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User: copyconstructor

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  1. Re:Why $11,000? on FTC Moves up "Do Not Call" List Registration · · Score: 1

    You see, most governments are going to be fining at 10,000 --you're at 10,000 on your fine, where can you go from there? Where? I don't know. Nowhere! Exactly! What we do, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

    You put it up to 11,000.

    Eleven. Exactly. One larger.

    Why don't you just make 10,000 larger, and make 10,000 be the top number, and make that a little larger?

    But these go to 11,000.

  2. Re:XP == Xtremely Pstupid on Test-Driven Development by Example · · Score: 2, Informative
  3. XP == Xtremely Pstupid on Test-Driven Development by Example · · Score: 2, Informative
    One day my manager came and suggested we try XP. So I did what I normally do in such situations and did a search on the pattern [stupid management suggestion] +stupid and quickly turned up what I was looking for:

    http://http://www.softwarereality.com/lifecycle/xp /case_against_xp.jsp

    In two minutes I was able to save both myself and my company many man-years and headaches.

  4. Re:Shouldn't this tell us something? on Quadrilingual Crazy Programming · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Did you even read the article. I'll challenge you to find languages with much more different syntax from C/Perl than Befunge-98 and Brainfuck!

    Malbolge. See these notes on writing hello, world in malbolge:

    this malbolge program generates:

    HEllO WORld

    it's not perfect - i ignored case to make the problem simpler (completion left as an exercise for the reader - it should be possible).

    when i finally got a decent algorithm worked out (i've been playing around with this for the best part of a month - see below), it took a few hours to generate the program on a 500mhz nt box with 96mb memory (the code was written in lisp - i started with clisp on suse linux and then changed to corman lisp on nt) (more numbers here).

    incidentally, i've come to hate malbolge.


  5. Re:Its a P233 pc on Linux On a Used Cash Register · · Score: 1

    As someone else pointed out, this is not a Linux port. Neither is this jos but pretty cool nonetheless.

    Actually, I'm not sure a C=64 (or any 8-bit) Linux port would be possible, or rather so much code would have to be changed, it would end up being more like one of these non-Linux OSes than Linux.

    Are there any good lists of existing and/or wanted 'odd' Linux ports anywhere? As a learning exercise, I'd like to port Linux to something, the stranger the better. Any ideas?

  6. Re:Prices please? on Charmed Announces Crusoe-based Linux Wearable · · Score: 1

    Right you are. My original post stated pretty much exactly that - at least 1 person would have to buy the 'Charmed OS' in order to get the source, after which it would be freely available assuming that person went to the trouble of making it available somehow. Some anonymous idiot replied that I was clueless for not knowing that Linux itself is freely available, to which I replied the above. Well, that's what I get for replying to posts below my threshold - I guess they're there for a reason.

  7. Re:Prices please? on Charmed Announces Crusoe-based Linux Wearable · · Score: 1

    I guess *you're* missing the point. What you're saying then is that Charmed got their source mods included in both Redhat and Debian and that anyone who doesn't know that is misinformed. Well, I highly doubt Charmed's mods are in any distro, especially Redhat and Debian. Try again.

  8. Re:Prices please? on Charmed Announces Crusoe-based Linux Wearable · · Score: 1

    Well, I guess the first buyer would be the only one to pay 250$, as the source would be freely available after that (assuming the first buyer put up a mirror for it that is). That is what GPL means, is it not?

  9. What the... on Movie Review: John Q · · Score: 1

    What the hell does this even remotely have to do with anything /. related???? Besides which, the trailer for this film makes it pretty obvious this film is a piece of crap, so it's not even worth discussing as entertainment.

  10. Do what's right, not what's legal on Beta-Testers and Intellectual Property? · · Score: 1

    As should be obvious to anyone in this industry and indeed in this society, what's legal and what's right may be two completely different things. If you can honestly answer "yes", however slightly, to the following question, you should give the client due credit, which should include compensation (get a lawyer to help figure out the exact percentage):

    "Did the client contribute some idea or insight that wouldn't have otherwise occurred to us and now is part of the product we're going to be making shitloads of money off of?"

  11. Allowing a monkey to control a mouse cursor... on Think And Click · · Score: 5, Funny

    Good to see Katz is taking Dubya up on his volunteerism agenda and making himself available as a research subject.

  12. It is noticeable on Trimming Television to Sell More Ads · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've noticed this since at least Sept 9, 1999 - see this rec.arts.tv posting:

    What's going on? Are they removing frames?

