Well, you must have been asleep when this was covered in class, as you appear to be confused about what a 404 page is. Browsers are perfectly capable of differentiating between a 'page' (ie, a 200 or 304 code) and an 'error' (a 404, 403, 500 or any other error). A 404 is not a web page, it's an error with a (hopefully) descriptive message which is usually displayed as a web page. The browser sees that it's a 404 way before it gets the rest of the page (byte-wise speaking) as that information is the first thing the web server transmits.
No kidding, eh? A virus description file is just a special case of a general file (by definition). The delta diffs, etc, claimed by Symantec have been used for ages to update 'general computer readable files'. Back in the DOS days, anyone remember the patch files for Doom? The patent _does_ say you can patch from any version to any other version (which the Doom patches didn't do), but unlike, say, Microsoft(r) WindowsUpdate(tm) and Service Packs(tm) which download the entire new files the Doom updates were really diffs. Which of course brings up something that has been around for ages, and that is rsync. If generates the differences between any two versions of 'general files' is has indexed and lets you download and apply them to local files.
Whoops.. don't you hate it when you have to reply to your own posts? Hit submit by accident while still drafting and previewing the previous post...
Now, to put this back on topic, sort of. This whole privacy free market idea reads pretty nicely and if you follow the bouncing ball it may even make sense and make you wonder why we aren't doing this. To me, all these utopian theories are really just that. Theories. With very little to no application in current conditions. They all assume perfect market conditions where corporations are affraid of every little consumer decision, and where people run around happily making the best choices they possibly can, thus enhancing their and everyone else's lives, and where everything works out in the end (if there is anything to work out to begin with). Well, it's not called a utopia for nothing, and as soon as it comes in contact with anything non-utopian it will just collapse. Witness any number of Pacific islands before the white man arrived and exploited or killed them all. Even communism may be argued to follow this pattern; after sufficient exposure to the great capitalist economies of the west people just jumped ship. The privacy market will be the same way; it will collapse after people become disillusioned when someone doesn't follow the neat little rules.
Is this just a theoretical excercise? I suppose in a perfect free-market utopia corporations' infinite greed and desire to get away with as much as possible would be balanced by responsive demand. Buyers start to feel they're getting screwed, they go somewhere else. Fair enough, we're speaking utopia after all.
However, things don't work that way at all, even in the bastion of free economy known as US of A (snicker, snicker). Troube is while corporations are perfectly willing to maximize their profits by any means thay can get away with (read: circumventing any protective legislation or customs), customers rarely act in their own best self-interest. Yes, the immediate benefits of their actions may be beneficial, but long term they harm the system in a slippery-slope kind of way. (As in, as immediate and short-term benefits are realized by succumbing to various conviniences and incentives, long-term prospects and choices for consumers as a whole worsen by eliminating or limiting real choice.) Would Microsoft exist in your utopia? Would it sell any software and would it get as powerful as it is? Would people still drink Coke by the gallons when it is obviously not in their short- and long-term financial and health self-interest? How can any purely free-market model account for real customer behaviour patterns? Conversely, if they do indeed are to act in their best interest, maximizing their purchasing power and influence, how do you propose they gather and process all the data necessary to make an informed decision to that effect? This system (as I see it) cannot work when decisions (initially minor, see slippery-slope) are not made by the consumers themselves, or without possessing full information. How would run-away corporations be checked in this environment? When consumers give up power by making uninformed decisions (that may or may not be in their best interest) who does that power go to? Are you assuming corporations will do 'what's right'?
I dunno... I was anways buffled how anyone can honestly believe any economical extreme (libertarian free market or communist command economy (similar arguments can be made against that side as well)) can possibly work in the real world, with real people, real inequalities (of all kinds, real and abstract, innante and constructed) and somehow not lead to a contradiction.
OK, _you_ do that. As far as your average user sophistication goes it's pretty weak security, but that's all that's required to keep casual copying down. There are actual laws to go after the pros.
