enough, and want to do a flawless run, by all means, have that as one of the challenges or achievements or whatever, and those people that can and want to do that will, hell, give them a bonus cutscene or dialog or whatever even... but there is no reason for that to be how one has to play the game.
Nobody normal puts up with that kind of nonsense in anything else they do, whether its biking, snowboarding, skiing, fishing... hell even programming... I mean can you imagine deciding to kill an afternoon writing a few perl scripts where you would delete your project and start from scratch every time you found a bug, under the assumption that eventually you'd get good enough that you'd be able to write it flawlessly?
I don't know anyone who is that "hardcore". In fact I wouldn't call that person "hardcore"... I'd just call him stupid.;)
If you don't repeat the game's content, then how are you supposed to get good at the game?
Agreed. But what is the point of repeating the content you already mastered?
Lets say I kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[six more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, all flawlessly and then mis-time my jump onto the swinging rope and fall into a pit trap and die.
What do I need to get better at?
"make the jump onto the swinging rope"
or
"kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[6 more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, then make the jump onto the swinging rope." ???
Making me repeat the lengthy sequence of stuff I already figured out and beat just to take another shot at jumping the rope is just more annoying than anything. I've played games where I couldn't figure out the boss, but had completely mastered the 6 minute level to reach him... WASTING 6 minutes between each attempt to try a different attack pattern on the boss is just annoying.
People who want to prove their skills should have difficulty mode with one life/ no respawns/ etc. But while learning the game or the first time through... What's the point?
You get killed, you try again, and you get better.
You try again to get past what killed you. Why exactly do you need to re-do several minutes worth of stuff you've already mastered?
If you're not enjoying the challenges that the game is giving...
The primary challenge in such games is simply one of my patience. The enjoyment comes from beating the parts you got stuck on, not on replaying the parts you were good at. I don't mind taking several tries to figure out a boss or a jump or a puzzle, but I do get pissed if I have to spend hours replaying the parts I've mastered just to retry the parts I'm stuck on.
When I go mountain biking and have trouble with a section I'll back up a 100 meters and take another run at it, I don't go back and restart the entire fucking 10km trail. And sure, there is definitely a feeling of satisfaction upon reaching the level that I can do a given trail in one clean pass... but I certainly don't want to get to that level by restarting the entire fucking trail every time I have to put my foot down.
then the technical term for your state is "burned out"
No. That's the state I get to when I have to restart.
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
Right.
But you are working from a 1000 year old hard disk platter. I think even 'well preserved' will mean 'significantly degraded'. You aren't going to just pop it in and read a file... you'll be examining the platter with an electron microscope or better, trying to reverse engineer the disk geometry, partitioning system, the file system, and then... after all that you'll get an indecipherable binary stream.
Go ahead, pull up a typical ms document in a hex editor. You'll find the text in there as ascii (well sort of... its there in unicode... so everything is two bytes wide), and in a 10k word file, 90%+ of it won't be the contents... so you'd be working to extract the meaningful text from the list of font names and formatting data... using an electron microscope. (And some of the newer xml formats are including a compression layer too rather than storing plaintext.)
I'm not saying it will be impossible... but it is going to be pretty ugly.
If you're using the screen to validate that you pressed a key, you're not typing as fast as you could be.
I think he means he's using the screen to validate input well after the fact. I usually visually catch typos (omissions, inversions, miskeys, etc) when I'm 5-10+ keystrokes past them, providing I'm looking at the screen. e.g. composing vs transcribing)
I agree absolutely that having a good keyboard reduces errors. I despise laptop keyboards, etc. However, I prefer a light quiet cushy (not 'squishy' -- there is a difference) keyboard with good key travel. I don't like heavy mechanical units. I don't like the noise. I don't like the weight. They slow me down.
Maybe if I spent enough time with them I'd adjust, and maybe after adjusting, I would find I'm slightly faster and/or have fewer errors... but I still wouldn't like the noise.
