So if Ford does that, then don't buy a Ford. If Microsoft does it, then don't buy an Xbox.
It's not hard, people, and it's not like Microsoft has ever made it a secret that they ban modders-- this is the 4th or 5th mass ban since Xbox Live was started. You're an informed customer, make an informed decision so that the free market works.
You know, any given piece of software from Microsoft will have a different set of developers, from Word to IE to Windows to Bing. But you know what they all have in common? They all get vulnerabilities and showstopping bugs. The lack of care and attention to detail is ingrained in the culture over there.
Are there any non-trivial pieces of software that have *never* had vulnerabilities and showstopping bugs? Ever? In the history of computing?
Dude, it's a fucking typo and Slashdot has no Edit option. Of course it's supposed to be "device", congratulations, you win. My typo is no excuse for the morons on this board who have no reading comprehension skills, but feel compelled to "correct" me anyway.
So my measured and intelligence response to you is, "go fuck a goat." Thank you.
I made up obviously fake percentages as a rhetorical advice. I hope you can use that on the 6th grade reading comprehension test you're trying to pass.
True. Though what I found disturbing about the computer industry is they tend to seem uninterested in determining what the rates really are. It seems to be enough to say 'well, everyone knows!'.
Other industries you would be required to do some pretty heavy research first.
So I am not saying they made the wrong economic choice.. but in every case that I have been able to actually observe of things like this happening, I have found the research justifying it lacking or completely absent.
What makes you think Microsoft hasn't figured that out? Just because they haven't announced it to the public?
Then for the 75 pounds he could have joined a game rental service like Gamefly and rented those games legally, playing each one until he got bored, then returning it. And as a bonus, his money would have gone to a legitimate business instead of to some sleaze under-the-table.
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
99.9% of them are people who want to play free games, or cheat on games. People who cheat on games ruin the experience for everybody else. Most modded Xboxes were modded by some guy at a games store, anyway, and that guy charged for it, it's not like these guys went through the effort of modding it themselves... they just paid some goon so they could steal games.
The remaining 0.1%, yes, actually just wants to write software for it. Slashdot pretends this group is the larger percentage, but Slashdot is wrong about a good many things.
I'm with you, but the Slashdot zeitgeist is usually "piracy is a-ok!" The justifications vary from the mainstream, I rarely see Slashdotters use the "I couldn't afford it" excuse, they usually use the more philosophical "information wants to be free/it's useless to even try to restrict it" excuse instead.
In addition, whenever a company tries to defeat pirates in some way, there's always the smug, "those clueless newbs will never stop us!" bullcrap, even though that misses the entire point of copy protection.
My favorite crappy name has always been the Javascript/DOM function XMLHttpRequest.
A single function name that: 1) Is inaccurate (it doesn't give a crap whether XML/JSON/plain text is received) 2) Doesn't follow camel-case pattern (as is the convention with DOM functions) 3) Writes two acronyms with different cases "XML" vs. "Http"-- both are acronyms, why the different case?
The only slight excuse you can give it is that it was mostly invented to serve as an internal tool for Outlook OWA and IE, and somehow got "into the wild," but that's still not much of an excuse.
I disagree. Anonymous speech is fine to a point and something we should protect but only if it's convenient. When you start attacking someone's child, I think it falls into a different realm.
He's 15. Fifth-fucking-teen. He hears much worse than that every day at his school, I can guarantee it.
I'm not saying it's right or anything, I'm just saying that if a 15-year-old man (I'm not going to coddle) can't take a few choice words in his direction, then he's going to be a huge failure at life. Internalizing your self-esteem is part of growing up, and it's a necessary process.
Yeah, but how hard would it be to place some explosives on a few high tension lines? You know, the kind that go through extremely rural areas, have completely open access roads, and are rarely inspected? (And I'm sure it would be easy to hide the bomb anyway, as the "inspection" probably consists of a quick eyeballing and nothing more.)
I don't think anybody cares about hackers, the real danger is terrorists taking down the high tension lines. That could cause immense damage.
The C variants, C, C++, C# etc, already have to get special-treatment by search engines. So yes, it is a problem, the only reason Google/Bing/etc work well with those is because they pre-existed Google/Bing/etc.
There's no reason to create a *new* language with an unsearchable name, except general web cluelessness. And search engine providers shouldn't have special-case certain words/names just because they were coined by people who don't know how search engines work.
This is a practical issue, it has nothing to do with marketing.
Perl, Java, PHP, Lua are good names because they're easy to Google. (Java shares a name with something pre-existing, but is vastly more popular than it on the web, so it's not a big deal.) Python, Ruby, Obj-C not quite as much. C, C++, C#? Awful. Go unfortunately falls into the "awful" category here.
Well, yah, but it's not like it would be hard for them to talk to an intern or grab up a new hire and ask them to port it before release, right? And assuming they wrote portable C in the first place, porting it to Windows should be pretty damned easy-- it's not like there's a UI or anything.
That's a terrible idea. They're going to end up with the PHP mish-mash. Dozens of functions that do the same thing, no organization, no standardized naming scheme-- it'll be PHP 4 all over again.
