I agree. But the Lexicon, unlike most similar publications, failed to build upon the original works. WB/Rowling/Scholastic had no issue with the MuggleNet book, for instance, as it contained primarily analysis rather than just reprinting what Rowling had already written in slightly different wording.
Slot B is visible in tabs A, C, D, E, F, and G. You're currently in tab B, slashdot.org. Very inappropriate multitasking, especially given that out of seven tabs, you're currently browsing the one that's not porn. You need to learn to prioritize.
I don't see why this was modded troll - it's a very accurate statement, even if it shows !Mozilla in a good light (even MS, *gasp*). I haven't used a computer with less than a gig of RAM in about five years, and a lightweight app is no good to anyone if it crashes every hour. Firefox has been relatively stable for me all things considered (except for some rogue JS at digg which I abandoned a while ago, I rarely have issues), but Chrome's approach of sandboxing tabs so they don't kill each other probably should have come around tabbed browsing 1.1.
It would be one thing if this approach bloated up Photoshop or something (as if PS wouldn't burst if it got any more bloated), but I spend ALL DAY with my browser open - dozens of tabs often spread across a couple windows. Firefox taking 400MB of my 4GB doesn't bother me considering how much of my time it gets (though since 3.0 and disabling Firebug, it's not usually near that bad), so taking a little more of my system's memory in order to significantly enhance stability is more than worth it.
Hell, even in my pre-Firefox days (actually, I think this was everyone's pre-firefox days, as I'd made the switch around the time of the old mozilla naming fights), I could almost emulate this by digging for that old setting somewhere in the bowels of explorer preference to make each IE6 window run it its own explorer.exe process. And as you might expect, the system as a whole became fantastically more stable upon doing so. IE6 was (and still is) as crash-prone as ever, but it wouldn't take out my other browser windows nor the main GUI process when one took a nosedive (the decision to make the browser and the desktop run in the same process by default has always been well outside the grasp of my understanding). In any case, that should have been a tip-off that each tab should have its own process. To be fair, that setting is so buried that I'm probably one of about five people in the world to have used it (hell if I still know where it is), but there was still an important lesson there.
iTunes is known to have something in the EULA about not running it in a nuclear missile base, but that's actually fairly typical CYA lawyer-spawned nonsense. If it were up to them, you wouldn't be able to install the software without breaking the EULA and thus the publisher's accountability (actually... these days that's not far off the mark). Hell, even the GPL and MIT licenses have liability disclaimers in them, though not that specific.
This is just why the average programmer shouldn't be writing software that controls a stock market. When you're dealing with something that mission-critical with that much money on the line, you damn well better be pulling from the same pool as NASA.
Yes, and once again my whole point was that it's damn near impossible to get in touch with the appropriate people at EA, whereas support@someindiedeveloper.com could plausibly get forwarded along to the next cube over (the lead developer).
It would be very ignorant to assume that nobody at EA reads slashdot or shops at Amazon. It only takes one guy to start the "hey, did you see this?" chain, but when you're dealing with a company the size of EA, this has to be a fairly major thing, rather than the irate ramblings of one non-customer to the support department.
Of course, it's perfectly conceivable that they just don't care. A former employer doesn't list any of their prices on their website, and despite all of the people bitching about it through the contact form on the site, management had their minds made up. I doubt a lot of sales were lost as most of the people complaining couldn't have come close to affording the product, but it would have at least saved the sales team a whole lot of wasted time and effort by allowing people to disqualify themselves rather than wasting hours on the phone with the sales guys who had real prospects to chase down.
Obviously the sales model is a bit different between a $50 game and a five-figure piece of software, but my experience has almost universally been that the bigger companies get, the less care about what customers have to say. At least for games, that's a pretty significant mistake to make.
A couple of days before the US release, actually. Which is true for almost every game under the sun these days.
I didn't get the cracked version, but presumably the only limitation is that you can't get other players' content, which is really the only online aspect to the game.
Excellent point. This is a very silly way to 'protest' about DRM.
Well... sort of. As an indie game developer, I expect you're considerably easier to get in touch with than the behemoth that is EA. Or, rather, it's much easier to get in touch with someone who can and will make a sensible decision at your company rather than EA.
Generally speaking, we're told to vote with our wallets for maximum effectiveness, at least when dealing with the big companies. The guys doing the Amazon ratings here are just trying to vote with a few extra wallets.
