The solution to that would be to make the epoxy that holds the wire together such that it won't be able to withstand the heat of reentry (not very hard, I imagine). Thus, all of the wire more than a few miles up will disintegrate into microscopic carbon filament when it hits the atmosphere.
It's already been determined that the best place to anchor the wire would be in the middle of the ocean (to avoid grounding issues) so the bit that doesn't burn up is unlikely to hit anything important.
Some guy wrote a great and very in-depth report in association with NASA as to the feasibility of a space elevator. He concluded that it is just as feasible now to build an elevator as it was to go to the moon in 1960.
Granted, I don't think the current crop of yahoos at NASA could pull something like this off, but NASA is the organization that went to the moon for Christ's sake. I'm sure that with enough capital investment and enough rolling heads, NASA could be restored to its former glory enough to build such a device.
Also, I think that an elevator is the only way to make space affordable. No engine that has to carry six kilos of fuel for every one kilo of superstructure and payload will ever be affordable to the average person.
Both oral and genetal herpes are strains of the herpes simplex virus. The former is HSV1 and the latter is HSV2. Nether are very harmful but HSV2 tends to come out of remission and be bothersome more often. Also, being a VD, it's politically considered to be more of a public health concern. Estimates are that between 50% and 60% of Americans have HSV1 and 20% have HSV2. Both diseases can weaken the immune system when they come out of remission and make the host more supseptable to other disease. Also, because HSV2 can cause open sores on the genitals, it increases the risk of contraction of other VDs, most importantly, AIDS. You are right though, both strains of Herpes Simplex are by themselves quite harmless to their hosts.
Arquette has figurted out something that Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pynchon missed,
Err, well, as far as I know, nether Dante, Shakespeare, nor Milton ever wrote a single line of prose in their lives, so I wouldn't expect them to figure out anything about novel writing.
Plus, Dante wasn't even an english writer. Styles are a product of the language they're written in. On that vein, I remember a quote about Pope's translation of the Illiad (which is second only to Milton's poem as far as english epics go). Thomas Bentley said to him, "It's a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you musn't call it Homer."
I know I'm being a little pedantic, I think we all get your point. I do not doubt that this "Arquette" guy is a total dumbass, but you could have been more accurate by mentioning real english novelists, such as Melville, Dickens, Twain, Crane or, um... I guess Pynchon... sorta.
The guy obviously British, not American. They're like Americans except that they have funny accents and tend to get really physical when their sports teams do poorly.
I know you just wanted to have a good 'ole anti-american rant, sorry to spoil it with reality.:<
I live on the north end of Chicago, and work and go to school downtown (roughly 5 miles south). I don't have a car had have no need for one. Very few of my friends have cars, and those that do don't use them to commute. This is, of course, because Chicago is one of the rare American cities that made it through the auto age with a functional transit system. I spend my half-hour commute on the el reading books, napping, watching the city go by out the window, or just watching the other people get on and off. Whatever I feel like doing that day. I also feel that my ride home gives me time to recharge, so I have energy to do other things than sit behind a television.
Believe it or not, there are still real communities in the US, it's not all suburbian wasteland. Of course, even the Chicago suburbs are served by Pace buses and the Metra (commuter rail). Fewer than half of my suburbian friends drive into town, most take the Metra, which is both faster than driving during rush hour and less stressful.
When I go back to my hometown (Springfield IL) to visit my family, which I do about six or seven times a year, I take Amtrak. Yeah, Amtrak is a pain sometimes, they are frequently late (mostly because of freight interference), but it's still a hell of alot better than driving. I usually spend the first hour of the three hour trip sleeping (Amtrak seats are quite comfortable, with alot of leg room), then get out my laptop and do whatever I feel like, maby just play nethack, but usually programming or tweaking the system, or I read or get something to eat in the dining car.
My point is that the whole "The US needs cars" thing is a bunch of bullshit. If this country would properly fund its public transit systems (and quit subsidizing those suburbian SUV drivers), we could have systems every bit as good as those in Europe. If we'd quit zoning to enforce sprawl (minimum setbacks and parking around stores, not allowing stores into residential areas (as an aside, the store from which I buy milk is a two minute walk from my apartment), minimum street width, etc) we could have real, living communities such as which now exist in a few isolated areas of cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
There's nothing intrisic about this country that says that it has to be an auto-suburbian wasteland, just people like the people in this thread who are too close-minded to think that there might be a better way to live.
