Snort isn't designed as a vulnerability scanner; Nessus is. And don't forget than nmap is pretty useful in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
As far as "intrusion prevention", there's not a "tool" that does that. You can firewall off unwanted and unneeded traffic; you still need to patch your public services. If you run public services, someone should be responsible for making certain everything you run is up to date and no unpatched vulnerabilities are public (and if the latter is the case, find a workaround or preventative measure until a real patch is out).
So Marvel will be last to market, and coming on the heels of their spurious lawsuit against Cryptic over CoH? Well, it will take some superpowers to make that one work.
CoV, sure, but Issue 5 also
on
Massive Quickies
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not only is City of Villains coming out (and I won a guaranteed beta slot in a contest! woot!), but so is City of Heroes Issue 5, the Forest of Dread.
It adds:
* 4 new villain groups * New zone * New task force * 2 new "events" (in one, hellions are setting fire to a building and you have to stop them, and the other has something to do with trolls and superadine) * 2 new power sets (Archery, and Sonic Blast) * New debt system, new badges
Even cooler, a bunch of missions have been revamped with more complexity, like escort-the-NPC type missions and fighting off "waves of villains" (similar to the Terra Volta trial you go through to earn a respec).
Also, no waiting, because this got patched in today, you can now "auto exemplar" into a task force or trial, which means 8 level 50s can decide they want to do the Positron task force, and it will auto-exemp (lower) their effective level to 16 (the max for that task force) and lock them in; no more needing half the party to be in the real range, and no more getting booted from the TF team if someone drops link. Yay!
Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).
Probably because 'Sack' is a goat farmer and hasn't the first clue about where to get a macro, how to set it up, and wouldn't know what to do with the gold when he got it.
Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?
Yes. I have a friend whose business took in like $700k selling diablo 2 items in 2004. This is how many years after it was released? It's obscene. He and I duped some stuff back when the early exploits were out. I wrote some code to sniff network traffic and spot uniques in trade windows, then we moved up to wholesale duping using a login/logoff race condition bug that I exploited using 4 computers at once. I was raking in stock options at the time, though, and eventually grew tired of it, especially with the competition from the Korean farmers wrecking out profitability by flooding the market. But he went on and perfected the process, using exploit after exploit, and finally got someone involved who reverse engineered the entire protocol so fully automated bots could play.
Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
MMORPGs are good at getting people to "want" what the MMO gives them - whether it is gold, items, higher levels, etc. When it ceases to be about "playing" the game and starts being about "having" or "achieving" something, or about "being" a certain level of power, people with money to burn start buying their way to the top. And frankly, if you're making $100k/yr, have limited entertainment time, and want your gaming experience to go a certain way, why not spend the money? Right now, you can buy 100 gold on the server I used to play on for WoW for $9. That's enough for a mount and more. I actually quit playing WoW a couple months ago, and one reason was that I was tired of walking around. (By no means the only thing I found lacking in WoW, but a significant one)
Now, for someone who is thinking: I want to get to L60, and I want phat l00t, and so on, $9 is a bit of a bargain. You're already paying $15/mo. How much can 100 gold "speed up" the process for you?
It was the same in Diablo 2. The golden items were ones that let people farm as fast as possible. At one point, my friend and I paid some guy like $200 on ebay for a ring which was maxed out life leech+mana leech+magic find, so we could dupe it, because it was golden.
Now, I think of all of this as a foregone conclusion. What *I* wonder about is: are there programmers who are making a *really* illegitimate fortune? If you were clever and, say, working at Blizzard, you might introduce some tiny error in the code that, if you knew how, could turn into a monstrous exploit. What would exclusive knowledge of such an exploit be worth? Especially if it was hard to track down, and hard to notice it being exploited? And hard to discover on your own?
The exploits in such industry become very carefully guarded secrets. In the early days, on D2, people in the know could wheedle the information out of people. Then people saw what happened - how quickly the information spread and how a competitive advantage in duping/farming was lost - and now people are tightlipped.
Anyhow, it's all an interesting exercise in examining why people do what they do. I'm more interested in how someone like Raph Koster looks at this privatel
I once bought flat-profile speakers from them. They were horrid, and they refused to take back them back without a large restocking fee. They didn't care that they were selling crap, and I was a good customer... until then. Caveat emptor.