The speakers would be part of a complete system. Just like there was talk about having future digital in displays (flat panels) accept a scrambled signal and decode it just before turning on the pixels so the image stream couldn't be captured on the wire. Same with sound. MS already has digital speakers you can buy (just plug 'em into a USB port and install the drivers) so it's not a stretch to imagine new computer systems from the likes of Compaq or Dell would get on the bandwagon. After all, it's better value for the consumer. You can still stick a microphone in front of your speakers or a camera in front of your monitor, but wouldn't the quality just suck?
As if there is a shortage of reasons why this system will _not_ work in the near future... I mean, sure, you have to contend with the millions of vehicles in motion at any given time feeding you data every x seconds which you have to analyze real-time and advise each vehicle as to how fast it should going.
Lets setp back for a second and look at all the billions of vehicles that will have to be retro-fitted with these devices, tested and approved in a tamper-proof manner. Yup, that'll happen really soon, uh uhm. Because governments always have trillions of dollars burning holes in their pockets.
And of course, just like with gun control and licensing, all criminals will happily comply because this will be such effective legislation.
Forget about it. The logistics alone of such an operation are well beyond the means of any nation, and will remain so for a long time.
There is an easy explanation to this article/interview/news release. Gotta get people to think about other things besides the outages of MS DNS servers. What better way than to fling some FUD around.
Outcry? What outcry? Public outcry? About what?You must be on crack. Where they actually to pull a stunt like that I'm sure Linus would just tell them to fuck off and then proceed to sift through the stack of job offers he keeps in his closet.
People play EQ because it's fun. They get together with other players to complete quests and find items and progress through the game. As soon as money enters the picture it's no longer fun. It's like you and your buddies playing poker or Quake (or pick a pastime) on odd weekends or days off for fun (ok, there may be some money involved, like, say, loser buys beer). Suddenly there's a $1000 pot. It's not not fun because there is money involved per se, but most players want no part of that (buying high level characters), they don't want some guy plopping down a grand and effectively gaining an unfair advantage. I'd go so far as to say it's cheating, it's as if a brand new player signed up with a high level character instead of starting at 0 like everyone else. There is an unstated assumption that everyone starts out equal, and it comes down to skill (and time and determination), not who has the most money. And when something stops being fun for some people (for whatever reason) they will leave and find something else they enjoy. It's bad for the game, as any form of cheating is.
Of course, there's also the factor of almost everyone scrunching up their noses whenever someone guys their way in. It's just not the way it's supposed to be done.
Slashdot is down quite frequently. Very often I can't connect to the server, only to get through again after a minute. Once someone's network was down (can't recall which one, a few weeks back) and Slashdot was unavailable to a large number of users for over a day. I assume this affected lots of people, it was a fairly major provider quite close to Slashdot's server judging from the traceroute hop count. As far as reliability goes, Slashdot is definitely not an example to follow.
I second this statement. I would say it's been stable for at least 2 years as well, that's how long I've been using it. We are using MySQL to run a fairly large db (128+MB) (one that I would _not_ relish rebuilding) with over 8 queries/s (that's average over the last month, which is exactly how long ago I restarted mysql for an upgrade). There's nothing wrong with mysql stability-wise, definitely nothing wrong with its performance (if you turn off table locking), and if you can get by without transactions (for which there is support now with db3). I have to say I wouldn't use it for anything really important or involving money, but that's only because it's not a 'trusted name', so it's largely a perception issue.
Way to go moderator! It's not like I'm posting at +2 or anything, and the post is definitely not offtopic. And moding down my spelling correction followup was just low. Cmon, I dare you! Use up one more mod point on me you wimp!
The term 'instrument' in relation to module music formats (like s3m) is somewhat misleading as they're not really instruments. An instrument in this case is any sampled sound: speech, ambient sounds, crowd sounds, distorted guitars, vocals or whatever. The goal of sound compression should be to identify patterns in wave music, isolate them into instruments and play them back by modyfying the pitch, volume, etc, to recreate the original recording as close as possible. Worst case scenario is you end up with 1 instrument, the entire track, hopefully mp3 compressed, so you're guaranteed at least as good a compression as regular mp3.
