I proudly host all of my own services, and I think more people should. I'm not advocating this as some kind of geek-upmanship, but for privacy, security, and community reasons. In these days of linksys wireless/routers/NAT/printerservers and netwinders/cobalt cubes you don't even need to be a hardcore sysadmin, although it sure helps.
If you run your own mail, you can encrypt it on the server and provide secure, spam-free access via HTTPS. Now you can email securely from work or wherever else you happen to be.
You can run your own webserver and install all the apache modules you want without trouble. You can publish your own material so that you can be slashdoted just like everyone else. Running your own servers is one of the best things you can do to preserve your political independence.
And then there's more esoteric fun... secure streaming media services wherever you are in the world, instant quick&dirty VPN into most networks via ssh tunneled back into itself, freenet nodes, etc.
I personally hate the fact that broadband services are increasingly assymetric and dynamically addressed, discouraging people from running their own servers. People should demand the right to be producers as well as consumers. Sure, colocation is better for most business uses, but there are lots of positive benefits to a democratic society if people run their own servers, and it really isn't that technically hard anymone.
You don't even have to imagine that you are disabled.. Image that you're trying to explain to a typical unix user how to set up cygwin on their home windows machine so that they can use SSH.
It starts off easy.. Go to www.cygwin.com, click on the download icon, run the setup.exe tool..
And then it all goes to hell. It's truly inconceivable that cygwin makes you click on this miniscule icon (for those people at high resolutions) for each and every sub-package that you select. It's painful to describe and painful to perform.
And then there's the actual download- I've found through painful experience that many of the mirror sites don't contain the all of the cygwin components you selected, or don't contain an up to date cygwin distribution, or simply die in the middle of your transfer. In some cases if you start downloading packages from one mirror and finish off with packages from another mirror, dependencies don't work out right because the packages on each mirror are different versions! In any of these cases you may spend up to an hour downloading and end up with JUNK.
All this could be changed if there was a simple "default install, everything install, minimal install, custom install" choice like there is in ALMOST EVERY OTHER INSTALLER.
The author had to go out of his way not to code such a feature, the sadistic bastard.
You should also be able to download a single package containing the cygwin subpackages for your desired install. Ie, cygwin-standard.zip like the netscape days of yore (and winamp).
Yes I know, "fix the code yourself!" say the ignorant slashpeople. I do fix code myself, but this UI is so intentionally bad the author should have to fix it himself to learn a lesson.
There's no reason why they can't continue proprietary development against the LGPL tree. You have to wonder if their motives are really good for the Wine community if transgaming doesn't even want to commit to sharing their updates to the existing codebase.
If they don't plan on sharing their code, which their ***ACTIONS*** indicate, then all they are doing is discouraging development of free API implementations by fooling people into believing that it's already done.
Parasites with good marketing. Show me the code or STFU.
I would disagree with your interpretation of my words.
Both fantasy and science fiction push the boundaries of world-environments beyond other types of fiction you mention. Both genres deal with worlds that are alien to our own. There is a continuum of worlds in works of fiction. At one end you have dramatized history, after that historical fiction, books such as "Moby Dick" which could have happened in our world, and then, down at the far opposite end of the spectrum, worlds that are far from our reality, such as Vernor Vinge's worlds and Middle Earth.
The difference you draw between "plausible" and "impossible" does not always hold, and it's a thin veil at best. Once genre may be superficially based on "science" and the other on "mythology" but as the quote goes "any suffiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The parallels between the two genres are explicitly seen in works that mix the two together, as you would say "plausibly", such as Anne McCaffrey's books.
Even with hard science fiction you're only talking about more rigorous consistency checking and (hopefully) fewer leaps of faith. Technobable about how quantum mechanics "really" work in a hard sci-fi book is not that much different than a fantasy book with a rigorously consistent magic system with its own magic-babble.
Why SF and fantasy are lumped together is beyond me. What Tolkein and Vernor Vinge have in common besides great creativity and command of the English language escapes my attention.
Obviously, what the two authors have in common is a prodigious imagination coupled with a patient intellect capable of exploring an entirely mentally constucted world through many levels and editing it for self-consistency.
Tokien used his vast research of european mythology to make a world of his imagination (middle earth) feel real to the reader, just as Vernor Vinge uses his scientific knowledge to make the universe of his imagination in "Fire Upon Deep" feel plausible (in parts).
Fantasy and science fiction *are* very similar. Both are excellent when the author has imagination, knowledge, and mental discipline to shed insight into our culture, and both are utter trash when all the author has is rehashed ideas, a bad love story, and a colorful front cover.