Even though I played like a donkey on the WPT Hollywood Homegame, I managed to finish third, so when the first and second place finishers couldn't play in the $25,000 World Poker Tour Championship at Bellagio, I got to go in their place. Holy shit, man! Can you imagine a $25,000 freeroll, against a field of only about 500 players, with a shot at 3 million bucks?! Of course I went . . . and suffered two BRUTAL beats to get knocked out about 100 places short of the money: I raised UTG+1 with pocket kings to 3X the BB, which was 1800, I think. It's folded around to this guy in late position, who re-raises me to 6000. It's folded to me, so I re-re-raised him to 20000. He went all-in, I called. He turns up AQo, and I was very happy . . . until the flop came Q-Q-x. That fucker took most of my T140,000 stack from me on that hand. Two hands later, I get pocket kings again, so I raise it, get re-raised by Annie Duke. I push, she turns up AKo, and rivers the ace to bust me. I went from 7th in chips to drowning my sorrows in Newcastle in three hands. It was tough, because if I'd won against that AQ, I could have folded into the money, and even made a few moves to seriously compete for the final table.
You know what, though? That means you got your money in while you were ahead, and that's all you can ever do. It vaguely reminds me of a time I pushed in against someone with the A-high flush, the stone cold nuts. This was on the turn. They called all in, and turned over another flush, maybe 3rd or 4th nuts. We both had 2 suited cards in the hole with 3 on board, and under the circumstances I could see him thinking I pushed with a draw.
Anyhow, as the dealer is about to deal the river, I have this epiphany: the guy has 4 to a straight flush, but it's a gutshot straight. Sure enough, the dealer flips over his dream card, he makes a straight flush, and I'm left thinking, "Nice one out. Grrrr."
But that's the name of the game. I've been on the other side of that once in a while. And remember: if you have your money all in at the right time more often - when you're in the lead - you will suffer more bad beats, because they will have to suck out on you. If you find you suck out more than your opposition does, it probably means you actually just suck. So good job not sucking;)
I love the quote where they say they gave Jackson "enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it wasn't enough". They try to make him sound greedy, to cover up the fact that he's basically suing them for... being greedy.
According to Peter Hoffman, a tax lawyer for leading Hollywood producers in the 1980's and a former chief executive of Carolco Pictures, all the legal saber rattling around claims of self-dealing and pre-emptive bidding could be avoided if studios turned the clock back and compensated stars based on net profits, not gross revenues.
"Once upon a time, Hollywood studios paid a lot of money to net profit participants, and it was a fair deal," said Mr. Hoffman, who is known in Hollywood for his knowledge of arcane deal making. "Then the studios got greedy and stopped paying, and now we have gross players who used to be net players fighting over vertical integration. The studios brought this problem on themselves."
In other words, Hollywood basically caused people to stop taking net deals specifically because of what you just noted. I think it would be pretty difficult to hide all the profits from a bonanza like Lord of the Rings, of course, since only a scant few ever imagined the success it enjoyed.
In Texas, when someone files an unemployment claim, their employers within their "eligibility window" - ie, those they worked for the last X months (18? 24?) get notices. If their unemployment claim is granted (which requires they have been terminated not-for-cause, or that they quit for very specific few reasons, like harrassment), it is "debited" to the employer, and the employer's unemployment tax rate may go up as a result.
I can't imagine how they manage to file unemployment claims without the employers knowing and going to the person and saying, "What the heck? You're still employed." The jig would be up pretty quick. In Texas, the first phone interview includes a call to the employer(s) and takes place within days of the filing, probably before the first check is paid.
Since the unemployment fund is paid into through payroll deductions linked to the SSN, by the employer, I don't see how this could succeed, at least in Texas.
Of course, the excellent is pretty much what you'd expect given that you're paying $1200 for a remote control and a pair of wireless bridge+tuner boxes.
I've used different things to block ads from time to time... Speaking of doubleclick, I've blocked their images and cookies on so many browsers I've lost track. People are tired of obnoxious advertising. Is it any wonder people block ads when they get deceptive windows that say, "Your computer may be infected with spyware, click here to scan for threats." in windows that look like system windows, but are really ads?
