I never claimed MS was going down. I may wish that to happen, but I'm a realist, and I don't see Windows dying in this latest revision. They will most likely lose a good bit of market share initially to Apple and Linux (for those taking this opportunity to test the "alternative"), but a good percentage of those will come slinking back to Windows when the latest wiz-bang DX 10 game comes out. In the long run, MS will lose a small percentage of sales to both Apple and Linux, but Vista will not sink them. That being said, I don't think we'll see a large scale adoption of Vista till SP1 at least, and probably not a really robust (relativly) solution till SP2. One can hope of course that in a few more years when the next version of Windows is released that perhaps Linux, or maybe even an OS that hasn't been created yet will have enough of a compeling feature set to finally push Windows off the desktop market.
I think you're confused about who he was referring to with that 20% comment. There was a article a little while back where the RIAA was whining that CD sales were down 20% from the previous year. I think that's the figure he was referring to. As to how bad or good Vista is, I won't get into that other than to say Vista for the average user dosn't really offer any major improvements over XP, and requires a great deal in terms of hardware specs, so for the average user. They'll get Vista when they buy a new system, but despite Microsofts wishes nobody is going to be rushing out to purchase a shiny new copy of Vista just because it's the latest steaming pile to come forth from MS.
Yeah, that's it. Now if only I could find a link about that first virus I mentioned. I think it actually pre-dates the practice of calling that sort of program a virus, or perhaps it's from around the same time. I know it was designed to run on one of the very early UNIXs. While looking for this I also ran into this page on notable viruses and worms which mentions The Reaper which was a program designed to wipe out The Creeper program, which is more or less an example of White Hat malware. I'm trying to remember more details about that first example, and I seem to recall it had something to do with maintenance on daemon apps, but not sure exactly what it was. I think the name was something like vampire or such, but I don't even remember where I read about it at this point so hard to say.
There is a classic case of this that happened IIRC at MIT on one of the early networks. Some bright person wrote a small worm that went around and performed regular updates to the systems. All went well for a few months or so, but then a previously unknown bug in the worm caused it to go nuts and brought the network down HARD. In a similar vein, as an example of how things can go wrong, there's a famous story of someone (seem to remember him being connected with NSA or CIA or one of them... son of the director?) who wrote a worm that didn't have a payload in it to see if he could do it. It was supposed to send a couple copies of itself out, propogate for a bit, then erase itself. A bug in the logic however made it bombard the network attempting to propogate which resulted in one of the first DDOS attacks, even if un-intentional.
The reason in short of why you don't see any white hat mal-ware is because the risk is just too great that something can go wrong. It's better to come up with a more robust solution to the problem, rather than introducing another element into the mix that is already on shaky ground to begin with.
Re:Leaves web to trusted sites only
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Web 2.0 Under Siege
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· Score: 2, Insightful
All very well and good until one of those ten gets infected by something nasty. I seem to recall seeing an article recently where a big site like CNN or one of them got hit by a worm and was actually serving up infected pages for 48 hours or so till it was discovered and cleaned out. The solution is not to rely on the servers being secure (although that can't be ignored either if you're securing the servers), but to ensure that even IF the servers are compromised that you arn't vulnerable.
As much as I hate to admit it, Vista is actually close in it's security implementation, the user really should be required to approve certain actions, just not every action. A more robust security model, such as the one used in SELinux (with a more sane administration interface), combined with some user confirmation such as that used in Vista would lead to a much more robust OS. Add to that more secure apps running in at least partially sandboxed environments and possible infection vectors would be reduced to almost nothing (not nothing mind you, but much better than today).
Applications should be designed like banks, secured and fairly well defended. OSes should be designed like Area 51, armed and not afraid to shoot.
Ultimatly of course, it's up to the user to be the last line of defense, so even though we can do alot to make the users life easier, the final part of the puzzle is user education.
That dosn't seem to make any sense at all. Now, if you were going to accuse them of holding out on shipments of Wimotes in order to be able to get them in the WiiPlay combo boxes, I'd say yeah, I can see that, but it dosn't make any sense at all for Nintendo to be holding back on the Wii itself. From what I've seen they have been making regular shipments to various retailers, just not very large shipments. If you're patient and willing to make an effort, you can get a Wii, you just need to check in on a regular basis (which can be even easyer if you can find out the shipping schedule for one of the retailers). I pre-ordered my Wii and had it on release night, so I didn't need to worry, but I also know of at least 12 other people who didn't and have since purchased them. Of course, I don't know anybody that's purchased a PS3, but that's not due to a shortage there.