Pure water is electrically inert. Though given how dusty servers tend to get, I doubt it really matters.
Regardless, I've never had a watercooling leak that wasn't my own fault (not connecting the fitting properly), and obviously in this kind of scenario you test things first. Then again, I'm talking about a couple of boxes, not a datacenter.
Fluorinert or something similar would be very effective and a whole hell of a lot safer for this. It's certainly not cheap, but given the fact that you can effectively use it to replace your HVACs (or at least move them to somewhere more efficient), the cost may be worth it.
That's true. But the notion of intelligent design sprung out of thin air really within the last few years because creationists just couldn't accept that they've been proven wrong. We may not know where life started, but we CAN conclusively prove that it's existed for well over 6,000 years and that evolution DOES happen. We've proven that through research, testing, the scientific method, and all of that good stuff. We did NOT prove it by reading a book, and then realizing we had been proven wrong and just arbitrarily change our story to work around the flaw in our gospel.
It's like the people with the Jesus fish stickers on their cars. More specifically, the ones eating a Darwin fish. Evolution at work (*sigh*). Or, hell, the creationist nonsense evolving into ID nonsense.
If you want to believe in bullshit that's fine, even if you know it's bullshit and are just in denial. But I'll be damned if you should be allowed to teach it alongside proven facts as if it, too, were fact.
That the highly religious keep having to change their story to fit the fact-based world is very telling. But then again, so is their tendency to break the commandments that they bitch at everyone for not knowing by heart (when they themselves can only recite three).
It's an echo chamber of idiots and lobbyists. A very bad combination. Fuck religion. It's good for nothing but starting war and controlling the brainwashed with threats.
"Claimed" being the operative word here. Did she see the data that they claimed to recover? If so, does she have a way of knowing for sure that they didn't just make up this data to incriminate someone and claim it was recovered from somewhere? If not, then for all anyone knows they were just spewing buzzwords from their multi-billion dollar anus and hoping that was sufficient to make people believe they weren't just flat-out making shit up.
I have no idea what they are and are not capable of doing in terms of data recovery, but I know they ARE very capable of lying and incompetence, so I'm not alone in taking anything the NSA claims as truth with a grain of salt.
Is it honestly relevant? The task is to determine whether a dd'd (...) drive can have its previous contents determined. Obviously the rules regarding how this can be done are somewhat problematic, but let's assume that all bets are off for recovery methods.
Find some guy with a couple grand sitting around. Put some crap on a hard drive. Wipe said drive with dd in the manner described in TFA. Send the drive to a recovery as any normal human with money would do. If they can recover it, dd isn't secure enough. If they can't, try a couple other places and if none of them can, it's probably secure enough. No special conditions, no 'security king' title, just a test that the recovery team doesn't know it's taking.
Interesting point... the last thing they want to do is make their jobs harder by inadvertently telling the criminals to use a more secure drive destruction method. Now I don't believe for a minute that those molten drives that saw the wrong end of an arc welder are going to have recoverable data, but I'd consider it at least vaguely plausible that zeroed-out data can be recovered (I don't see it happening on the 7- or 35-pass wipes, but would be intrigued to see someone prove me wrong)
But could they do it successfully? That's all this contest is looking to prove. Now granted I'll give you that it's worth a metric shitton more than the $40 prize, but absolutely needing it to happen doesn't ensure that it will.
The question is then, I suppose, whether if I dropped off some drive from Osama at FBI HQ that had been zeroed out with dd they could recover the data. If so, then obviously dd isn't safe for data that warrants that level of recovery; if not, then I'll toss my copy of DBAN and just grab one of the dozen Ubuntu live CDs and kill data that way.
Of course if it takes two years and $50m, I'd consider it more than safe enough. I'm pretty sure Osama only has a $25m price on his head, and in any case the damage has probably already been done during that recovery period. This kind of thing is really to try and lock someone up for kiddie porn or stealing corporate secrets or whatever.
Are there still web developers out there that do anything with server-side user-agent detection, with the exception of forwarding to a mobile page? If you're, as a web developer, doing anything more than IE-conditional stylesheets, you should be immediately stripped of your job and title and forced to spend an eternity browsing the web with Lynx.