I think the best point RMS makes is his insistance that social issues, such as licensing, use of proprietary tools, be weighed as or more heavily as technical issues.
I agree with him that it is a shame that the kernel is managed with bitkeeper, instead of an open source alternative. If the GNU project has done one thing well, it is that he has proven beyond a doubt that that free software can be superior to proprietary software.
There's no reason CVS can't be improved, or alternative efforts such as subversion put on the fast track. By choosing bitkeeper over these alternatives, Linux kernel development is missing an important opportunity to focus talent into these free tools. Some would argue that this is socially irresponsible, and I agree.
If the GNU project has done a second thing well, it is that GNU has shown that free software is better for society than proprietary software. At least some of world *will* be a better place if more software is free. A vision like RMS's takes great effort to realize in our world. Along with reaping the benefits of others work comes the responsibility to give back to future generations. Linux kernel developers, as a high-profile group, bear an even greater social responsibility than others.
Many developers conveniently ignore social issues to absolve themselves of responsibility. All I can say that social responsibility is a good and important, and selfishness and shortsightedness is not. People should strive to be their best, all the time.
The naming issue is the more minor one at stake here... Obviously it is easier to say "Linux" than "GNU/Linux", and it's not clear this particular battle is worth fighting if there are better alternatives. I agree with RMS that the GNU project should get front page credit along with Linux for their mutual success, but I hope for everyone's sake that there can be open negotiation on how this credit can happen in other ways than the nomenclature "GNU/Linux".
Massive karma points for anyone who can mediate a solution to this one.
I remember being at a social gathering where a project manager went on and on about the benefits of contracting out programmers - 10 years ago.
The arguments then were exactly the same as the ones mentioned in this article. The practical reality hasn't changed much either.
Some companies can contract out one-off programming work either locally or abroad to India/SE Asia. For lots of other companies, it will always be highly desirable to directly employ key talent in order to retain investment in product experience, improve security, improve the viability of long term software maintenance, and gain better overall negotiation power.
The way I see it is the only way the industry will switch to mostly contractors is if programmers chose to do it for their own benefit, like doctors. Don't count on this happening in the absense of a strong guild structure.
Backhanded compliment :)
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
This article didn't have any sort of hyperbolic buzzword-dropping extrapolation!
I have to say that by sticking to the primary source account and resisting the urge to excessively editorialize, you made something I found worthwhile to read.
Thank you, and I agree that this aspect of tech support should be put under the spotlight. Telecom companies are the very worst abusers in my opinion. Not only do they make it difficult to disconnect, but then they try to ruin all of your future dinner hours trying to "get you back".
I can't believe this story was posted as-is. What obvious flamebait!
Newsflash- the LPGL is not some awful burdensom thing designed to make your life hell. It's a perfectly reasonable license that strikes a good balance between the full blown GPL and a BSD-type license. Anyone who has serious complaints about it is just selfish. This kind of pointless sniping is not a stellar example of how business and open source can work together. Hopefully Codeweavers and Transgaming (and the l33t followers on both sides) can come up with a more intelligent solution than schoolyard name-calling.
XYZ news reports that citizens are seen as subversive to their governments.
Seemingly innocent items such as paper, automobiles, computers, and currency can all be used to undermine government authority, homeland security experts warn.
The dangers disgruntled citizens posed was highlighted by a survey showing that almost half of the anti-government incidents recorded last year were instigated by a government's own citizens.
By contrast, 75% of all government officials questioned in 2001 named "the axis of evil" as the biggest threat to security.
Many governments are now installing software that watches for citizens doing things on a domestic territory that they should not be doing.
Citizens can be a security hazard in other ways too.
Citizens unfamiliar with their government or who blithely repeat statements made by outsiders could kick off propaganda outbreaks or inadvertently aid terrorist "sleeper cells" trying to get access to a government's internal infrastructure.
"Activist Mahatma Ghandi has gone on record to say that that he rarely used firearms," said senator Chris Dick of the USSA. "Instead, he used social engineering to spread the information he wanted."
Senator Dick said the Homeland Security office had been created to advise governments on the best way to educate staff about citiznes.
Properly educated staff will choose legalese that were hard to understand, knew to be suspicious of unsolicited e-mails bearing criticism, and refused to divulge confidential information, he said.
This might be a redundant post, but I don't think the point can be made clearly enough:
As an developer and an IT professional who evaluates plenty of software each year for purchase, my biggest turn-off is companies that force you to register your name, company info, email address, and get a username/password etc simply to download some lime-limited evaluation copy.