How about when you go to look up something technical at work and there's suddenly some obnoxious voice coming out of your speakers going, "Are you stuck in the mundane world of the boooring sedan?", coming from some irritating flash ad?
Meanwhile, I've never been bothered by google ads. Certainly not on Google's pages, and typically not by pages I visited that displayed google ads. Why?
(1) They're visible, but unobtrusive. They're relatively small, they're easy to see, they're clear on what they're advertising (usually), and they never blink, flash, popover, popunder, make noise, or otherwise irritate me.
(2) They're generally contextual. If I'm interested in something of commercial significance - say, I search for 'nvidia geforce 6800' - then they'll have ads that show up related to that. This means I won't get ads for FREE ALL NEW EMOTICONS (<fineprint>laden with spyware<fineprint>) when I'm looking for video cards, and I appreciate not being bothered.
(3) They're easy on my system. I don't find myself loading massive cpu-sucking flash apps or such all of the sudden.
There will always be ads, and I don't think I'd wish them away. But ads will become helpful, or they will be eliminated by ads consumers prefer more. The advertising industry should have learned this when they started pop-unders. At the time, they said: We get a much better click through rate; people may hate them, but they work. And now you have the result: it doesn't matter if its effective; if people hate your ads, sooner or later they will dispense with them. The solution is to create ads that consumers want.
I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that this is going on. Many have long preferred the CLI for interacting with applications. The web is undergoing a change from a medium for simply displaying information and become more of a protocol for client/server web applications. Is it any wonder that as the universe of web apps grows, that people want CLI utilities to communicate with them?
It's nothing new. We've been running finger, whois, nslookup and so on from the CLI for ages; these are utilities that could just as easily run over the web. (As opposed to say, IRC, which is hurt by the lack of statefulness)
I suppose this is yet another reason why web applications should carefully separate their presentation from other logic, since they may be called upon to present data to entirely different clients in the future if this became more common.
If you're good, my best advice is: start in a small company. Startup-size. 50-100 people tops. If they're rapidly expanding, that's better.
As a very small company grows, "gaps" appear. The sysadmin position is really "sysadmin, network security admin, network admin"; over time it splits into 3 as the company grows. This gives you a chance to grow your skills in a wide variety of tasks, learn a lot of real world skills, and then specialize as it suits you. If management is your thing, you might be more easily able to work that in with the expansion.
Alternately: Go out on your own. If you can come up with an idea, now is the time to try and make it work, because if you fail utterly, you're just back where you started: college degree and broke; pretty much where you are now. Give yourself 10 years in a career, and you'll probably have a cushy job and a larger savings account, and be more reluctant to take big risks.
How long the Earth takes to go around the sun is a basic question designed to probe people for the tiniest shred of scientific knowledge. Is it important to your daily life? No. But it's damn near impossible to have any scientific knowledge without having some of the basics stick, so the question is probably a good proxy for scientific ignorance.
If someone can't answer "A year" to that question, will they know anything about stem cell research when it comes time to vote? Global warming? What will they think about "evolution is a theory, not a fact" stickers in textbooks?
For that matter, will they be so ignorant they might be dangerous to society because, for example, they don't know that taking antibiotics spuriously or improperly can breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains?
It reminds me of a saying I heard a long time ago: A man who knows how will always have a job; a man who knows why will always be his boss. If Americans do not know 'why', they are not in charge of their own destiny. Ignorance is the greatest enemy we face.
Frankly, we need to stop encouraging people to go vote. If you don't know why it is important to vote, then stay the hell home, because you probably don't know enough to intelligently cast a vote anyhow. "Get out the vote" campaigns are at best drives to sign up supports and at worst just base demagoguery.
Mark Cuban just commented on Macrovision, and wondered what its purpose was. Obviously the answer is: copy protection, however bad, exists so you can sue people who make things that allow consumers to circumvent it and exercise their fair use rights.
And even Sklansky would tell you that with a table of perfect players, it is a game of chance. But there are few or no perfect players, as it is always possible to adjust your strategy.
