Posts by Majid 81 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jun 2007
Just make a game that would get the average IT student a B+. Add levels that are impossible to complete, then add some bonusses that you have to pay for to complete the level, so that you don't feel like a complete loser and there you have it.... : payed addiction..
The masses would probably be better off buying real drugs.. Its cheaper, and probably less addictive.
Even if you have all the code, and reviewed all the code, you are still compiling it with a compiler in binary form.
So then you would need to compile the compiler again, with another compiler, but you have that compiler in binary form, so you can't trust that one either. So there's a chicken and an egg problem.
This problem is probably solvable by writing your bootstrap compiler and linker in assembler (have fun doing that, see ya in a few years), and using that to compile the gnu-c compiler, and then use that compiler to compile truecrypt.
But then again, you are still using IO functions from your developers os.. So maybe you need to recompile that first as well.. sigh...
I have an easier solution, if you don't want people to know some things, don't tell em, don't write it down, and certainly don't store it on a computer.
I know a lot of people who just upgraded for 35 euros.
Before you needed to buy a full version for about 170 euros or so, if you didn't buy a new machine with an OEM version on it/with it.
That always got me, when my hardware was getting a bit old. The 170 euros seemed like a waste of money, when I would 'save' about 80 euros if I could get an OEM version with new hardware.
Nowadays hardware doesn't really get old. (Well older but not much slower). And when you plug in a new GPU card and an ssd you are as good as new.. So thats 35 euros + 400-500 euros for some hardware upgrades. So why buy a new PC for a 1000-1200 or so?
Its a limitation of how our brain works. There is no need to fund research for every individual case. You just have to prove a task requires concentration, if you prove that you cannot do it with any other task that also requires your concentration.
So for example its not a good idea:
to shave while writing a letter.
to ski while writing a letter.
to ski while having a conversion.
drive while having a conversion.
drive while shaving.
etc etc..
And yes some conversions you can do with other tasks, but that are the ones where you werent really listening (thus not concentration), and just 'ehehing' the gaps in noise from the other side. So in the future when a cop pulls you over because he sees you were talking in the car, you can get away with it by claiming it was your mother on the other side of the line ;-)
It is no longer about gathering facts, but it is about twisting the facts to fit your own belief. So we have one camp that BELIEVES we are causing global warming which will lead to doom and destruction, and the other camp that BELIEVES we are not causing global warming and trying to fix it will cause economic doom and destruction. Both sides are heavily funded by companies/interest groups who have a vested interest in seeing one side prevail.
Seems like we have the right ingredients to start a war:
* Suspicion.
* False information.
* A perceived threat.
* A real opponent, which if we kill em will take away the threat.
Ps. Would be kind of poetic justice if the dinosaurs reign got ended by sudden climate change and our reign gets ended by the fear of it leading to a war in which we wipe ourselves out. I wonder what Darwin would have said about that one.
Things change, Warner just thinks they can keep stuff the same. Evolution will just make sure they perish. People want content on their devices, so if a device maker wants to display your content on their devices you better take notice and embrace. Or history will welcome you as yet another cu de sac...
What are you going to do when Apple just hires a bunch of producers and actors and start to provide their own content.. Sit in the corner and sulk?
FREE doesn't exist, if it is payed for by ads you are just paying for it indirectly.
Company X buys adds -> Google displays adds -> You consume youtube movie for "free".
You buy Company X product -> Price is reflecting costs which includes the money they payed Google -> You payed for your "free" movie.
Even if you are not the one buying the Company X product someone else will, so in the end, we are all paying for the youtube movies. EVEN if we are not the ones watching them. Seems kind of against the whole idea of Capitalism to me. Sounds more like Marxism.. But that's the way it works now..
Enjoy your Marxist system.
Don't worry about a 4 degree temperature rise. It's not the cause, it is the consequence of us, breeding like rabbits.
Sure we can spread wealth around, I guess everyone can live on 2 sandwiches a day and some water. Maybe that way we can increase the population with 10 more billion silly organisms. But maybe we should re-examine our goals.
We have all been poluted with science fiction. Especially the one where a certain captain would drop out of warp and at almost every solar system, and it would have at least 2 class M planets capable of life, and on landing, he found out it had life, and the race was obviously mostly an all female race with mini-skirts.
But that is because it is science-FICTION. Noone would like to watch a spaceship travelling through space, never finding any life. (Let alone girls in mini-skirts). It is boring and depressing.
