I actually have in the past with individual professors, and I always came out the victor because there is simply no sane justification for such a policy
Consider yourself lucky that the lack of sane justification is sufficient to stop such nonsense wherever you go to school. In my experience that's rarely in the case.
I could handle blocking wi-fi in lecture theatres.. that helps just a bit.
For what it's worth, I've found internet access to be quite helpful in class. It's not unusual that I've forgotten something the professor assumes you've remembered. This hits me particularly hard in the autumn after a summer away from academia. When I can simply Google "taylor series" for a quick reminder and actually understand what's going on in class I benefit quite a lot more then just sitting there lost.
I've been going back to school to get a Master's at night. It's pretty annoying that the classroom is full of kids watching TV or movies on their laptops. While I do what I can to sit near the front so that I don't have any video playing on a screen in front of me, it's not always possible. I have to leave work to get to class, so I can't just show up early enough to get in front of the TV watching idiots.
From a purely anecdotal perspective, I'd say 60-70% of laptops in the college classroom are being used for entertainment, not note taking. At the very least, I'd like to see them confined to the back few rows of the room.
So explain to the professor your situation. You have a difficult time focusing with laptops in front of you, and you can't get to class early enough to guarantee yourself a seat in the front row because of work. Request that a seat in the front row be reserved for you. If you honestly expect the professor would consider allocating seats for all the laptop users, surely s/he'd be willing to do so for just you.
Don't take out your frustration over your own learning problems on others. Many of us learn better with laptops. Even by your own admission, 30~40% of the laptop users in class aren't using the laptop for entertainment. Just because we're a minority doesn't mean we should be forced to sit in the back of the bus^H^H^Hroom.
I don't know about you, but myself and a few of my friends found that even though it seemed like both ways of taking notes would trigger the witless stenographer, writing by hand actually locked the information in, while computer note-taking meant you remembered little or none of it.
For me, it's the opposite. I retain things I've typed far better than anything hand-written.
I took Latin in middle school. If a student did insufficiently well, s/he was forced to hand-write the information hundreds of times, because the teacher was closed-minded enough that she believed that it helped reinforce the information for everyone. It didn't help me at all - I wasted hours hand-writing things and nearly failed the classes. Taking notes on the material taught in class by hand doesn't benefit me at all - I just end up with cramped hands, illegible scribbles I am unable to decrypt if read a week later, and no recollection of what was actually covered.
Nowadays I use a laptop to take all my notes in vim+LaTeX. The processes uses far less of my concentration, allowing more of my mental capacity to actually think about the information being taught - and I can understand my notes to review later, if I didn't absorb it all. I often don't need to though, because I was actually able to listen to the professor, and the act of typing helped get thinks to sink in.
To drill things into my mind, I use a small script I wrote to 'quiz' me on the material, which shows me something expected to jog my memory and prompts me for whatever I need to eventually know. I *type* the answer. Eventually, the act of typing a sufficient number of times is what gets it to sink in. This helps in rote-memorization classes like History, as well as more idea-centric classes like Mathematics (where you still have to memorize things - what's the formula to find the distance between a point and a plane?)
During a midterm a few weeks ago, an observant TA noticed that my hands undergo the motion of 'air-typing' when I'm thinking about a question - that action helps trigger the required memories.
Everybody's different.
If not for loud keyboards, I couldn't care less if other students are using a computer to take notes; if I'm right and the computer is a less effective tool, that hurts them, not me.
I wish more people thought like you and let me learn my own way. So long as I don't bring my Model M-esque keyboard to class, I should be free to learn the way that works best for me. The worst case scenario is I've interpreted my own learning style incorrectly and I don't benefit - it doesn't hurt anyone else.
A browser distribution may well include certificates for various CA's as a convenience
Mozilla gets finicky if you toy with Firefox too much and still call it Firefox. If Linux distros did that, they'd risk being forced to move to Iceweasel. Not a HUGE deal, but nonetheless - they can't technically do as you propose. Security-focused distros may want to do so, however.
More relevant, however, is the fact that most Firefox users don't use "distros" but get the raw executable installer from the website (or a friend's usb holding the same file, etc). The vast, vast majority of these users don't know or care to learn about which certificates they should allow - if any.
but generally shouldn't include any of them as trusted by default. There should be an option for the user to designate bundled CA certs (or ones obtained elsewhere) as trusted, and installers could even include option to enable them in the install procedure.