However, the book IS fantastic. Few people realize that bluffing is not merely a tactic to "trick" your opponents, but a mathematical way of forcing your opponents to pay you more money in certain situations. There are situations where you should bluff about X% of the time, and your doing so extracts more money from your opponent whether they opt to call always, fold always, or anything in between, because of the nature of the scenario.
Funny, I went looking in the comments specifically FOR this point. And you're absolutely right. And who better to note this than you? I'm one of probably thousands of people who found NWN's original campaign and thought your Dreamcatcher mods basically "redeemed" the game.
That said, there is another possibility. Remember that the next-gen consoles will have network connectivity. There's no reason you can't have a toolset like the NWN toolset running on a PC, and when it saves the mod, you 'push' it over to your console and can then make it available via a download directly to that.
I don't see hardcore PC gamers satisfied with a 4+ year long upgrade cycle either, so I don't see them making a full switch.
I don't really get it. I hadn't played an FPS since the original duke nukem. I sat down to play Q3, and I quickly found myself laughing out loud it was so fun. I played for more than 2 years, and even hit quakecon in 2002 to meet up with people I'd met playing the game. I went from clueless to just shy of pro level, and found lots of friendly, helpful people along the way who helped me with settings, strategy, etc. Sure, there were some rivalries - mostly good-natured - but by far the common theme was friendly but fierce play. The only people *I* ever saw getting called newbs as they walked in the door are the ones who immediately started accusing people of cheating.
1. It would be seen as an admission that the Windows Server technology is not what it is cracked up to be, and be read by the market as such. The immediate impact to the server business would be significant, and it is the only segment at Microsoft that is growing.
Everyone who makes these decisions knows there are differences between Windows Servers and Linux Server already. What there is, however, is a perception that there is a dearth of administrative skills for Linux systems. This may well be true. I'd be an excellent linux sysadmin, I think, and I've been running small sets of linux servers for a decade now. But like many would-be linux admins, I have better jobs I can be doing that pay more. Eventually, you'll see the lower-end linux jobs proliferate as the windows server jobs have.
2. It would be seen as an admission that Linux MIGHT have some redeeming qualities, something that the Executive team at Microsoft has been avoiding at all costs. Just like Hertz and Avis, #1 should NEVER acknowledge #2 in the market.
I think the most telling thing about this is that I can name Hertz, Avis, Dollar, National, Budget rent-a-car all offhand, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me which one is the #1 or which is the #2. Cars are cars. Everyone knows Linux has redeeming values - just a lot of people don't know if they can work it/support it/use it to do the things windows does. There's uncertainty, but there's no doubt that it has its uses; it's just that people don't know if it is right for them.
3. It would dramatically confuse the market at a time when Microsoft is trying very hard (read $100M+ marketing) to win the server space and defend the desktop.
It certainly would confuse the market... but $100M marketing is nothing to microsoft. Meanwhile, they have to wonder if trying to hold onto a windows monopoly may kill their business whole.
Well, I mostly like the Shard simply because it's so graphically stunning - especially when you get out to the storm palace and see the battlestation thing under seige, it looks amazing. First time I made it, I did it using superleap and superspeed only - well, and the little gravity launchers, but a few times I had to hop across tiny rocks using superleap because I couldn't find a path via the launchers. But it's pretty cool. If I6 ends up being a high-level update with new 40+ content, I hope there's more wild settings like it.
I think the shard is less popular not only because of the travel issues, but because people don't like Rularuu. I've never had a problem with them but apparently some people do.
Slashdot Mirror
Snort isn't designed as a vulnerability scanner; Nessus is. And don't forget than nmap is pretty useful in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
As far as "intrusion prevention", there's not a "tool" that does that. You can firewall off unwanted and unneeded traffic; you still need to patch your public services. If you run public services, someone should be responsible for making certain everything you run is up to date and no unpatched vulnerabilities are public (and if the latter is the case, find a workaround or preventative measure until a real patch is out).
So Marvel will be last to market, and coming on the heels of their spurious lawsuit against Cryptic over CoH? Well, it will take some superpowers to make that one work.
Not only is City of Villains coming out (and I won a guaranteed beta slot in a contest! woot!), but so is City of Heroes Issue 5, the Forest of Dread.