I very much dislike giving out personal information. I also dislike having to spend the time to fill out forms that violate my privacy. Finally, I dislike being burdened with YET ANOTHER username/password pair that I will never remember.
I never give accurate information on these forms, and the email address I use is always a one-off throw-away account.
Unless the product is obviously compelling, I don't bother with it if there is some awful registration process like the above. Even if the product is obviously compelling, I will check out all the competitors that don't have an annoying registration evaluation process first.
I have even recommended products for purchase (that were for our purposes equally good) based on whether or not they had an annoyed registration process for the eval software.
Not to be annoying, but if you read the rsync docs (which I just happened to do today) it explains how to do a bi-directional sync. It's pretty trivial, no need for another tool.
ACtually I toured a nuclear power plant once. It was designed to sustain a direct hit from a large plane and a major earthquake. Apparently these were known threats decades before Sept. 11.
There are many problems in book publishing and many ways in which the little guy is getting screwed by the corporation, but the boilerplate contract, as analyzed in this article, is the least of it.
Termination clauses
Contracts are a two-way street. The publisher promises to publish the book as long as the author delivers what he promised to deliver. There are a few set ways in which a contract can be terminated:
The author fails to deliver the book. At all. Every contract stipulates a delivery date, and there is usually a grace period for extenuating circumstances, or the contract is renegotiated. If the author still doesn't turn in the manuscript, there really isn't any way the publisher can publish it.
The author delivers something substantially different from the book that was proposed and agreed upon. In this case the author is pulling the old bait-and-switch on the publisher, and there should be no obligation to publish a different book from the one the publisher thought they were contracting for.
The author can also terminate a contract if he has delivered everything according to the contract but the publisher fails to publish within a certain time frame (usually a year to 18 months -- typical lead time for a fiction/nonfiction work is 9 months from delivery of manuscript to publication). The author does have some recourse against the big evil company.
Termination clauses are never invoked casually -- before the contract is even drawn up the publisher has decided they like this author and their book, and they want to publish it. They've scheduled it for some future date and they're counting on the revenue it'll bring. So they may be amenable to stretching deadlines, or reworking a manuscript that doesn't come in as they expected, but they're rarely going to ditch it altogether. They've invested in the book, and if they terminate the contract they're out the money already paid to the author. Sure, the author has to pay it back if they manage to sell it to another publisher, but it's only fair since the second publisher will no doubt have paid him another advance.
Options
The case presented in the article is one of many possible option clauses; not all are so "Draconian". Rarely is the entire manuscript required before the publisher needs to decide whether to take on the next book or not, though it's true they're unlikely to commit to another book from an author before they see the sales record of the first one. But then again, how often is the next manuscript all finished before the first book is out? In the case where another book is already in the works and destined for another publisher, there are often amendments to the option clause to allow for it. As for putting an author's career on hold indefinitely, that author'd be a fool to agree to an option clause that didn't give the publisher a time limit to make an offer on the option work.
Royalties
Book royalties may not be that impressive, but the truth is most books don't earn out their advances in the first place. So for all the haggling over royalty rates, most authors won't see a dime after their last royalty advance, and the publisher swallows the difference. In those rare cases where the book does earn out, the author will almost certainly negotiate a better rate next time.
Yes, you can negotiate the terms. You can even get an agent to do it for you if you're willing to part with 10-15% of the earnings in exchange for a better deal and most likely a better relationship with your editor, one that isn't soured by a rough contract negotiation. Don't want your book excerpted somewhere embarassing? Ask for approval on licensing; you may get it.
If you want to point out problems with publishing, look to the conglomeration of publishing houses into massive corporations that care only about the bottom line, guaranteeing that the majority of potential authors never get offered that contract in the first place. (Ironically, that approach doesn't seem to have made any more money for the publishers than simply putting out the books they love.) The focus on commercialism paired with the increasing ability of Barnes & Noble to drive the book industry from the creation of books through to sales is a bigger part of what's wrong with book publishing today.
1. Paypal has some serious issues. They're facing a class action, have screwed over enough people to warrant a hate-website, and its only going to get worse once they go public. Slashdot shouldn't be supporting them.
2. It will be trivial to filter out the crappy big ads. The people who use slashdot all the time will filter them out, and the people who look at the site for the first time will say, "YUCK!" and go elsewhere. It sounds like slashdot doesn't know its audience.
3. Would it have been so difficult to try unobtrusive google-style advertising, "membership" drives, or a subscription model that didn't involve dumping large ads everywhere to the "regular" site?