Even forcing the user to manually check "enable all certs" is too much. Double-click the installer, next->next->next->done. Any more then that is confusing and not worth the trouble.
Mozilla wants Firefox to be a mainstream browser. What you propose would seriously hamper that.
Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?
Nvidia's driver may not necessarily be "better," depending on how you define it. Nvidia's driver is clearly better in terms of 3D acceleration, but Nouveau wins in many other areas (largely as an extension of it's F/OSS'ness). There's much less legal worry when distributing it, it doesn't have to be recompiled against the kernel updates, it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself), it can be fix/changed/updated without dependence on Nvidia, it's also more likely to have continued support on older hardware - the list gets pretty long. Maybe these things don't matter to you as much as 3D acceleration, but for many they do.
I use linux because it works perfectly well for me.
F/OSS isn't just blind idealism - there's practical benefits which result. I expect at least part of the reason why Linux "works perfectly well" for you is a result of the fact it's F/OSS. This carries over to the video drivers, too.
According to Shacknews the minimum system requirements are as follows:
PC Minimum Requirements:
* Windows XP SP3/Vista SP1/Windows 7 * 2.2 Ghz Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon processor * 1 GB system RAM/1.5 GB for Vista and Windows 7 * 128 MB NVidia GeForce 6600 GT/ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card * 1024x768 minimum display resolution * 4 GB free hard space (Beta) * Broadband connection
Nice to know my trusty old 3.0Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM and an NVidia GeForce 6800GT is still available for friends who can't bring their box to Starcraft LANs! Well, assuming Blizzard allows it.
Can anyone else confirm that Foxit has known security problems?
Sadly, yes.
Foxit isn't happy with just doing basic rendering on PDF's, but wants to be a more completely alternative to Adobe's Reader. This includes things like running PDF's scripting, and makes it harder to implement securely.
I'm not saying a secure, full-featured PDF reader can't be made, so much as that you're a lot safer using a program that only does the basic rendering. Foxit doesn't fit the bill. It's also closed source >.>
It wasn't Google that determined your location by getting around the VPN, it was your browser before anything went over the VPN. You can be behind seven proxies, if you tell the guy at the other end where you are the proxies aren't going to automatically censor you. In this instance, it was all you that gave up the information, not some crazy complicated scheme to steal your personal information. Good privacy isn't _that_ hard, just don't go around telling people where you are d:
I use a similar system to yours. I'd like to add that this works wonderfully in conjunction with a good text editor, such as vim (plus vim-latexsuite) or emacs. There's many, many ways those can be used to save time when creating notes. If done properly, I've found I'm *much* faster then anyone I've seen on paper.
For example, in LaTeX you can break mathematical equations onto multiple lines without changing the compiled product. Hence, for things you'd type over and over, you can put these on their own lines and just type the first few characters followed by a ^X^L in vim to finish the line. I just completed the section on infinite series in Calculus 3, and "\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty" came up a lot, but was only typed once. You can also set up abbreviations (so that \ss would expand into what I have above) or mappings (\ss would again work, as would other things), or take advantage of multiple copy/paste buffers...
If there's any pattern in the notes being generated, it can be exploited when typed (with a decent editor). Not so with paper and pen/pencil. Plus readability, easy backups, easy to reorganize, etc. The only fault is difficulty with non-text, where you have to pull out the paper.
It's not black-and-white. It's better then Android being closed source, but it's not as good as it could be. It'd have been better (for the public, not necessarily Google) if Google got the android-specific changes to the Linux kernel in the mainline kernel. This would require quite a bit of back-and-forth with the kernel devs, though, and a lot more time and money then Google would truly have to spend to get Android on the market.
No one is surprised when Microsoft does this but it'a amazing that people are when Google does.
Microsoft has a history of being immoral, baring China it's pretty rare for Google to do such things.
As a publicly traded company Google's only obligation is to make a profit for shareholders. That means doing things like instituting business practices that are favorable to their business.