It adds:
* 4 new villain groups
* New zone
* New task force
* 2 new "events" (in one, hellions are setting fire to a building and you have to stop them, and the other has something to do with trolls and superadine)
* 2 new power sets (Archery, and Sonic Blast)
* New debt system, new badges
Even cooler, a bunch of missions have been revamped with more complexity, like escort-the-NPC type missions and fighting off "waves of villains" (similar to the Terra Volta trial you go through to earn a respec).
Also, no waiting, because this got patched in today, you can now "auto exemplar" into a task force or trial, which means 8 level 50s can decide they want to do the Positron task force, and it will auto-exemp (lower) their effective level to 16 (the max for that task force) and lock them in; no more needing half the party to be in the real range, and no more getting booted from the TF team if someone drops link. Yay!
************ // I got nothing. *shrugs* // I got nothing. Well, except the millions I got paid by Andover. *lights cigar with burning stack of hundreds*
*** 5,7 ****
} else {
-
}
--- 5,7 ---
} else {
+
}
************
Let's be conservative and say they only make an average of $10,000 per month from his work. Now, why aren't there thousands of Americans making $10,000 per month by working 12 hour days on this game? I bet they're only making these incomes from the entire sweatshop, and not just from one guy's work, otherwise we'd all be doing it (or Sack would be sitting in a cybercafe doing it for himself after stealing their macros).
Probably because 'Sack' is a goat farmer and hasn't the first clue about where to get a macro, how to set it up, and wouldn't know what to do with the gold when he got it.
Secondly, is the market for gold in online games really that big? Are there really tens of thousands of players who would rather pay $250 for some gold than actually play the game? I can understand buying characters at the start, but who are these people who can spend thousands of dollars with the gold miners?
Yes. I have a friend whose business took in like $700k selling diablo 2 items in 2004. This is how many years after it was released? It's obscene. He and I duped some stuff back when the early exploits were out. I wrote some code to sniff network traffic and spot uniques in trade windows, then we moved up to wholesale duping using a login/logoff race condition bug that I exploited using 4 computers at once. I was raking in stock options at the time, though, and eventually grew tired of it, especially with the competition from the Korean farmers wrecking out profitability by flooding the market. But he went on and perfected the process, using exploit after exploit, and finally got someone involved who reverse engineered the entire protocol so fully automated bots could play.
Yeah, I know I'm quite ignorant of the MMORPG market, but this all seems like craziness.
MMORPGs are good at getting people to "want" what the MMO gives them - whether it is gold, items, higher levels, etc. When it ceases to be about "playing" the game and starts being about "having" or "achieving" something, or about "being" a certain level of power, people with money to burn start buying their way to the top. And frankly, if you're making $100k/yr, have limited entertainment time, and want your gaming experience to go a certain way, why not spend the money? Right now, you can buy 100 gold on the server I used to play on for WoW for $9. That's enough for a mount and more. I actually quit playing WoW a couple months ago, and one reason was that I was tired of walking around. (By no means the only thing I found lacking in WoW, but a significant one)
Now, for someone who is thinking: I want to get to L60, and I want phat l00t, and so on, $9 is a bit of a bargain. You're already paying $15/mo. How much can 100 gold "speed up" the process for you?
It was the same in Diablo 2. The golden items were ones that let people farm as fast as possible. At one point, my friend and I paid some guy like $200 on ebay for a ring which was maxed out life leech+mana leech+magic find, so we could dupe it, because it was golden.
Now, I think of all of this as a foregone conclusion. What *I* wonder about is: are there programmers who are making a *really* illegitimate fortune? If you were clever and, say, working at Blizzard, you might introduce some tiny error in the code that, if you knew how, could turn into a monstrous exploit. What would exclusive knowledge of such an exploit be worth? Especially if it was hard to track down, and hard to notice it being exploited? And hard to discover on your own?
The exploits in such industry become very carefully guarded secrets. In the early days, on D2, people in the know could wheedle the information out of people. Then people saw what happened - how quickly the information spread and how a competitive advantage in duping/farming was lost - and now people are tightlipped.
Anyhow, it's all an interesting exercise in examining why people do what they do. I'm more interested in how someone like Raph Koster looks at this privatel
I once bought flat-profile speakers from them. They were horrid, and they refused to take back them back without a large restocking fee. They didn't care that they were selling crap, and I was a good customer... until then. Caveat emptor.
