I know in your world they should've probably taken him from his home, maybe tortured him with some waterboarding a bit, coerced a confession and then sent him to Guantanamo.
But in the civilised world that's not how things are done, at best the security services should've sent someone to observe him. If he really and truly was a threat they'd have wanted to catch him with equipment that can make a bomb, or worst case on the way to the airport with a bomb or whatever so that they could secure a conviction without trouble.
Instead they've wasted more resources and time going after the kid, who made some throw away comments, they're going to go through legal process anyway because they have to now or risk being sued for harassment, they now have to pretend they had good reason to investigate, but will eventually have to drop the investigation.
The issues here are: - Even if he was a terrorist, the response was an idiotic one - The fact he isn't a terrorist could've been confirmed in a much more tactful manner - More tax payers cash was wasted than need be - Further respect was lost for US security services, it's a boy who cried wolf scenario that they keep repeating. When they really need help and really need to be listened to no one will care.
There was some talk in the news a year or so back about how security services were afraid of terrorists using online chat in games and such to organise.
Who wants a bet the "monitor" was actually another NSA (or similar) program data mining chat logs rather than just someone seeing it on the off chance?
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but if the actions of security services in various countries across the world have taught us anything this last 5 or so years, it's that the measures they'll go to are suprising - from the Russian FSB murdering Litvinenko in London, to the NSA warantless wiretaps program, to the shooting of Menezes on the tube in London and the subsequent "dissapearance" of the CCTV tapes, to the use of torture by the CIA, and now it appears almost certainly MI5 too.
Perhaps a more important point is that not all Javascript implementations work the same. Chances are if you build a site with heavy use of Javascript using Internet Explorer as your test browser, you will have to spend hours trying to make it work for Firefox, and then Safari and Opera. There are a lot of libraries that help with cross-browser development (e.g. jQuery) but I've yet to find one that works perfectly between browsers.
It goes further than that though, you're missing a massively important segment of the market - mobile users. Most people visiting W3Schools from where most the stats were pulled will be web developers and will almost certainly have a full feature site, it's also more likely to be listed as a trusted site for people who use Javascript whitelists.
If you're building a site to be accessible to as many people as possible then by using Javascript you're almost certainly writing off the majority of the mobile market (which is growing rapidly and is bad to ignore) and you're also probably throwing away at least 1 in 20 users, but probably at least 1 in 10.
Of people who do have Javascript there are still many with slow computers, older browsers who will simply hate your site for using Javascript and navigate away immediately. There are people with disabilities who rely on software such as screen readers that need easily and cleanly parsable markup. Again, there are many potential users in this category simply being thrown away by use of JS.
It's ignorant to suggest there's no excuse to avoid using Javascript now - in business you cannot simply throw away that many potential customers for nothing more than a few visual effects that ultimately wont have any benefit for you over a well designed site.
I feel Javascript is an important technology and rather than fucking around with all the proprietary crap like Flash we should be strengthening Javascript so it's more secure and more useful, in fact, a lot of browser vendors seem to be doing this, and those Chrome demos posted a few months back were agood example.
But I also think it's silly to assume and design for Javascript unless Javascript is the whole point of your site. There's so many sites out there that use Javascript for things like drop down menus and sometimes even positioning where CSS would suffice and not require Javascript support it's silly. To turn away 1 in 20 users doesn't seem the brightest idea unless you're building a web application where absolutely the only way to do what you want to do is to use Javascript.
Javascript shouldn't be a requirement for the vast majority of the web, only for those sites that truly need it.
Because of the afformentioned problem of people being swamped with titles. It becomes impossible to organise if you have thousands and thousands of titles.
When you release 1 or 2 titles a week most people have time to play the trials of each of them. If you release 10 a week, people will no longer have time to play the trials. They may try the trials of one or two games that "sound" good, but turn out to be crap and so don't buy them, whilst simultaneously missing the trials of games that they would in fact have liked that week. If they stick to just releasing the good titles more people will have chance to try the trials of those good titles and will more likely purchase them due to their higher quality.
Flooding the market certainly wont help them improve profitability and again, it certainly wont help the user experience. If people start seeing a ton of crap on Live Arcade, they may even stop bothering to look at it at all.
Again, Microsoft have the community games section for low quality stuff, they don't mix it with the main arcade for exactly these reasons - they don't want the lower quality of "everyone can publish" bringing their main arcade section into disrepute so sensibly give it a section of its own.
As usual a drama is being made out of nothing, with a bit of Microsoft blame added in for the sake of hating Microsoft.
Microsoft will publish whichever games are going to net them most profit, just like any other company would. If large companies have more resources to produce better titles than indies, that sucks for indies, but it's not really Microsoft's problem. They still provide the community games option for titles who want to publish but don't make the cut for a full arcade title.
Microsoft's primary goal is to produce profit, it's secondary goal is providing a good service to it's users. The latter can of course effect the former. But here's the real problem, publish indie games for the sake of publishing indies games purely so indies get a fair share of the market regardless of equality fails in both respects - it means less profit, and a worse selection of games for users if better games by big publishers are pushed back to make way for lower quality games by indies.
With XNA GSE and Community games Microsoft's gone out of it's way more than any other company with involvement in the games industry (with the exception of perhaps Garagegames) to make sure anyone can publish. At the end of the day, indie games that beat big publisher games still get published - Braid being a good example, but Live Arcade being flooded with the crap that comes between Braid and the likes just for the sake of someone's arbitrary assumption that there should be some balanced ratio between big publisher games and indie games is a stupid idea. If anything I'd argue too much gets published to Live Arcade as is, there's simply too much on there to search through now, it's no suprise that competition is getting tougher and the people with more resources and more professional experience are beating the others out then.