Ok, yeah, that last one was un-called for. And I do like the PS3, but only enough to pay about $350, so till then, I'll stick with the Wii (and maybe a 360 if they release the new hardware and it comes down to $300).
If you convince people that the free open source apps really are as good as or better than the proprietary garbage that MS (among others) forces down there throats, and get them using it on a regular basis, then there will be nothing tying them to Windows. For most people, what holds them back from switching off Windows to something that's more stable and secure isn't that it dosn't come pre-installed, it's that they don't know how to use any of the apps all of us that use Linux take for granted. If you had someone that uses OOo, FF, The GIMP, and Amarok on a regular basis under XP, then went in and installed something like Kubuntu over night with all the same apps, they'd probably barely even notice.
I can't RTFA right now because I'm at work and they block "Gaming" sites at our proxy, but based on what I've read from everyone else's comments it sounds like they're looking at the wrong problems. There are certain things that players have always griped about, and I should know, I've been a player in a lot of MMOs, including the pre-cursor to modern MMOs MUDs. The problem is, what players gripe about, and what is really wrong with current MMOs are two very different things. Players don't really mind the level grind all that much, it's part of the point, if you had a button you could push that would instantly take you to max level with full skills no one would bother playing because there was no challenge. What keeps people coming back is the reward of all that effort paying off. In traditional linear games the payoff is getting to the end and killing that last big boss, saving the world. In an MMO the payoff is the accolades you get from the other players for reaching end game, and being able to play your character in a skillfull way. This is part of the reason why many MMOs have ridiculously hard end game content, so that it weeds out the average players from the great players, and provides incentive for the average players to get better.
If you really wanted to improve an MMO, the thing is not to do away with things like the level grind, but to provide more interactive persistant environment in a way that dosn't destabilize the game. Now, I never said it would be easy of course, because if it was it would have been done already, but if it can be done, the results will be amazing. What players want more than anything else, is to feel both powerful, and to have an impact on the game world. They want that feeling of walking through a town filled with lower level players, and everybody going "Oh man, there he goes, he killed an entire battalion by himself." or even the respect of there fellow equals (or enemies). At the same time they also want the ability to do something with an impact on the game world, they want to be able to have at least a semi-perminent effect on the scenery and creatures around them. Even if it's only something minor like wiping out a colony of pesky kobolds that have been harasing a nearby town (and not having them all immediatly respawn for the next player). Now the tricky part is that you need to do this in a way that dosn't ruin things for the next player either intentionaly or un-intentionaly.
Which brings me to one of the biggest true gripes players have, which is of course, other players. The problem is, no matter what you do, there will always be those that will be determined to ruin things for everyone else, either by exploiting a flaw in the game, or by harasing other players. The only real solution to this is to provide some way for players to police themselves. This is part of the reason I play on a PvP server, because if someone is harasing me, I can always call on a few of my friends to kill him a few times, and that usually gets the message across that they should go do something else.
This is interesting for the bio-tech field, but completely impractical for consumer electronics. The simple fact is, the human body, and consumer electronics have two very different needs in terms of energy. This is kind of like the NASA guys sitting around and saying, well, my car runs just fine on regular unleaded, why can't we just pump some of that into the shuttles tanks, it should work just as well. If they really really worked at it, they might even figure out a way to get the shuttle into orbit using regular unleaded, but the point is WHY! The liquid and solid fuels the shuttle uses are designed specificly for propelling the shuttle into orbit, and the unleaded fuels we put in our cars are designed to power our cars engines. I'm not saying that there arn't better fuel sources for either one, just that they arn't really interchangable. Just because one fuel source works well in one application, is no reason to try and use it in a completely different application.
Sugars are an ok source of energy for the human body, they're relativly easy to come by in nature, and we can break them down without to much effort, thus we evolved to use them, but relative to other chemical reactions, sugars are not very energy dense. Now, for powering things like nano-bots or for alternative energy sources for implants, this is very interesting. Perhaps even for use in building bio-electronics it's useful as well, but to power normal electronics using sugars is just plain stupid.
Well, yes and no. The old serials were really closer to a modern TV series in that they tended to be very short, certainly less than a hour. Also, many of the examples that come close, such as LOTR, don't really follow through in that they still follow current movie standards with only putting one movie out every year or so even if they do film them all at about the same time. What I'm proposing is that they film them all, and release them with at most, a month between them. The ideal would be to either release them all at once, or more likely, with something like a week between them.