Even though I played like a donkey on the WPT Hollywood Homegame, I managed to finish third, so when the first and second place finishers couldn't play in the $25,000 World Poker Tour Championship at Bellagio, I got to go in their place. Holy shit, man! Can you imagine a $25,000 freeroll, against a field of only about 500 players, with a shot at 3 million bucks?! Of course I went . . . and suffered two BRUTAL beats to get knocked out about 100 places short of the money: I raised UTG+1 with pocket kings to 3X the BB, which was 1800, I think. It's folded around to this guy in late position, who re-raises me to 6000. It's folded to me, so I re-re-raised him to 20000. He went all-in, I called. He turns up AQo, and I was very happy . . . until the flop came Q-Q-x. That fucker took most of my T140,000 stack from me on that hand. Two hands later, I get pocket kings again, so I raise it, get re-raised by Annie Duke. I push, she turns up AKo, and rivers the ace to bust me. I went from 7th in chips to drowning my sorrows in Newcastle in three hands. It was tough, because if I'd won against that AQ, I could have folded into the money, and even made a few moves to seriously compete for the final table.
;)
You know what, though? That means you got your money in while you were ahead, and that's all you can ever do. It vaguely reminds me of a time I pushed in against someone with the A-high flush, the stone cold nuts. This was on the turn. They called all in, and turned over another flush, maybe 3rd or 4th nuts. We both had 2 suited cards in the hole with 3 on board, and under the circumstances I could see him thinking I pushed with a draw.
Anyhow, as the dealer is about to deal the river, I have this epiphany: the guy has 4 to a straight flush, but it's a gutshot straight. Sure enough, the dealer flips over his dream card, he makes a straight flush, and I'm left thinking, "Nice one out. Grrrr."
But that's the name of the game. I've been on the other side of that once in a while. And remember: if you have your money all in at the right time more often - when you're in the lead - you will suffer more bad beats, because they will have to suck out on you. If you find you suck out more than your opposition does, it probably means you actually just suck. So good job not sucking
I love the quote where they say they gave Jackson "enough money to rebuild Baghdad, but it wasn't enough". They try to make him sound greedy, to cover up the fact that he's basically suing them for... being greedy.
From TFA:
According to Peter Hoffman, a tax lawyer for leading Hollywood producers in the 1980's and a former chief executive of Carolco Pictures, all the legal saber rattling around claims of self-dealing and pre-emptive bidding could be avoided if studios turned the clock back and compensated stars based on net profits, not gross revenues.
"Once upon a time, Hollywood studios paid a lot of money to net profit participants, and it was a fair deal," said Mr. Hoffman, who is known in Hollywood for his knowledge of arcane deal making. "Then the studios got greedy and stopped paying, and now we have gross players who used to be net players fighting over vertical integration. The studios brought this problem on themselves."
In other words, Hollywood basically caused people to stop taking net deals specifically because of what you just noted. I think it would be pretty difficult to hide all the profits from a bonanza like Lord of the Rings, of course, since only a scant few ever imagined the success it enjoyed.
In Texas, when someone files an unemployment claim, their employers within their "eligibility window" - ie, those they worked for the last X months (18? 24?) get notices. If their unemployment claim is granted (which requires they have been terminated not-for-cause, or that they quit for very specific few reasons, like harrassment), it is "debited" to the employer, and the employer's unemployment tax rate may go up as a result.
I can't imagine how they manage to file unemployment claims without the employers knowing and going to the person and saying, "What the heck? You're still employed." The jig would be up pretty quick. In Texas, the first phone interview includes a call to the employer(s) and takes place within days of the filing, probably before the first check is paid.
Since the unemployment fund is paid into through payroll deductions linked to the SSN, by the employer, I don't see how this could succeed, at least in Texas.
Of course, the excellent is pretty much what you'd expect given that you're paying $1200 for a remote control and a pair of wireless bridge+tuner boxes.
I've used different things to block ads from time to time... Speaking of doubleclick, I've blocked their images and cookies on so many browsers I've lost track. People are tired of obnoxious advertising. Is it any wonder people block ads when they get deceptive windows that say, "Your computer may be infected with spyware, click here to scan for threats." in windows that look like system windows, but are really ads?