And I don't do much transcribing. When I'm composing I find my mind is the bottleneck, not my fingers as I already type at 70+ wpm. And I usually program with aids like code completion, so I'm rarely streaming text as fast as my fingers can go.
I don't want a "Model M". Currently I'm using a Saitek Exclipse 2, all the keys are where I want them, in the shape I want them, and its got pretty much exactly the weight and feel I like. It won't last 15 years, but I really couldn't care less.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I did a lot of transcribing... you yourself seem to admit that's where its greatest strength is. But I don't do much of that, and would prefer to keep it that way.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure what your point is.
So proprietary code stifles the advancement of hardware....
No, proprietary code stifles the support of legacy hardware.
New hardware, conversely, tends to be supported by proprietary software first, and the FOSS comes later.
And niche hardware tends to be exclusively supported by proprietary software, and FOSS never gets around to adding support. (Think medical instruments, etc...)
Meanwhile, open source drivers for linux and bsd have been ported to 64bit hardware years ago.
Yup, exactly. Your old 10 megabit network card will have 64-bit latest kernel support on OSS while the windows drivers haven't been updated since windows 98. But the latest nvidia graphics card? Proprietary drivers are way ahead of the OSS stuff, and it will be years before the OSS stuff catches up.
Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?
Of course they can, and do. Vista x64 runs 32 bit apps just fine.
Unfortunately MS doesn't have the source for all the devices out there, and can't just recompile all of those to be 64-bit, and the 3rd party vendors that can do it, would rather not spend the effort -- hell, they kicked and screamed and did a half-assed job of updating their drivers to work with Vista in 32 bit (the main source of most real Vista woe).
Yes, it would, if we did not routinely speak out and act against the KKK in this country.
Do we? Is the grand wizard of the KKK behind bars? No? Is he being sought after by police? No? Well, surely the ACLU is upset? What... the ACLU has gone to court -defending- the KKK's rights?
It wouldn't be hard for a foreign media to cherry pick plenty of soundbites that make it seem like America not only supports the KKK but is actively protecting it, and its members.
But that would be a distortion, now wouldn't it. The fact that we respect first amendment rights to free speech, and so on leads us to defend individuals we don't like and all that, but that sort of nuance is easily lost in a biased newscast.
And with that in mind, do you really think the vast majority of muslims, especially of those who are American citizens aren't speaking out against terrorism? They are. Despite the controversial ratings getting idiots the networks dig up and give too much mic time too.
That being said, as the years go on and I see how much we are being robbed blind in this country, I am starting to think, maybe I should never have, and in the future may not, speak out against the KKK. Maybe I'll join them.
Classy.
Fuck, I wish I hadn't already contributed to this article or I'd mod you up. You hit the nail on the head. For the record, it's reasonable and logical to profile based on culture. Our society takes it to the extreme (and beyond) and that is a definite problem. But the underlying idea(l) behind it is sound and perfectly reasonable.
The trouble here is that these people were only dressed up like Muslims. As an overall "culture", they are perfectly reasonable, calm, rational people, that make up 20% of the global population. I've encountered thousands and never encountered an elevated level of problems or violence levels.
Bottom line, fearing "Muslim's" is irrational. Muslim's aren't a "problem culture". Your stereotype is wrong or at least so overly-broad as to be meaningless.
And THAT is the problem here. Your applying your stereotype too broadly because you don't know how to identify the actual 'problem culture'.
Suppose a few Chinese men came to the US and were violently accosted by neonazi skinheads... and then returned to China and told their tale, and from then on, every white person who goes to china gets treated with "extra prudence" because they've identified "white people" as a "problem culture".
Would that be warranted? Of course not!
What's the difference?
Sure, to you and I a Nazi Skinhead might stick out in a crowd... but perhaps to someone from another culture, we're all just homogeneous white guys. Or what if the skin heads were KKK instead -- and truly inconspicuous amongst us? Would that make it ok for every non-white to treat all whites as as problem culture, due to KKK violence?