Being an indie developer doesn't give you some magical right to be given an artificial advantage in the marketplace. You still have to compete on your merits.
Ah, I assumed when you spoke of photos of skeletal parts of dinosaurs being unavailable in the gift shop you were referring to be unable to take pictures in the main exhibits also.
Do they give reason for doing that in libraries? presumably if they do it there they at least have some argument for doing so? Are any books there still in copyright perhaps?
I agree it's certainly an issue then. Any idea if this is the same across other museum libraries like the one in the British Museum?
You've clearly never been to a museum like The Natural History Museum in London or in fact any of the UK's good museums from the Royal Armouries and the Jorvik Viking Centre to the Natural History Museum and National Science Museum.
The amount of people at the tills in the numerous gift shops and the cost of the items being blatantly much higher than the initial cost is evidence enough that they make a lot of income from gift shops.
Note that I did not claim whether this covers their costs or not, it does not detract from the point they clearly make a ton of cash from the gift shops. Similarly with the cost and number of visitors to special exhibits.
The only problem I had at the NHM was that I wasn't allowed to take photos in the Darwin exhibition itself but again that's for the reasons I mentioned presumably.
I took photos all round the rest of the museum without any hassle or form filling at all.
How long ago did this happen to you? I've been various times through the last 20 years and never heard of such a thing.
Just to add some perspective to your comment though, because it doesn't tell the full story, the reason most museums don't do this is because whilst yes, they receive public funding, they also make a small fortune from gift shop sales from visitors or for charging for special exhibitions.
Their argument is that government funding alone does not provide them enough to run top end museums.
I don't know the first thing about their finances, I haven't look into it, but they do have reasonable arguments against doing what you say. Whether their arguments are valid, and whether the reason they need this extra cash is because they're not efficient enough with what they are given I do not know. Certainly in the UK though, most museums I've been too seem to be some of the most well run of all public institutions compared to the jokes that are places like local government and such.
I agree it'd be nice if you could see more on their websites, if more of the information they have was available free digitally, but the truth is we do not know if this is financially viable or not. If they lose visitors in doing it such that they ultimately lose income and can't afford to provide great exhibits in the first place then the idea you suggest is pointless. If however they can do it without detriment then as you say, they should.
Yes it's a pretty odd list. No Source, no id tech yet they have stuff like the pile of poorly optimized turd that is the latest CryEngine?
I disagree that source is better than the Unreal engine though, I've yet to see any Source game that even comes close visually to things like Gears of War 2. That said I'm not even convinced any source games look better than Bioshock so I guess maybe it's quite subjective.
They included things like the Call of Duty engine and whilst the CoD games really are awesome (CoD4 being my favourite game in the last few years) I think this is more down to gameplay than engine quality. I do not think that Call of Duty's engine either looks better, or is more playable than say, the Halo 3 engine for example.
That said, in contrast, things like the assassins creed engine do deserve to be on there because whilst the game was crap it was down to crap gameplay, the engine was jaw dropping to look at and felt fun to play.
The chance of finding enough bandwidth to do a DDOS from the UK under BT's penny pinching broadband network is probably a bigger barrier to the UK being responsible;)
Seriously, you'd hit your users bandwidth caps and be throttled down to 2k/s or whatever before the target servers even realised something was trying to harass them.
"He uses one. Just like I do... it works, read his article! Spybot S&D, a respected antispyware program, also uses them & helps make them stronger too... I suppose you know more than me, but Mr. Oliver Day & Spybot's people?"
There's a fundamental difference between the way they use it and the way you use it.
They used it to blackhole a select set of specific malware related addresses where the outbound Malware connections could use any port and could use any protocol.
You use it to filter fucking ad servers who you'll only ever be contacting via HTTP so would be much better served by an HTTP specific block such as say, a browser plugin or a proxy style app. Bloating your DNS resolutions by adding 650,000 odd hosts to check on each request is plain idiotic. Even your prized example, Oliver Stone that you keep referencing only blocks 16,500 hosts as per his article, that's a roughly 15 fold decrease in the number of hosts to check - that's more than an order of magnitude less.
Similarly Spybot does not blackhole anywhere near the amount of hosts in the hosts file that you do.
This is effectively your problem, your only justification for making the points you do is that "Well look someone else is doing it so I will too", the difference is, you don't understand their reasoning for it, you don't understand the repercussions, you just insist that it's okay to abuse it that way.
Regardless of that though, Oliver Stone's article is an opinion and nothing more, it's an individual opinion, and Spybot's method is similar their opinion on how to do it. But you see, for both of them there's thousands of IT professionals who would disagree with their method, I'm one of them. There are better solutions, perhaps the hosts file method is straightforward, it's certainly one of the easiest methods, but as you're finding it's not the intended use of the hosts file and ultimately it can lead to problems.