They lose the freedom to tinker with what would have been open, whatever it was that the company theoretically closed.
So you think that if a company uses a public domain component, it's *no longer* in the public domain? Or what are you saying here-- it makes no sense to me. How can a company "close" something that's already been put into the public domain?
If that's the component they're struggling to fix it could be all-important.
If it's a large product, and the one component that's busted is in the public domain, that would make it the *easiest* part to fix, no?
I found a minor bug in Rubygems the other day simply by reading the source. If it wasn't available I'd still be wondering what was supposed to happen and tweaking my code trying to make it work.
[Insert "great story, bro" image macro.]
Solitaire doesn't run better just because it's open sourced so many users might not even notice, but the ones who poke around or fix anything would. It's the difference between a usable machine and one completely covered into anti-tampering epoxy.
Huh?
From my perspective, proprietary machines are by far the most usable since (by and large, and this is slowly changing) open source coders don't give half-a-whit about usability issues.
They could use a tracking pixel, but put it on HTTP and behind a user/password prompt. That way, it would have to be reported by the e-commerce site's back-end (making implementation more difficult), but the security would be there.
It's not the tracking pixel that's necessarily the problem, it's the completely unsecured generated-client-side tracking pixel.
I see this like griping that the prof is teaching on a whiteboard instead of a blackboard-- who gives a shit?
If the prof is interactive with his class, marking-up the PowerPoint slides as questions arise, letting students download and print them out, etc... then he's a good prof, regardless of the tool used. The fact that PowerPoint slides are trivially editable, annotated, can contain links and media, etc actually makes them a pretty damned good choice, IMO.
If the prof just shows slides and reads them in a droning voice, then he's a bad prof. Guess what? Bad profs existed before PowerPoint-- believe me, I had gobs of them. (Not that I went to school before PowerPoint, but my school didn't have projectors in any classrooms when I was there.)
Slashdot Mirror
So if Ford does that, then don't buy a Ford. If Microsoft does it, then don't buy an Xbox.
It's not hard, people, and it's not like Microsoft has ever made it a secret that they ban modders-- this is the 4th or 5th mass ban since Xbox Live was started. You're an informed customer, make an informed decision so that the free market works.
You know, any given piece of software from Microsoft will have a different set of developers, from Word to IE to Windows to Bing. But you know what they all have in common? They all get vulnerabilities and showstopping bugs. The lack of care and attention to detail is ingrained in the culture over there.
Are there any non-trivial pieces of software that have *never* had vulnerabilities and showstopping bugs? Ever? In the history of computing?
Is Slashdot in some kind of Internet time-warp where moderators are *just now* seeing this meme and, therefore, somehow think it's still funny?
Oh look another typo! Crucify me now!!!
Dude, it's a fucking typo and Slashdot has no Edit option. Of course it's supposed to be "device", congratulations, you win. My typo is no excuse for the morons on this board who have no reading comprehension skills, but feel compelled to "correct" me anyway.
So my measured and intelligence response to you is, "go fuck a goat." Thank you.
I made up obviously fake percentages as a rhetorical advice. I hope you can use that on the 6th grade reading comprehension test you're trying to pass.
Considering theres no homebrew scene in Xbox360, the sole reason people get their consoles modded is to play copies.
Wut.
There's a huge Xbox 360 homebrew scene, supported by the company itself: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/
Oh wait, let me guess: "that's doesn't count as homebrew because it's not indie enough!" Whatever.
True. Though what I found disturbing about the computer industry is they tend to seem uninterested in determining what the rates really are. It seems to be enough to say 'well, everyone knows!'.
Other industries you would be required to do some pretty heavy research first.
So I am not saying they made the wrong economic choice.. but in every case that I have been able to actually observe of things like this happening, I have found the research justifying it lacking or completely absent.
What makes you think Microsoft hasn't figured that out? Just because they haven't announced it to the public?
Then for the 75 pounds he could have joined a game rental service like Gamefly and rented those games legally, playing each one until he got bored, then returning it. And as a bonus, his money would have gone to a legitimate business instead of to some sleaze under-the-table.
Still no excuse.
Did Microsoft really think this through? The people who mod Xboxes are their best customers. They are the enthusiasts who care enough to learn more about the console.
99.9% of them are people who want to play free games, or cheat on games. People who cheat on games ruin the experience for everybody else. Most modded Xboxes were modded by some guy at a games store, anyway, and that guy charged for it, it's not like these guys went through the effort of modding it themselves... they just paid some goon so they could steal games.
The remaining 0.1%, yes, actually just wants to write software for it. Slashdot pretends this group is the larger percentage, but Slashdot is wrong about a good many things.
I'm with you, but the Slashdot zeitgeist is usually "piracy is a-ok!" The justifications vary from the mainstream, I rarely see Slashdotters use the "I couldn't afford it" excuse, they usually use the more philosophical "information wants to be free/it's useless to even try to restrict it" excuse instead.
