The only thing I use that machine for is gaming. I dislike the propspect of calling MS to re-register (I reformat once every two months, or so it seems), so I use the Corporate version. After that, it's just important to make sure that it doesn't get hacked immediately.
Everything else happens under Gentoo. I know that I could run NWN, UT, and Q3A in Linux, but the 3-D acceleration isn't as good (different hardware.)
I am for that. If the information is not released after a reasonable amount of time, the company may never take responsibility for it being there. We've witnessed this several times from a certain big company. Also, the moment that the vulnerability goes public, there should be a side note that says "The company was repeated informed of this vulnerability over a span of X months , but chose not to improve the quality of their product."
If massive numbers of users are infected by a virus created as a result of this announcement, then the company should be held completely responsible. They would have had months to address the issue, but chose not to.
I am a programmer, but started as the in-between half-support, half-development utility guy. I was hired on after being a temp in a different department, at $13/hr. After the first year, I was salaried at $35,000.
$35K seems fair. Nothing against you, but as a kid out of school, you're more than likely to be annoying to fellow workers than a valuable member of the team. Also, the work you're going to do is going to be boring and low priority. It's at that time when you have enough time to do something useful on the side, and basically sell it to your boss. That's what I did, and after the boss saw my value as a programmer, I was moved shortly afterwards.
After the first couple of years, your salary will be much higher. You can't expect to be making.COM era money right now. It's better to "start at the bottom and work your way up."
The statement "Nothing is certain or provable" disproves itself. If, in fact, it is true, then it is a certainty in itself. If it's not, then it leaves the door open for certainty and provability.
Eh. They didn't make much of a dent in the dial-up ISP market, even though they tried to force their way into that. They are also failing in the pocket-pc / palmtop market. They probably aren't doing all that well in their wireless networking push, and I have doubts about even the X-Box.
Even if Microsoft looked at such a deal objectively, they wouldn't see enough money to make it worth the effort. The last time I checked, MS does not have a monopoly in the hand-held audio player department, and it's a bit late in the game for them to start.
MS doesn't really have the same things to offer as Apple does. MS does have the desktop monopoly, but there's the problem of Real already having a player for that platform. It's unlikely that people are going to want to load up Real on their palm PC's too, since that whole role falls into the realm of the iPod and Rio.
I hope Real tanks. They have realized that their product sucks, that ad-infested software sucks, and that they don't have the intelligence to really know marketing. They are trying to turn to other companies to bail them out, but I think they'll run up against the fact that no one really gives a crap about their products.
I had an independant contract that I was working on not too long ago. I love the "real" job that I have, but the on-the-side project would have provided some extra cash.
My friend and I went into the deal without writing up a contract, and also without requiring a final set of specifications up front. This was our biggest mistake, because the guy we had the contract with kept changing the specifications on a whim. You could tell that he hadn't ever done real development work either, because he though his changes would be simple, when in fact they usually involved two to three days of work.
As it went, we took far longer than we had estimated, and we never got paid for the work. I guess we still own the copyright on the code, but it isn't really useful for us in any way. I had spent many nights coding a program that I didn't really enjoy instead of doing hobbies or going out. I had to endure a number of phone calls that occasionally came later at night, because the guy that we had the contract with was socially inept. Lastly, he did not speak English very well at all.
That whole experience almost turned me off to the whole independant project experience. At least now I know that everything needs to be defined in the beginning, with little room for change. The design needs to be in place before the coding, otherwise you'll get bogged down in a quagmire of continuous "extra" features.
That's absolutely right. The U.S. DOJ in this case is being incredibly stupid. The guy isn't a citizen of the U.S., hasn't ever been in the U.S., and is not beholden to U.S. laws.
Now, if the U.S. decided to attack Australia, then we could get our mitts on that guy.....
The question is, what law would these orders be beholden to? Last time I checked, Bush had unanimous support for his actions from both the Senate and the House.
What's amusing is that if the U.S. decided to break a treaty, there's nothing that any other country on Earth would do about it. They'd bitch and moan, but they wouldn't raise a finger. I imagine that if the U.S. became a totalitarian country that practiced genocide, I imagine the French would want to have peace talks instead of trying to right the wrong that the U.S. would be comitting.