I think part of this has to do with how the adaptation is handled. If you naively try and do a direct adaptation of the book to the screen it's going to fail for the simple fact that what works very well in one medium, simply does not work in another. Look at LoTR, it worked very well because the person who did the adaptation very carefully chose what would and would not be part of the movie, and even then we ended up with over 3 hours of content that pushed audiences to the limits of how long they're willing to sit in one place. I think in some ways, LoTR, Pirates of the Carribean and even Kill Bill, could serve very well as models for a new kind of movie, the serial movie. The fact is, to really lay out these grand stories in these amazing universes, you need more time than you can reasonably demand of a person in one movie. I think they're very close now, but what they need to do is film all of the movie at once, then divide it into showings, say 2.5 hours each or so, and release all of them at once. Something like just one of Niven's Ringworld (or my favorite, Man Kzin Wars) novels could easily be 2 or 3, 2.5 hour movies.
That is exactly my point though. It's that attitude that has screwed up the CS curriculum. I couldn't believe all the junk classes I was expected to take when I went to get my BS in comp. sci. from UCF. I'm a programmer, and I have been for a long time. I enjoy some of the theory classes a bit, and even some of the Math, but I really use almost no math at all in my day to day job, and certainly nothing past at most calculus 1, yet the CS degree from UCF is only 2 classes short of a math major. That's just plain ridiculous. In a similar vein, there were some distinctly EE classes in the curriculum that really didn't need to be there. At most, they should be electives, cause honestly, even if I'm doing assembly programming, I really don't care what the circuit diagram of the processor looks like at all.
I am waiting to see if the movie adaptation of Ender's Game (by Orson Scott Card) will receive similar treatment (be actionized). That movie when it's released will either be great, or it will be terrible. Not because it will necessarily be a bad movie when compared to others, but because it has so much great potential that anything less than awesome is a complete dis-service to the book.
He wasn't saying any of those commented on the "human condition", he was saying they were the prime influence on Lucas. I think what he's getting at, is that there is a severe lack of sci-fi movies that address modern concerns in any sort of capacity without at least being 50% action. Sort of like hollywood is saying, yeah, you can talk about whether someone who has been geneticly engineered still counts as a human or not, so long as every other scene has something blowing up, or a shoot out.
A college degree under the strictest definition is not useless, and even in some fields is quite beneficial, however, in IT this is not always the case. The biggest issue is the Computer Science field itself. To put it bluntly, it's too broad. Under the heading of Computer Science you have everything from network engineers, to web developers, to programmers, and even some IT managers. I'm not even saying that all of these fields don't require some sort of education, just that none of them are properly being served by a Computer Science degree. The problem with Computer Science is that it takes a little bit from all of these various fields, and then sprinkles it heavily with some advanced maths, which is really not meeting the needs of any of these. Computer Science needs to be more finely broken down. The way things are now, it's as if you lumped Chemistry, Physics, Metalurgy, and Astronomy all under something like a Bachelors of Physical Sciences degree. Sure it would probably help a little with all of those, but it wouldn't provide all the knowledge any one of them needed, and would probably frustrate the hell out of all of them.
The second issue that compounds all of this is the opinion that HR seems to promote whenever possible that the type of degree a person has is the primary determination in the salary that individual is worth. A piece of paper is all well and good when trying to decide who you should interview, but in terms of salary what a person knows and can do should count for much more. Unfortunatly that's not usually the case, all HR cares about is making sure everyone with X degree in field Y makes about the same amount, otherwise in their eyes it wouldn't be fair.
This is why college degrees here arn't thought of well, not because they are bad on their own, but because the IT field is so terribly represented by the degrees that can be had today.
While Exchange 2007 doesn't cause issues, users with older versions may see their email quarantined as a matter of course.
Sounds like it's working just fine to me. If anything is wrong, it's that the Exchange 2007 e-mails arn't being quarantined as a matter of course as well.
Oh wait, I get it now, they're mad because it's hurting MS Anti-Virus sells by quarantining the latest batch of exchange worms before they get a chance to make the rounds.
Or far more interesting, insert random watermarks. If they can crack it, they can modify it to their will. What good will watermarks be when every video you download will have another random code? The MAFIAA will have no court standing because you can always argue it wasn't your copy, but someone elses that the pirate altered with a random code that just happened to be yours.