"I layer on several layers of software protection, in the interests of "layered security" (the recommended trend by security pros in computers) &, that seems to be doing well for others, not just myself:"
Yet here you go again, you really don't understand layered security. There is little point in layered protection like you suggest on Windows, because it only takes one layer to be vulnerable for the whole system compromised because of the poor way in which Windows is architected. If you add more layers, you're not necessarily adding more security, you're just adding more to go wrong and more to potentially cause problems. No, real layered security is about having a solid router and stateful firewall. With properly setup routing/NAT to prevent unsolicited incoming connections, and with any relevant servers setup in the DMZ. Layered security isn't about adding more and more layers for the sake of adding layers, it's about adding effective layers, but not more than are needed such that you end up with problems and possibly less security than you started with. Case in point, some years ago specific versions of Symantec and McAfee anti-virus didn't play well, have both on your system and neither would work, what use are the extra layers if they cause more of a security issue than just having one less layer? Again, you talk about something you've heard of, but you don't actually understand it.
"Have YOU done the same, Mr. Wannabe expert?"
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but I can speak for myself. No I didn't earn $100 writing up Windows spyware removal basics to a bunch of idiots on some non-factor site and for some non-factor publications. Instead, I spent years in a team managing a network, being responsible for security at an organisation with 11,000 employees and with over 100 sites distributed about the region. So fuck off with the bullshit about how you wrote an article and some shareware for a magazine aimed at Joe average who knows nothing about PCs, some of us have instead been working on high end real world security where dumping 650,000 hos
Microsoft haven't really taken away the layers, they've just changed the underlying code structure of those layers. The firewall platform is still performing all the checks it always has, it's just integrated together now. This really doesn't mean it's less secure. Either a packet gets through each stage or it does not. If a specific stage has a vulnerability in it's still got the vulnerability at that stage if that stage is in it's own binary or not.
If we're talking about an internal threat then again disabling one or three files is going to make no difference in Windows, it's just as trivial for a malware writer.
The hosts stuff is a load of crap too, the top parent doesn't seem to understand what the hosts file is for, it's certainly not designed to be used as a 650,000 entry blacklist, it's merely meant to contain a couple of hosts and even then only as a fix for broken DNS. Filtering of base hosts should not be done in the hosts file, that's a really bad hack for someone who simply does not understand how to build their own security layer to filter inbound/outbound connections but a hack with negative repercussions - the hosts file has to be accessed and 650,000 names have to be checked every time you access a host, that's going to slow down your DNS lookups massively.
Real layered security comes quite rightly from separate devices, not separate pieces of software on a system. You might have a hardware router at the front, a hardware firewall behind it and so on. For most home users a simple router with a built in firewall is fine, but you'll probably want them separate in a commercial environment.
The real security threats don't tend to come from direct outside connection attempts nowadays much anyway simply because of the prevailance of NAT and stateful firewalls. The most prominent attack vectors now are the browser, e-mail attachments and that sort of thing, but even these are fairly trivial to defend against. Your browser should be fairly secure if you disable Javascript on untrusted sites and no one should be opening unsolicited e-mail attachments unless they're asking to be infected. The applications you use to connect out are a far bigger worry than any attempting to connect in if you're behind a NAT and/or firewall setup.
"People who think it's a simple self control issue are idiots. Your makeup pre-disposes you to wanting to eat and to piling on weight. It's like looking at a dyslexic person and saying it's just a matter of self control when it comes to reading. It shows a profound lack of understanding of the issue."
So please explain why America has such a high level of obesity when most Americans are of African or European descent and where they don't have such an issue?
The only difference is cultural. Are there people with genetic traits that make them pre-disposed to greater weight gain? Sure there are, but it's certainly not everyone whose obese that suffers it and it's certainly not as common as many overweight people would have us believe.
I don't disagree that doing what it takes to lose weight is hard, I'd probably be unable to entirely give up the internet voluntarily, but that doesn't mean I think it's genetic. I'm not skinny anymore, although I'm certainly not fat yet, however it's creeping that way so should probably consider exercising more but simply cannot be arsed because I'm too knackered to bother when I get home from work, have studying to do and games I want to play. I sympathise with your situation, but I disagree with your reasoning.
The punishment means this has been defined as a serious offence. The level of evidence that can be provided by seeing an IP address in a swarm and linking that back to a specific individual simply by them being the internet subscribes is almost certainly not strong enough to secure such a conviction.
I say almost certainly because I don't know French law or the French courts, I may be proven wrong because government corruption never ceases to amaze, but no sane judge should let someone go to jail over the useless evidence. Here's the important point though, even if they do then what will the response be when an innocent person goes to jail? when 10 do? when 50 do? when hundreds do?
It's not going to be a sutainable law, either judges will do their job and the law will be a lame duck as no one can be convicted under the standard of evidence provided, or it'll result in innocent convictions which will cause uproar to the point they'll either have to backdown and remove the law or get kicked out of government.
"What the British government did, by covering up and hiding the work these people did, is an affront to the very concept of a free society."
I assume you mean after the war? Else if the government had strived for a free society during the war hence letting the Germans know we'd cracked enigma and that we were going to carry out D-Day then we'd all be speaking German.
"But what's wrong with the people involved that they can't do it for anything more than love of their country?"
The idea of doing something for the love of your country is a bit pointless, most people particularly of the enlightened view of the folks at Bletchley probably wouldn't have such time for that argument. You can't really help where you're born, and whilst it might shape who you are to an extent, it doesn't necessarily shape your world view. You could not say that everyone brought up in Nazi Germany at the time for example supported the Nazi viewpoint that all Jews should be exterminated. Personally, I don't support many modern British values such as the prominent xenophobia that is rife in British society nowadays. I was born here, I'm British, but my viewpoint is much more closely aligned to much more liberal countries like Sweden and Canada so in all honesty I'm not a big fan of my country or what it's become even if I'm proud of certain elements of it's history - but only because those elements represent the things I agree with but that modern society in this country go against. So whilst these people may have been happy to do what they did for the cause their country is fighting for, they may not have seen the value in doing it purely for their country, because countries can be wrong, can do things wrong, and can ultimately be quite fallible. Even at the time of the War there were many parts of British imperialism that were quite shameful even if the cause Britain was fighting for militarily at the time was just.