How about when you go to look up something technical at work and there's suddenly some obnoxious voice coming out of your speakers going, "Are you stuck in the mundane world of the boooring sedan?", coming from some irritating flash ad?
Meanwhile, I've never been bothered by google ads. Certainly not on Google's pages, and typically not by pages I visited that displayed google ads. Why?
(1) They're visible, but unobtrusive. They're relatively small, they're easy to see, they're clear on what they're advertising (usually), and they never blink, flash, popover, popunder, make noise, or otherwise irritate me.
(2) They're generally contextual. If I'm interested in something of commercial significance - say, I search for 'nvidia geforce 6800' - then they'll have ads that show up related to that. This means I won't get ads for FREE ALL NEW EMOTICONS (<fineprint>laden with spyware<fineprint>) when I'm looking for video cards, and I appreciate not being bothered.
(3) They're easy on my system. I don't find myself loading massive cpu-sucking flash apps or such all of the sudden.
There will always be ads, and I don't think I'd wish them away. But ads will become helpful, or they will be eliminated by ads consumers prefer more. The advertising industry should have learned this when they started pop-unders. At the time, they said: We get a much better click through rate; people may hate them, but they work. And now you have the result: it doesn't matter if its effective; if people hate your ads, sooner or later they will dispense with them. The solution is to create ads that consumers want.
This won't be the first time Sony lost a format war.
I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that this is going on. Many have long preferred the CLI for interacting with applications. The web is undergoing a change from a medium for simply displaying information and become more of a protocol for client/server web applications. Is it any wonder that as the universe of web apps grows, that people want CLI utilities to communicate with them?
It's nothing new. We've been running finger, whois, nslookup and so on from the CLI for ages; these are utilities that could just as easily run over the web. (As opposed to say, IRC, which is hurt by the lack of statefulness)
I suppose this is yet another reason why web applications should carefully separate their presentation from other logic, since they may be called upon to present data to entirely different clients in the future if this became more common.
If you're good, my best advice is: start in a small company. Startup-size. 50-100 people tops. If they're rapidly expanding, that's better.
As a very small company grows, "gaps" appear. The sysadmin position is really "sysadmin, network security admin, network admin"; over time it splits into 3 as the company grows. This gives you a chance to grow your skills in a wide variety of tasks, learn a lot of real world skills, and then specialize as it suits you. If management is your thing, you might be more easily able to work that in with the expansion.
Alternately: Go out on your own. If you can come up with an idea, now is the time to try and make it work, because if you fail utterly, you're just back where you started: college degree and broke; pretty much where you are now. Give yourself 10 years in a career, and you'll probably have a cushy job and a larger savings account, and be more reluctant to take big risks.
How long the Earth takes to go around the sun is a basic question designed to probe people for the tiniest shred of scientific knowledge. Is it important to your daily life? No. But it's damn near impossible to have any scientific knowledge without having some of the basics stick, so the question is probably a good proxy for scientific ignorance.
If someone can't answer "A year" to that question, will they know anything about stem cell research when it comes time to vote? Global warming? What will they think about "evolution is a theory, not a fact" stickers in textbooks?
For that matter, will they be so ignorant they might be dangerous to society because, for example, they don't know that taking antibiotics spuriously or improperly can breed antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains?
It reminds me of a saying I heard a long time ago: A man who knows how will always have a job; a man who knows why will always be his boss. If Americans do not know 'why', they are not in charge of their own destiny. Ignorance is the greatest enemy we face.
Only 70% of americans know how many stars are on the flag
60% of people cannot name the three branches of American government, 37% could not even name one branch, and 89% don't realize the Patriot Act allows secret search & seizures by the government
30% of americans do not know that plants produce most of the Oxygen on earth; only 11% can describe radiation and only 13% know what a molecule is
Only 38% of *investors* know what a "no-load" fund is (Which I suppose goes to show that just because Americans get involved with something doesn't mean they bother to actually know anything about it)
Only 50% of Americans know how long it takes the Earth to circle the sun
Frankly, we need to stop encouraging people to go vote. If you don't know why it is important to vote, then stay the hell home, because you probably don't know enough to intelligently cast a vote anyhow. "Get out the vote" campaigns are at best drives to sign up supports and at worst just base demagoguery.