GM both does and does not save lives as you put it. GM crops are engineered to stand up better in certain extreme conditions, and to be more resistant to diseases and parasites. The upshot of all of that is that a GM crop will have signifigantly higher yield per acre than non-GM crop. The downside as you also pointed out, is that companies are selling this for a profit, which in the case of corporations means the same thing no matter what industry you're in. The basic problem is the corporations have done a number of things in the name of profit that are frankly dispicable at best, and criminal at worst. The fact that one of these mega-corps would cover up (as yet unproven) information that they're product is potentially toxic does not suprise me in the least, in the same way that if McDonalds discovered that one of their products caused colon cancer I'm sure we'd never hear about it, it would just be quietly fazed out of production.
The issue that most people have with GMO basically falls into one of two broad categories. There are the religious ludites, who are opposed to GMO on the basis that it's "not natural" and therefore somehow an affront to god, and then there are those that are opposed to the anti-seed crop GM that the greedy corporations have worked into the products. The second of these two categories has a genuine gripe, the first need to go back to their bible thumping and leave the rest of humanity alone.
The worst thing to the GM industry that these companies have done is to engineer a sequence of genes into all of their products that causes the crop to be sterile. From the perspective of the corporation this is great, because it allows them to rather cheaply engineer a product, and then continually re-sale that exact same product ever year. Without this gene, they would actually have to do something innovative in order to continue to sell products. It would be as if every car sold was designed in such a way that it would melt after one year, and you would have to go back to the dealer every year and buy a new car. Great for car dealers, but really sucks for everyone else.
What's more, the farmers that actually grow this stuff are dirt poor and only manage to survive based on massive handouts from the government, but in order to plant a crop next year (because remember the one from last year was sterile) they need to hand over almost all that money to the corporations for more crop. In essence the farmer is a middle man in all this, who unfortunatly ends up doing virtually all the work, but collecting virtually none of the profit. Maybe all the GMO crop companies should just buy farms and skip the middle step, everyone would be better off, and they might actually start taking some responsibility with their product if it was more obvious to the consumers that it came from company XYZ instead of some poor farmer in the mid-west.
How many 12 year olds were there? If not that many, probably Horde, as in my experience most Alliance players are around 12. At my location we seemed to have mostly males as well, although most of us, like me had girlfriends or wives at home that just didn't care to come out and pickup the expansion. As for ages, I didn't see anyone that seemed particularly young, and quite a few people who had to be into their 30s. The average age was probably somewhere around 25. As for distribution of Horde vs. Alliance, it seemed to be about 2/3 Horde, although that number is hard to guage as we only really got to talk to the 30 or so people closest to us out of the 60 or so that were waiting.
Read the post a little closer. The guy who wrote the article is a CompSci researcher who primarily works with cryptography, but the article was submitted by a Medical Imaging Specialist. The confusion was caused because the submitters commits are mistakenly being associated as coming from the writer of the article. In your defense of course this seems to be a fairly common mistake on this article because I've counted at least 5 comments so far that make the exact same mistake.
Your count is a little off on the languages. First off, HTML, CSS, and XML are not programming languages, they are markup languages (that's what the M in HTML and XML stands for). Secondly, HTML is a subset of XML (or at least XHTML is), so really XML/HTML should be expressed as XHTML, however as previously mentioned these arn't programming languages, so they can't be lumped into the same category as ECMAScript (or JScript/JavaScript is you prefer). The breakout of XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript is actually just right, as this lends itself perfectly to a MVC model, in which the XHTML is your model, CSS is your view, and ECMAScript is the controller. Now, this is of course all on the client side, when you go to the server side there's another issue, but this is a advantage not a problem. If you wish to use only ECMAScript for development, that is of course perfectly possible, all you need to do is install one of the ECMAScript based application frameworks such as Cocoon (which admitedly also uses XSLT, but for most things the default XSLT files should suffice).
So to summarize you really need to know 2 markup languages, and 1 programming language in order to write a web-based application, plus the associated APIs for any libraries or environments you wish to write in. You need to know, XML, CSS, and ECMAScript, with the XHTML and DOM APIs as well as the IE and W3C APIs. On the server side you have a ton of possibilities, and the choice is really more of personal preference. In my case, I'm a Java developer, so I tend to lean towards Java. However even in that I don't do pure Java as I usually use the Spring framework, so I also need to use XML for my dependency injection, and the property file format for my configuration constants.