It's not just a bitter programmer talking there. Read the rest of the website (I admit to not having finished the linked article, I jumped to the main page right away). The author makes very reasoned, valid arguments against the myth of OOP in a particular niche, in his case it's business software. The basic argument is that OO features are not needed there, they're misused or not used at all and can be better done with a structured approach, and buying wholly into OOD works _against_ the business processes and models the software is supposed to support.
The article is not against OO, it's just against using OOP where it's not applicable just because it's 'buzzwordy' and maintains an appearance of quality. OOP is hard. That is to say real OOP is hard. It takes many years to master C++ (for example)to be able to use it to write proper OO applications. Just like you can sit any monkey in front of a keyboard and have it whip out crappy VB code by the megabyte, it's just as easy to have an inexperienced programmer generate crappy OO code.
Exactly. The earliest C++ compilers were nothing more than wrappers translating C++ to C and handing off the C code to a compiler. All of this eventually boils bown to assembly code; in fact a friend of mine wrote a mini-os in assembly for a university assignment that actually did simple inheritance. Despite what it seems it's not rocket science, and if you think about it for a minute you'll relize it isn't. A creative application of function pointers simulates very well what C++ does with objects and inheritance, it just doesn't look as pretty and polished.
I'm assuming you were trying to be funny or sarcastic there... perfectly good working applications can be written without using GOTO in VB, there's no good reason to use it, and I haven't used it in any VB code I touched since my GW-BASIC days. The only exception is, uhm, exception/errror handling for which purpose the GOTO keyword has been co-opted (as in ON ERROR GOTO xxx). Bashing VB because it has GOTO is just as bad as bashing C because it has a long jump. I've seen more C code with gotos than VB code, and let me tell you, unlike with VB to this day I haven't figured out what the C program was doing.
Languages don't write bad code, people write bad code.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you must have been asleep when this was covered in class, as you appear to be confused about what a 404 page is. Browsers are perfectly capable of differentiating between a 'page' (ie, a 200 or 304 code) and an 'error' (a 404, 403, 500 or any other error). A 404 is not a web page, it's an error with a (hopefully) descriptive message which is usually displayed as a web page. The browser sees that it's a 404 way before it gets the rest of the page (byte-wise speaking) as that information is the first thing the web server transmits.
No kidding, eh? A virus description file is just a special case of a general file (by definition). The delta diffs, etc, claimed by Symantec have been used for ages to update 'general computer readable files'. Back in the DOS days, anyone remember the patch files for Doom? The patent _does_ say you can patch from any version to any other version (which the Doom patches didn't do), but unlike, say, Microsoft(r) WindowsUpdate(tm) and Service Packs(tm) which download the entire new files the Doom updates were really diffs. Which of course brings up something that has been around for ages, and that is rsync. If generates the differences between any two versions of 'general files' is has indexed and lets you download and apply them to local files.
Now, to put this back on topic, sort of. This whole privacy free market idea reads pretty nicely and if you follow the bouncing ball it may even make sense and make you wonder why we aren't doing this. To me, all these utopian theories are really just that. Theories. With very little to no application in current conditions. They all assume perfect market conditions where corporations are affraid of every little consumer decision, and where people run around happily making the best choices they possibly can, thus enhancing their and everyone else's lives, and where everything works out in the end (if there is anything to work out to begin with). Well, it's not called a utopia for nothing, and as soon as it comes in contact with anything non-utopian it will just collapse. Witness any number of Pacific islands before the white man arrived and exploited or killed them all. Even communism may be argued to follow this pattern; after sufficient exposure to the great capitalist economies of the west people just jumped ship. The privacy market will be the same way; it will collapse after people become disillusioned when someone doesn't follow the neat little rules.
