Monday, March 31, 2008

Interesting Stuff

This is my final day off on my mini-vacation. We had a party for Rocco's birthday yesterday. I think today we'll go on a pony ride and take a steam train. Here are some things that caught my attention this morning:

Open Gaming.
There was some speculation that Wizards of the Coast might not have an open gaming license for 4th Edition D&D after a strangely worded post by the D&D brand director. Chris Pramas analyzes it on his blog. I'll just make the observation that WOTC has the worst communication of any game company I know. My guess is this was just a poorly worded blunder. Regardless of the WOTC statement, Chris Pramas does an interesting analysis of open source gaming.

Competitors. This article by a comic book store owner summed up exactly how I feel about new competitors. It feels much like your boss just hired a new guy to do your job, despite their not being enough work for both of you.

Hacking. This blog entry summed up a contest to hack three operating systems: Mac, Windows, Linux. The winner got to keep the computer. Time to hack: Mac: 2 minutes. Windows: 2 days. Linux: Survived. The vulnerabilities were in the applications.

3 comments:

  1. "Macintosh - Secure as long as nobody cares enough to hack us."

    Security through obscurity indeed.

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  2. What I found highly annoying is that iTunes installed the Safari browser on my Vista machine with its latest update. Safari was the vulnerability in this contest.

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  3. Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about the Safari "update" on Slashdot. I uninstalled it after accidentally installing it in what I thought was an iTunes update, and it now bugs me about once a week to install it.

    I hope Apple is pleased, because it could be the straw that makes me decide not to get an iPhone.

    ReplyDelete