In addition, whenever a company tries to defeat pirates in some way, there's always the smug, "those clueless newbs will never stop us!" bullcrap, even though that misses the entire point of copy protection.
My favorite crappy name has always been the Javascript/DOM function XMLHttpRequest.
A single function name that:
1) Is inaccurate (it doesn't give a crap whether XML/JSON/plain text is received)
2) Doesn't follow camel-case pattern (as is the convention with DOM functions)
3) Writes two acronyms with different cases "XML" vs. "Http"-- both are acronyms, why the different case?
The only slight excuse you can give it is that it was mostly invented to serve as an internal tool for Outlook OWA and IE, and somehow got "into the wild," but that's still not much of an excuse.
I disagree. Anonymous speech is fine to a point and something we should protect but only if it's convenient. When you start attacking someone's child, I think it falls into a different realm.
He's 15. Fifth-fucking-teen. He hears much worse than that every day at his school, I can guarantee it.
I'm not saying it's right or anything, I'm just saying that if a 15-year-old man (I'm not going to coddle) can't take a few choice words in his direction, then he's going to be a huge failure at life. Internalizing your self-esteem is part of growing up, and it's a necessary process.
Yeah, but how hard would it be to place some explosives on a few high tension lines? You know, the kind that go through extremely rural areas, have completely open access roads, and are rarely inspected? (And I'm sure it would be easy to hide the bomb anyway, as the "inspection" probably consists of a quick eyeballing and nothing more.)
I don't think anybody cares about hackers, the real danger is terrorists taking down the high tension lines. That could cause immense damage.
The C variants, C, C++, C# etc, already have to get special-treatment by search engines. So yes, it is a problem, the only reason Google/Bing/etc work well with those is because they pre-existed Google/Bing/etc.
There's no reason to create a *new* language with an unsearchable name, except general web cluelessness. And search engine providers shouldn't have special-case certain words/names just because they were coined by people who don't know how search engines work.
This is a practical issue, it has nothing to do with marketing.
Perl, Java, PHP, Lua are good names because they're easy to Google. (Java shares a name with something pre-existing, but is vastly more popular than it on the web, so it's not a big deal.) Python, Ruby, Obj-C not quite as much. C, C++, C#? Awful. Go unfortunately falls into the "awful" category here.
Well, yah, but it's not like it would be hard for them to talk to an intern or grab up a new hire and ask them to port it before release, right? And assuming they wrote portable C in the first place, porting it to Windows should be pretty damned easy-- it's not like there's a UI or anything.
That's a terrible idea. They're going to end up with the PHP mish-mash. Dozens of functions that do the same thing, no organization, no standardized naming scheme-- it'll be PHP 4 all over again.
Perhaps it's designed to be embedded, like LUA or Javascript? In that case, comprehensive libraries aren't necessary or even desirable.
Or, more likely, they just did the fun part of designing the language, and are leaving the hard part of creating libraries to somebody else.
This is a nice gesture of goodwill from Google... I wonder how much it costs.
Goodwill my ass. They're only doing it because Microsoft announced a similar program. Of course, Slashdot wouldn't report that...
Because then Portlanders wouldn't be able to make irritatingly smug forum postings?
They lose the freedom to tinker with what would have been open, whatever it was that the company theoretically closed.
So you think that if a company uses a public domain component, it's *no longer* in the public domain? Or what are you saying here-- it makes no sense to me. How can a company "close" something that's already been put into the public domain?
If that's the component they're struggling to fix it could be all-important.
If it's a large product, and the one component that's busted is in the public domain, that would make it the *easiest* part to fix, no?
I found a minor bug in Rubygems the other day simply by reading the source. If it wasn't available I'd still be wondering what was supposed to happen and tweaking my code trying to make it work.
[Insert "great story, bro" image macro.]
Solitaire doesn't run better just because it's open sourced so many users might not even notice, but the ones who poke around or fix anything would. It's the difference between a usable machine and one completely covered into anti-tampering epoxy.
Huh?
From my perspective, proprietary machines are by far the most usable since (by and large, and this is slowly changing) open source coders don't give half-a-whit about usability issues.
I meant to say "put it on HTTPS", not "HTTP."
They could use a tracking pixel, but put it on HTTP and behind a user/password prompt. That way, it would have to be reported by the e-commerce site's back-end (making implementation more difficult), but the security would be there.
It's not the tracking pixel that's necessarily the problem, it's the completely unsecured generated-client-side tracking pixel.
PowerPoint is a medium like any other.
I see this like griping that the prof is teaching on a whiteboard instead of a blackboard-- who gives a shit?
If the prof is interactive with his class, marking-up the PowerPoint slides as questions arise, letting students download and print them out, etc... then he's a good prof, regardless of the tool used. The fact that PowerPoint slides are trivially editable, annotated, can contain links and media, etc actually makes them a pretty damned good choice, IMO.
If the prof just shows slides and reads them in a droning voice, then he's a bad prof. Guess what? Bad profs existed before PowerPoint-- believe me, I had gobs of them. (Not that I went to school before PowerPoint, but my school didn't have projectors in any classrooms when I was there.)