"Barring that, why aren't they satisfied with the money they received for it?"
The problem is, that whilst they were no doubt happy at the time, it is somewhat of a kick in the teeth that society has forgotten what a certain segment of who are frankly war heroes have done. Particularly if other heroes are being honoured and they're simply being ignored. It seems silly to honour the guy at Normandy who saved his single friend from a German soldiers knife whilst ignoring the codebreaker back at Bletchley who saved a thousand people on a boat by breaking the code to find out where the U-Boats were hidden. Both are ultimately heroes, but it's a kick in the teeth to the other guy if you honour one and not the other. It doesn't do much for pulling in talent to codebreak in a future war effort if codebreakers are effectively shat on despite the fact they ultimately have a larger effect on the war effort as individuals than the troops on the ground do.
I'm not discrediting the value of the soldiers on the ground, personally I'm for honouring every man, woman and even animal who contributes to such a cause, but we shouldn't allow heroes to be forgotten. In fact, whilst I love animals it strikes me as a little odd that up until now we had honoured courier pidgeons used to send messages covertly and dogs that had been parachuted into enemy territory along with the SAS to evade patrols yet we had not honoured the codebreakers at Bletchley.
Effectively then, if you honour one set of actors in a war, but not others it sends the wrong message. It sends the message that their work wasn't appreciated and that they do not matter.
It's a similar case for Visual Studio, VS doesn't look that much different since like 2003, but the code completion has come on leaps and bounds, if you go back to 2003 and write code then write the same code in 2008 you'll notice a massive difference.
I agree, most IDE changes now are under the hood, because there's not a lot more you can add to the UI once you've got all the standard features in you'd expect an IDE to have. Most developers end up using keyboard shortcuts anyway once they've inititally got used to the IDE's features.
LLU just lets companies put their own kit at the point where a customers line terminates at the local exchange. BT still owns the exchange and everything upstream of it and as such it has no effect on removal of their telecommunications monopoly, it only prevents them building an additional monopoly around the internet related kit (i.e. ADSL technology) at the local loop. Those companies still have to use BT for everything upstream of the connection point in the exchange and BT still get paid by companies putting their own kit in there.
That's an issue with bad IT management more than anything though.
IE6 is probably the least secure browser ever released and so hanging onto it like that is bad practice in itself. At the end of the day, IE6 wont be available for ever, XP will become unsupported and you'll be stuck with an unsupported OS so something is going to have to shift else your companies IT infrastructure will have more holes in it than swiss cheese.
There isn't even that much work involved in upgrading to a new version of IE, particularly as IE8 includes a compatability mode for exactly situations like yours.
More realistically it's something to do with the IE8 release as this is the period that IE8 was released to Windows System Update Services so it's the time you could expect large corporations to start having it rolled out.
I might be wrong, but I think if anything large scale has happened to browser market share it's much more likely to be tied to that, particularly when you take into account the fact IE8 install from WSUS makes itself the default browser and many users wont really know what difference that makes other than the fact their browser suddenly looks different.
Perhaps the confusion is also to do with IE8's compatability mode, I don't know, maybe it reports a different user agent string when it's in compatability mode or something?
I'm just speculating, don't quote me on any of this, but it seems the most plausible cause for a massive change like that, particularly as the time frames coincide.
The biggest issue I find with stuff like this is they just stick the old game on there, which is fucking useless because a lot of old DOS games wont work on anything from Windows 2000 up anyway. You can bodge them into work with DOSbox and stuff sometimes but it's not ideal.
So have they updated these games from DOS executables using custom renderers and drivers to something that just works like a Win32 executable using DirectX?
"Presentation still goes in the stylesheets, HTML 5 just adds tags for common things so you don't need quite so many class attributes."
Even if that were true, it still leads to the issue of inconsistency where you have half your markup using these pre-defined tags and the other half using the classic spans and divs because there aren't generically predefined tags. It also means that more likely that not, as the web evolves some of those tags will become obsolete and just unneeded cruft on the spec.
The reason I say it's not true is because it takes some stretch of the imagination to suggest the new descriptions for tags like strong, b, i and so on mean anything other than their classic meanings, which are presentation differences. Even if you disagree and take those ambiguous interpretations are not meaning that (and ignore that argument that most people wont even know the definition of them has changed and will assume they're as they always were) it's hard to argue that stuff like the marquee tag is anything other than a presentation tag, and to be honest, a god awful one too.
Stuff like bold, italic and so forth which are clearly presentational rather than structural elements aren't deprecated in HTML4.01 and similarly are not so in HTML5 although the meaning has changed somewhat it's not ideal.
Slashdot Mirror
I know in your world they should've probably taken him from his home, maybe tortured him with some waterboarding a bit, coerced a confession and then sent him to Guantanamo.
But in the civilised world that's not how things are done, at best the security services should've sent someone to observe him. If he really and truly was a threat they'd have wanted to catch him with equipment that can make a bomb, or worst case on the way to the airport with a bomb or whatever so that they could secure a conviction without trouble.