I don't have a problem supporting slashdot financially as it is now. Strangely enough, by stuffing big obnoxious ads in the comments I will be less likely to financially support the site. Too bad.
You're right, you definitely need to seperate the "world data" from the code. The code should ideally be world-agnostic.
One thing you may have overlooked, however, is that the game engine is ideally suited to an OOP structure, and relational databases with flat tables are not. So you either need to write a translation layer to turn tables into objects and vice versa (this is not trivial, and it takes a long time to do), or you need to use a object database instead of a relational one. Problem is there aren't very many free object databases that are worth anything, and if you do find one chances are that it doesn't have a good API for your language of choice.
I ran into a java-based one called bluezone a while back and it was the only thing that came close. Too bad I didn't discover it sooner:P
I must say that I agree. I've been working on a text-based MMORPG for the last few years. Yes, that sounds like an paradox but the idea to to make the engine robust/abstract enough so that graphical clients could be added at some point in the future without forcing a rewrite. For the moment the developers like text, prefer text, want text, etc. There's graphical clients for players and world editors with fun widgets, but the world in mostly expressed in text.
This project was my 3rd attempt, so I knew what I was getting into. I tried to use off the shelf technology whenever possible. It was decided up front that speed and performance were not an initial goal- we can worry about optimizations later if moore's law doesn't do a preemptive stike.
So, we've waded pretty deep into the waters of multithread scheduling & concurrency safety, Object modelling, internal scripting languages, Relational databases and persistence layers to abstract their interfaces, XML parsers and generators for client/server protocols, and all the other fun stuff that you would never imagine you need to know to write a decent engine.
Yeah, it's taken longer than we thought it would and we're just recently at the point where we can write "the fun stuff" (ie, non-infrastructure).
For a project that's done in spare time by a running average of 2 active people (and a dozen well-wishers) I think we've done very well. The only reason I think we made it this far is that people were willing to wear multiple hats of sysadmin, developer, webmaster, packager, and documentation maintainer. That, and they were willing to waste a few years working on infrastructure instead of "the cool magic system".
I still think we'll be surprised if the system is ever playable, but at this point it's a social activity for the people involved and it's helped me land at least one good job. I've learned a lot from working on the project and don't reqret any of the time put in.
I don't like to talk about the project too publicly (I guess this is the exception) because of the high failure rate and generally lack of respect anyone has for these sort of things, as evidenced by the article. Still, if you're realistic about what you can get out of the effort, it might be worth a shot.
I miss the days where you had a lightweight anti-virus scanner that ran only when you wanted it to, or at most scheduled itself to run overnight and that's it. I was a big fan of F-Protect software but it seems to be prohibitively expensive now.
If there's one piece of software that can make your 2Ghz system perform like a Pentium 200 it's overly aggressive anti-virus software. It seems like Norton is the worst offender. It causes a noticable resource drain whenever you do anything with files. It's resident in memory all the time in various different places. It's hooked into the OS in so many different places that I worry if it will break when updates, hotfixes, etc are applied. I suppose it's great from a IT perspective where you have to assume your users are stupid, but I can't stand to deal with software like that at home.
Not like I use windows that much these days at home, but I sure don't miss all those "treat your user like a moron" anti-virus packagages.
> Those of you who've seen the
> freenet code will most likely agree with me, that
> many of the freenet developers couldn't code their
> way out of a wet paper bag.
I remember looking at Scott Miller's code on Gamora and feeling like, "Wow, this is the most elegent OOP code I've seen in the wild". Most code really sucks, especially if it's written in an OOP language and gets to be more than a few thousand lines.
Very few people could make the concept work in those days when Design Patterns was still new. Scott was one of those people and it looks like he's still an active developer. So, while I agree with the other statements in your comment I must disagree with the snipe about the coders not being any good.
I'm sick of these reviews with a line like "The results are *interesting*". Lets just agree that if the results weren't interesting, it shouldn't have been posted in the first place. By posting the article on slashdot, the "interesting" part is implied.
Please, go out on a limb, put on some body armor, and have the guts to say ONE MEANINGFUL SENTENCE about the results other than that they were "interesting". It's not that hard.
You want to be sure that you only have one time synchronization daemon running. It sounds like you might have more than one, with one misconfigured to ignore daylight savings time or something similar.
ntp is the most robust free time synchronization software. Try using that in preference to rdate, timed, timeslave, etc. Test ntpd by using "ntpdate" against your upstream ntpd time servers to make sure they do what you expect.