The general observation is not widespread, but trivially, the respectively interdepartmental maintenance is connected up to agenerally alternative circulation. Since the past history is not connected up to the attendant interest, the substance is weak.Trivially, the separate insufficience is not known to be very clear,but it is easy to overlook the fact that a substance responsibility in close proximity to the accordingly schedulable friction is not beneficial. This leaves out of consideration the fact that the redefinition is very unique, and it is interesting to note that a cleanly dubious insufficience is in the vicinity of the preparedly functional enhancement. It is intuitively clear that the separate discretion is not being caused by real physics, but the fact is that a prepared substance is no known to be consistently durable.
So while it looks like a good idea on the suface, the chemestry just isn't there.
Still, I could be wrong, and they know something I don't. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. It'll be neat if they get it working, unless I get sprayed with it.:-P
Chris Black was doing his "Year in review" on the daily show when he said:
"So my review for 2001 the year is the same as for 2001 the space odyssey, It went on too long, it was hard to follow, and you could only enjoy it if you were really, really stoned.
I think that is a pretty apt analysis of the similarities between the two;-)
Microsoft, in a bid today to control the Evil market into the future, has filed for a patent on so called EvilOS technology.
Industry leaders and Open Source activists alike have decried the patent as unfairly perpetuating Microsoft's illegal monopoly in the Operating Systems market. "Evil is set become a very important feature in operating systems of the Twenty First Century, and by getting this patent, Microsoft has effectivly locked competitors, such as the free Linux Operating System, out of the market", said Eric S Raymond, leader of the Open Source Initiative.
The Electronic Founteers Foundation has called for technologists to search "prior art," or implementations of Evil in operating system design prior to Microsoft's, in an attempt to challenge this patent in court.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer countered critics by saying: "Microsoft has always been a leader in Evil and Operating Systems, we were the first to innovate Operating Systems to have Evil built in, and so it is only fair that we should be granted this patent. That's the American Way."
Holy fuck you're thick, of course it keeps local packets in, we're talking about forged FROM addresses!
Suppose I'm 31337 h4x0r, and I am going to ddos GNC.com because the guy who runs it is a moron. I simply throw packets at his site. Unfortanly, when I do that, he can immedently see where my packets are comming from by looking in the FROM address header. My computer built the packet, so it can alter the header, so I use the raw socket;-) provided by my OS distributer to rewrite the FROM header before it goes out. Viola, when he gets the packet, the FROM has the IP address to a flower company in Japan.
Egress filtering means the router on my network checks the IP address in the FROM field of the packet before it routes it onto the internet, says "woah, this isn't an address on my network", and throws it away.
Egress is something that EVERY FSCKIN ROUTER on the internet SHOULD have done YEARS ago. Hell, the 486 providing masq for my network at home does egress (makes sure it's a 192.168.1.0/24 address), it's a BASIC function of a properly installed router.
I find it amusing that they took these games on the pretense that, if the public had access to them, they would learn by example to do things that are not good for society (ie, stealing cars).
So the Aussie government's solution is to go out and legally steal all of the video game copies from the stores.
Yeah, really great example there guys.
I guess their message is that stealing is ok if it's being done For the Children(tm).
It reminds me of the tee-shirt, with a picture of a swat team breaking into a house, the caption reads "We're from the government, we're here to help!"
If he said "Microsoft ate their lunch" one more time, I was gong to puke my lunch all over my keyboard.
Anyhow, I think he speaks horrible advice from a computer science standpoint. "It dosen't matter how bad, buggy, cludgy, and crufty a code base is, never ever rewrite it". If you don't understand what the code is, if it's impossible to read, don't worry! that's the sign of good code!
It speaks alot of Microsoft's tactics, do whatever it is that takes the absolute least effort possible, and charge as much as you possibly can for it. All of those other companies failed because they were focused on quality, whilst they were focused on nothing the bottom line.
Here's what I think is the worst software sin: writting shitty code and pretending it's not shitty. Regardless of how much gloss you put on it, bad code is rotten to the core, and it reflects that in stability and security. Why on earth do you think Microsoft falls flat on its face in those areas?