A reasonable level of prudence is required
No a reasonable sense of perspective is required. The odds that the guy next to you adorned with nazi symbols and a shaved head is a nazi skinhead and is likely to be belligerent and racist and is from a 'problem culture' is reasonably high, and you are justified in being extra prudent. The odds that the person dressed in traditional muslim attire next to you is affiliated with terrorism are a million to one - the odds that the normal looking white guy on your other side is going to mug you are probably significantly higher.
Yet which one are you eying suspiciously?
The one thing these articles miss out is the massive costs involved in switching over and training staff. The old adage of "Linux is free only if your time is worthless" is especially relevent to the corporate world.
Office 2007 is both expensive and different.
OpenOffice is free and different (some would even argue less different).
That makes it potentially a good value proposition, unless of course you can stay on Office 2003 which is already bought and paid for. But I know companies still on Office 2000 and Office XP and those aren't fully compatible with Vista (and Windows 7) and while they can hang onto WinXP for a bit yet, they can see the end is near.
For them, OOo is genuinely a good value proposition.
Did you skim the Commons Deed (no legal force) or the actual license? Please search for the words "upon notice from any Licensor" in the license.
Thanks. I did skim the actual license, but the operative word is "skimmed". Legalese and skimming aren't exactly compatible; and the offending restriction is at the tail end of 4(a) which is mostly about something else.
cheers.
It's still technically an extra restriction on downstream users, which is incompatible with the GPL's ban on adding extra restrictions for the same reason that the BSD licenses with the advertising clause were incompatible with the GPL's ban on adding extra restrictions.
Oh, I see what you are saying now.
That said, I notice that CC-SA v3.0 (creative commons share alike 3.0) is considered DFSG-Free. Does that mean its also now compatible with the GPL?
I skimmed it, but didn't see anywhere where the author could request a -change- in attribution. Merely that you had to honor the authors attribution requirements as specified in the work when you got it.
Have I missed something, or is CC-SA 3.0 now GPL friendly?
I disagree.
Remember, there are 2 factors working in my favor:
1) I have to receive notice from the licensor. I don't have to worry about being sideswiped by a licensing change I don't know about. And if the licensor doesn't notify me then I don't have to do anything.
2) Upon receiving notice, I only have to remove attribution to the extent practicable. I can't go back in time and retroactively undo what is done, and therefore I am not required to do that. I am required to do what I can, which is remove it 'going forward'. That really doesn't seem unduly onerous.
It doesn't strike me as really that big of a problem, especially if it doesn't happen all that often... which in actual practice I don't think it does happen much. Has anyone here ever actually received a notice from the licensor to remove attribution? (And if someone actually has, how much trouble was it to deal with?)
I would guess half of all avoided collisions resulted from the gas pedal and steering wheel instead of the break.
Citation?
Seriously. I don't believe that for a second. I'd guess less than half of one percent of all avoided collisions resulted from hitting the gas pedal.
I'd concede that a significant number involved the steering wheel, usually in conjunction with the brakes. I've been driving for 20+ years, and I've avoided a lot of collisions; the number of times I've used the brakes utterly and completely dominates the number of times I've hit the gas.
The few times I've actually been rear ended and saw it coming enough in advance to do anything about it, I was stopped at a light. (usually behind someone else also stopped). There is no -good- evasion strategy. Even if there is no one stopped in front of you, accelerating into an intersection on a red is asking for an even worse incident, especially since there isn't time to ensure its clear. Alternatively swerving to a lane on the side (again without checking) is also a recipe for disaster - there may be traffic there, or cyclists or pedestrians - and flooring your car into a pedestrian to avoid being rear ended isn't going to put you ahead of the game. Plus there is a high probability that is where the sliding driver will try to go too -- after all if I'm sliding towards another car and don't think I'll be able to stop, the obvious course of action is to try to go around him... the last thing I need is for him to cut me off.