Instead they've wasted more resources and time going after the kid, who made some throw away comments, they're going to go through legal process anyway because they have to now or risk being sued for harassment, they now have to pretend they had good reason to investigate, but will eventually have to drop the investigation.
The issues here are:
- Even if he was a terrorist, the response was an idiotic one
- The fact he isn't a terrorist could've been confirmed in a much more tactful manner
- More tax payers cash was wasted than need be
- Further respect was lost for US security services, it's a boy who cried wolf scenario that they keep repeating. When they really need help and really need to be listened to no one will care.
There was some talk in the news a year or so back about how security services were afraid of terrorists using online chat in games and such to organise.
Who wants a bet the "monitor" was actually another NSA (or similar) program data mining chat logs rather than just someone seeing it on the off chance?
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, but if the actions of security services in various countries across the world have taught us anything this last 5 or so years, it's that the measures they'll go to are suprising - from the Russian FSB murdering Litvinenko in London, to the NSA warantless wiretaps program, to the shooting of Menezes on the tube in London and the subsequent "dissapearance" of the CCTV tapes, to the use of torture by the CIA, and now it appears almost certainly MI5 too.
Perhaps a more important point is that not all Javascript implementations work the same. Chances are if you build a site with heavy use of Javascript using Internet Explorer as your test browser, you will have to spend hours trying to make it work for Firefox, and then Safari and Opera. There are a lot of libraries that help with cross-browser development (e.g. jQuery) but I've yet to find one that works perfectly between browsers.
It goes further than that though, you're missing a massively important segment of the market - mobile users. Most people visiting W3Schools from where most the stats were pulled will be web developers and will almost certainly have a full feature site, it's also more likely to be listed as a trusted site for people who use Javascript whitelists.
If you're building a site to be accessible to as many people as possible then by using Javascript you're almost certainly writing off the majority of the mobile market (which is growing rapidly and is bad to ignore) and you're also probably throwing away at least 1 in 20 users, but probably at least 1 in 10.
Of people who do have Javascript there are still many with slow computers, older browsers who will simply hate your site for using Javascript and navigate away immediately. There are people with disabilities who rely on software such as screen readers that need easily and cleanly parsable markup. Again, there are many potential users in this category simply being thrown away by use of JS.
It's ignorant to suggest there's no excuse to avoid using Javascript now - in business you cannot simply throw away that many potential customers for nothing more than a few visual effects that ultimately wont have any benefit for you over a well designed site.
Looking at W3Schools stats on it it's about 5%. I've seen some stats suggest as high as 16% around 3 years ago:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
I feel Javascript is an important technology and rather than fucking around with all the proprietary crap like Flash we should be strengthening Javascript so it's more secure and more useful, in fact, a lot of browser vendors seem to be doing this, and those Chrome demos posted a few months back were agood example.
But I also think it's silly to assume and design for Javascript unless Javascript is the whole point of your site. There's so many sites out there that use Javascript for things like drop down menus and sometimes even positioning where CSS would suffice and not require Javascript support it's silly. To turn away 1 in 20 users doesn't seem the brightest idea unless you're building a web application where absolutely the only way to do what you want to do is to use Javascript.
Javascript shouldn't be a requirement for the vast majority of the web, only for those sites that truly need it.
Because of the afformentioned problem of people being swamped with titles. It becomes impossible to organise if you have thousands and thousands of titles.
When you release 1 or 2 titles a week most people have time to play the trials of each of them. If you release 10 a week, people will no longer have time to play the trials. They may try the trials of one or two games that "sound" good, but turn out to be crap and so don't buy them, whilst simultaneously missing the trials of games that they would in fact have liked that week. If they stick to just releasing the good titles more people will have chance to try the trials of those good titles and will more likely purchase them due to their higher quality.
Flooding the market certainly wont help them improve profitability and again, it certainly wont help the user experience. If people start seeing a ton of crap on Live Arcade, they may even stop bothering to look at it at all.
Again, Microsoft have the community games section for low quality stuff, they don't mix it with the main arcade for exactly these reasons - they don't want the lower quality of "everyone can publish" bringing their main arcade section into disrepute so sensibly give it a section of its own.
As usual a drama is being made out of nothing, with a bit of Microsoft blame added in for the sake of hating Microsoft.
Microsoft will publish whichever games are going to net them most profit, just like any other company would. If large companies have more resources to produce better titles than indies, that sucks for indies, but it's not really Microsoft's problem. They still provide the community games option for titles who want to publish but don't make the cut for a full arcade title.
Microsoft's primary goal is to produce profit, it's secondary goal is providing a good service to it's users. The latter can of course effect the former. But here's the real problem, publish indie games for the sake of publishing indies games purely so indies get a fair share of the market regardless of equality fails in both respects - it means less profit, and a worse selection of games for users if better games by big publishers are pushed back to make way for lower quality games by indies.
With XNA GSE and Community games Microsoft's gone out of it's way more than any other company with involvement in the games industry (with the exception of perhaps Garagegames) to make sure anyone can publish. At the end of the day, indie games that beat big publisher games still get published - Braid being a good example, but Live Arcade being flooded with the crap that comes between Braid and the likes just for the sake of someone's arbitrary assumption that there should be some balanced ratio between big publisher games and indie games is a stupid idea. If anything I'd argue too much gets published to Live Arcade as is, there's simply too much on there to search through now, it's no suprise that competition is getting tougher and the people with more resources and more professional experience are beating the others out then.