I remember a story about JD Rockefeller. He was touring one of his oil works, and he saw someone soldering the oil cans shut. He asked him how much solder he uses on each can. The man told him, something like 48. Rockefeller said "from now on, use 36". That's exactly the type of cutting corners companies like Microsoft do. THat's not good for the customers, it's not good for society, and it's not good capatilism.
WURE GOING 2 BR1NG DOWN THE ENTIRE INTURNET!!!! U CANT M1Z IT. AL UV THE FBIZ THINK THEYRE GOING 2 GET UZ BUT THEIYRE RONG!
2 ATTEND: GO 2 THE FRENCH HAXOR SCH00L 2 FRESEN UP UR 31337 SK1LZ.NEXT. MAKE SURE UR SCRIPTZ ARE UP 2 SNUFF. WHEN URE DONE W1TH AL UV THAT. CUM + HAVE FUN!!!!!1!!
WURE GOING 2 MEET AT CESUR HOTEL IN LOZ VEGAZ + 1F URE LUCKY. UL SEE UZ BREAK IN2 THE NSA!!!!!!!1
DONT BOTHUR TELING UZ UR CRED1T CARD NUMBUR. WE ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!
I realise no-one cares, but I'm going to say it anyway. CP/M stands for Control Program/Monitor. If it was Control Program for Microcomputers, it wouldn't have a slash.
The article refrenced the comp.os.cpm FAQ, which has this to say on the subject:
Q3: Does CP/M stand for anything?
There are at least three popular answers - Control Program for Microcomputers, Control Program for Microprocessors, and Control Program/Monitor. The issue is clouded by authors of popular CP/M books giving different answers. According to Gary Kildall (the author of CP/M), in response to a direct question on the PBS show "The Computer Chronicles" following Computer Bowl I, the answer is: Control Program for Microcomputers. This is also consistent with DRI documentation. See, for example, p. 4 of the DRI TEX manual.
I agree that your argument makes sense, but the authoritive souces say "Control Program for Microcomputers
As is often true on O'Reillynet, the article's well-thought and interesting reading.
I don't know what's worse, that Hemos is quote whoring* for O'Reilly now, or that he's so bad at it. I mean, god damn, show some tact man! It's like when Jon Katz tried to claim that an Afgani emaied him from a war zone, everyone knew he was full of it from a mile away. If you're going to be so obvious about blasting away your journalistic integrity (does slashdot have any left?), you might as well get a job reviewing movies for the LA times or something.
*For those who don't know (and will probably moderate me down for using a 'naughty word') a "quote whore" is somone in some imagined place of authority on a subject who is paid by a cooporate entity to say good things about it. Like a film critic being paid off by a movie studio.
Vera was released as Free Software a while ago. It isn't GPL, but the license looks alot like the GPL. I wonder if one program going Free puts pressure on its compeditors to become Free too.
Appearently, one of the reasons Synopsys released Vera as Free Software was to make it an ubiquitous "industry standard" verification langague. Now, if other verification langages are to survive, they must even the playing field by becomming Free as well.
I used fanatic in the above post. It didn't look like that in the preview (it properly closed the italics). Slashcode has really gone downhill in the past few months, and it's getting really annoying.
My physics teacher last year was an HP fanatic. I'm sure he's crying right now. It's because of him that I know how to use HP calculators at all.
One thing though, we were once dealing with a real bugger of an equation, and to solve for variables on the "wrong" side of it, he just had us put as many numbers in it as possible to crunch some of the algebra out of it and then solve. One student asked him about changing it around, and he said he did it by hand a few years ago and it took him eight sheets of paper and about two hours. I did it on my TI-92+ sitting there in class in about five minutes.
He couldn't help but be impressed.
My point is that the HP croud acts so stuck up sometimes that they can't admit that some TI calculators have some really neat featurs. It's not a Chevy vs Ferrari debate, it's more like Chevy vs Ford. I'll agree though, all TI calculators except the 92* and 89s suck ass.
The best definition of God that I've ever heard is "That which created this Universe." It's a great definiton, because it means that everyone can believe in God, even me, and I'm agnostic.
I can prove that such a god exists:
First, I must postulate that this Universe exists. Second, I postulate that this Universe can not survive forever. I will prove that postulate with the second law of thermodynamics: This Universe will eventually undergo heat death. Because it hasn't yet, its age is finite. Consequently, there must have been some point in time in the distant past that the Universe came into existance. Therefore, the Universe must have been created by some phenomenon. Per our definition, that pehnomenon is God, so God exists.