However, things don't work that way at all, even in the bastion of free economy known as US of A (snicker, snicker). Troube is while corporations are perfectly willing to maximize their profits by any means thay can get away with (read: circumventing any protective legislation or customs), customers rarely act in their own best self-interest. Yes, the immediate benefits of their actions may be beneficial, but long term they harm the system in a slippery-slope kind of way. (As in, as immediate and short-term benefits are realized by succumbing to various conviniences and incentives, long-term prospects and choices for consumers as a whole worsen by eliminating or limiting real choice.) Would Microsoft exist in your utopia? Would it sell any software and would it get as powerful as it is? Would people still drink Coke by the gallons when it is obviously not in their short- and long-term financial and health self-interest? How can any purely free-market model account for real customer behaviour patterns? Conversely, if they do indeed are to act in their best interest, maximizing their purchasing power and influence, how do you propose they gather and process all the data necessary to make an informed decision to that effect? This system (as I see it) cannot work when decisions (initially minor, see slippery-slope) are not made by the consumers themselves, or without possessing full information. How would run-away corporations be checked in this environment? When consumers give up power by making uninformed decisions (that may or may not be in their best interest) who does that power go to? Are you assuming corporations will do 'what's right'?
I dunno... I was anways buffled how anyone can honestly believe any economical extreme (libertarian free market or communist command economy (similar arguments can be made against that side as well)) can possibly work in the real world, with real people, real inequalities (of all kinds, real and abstract, innante and constructed) and somehow not lead to a contradiction.
OK, _you_ do that. As far as your average user sophistication goes it's pretty weak security, but that's all that's required to keep casual copying down. There are actual laws to go after the pros.
The speakers would be part of a complete system. Just like there was talk about having future digital in displays (flat panels) accept a scrambled signal and decode it just before turning on the pixels so the image stream couldn't be captured on the wire. Same with sound. MS already has digital speakers you can buy (just plug 'em into a USB port and install the drivers) so it's not a stretch to imagine new computer systems from the likes of Compaq or Dell would get on the bandwagon. After all, it's better value for the consumer. You can still stick a microphone in front of your speakers or a camera in front of your monitor, but wouldn't the quality just suck?
Lets setp back for a second and look at all the billions of vehicles that will have to be retro-fitted with these devices, tested and approved in a tamper-proof manner. Yup, that'll happen really soon, uh uhm. Because governments always have trillions of dollars burning holes in their pockets.
And of course, just like with gun control and licensing, all criminals will happily comply because this will be such effective legislation.
Forget about it. The logistics alone of such an operation are well beyond the means of any nation, and will remain so for a long time.
There is an easy explanation to this article/interview/news release. Gotta get people to think about other things besides the outages of MS DNS servers. What better way than to fling some FUD around.
Uh, duh, talk about re-stating the obvious.
Outcry? What outcry? Public outcry? About what?You must be on crack. Where they actually to pull a stunt like that I'm sure Linus would just tell them to fuck off and then proceed to sift through the stack of job offers he keeps in his closet.
People play EQ because it's fun. They get together with other players to complete quests and find items and progress through the game. As soon as money enters the picture it's no longer fun. It's like you and your buddies playing poker or Quake (or pick a pastime) on odd weekends or days off for fun (ok, there may be some money involved, like, say, loser buys beer). Suddenly there's a $1000 pot. It's not not fun because there is money involved per se, but most players want no part of that (buying high level characters), they don't want some guy plopping down a grand and effectively gaining an unfair advantage. I'd go so far as to say it's cheating, it's as if a brand new player signed up with a high level character instead of starting at 0 like everyone else. There is an unstated assumption that everyone starts out equal, and it comes down to skill (and time and determination), not who has the most money. And when something stops being fun for some people (for whatever reason) they will leave and find something else they enjoy. It's bad for the game, as any form of cheating is.
Of course, there's also the factor of almost everyone scrunching up their noses whenever someone guys their way in. It's just not the way it's supposed to be done.