Slashdot Mirror
I proudly host all of my own services, and I think more people should. I'm not advocating this as some kind of geek-upmanship, but for privacy, security, and community reasons. In these days of linksys wireless/routers/NAT/printerservers and netwinders/cobalt cubes you don't even need to be a hardcore sysadmin, although it sure helps.
If you run your own mail, you can encrypt it on the server and provide secure, spam-free access via HTTPS. Now you can email securely from work or wherever else you happen to be.
You can run your own webserver and install all the apache modules you want without trouble. You can publish your own material so that you can be slashdoted just like everyone else. Running your own servers is one of the best things you can do to preserve your political independence.
And then there's more esoteric fun... secure streaming media services wherever you are in the world, instant quick&dirty VPN into most networks via ssh tunneled back into itself, freenet nodes, etc.
I personally hate the fact that broadband services are increasingly assymetric and dynamically addressed, discouraging people from running their own servers. People should demand the right to be producers as well as consumers. Sure, colocation is better for most business uses, but there are lots of positive benefits to a democratic society if people run their own servers, and it really isn't that technically hard anymone.
You don't even have to imagine that you are disabled.. Image that you're trying to explain to a typical unix user how to set up cygwin on their home windows machine so that they can use SSH.
It starts off easy.. Go to www.cygwin.com, click on the download icon, run the setup.exe tool..
And then it all goes to hell. It's truly inconceivable that cygwin makes you click on this miniscule icon (for those people at high resolutions) for each and every sub-package that you select. It's painful to describe and painful to perform.
And then there's the actual download- I've found through painful experience that many of the mirror sites don't contain the all of the cygwin components you selected, or don't contain an up to date cygwin distribution, or simply die in the middle of your transfer. In some cases if you start downloading packages from one mirror and finish off with packages from another mirror, dependencies don't work out right because the packages on each mirror are different versions! In any of these cases you may spend up to an hour downloading and end up with JUNK.
All this could be changed if there was a simple "default install, everything install, minimal install, custom install" choice like there is in ALMOST EVERY OTHER INSTALLER.
The author had to go out of his way not to code such a feature, the sadistic bastard.
You should also be able to download a single package containing the cygwin subpackages for your desired install. Ie, cygwin-standard.zip like the netscape days of yore (and winamp).
Yes I know, "fix the code yourself!" say the ignorant slashpeople. I do fix code myself, but this UI is so intentionally bad the author should have to fix it himself to learn a lesson.
There's no reason why they can't continue proprietary development against the LGPL tree. You have to wonder if their motives are really good for the Wine community if transgaming doesn't even want to commit to sharing their updates to the existing codebase.
If they don't plan on sharing their code, which their ***ACTIONS*** indicate, then all they are doing is discouraging development of free API implementations by fooling people into believing that it's already done.
Parasites with good marketing. Show me the code or STFU.
I would disagree with your interpretation of my words.
Both fantasy and science fiction push the boundaries of world-environments beyond other types of fiction you mention. Both genres deal with worlds that are alien to our own. There is a continuum of worlds in works of fiction. At one end you have dramatized history, after that historical fiction, books such as "Moby Dick" which could have happened in our world, and then, down at the far opposite end of the spectrum, worlds that are far from our reality, such as Vernor Vinge's worlds and Middle Earth.
The difference you draw between "plausible" and "impossible" does not always hold, and it's a thin veil at best. Once genre may be superficially based on "science" and the other on "mythology" but as the quote goes "any suffiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". The parallels between the two genres are explicitly seen in works that mix the two together, as you would say "plausibly", such as Anne McCaffrey's books.
Even with hard science fiction you're only talking about more rigorous consistency checking and (hopefully) fewer leaps of faith. Technobable about how quantum mechanics "really" work in a hard sci-fi book is not that much different than a fantasy book with a rigorously consistent magic system with its own magic-babble.
You end up taking them both on faith in the end.
This genre is usually called "post-industrial". If you want to see an example on film check out "City of Lost Children" and "Delicatessen".
Obviously, what the two authors have in common is a prodigious imagination coupled with a patient intellect capable of exploring an entirely mentally constucted world through many levels and editing it for self-consistency.
Tokien used his vast research of european mythology to make a world of his imagination (middle earth) feel real to the reader, just as Vernor Vinge uses his scientific knowledge to make the universe of his imagination in "Fire Upon Deep" feel plausible (in parts).
Fantasy and science fiction *are* very similar. Both are excellent when the author has imagination, knowledge, and mental discipline to shed insight into our culture, and both are utter trash when all the author has is rehashed ideas, a bad love story, and a colorful front cover.