Mark Cuban just commented on Macrovision, and wondered what its purpose was. Obviously the answer is: copy protection, however bad, exists so you can sue people who make things that allow consumers to circumvent it and exercise their fair use rights.
And even Sklansky would tell you that with a table of perfect players, it is a game of chance. But there are few or no perfect players, as it is always possible to adjust your strategy.
However, the book IS fantastic. Few people realize that bluffing is not merely a tactic to "trick" your opponents, but a mathematical way of forcing your opponents to pay you more money in certain situations. There are situations where you should bluff about X% of the time, and your doing so extracts more money from your opponent whether they opt to call always, fold always, or anything in between, because of the nature of the scenario.
Funny, I went looking in the comments specifically FOR this point. And you're absolutely right. And who better to note this than you? I'm one of probably thousands of people who found NWN's original campaign and thought your Dreamcatcher mods basically "redeemed" the game.
That said, there is another possibility. Remember that the next-gen consoles will have network connectivity. There's no reason you can't have a toolset like the NWN toolset running on a PC, and when it saves the mod, you 'push' it over to your console and can then make it available via a download directly to that.
I don't see hardcore PC gamers satisfied with a 4+ year long upgrade cycle either, so I don't see them making a full switch.
It's a shame that this has happened, and that Star Wars Ep. III is hardly taking in any money as a result.
until those 'smart' aircraft start taking over. Be afraid!
I don't really get it. I hadn't played an FPS since the original duke nukem. I sat down to play Q3, and I quickly found myself laughing out loud it was so fun. I played for more than 2 years, and even hit quakecon in 2002 to meet up with people I'd met playing the game. I went from clueless to just shy of pro level, and found lots of friendly, helpful people along the way who helped me with settings, strategy, etc. Sure, there were some rivalries - mostly good-natured - but by far the common theme was friendly but fierce play. The only people *I* ever saw getting called newbs as they walked in the door are the ones who immediately started accusing people of cheating.
1. It would be seen as an admission that the Windows Server technology is not what it is cracked up to be, and be read by the market as such. The immediate impact to the server business would be significant, and it is the only segment at Microsoft that is growing.
Everyone who makes these decisions knows there are differences between Windows Servers and Linux Server already. What there is, however, is a perception that there is a dearth of administrative skills for Linux systems. This may well be true. I'd be an excellent linux sysadmin, I think, and I've been running small sets of linux servers for a decade now. But like many would-be linux admins, I have better jobs I can be doing that pay more. Eventually, you'll see the lower-end linux jobs proliferate as the windows server jobs have.
2. It would be seen as an admission that Linux MIGHT have some redeeming qualities, something that the Executive team at Microsoft has been avoiding at all costs. Just like Hertz and Avis, #1 should NEVER acknowledge #2 in the market.
I think the most telling thing about this is that I can name Hertz, Avis, Dollar, National, Budget rent-a-car all offhand, but I couldn't tell you for the life of me which one is the #1 or which is the #2. Cars are cars. Everyone knows Linux has redeeming values - just a lot of people don't know if they can work it/support it/use it to do the things windows does. There's uncertainty, but there's no doubt that it has its uses; it's just that people don't know if it is right for them.
3. It would dramatically confuse the market at a time when Microsoft is trying very hard (read $100M+ marketing) to win the server space and defend the desktop.
It certainly would confuse the market... but $100M marketing is nothing to microsoft. Meanwhile, they have to wonder if trying to hold onto a windows monopoly may kill their business whole.
Well, I mostly like the Shard simply because it's so graphically stunning - especially when you get out to the storm palace and see the battlestation thing under seige, it looks amazing. First time I made it, I did it using superleap and superspeed only - well, and the little gravity launchers, but a few times I had to hop across tiny rocks using superleap because I couldn't find a path via the launchers. But it's pretty cool. If I6 ends up being a high-level update with new 40+ content, I hope there's more wild settings like it.
I think the shard is less popular not only because of the travel issues, but because people don't like Rularuu. I've never had a problem with them but apparently some people do.