Of course, the U.S. doesn't break treaties with countries that depend on the U.S. Treaties with Germany, France, the U.K., and Spain are all intact, much to the favor of those countries. The U.S. surely doesn't need to have treaties with these countries, but it does. Explain the reason why a "treatybreaker" country would do such a thing?
I'll bet that any hosting company out there that size would be churning that number of sites. Think about the percentage of the population that actually cares about technological things. They are the ones that would maintain sites, probably on their own. Those that put up sites and email them to their friends, saying "Come check out my homepage!," well... those sites really don't last that long.
Given that they are the majority of the population, the amount of turnover is probably not bad to just average.
Any lawsuit that SCO files against his company will have to wait until the suit with IBM is done, and the actual ownership of Linux IP has been decided in court. Even if SCO does file suit, the judge in the case would probably put it on hold until the IBM suit is done.
If it is found that SCO does not hold any rights to the Linux kernel, then the contract that EV1Servers entered into with SCO is invalid. I'm sure that EV1Servers would also have the right to file suit against SCO, for defrauding the company.
No kidding. It's kind of like the sand in the long jump pit: The athletes might not get hurt if they jumped without it, but it ensures safety whether it's needed or not.
I know that I would feel safe as a customer of his service, because he acts in my best interests. My best interests don't really follow with my political views or emotional ties to the SCO case. I think that SCO is a company that is best tied and burned in a pit, but I know that I don't have the resources to stand against SCO, should they come after me.
I have not purchased licenses for the linux machines that I run. I probably wouldn't, were I in his shoes, but I would consider it.
This sort of makes me worry about the school that you went to. Where I went to school, the CS curriculum was really just another form of math. The math class requirements were steep, since it was a required minor, and the CS classes taught a much more in-depth form of the CS-vital math.
Stuff like automata theory and advanced logic were offered through the CS department, not the Math department. Other requirements were a firm understanding of the lambda calculus, and a whole lot of other mathematical stuff that goes into defining languages. Programming took a back seat to the actual understanding of CS concepts.
If your school were anything like mine, you missed out on a whole lot of detailed math by shunning CS-offered courses. CS is essentially a subset of Mathematics, and has less to do with things like web programming, RAD, VB, Java, etc, than it does with algorithmic efficiency, languages and machines, logic, discrete mathematics, and a sleiu of other things.
Don't forget these people. The difference between these people and the mono people is the level of zealotry.:-)
The dot-gnu people object to the fact that the mono compiler was written in C# and bootstrapped with with MS C# compiler. So, the dot-gnu people wrote their own compiler in C, not C#, and haven't found a reason to write the compiler in C#.
Patents exist to enforce a mini-monopoly on the marketplace. Patents are open, you can see all of the designs and everything. You, in effect, can re-create anything that has been patented. You just can't sell it as a product.
Last time I checked, MONO wasn't being sold by anyone.
You only get 20 forked versions on projects that are shittily managed. XFree comes to mind, or AtheOS How many OSS projects out there have 4+ forks? I can really only think of X at the moment.
Now, if Java went OSS, and it was guided along fairly by Sun, or some Sun-created consortium, would they really get 20 forks? I highly doubt it.
I think it would be more interesting if you had to get the healer to go back to your corpse to resurrect you. It only makes sense, right? I mean... If a healer resurrected your ghost on the spot, you or the healer should be able to design the new body that you're going into.
Hmm. That could be cool. You could have wierd maniacal healers that construct golems, and go out and capture spirits and imprison them in an artificial body. Then again, you could also have the healer that follows you ghost and loots your ass while your ghost is watching. I also like the idea of haunting someone into retrieving your body, bringing you to a healer, getting you resurrected, then marrying and having a happy ending.
Why don't you get out the tinfoil hat already. If Blizzard wanted to steal information from you, they'd probably go about it by taking advantage of one of the numerous software holes in Windows.
Blizzard doesn't really care who you are. Of course, they care about when you log on, and what type of character you play, and all that jazz. This allows them to do a number of things to enhance the game playing experience. Think about it...