I think the best point RMS makes is his insistance that social issues, such as licensing, use of proprietary tools, be weighed as or more heavily as technical issues.
I agree with him that it is a shame that the kernel is managed with bitkeeper, instead of an open source alternative. If the GNU project has done one thing well, it is that he has proven beyond a doubt that that free software can be superior to proprietary software.
There's no reason CVS can't be improved, or alternative efforts such as subversion put on the fast track. By choosing bitkeeper over these alternatives, Linux kernel development is missing an important opportunity to focus talent into these free tools. Some would argue that this is socially irresponsible, and I agree.
If the GNU project has done a second thing well, it is that GNU has shown that free software is better for society than proprietary software. At least some of world *will* be a better place if more software is free. A vision like RMS's takes great effort to realize in our world. Along with reaping the benefits of others work comes the responsibility to give back to future generations. Linux kernel developers, as a high-profile group, bear an even greater social responsibility than others.
Many developers conveniently ignore social issues to absolve themselves of responsibility. All I can say that social responsibility is a good and important, and selfishness and shortsightedness is not. People should strive to be their best, all the time.
The naming issue is the more minor one at stake here... Obviously it is easier to say "Linux" than "GNU/Linux", and it's not clear this particular battle is worth fighting if there are better alternatives. I agree with RMS that the GNU project should get front page credit along with Linux for their mutual success, but I hope for everyone's sake that there can be open negotiation on how this credit can happen in other ways than the nomenclature "GNU/Linux".
Massive karma points for anyone who can mediate a solution to this one.
I remember being at a social gathering where a project manager went on and on about the benefits of contracting out programmers - 10 years ago.
The arguments then were exactly the same as the ones mentioned in this article. The practical reality hasn't changed much either.
Some companies can contract out one-off programming work either locally or abroad to India/SE Asia. For lots of other companies, it will always be highly desirable to directly employ key talent in order to retain investment in product experience, improve security, improve the viability of long term software maintenance, and gain better overall negotiation power.
The way I see it is the only way the industry will switch to mostly contractors is if programmers chose to do it for their own benefit, like doctors. Don't count on this happening in the absense of a strong guild structure.
This article didn't have any sort of hyperbolic buzzword-dropping extrapolation!
I have to say that by sticking to the primary source account and resisting the urge to excessively editorialize, you made something I found worthwhile to read.
Thank you, and I agree that this aspect of tech support should be put under the spotlight. Telecom companies are the very worst abusers in my opinion. Not only do they make it difficult to disconnect, but then they try to ruin all of your future dinner hours trying to "get you back".
I can't believe this story was posted as-is. What obvious flamebait!
Newsflash- the LPGL is not some awful burdensom thing designed to make your life hell. It's a perfectly reasonable license that strikes a good balance between the full blown GPL and a BSD-type license. Anyone who has serious complaints about it is just selfish.
This kind of pointless sniping is not a stellar example of how business and open source can work together. Hopefully Codeweavers and Transgaming (and the l33t followers on both sides) can come up with a more intelligent solution than schoolyard name-calling.
Digital Rights Management.
or..
"Ode to Greed"
XYZ news reports that citizens are seen as subversive to their governments.
Seemingly innocent items such as paper, automobiles, computers, and currency can all be used to undermine government authority, homeland security experts warn.
The dangers disgruntled citizens posed was highlighted by a survey showing that almost half of the anti-government incidents recorded last year were instigated by a government's own citizens.
By contrast, 75% of all government officials questioned in 2001 named "the axis of evil" as the biggest threat to security.
Many governments are now installing software that watches for citizens doing things on a domestic territory that they should not be doing.
Citizens can be a security hazard in other ways too.
Citizens unfamiliar with their government or who blithely repeat statements made by outsiders could kick off propaganda outbreaks or inadvertently aid terrorist "sleeper cells" trying to get access to a government's internal infrastructure.
"Activist Mahatma Ghandi has gone on record to say that that he rarely used firearms," said senator Chris Dick of the USSA. "Instead, he used social engineering to spread the information he wanted."
Senator Dick said the Homeland Security office had been created to advise governments on the best way to educate staff about citiznes.
Properly educated staff will choose legalese that were hard to understand, knew to be suspicious of unsolicited e-mails bearing criticism, and refused to divulge confidential information, he said.
This might be a redundant post, but I don't think the point can be made clearly enough:
As an developer and an IT professional who evaluates plenty of software each year for purchase, my biggest turn-off is companies that force you to register your name, company info, email address, and get a username/password etc simply to download some lime-limited evaluation copy.