Agreed with what you're saying, but not with what you're implying. Pissing off and consequently losing customers by spying on them isn't favorable to their business. Risking a comparatively large fiasco over a comparatively small amount of data mining isn't worth pot odds. Google doesn't have Microsoft's lock-in - it's easy to move away from Google. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't know this.
80% of the search market and people love you.
I realize that correlation does not _necessarily_ imply causation (people love you -> more marketshare), but it doesn't take an economist to show that if people like a company, they'll be more likely to do business with it.
While I obviously don't have much more then Google's word, the fact that the toolbar acting when 'off' was only in certain situations and not always, and the fact that Google isn't quite stupid enough to risk a big affair over what little they'd get from this, I for one put the odds against this being a purposeful act.
I concur with just about everything you've said - I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way. Historically, very little story was directly told in the (2D) Metroid Games. What little story there was was shown through the gameplay itself - no text, no talking. There was no need to say "Surpirse! Samus is a woman" or "Surprise! She still has a heart, and saved the young Metroid," or "Surprise! The Metroid came to save her" etc. I'm quite worried the trend will continue as it was in Fusion, with far to much text/speach.
I found the level design in ZM okay. It's nice that the developers purposefully put in creative/indirect/sequence-breaking options (eg: you can beat the entire game without the long beam), but it just worked so well in SM when it was unintentional. And yes, the stealth section was bullshit. I do buy the fact that you got the Power Bombs only *after* defeating the Motherbrain, since Samus never did get them in the original Metroid.
Maaaaybe Yokoi's ghost will haunt Sakamoto in going old-school again, or maybe the Team Ninja folks are actually hardcore SM fans. Maybe.
While all the details aren't known, they are working on another Metroid. While part of the development team is Team Ninja, the other part is the same guys who worked on Metroid Fusion, which is the department which descended from the department which made Super Metroid.
He's to a true sequel to Super Metroid that isn't a clone and doesn't withhold gameplay elements (eg: single-column wall jumps)
For what it's worth, firegestures works for me on 3.6. It seems to be updated sooner than all-in-one does; I had the same issue during the 3.0->3.5 transition with all-in-one, when firegestures worked.
Oh they cared, just not enough to act. The hack was what put them over the top. It's disingenuous to try to make it seem as though before the hack Google was fine with the censorship before hand.
codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic
No, it's intentional. Mozilla has been using Minefield has the code name for their cutting edge nightly stuff for quite some time... you know, the stuff that could randomly explode.
will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates
This seems to be a horrible idea to me, unless I'm misinterpreting it. I can see this being implemented in two ways:
One, Mozilla withholds security updates until there is a feature ready to go, which is just stupid - don't leave a hole if you've got a fix ready. One of the arguments in favor Firefox over IE is the more rapid security updates.
Two, Mozilla withholds features until a security update is necessary. I can't see any advantage to doing this, but there's a few obvious downsides (like withholding a perfectly good feature until someone finds something we're supposed to be hoping is not there).
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
It's ready for benchmarking, it's just not ready for widespread use yet. If Google was looking for a filesystem to make a switch to in the near future, BTRFS simply isn't an option quite yet.
It's really easy at this point to move from EXT2 to EXT4 (I believe you can simply remount the partition as the new filesystem, maybe change a flag or two, and away you go). It's basically free performance. If Google is convinced it's stable, there isn't much reason not to do this. It could act as an interim filesystem until something significantly better - such as BTRFS - gets to the point where it's dependable. The fact BTRFS was not mentioned here doesn't mean it's completely ruled out.
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.
Additionally, I was under the impression that Google used massive numbers of commodity consumer-grade harddrives, as opposed to high-grade stuff which I presume is less likely to err. Couple this fact with the massive amount of data Google is working with and there has got to be a lot of filesystem errors, no?
Can anyone else with experience with big database stuff hint as to why Google would not need to fsck their data (often enough for EXT3 to be worthwhile)? Is it cheaper just to overwrite the data from some backup elsewhere at this scale? How do they know the backup is clean without fscking that?
Maybe the full intent of the hack was not reached, but the fact is - as you so kindly presented - unauthorized access to *some* information was successful, such as reading the subject line of an unspecified number of emails. Accessing things like that - even if it's not everything - without authorization is a hack (or crack, if you want to be pedantic).