They know when you log on. This lets them map out peak times of connectivity, so you don't have to play with massive amounts of lag. The Battle.Net servers have been somewhat laggy recently, but it's not bad for something that is provided for free. They also would like to know what times are the peaks of activity because they probably bill those ad companies for time, and base the price off of the load on the server.
Blizzard wants to make sure that you own the game that you're playing. Why is this such a problem? If I wrote some software, and sold it, I would probably want to implement a relatively easy but effective way of ensuring that the product isn't being stolen. As it is, since I own my copy of Diablo II, I don't have to worry whether I can play on Battle.Net or not.
Lastly, Blizzard wants to enhance the game itself. This is based, in part, by it's knowledge of what you play, what you use, etc. Balance is a key part of the game... getting it to the point where the game is a challenge to get to the point of greatness, but once greatness is achieved, the sense of accomplishment is high. Having a level 50 sorcerous, for instance, is a rather enjoyable thing... even if you do die frequently enough in nightmare and hell difficulties. From what I know, the last update that Blizzard made to Diablo II basically changed the entire game. There's always new things being added, there's always security problems being fixed, and there are always new avenues for creating characters being made.
Tell me, then, why should Blizzard be denied the rights to control their own software?
I can't say that it's buggy or anything, but there's a game called "Blackstone" or "Blackthorn" that isn't really that great. It's a platform based shooter, but it isn't nearly as fun as the original Duke Nukem, or The Gods.
Profanity as a word only came into existence as a result of religion. Only one out of the four definitions for "profane" from dictionary.com did not have to do with the word "sacred."
Funny enough, profanity is really just something that is not religious. The FCC is profane, in this case.
But we remain concerned about the potential dangers posed to the public by peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.
p2p is terrorism at it's finest! It causes the death of many people, and is more fatal than second-hand smoke! Fellow members of society are adversely affected by your useage of such applications, because surely the data residing on your machine can cause heart problems for your neighbor, will cripple their offspring, and will ultimately blow up their house.
"Harmful to the public." What kind of bullshit are they trying to pawn on us? One can argue that the RIAA and MPAA are harmful to the public, by way of the negative influences upon the younger generations of society. One can argue that I could fend off an army of attacking barbozons with a spoon. One can argue that Rush Limbaugh is both detrimental and beneficial at the same time. I don't know how they can argue that p2p applications themselves, though, are harmful to society.
The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst geeks. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you'd really like to talk to doesn't care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you'd be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean - get real here.
By this point, you already know that this guy is playing to the irrational fears of the kid, and not any rational argument. Take it this way... Even if the kid gets paid a lot of money for software that he writes, the girl at the bar is still not going to know him from Adam. Sure, everyone may have heard of this guy named "Bill Gates," but how many chicks are going to recognize the guy if he walks into the bar? I imagine the number is somewhere around "incredibly few."
This Clemens guy also seems to have the viewpoint of "Get a job and get paid for what you do, don't do anything but that." This is sort of annoying, since there's no reason why you can't do both. I, for one, think that F/OSS is a thing of the future, yet is in its infancy right now. It doesn't have the money or the glamour, nor does it offer a comfortable lifestyle (outside of a lucky, extremely talented few). Has this guy never heard of other viewpoints? The "I release free software because I believe that all should be free," or the "I am an avid supporter of CS in general, and F/OSS is an excellent way for me to cut my teeth on things that I love," or the "I'm an insane guy that doesn't shave or cut hair, but I was shafted back in the day when I wrote something free that I didn't have control over, etc. etc. etc."
Software originally wasn't about money. It was about ideals, interests, and curiousity. Sure, it happened to make money in the end. Numerous problems spawned as a result, mainly a huge number of VB programmers, guys with little understanding jumped into the industry because it had money, and a fair number of people in the industry that just don't care about the code that the write. Money has a tendancy to dirty up pure things. I bet this guy would use a bubble sort to organize his 50k+ record database (and growing), if he knew what a bubble sort was.
F/OSS is about good quality software. It is about freedom in price and code. It is also about purity.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I use that machine for is gaming. I dislike the propspect of calling MS to re-register (I reformat once every two months, or so it seems), so I use the Corporate version. After that, it's just important to make sure that it doesn't get hacked immediately.