Also it is kind of heavy on our responsibility to even consider that we might be the only life in the universe. This would suddenly give us a great burden not to mess it up. Now we can just say: Ah well theres an infinite number of solar systems so there is bound to be other life forms, implicitly concluding that if we mess it up it doesn't matter.
So the chances that curiosity finds what we are really looking for: "The proof that we are/were not alone", are extremely small (2 class M planets in one solar system are extremely remote, and probably only happens in science fiction). So no Martians will be found...
However Curiosity serves a far bigger purpose. It is the stepping stone to more useful inventions. You can see it as Formula 1. Racing in circles has no purpose, but the inventions made in Formula 1 benefit every car manufactorer in the world. (active suspension, abs, traction control, power steering etc etc). So when we do find a planet capable of sustaining us, we can try to go there and fullfil our ever tingling urge..
the urge to multiply..
We messed it up before, causing fumingly hot temperatures that wiped out life, destroyed nearly all life, which then restarted, created land-animals, dinosaurs which were wiped out again by a meteor, then we got the chance for our species to strive, and now we are succeeding at it again, we are completing the cycle!!!
How many times have we destroyed the earth before? We must be getting pretty efficient at it by now right? It's the bloody Matrix!!
Ok all fun things aside, Lets get things in bloody perspective: We are COMPLETELY insignificant!!:
-- We can't diverge a meteor by sending Bruce Willis in a space shuttle to confront it (Armageddon 1998) (Ps .the space shuttle we scrapped because it was costing too much money to maintain, money we would rather use starting silly wars over living habits/religion).
-- We can't reignite the sun by nuking it.. (sunshine 2007) Think of it: If you line up a 100 earths its even smaller than the diameter of the sun. So do you really think that a nuke coming from earth is going to have an effect?
-- We can't create a black hole to suck up the earth, by making a grownups kid racing track under the mountains of Europe that collides stuff (Large Hadron Collider 2011) (really believe me on this, I did this when I was young, and it was a lot of fun, and I actually managed to break the window once by ramping the powered up racecar to jump, and it broke the window. But it never created a black hole..)
The only thing we do at the moment, is shit in our own bed. I am happy to discuss, how it is not smart to be shitting in your own bed, but concluding that we will end all life on earth for a million years is silly. We might be able to wipe ourselves out, but even that is pretty difficult, because next to roaches we might be one of the hardest species to exterminate: We are everywhere on this planet, and we can adapt to lots of different temperatures/threads/infections/diseases, so it probably will take something pretty nifty to destroy all of us..
And even if we do survive, is that our goal? To be some ever living organism on some planet? Maybe at some time we just got to make place for the new. Stop fighting it and embrace the inevitable, that's what evolution is about.... ;-)
One thing is pretty certain: The earth will be here, long after we are gone.
A long time ago, advertisement was useful, it made your product known, if otherwise unknown, you could highlight why it was a good product. If such information was delivered in small amounts it made people think about it.
Nowadays, you get all this advertisement force fed:
- You are reading a forum about a programming problem: Theres google bots, auto inserting dumb replies with adds.
- You want to watch a movie on youtube: There's an add you are forced to watch before watching what you wanted to watch.
- Watch a movie on a public tv channel. There's adds every 15 minutes.
- Click somewhere, it might be trick to redirect you to an add..
Why do companies think they can annoy me into buying their product? Well they don't. The problem is this whole pay per click payment scheme, which is misused left and right and the fact that companies haven't realised that they are being screwed over as well and that the ads they pay for are only driving away customers.
For the customers, its a double yammie. First they get annoyed, then they pay more for the products if they buy them because all the companies are spending loads of money on adds that dont work. So the net result is that all products are getting more expensive. Profit = Cost + Margin. So Cost will go up, because they have to pay for all these useless commercials and ads.
So: I hope they ban advertisement from the whole internet. I rather pay with money for internet than that I pay with my irritation, and then later pay indirectly by having to buy more expensive products.
But that is no problem because then the IPhone5S comes out? Surely not for a reviewer which gets a free IPhone if he writes a positive review. But most people have to pay real money for a phone. (Lots in case of an IPhone). I would hope that if I would ever be foolish enough to pay 500+ euros for a phone it would last longer than a year. Otherwise I would be pretty upset.
But it has to be enormously precise, So probably they will need Kinect 2. So you can just resize move rotate and swipe, by holding your hands in front of you, and making gestures.
When I first saw the adds about Kinect I thought it was an advertisement trick, but to my surprise it actually worked. Hope for Microsoft they can deliver with Kinect 2. Otherwise the whole 'Metro' idea on the desktop is dead in the water, because driving it with the mouse is just awkward.