The subject lines of a few emails may very well be enough proof to result in certain human rights activists disappearance. Consider:
Fw: Re: increasing world awareness of china govt crimes against humanity
I would anticipate this will only encourage similar behavior.
I expect a similar ultimate result - more bandwidth usage - but for a different reason. People don't have to worry about going over the limit without realizing it - they no longer have to keep any sort of margin of error. They're free to use every last drop of service they're paying for without worry of accidentally going over and getting punished.
I've had, uhh, "husky" friends who went on diet and exercise regiments that worked quite well *before* they started counting calories and setting hard limits. The idea of "well, I'm not actually hungry so I shouldn't push it and eat this" didn't cross their mind - it became "well, I'm allowed another 500calories today, let's have desert!" Conversely, "I think I can go around another block or two" didn't cross their minds, it became "well, that's it, I jogged as far as I was supposed to." Both the friends I'm talking about did eventually lose the weight (and one of them got a girlfriend!), but it clearly took longer then necessary and was an over-all more painful experience. From what I'm told, that extra bit of pleasure from stuffing yourself with desert doesn't counter the feeling from when you look down at the scale and fail to recognize improvement.
While plenty of Comcasts customers don't really understand mechanics such as bandwidth, I fully expect those who do to follow a similar logic to those of the aforementioned friends and use everything they can because they know they can.
Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?
It's an attempt to rationalize the situation, while interpreting the facts as the "ezabi" and/or the editors see them. Nothing so heinous as a troll, or overplayed as sarcasm.
There are plenty of free filesharing sites
All of which that I've seen have some limitations. Either you pay, or your bandwidth is capped, or you're limited to $files per $timeperiod, or $megabytes per $timeperiod, etc. As ezabi and/or the editors and I see it, it's unlikely Google is going to be quite as annoying or limited as they are with this regard. It's willing to subsidize the cost of the bandwidth for mindshare and long-term money. (ie, "Google's file service is so great I'll probably just use their other services too"). A free service from a household name with less frustrating limitations could very well grab the market.
and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards
When you hit the filesize limit at most other file sharing sights, it's common to split the file into multiple files (usually via rar). That should work here - the limit isn't a big issue if Google lets you download the partial-files one after another. Consider youtube's length limit, and how it's circumvented by simply making a play list with multiple limited-length videos.
Even more important is the likely scenario that Google ups the limit as the service matures. Remember how much gmail used to allow at first? Take a look at what they offer now. It's not a reach to imagine a similar thing happening here. Harddrives are cheap, and Google has tones of experience scaling that up.
not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account.
I'm guessing you've never read any comment ever on youtube? Google fights bots, but with humans it plays fast and loose with accounts, I'm not sure where you got the idea otherwise.
Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.
Despite the fact that they eventually gave in to China for censorship and various music and movie IP's on youtube, Google has been a pretty big advocate of such freedoms (well, from Big Brother and Big Media - not necessarily from Big Search Engine/Advertisement Service). They fought China, Viacom, et al on the issues before giving in, and they've fought the US on such issue as well (no links handy, hopefully another/.'er can oblige). Honestly, I'd be more inclined to trust Google with my info then a random filesharing service, if I had to trust anyone.
But here's the cool thing - you can log out, or make an account just for shady stuff and switch between the two. Heck, doesn't Chrome have some sort of privacy mode? Yes, Google could match the IP with past account info and maybe put two and two together. Even so, the idea that you're using Google vs $random_fileshare_sight doesn't really increase the odds of getting caught.
Or you could just keep it legal d:
It's possible Google is willing to ruin its still pretty solid reputation for user-rights by using this to hunt down illegal file sharers, and it's possible that Google will put huge limits and allow other services to compete, but those are both pretty long shots if you think it through and don't know anything relevant that I don't.
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I actually have in the past with individual professors, and I always came out the victor because there is simply no sane justification for such a policy
Consider yourself lucky that the lack of sane justification is sufficient to stop such nonsense wherever you go to school. In my experience that's rarely in the case.
I could handle blocking wi-fi in lecture theatres.. that helps just a bit.