Just in case someone points out that time might not have always been what it is today, I shall define "Universe." See, the whole multiple Universe theory is pretty useless if you define Universe as "everything", and it isn't a very useful definition anyhow. Therefore, I presume to define this Universe as "everthing that obeys the same laws of physics which we obey". There is no evidence that we can be directly affected by anything other than this Universe (and if we could, the Second Law might not be true anyhow). So time always had to work this way or it wouldn't be this Universe any more.
I mean, if you the ISP can change the code, how can it be insured that the software hasn't been tinkered with, to produce in-accurate results?
The FBI could take MD5 checksums of all the binaries on the system before giving it to the ISP, then it could simply check the checksums when it gets it back.
Of course, if the ISP couldn't be trusted with the binaries, I don't think the ISP could be trusted not to tinker with the datafiles that they generate ether.
Linuxworld is having issues, so I can't read the atricle, but I remember Petreley from when I used to get Inforworld Magazine.
He's the stereotypical technology pundit. He learns just enough about technology to have an uninformed opinion about it.
The worst thing is that we on the internet have truckloads of people like him. Every mailing list, newsgroup, web log, IRC channel, or any other group in which people or trying to get things done will have a crew of wankers spouting their opinions with no attempt to actually contribute anything useful.
What really burns me about pundits is that they're getting paid to do what a couple million monkeys on the internet do for free.
Take Petreley. One time, he wrote an article about how maverick programmers don't write good code. I guess I can believe that. Then he went on to say that all brilliant programmers are mavericks, and Microsoft etc all hire them so they'll write bad code and people will have to buy bug fixes. Um, right. He then finished off by claiming that he used to be an absolutely outstanding programmer and that he had to quit because he was so amazingly good that writing decent code wasn't fun for him.
He has, to the best of my knowledge, never actually contributed anything at all even remotely useful to Free Software, or computing in general. He's even worse than Fred Langa, the guy who helped invent ethernet in 1976, then spent the rest of his career punditing, developing more and more bizarre opinions as his practical knowledge became antiquated.
So here's a message to Petreley: Do something useful, anything. If all you have to contribute is your opinion, then go home. Free Software writers are mostly volunteers, we don't have to put up with your wanking. If you have a problem with a program, file a fucking bug report. Actually, if you're such an amazing programmer, SHOW US SOME CODE! I don't care how much Infoworld pays you, to us, your opinions are worthless. So do something useful or, I'll have to dig out my cluestick and use it bash you into a profession that benifits humanity in some conceivable way.
Slashdot Mirror
The solution to that would be to make the epoxy that holds the wire together such that it won't be able to withstand the heat of reentry (not very hard, I imagine). Thus, all of the wire more than a few miles up will disintegrate into microscopic carbon filament when it hits the atmosphere.
It's already been determined that the best place to anchor the wire would be in the middle of the ocean (to avoid grounding issues) so the bit that doesn't burn up is unlikely to hit anything important.
Some guy wrote a great and very in-depth report in association with NASA as to the feasibility of a space elevator. He concluded that it is just as feasible now to build an elevator as it was to go to the moon in 1960.
Granted, I don't think the current crop of yahoos at NASA could pull something like this off, but NASA is the organization that went to the moon for Christ's sake. I'm sure that with enough capital investment and enough rolling heads, NASA could be restored to its former glory enough to build such a device.
Also, I think that an elevator is the only way to make space affordable. No engine that has to carry six kilos of fuel for every one kilo of superstructure and payload will ever be affordable to the average person.
Check out herpes.com for more information.
Err, well, as far as I know, nether Dante, Shakespeare, nor Milton ever wrote a single line of prose in their lives, so I wouldn't expect them to figure out anything about novel writing.
Plus, Dante wasn't even an english writer. Styles are a product of the language they're written in. On that vein, I remember a quote about Pope's translation of the Illiad (which is second only to Milton's poem as far as english epics go). Thomas Bentley said to him, "It's a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you musn't call it Homer."
I know I'm being a little pedantic, I think we all get your point. I do not doubt that this "Arquette" guy is a total dumbass, but you could have been more accurate by mentioning real english novelists, such as Melville, Dickens, Twain, Crane or, um ... I guess Pynchon ... sorta.
The guy obviously British, not American. They're like Americans except that they have funny accents and tend to get really physical when their sports teams do poorly.