Being an indie developer doesn't give you some magical right to be given an artificial advantage in the marketplace. You still have to compete on your merits.
Ah, I assumed when you spoke of photos of skeletal parts of dinosaurs being unavailable in the gift shop you were referring to be unable to take pictures in the main exhibits also.
Do they give reason for doing that in libraries? presumably if they do it there they at least have some argument for doing so? Are any books there still in copyright perhaps?
I agree it's certainly an issue then. Any idea if this is the same across other museum libraries like the one in the British Museum?
You've clearly never been to a museum like The Natural History Museum in London or in fact any of the UK's good museums from the Royal Armouries and the Jorvik Viking Centre to the Natural History Museum and National Science Museum.
The amount of people at the tills in the numerous gift shops and the cost of the items being blatantly much higher than the initial cost is evidence enough that they make a lot of income from gift shops.
Note that I did not claim whether this covers their costs or not, it does not detract from the point they clearly make a ton of cash from the gift shops. Similarly with the cost and number of visitors to special exhibits.
That has never once happened to me.
The only problem I had at the NHM was that I wasn't allowed to take photos in the Darwin exhibition itself but again that's for the reasons I mentioned presumably.
I took photos all round the rest of the museum without any hassle or form filling at all.
How long ago did this happen to you? I've been various times through the last 20 years and never heard of such a thing.
There seems to be conflicting information on what's going on.
It sounds like the guy didn't take any photos himself but simply copied photos taken by a professional photographer for the NPG off of the NPG site.
Judging by the original solicitors letter etc. he has simply copied all the images from the NPG site and posted them to Wikipedia.
Just to add some perspective to your comment though, because it doesn't tell the full story, the reason most museums don't do this is because whilst yes, they receive public funding, they also make a small fortune from gift shop sales from visitors or for charging for special exhibitions.
Their argument is that government funding alone does not provide them enough to run top end museums.
I don't know the first thing about their finances, I haven't look into it, but they do have reasonable arguments against doing what you say. Whether their arguments are valid, and whether the reason they need this extra cash is because they're not efficient enough with what they are given I do not know. Certainly in the UK though, most museums I've been too seem to be some of the most well run of all public institutions compared to the jokes that are places like local government and such.
I agree it'd be nice if you could see more on their websites, if more of the information they have was available free digitally, but the truth is we do not know if this is financially viable or not. If they lose visitors in doing it such that they ultimately lose income and can't afford to provide great exhibits in the first place then the idea you suggest is pointless. If however they can do it without detriment then as you say, they should.
Yes it's a pretty odd list. No Source, no id tech yet they have stuff like the pile of poorly optimized turd that is the latest CryEngine?
I disagree that source is better than the Unreal engine though, I've yet to see any Source game that even comes close visually to things like Gears of War 2. That said I'm not even convinced any source games look better than Bioshock so I guess maybe it's quite subjective.
They included things like the Call of Duty engine and whilst the CoD games really are awesome (CoD4 being my favourite game in the last few years) I think this is more down to gameplay than engine quality. I do not think that Call of Duty's engine either looks better, or is more playable than say, the Halo 3 engine for example.
That said, in contrast, things like the assassins creed engine do deserve to be on there because whilst the game was crap it was down to crap gameplay, the engine was jaw dropping to look at and felt fun to play.
The chance of finding enough bandwidth to do a DDOS from the UK under BT's penny pinching broadband network is probably a bigger barrier to the UK being responsible ;)
Seriously, you'd hit your users bandwidth caps and be throttled down to 2k/s or whatever before the target servers even realised something was trying to harass them.
"He uses one. Just like I do... it works, read his article! Spybot S&D, a respected antispyware program, also uses them & helps make them stronger too... I suppose you know more than me, but Mr. Oliver Day & Spybot's people?"
There's a fundamental difference between the way they use it and the way you use it.
They used it to blackhole a select set of specific malware related addresses where the outbound Malware connections could use any port and could use any protocol.
You use it to filter fucking ad servers who you'll only ever be contacting via HTTP so would be much better served by an HTTP specific block such as say, a browser plugin or a proxy style app. Bloating your DNS resolutions by adding 650,000 odd hosts to check on each request is plain idiotic. Even your prized example, Oliver Stone that you keep referencing only blocks 16,500 hosts as per his article, that's a roughly 15 fold decrease in the number of hosts to check - that's more than an order of magnitude less.
Similarly Spybot does not blackhole anywhere near the amount of hosts in the hosts file that you do.
This is effectively your problem, your only justification for making the points you do is that "Well look someone else is doing it so I will too", the difference is, you don't understand their reasoning for it, you don't understand the repercussions, you just insist that it's okay to abuse it that way.
Regardless of that though, Oliver Stone's article is an opinion and nothing more, it's an individual opinion, and Spybot's method is similar their opinion on how to do it. But you see, for both of them there's thousands of IT professionals who would disagree with their method, I'm one of them. There are better solutions, perhaps the hosts file method is straightforward, it's certainly one of the easiest methods, but as you're finding it's not the intended use of the hosts file and ultimately it can lead to problems.