Finally, provided the rear-end accident will be minor enough that your life isn't threatened -- in terms of insurance, being rear ended while legally stopped is about as good as it gets. Having a collision while attempting some illegal evasive maneuver is likely to bring some significant liability your way, even if it was really the other guys fault.
So, really, its only worthwhile even trying if you are about to be rear ended by an out of control speeding vehicle that will hit you going full tilt -- that you can also see coming and have enough time to properly react to... this doesn't happen often.
But salt for a CA cert verification method would have to be the same for each cert, or public, wouldn't it?
Yes.
And either way, it's useless for the way that salt is used for password hashes in /etc/shadow or the like.
More or less, yes. Its not 'useless' per se, but since they are attacking a given cert specifically anyway, salt doesn't really add anything.
The original poster who suggested salt in the first place didn't know what they were talking about.
The sales numbers are on new SALES, not on units manufactured.
Not necessarily.
MS replaces RRoD machines for free, so those don't get counted in the sales numbers.
You'd be surprised. You are right if the unit gets sent directly to microsoft those won't be counted as sales.
But a lot of defective units are simply brought back to their place of purpose and exchanged their. And at that point it depends entirely how the individual retailer does the accounting for the exchanges and how it does the reporting, and whether it goes to the trouble of adjusting the reporting.
However, in normal password routines, you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the encryption starting with a Trim. So no problem.
If you apply the 6 character minimum rule before the trim, then yeah, it will be accepted, and it will work transparently for the users, but you've failed to enforce the rule. Suppose someone set their password to be:
"[space][space][space]123"
And then in future, when logging in, they could login just using "123", since that is what is actually been hashed and stored. So you've got a 6 character rule in place, and someone's bypassed it... that's no good.
Unless you again validated the supplied password strength for validity before logging in, each time verifying that they did at least enter 6 characters before submitting it to be trimmed and hashed and validated against the stored version...but that leads to other problems.
For example, if the strength rules were changed since you last logged in, you could no longer log in, as the pre-login password check would reject your password before even trying it. (e.g. suppose you had a 6 character password and the minimum was raised to 7, existing users with 6 digit passwords would be unable to login, because the pre-login check would require that they enter 7. (Which they could ironically defeat by entering their 6 digit password with a leading or trailing space...)
No, I think that route just leads to all kinds of defects and madness in general.
I think you should either trim the password -before- you check it for strength validity (and if you do that, let them know that their spaces were trimmed when you reject their password) or allow spaces and don't trim passwords (with the disadvantage that some users are going to inadvertently lead or trail their password with spaces and then not be able to login) -- so I'm leaning towards agreeing with banning leading or trailing spaces from passwords, which is what the designer in the example case did.
Likewise I know quite a few Wii's that grandparents got "for when the grandchildren come over" and rarely (if ever) get used.
Fortunately, Nintendo profits when you buy it not when you use it, so they don't really give a shit.
Yes. This solution is so glaringly obvious that there must be some sinister reason they are ignoring it. I mean, seriously? You're going to go with a fancypants expensive satellite-based high-tech solution requiring lots of new legislation, training, infrastructure, and other costs, not to mention the overwhelming privacy violation -- instead of just raising the tax a little bit? What, seriously? I call shenanigans.
Yes. If by "glaringly sinister" you mean simply that the systems hardware and software manufacturers contributed handsomely to someone's campaign fund.
Why would it not work, if you were trimming all user input strings, in every instance, like any good user interface design SHOULD?
Perhaps it would not work because the user would be highly confused that
[space]1h$/X
did not meet the 6 character minimum password length requirement?
Not every country HAS a $1 bill.
So you walk up to your nearest bank or travel agency and buy a $1 US bill.
Your idea would fail, as most people would take offense to having to pay $5 to register for a forum.
I think most people would take offense at having to pay $1 to register for most forums -- especially to leave a message on some random blog they drove by. It would work for the really big forums... maybe... I say maybe because it might actually be worth it for the spammer to pay a buck to spam on it.