I know you just wanted to have a good 'ole anti-american rant, sorry to spoil it with reality. :<
Believe it or not, there are still real communities in the US, it's not all suburbian wasteland. Of course, even the Chicago suburbs are served by Pace buses and the Metra (commuter rail). Fewer than half of my suburbian friends drive into town, most take the Metra, which is both faster than driving during rush hour and less stressful.
When I go back to my hometown (Springfield IL) to visit my family, which I do about six or seven times a year, I take Amtrak. Yeah, Amtrak is a pain sometimes, they are frequently late (mostly because of freight interference), but it's still a hell of alot better than driving. I usually spend the first hour of the three hour trip sleeping (Amtrak seats are quite comfortable, with alot of leg room), then get out my laptop and do whatever I feel like, maby just play nethack, but usually programming or tweaking the system, or I read or get something to eat in the dining car.
My point is that the whole "The US needs cars" thing is a bunch of bullshit. If this country would properly fund its public transit systems (and quit subsidizing those suburbian SUV drivers), we could have systems every bit as good as those in Europe. If we'd quit zoning to enforce sprawl (minimum setbacks and parking around stores, not allowing stores into residential areas (as an aside, the store from which I buy milk is a two minute walk from my apartment), minimum street width, etc) we could have real, living communities such as which now exist in a few isolated areas of cities like Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.
There's nothing intrisic about this country that says that it has to be an auto-suburbian wasteland, just people like the people in this thread who are too close-minded to think that there might be a better way to live.
Check this out. I have a friend who's fired a number of them off, he says that they're every bit as impressive as the website claims.
Unfortunatly, I don't have enough money to buy ~600 sparklers, so no bomb this fourth. :(
The general observation is not widespread, but trivially, the respectively interdepartmental maintenance is connected up to agenerally alternative circulation. Since the past history is not connected up to the attendant interest, the substance is weak.Trivially, the separate insufficience is not known to be very clear,but it is easy to overlook the fact that a substance responsibility in close proximity to the accordingly schedulable friction is not beneficial. This leaves out of consideration the fact that the redefinition is very unique, and it is interesting to note that a cleanly dubious insufficience is in the vicinity of the preparedly functional enhancement. It is intuitively clear that the separate discretion is not being caused by real physics, but the fact is that a prepared
:-P
substance is no known to be consistently durable.
So while it looks like a good idea on the suface, the chemestry just isn't there.
Still, I could be wrong, and they know something I don't. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see. It'll be neat if they get it working, unless I get sprayed with it.
That's silicone, the polymer, not silicon, the metalloid.
Chris Black was doing his "Year in review" on the daily show when he said:
"So my review for 2001 the year is the same as for 2001 the space odyssey, It went on too long, it was hard to follow, and you could only enjoy it if you were really, really stoned.
I think that is a pretty apt analysis of the similarities between the two ;-)
Microsoft, in a bid today to control the Evil market into the future, has filed for a patent on so called EvilOS technology.
Industry leaders and Open Source activists alike have decried the patent as unfairly perpetuating Microsoft's illegal monopoly in the Operating Systems market. "Evil is set become a very important feature in operating systems of the Twenty First Century, and by getting this patent, Microsoft has effectivly locked competitors, such as the free Linux Operating System, out of the market", said Eric S Raymond, leader of the Open Source Initiative.
The Electronic Founteers Foundation has called for technologists to search "prior art," or implementations of Evil in operating system design prior to Microsoft's, in an attempt to challenge this patent in court.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer countered critics by saying: "Microsoft has always been a leader in Evil and Operating Systems, we were the first to innovate Operating Systems to have Evil built in, and so it is only fair that we should be granted this patent. That's the American Way."
Holy fuck you're thick, of course it keeps local packets in, we're talking about forged FROM addresses!
;-) provided by my OS distributer to rewrite the FROM header before it goes out. Viola, when he gets the packet, the FROM has the IP address to a flower company in Japan.
Suppose I'm 31337 h4x0r, and I am going to ddos GNC.com because the guy who runs it is a moron. I simply throw packets at his site. Unfortanly, when I do that, he can immedently see where my packets are comming from by looking in the FROM address header. My computer built the packet, so it can alter the header, so I use the raw socket
Egress filtering means the router on my network checks the IP address in the FROM field of the packet before it routes it onto the internet, says "woah, this isn't an address on my network", and throws it away.