Does that mean they'll sue patent search engines for infringing their patents?
Slashdot is down quite frequently. Very often I can't connect to the server, only to get through again after a minute. Once someone's network was down (can't recall which one, a few weeks back) and Slashdot was unavailable to a large number of users for over a day. I assume this affected lots of people, it was a fairly major provider quite close to Slashdot's server judging from the traceroute hop count. As far as reliability goes, Slashdot is definitely not an example to follow.
I second this statement. I would say it's been stable for at least 2 years as well, that's how long I've been using it. We are using MySQL to run a fairly large db (128+MB) (one that I would _not_ relish rebuilding) with over 8 queries/s (that's average over the last month, which is exactly how long ago I restarted mysql for an upgrade). There's nothing wrong with mysql stability-wise, definitely nothing wrong with its performance (if you turn off table locking), and if you can get by without transactions (for which there is support now with db3). I have to say I wouldn't use it for anything really important or involving money, but that's only because it's not a 'trusted name', so it's largely a perception issue.
Way to go moderator! It's not like I'm posting at +2 or anything, and the post is definitely not offtopic. And moding down my spelling correction followup was just low. Cmon, I dare you! Use up one more mod point on me you wimp!
Exactly. The flying just looked silly in the trailers, but fit in very well in the movie.
I wasn't aware NetSol had the right to sell any of their TLDs at any time©
The term 'instrument' in relation to module music formats (like s3m) is somewhat misleading as they're not really instruments. An instrument in this case is any sampled sound: speech, ambient sounds, crowd sounds, distorted guitars, vocals or whatever. The goal of sound compression should be to identify patterns in wave music, isolate them into instruments and play them back by modyfying the pitch, volume, etc, to recreate the original recording as close as possible. Worst case scenario is you end up with 1 instrument, the entire track, hopefully mp3 compressed, so you're guaranteed at least as good a compression as regular mp3.
FYI, this is not the case at all© If you install drivers that are not 'certified/signed by MS' a message box will pop up warning you that these drivers are not signed and as such they're bad for your health and you should stay away from them© Despite that there appears to be no shortage of unsigned drivers from every major hardware company©
The article is not against OO, it's just against using OOP where it's not applicable just because it's 'buzzwordy' and maintains an appearance of quality. OOP is hard. That is to say real OOP is hard. It takes many years to master C++ (for example)to be able to use it to write proper OO applications. Just like you can sit any monkey in front of a keyboard and have it whip out crappy VB code by the megabyte, it's just as easy to have an inexperienced programmer generate crappy OO code.
Exactly. The earliest C++ compilers were nothing more than wrappers translating C++ to C and handing off the C code to a compiler. All of this eventually boils bown to assembly code; in fact a friend of mine wrote a mini-os in assembly for a university assignment that actually did simple inheritance. Despite what it seems it's not rocket science, and if you think about it for a minute you'll relize it isn't. A creative application of function pointers simulates very well what C++ does with objects and inheritance, it just doesn't look as pretty and polished.
I'm assuming you were trying to be funny or sarcastic there... perfectly good working applications can be written without using GOTO in VB, there's no good reason to use it, and I haven't used it in any VB code I touched since my GW-BASIC days. The only exception is, uhm, exception/errror handling for which purpose the GOTO keyword has been co-opted (as in ON ERROR GOTO xxx). Bashing VB because it has GOTO is just as bad as bashing C because it has a long jump. I've seen more C code with gotos than VB code, and let me tell you, unlike with VB to this day I haven't figured out what the C program was doing.
Languages don't write bad code, people write bad code.
Exactly© All objects actually fall at the same rate given the same gravity© It's easy enough to calculate how fast something should be going after a certain time if you know the gravity figure© The trouble comes in when there's friction and other forces to slow the falling object down, say a feather vs rock dropped from the same height©
I don't think too many people get excited over coaches, period, white or black.
Except for all the nice unique items you no longer have and are not very likely to find and will have to pay an arm and a leg to buy from someone.