I've been thinking recently about what makes a good video game experience for me, and it's slightly relevant.
I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories:
-Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction.
-Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings.
Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter.
I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress.
I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too.
I pretty much exactly agree on this. I've been buying far more games (both quantity and $ spent) since I got into the indie-er crowd, and have been enjoying them more.
Also, I don't buy "X dollars / Y devs" and "X is fixed". If anything, the massive rise in casual (and mobile) gaming disproves it solidly. New markets exist, and you can eat from external markets too (I find more and more people watching (and wanting!) less TV - dropping cable gives you quite a large gaming budget).
There's a third category that I would put most of the games I enjoy into:
-Long and Deep: Games you can play for huge amounts of time but don't depend on an artificial sense of progress to do it. Strategy games, roguelikes, competitive games, etc. Games where you level up yourself by getting better, instead of the character in the game.
Some other things about ssh that everyone knew but me (until I found out):
-scp supports bash completion for files on the server if you use a key pair.
-Keychain (http://www.funtoo.org/Keychain) makes having a password on your private key less of a hassle by prompting for your password when you first log in to your local account and using that when you ssh. (ssh-agent alone is similar but requires your password for every new login session).
> "[LinkedIn] does not sanction the creation or use of fake LinkedIn profiles or the exploitation of its platform for the purposes alleged in this report."
If I understand things correctly, it's not claimed that GHCQ made fake profiles or exploited their platform. It's possible that whoever made the statement didn't really understand MITM, but this kind of reads like another one of the usual carefully worded non-denials.
Full paragraph in the article:
When contacted, LinkedIn stated that the company takes the privacy and security of its members "very seriously" and "does not sanction the creation or use of fake LinkedIn profiles or the exploitation of its platform for the purposes alleged in this report." "To be clear," the company continued, "LinkedIn would not authorize such activity for any purpose." The company stated it "was not notified of the alleged activity."
At the bottom there are two lines that taken together really confuse me:
<grsecurity> If you're running Linux 3.4 or newer and enabled CONFIG_X86_X32 , you need to disable it or update
immediately; upstream vuln CVE-2014-0038
and
<grsecurity> In case there's confusion, this vuln is not about 32bit userland on 64bit (CONFIG_X86_32), but the new X32
ABI. Ubuntu enables it recently
Does the second line affect the first? EDIT: I ask because it looks like I need to fix my kernel, but I'd rather be lazy if possible.
x32 is a separate abi, distinct from the normal 64-bit and 32-bit abis.
Most distros don't use it, most don't even offer an x32 install image, but if they enable the kernel option for the x32 abi even without intending to use it, they're vulnerable.
If you're using the x32 abi, either you're using it on purpose, or your distro happens to offer an x32 install image and you downloaded it by accident instead of the normal 32-bit image you probably wanted. In all other cases it should be safe enough to disable the kernel option.
Does "grep CONFIG_X86_X32 /boot/config-`uname -r`" give you any results which aren't commented out? If it does, you're at risk; if not, nothing to worry about (at least, with regards to this vulnerability).
Say I change security.tls.version.max to 3, which changes it's status from 'default' to 'user set'. In the future, if the default for security.tls.version.max is changed to, say, 4, would the fact that my setting has the 'user set' status prevent it from incrementing to the better default?
I'm not proposing that this is a risk or that Firefox behaves this way---I have no idea. Does anyone else know?
The (non-about:config) UI for these settings was removed for a reason. Even though it makes sense for these to be configurable for testing, end users are more likely to break their browser (make it less secure or make it incompatible with real sites they need to use) by tweaking these settings.
Firefox developers have had to reset these settings in the past in order to save users from self-inflicted insecurity.
Without an explicit effort by Firefox developers to reset these prefs, the prefs won't automatically reset to make sense in the future if the value space of the prefs grows. There is no guarantee of what explicit effort might be taken to deal with non-default values of these prefs in the future.
In my opinion, anyone who wants https://www.howsmyssl.com/ to tell them they are probably okay today should install Firefox Beta (or Aurora or Nightly) instead of manually changing these settings.
(Disclosure: I'm a Gecko developer but I don't work on TLS. Disclaimer: The above is my personal understanding and opinion, not any sort of official statement.)
Often with settings like this, they will flip the preference name to something like `security.tls.max_version` or something so user-set and extension-set overrides are invalidated. They've done this with other common, significant settings that users often overrode.
I believe it would, but I'm not certain. This is one of reasons not to mess with it and just wait until the next version which will be out RSN (real soon now) that has a better default.
For whatever it's worth though, while I'm not sure how they're doing their version numbers and it may be quite awhile until this is relevant, you could probably just set the integer really high (like 99 or something) and that would effectively translate into "try the highest version you've got" which might break things sometimes, but it wouldn't leave you stuck in a lower version later at least.
"In mathematics, Cauchy's integral formula, named after Augustin-Louis Cauchy, is a central statement in complex analysis. It expresses the fact that a holomorphic function defined on a disk is completely determined by its values on the boundary of the disk, and it provides integral formulas for all derivatives of a holomorphic function. Cauchy's formula shows that, in complex analysis, "differentiation is equivalent to integration": complex differentiation, like integration, behaves well under uniform limits – a result denied in real analysis."
Does anyone who knows this stuff better than me know if there's any meaningful connection?
It's similar to Green's Theorem, a special case of Stokes' Theorem. The latter is probably very closely related to the ideas underpinning the holographic principal (just guessing; my background is more math than physics, though I love both).
I thought the whole article was pretty interesting, but I responded to that part exactly the way you did.
One of the big things I retained from my stats classes is the idea that, once you deviate from a pre-specified analysis technique, the strength of your conclusion is strongly diminished. Also, sophisticated statistical techniques are often less robust than simple ones. Maybe some other ideas apply that I can't think of off the top of my head.
On the other hand, the author may not have appreciated the statistical iffyness of that phrasing, and perhaps misrepresented the rigor of the actual analysis.
Did anyone else find Inception to be basically straightforward (though interesting and enjoyable) with an insignificant binary question at the end?
There certainly may be more depth than I'm seeing, but there wasn't anything that made me need to wonder why anything happened the way it happened. As mentioned in the thread already, Momento's the one that isn't straightforward.
I'm not intentionally trolling---I suppose I probably am missing something. There just wasn't anything obviously confusing on the movie's surface for me.
After reading this article I realized I have a completely unrelated nerve wracking situation in my life that could benefit by having a "superior" work for me rather than the other way around.
I can place the games I've highly enjoyed into two basic categories:
-Short and sweet, having one or more of 1. interesting play mechanics 2. great story/theme 3. interesting art direction.
-Solid all around, with addictive elements (e.g. leveling, collecting things) that make repetitive tasks seem fun and extend the time I play the game to beyond a few evenings.
Many indie games I've played fit into the former category, and most non-indie games fit into the latter.
I've been realizing that these "short and sweet" games that I've been getting more and more of a chance to play have provided more lasting and fulfilling experiences than longer games. The feeling I get from sinking an evening into a short and sweet game is kind of similar to reading a good book or playing a good chess match. Likewise, the feeling I get from sinking an evening into a longer game is some artificial feeling of making progress.
I'm overgeneralizing a little, but the point is I've started skipping AAA titles in favor of trying out lots of indie games. Most aren't great, but the cost of a few dollars or less and a half hour to find out isn't bad. For me, it's worth it to find the gems. And not having several-week-long addictions to games with low quality:time ratios is great too.
I really hope there's no indie bubble.