Seriously, outside of long-outdated intranets, has this been an issue in the last five years or so? I haven't seen issues related to ActiveX in years which is the only somewhat-reasonable reason to block a browser/UA. The types of developers who would do that are almost certainly stuck in the land of table hell, which despite all of their other problems are pretty safe in terms of cross-browser display consistency so that's out as a reason.
I'd rather the government just start following the fucking Constitution again. I'm not concerned about the interpretation of 18th-century comma placement so much as what the flatly obvious spirit of the thing is.
Then again, I'd rather see taxation of all forms die and make the government earn their keep rather than continue to get their bogus free ride. They certainly fail to represent the vast majority of Americans these days - that's certainly "taxation without representation" in some sense of the phrase.
That's great if the machine is used for NOTHING but gaming. If you get the right apps, you'll peg an 8-core system (and I do this frequently with Handbrake on my Mac Pro). With browsers and whatnot often going on the fritz, I'd feel better knowing they'll only kill a quarter (or an eighth) of my system resources rather than half - especially if you're like the rest of the world in not closing your browser while gaming.
No, rebates rock. The process for actually getting your money out of them tends to suck. I've gotta give Apple some credit on that one - just hit their website, type in some number at the bottom of the receipt and where you want the check mailed, and I had the checks within a week. No stamps, no cutting boxes, etc. More companies need to start doing that.
There are plenty of apps that actually see some heavy use. As in 50k+ installations, not 500+. Just hotlinking an image could do some pretty heavy damage to most sites, never mind a massive POST request.
Obviously it costs them less than they're charging, and "at cost" will never happen. Ever. Either it'll be ad-supported at no direct cost to you, or you get to pay the royalties directly. At the end of the day, someone is going to get paid somehow for producing the content. If that doesn't happen, it's completely unsustainable and it dies off.
And of course it goes down to 10c/GB at the rates they charge you. Amazon probably goes through enough bandwidth in an hour to put them in the lowest rate category. $0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out $0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out $0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out $0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
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I agree. But the Lexicon, unlike most similar publications, failed to build upon the original works. WB/Rowling/Scholastic had no issue with the MuggleNet book, for instance, as it contained primarily analysis rather than just reprinting what Rowling had already written in slightly different wording.
Slot B is visible in tabs A, C, D, E, F, and G. You're currently in tab B, slashdot.org. Very inappropriate multitasking, especially given that out of seven tabs, you're currently browsing the one that's not porn. You need to learn to prioritize.
I don't see why this was modded troll - it's a very accurate statement, even if it shows !Mozilla in a good light (even MS, *gasp*). I haven't used a computer with less than a gig of RAM in about five years, and a lightweight app is no good to anyone if it crashes every hour. Firefox has been relatively stable for me all things considered (except for some rogue JS at digg which I abandoned a while ago, I rarely have issues), but Chrome's approach of sandboxing tabs so they don't kill each other probably should have come around tabbed browsing 1.1.
It would be one thing if this approach bloated up Photoshop or something (as if PS wouldn't burst if it got any more bloated), but I spend ALL DAY with my browser open - dozens of tabs often spread across a couple windows. Firefox taking 400MB of my 4GB doesn't bother me considering how much of my time it gets (though since 3.0 and disabling Firebug, it's not usually near that bad), so taking a little more of my system's memory in order to significantly enhance stability is more than worth it.
Hell, even in my pre-Firefox days (actually, I think this was everyone's pre-firefox days, as I'd made the switch around the time of the old mozilla naming fights), I could almost emulate this by digging for that old setting somewhere in the bowels of explorer preference to make each IE6 window run it its own explorer.exe process. And as you might expect, the system as a whole became fantastically more stable upon doing so. IE6 was (and still is) as crash-prone as ever, but it wouldn't take out my other browser windows nor the main GUI process when one took a nosedive (the decision to make the browser and the desktop run in the same process by default has always been well outside the grasp of my understanding). In any case, that should have been a tip-off that each tab should have its own process. To be fair, that setting is so buried that I'm probably one of about five people in the world to have used it (hell if I still know where it is), but there was still an important lesson there.
A hundred and fucking fifty dollars per excess gig?!
Damn.
iTunes is known to have something in the EULA about not running it in a nuclear missile base, but that's actually fairly typical CYA lawyer-spawned nonsense. If it were up to them, you wouldn't be able to install the software without breaking the EULA and thus the publisher's accountability (actually... these days that's not far off the mark). Hell, even the GPL and MIT licenses have liability disclaimers in them, though not that specific.