"I layer on several layers of software protection, in the interests of "layered security" (the recommended trend by security pros in computers) &, that seems to be doing well for others, not just myself:"
Yet here you go again, you really don't understand layered security. There is little point in layered protection like you suggest on Windows, because it only takes one layer to be vulnerable for the whole system compromised because of the poor way in which Windows is architected. If you add more layers, you're not necessarily adding more security, you're just adding more to go wrong and more to potentially cause problems. No, real layered security is about having a solid router and stateful firewall. With properly setup routing/NAT to prevent unsolicited incoming connections, and with any relevant servers setup in the DMZ. Layered security isn't about adding more and more layers for the sake of adding layers, it's about adding effective layers, but not more than are needed such that you end up with problems and possibly less security than you started with. Case in point, some years ago specific versions of Symantec and McAfee anti-virus didn't play well, have both on your system and neither would work, what use are the extra layers if they cause more of a security issue than just having one less layer? Again, you talk about something you've heard of, but you don't actually understand it.
"Have YOU done the same, Mr. Wannabe expert?"
I can't speak for the guy you're responding to, but I can speak for myself. No I didn't earn $100 writing up Windows spyware removal basics to a bunch of idiots on some non-factor site and for some non-factor publications. Instead, I spent years in a team managing a network, being responsible for security at an organisation with 11,000 employees and with over 100 sites distributed about the region. So fuck off with the bullshit about how you wrote an article and some shareware for a magazine aimed at Joe average who knows nothing about PCs, some of us have instead been working on high end real world security where dumping 650,000 hos
Microsoft haven't really taken away the layers, they've just changed the underlying code structure of those layers. The firewall platform is still performing all the checks it always has, it's just integrated together now. This really doesn't mean it's less secure. Either a packet gets through each stage or it does not. If a specific stage has a vulnerability in it's still got the vulnerability at that stage if that stage is in it's own binary or not.
If we're talking about an internal threat then again disabling one or three files is going to make no difference in Windows, it's just as trivial for a malware writer.
The hosts stuff is a load of crap too, the top parent doesn't seem to understand what the hosts file is for, it's certainly not designed to be used as a 650,000 entry blacklist, it's merely meant to contain a couple of hosts and even then only as a fix for broken DNS. Filtering of base hosts should not be done in the hosts file, that's a really bad hack for someone who simply does not understand how to build their own security layer to filter inbound/outbound connections but a hack with negative repercussions - the hosts file has to be accessed and 650,000 names have to be checked every time you access a host, that's going to slow down your DNS lookups massively.
Real layered security comes quite rightly from separate devices, not separate pieces of software on a system. You might have a hardware router at the front, a hardware firewall behind it and so on. For most home users a simple router with a built in firewall is fine, but you'll probably want them separate in a commercial environment.
The real security threats don't tend to come from direct outside connection attempts nowadays much anyway simply because of the prevailance of NAT and stateful firewalls. The most prominent attack vectors now are the browser, e-mail attachments and that sort of thing, but even these are fairly trivial to defend against. Your browser should be fairly secure if you disable Javascript on untrusted sites and no one should be opening unsolicited e-mail attachments unless they're asking to be infected. The applications you use to connect out are a far bigger worry than any attempting to connect in if you're behind a NAT and/or firewall setup.
"People who think it's a simple self control issue are idiots. Your makeup pre-disposes you to wanting to eat and to piling on weight. It's like looking at a dyslexic person and saying it's just a matter of self control when it comes to reading. It shows a profound lack of understanding of the issue."
So please explain why America has such a high level of obesity when most Americans are of African or European descent and where they don't have such an issue?
The only difference is cultural. Are there people with genetic traits that make them pre-disposed to greater weight gain? Sure there are, but it's certainly not everyone whose obese that suffers it and it's certainly not as common as many overweight people would have us believe.
I don't disagree that doing what it takes to lose weight is hard, I'd probably be unable to entirely give up the internet voluntarily, but that doesn't mean I think it's genetic. I'm not skinny anymore, although I'm certainly not fat yet, however it's creeping that way so should probably consider exercising more but simply cannot be arsed because I'm too knackered to bother when I get home from work, have studying to do and games I want to play. I sympathise with your situation, but I disagree with your reasoning.
I'm not sure it is.
The punishment means this has been defined as a serious offence. The level of evidence that can be provided by seeing an IP address in a swarm and linking that back to a specific individual simply by them being the internet subscribes is almost certainly not strong enough to secure such a conviction.
I say almost certainly because I don't know French law or the French courts, I may be proven wrong because government corruption never ceases to amaze, but no sane judge should let someone go to jail over the useless evidence. Here's the important point though, even if they do then what will the response be when an innocent person goes to jail? when 10 do? when 50 do? when hundreds do?
It's not going to be a sutainable law, either judges will do their job and the law will be a lame duck as no one can be convicted under the standard of evidence provided, or it'll result in innocent convictions which will cause uproar to the point they'll either have to backdown and remove the law or get kicked out of government.
"What the British government did, by covering up and hiding the work these people did, is an affront to the very concept of a free society."
I assume you mean after the war? Else if the government had strived for a free society during the war hence letting the Germans know we'd cracked enigma and that we were going to carry out D-Day then we'd all be speaking German.
"But what's wrong with the people involved that they can't do it for anything more than love of their country?"