For what it's worth, I've found internet access to be quite helpful in class. It's not unusual that I've forgotten something the professor assumes you've remembered. This hits me particularly hard in the autumn after a summer away from academia. When I can simply Google "taylor series" for a quick reminder and actually understand what's going on in class I benefit quite a lot more then just sitting there lost.
I've been going back to school to get a Master's at night. It's pretty annoying that the classroom is full of kids watching TV or movies on their laptops. While I do what I can to sit near the front so that I don't have any video playing on a screen in front of me, it's not always possible. I have to leave work to get to class, so I can't just show up early enough to get in front of the TV watching idiots.
From a purely anecdotal perspective, I'd say 60-70% of laptops in the college classroom are being used for entertainment, not note taking. At the very least, I'd like to see them confined to the back few rows of the room.
So explain to the professor your situation. You have a difficult time focusing with laptops in front of you, and you can't get to class early enough to guarantee yourself a seat in the front row because of work. Request that a seat in the front row be reserved for you. If you honestly expect the professor would consider allocating seats for all the laptop users, surely s/he'd be willing to do so for just you.
Don't take out your frustration over your own learning problems on others. Many of us learn better with laptops. Even by your own admission, 30~40% of the laptop users in class aren't using the laptop for entertainment. Just because we're a minority doesn't mean we should be forced to sit in the back of the bus^H^H^Hroom.
I don't know about you, but myself and a few of my friends found that even though it seemed like both ways of taking notes would trigger the witless stenographer, writing by hand actually locked the information in, while computer note-taking meant you remembered little or none of it.
For me, it's the opposite. I retain things I've typed far better than anything hand-written.
I took Latin in middle school. If a student did insufficiently well, s/he was forced to hand-write the information hundreds of times, because the teacher was closed-minded enough that she believed that it helped reinforce the information for everyone. It didn't help me at all - I wasted hours hand-writing things and nearly failed the classes. Taking notes on the material taught in class by hand doesn't benefit me at all - I just end up with cramped hands, illegible scribbles I am unable to decrypt if read a week later, and no recollection of what was actually covered.
Nowadays I use a laptop to take all my notes in vim+LaTeX. The processes uses far less of my concentration, allowing more of my mental capacity to actually think about the information being taught - and I can understand my notes to review later, if I didn't absorb it all. I often don't need to though, because I was actually able to listen to the professor, and the act of typing helped get thinks to sink in.
To drill things into my mind, I use a small script I wrote to 'quiz' me on the material, which shows me something expected to jog my memory and prompts me for whatever I need to eventually know. I *type* the answer. Eventually, the act of typing a sufficient number of times is what gets it to sink in. This helps in rote-memorization classes like History, as well as more idea-centric classes like Mathematics (where you still have to memorize things - what's the formula to find the distance between a point and a plane?)
During a midterm a few weeks ago, an observant TA noticed that my hands undergo the motion of 'air-typing' when I'm thinking about a question - that action helps trigger the required memories.
Everybody's different.
If not for loud keyboards, I couldn't care less if other students are using a computer to take notes; if I'm right and the computer is a less effective tool, that hurts them, not me.
I wish more people thought like you and let me learn my own way. So long as I don't bring my Model M-esque keyboard to class, I should be free to learn the way that works best for me. The worst case scenario is I've interpreted my own learning style incorrectly and I don't benefit - it doesn't hurt anyone else.
A browser distribution may well include certificates for various CA's as a convenience
Mozilla gets finicky if you toy with Firefox too much and still call it Firefox. If Linux distros did that, they'd risk being forced to move to Iceweasel. Not a HUGE deal, but nonetheless - they can't technically do as you propose. Security-focused distros may want to do so, however.
More relevant, however, is the fact that most Firefox users don't use "distros" but get the raw executable installer from the website (or a friend's usb holding the same file, etc). The vast, vast majority of these users don't know or care to learn about which certificates they should allow - if any.
but generally shouldn't include any of them as trusted by default. There should be an option for the user to designate bundled CA certs (or ones obtained elsewhere) as trusted, and installers could even include option to enable them in the install procedure.
Even forcing the user to manually check "enable all certs" is too much. Double-click the installer, next->next->next->done. Any more then that is confusing and not worth the trouble.