Everything else happens under Gentoo. I know that I could run NWN, UT, and Q3A in Linux, but the 3-D acceleration isn't as good (different hardware.)
I am for that. If the information is not released after a reasonable amount of time, the company may never take responsibility for it being there. We've witnessed this several times from a certain big company. Also, the moment that the vulnerability goes public, there should be a side note that says "The company was repeated informed of this vulnerability over a span of X months , but chose not to improve the quality of their product."
If massive numbers of users are infected by a virus created as a result of this announcement, then the company should be held completely responsible. They would have had months to address the issue, but chose not to.
I am a programmer, but started as the in-between half-support, half-development utility guy. I was hired on after being a temp in a different department, at $13/hr. After the first year, I was salaried at $35,000.
$35K seems fair. Nothing against you, but as a kid out of school, you're more than likely to be annoying to fellow workers than a valuable member of the team. Also, the work you're going to do is going to be boring and low priority. It's at that time when you have enough time to do something useful on the side, and basically sell it to your boss. That's what I did, and after the boss saw my value as a programmer, I was moved shortly afterwards.
After the first couple of years, your salary will be much higher. You can't expect to be making .COM era money right now. It's better to "start at the bottom and work your way up."
The statement "Nothing is certain or provable" disproves itself. If, in fact, it is true, then it is a certainty in itself. If it's not, then it leaves the door open for certainty and provability.
Eh. They didn't make much of a dent in the dial-up ISP market, even though they tried to force their way into that. They are also failing in the pocket-pc / palmtop market. They probably aren't doing all that well in their wireless networking push, and I have doubts about even the X-Box.
MS might be big, but they aren't God.
Anyone who goes by theories and not laws is a complete fucking moron.
Always works.
Even if Microsoft looked at such a deal objectively, they wouldn't see enough money to make it worth the effort. The last time I checked, MS does not have a monopoly in the hand-held audio player department, and it's a bit late in the game for them to start.
MS doesn't really have the same things to offer as Apple does. MS does have the desktop monopoly, but there's the problem of Real already having a player for that platform. It's unlikely that people are going to want to load up Real on their palm PC's too, since that whole role falls into the realm of the iPod and Rio.
I hope Real tanks. They have realized that their product sucks, that ad-infested software sucks, and that they don't have the intelligence to really know marketing. They are trying to turn to other companies to bail them out, but I think they'll run up against the fact that no one really gives a crap about their products.
I had an independant contract that I was working on not too long ago. I love the "real" job that I have, but the on-the-side project would have provided some extra cash.
My friend and I went into the deal without writing up a contract, and also without requiring a final set of specifications up front. This was our biggest mistake, because the guy we had the contract with kept changing the specifications on a whim. You could tell that he hadn't ever done real development work either, because he though his changes would be simple, when in fact they usually involved two to three days of work.
As it went, we took far longer than we had estimated, and we never got paid for the work. I guess we still own the copyright on the code, but it isn't really useful for us in any way. I had spent many nights coding a program that I didn't really enjoy instead of doing hobbies or going out. I had to endure a number of phone calls that occasionally came later at night, because the guy that we had the contract with was socially inept. Lastly, he did not speak English very well at all.
That whole experience almost turned me off to the whole independant project experience. At least now I know that everything needs to be defined in the beginning, with little room for change. The design needs to be in place before the coding, otherwise you'll get bogged down in a quagmire of continuous "extra" features.
That's absolutely right. The U.S. DOJ in this case is being incredibly stupid. The guy isn't a citizen of the U.S., hasn't ever been in the U.S., and is not beholden to U.S. laws.
Now, if the U.S. decided to attack Australia, then we could get our mitts on that guy.....
The question is, what law would these orders be beholden to? Last time I checked, Bush had unanimous support for his actions from both the Senate and the House.
What's amusing is that if the U.S. decided to break a treaty, there's nothing that any other country on Earth would do about it. They'd bitch and moan, but they wouldn't raise a finger. I imagine that if the U.S. became a totalitarian country that practiced genocide, I imagine the French would want to have peace talks instead of trying to right the wrong that the U.S. would be comitting.