Egress is something that EVERY FSCKIN ROUTER on the internet SHOULD have done YEARS ago. Hell, the 486 providing masq for my network at home does egress (makes sure it's a 192.168.1.0/24 address), it's a BASIC function of a properly installed router.
I find it amusing that they took these games on the pretense that, if the public had access to them, they would learn by example to do things that are not good for society (ie, stealing cars).
So the Aussie government's solution is to go out and legally steal all of the video game copies from the stores.
Yeah, really great example there guys.
I guess their message is that stealing is ok if it's being done For the Children(tm).
It reminds me of the tee-shirt, with a picture of a swat team breaking into a house, the caption reads "We're from the government, we're here to help!"
If he said "Microsoft ate their lunch" one more time, I was gong to puke my lunch all over my keyboard.
Anyhow, I think he speaks horrible advice from a computer science standpoint. "It dosen't matter how bad, buggy, cludgy, and crufty a code base is, never ever rewrite it". If you don't understand what the code is, if it's impossible to read, don't worry! that's the sign of good code!
It speaks alot of Microsoft's tactics, do whatever it is that takes the absolute least effort possible, and charge as much as you possibly can for it. All of those other companies failed because they were focused on quality, whilst they were focused on nothing the bottom line.
Here's what I think is the worst software sin: writting shitty code and pretending it's not shitty. Regardless of how much gloss you put on it, bad code is rotten to the core, and it reflects that in stability and security. Why on earth do you think Microsoft falls flat on its face in those areas?
I remember a story about JD Rockefeller. He was touring one of his oil works, and he saw someone soldering the oil cans shut. He asked him how much solder he uses on each can. The man told him, something like 48. Rockefeller said "from now on, use 36". That's exactly the type of cutting corners companies like Microsoft do. THat's not good for the customers, it's not good for society, and it's not good capatilism.
HEY D00D. BOY HAVE 1 GOT A HAX0R PARTY 4 U!!1!
WURE GOING 2 BR1NG DOWN THE ENTIRE INTURNET!!!! U CANT M1Z IT. AL UV THE FBIZ THINK THEYRE GOING 2 GET UZ BUT THEIYRE RONG!
2 ATTEND: GO 2 THE FRENCH HAXOR SCH00L 2 FRESEN UP UR 31337 SK1LZ.NEXT. MAKE SURE UR SCRIPTZ ARE UP 2 SNUFF. WHEN URE DONE W1TH AL UV THAT. CUM + HAVE FUN!!!!!1!!
WURE GOING 2 MEET AT CESUR HOTEL IN LOZ VEGAZ + 1F URE LUCKY. UL SEE UZ BREAK IN2 THE NSA!!!!!!!1
DONT BOTHUR TELING UZ UR CRED1T CARD NUMBUR. WE ALREADY HAVE IT!!!!
Vi != emacs
I realise no-one cares, but I'm going to say it anyway. CP/M stands for Control Program/Monitor. If it was Control Program for Microcomputers, it wouldn't have a slash.
The article refrenced the comp.os.cpm FAQ, which has this to say on the subject:
Q3: Does CP/M stand for anything?
There are at least three popular answers - Control Program for Microcomputers, Control Program for Microprocessors, and Control Program/Monitor. The issue is clouded by authors of popular CP/M books giving different answers. According to Gary Kildall (the author of CP/M), in response to a direct question on the PBS show "The Computer Chronicles" following Computer Bowl I, the answer is: Control Program for Microcomputers. This is also consistent with DRI documentation. See, for example, p. 4 of the DRI TEX manual.
I agree that your argument makes sense, but the authoritive souces say "Control Program for Microcomputers
I don't know what's worse, that Hemos is quote whoring* for O'Reilly now, or that he's so bad at it. I mean, god damn, show some tact man! It's like when Jon Katz tried to claim that an Afgani emaied him from a war zone, everyone knew he was full of it from a mile away. If you're going to be so obvious about blasting away your journalistic integrity (does slashdot have any left?), you might as well get a job reviewing movies for the LA times or something.
*For those who don't know (and will probably moderate me down for using a 'naughty word') a "quote whore" is somone in some imagined place of authority on a subject who is paid by a cooporate entity to say good things about it. Like a film critic being paid off by a movie studio.