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I never claimed MS was going down. I may wish that to happen, but I'm a realist, and I don't see Windows dying in this latest revision. They will most likely lose a good bit of market share initially to Apple and Linux (for those taking this opportunity to test the "alternative"), but a good percentage of those will come slinking back to Windows when the latest wiz-bang DX 10 game comes out. In the long run, MS will lose a small percentage of sales to both Apple and Linux, but Vista will not sink them. That being said, I don't think we'll see a large scale adoption of Vista till SP1 at least, and probably not a really robust (relativly) solution till SP2. One can hope of course that in a few more years when the next version of Windows is released that perhaps Linux, or maybe even an OS that hasn't been created yet will have enough of a compeling feature set to finally push Windows off the desktop market.
I think you're confused about who he was referring to with that 20% comment. There was a article a little while back where the RIAA was whining that CD sales were down 20% from the previous year. I think that's the figure he was referring to. As to how bad or good Vista is, I won't get into that other than to say Vista for the average user dosn't really offer any major improvements over XP, and requires a great deal in terms of hardware specs, so for the average user. They'll get Vista when they buy a new system, but despite Microsofts wishes nobody is going to be rushing out to purchase a shiny new copy of Vista just because it's the latest steaming pile to come forth from MS.
Yeah, that's it. Now if only I could find a link about that first virus I mentioned. I think it actually pre-dates the practice of calling that sort of program a virus, or perhaps it's from around the same time. I know it was designed to run on one of the very early UNIXs. While looking for this I also ran into this page on notable viruses and worms which mentions The Reaper which was a program designed to wipe out The Creeper program, which is more or less an example of White Hat malware. I'm trying to remember more details about that first example, and I seem to recall it had something to do with maintenance on daemon apps, but not sure exactly what it was. I think the name was something like vampire or such, but I don't even remember where I read about it at this point so hard to say.
There is a classic case of this that happened IIRC at MIT on one of the early networks. Some bright person wrote a small worm that went around and performed regular updates to the systems. All went well for a few months or so, but then a previously unknown bug in the worm caused it to go nuts and brought the network down HARD. In a similar vein, as an example of how things can go wrong, there's a famous story of someone (seem to remember him being connected with NSA or CIA or one of them... son of the director?) who wrote a worm that didn't have a payload in it to see if he could do it. It was supposed to send a couple copies of itself out, propogate for a bit, then erase itself. A bug in the logic however made it bombard the network attempting to propogate which resulted in one of the first DDOS attacks, even if un-intentional.
The reason in short of why you don't see any white hat mal-ware is because the risk is just too great that something can go wrong. It's better to come up with a more robust solution to the problem, rather than introducing another element into the mix that is already on shaky ground to begin with.
All very well and good until one of those ten gets infected by something nasty. I seem to recall seeing an article recently where a big site like CNN or one of them got hit by a worm and was actually serving up infected pages for 48 hours or so till it was discovered and cleaned out. The solution is not to rely on the servers being secure (although that can't be ignored either if you're securing the servers), but to ensure that even IF the servers are compromised that you arn't vulnerable.
As much as I hate to admit it, Vista is actually close in it's security implementation, the user really should be required to approve certain actions, just not every action. A more robust security model, such as the one used in SELinux (with a more sane administration interface), combined with some user confirmation such as that used in Vista would lead to a much more robust OS. Add to that more secure apps running in at least partially sandboxed environments and possible infection vectors would be reduced to almost nothing (not nothing mind you, but much better than today).
Applications should be designed like banks, secured and fairly well defended. OSes should be designed like Area 51, armed and not afraid to shoot.
Ultimatly of course, it's up to the user to be the last line of defense, so even though we can do alot to make the users life easier, the final part of the puzzle is user education.
I for one welcome our Giant Spinning Hexagon Overlords.
That dosn't seem to make any sense at all. Now, if you were going to accuse them of holding out on shipments of Wimotes in order to be able to get them in the WiiPlay combo boxes, I'd say yeah, I can see that, but it dosn't make any sense at all for Nintendo to be holding back on the Wii itself. From what I've seen they have been making regular shipments to various retailers, just not very large shipments. If you're patient and willing to make an effort, you can get a Wii, you just need to check in on a regular basis (which can be even easyer if you can find out the shipping schedule for one of the retailers). I pre-ordered my Wii and had it on release night, so I didn't need to worry, but I also know of at least 12 other people who didn't and have since purchased them. Of course, I don't know anybody that's purchased a PS3, but that's not due to a shortage there.