Mozilla wants Firefox to be a mainstream browser. What you propose would seriously hamper that.
Do some people really use markedly inferior software simply because it is open source, even if a better competitor is available at no cost?
Nvidia's driver may not necessarily be "better," depending on how you define it. Nvidia's driver is clearly better in terms of 3D acceleration, but Nouveau wins in many other areas (largely as an extension of it's F/OSS'ness). There's much less legal worry when distributing it, it doesn't have to be recompiled against the kernel updates, it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself), it can be fix/changed/updated without dependence on Nvidia, it's also more likely to have continued support on older hardware - the list gets pretty long. Maybe these things don't matter to you as much as 3D acceleration, but for many they do.
I use linux because it works perfectly well for me.
F/OSS isn't just blind idealism - there's practical benefits which result. I expect at least part of the reason why Linux "works perfectly well" for you is a result of the fact it's F/OSS. This carries over to the video drivers, too.
Nice to know my trusty old 3.0Ghz P4 with 1GB RAM and an NVidia GeForce 6800GT is still available for friends who can't bring their box to Starcraft LANs! Well, assuming Blizzard allows it.
Can anyone else confirm that Foxit has known security problems?
Sadly, yes. Foxit isn't happy with just doing basic rendering on PDF's, but wants to be a more completely alternative to Adobe's Reader. This includes things like running PDF's scripting, and makes it harder to implement securely.
I'm not saying a secure, full-featured PDF reader can't be made, so much as that you're a lot safer using a program that only does the basic rendering. Foxit doesn't fit the bill. It's also closed source >.>
It wasn't Google that determined your location by getting around the VPN, it was your browser before anything went over the VPN. You can be behind seven proxies, if you tell the guy at the other end where you are the proxies aren't going to automatically censor you. In this instance, it was all you that gave up the information, not some crazy complicated scheme to steal your personal information. Good privacy isn't _that_ hard, just don't go around telling people where you are d:
Well, consider, if it wasn't Anonymous, I'd be less likely to believe s/he genuinely had enough interest in 4chan to place such a call, no?
I use a similar system to yours. I'd like to add that this works wonderfully in conjunction with a good text editor, such as vim (plus vim-latexsuite) or emacs. There's many, many ways those can be used to save time when creating notes. If done properly, I've found I'm *much* faster then anyone I've seen on paper.
For example, in LaTeX you can break mathematical equations onto multiple lines without changing the compiled product. Hence, for things you'd type over and over, you can put these on their own lines and just type the first few characters followed by a ^X^L in vim to finish the line. I just completed the section on infinite series in Calculus 3, and "\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty" came up a lot, but was only typed once. You can also set up abbreviations (so that \ss would expand into what I have above) or mappings (\ss would again work, as would other things), or take advantage of multiple copy/paste buffers...
If there's any pattern in the notes being generated, it can be exploited when typed (with a decent editor). Not so with paper and pen/pencil. Plus readability, easy backups, easy to reorganize, etc. The only fault is difficulty with non-text, where you have to pull out the paper.
Android is open source so does it really matter?
It's not black-and-white. It's better then Android being closed source, but it's not as good as it could be. It'd have been better (for the public, not necessarily Google) if Google got the android-specific changes to the Linux kernel in the mainline kernel. This would require quite a bit of back-and-forth with the kernel devs, though, and a lot more time and money then Google would truly have to spend to get Android on the market.
No one is surprised when Microsoft does this but it'a amazing that people are when Google does.
Microsoft has a history of being immoral, baring China it's pretty rare for Google to do such things.
As a publicly traded company Google's only obligation is to make a profit for shareholders. That means doing things like instituting business practices that are favorable to their business.
Agreed with what you're saying, but not with what you're implying. Pissing off and consequently losing customers by spying on them isn't favorable to their business. Risking a comparatively large fiasco over a comparatively small amount of data mining isn't worth pot odds. Google doesn't have Microsoft's lock-in - it's easy to move away from Google. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't know this.
80% of the search market and people love you.
I realize that correlation does not _necessarily_ imply causation (people love you -> more marketshare), but it doesn't take an economist to show that if people like a company, they'll be more likely to do business with it.