And have we, yet again, proven that security by obscurity doesn't work?
Salt really has nothing to do with security by obscurity.
Salt has everything to do with preventing dictionary attacks using precomputed hashes of a gazillion passwords.
Salt, done well, is generated randomly for each password. That way you need to attack each password in the database separately.
The problem here is that they are brute forcing collisions; and have the resources and motivation to do it.
And for the equally questionable counter-example; Let's say we're playing a game of tennis which I suck at. Each time I miss a point I can just say "oh no, that didn't count" and we continue the game as if nothing happened.
I happen to have a tennis game. Here's how it works:
When you miss a point: the game CONTINUES -gasp-. You don't have to go back and restart it from the beginning!
You can even lose a game or two, and still win the set. And win or lose the set, you are assigned a score and rank. The point of the game is to play more sets of tennis to improve your score and rank, and unlock additional courts, players, uniforms, etc...
To actually win requires skill. But it doesn't prevent you from finishing a match if you suck.
I actually quite enjoy it. I would enjoy it a lot less if every time I dropped the ball I'd have to go back and restart the entire fucking game.
No matter how much I suck or how good you are I will still beat you easily because there is no punishment or even possibility in losing.
Only if you define winning as "getting to the end". That doesn't define "winning" in tennis, now does it? The fact that a game of tennis was played to completion doesn't imply that you won it.
It doesn't define "winning" in mountain biking either - when riding solo a win would be a clean run, or even a clean run within a time limit. Its generally assumed you'll reach the end.
Similarly 'story games' and 'platformers' shouldn't be about 'reaching the end'. Winning is doing it clean and/or fast, but anyone should be able to reach the end. Mountain biking is little more than a real world platformer after all. Game devs should look how people approach that, and model games the same way.
My shelves are full of games that I've never seen the end of, because I got bored of doing level 1 to see level 2, then doing level 1 and 2 to see level 3, then doing level 1,2,3 to see level 4... the more I played the worse it got. I had to keep repetitively replaying increasingly more of the game to see just a little more of it, until it just wasn't fun anymore to keep going. Playing for 10 minutes that you've seen 100 times for a chance at seeing another 15 seconds of new content... ? forget it.
Would it be too hard to allow the Hardcore mode from the beginning? No, and that's what bothers me.
I actually agree with you here to a point. Some games I enjoy enough that I =do= want to go straight to the hard mode, especially if I'm coming back to it. I didn't like that after I bought a new computer and reinstalled Doom that I was supposed to replay the entire game over again just to unlock 'nightmare' difficulty. That irritated me.
But take a game like super monkey ball that has all the fun and silly easy little multiplayer minigames as un-lockables that you get from completing the much harder single player game. That's worse. My kids (4 and 5 love the monkeyball minigames, but don't have a hope in hell of beating the single player game... so I have to spend hours doing the single player stuff just to unlock the parts they'll like. Luckily they have me around... if I wasn't a gamer myself, they'd have this game full of stuff they'd love to do that they simply wouldn't ever be able to unlock.
So in my opinion if you are going to have unlockables, it makes more sense to unlock progressively 'harder stuff' than to do hard stuff to unlock 'fun stuff'. Because at least the players that would enjoy the unlockables can unlock them.
Maybe you should learn to do those 6 minutes quicker? I've seen a friend of mine complete the first map of Duke Nukem 3d in 18 seconds.
Maybe I have no interest in doing that.
I have nothing against speed runs, and in games I really like I have taken to that level. But that shouldn't be mandatory. Plus for a lot of games, that simply isn't an option - shmups for example typically scroll at one speed. I've been playing R-Type on the Wii Virtual Console, and I quite enjoy it... I get to the 5th level unfailingly every time I play now, and then promptly die. Its a game of learning the attack patterns.