Ok, yeah, that last one was un-called for. And I do like the PS3, but only enough to pay about $350, so till then, I'll stick with the Wii (and maybe a 360 if they release the new hardware and it comes down to $300).
If you convince people that the free open source apps really are as good as or better than the proprietary garbage that MS (among others) forces down there throats, and get them using it on a regular basis, then there will be nothing tying them to Windows. For most people, what holds them back from switching off Windows to something that's more stable and secure isn't that it dosn't come pre-installed, it's that they don't know how to use any of the apps all of us that use Linux take for granted. If you had someone that uses OOo, FF, The GIMP, and Amarok on a regular basis under XP, then went in and installed something like Kubuntu over night with all the same apps, they'd probably barely even notice.
Because when you refer to it as just Linux, it makes RMS cry.
I can't RTFA right now because I'm at work and they block "Gaming" sites at our proxy, but based on what I've read from everyone else's comments it sounds like they're looking at the wrong problems. There are certain things that players have always griped about, and I should know, I've been a player in a lot of MMOs, including the pre-cursor to modern MMOs MUDs. The problem is, what players gripe about, and what is really wrong with current MMOs are two very different things. Players don't really mind the level grind all that much, it's part of the point, if you had a button you could push that would instantly take you to max level with full skills no one would bother playing because there was no challenge. What keeps people coming back is the reward of all that effort paying off. In traditional linear games the payoff is getting to the end and killing that last big boss, saving the world. In an MMO the payoff is the accolades you get from the other players for reaching end game, and being able to play your character in a skillfull way. This is part of the reason why many MMOs have ridiculously hard end game content, so that it weeds out the average players from the great players, and provides incentive for the average players to get better.
If you really wanted to improve an MMO, the thing is not to do away with things like the level grind, but to provide more interactive persistant environment in a way that dosn't destabilize the game. Now, I never said it would be easy of course, because if it was it would have been done already, but if it can be done, the results will be amazing. What players want more than anything else, is to feel both powerful, and to have an impact on the game world. They want that feeling of walking through a town filled with lower level players, and everybody going "Oh man, there he goes, he killed an entire battalion by himself." or even the respect of there fellow equals (or enemies). At the same time they also want the ability to do something with an impact on the game world, they want to be able to have at least a semi-perminent effect on the scenery and creatures around them. Even if it's only something minor like wiping out a colony of pesky kobolds that have been harasing a nearby town (and not having them all immediatly respawn for the next player). Now the tricky part is that you need to do this in a way that dosn't ruin things for the next player either intentionaly or un-intentionaly.
Which brings me to one of the biggest true gripes players have, which is of course, other players. The problem is, no matter what you do, there will always be those that will be determined to ruin things for everyone else, either by exploiting a flaw in the game, or by harasing other players. The only real solution to this is to provide some way for players to police themselves. This is part of the reason I play on a PvP server, because if someone is harasing me, I can always call on a few of my friends to kill him a few times, and that usually gets the message across that they should go do something else.
This is interesting for the bio-tech field, but completely impractical for consumer electronics. The simple fact is, the human body, and consumer electronics have two very different needs in terms of energy. This is kind of like the NASA guys sitting around and saying, well, my car runs just fine on regular unleaded, why can't we just pump some of that into the shuttles tanks, it should work just as well. If they really really worked at it, they might even figure out a way to get the shuttle into orbit using regular unleaded, but the point is WHY! The liquid and solid fuels the shuttle uses are designed specificly for propelling the shuttle into orbit, and the unleaded fuels we put in our cars are designed to power our cars engines. I'm not saying that there arn't better fuel sources for either one, just that they arn't really interchangable. Just because one fuel source works well in one application, is no reason to try and use it in a completely different application.
Sugars are an ok source of energy for the human body, they're relativly easy to come by in nature, and we can break them down without to much effort, thus we evolved to use them, but relative to other chemical reactions, sugars are not very energy dense. Now, for powering things like nano-bots or for alternative energy sources for implants, this is very interesting. Perhaps even for use in building bio-electronics it's useful as well, but to power normal electronics using sugars is just plain stupid.
Well, yes and no. The old serials were really closer to a modern TV series in that they tended to be very short, certainly less than a hour. Also, many of the examples that come close, such as LOTR, don't really follow through in that they still follow current movie standards with only putting one movie out every year or so even if they do film them all at about the same time. What I'm proposing is that they film them all, and release them with at most, a month between them. The ideal would be to either release them all at once, or more likely, with something like a week between them.
I think part of this has to do with how the adaptation is handled. If you naively try and do a direct adaptation of the book to the screen it's going to fail for the simple fact that what works very well in one medium, simply does not work in another. Look at LoTR, it worked very well because the person who did the adaptation very carefully chose what would and would not be part of the movie, and even then we ended up with over 3 hours of content that pushed audiences to the limits of how long they're willing to sit in one place. I think in some ways, LoTR, Pirates of the Carribean and even Kill Bill, could serve very well as models for a new kind of movie, the serial movie. The fact is, to really lay out these grand stories in these amazing universes, you need more time than you can reasonably demand of a person in one movie. I think they're very close now, but what they need to do is film all of the movie at once, then divide it into showings, say 2.5 hours each or so, and release all of them at once. Something like just one of Niven's Ringworld (or my favorite, Man Kzin Wars) novels could easily be 2 or 3, 2.5 hour movies.
That is exactly my point though. It's that attitude that has screwed up the CS curriculum. I couldn't believe all the junk classes I was expected to take when I went to get my BS in comp. sci. from UCF. I'm a programmer, and I have been for a long time. I enjoy some of the theory classes a bit, and even some of the Math, but I really use almost no math at all in my day to day job, and certainly nothing past at most calculus 1, yet the CS degree from UCF is only 2 classes short of a math major. That's just plain ridiculous. In a similar vein, there were some distinctly EE classes in the curriculum that really didn't need to be there. At most, they should be electives, cause honestly, even if I'm doing assembly programming, I really don't care what the circuit diagram of the processor looks like at all.
He wasn't saying any of those commented on the "human condition", he was saying they were the prime influence on Lucas. I think what he's getting at, is that there is a severe lack of sci-fi movies that address modern concerns in any sort of capacity without at least being 50% action. Sort of like hollywood is saying, yeah, you can talk about whether someone who has been geneticly engineered still counts as a human or not, so long as every other scene has something blowing up, or a shoot out.
A college degree under the strictest definition is not useless, and even in some fields is quite beneficial, however, in IT this is not always the case. The biggest issue is the Computer Science field itself. To put it bluntly, it's too broad. Under the heading of Computer Science you have everything from network engineers, to web developers, to programmers, and even some IT managers. I'm not even saying that all of these fields don't require some sort of education, just that none of them are properly being served by a Computer Science degree. The problem with Computer Science is that it takes a little bit from all of these various fields, and then sprinkles it heavily with some advanced maths, which is really not meeting the needs of any of these. Computer Science needs to be more finely broken down. The way things are now, it's as if you lumped Chemistry, Physics, Metalurgy, and Astronomy all under something like a Bachelors of Physical Sciences degree. Sure it would probably help a little with all of those, but it wouldn't provide all the knowledge any one of them needed, and would probably frustrate the hell out of all of them.
The second issue that compounds all of this is the opinion that HR seems to promote whenever possible that the type of degree a person has is the primary determination in the salary that individual is worth. A piece of paper is all well and good when trying to decide who you should interview, but in terms of salary what a person knows and can do should count for much more. Unfortunatly that's not usually the case, all HR cares about is making sure everyone with X degree in field Y makes about the same amount, otherwise in their eyes it wouldn't be fair.
This is why college degrees here arn't thought of well, not because they are bad on their own, but because the IT field is so terribly represented by the degrees that can be had today.
While Exchange 2007 doesn't cause issues, users with older versions may see their email quarantined as a matter of course.
Sounds like it's working just fine to me. If anything is wrong, it's that the Exchange 2007 e-mails arn't being quarantined as a matter of course as well.
Oh wait, I get it now, they're mad because it's hurting MS Anti-Virus sells by quarantining the latest batch of exchange worms before they get a chance to make the rounds.
Or far more interesting, insert random watermarks. If they can crack it, they can modify it to their will. What good will watermarks be when every video you download will have another random code? The MAFIAA will have no court standing because you can always argue it wasn't your copy, but someone elses that the pirate altered with a random code that just happened to be yours.
This was moderated Funny, but honestly I think Insightful might be more accurate. That's kind of a sad statement when you think about it.
GM both does and does not save lives as you put it. GM crops are engineered to stand up better in certain extreme conditions, and to be more resistant to diseases and parasites. The upshot of all of that is that a GM crop will have signifigantly higher yield per acre than non-GM crop. The downside as you also pointed out, is that companies are selling this for a profit, which in the case of corporations means the same thing no matter what industry you're in. The basic problem is the corporations have done a number of things in the name of profit that are frankly dispicable at best, and criminal at worst. The fact that one of these mega-corps would cover up (as yet unproven) information that they're product is potentially toxic does not suprise me in the least, in the same way that if McDonalds discovered that one of their products caused colon cancer I'm sure we'd never hear about it, it would just be quietly fazed out of production.
The issue that most people have with GMO basically falls into one of two broad categories. There are the religious ludites, who are opposed to GMO on the basis that it's "not natural" and therefore somehow an affront to god, and then there are those that are opposed to the anti-seed crop GM that the greedy corporations have worked into the products. The second of these two categories has a genuine gripe, the first need to go back to their bible thumping and leave the rest of humanity alone.
The worst thing to the GM industry that these companies have done is to engineer a sequence of genes into all of their products that causes the crop to be sterile. From the perspective of the corporation this is great, because it allows them to rather cheaply engineer a product, and then continually re-sale that exact same product ever year. Without this gene, they would actually have to do something innovative in order to continue to sell products. It would be as if every car sold was designed in such a way that it would melt after one year, and you would have to go back to the dealer every year and buy a new car. Great for car dealers, but really sucks for everyone else.
What's more, the farmers that actually grow this stuff are dirt poor and only manage to survive based on massive handouts from the government, but in order to plant a crop next year (because remember the one from last year was sterile) they need to hand over almost all that money to the corporations for more crop. In essence the farmer is a middle man in all this, who unfortunatly ends up doing virtually all the work, but collecting virtually none of the profit. Maybe all the GMO crop companies should just buy farms and skip the middle step, everyone would be better off, and they might actually start taking some responsibility with their product if it was more obvious to the consumers that it came from company XYZ instead of some poor farmer in the mid-west.
How many 12 year olds were there? If not that many, probably Horde, as in my experience most Alliance players are around 12. At my location we seemed to have mostly males as well, although most of us, like me had girlfriends or wives at home that just didn't care to come out and pickup the expansion. As for ages, I didn't see anyone that seemed particularly young, and quite a few people who had to be into their 30s. The average age was probably somewhere around 25. As for distribution of Horde vs. Alliance, it seemed to be about 2/3 Horde, although that number is hard to guage as we only really got to talk to the 30 or so people closest to us out of the 60 or so that were waiting.
Read the post a little closer. The guy who wrote the article is a CompSci researcher who primarily works with cryptography, but the article was submitted by a Medical Imaging Specialist. The confusion was caused because the submitters commits are mistakenly being associated as coming from the writer of the article. In your defense of course this seems to be a fairly common mistake on this article because I've counted at least 5 comments so far that make the exact same mistake.
*Pst* Hiroshima and Nagasaki are in Japan, not China. I realize this was supposed to be a joke, but you could at least get the country correct.
Your count is a little off on the languages. First off, HTML, CSS, and XML are not programming languages, they are markup languages (that's what the M in HTML and XML stands for). Secondly, HTML is a subset of XML (or at least XHTML is), so really XML/HTML should be expressed as XHTML, however as previously mentioned these arn't programming languages, so they can't be lumped into the same category as ECMAScript (or JScript/JavaScript is you prefer). The breakout of XHTML, CSS, and ECMAScript is actually just right, as this lends itself perfectly to a MVC model, in which the XHTML is your model, CSS is your view, and ECMAScript is the controller. Now, this is of course all on the client side, when you go to the server side there's another issue, but this is a advantage not a problem. If you wish to use only ECMAScript for development, that is of course perfectly possible, all you need to do is install one of the ECMAScript based application frameworks such as Cocoon (which admitedly also uses XSLT, but for most things the default XSLT files should suffice). So to summarize you really need to know 2 markup languages, and 1 programming language in order to write a web-based application, plus the associated APIs for any libraries or environments you wish to write in. You need to know, XML, CSS, and ECMAScript, with the XHTML and DOM APIs as well as the IE and W3C APIs. On the server side you have a ton of possibilities, and the choice is really more of personal preference. In my case, I'm a Java developer, so I tend to lean towards Java. However even in that I don't do pure Java as I usually use the Spring framework, so I also need to use XML for my dependency injection, and the property file format for my configuration constants.