While I obviously don't have much more then Google's word, the fact that the toolbar acting when 'off' was only in certain situations and not always, and the fact that Google isn't quite stupid enough to risk a big affair over what little they'd get from this, I for one put the odds against this being a purposeful act.
I concur with just about everything you've said - I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way. Historically, very little story was directly told in the (2D) Metroid Games. What little story there was was shown through the gameplay itself - no text, no talking. There was no need to say "Surpirse! Samus is a woman" or "Surprise! She still has a heart, and saved the young Metroid," or "Surprise! The Metroid came to save her" etc. I'm quite worried the trend will continue as it was in Fusion, with far to much text/speach.
I found the level design in ZM okay. It's nice that the developers purposefully put in creative/indirect/sequence-breaking options (eg: you can beat the entire game without the long beam), but it just worked so well in SM when it was unintentional. And yes, the stealth section was bullshit. I do buy the fact that you got the Power Bombs only *after* defeating the Motherbrain, since Samus never did get them in the original Metroid.
Maaaaybe Yokoi's ghost will haunt Sakamoto in going old-school again, or maybe the Team Ninja folks are actually hardcore SM fans. Maybe.
While all the details aren't known, they are working on another Metroid. While part of the development team is Team Ninja, the other part is the same guys who worked on Metroid Fusion, which is the department which descended from the department which made Super Metroid.
/me holds up glass
He's to a true sequel to Super Metroid that isn't a clone and doesn't withhold gameplay elements (eg: single-column wall jumps)
For what it's worth, firegestures works for me on 3.6. It seems to be updated sooner than all-in-one does; I had the same issue during the 3.0->3.5 transition with all-in-one, when firegestures worked.
to
Why view the PDF in your browser? Download and open in a PDF viewer of your choice. Doing it this way won't kill your browser, honest!
Oh they cared, just not enough to act. The hack was what put them over the top. It's disingenuous to try to make it seem as though before the hack Google was fine with the censorship before hand.
codename: Minefield...which is now, possibly, ironic
No, it's intentional. Mozilla has been using Minefield has the code name for their cutting edge nightly stuff for quite some time... you know, the stuff that could randomly explode.
will be replaced with feature updates for Firefox 3.6 that will be rolled out with security updates
This seems to be a horrible idea to me, unless I'm misinterpreting it. I can see this being implemented in two ways:
One, Mozilla withholds security updates until there is a feature ready to go, which is just stupid - don't leave a hole if you've got a fix ready. One of the arguments in favor Firefox over IE is the more rapid security updates.
Two, Mozilla withholds features until a security update is necessary. I can't see any advantage to doing this, but there's a few obvious downsides (like withholding a perfectly good feature until someone finds something we're supposed to be hoping is not there).
Unless I'm missing something?
Btrfs is under heavy development, and is not suitable for any uses other than benchmarking and review. The Btrfs disk format is not yet finalized, but it will only be changed if a critical bug is found and no workarounds are possible.
It's ready for benchmarking, it's just not ready for widespread use yet. If Google was looking for a filesystem to make a switch to in the near future, BTRFS simply isn't an option quite yet.
It's really easy at this point to move from EXT2 to EXT4 (I believe you can simply remount the partition as the new filesystem, maybe change a flag or two, and away you go). It's basically free performance. If Google is convinced it's stable, there isn't much reason not to do this. It could act as an interim filesystem until something significantly better - such as BTRFS - gets to the point where it's dependable. The fact BTRFS was not mentioned here doesn't mean it's completely ruled out.
The main advantage of EXT3 over EXT2 is that, with journaling, if you ever need to fsck the data, it goes a LOT quicker. It's interesting to note that Google never felt it needed that functionality.
Additionally, I was under the impression that Google used massive numbers of commodity consumer-grade harddrives, as opposed to high-grade stuff which I presume is less likely to err. Couple this fact with the massive amount of data Google is working with and there has got to be a lot of filesystem errors, no?
Can anyone else with experience with big database stuff hint as to why Google would not need to fsck their data (often enough for EXT3 to be worthwhile)? Is it cheaper just to overwrite the data from some backup elsewhere at this scale? How do they know the backup is clean without fscking that?