It took me quite a while to master the the level 4 boss. But primarily because I could only try a couple times an hour. It takes 10-15 minutes to play through the first 4 levels of the game to reach the level 4 boss, and after you die you lose all your power ups, making the battle that much harder, and then after a couple deaths you have to restart the ENTIRE GAME, not the level, the entire game. And its a fixed rate scroller so there's no 'going faster'.
So now I've beaten the level 4 boss, and can reliably reach level 5 on one or two lives with both my 'continues' available, and die before reaching the level 5 boss.
I really just need to practice level 5. Having to replay levels 1 through 4 every half dozen deaths just sucks back a lot of time. I've played level 1 probably hundreds of times now. I really don't want to have to play it over and over again just for the privilege of taking another crack at level 5.
Well, that, and most of the time when I first reach the boss, I already have lost hit points. So I need to do the level again without losing HP that I need against the boss.
Yep, if I reach the boss and think I need to go back and redo the level to reach him with more ammo and health, by all means I should have that option. But it should be an OPTION.
You don't master a game just because you passed a level.
Perhaps not, but after repeating the level 7 times without taking so much as a scratch to get to the part I'm stuck on, I'm comfortable saying I've mastered that part of the level. And I certainly don't need to do it 13 more times for the privilege of trying the part I actually am stuck on.
You think people doing speed runs just did the level once?
You think people doing speed runs have any bearing on the conversation at all? Those people practice the level endlesslessly, analyzing it for shortcuts and optimum routes. They aren't even part of the discussion.
You're also talking about reducing the total number of hours spent on a game.
So? I reduced it by removing the hours I had no interest in. And their is nothing stopping them from having a 'challenge mode' where you have to do the entire game on a single life to soak up the hours from the hardcore players.
Let's face it, people buy a game based on hours of gameplay - why else would it be splashed across the box?
People buy games on the expectation that those hours of gameplay are actually new content. Making people play through the same level 140 times doesn't count as more gameplay. Otherwise Pac-Man has infinite hours of gameplay.
If games are trying your patience, then you've probably outgrown them, and need to move on to more mature pursuits.
Or they are poorly designed games, and I'm mature enough to recognize this.
Playing games is about playing the games...not getting frustrated because the game you're playing requires you to play the game.
I find it odd that you have made no provision for recognizing badly designed games. I guess no matter how arbitrary and stupid the game is, the developers are always right, and if you don't enjoy it then you've outgrown games?
I disagree.
I haven't played the game, but that said, how much of the heart of great games was the thrill of just squeaking by? If you know that there isn't any way to loose, what you're left with is a empty shell.
I liken it to mountain biking. When I run a trail and have trouble with a section, I back up a bit and repeat the section. I don't restart the entire 10km trail. That would be stupid. Just getting to the end is satisfying.
Eventually I master a trail, and can do a clean pass, and that's even more satisfying. But I would NEVER reach that point, if, after every time I had to put a foot down, I had to go back and restart the entire trail.
Nice to look at, and shows you some neat tricks, but nothing else later.
Huh?
Putting training wheels on a game isn't the future, it's just a gimmick to try and make a bland game that offends no one, and doesn't really try to solve the problem of playability. My 2c.
Realizing that most people who want to play a game aren't aiming to prove they can do a flawless run IS the future. If they like the game enough, and want to do a flawless run, by all means, have that as one of the challenges or achievements or whatever, and those people that can and want to do that will, hell, give them a bonus cutscene or dialog or whatever even... but there is no reason for that to be how one has to play the game.
Nobody normal puts up with that kind of nonsense in anything else they do, whether its biking, snowboarding, skiing, fishing ... hell even programming... I mean can you imagine deciding to kill an afternoon writing a few perl scripts where you would delete your project and start from scratch every time you found a bug, under the assumption that eventually you'd get good enough that you'd be able to write it flawlessly?
I don't know anyone who is that "hardcore". In fact I wouldn't call that person "hardcore"... I'd just call him stupid. ;)
If you don't repeat the game's content, then how are you supposed to get good at the game?