I remember in its early days it was a bit flacky, but nowadays it is very good. Although I can understand if you are not using the framework yourself anymore, because you went full DotNet that maintaining an open source C++ gui framework with a hunderd developers that will not generate any revenue doesn't make much sense, financially speaking. But strategically it might be a poor choice to sell it off.. Time will tell.
I consider myself quite 'tech-savvy'' but a lot of these popups I don't know how to answer myself. It's more like if I say yes, I might be doomed but if I say no I might be doomed as well.
The problem with these auto-updaters is that you don't know who is asking you the question, the producer of the product or the hacker that has hacked the update protocol of that product, to infect you with a virus..
At least on windows when you install something through the windows installer you get a windows popup with a signed certifficate of what the company is that is trying to install stuff on your machine.
So when you really choose to install some software with a unknown certificate you know you are putting yourself at risk.
Maybe windows elevation should have been a lot stronger, and just not allowed in program elevation.. But as many windows users were complaining already about elevation, I guess user convenience did win against safety one more time...
Theres is this difference between:
* Consuming information/creativity.
* Producing information/creativity.
When consuming, a touch pad is more than enough, you are basically reading a book with pictures/movies.. But when I am producing information/creativity I feel like I need 6 more arms, and a lot of keyboards/input devices to keep up with me. So even a PC with fancy logitech keyboard, and mouse with 10 buttons will just not do.
I am not sure that surface can deliver, or that I will be running to my desktop as soon as I want to input something more than a few sentences, like I do now.
Hey, I will make a proposal to remedy the situation, lets say I will drive 10 km/h under the speed limit 5 times, this will then offset my 50 km/h over the speed limit at the time you caught me..
So that will make us even check? I can even cut you a deal and do that 6 times, so in the end you will end up with a 10 km/h benefit!!
You see I am a nice guy.. I just cut you in on a deal you cant refuse..
right.......
It is a serious invasion of privacy, and I can very much understand the psychological effect this can have on someone.
Obviously here most people think its a laughing matter, or somehow justified just because we 'all' probably want to see miss Scarlett in the nude.
What was meant to be private should be treated with respect and not published for the whole world to see. If you do that then in my eyes you are a rat, and if you wilfully steal that mail/pictures you are a also a thief.. So he basically is a thief and a rat..
If something as trivial as normal C written in an object oriented way, together with non-default optimizing flags can throw the virus-hunters completely off, then any decent programmer (and I mean someone that can write some c and some assembly code) can completely outwit them.
Oh and the oldest C++ compilers where just preprocessors first converting it to C with some arrays of function pointers resembling the vtable. So C and C++ where originally not that far apart.
So I would say, learn to read assembly code and don't rely so much on reverse engineering tools, that will decompile your assembly into a language you do understand.
So if you want to have real quality content, I am willing to pay for it. If the price is fair, and it is easy to pay for just that one item. And not have to have a subscription set up you can't get rid of any more.
Let me give an example: I am not a big football fan, but there are some games during the year that I want to see.. So a subscription is a nogo. I would gladly pay something like 3 or 4 euros for viewing Barcelona vs Real Madrid.. but I don't want a subscription to all football matches during the whole year.
I am pretty sure that theres a lot of money lost now, because companies just want to tie us into subscriptions. Thats a much bigger problem than the drm itself. drm is just a means... you first have to have a goal.
So the EU threatens companies on a 10 percent revenue tax on rules they make up themselves? So where does that 10% go to then? The Greek money pit?
It seems like standards are now some new kind of card used in the old economic war card game.
I trump your state controlled rating agencies downgrading our countries card, with our self made anti-competition laws? Oh but then I'll trump yours with my: you violate human rights card..
Slick.. Wait while I get my beer and chips to see how this thing will unfold.. This is going to be good.
Most of those systems are so far away that even if we detect life, and try to fly there to contact them, they will be most likely be extinct once we get there. And even if they are not, if we fly back we will find out humanity has become extinct.
So even if we are surrounded by billions of races, we are still alone. (unless of course we invent space folding).
Microsoft is about software. not hardware. So I find it extremely unlikely that Ms will ever buy a hardware company (which Nokia is).
Their whole bussiness strategy is about leaving hardware to 'partners'. (hp, dell, htc, samsung, .. just about everybody that matters) So I don't see them turning that strategy around any time soon, because it will just rub their remaining partners the wrong way, and not to mention that it will bring counts of monopoly probes and lawsuits on their doorstep.