The idea of doing something for the love of your country is a bit pointless, most people particularly of the enlightened view of the folks at Bletchley probably wouldn't have such time for that argument. You can't really help where you're born, and whilst it might shape who you are to an extent, it doesn't necessarily shape your world view. You could not say that everyone brought up in Nazi Germany at the time for example supported the Nazi viewpoint that all Jews should be exterminated. Personally, I don't support many modern British values such as the prominent xenophobia that is rife in British society nowadays. I was born here, I'm British, but my viewpoint is much more closely aligned to much more liberal countries like Sweden and Canada so in all honesty I'm not a big fan of my country or what it's become even if I'm proud of certain elements of it's history - but only because those elements represent the things I agree with but that modern society in this country go against. So whilst these people may have been happy to do what they did for the cause their country is fighting for, they may not have seen the value in doing it purely for their country, because countries can be wrong, can do things wrong, and can ultimately be quite fallible. Even at the time of the War there were many parts of British imperialism that were quite shameful even if the cause Britain was fighting for militarily at the time was just.
"Barring that, why aren't they satisfied with the money they received for it?"
The problem is, that whilst they were no doubt happy at the time, it is somewhat of a kick in the teeth that society has forgotten what a certain segment of who are frankly war heroes have done. Particularly if other heroes are being honoured and they're simply being ignored. It seems silly to honour the guy at Normandy who saved his single friend from a German soldiers knife whilst ignoring the codebreaker back at Bletchley who saved a thousand people on a boat by breaking the code to find out where the U-Boats were hidden. Both are ultimately heroes, but it's a kick in the teeth to the other guy if you honour one and not the other. It doesn't do much for pulling in talent to codebreak in a future war effort if codebreakers are effectively shat on despite the fact they ultimately have a larger effect on the war effort as individuals than the troops on the ground do.
I'm not discrediting the value of the soldiers on the ground, personally I'm for honouring every man, woman and even animal who contributes to such a cause, but we shouldn't allow heroes to be forgotten. In fact, whilst I love animals it strikes me as a little odd that up until now we had honoured courier pidgeons used to send messages covertly and dogs that had been parachuted into enemy territory along with the SAS to evade patrols yet we had not honoured the codebreakers at Bletchley.
Effectively then, if you honour one set of actors in a war, but not others it sends the wrong message. It sends the message that their work wasn't appreciated and that they do not matter.
It's a similar case for Visual Studio, VS doesn't look that much different since like 2003, but the code completion has come on leaps and bounds, if you go back to 2003 and write code then write the same code in 2008 you'll notice a massive difference.
I agree, most IDE changes now are under the hood, because there's not a lot more you can add to the UI once you've got all the standard features in you'd expect an IDE to have. Most developers end up using keyboard shortcuts anyway once they've inititally got used to the IDE's features.
That's not what LLU does.
LLU just lets companies put their own kit at the point where a customers line terminates at the local exchange. BT still owns the exchange and everything upstream of it and as such it has no effect on removal of their telecommunications monopoly, it only prevents them building an additional monopoly around the internet related kit (i.e. ADSL technology) at the local loop. Those companies still have to use BT for everything upstream of the connection point in the exchange and BT still get paid by companies putting their own kit in there.
That's an issue with bad IT management more than anything though.
IE6 is probably the least secure browser ever released and so hanging onto it like that is bad practice in itself. At the end of the day, IE6 wont be available for ever, XP will become unsupported and you'll be stuck with an unsupported OS so something is going to have to shift else your companies IT infrastructure will have more holes in it than swiss cheese.
There isn't even that much work involved in upgrading to a new version of IE, particularly as IE8 includes a compatability mode for exactly situations like yours.
More realistically it's something to do with the IE8 release as this is the period that IE8 was released to Windows System Update Services so it's the time you could expect large corporations to start having it rolled out.
I might be wrong, but I think if anything large scale has happened to browser market share it's much more likely to be tied to that, particularly when you take into account the fact IE8 install from WSUS makes itself the default browser and many users wont really know what difference that makes other than the fact their browser suddenly looks different.
Perhaps the confusion is also to do with IE8's compatability mode, I don't know, maybe it reports a different user agent string when it's in compatability mode or something?
I'm just speculating, don't quote me on any of this, but it seems the most plausible cause for a massive change like that, particularly as the time frames coincide.
Have they updated the executables though?
The biggest issue I find with stuff like this is they just stick the old game on there, which is fucking useless because a lot of old DOS games wont work on anything from Windows 2000 up anyway. You can bodge them into work with DOSbox and stuff sometimes but it's not ideal.
So have they updated these games from DOS executables using custom renderers and drivers to something that just works like a Win32 executable using DirectX?
"Presentation still goes in the stylesheets, HTML 5 just adds tags for common things so you don't need quite so many class attributes."
Even if that were true, it still leads to the issue of inconsistency where you have half your markup using these pre-defined tags and the other half using the classic spans and divs because there aren't generically predefined tags. It also means that more likely that not, as the web evolves some of those tags will become obsolete and just unneeded cruft on the spec.
The reason I say it's not true is because it takes some stretch of the imagination to suggest the new descriptions for tags like strong, b, i and so on mean anything other than their classic meanings, which are presentation differences. Even if you disagree and take those ambiguous interpretations are not meaning that (and ignore that argument that most people wont even know the definition of them has changed and will assume they're as they always were) it's hard to argue that stuff like the marquee tag is anything other than a presentation tag, and to be honest, a god awful one too.
That's not true, check the spec such as here for some good examples:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/graphics.html#h-15.2.1
Stuff like bold, italic and so forth which are clearly presentational rather than structural elements aren't deprecated in HTML4.01 and similarly are not so in HTML5 although the meaning has changed somewhat it's not ideal.