I very much dislike giving out personal information. I also dislike having to spend the time to fill out forms that violate my privacy. Finally, I dislike being burdened with YET ANOTHER username/password pair that I will never remember.
I never give accurate information on these forms, and the email address I use is always a one-off throw-away account.
Unless the product is obviously compelling, I don't bother with it if there is some awful registration process like the above. Even if the product is obviously compelling, I will check out all the competitors that don't have an annoying registration evaluation process first.
I have even recommended products for purchase (that were for our purposes equally good) based on whether or not they had an annoyed registration process for the eval software.
-OT
Not to be annoying, but if you read the rsync docs (which I just happened to do today) it explains how to do a bi-directional sync. It's pretty trivial, no need for another tool.
ACtually I toured a nuclear power plant once. It was designed to sustain a direct hit from a large plane and a major earthquake. Apparently these were known threats decades before Sept. 11.
This is a particularly ugly troll. It's not funny in any way. Your maliciousness only shows your own perversity. Too bad I don't have mod points.
Termination clauses
Contracts are a two-way street. The publisher promises to publish the book as long as the author delivers what he promised to deliver. There are a few set ways in which a contract can be terminated:
- The author fails to deliver the book. At all. Every contract stipulates a delivery date, and there is usually a grace period for extenuating circumstances, or the contract is renegotiated. If the author still doesn't turn in the manuscript, there really isn't any way the publisher can publish it.
- The author delivers something substantially different from the book that was proposed and agreed upon. In this case the author is pulling the old bait-and-switch on the publisher, and there should be no obligation to publish a different book from the one the publisher thought they were contracting for.
- The author can also terminate a contract if he has delivered everything according to the contract but the publisher fails to publish within a certain time frame (usually a year to 18 months -- typical lead time for a fiction/nonfiction work is 9 months from delivery of manuscript to publication). The author does have some recourse against the big evil company.
Termination clauses are never invoked casually -- before the contract is even drawn up the publisher has decided they like this author and their book, and they want to publish it. They've scheduled it for some future date and they're counting on the revenue it'll bring. So they may be amenable to stretching deadlines, or reworking a manuscript that doesn't come in as they expected, but they're rarely going to ditch it altogether. They've invested in the book, and if they terminate the contract they're out the money already paid to the author. Sure, the author has to pay it back if they manage to sell it to another publisher, but it's only fair since the second publisher will no doubt have paid him another advance.Options
The case presented in the article is one of many possible option clauses; not all are so "Draconian". Rarely is the entire manuscript required before the publisher needs to decide whether to take on the next book or not, though it's true they're unlikely to commit to another book from an author before they see the sales record of the first one. But then again, how often is the next manuscript all finished before the first book is out? In the case where another book is already in the works and destined for another publisher, there are often amendments to the option clause to allow for it. As for putting an author's career on hold indefinitely, that author'd be a fool to agree to an option clause that didn't give the publisher a time limit to make an offer on the option work.
Royalties
Book royalties may not be that impressive, but the truth is most books don't earn out their advances in the first place. So for all the haggling over royalty rates, most authors won't see a dime after their last royalty advance, and the publisher swallows the difference. In those rare cases where the book does earn out, the author will almost certainly negotiate a better rate next time.
Yes, you can negotiate the terms. You can even get an agent to do it for you if you're willing to part with 10-15% of the earnings in exchange for a better deal and most likely a better relationship with your editor, one that isn't soured by a rough contract negotiation. Don't want your book excerpted somewhere embarassing? Ask for approval on licensing; you may get it.
If you want to point out problems with publishing, look to the conglomeration of publishing houses into massive corporations that care only about the bottom line, guaranteeing that the majority of potential authors never get offered that contract in the first place. (Ironically, that approach doesn't seem to have made any more money for the publishers than simply putting out the books they love.) The focus on commercialism paired with the increasing ability of Barnes & Noble to drive the book industry from the creation of books through to sales is a bigger part of what's wrong with book publishing today.
1. Paypal has some serious issues. They're facing a class action, have screwed over enough people to warrant a hate-website, and its only going to get worse once they go public. Slashdot shouldn't be supporting them.
2. It will be trivial to filter out the crappy big ads. The people who use slashdot all the time will filter them out, and the people who look at the site for the first time will say, "YUCK!" and go elsewhere. It sounds like slashdot doesn't know its audience.
3. Would it have been so difficult to try unobtrusive google-style advertising, "membership" drives, or a subscription model that didn't involve dumping large ads everywhere to the "regular" site?