Of course, the U.S. doesn't break treaties with countries that depend on the U.S. Treaties with Germany, France, the U.K., and Spain are all intact, much to the favor of those countries. The U.S. surely doesn't need to have treaties with these countries, but it does. Explain the reason why a "treatybreaker" country would do such a thing?
I'll bet that any hosting company out there that size would be churning that number of sites. Think about the percentage of the population that actually cares about technological things. They are the ones that would maintain sites, probably on their own. Those that put up sites and email them to their friends, saying "Come check out my homepage!," well... those sites really don't last that long.
Given that they are the majority of the population, the amount of turnover is probably not bad to just average.
Any lawsuit that SCO files against his company will have to wait until the suit with IBM is done, and the actual ownership of Linux IP has been decided in court. Even if SCO does file suit, the judge in the case would probably put it on hold until the IBM suit is done.
If it is found that SCO does not hold any rights to the Linux kernel, then the contract that EV1Servers entered into with SCO is invalid. I'm sure that EV1Servers would also have the right to file suit against SCO, for defrauding the company.
No kidding. It's kind of like the sand in the long jump pit: The athletes might not get hurt if they jumped without it, but it ensures safety whether it's needed or not.
I know that I would feel safe as a customer of his service, because he acts in my best interests. My best interests don't really follow with my political views or emotional ties to the SCO case. I think that SCO is a company that is best tied and burned in a pit, but I know that I don't have the resources to stand against SCO, should they come after me.
I have not purchased licenses for the linux machines that I run. I probably wouldn't, were I in his shoes, but I would consider it.
This sort of makes me worry about the school that you went to. Where I went to school, the CS curriculum was really just another form of math. The math class requirements were steep, since it was a required minor, and the CS classes taught a much more in-depth form of the CS-vital math.
Stuff like automata theory and advanced logic were offered through the CS department, not the Math department. Other requirements were a firm understanding of the lambda calculus, and a whole lot of other mathematical stuff that goes into defining languages. Programming took a back seat to the actual understanding of CS concepts.
If your school were anything like mine, you missed out on a whole lot of detailed math by shunning CS-offered courses. CS is essentially a subset of Mathematics, and has less to do with things like web programming, RAD, VB, Java, etc, than it does with algorithmic efficiency, languages and machines, logic, discrete mathematics, and a sleiu of other things.
Don't forget these people. The difference between these people and the mono people is the level of zealotry. :-)
The dot-gnu people object to the fact that the mono compiler was written in C# and bootstrapped with with MS C# compiler. So, the dot-gnu people wrote their own compiler in C, not C#, and haven't found a reason to write the compiler in C#.
Patents exist to enforce a mini-monopoly on the marketplace. Patents are open, you can see all of the designs and everything. You, in effect, can re-create anything that has been patented. You just can't sell it as a product.
Last time I checked, MONO wasn't being sold by anyone.
You only get 20 forked versions on projects that are shittily managed. XFree comes to mind, or AtheOS How many OSS projects out there have 4+ forks? I can really only think of X at the moment.
Now, if Java went OSS, and it was guided along fairly by Sun, or some Sun-created consortium, would they really get 20 forks? I highly doubt it.
I just have to answer this one, considering the actual source of VS.Net:
What do you think really inspired Visual Studio .Net?
Answer: Delphi.
I think it would be more interesting if you had to get the healer to go back to your corpse to resurrect you. It only makes sense, right? I mean... If a healer resurrected your ghost on the spot, you or the healer should be able to design the new body that you're going into.
Hmm. That could be cool. You could have wierd maniacal healers that construct golems, and go out and capture spirits and imprison them in an artificial body. Then again, you could also have the healer that follows you ghost and loots your ass while your ghost is watching. I also like the idea of haunting someone into retrieving your body, bringing you to a healer, getting you resurrected, then marrying and having a happy ending.
Why don't you get out the tinfoil hat already. If Blizzard wanted to steal information from you, they'd probably go about it by taking advantage of one of the numerous software holes in Windows.
Blizzard doesn't really care who you are. Of course, they care about when you log on, and what type of character you play, and all that jazz. This allows them to do a number of things to enhance the game playing experience. Think about it...