Rendered obsolete by smartphones. Or should I call them multipurpose transportable multimedia devices (where actually calling someone has just taken a backseat to all the other stuff you can do with it).
So here's the recipe for a gamer for you:
1. You want to game on a holiday you take your gaming laptop.
2. You want to game while travelling you use your smartphone.
3. You want to game at home, you take your 800 watt PC with dual graphical cards, and SSD's to match. (or gaming console, if you prefer being owned by PC gamers at any shooting game).
They should have some seperate program where I can enter/store my credentials per website, For which the browser should supply them with the appropriate entry in this collection which a specific website then can read and log me in automatically. Any other reason why websites would want to be storing any data is bull anyway.
And yes, fix http so it is session aware, or store the session in the url. But don't misuse cookies for that either.
And the funny thing is: The Register is as bad as any of them, why did I get advertisement of a certain clothing website I visited on your site? Adsense is bad, it's one of the worst offenders of cookie/browser history misuse.
Carbon or not that does not matter. What matters is that they have read the market better. Local small airports are booming, while the big ones are losing bussiness quick. Why?
People just like to travel from their small town to their destination, not first travel by train or by car or airplane, to another city then take a big plane, just to land close to where they want to be, and then take another bus, train, car or airplane to the final destination.
Look up "The paradox of choice" on youtube by Barry Schwartz.
I think Steve Jobs has watched that, and Stallman probably didn't.
Do you really think that an OS where you can choose loads of filesystems, desktopmanagers, distributions in all kinds of weird combinations will bring more freedom? Or will all these choices just bring paralysis..?
The problem with programmers is, they always want to make systems that suits them (with thousands of wild options to toggle on and off), but they forget to take into account that the majority of users are not programmers.
Steve Jobs got that fact straight. Although maybe restricting to programmers, Apples products are usable for users, its does not make sense to create a program (or os) that is handy for programmers but just wildly confusing for the people you are really writing it for.
Ps. and no, I don't own any Apple soft- or hardware. But that's just because I find it too expensive for what they offer.
It must be something good and un-refutable.. Samsung is one of the biggest IT/Hardware/electronics companies in the world, I don't think you can just bully them into paying you money.
They have more than enough to buy an army of the best lawyers to defend themselves...
So you are saying you want to run a 'maybe' rootkitted OS on your machine?
Signing a kernel is a hassle? Sure, yeah any security measure is a hassle. I think Linux wants to be a safe OS too right? Or are we going to play the Apple game and state that there is no reason for that because the OS is so secure it can't be rootkitted?
For development purposes I agree. There should be an option to disable, but normal customers would surely want an OS that they can be reasonably sure that it isn't easy to be rootkitted.
It was an IQ test. Just not an IQ test for browser users, but for news sites failing to check the source of their material, and actually reading the news itself first: I mean come on, if you just start reading at the conclusion (which I always do), and you read some opinionated piece which is completely irrelevant to the fact that they are trying to prove you already know that you don't have to read the article.. (would have saved you time, and also face).
I always watched F1 on the BBC.. (and I am from Holland). Much better than the crap F1 coverage we have to put up with here.. Commentators are so busy with themselves, they miss all important moments and if they don't, there are the commercial breaks every 10 minutes, that will surely make you miss them.
It might not mean what you think it means. There are many languages with JIT compilers that compile write-once-run-anywhere code to native code, so it can run faster.
It does not have to mean they will extend html 5 with the an <asm> tag and put a bunch of x86 specific assembly code in there.
Sony advertised the PS3 to be able to perform a certain amount of functions:
- gaming
- surfing/browsing
- blueray player
- running another operating system. (turning it into a 'real' computer).
- media player.
- etc
They even made commercials advertising it as such. So if you buy such a product, it should perform as advertised. And it should continue to perform as advertised.
I have a PS3 and I never even bothered to install linux, because thats not why I bought it, but I can understand if you bought it 'partly' for that, and that function is now denied to you as a consumer you would feel cheated.
If this stands, then what is to keep sony from disabling the ps3 from being a media player? (and yes I do use it for that, next to gaming).
You can say that you dont have to agree with the eula, but that is not really an option, because they advertised the ps3 to be a multipurpose machine, and if you don't sign the aggreement you can't go online anymore, disabling another purpose: Being online and doing online gaming.
So Sony basically offer you the choice of chopping of your hands, or your feet.. Doesn't sound like a nice choice you offer people who are supposed to be your customers.
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