Of course, this is currently Win32 only . . . Might Cartio be the first to do micropayments right?
What site is this again? Because I thought I was reading slashdot.org.
I think there's been some horrible mistake.
Vera was released as Free Software a while ago. It isn't GPL, but the license looks alot like the GPL. I wonder if one program going Free puts pressure on its compeditors to become Free too.
Appearently, one of the reasons Synopsys released Vera as Free Software was to make it an ubiquitous "industry standard" verification langague. Now, if other verification langages are to survive, they must even the playing field by becomming Free as well.
Just a thought.
And here I sit sipping on Ramen broth.
I used fanatic in the above post. It didn't look like that in the preview (it properly closed the italics). Slashcode has really gone downhill in the past few months, and it's getting really annoying.
One thing though, we were once dealing with a real bugger of an equation, and to solve for variables on the "wrong" side of it, he just had us put as many numbers in it as possible to crunch some of the algebra out of it and then solve. One student asked him about changing it around, and he said he did it by hand a few years ago and it took him eight sheets of paper and about two hours. I did it on my TI-92+ sitting there in class in about five minutes.
He couldn't help but be impressed.
My point is that the HP croud acts so stuck up sometimes that they can't admit that some TI calculators have some really neat featurs. It's not a Chevy vs Ferrari debate, it's more like Chevy vs Ford. I'll agree though, all TI calculators except the 92* and 89s suck ass.
Define God.
The best definition of God that I've ever heard is "That which created this Universe." It's a great definiton, because it means that everyone can believe in God, even me, and I'm agnostic.
I can prove that such a god exists:
First, I must postulate that this Universe exists. Second, I postulate that this Universe can not survive forever. I will prove that postulate with the second law of thermodynamics: This Universe will eventually undergo heat death. Because it hasn't yet, its age is finite. Consequently, there must have been some point in time in the distant past that the Universe came into existance. Therefore, the Universe must have been created by some phenomenon. Per our definition, that pehnomenon is God, so God exists.
Just in case someone points out that time might not have always been what it is today, I shall define "Universe." See, the whole multiple Universe theory is pretty useless if you define Universe as "everything", and it isn't a very useful definition anyhow. Therefore, I presume to define this Universe as "everthing that obeys the same laws of physics which we obey". There is no evidence that we can be directly affected by anything other than this Universe (and if we could, the Second Law might not be true anyhow). So time always had to work this way or it wouldn't be this Universe any more.
The FBI could take MD5 checksums of all the binaries on the system before giving it to the ISP, then it could simply check the checksums when it gets it back.
Of course, if the ISP couldn't be trusted with the binaries, I don't think the ISP could be trusted not to tinker with the datafiles that they generate ether.
Linuxworld is having issues, so I can't read the atricle, but I remember Petreley from when I used to get Inforworld Magazine.
He's the stereotypical technology pundit. He learns just enough about technology to have an uninformed opinion about it.
The worst thing is that we on the internet have truckloads of people like him. Every mailing list, newsgroup, web log, IRC channel, or any other group in which people or trying to get things done will have a crew of wankers spouting their opinions with no attempt to actually contribute anything useful.
What really burns me about pundits is that they're getting paid to do what a couple million monkeys on the internet do for free.
Take Petreley. One time, he wrote an article about how maverick programmers don't write good code. I guess I can believe that. Then he went on to say that all brilliant programmers are mavericks, and Microsoft etc all hire them so they'll write bad code and people will have to buy bug fixes. Um, right. He then finished off by claiming that he used to be an absolutely outstanding programmer and that he had to quit because he was so amazingly good that writing decent code wasn't fun for him.
He has, to the best of my knowledge, never actually contributed anything at all even remotely useful to Free Software, or computing in general. He's even worse than Fred Langa, the guy who helped invent ethernet in 1976, then spent the rest of his career punditing, developing more and more bizarre opinions as his practical knowledge became antiquated.
So here's a message to Petreley: Do something useful, anything. If all you have to contribute is your opinion, then go home. Free Software writers are mostly volunteers, we don't have to put up with your wanking. If you have a problem with a program, file a fucking bug report. Actually, if you're such an amazing programmer, SHOW US SOME CODE! I don't care how much Infoworld pays you, to us, your opinions are worthless. So do something useful or, I'll have to dig out my cluestick and use it bash you into a profession that benifits humanity in some conceivable way.