They know when you log on. This lets them map out peak times of connectivity, so you don't have to play with massive amounts of lag. The Battle.Net servers have been somewhat laggy recently, but it's not bad for something that is provided for free. They also would like to know what times are the peaks of activity because they probably bill those ad companies for time, and base the price off of the load on the server.
Blizzard wants to make sure that you own the game that you're playing. Why is this such a problem? If I wrote some software, and sold it, I would probably want to implement a relatively easy but effective way of ensuring that the product isn't being stolen. As it is, since I own my copy of Diablo II, I don't have to worry whether I can play on Battle.Net or not.
Lastly, Blizzard wants to enhance the game itself. This is based, in part, by it's knowledge of what you play, what you use, etc. Balance is a key part of the game... getting it to the point where the game is a challenge to get to the point of greatness, but once greatness is achieved, the sense of accomplishment is high. Having a level 50 sorcerous, for instance, is a rather enjoyable thing... even if you do die frequently enough in nightmare and hell difficulties. From what I know, the last update that Blizzard made to Diablo II basically changed the entire game. There's always new things being added, there's always security problems being fixed, and there are always new avenues for creating characters being made.
Tell me, then, why should Blizzard be denied the rights to control their own software?
Can you name one bad game that Blizzard has made?
I can't say that it's buggy or anything, but there's a game called "Blackstone" or "Blackthorn" that isn't really that great. It's a platform based shooter, but it isn't nearly as fun as the original Duke Nukem, or The Gods.
Profanity as a word only came into existence as a result of religion. Only one out of the four definitions for "profane" from dictionary.com did not have to do with the word "sacred."
Funny enough, profanity is really just something that is not religious. The FCC is profane, in this case.
I think that Washington D.C. is full of idiots.
But we remain concerned about the potential dangers posed to the public by peer-to-peer file-sharing technology.
p2p is terrorism at it's finest! It causes the death of many people, and is more fatal than second-hand smoke! Fellow members of society are adversely affected by your useage of such applications, because surely the data residing on your machine can cause heart problems for your neighbor, will cripple their offspring, and will ultimately blow up their house.
"Harmful to the public." What kind of bullshit are they trying to pawn on us? One can argue that the RIAA and MPAA are harmful to the public, by way of the negative influences upon the younger generations of society. One can argue that I could fend off an army of attacking barbozons with a spoon. One can argue that Rush Limbaugh is both detrimental and beneficial at the same time. I don't know how they can argue that p2p applications themselves, though, are harmful to society.
The whole fame thing you are telling me only works amongst geeks. The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you'd really like to talk to doesn't care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you'd be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean - get real here.
By this point, you already know that this guy is playing to the irrational fears of the kid, and not any rational argument. Take it this way... Even if the kid gets paid a lot of money for software that he writes, the girl at the bar is still not going to know him from Adam. Sure, everyone may have heard of this guy named "Bill Gates," but how many chicks are going to recognize the guy if he walks into the bar? I imagine the number is somewhere around "incredibly few."
This Clemens guy also seems to have the viewpoint of "Get a job and get paid for what you do, don't do anything but that." This is sort of annoying, since there's no reason why you can't do both. I, for one, think that F/OSS is a thing of the future, yet is in its infancy right now. It doesn't have the money or the glamour, nor does it offer a comfortable lifestyle (outside of a lucky, extremely talented few). Has this guy never heard of other viewpoints? The "I release free software because I believe that all should be free," or the "I am an avid supporter of CS in general, and F/OSS is an excellent way for me to cut my teeth on things that I love," or the "I'm an insane guy that doesn't shave or cut hair, but I was shafted back in the day when I wrote something free that I didn't have control over, etc. etc. etc."
Software originally wasn't about money. It was about ideals, interests, and curiousity. Sure, it happened to make money in the end. Numerous problems spawned as a result, mainly a huge number of VB programmers, guys with little understanding jumped into the industry because it had money, and a fair number of people in the industry that just don't care about the code that the write. Money has a tendancy to dirty up pure things. I bet this guy would use a bubble sort to organize his 50k+ record database (and growing), if he knew what a bubble sort was.
F/OSS is about good quality software. It is about freedom in price and code. It is also about purity.