Agreed. But what is the point of repeating the content you already mastered?
Lets say I kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[six more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, all flawlessly and then mis-time my jump onto the swinging rope and fall into a pit trap and die.
What do I need to get better at?
"make the jump onto the swinging rope"
or
"kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[6 more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, then make the jump onto the swinging rope."
???
Making me repeat the lengthy sequence of stuff I already figured out and beat just to take another shot at jumping the rope is just more annoying than anything. I've played games where I couldn't figure out the boss, but had completely mastered the 6 minute level to reach him... WASTING 6 minutes between each attempt to try a different attack pattern on the boss is just annoying.
People who want to prove their skills should have difficulty mode with one life/ no respawns/ etc. But while learning the game or the first time through... What's the point?
You get killed, you try again, and you get better.
You try again to get past what killed you. Why exactly do you need to re-do several minutes worth of stuff you've already mastered?
If you're not enjoying the challenges that the game is giving...
The primary challenge in such games is simply one of my patience. The enjoyment comes from beating the parts you got stuck on, not on replaying the parts you were good at. I don't mind taking several tries to figure out a boss or a jump or a puzzle, but I do get pissed if I have to spend hours replaying the parts I've mastered just to retry the parts I'm stuck on.
When I go mountain biking and have trouble with a section I'll back up a 100 meters and take another run at it, I don't go back and restart the entire fucking 10km trail. And sure, there is definitely a feeling of satisfaction upon reaching the level that I can do a given trail in one clean pass... but I certainly don't want to get to that level by restarting the entire fucking trail every time I have to put my foot down.
then the technical term for your state is "burned out"
No. That's the state I get to when I have to restart.
You can still retrieve quite a lot of plaintext by treating the file as ASCII, even if you lose the formatting.
Right.
But you are working from a 1000 year old hard disk platter. I think even 'well preserved' will mean 'significantly degraded'. You aren't going to just pop it in and read a file... you'll be examining the platter with an electron microscope or better, trying to reverse engineer the disk geometry, partitioning system, the file system, and then... after all that you'll get an indecipherable binary stream.
Go ahead, pull up a typical ms document in a hex editor. You'll find the text in there as ascii (well sort of... its there in unicode... so everything is two bytes wide), and in a 10k word file, 90%+ of it won't be the contents ... so you'd be working to extract the meaningful text from the list of font names and formatting data... using an electron microscope. (And some of the newer xml formats are including a compression layer too rather than storing plaintext.)
I'm not saying it will be impossible... but it is going to be pretty ugly.
If you're using the screen to validate that you pressed a key, you're not typing as fast as you could be.
I think he means he's using the screen to validate input well after the fact. I usually visually catch typos (omissions, inversions, miskeys, etc) when I'm 5-10+ keystrokes past them, providing I'm looking at the screen. e.g. composing vs transcribing)
I agree absolutely that having a good keyboard reduces errors. I despise laptop keyboards, etc. However, I prefer a light quiet cushy (not 'squishy' -- there is a difference) keyboard with good key travel. I don't like heavy mechanical units. I don't like the noise. I don't like the weight. They slow me down.
Maybe if I spent enough time with them I'd adjust, and maybe after adjusting, I would find I'm slightly faster and/or have fewer errors... but I still wouldn't like the noise.
And I don't do much transcribing. When I'm composing I find my mind is the bottleneck, not my fingers as I already type at 70+ wpm. And I usually program with aids like code completion, so I'm rarely streaming text as fast as my fingers can go.
I don't want a "Model M". Currently I'm using a Saitek Exclipse 2, all the keys are where I want them, in the shape I want them, and its got pretty much exactly the weight and feel I like. It won't last 15 years, but I really couldn't care less.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I did a lot of transcribing... you yourself seem to admit that's where its greatest strength is. But I don't do much of that, and would prefer to keep it that way. ;)