This is just why the average programmer shouldn't be writing software that controls a stock market. When you're dealing with something that mission-critical with that much money on the line, you damn well better be pulling from the same pool as NASA.
Yes, and once again my whole point was that it's damn near impossible to get in touch with the appropriate people at EA, whereas support@someindiedeveloper.com could plausibly get forwarded along to the next cube over (the lead developer).
It would be very ignorant to assume that nobody at EA reads slashdot or shops at Amazon. It only takes one guy to start the "hey, did you see this?" chain, but when you're dealing with a company the size of EA, this has to be a fairly major thing, rather than the irate ramblings of one non-customer to the support department.
Of course, it's perfectly conceivable that they just don't care. A former employer doesn't list any of their prices on their website, and despite all of the people bitching about it through the contact form on the site, management had their minds made up. I doubt a lot of sales were lost as most of the people complaining couldn't have come close to affording the product, but it would have at least saved the sales team a whole lot of wasted time and effort by allowing people to disqualify themselves rather than wasting hours on the phone with the sales guys who had real prospects to chase down.
Obviously the sales model is a bit different between a $50 game and a five-figure piece of software, but my experience has almost universally been that the bigger companies get, the less care about what customers have to say. At least for games, that's a pretty significant mistake to make.
A couple of days before the US release, actually. Which is true for almost every game under the sun these days.
I didn't get the cracked version, but presumably the only limitation is that you can't get other players' content, which is really the only online aspect to the game.
Excellent point. This is a very silly way to 'protest' about DRM.
Well... sort of. As an indie game developer, I expect you're considerably easier to get in touch with than the behemoth that is EA. Or, rather, it's much easier to get in touch with someone who can and will make a sensible decision at your company rather than EA.
Generally speaking, we're told to vote with our wallets for maximum effectiveness, at least when dealing with the big companies. The guys doing the Amazon ratings here are just trying to vote with a few extra wallets.
Pure water is electrically inert. Though given how dusty servers tend to get, I doubt it really matters.
Regardless, I've never had a watercooling leak that wasn't my own fault (not connecting the fitting properly), and obviously in this kind of scenario you test things first. Then again, I'm talking about a couple of boxes, not a datacenter.
Fluorinert or something similar would be very effective and a whole hell of a lot safer for this. It's certainly not cheap, but given the fact that you can effectively use it to replace your HVACs (or at least move them to somewhere more efficient), the cost may be worth it.
What do evolutionists have to say to that? ahahaha...
Once species' trash is another species' treasure. Duh.
That's true. But the notion of intelligent design sprung out of thin air really within the last few years because creationists just couldn't accept that they've been proven wrong. We may not know where life started, but we CAN conclusively prove that it's existed for well over 6,000 years and that evolution DOES happen. We've proven that through research, testing, the scientific method, and all of that good stuff. We did NOT prove it by reading a book, and then realizing we had been proven wrong and just arbitrarily change our story to work around the flaw in our gospel.
It's like the people with the Jesus fish stickers on their cars. More specifically, the ones eating a Darwin fish. Evolution at work (*sigh*). Or, hell, the creationist nonsense evolving into ID nonsense.
If you want to believe in bullshit that's fine, even if you know it's bullshit and are just in denial. But I'll be damned if you should be allowed to teach it alongside proven facts as if it, too, were fact.
That the highly religious keep having to change their story to fit the fact-based world is very telling. But then again, so is their tendency to break the commandments that they bitch at everyone for not knowing by heart (when they themselves can only recite three).
It's an echo chamber of idiots and lobbyists. A very bad combination. Fuck religion. It's good for nothing but starting war and controlling the brainwashed with threats.
"Claimed" being the operative word here. Did she see the data that they claimed to recover? If so, does she have a way of knowing for sure that they didn't just make up this data to incriminate someone and claim it was recovered from somewhere? If not, then for all anyone knows they were just spewing buzzwords from their multi-billion dollar anus and hoping that was sufficient to make people believe they weren't just flat-out making shit up.
I have no idea what they are and are not capable of doing in terms of data recovery, but I know they ARE very capable of lying and incompetence, so I'm not alone in taking anything the NSA claims as truth with a grain of salt.