Maybe the full intent of the hack was not reached, but the fact is - as you so kindly presented - unauthorized access to *some* information was successful, such as reading the subject line of an unspecified number of emails. Accessing things like that - even if it's not everything - without authorization is a hack (or crack, if you want to be pedantic).
The subject lines of a few emails may very well be enough proof to result in certain human rights activists disappearance. Consider:
Fw: Re: increasing world awareness of china govt crimes against humanity
Google was hacked, Mr. Coward.
I would anticipate this will only encourage similar behavior.
I expect a similar ultimate result - more bandwidth usage - but for a different reason. People don't have to worry about going over the limit without realizing it - they no longer have to keep any sort of margin of error. They're free to use every last drop of service they're paying for without worry of accidentally going over and getting punished.
I've had, uhh, "husky" friends who went on diet and exercise regiments that worked quite well *before* they started counting calories and setting hard limits. The idea of "well, I'm not actually hungry so I shouldn't push it and eat this" didn't cross their mind - it became "well, I'm allowed another 500calories today, let's have desert!" Conversely, "I think I can go around another block or two" didn't cross their minds, it became "well, that's it, I jogged as far as I was supposed to." Both the friends I'm talking about did eventually lose the weight (and one of them got a girlfriend!), but it clearly took longer then necessary and was an over-all more painful experience. From what I'm told, that extra bit of pleasure from stuffing yourself with desert doesn't counter the feeling from when you look down at the scale and fail to recognize improvement.
While plenty of Comcasts customers don't really understand mechanics such as bandwidth, I fully expect those who do to follow a similar logic to those of the aforementioned friends and use everything they can because they know they can.
Is the summary a troll or just an attempt at sarcasm?
It's an attempt to rationalize the situation, while interpreting the facts as the "ezabi" and/or the editors see them. Nothing so heinous as a troll, or overplayed as sarcasm.
There are plenty of free filesharing sites
All of which that I've seen have some limitations. Either you pay, or your bandwidth is capped, or you're limited to $files per $timeperiod, or $megabytes per $timeperiod, etc. As ezabi and/or the editors and I see it, it's unlikely Google is going to be quite as annoying or limited as they are with this regard. It's willing to subsidize the cost of the bandwidth for mindshare and long-term money. (ie, "Google's file service is so great I'll probably just use their other services too"). A free service from a household name with less frustrating limitations could very well grab the market.
and 250mb is pretty paltry by their standards
When you hit the filesize limit at most other file sharing sights, it's common to split the file into multiple files (usually via rar). That should work here - the limit isn't a big issue if Google lets you download the partial-files one after another. Consider youtube's length limit, and how it's circumvented by simply making a play list with multiple limited-length videos.
Even more important is the likely scenario that Google ups the limit as the service matures. Remember how much gmail used to allow at first? Take a look at what they offer now. It's not a reach to imagine a similar thing happening here. Harddrives are cheap, and Google has tones of experience scaling that up.
not to mention the fact that Google has pretty decent standards for who it lets have an account.
I'm guessing you've never read any comment ever on youtube? Google fights bots, but with humans it plays fast and loose with accounts, I'm not sure where you got the idea otherwise.
Given the amount of information they have on everyone, it's the last site you want to know if you're doing something illegal.
Despite the fact that they eventually gave in to China for censorship and various music and movie IP's on youtube, Google has been a pretty big advocate of such freedoms (well, from Big Brother and Big Media - not necessarily from Big Search Engine/Advertisement Service). They fought China, Viacom, et al on the issues before giving in, and they've fought the US on such issue as well (no links handy, hopefully another /.'er can oblige). Honestly, I'd be more inclined to trust Google with my info then a random filesharing service, if I had to trust anyone.
But here's the cool thing - you can log out, or make an account just for shady stuff and switch between the two. Heck, doesn't Chrome have some sort of privacy mode? Yes, Google could match the IP with past account info and maybe put two and two together. Even so, the idea that you're using Google vs $random_fileshare_sight doesn't really increase the odds of getting caught.
Or you could just keep it legal d:
It's possible Google is willing to ruin its still pretty solid reputation for user-rights by using this to hunt down illegal file sharers, and it's possible that Google will put huge limits and allow other services to compete, but those are both pretty long shots if you think it through and don't know anything relevant that I don't.