I don't have a problem supporting slashdot financially as it is now. Strangely enough, by stuffing big obnoxious ads in the comments I will be less likely to financially support the site. Too bad.
You're right, you definitely need to seperate the "world data" from the code. The code should ideally be world-agnostic.
:P
One thing you may have overlooked, however, is that the game engine is ideally suited to an OOP structure, and relational databases with flat tables are not. So you either need to write a translation layer to turn tables into objects and vice versa (this is not trivial, and it takes a long time to do), or you need to use a object database instead of a relational one. Problem is there aren't very many free object databases that are worth anything, and if you do find one chances are that it doesn't have a good API for your language of choice.
I ran into a java-based one called bluezone a while back and it was the only thing that came close. Too bad I didn't discover it sooner
I must say that I agree. I've been working on a text-based MMORPG for the last few years. Yes, that sounds like an paradox but the idea to to make the engine robust/abstract enough so that graphical clients could be added at some point in the future without forcing a rewrite. For the moment the developers like text, prefer text, want text, etc. There's graphical clients for players and world editors with fun widgets, but the world in mostly expressed in text.
This project was my 3rd attempt, so I knew what I was getting into. I tried to use off the shelf technology whenever possible. It was decided up front that speed and performance were not an initial goal- we can worry about optimizations later if moore's law doesn't do a preemptive stike.
So, we've waded pretty deep into the waters of multithread scheduling & concurrency safety, Object modelling, internal scripting languages, Relational databases and persistence layers to abstract their interfaces, XML parsers and generators for client/server protocols, and all the other fun stuff that you would never imagine you need to know to write a decent engine.
Yeah, it's taken longer than we thought it would and we're just recently at the point where we can write "the fun stuff" (ie, non-infrastructure).
For a project that's done in spare time by a running average of 2 active people (and a dozen well-wishers) I think we've done very well. The only reason I think we made it this far is that people were willing to wear multiple hats of sysadmin, developer, webmaster, packager, and documentation maintainer. That, and
they were willing to waste a few years working on infrastructure instead of "the cool magic system".
I still think we'll be surprised if the system is ever playable, but at this point it's a social activity for the people involved and it's helped me land at least one good job. I've learned a lot from working on the project and don't reqret any of the time put in.
I don't like to talk about the project too publicly (I guess this is the exception) because of the high failure rate and generally lack of respect anyone has for these sort of things, as evidenced by the article. Still, if you're realistic about what you can get out of the effort, it might be worth a shot.
Good Luck,
I miss the days where you had a lightweight anti-virus scanner that ran only when you wanted it to, or at most scheduled itself to run overnight and that's it. I was a big fan of F-Protect software but it seems to be prohibitively expensive now.
If there's one piece of software that can make your 2Ghz system perform like a Pentium 200 it's overly aggressive anti-virus software. It seems like Norton is the worst offender. It causes a noticable resource drain whenever you do anything with files. It's resident in memory all the time in various different places. It's hooked into the OS in so many different places that I worry if it will break when updates, hotfixes, etc are applied. I suppose it's great from a IT perspective where you have to assume your users are stupid, but I can't stand to deal with software like that at home.
Not like I use windows that much these days at home, but I sure don't miss all those "treat your user like a moron" anti-virus packagages.
> Those of you who've seen the
> freenet code will most likely agree with me, that
> many of the freenet developers couldn't code their
> way out of a wet paper bag.
I remember looking at Scott Miller's code on Gamora and feeling like, "Wow, this is the most elegent OOP code I've seen in the wild". Most code really sucks, especially if it's written in an OOP language and gets to be more than a few thousand lines.
Very few people could make the concept work in those days when Design Patterns was still new. Scott was one of those people and it looks like he's still an active developer. So, while I agree with the other statements in your comment I must disagree with the snipe about the coders not being any good.
I'm sick of these reviews with a line like "The results are *interesting*". Lets just agree that if the results weren't interesting, it shouldn't have been posted in the first place. By posting the article on slashdot, the "interesting" part is implied.
Please, go out on a limb, put on some body armor, and have the guts to say ONE MEANINGFUL SENTENCE about the results other than that they were "interesting". It's not that hard.
You want to be sure that you only have one time synchronization daemon running. It sounds like you might have more than one, with one misconfigured to ignore daylight savings time or something similar.
ntp is the most robust free time synchronization software. Try using that in preference to rdate, timed, timeslave, etc. Test ntpd by using "ntpdate" against your upstream ntpd time servers to make sure they do what you expect.
How about the X-box?