Is it honestly relevant? The task is to determine whether a dd'd (...) drive can have its previous contents determined. Obviously the rules regarding how this can be done are somewhat problematic, but let's assume that all bets are off for recovery methods.
Find some guy with a couple grand sitting around. Put some crap on a hard drive. Wipe said drive with dd in the manner described in TFA. Send the drive to a recovery as any normal human with money would do. If they can recover it, dd isn't secure enough. If they can't, try a couple other places and if none of them can, it's probably secure enough. No special conditions, no 'security king' title, just a test that the recovery team doesn't know it's taking.
Interesting point... the last thing they want to do is make their jobs harder by inadvertently telling the criminals to use a more secure drive destruction method. Now I don't believe for a minute that those molten drives that saw the wrong end of an arc welder are going to have recoverable data, but I'd consider it at least vaguely plausible that zeroed-out data can be recovered (I don't see it happening on the 7- or 35-pass wipes, but would be intrigued to see someone prove me wrong)
But could they do it successfully? That's all this contest is looking to prove. Now granted I'll give you that it's worth a metric shitton more than the $40 prize, but absolutely needing it to happen doesn't ensure that it will.
The question is then, I suppose, whether if I dropped off some drive from Osama at FBI HQ that had been zeroed out with dd they could recover the data. If so, then obviously dd isn't safe for data that warrants that level of recovery; if not, then I'll toss my copy of DBAN and just grab one of the dozen Ubuntu live CDs and kill data that way.
Of course if it takes two years and $50m, I'd consider it more than safe enough. I'm pretty sure Osama only has a $25m price on his head, and in any case the damage has probably already been done during that recovery period. This kind of thing is really to try and lock someone up for kiddie porn or stealing corporate secrets or whatever.
Are there still web developers out there that do anything with server-side user-agent detection, with the exception of forwarding to a mobile page? If you're, as a web developer, doing anything more than IE-conditional stylesheets, you should be immediately stripped of your job and title and forced to spend an eternity browsing the web with Lynx.
Seriously, outside of long-outdated intranets, has this been an issue in the last five years or so? I haven't seen issues related to ActiveX in years which is the only somewhat-reasonable reason to block a browser/UA. The types of developers who would do that are almost certainly stuck in the land of table hell, which despite all of their other problems are pretty safe in terms of cross-browser display consistency so that's out as a reason.
I'd rather the government just start following the fucking Constitution again. I'm not concerned about the interpretation of 18th-century comma placement so much as what the flatly obvious spirit of the thing is.
Then again, I'd rather see taxation of all forms die and make the government earn their keep rather than continue to get their bogus free ride. They certainly fail to represent the vast majority of Americans these days - that's certainly "taxation without representation" in some sense of the phrase.
That's great if the machine is used for NOTHING but gaming. If you get the right apps, you'll peg an 8-core system (and I do this frequently with Handbrake on my Mac Pro). With browsers and whatnot often going on the fritz, I'd feel better knowing they'll only kill a quarter (or an eighth) of my system resources rather than half - especially if you're like the rest of the world in not closing your browser while gaming.
No, rebates rock. The process for actually getting your money out of them tends to suck. I've gotta give Apple some credit on that one - just hit their website, type in some number at the bottom of the receipt and where you want the check mailed, and I had the checks within a week. No stamps, no cutting boxes, etc. More companies need to start doing that.
If I can start 'renting' 8GB flash drives for three bucks, I really don't care that much about the DRM.
So... you just waste your own bandwidth? Nice.
There are plenty of apps that actually see some heavy use. As in 50k+ installations, not 500+. Just hotlinking an image could do some pretty heavy damage to most sites, never mind a massive POST request.
If you're rich enough to afford a Mac and these rentals, you can afford a copy of VMWare and XP.
Unfortunately my Mac bankrupted me so it's off to TBP.
Obviously it costs them less than they're charging, and "at cost" will never happen. Ever. Either it'll be ad-supported at no direct cost to you, or you get to pay the royalties directly. At the end of the day, someone is going to get paid somehow for producing the content. If that doesn't happen, it's completely unsustainable and it dies off.
And of course it goes down to 10c/GB at the rates they charge you. Amazon probably goes through enough bandwidth in an hour to put them in the lowest rate category.
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB