a general problem of modern individualist society is to generally avoid any type of generalisation and generally scream upon any generalizing individual offering him not to think in so small dimensions anymore.

lion king demo - funny i played that too. A lot.

but I went with descent, as it came to whishes. Now in descent full game was as exciting as the demo levels. :)

If this is how it is supposed to work then, no wonder, that obtaining illegal copies of the game is still the number one strategy of many game classics to get major attention. (did even work for operating systems)

I think on the PC market, selling many games is still based very much on the quality of the game - especially in multiplayer. But PC gaming sector is mainly hardcore gamers anyway. Most revenues are created through console titles. Not sure, how it is with demos there.

Actually Aging was not reversed. It was made faster in the first place. And then telomerase was added, and aging was normal again.

It's nice. But sometimes it is deactivated for a reason. To stop aging we would have to stop mutating cells. Our cells still would have to divide. Our braincells would still be more or less limited. So we would have to control our tumours while getting more stupid. The biblical 120 max won't be broken any time soon.

Still, such a news is incredible in a scientific perspective. But for potions of life, please consider your local alchemist or any grail you might find.

I have done a kiosk like application for a bigger university in the past, which is based on wxPython entirely. It still runs on those machines until today and does its job very well. Its a rather big app.

For most simple applications WX does suffice. However, I had to do of workarounds and finally ended up "abstracting" wx to our needs, mostly because some tests showed, you can crash wx in the background unfortunately in some circumstances. (just do a lot of sizers and tell him to apply them very fast)

In my eyes, developing a bigger GUI app always needs an abstraction layer between the engine you use and your application. certain windows look the same, behave the same, hence, are the same. It would not have been that hard in the end to switch the abstraction layer to use Qt and just replace certain points in the code, where wx is directly used to switch the whole app.

Also, destroying windows in WX is kinda funny in python sometimes, e.g. - I ended up doing it with timers, who triggered the destruction later, because we ran in a lot of problems (might be python related)

wx is really easy to work with, but it can get a mess.
I admit, I dont know Qt in extensive projects, but I do know that Qt editboxes sometimes slow down on my machine and only speed up upon window resize in kde komponents (sic). Could be kdelibs / X11 / whatever however.

I am wondering how many ppl actually come forward with Qt here, while GTK seems every geeks choice in some other /. threads. I would certainly choose Qt, but I think it is a little bit harder to learn, than WX. I would choose Qt mostly because its very complete, proven to work, and it just looks a lot nicer optically (no matter how you skin it), than GTK. But that is obviously a stupid reason for many ppl :)

You could use Googles GWT to write your GUI, and simply display a webkit window in the application, making it server-client friendly and usable via browser if needed.

GWT is fairly cool and very advanced. You write stuff in Java, and it is translated to browser specific javascripts.

However, I would still use Qt. For smaller projects I used wx already. PITA.

I see your point.

But I still dont see the profit behind it. Maybe I dont really get the money to be taken there.

But there must be some. Somebody pays you money for doing that stuff, this somebody must have intentions or profit for themselves.

So where does the profit lie?

(interesting, how do you share the IP with others? I should look this up, could come in handy to secure my servers further)

Well let me think of examples.

• drivers are not installed from CDs or various internet sites. Most linux systems e.g. use repositories. Drivers are allowed into kernel space, applications are not.
• there is no need for a graphical environment.
• usually, the filesystem does not hide extensions to the user. nor does any executable have the rights to promote itself to administrator without explicit allowance, easily identified by a bit, not by some Resource imported into the exe. (I do code a lot cross platform, I did have to create binaries which run themselves as administrator)
• admistration and users are clearly separated by design.
• groups/users play an important role in unix systems. they are used through and through. there are more than 3+some hidden groups by default.
• there are no workaround patches in the OS to get APPLICATIONS running again in a new version. microsoft did adapt their system to partners. the one i remember was sim city.
• configuration is mostly very well documented. it is commonly accessible on the machine even offline via manpages or info.
• I never saw my system autostarting something after mounting a CD or USB drive, just because there was a hidden autorun.inf there.

And if I would have a lot of time, I would find more. OF COURSE, that does not mean, a linux box or a bsd box or a macosx box is not breakable, infestable, controllable by malware, virii, hacks, whatever.

Also I can agree, that in many layers of perspective microsoft did even a better job with their OS (customer oriented (well not the user, but the other companies creating apps for you), configurable via common tools, and also security has improved a lot with the last reincarnations of NT)

True. Windows95 was the kind of OS which you never plugged into a direct internet connection at ANY TIME because of the EOT bug. I think it was called winnuke. you would have also been instantly infected. Also true, linux was not quite there yet either. I still had this issues with win2k, until my internet got NATed.

However, I am just assuming unix would be harder to break. I can think of many ways controlling a linux user without the users knowledge just by hacking his account. From there I could of course get the entrypoint to anything he does after login.

(I am mixing linux and unix on purpose here)

If any OS gets desktop and customer oriented, you have to deal with people downloading stuff, installing it and running it. The greatest security leak is always the user itself. No OS can fix that if it wants be used as a desktop or any sort of "personal device". I think thats inevit.. inevitbl... uncircumventable. :)

your analogy in all respect, i would go for the first one. :)

if your team consists of 50 people you can get the new cars. Of course normally you would be more or less like 3 people and get 50 cars. But I get the point.

I still dont believe the big profit thing, though. I think thats just an illusion. Most malware has no primarily profit intentions. At least, its not the only motivation. Everybody knows, how you feel if you know you have control over something you should not. Everybody knows the dark side of coding. The competition between each other in adolescense. Or later on, simply being a jerk and wanting to delete files on a coworkers lap (nah I wouldnt but I know people who thought about stuff like that).
And everybody knows how easy you can infect computers of end users anyway.
I think our daily imagination of hacker / malware author stereotypes is just influenced by media depictions or extreme cases.

I still think, it's harder to break unix oses by design, and thats the simple thing about windows being more targeted.

Also, most people in the scene go for games cracking, and many who target Windows and expose the security holes, either hate that piece of software, or work in that field and would never use it for doing harm.

I mean come on. We could take over Windows machines for years with an End Of Tape signal across the network, or spreading subnet clients. At least that was the thing when I was in school and win95 got out. Most of us moved on. And every generation had its tools and bots and viruskits :)

So hacking personal computers is more lucrative, than, e.g. the servers on the internet?

You mention this malware author, who wants profit. Back in the days, so I thought, most of the hackers did it more for personal challenge, or fame, than for profit. I also thought, the first bright minds of this sector came out from people who actually built the software, they protected or hacked. They worked at universities and had all crazy ideas, were joining together in some kind of devotion to computers - it was not always a socially lucrative thing to be a geek. Engineers, mathematicians, and stuff.

So which kind of profit lies in unprotected Windows Systems, which have enough stuff installed, which easily and legally could undermine them? Like Flash? Skype? Stealing data can't really be the reason why there is so much money behind it.

Most Workstations in big networks are secured not only by hardware firewalls, but also by unix systems. If accessing those Workstations is so crucial to get profit, accessing the network via a unix virus would be very easy. And from there, malware could be easily spread.

However I turn it in my mind, I don't think the no. 1 OS for the Desktop marketshare is any more profitable, than the no. 1 OS type in any other sector, which stores the same crucial data, or any other thing, that could be very profitable.
Either those securing systems are just harder to overtake, or profit is not the key factor in the overall hackers motivation.

For me, people who do that kind of coding either just do it for curiousity or because of paranoia. Or because of the thrill. Some of them maybe for profit, but I hardly think, they would post it on the internet, anyway.

But I sincerely ask which aspects I just don't know yet, since I am young, maybe I am too historic to be a realist.

Well, opinions stay opinions.
Don't get me wrong, I am a very open person, but reading BSG next to the other (really great) shows made me shiver.

You are right, some actors were very bad in B5 - but some were genius (Katsulas, e.g.).
Well this mostly also has to do with budget.

Also, the storyarcs of B5 are still one of the best writings (in terms of WRITING) for any space opera, creating a very epic feeling until the show unfolds into season 5. Many things could have been done better, but we can tell that about every sci-fi show. I do not talk about Crusader or most of the silly movies.

It was an experiment to slightly plan forward 5 Seasons of story and holding that promise, unveiling things which were planted seasons before. Some things of course did not work without some patchwork, like the unexpected change of captains and their meaning being "the one" in season 2/3.
You do not have this in DS9 until S3. (I love both shows)

To the question, which came first: It is very likely that Paramount used Straczynski's ideas to influence or even develop DS9 (since they had his first 22 episodes as writing already in '89), however Straczynski never wanted to sue them. You can read about that on wikipedia.

Scientific ideas about how ships, stations, weapons, governments and societies work were very well made in B5. The choice to focus on 4 races was a good one. Of course, it was heavily LotR influenced storytelling, but it worked out.

BSG on the other hand was sometimes terrible to watch - too much obvious but claiming-to-be-very-philosophical dialogues (the philosophical questions thrown up in a sci-fi-show should be between the lines), too much new age hypertheories, terrible nausea while watching space scenes, and again only a few actors were good - however none were as terrible as some in B5, I must admit.

BSG deserves its credit to be a fine show. But it does not deserve to stand beside Firefly, Star Trek or Star Wars at all. B5 in my opinion does.
I would add it to the second bestest, where Stargate Atlantis, Farscape, Earth2 and so on can be found.

Well and there is Andromeda. We can agree about that one, I hope.

fixed that for you.

Ok, so there is Rush having a secret which already crumbles, which looks illogical to you. I agree, but I never bothered (while I do bother with logic a lot normally)

And there is the small plot thing. However, SGUs small plots do connect, and the most important thing seems to be human interactions, feelings, dark ambiente, and good acting. Which is kinda modern.
All the time, characters got developed in SG:U at least. Some of them are really fun to watch. I agree, it needs slightly more action, but still it has its own magic, and I never missed an episode anyway.
Especially because it has a very good acting quality by the characters. Not too much senseless emo-talk, but still enough to keep the characters in trouble and going.

I dropped Caprica after seeing the Tennis Match on the "almost tennis-like field", the weird religious stuff, and so on, and moving through the episode denoting, that it is as crap as BSG was, but even worse, without spacefights, which I did not enjoy anyway because of motion sickness caused by the zooming camera. There is *nothing* worse, than the whole Battlestar Remake Franchise. I even enjoy Babylon5: Crusader more. And thats a lot of bad acting there.

For me SG:U is what BSG should have been. And the writing is superb.

But yeah, I hope Destiny finally finds something to explore outside the ship. Maybe some allies, some troubles, and some really bad ass enemy?

oh c'mon nobody wants to play your educational games!

if billie would ask this as rhetorical question, i would say, from Uranus.