    I've even started noticing it on video rentals.

    Since it seems this doesn't bother too many people other than myself, I guess the networks will get even more brazen in the future. Who knows what else they'll come up with to sacrifice quality for a few more bucks. Oh well, I suppose it's had a good effect for me personally in that I don't watch TV any more because of it, but I sure do miss it sometimes.

  13. Pintop computing on Nano-sized Microchips? HP Says So. · · Score: 1

    And I thought the keyboards on handhelds were almost unusable. Yikes.

  14. What's so bad about .24? on Linux On the Desktop: 0.24 Percent? · · Score: 1

    Until recently, that number was around .005, so I'd say a 5000% increase is pretty good in only a few years. Unix has never had a desktop presence outside of tech/academic settings, so getting even .24% is significant.

    Also, the sad fact is that Linux desktops are still a long way from actually competing with M$ in terms of usability and UI performance. Having just installed KDE and Gnome on my 800MHz laptop, I can attest to the fact that performance is an issue, and a lot of applications have UIs that look like bad Java applications even though they're not.

    What someone said about Java applications applies equally to Linux desktops - they're like pod people - dogs bark at them, they make grownups feel a little queasy, and kids aren't fooled at all.

  15. Absurd on Stephen Hawking On Genetic Engineering vs. AI · · Score: 1

    Hawking should stick to physics. AI is so far away from anything even resembling human intelligence it's not funny. Years of AI research and massive hardware advances have so far produced the equivalent of a cockroach, and that's being generous. What's more, there's no sign that that'll change anytime soon. Maybe in a thousand years we'll see the equivalent of a fish or a Dubya. That's the rate of change in the field and unless someone comes up with something like a Theory of Relativity for AI, that's how it'll stay.

    Rather than coming up with idiotic recommendations on a subject he obviously knows nothing about, he should be using his (I suspect highly exaggerated) intelligence to come up with such a Theory, at which point he might be worth listening to.

  16. Children's rights on Are Kids Turning Your Kids Into Killers? · · Score: 1

    The real problem is that children don't have rights and they're forced into a situation in which they don't have any rights (school). No wonder some of them go berserk.

    If the same mental and physical abuse that occurs in schools took place in the workplace, it would be quickly taken care of (at least that's what the laws say).

    What's needed is a Childrens Bill of Rights to address the untenable situation that's the reality for a lot of kids. It's really unconcionable to force children into such a horrible situation with no way out (well, blowing away other students is one way out).

  17. Re:Jesus wept... on Where Is The Innovation? · · Score: 1

    So what? We now have our 'own fucking genome' but we have no clue what any of it means except for trivially small percentage. Figuring out what it means is many orders of magnitude more difficult, and in that, we basically have no clue.

  18. Re:Jesus wept... on Where Is The Innovation? · · Score: 1

    Well, brute force sequencing of the human genome isn't really very earth-shattering; I continue to not understand what the hullabaloo there is all about.

    Tech advances continue to be the main innovative force lifting all boats - just a couple examples that will soon be again revolutionizing computing (and everything else along with it): quantum computing and holographic storage. Within our lifetime we should expect to see teleportation and holodecks, and instantaneous food synthesis will likely solve most of the worlds hunger problems, all with technology being concretely developed in research labs right now.

  19. Duh on O'Reilly Ends Software Development · · Score: 1

    Hey, O'Reilly, how about doing the obvious and finally putting your money where your mouth is - GPL it. I doubt anyone will want to actually use the code, but you should get some PR out of it, or at least give you the appearance of being consistent with your open source rantings.

  20. Re:How? Utilitarianism on Are Computers Stealing Your Memory? · · Score: 1

    You're either a troll or an idiot, I can't tell which. At the least, you're a perfect example of how public education has failed in producing people who can think for themselves - your arguments are obviously nothing more than a transparent parroting of Republican/Randian dogma. Even their structure reveals a stilted mental growth.

    Your talking 'points' are all ludicrous, but a few are too ridiculous to let pass.

    When you talk about oppressed cultures being weeded out of the 'memepool', which is a suspect concept in itself, or at least a popularized simplification, it indicates that you don't understand the first thing about the complexities of how societies evolve. Do a search on 'dynamical systems' for starters. And no, evolution doesn't operate at the level of 'culture' so don't talk about 'social Darwinism' as if it were something real outside of the popular press.

    As to physics being 'overrated', well I don't know many physicist who 'pontificate on what the particles feel', as you put it, but it's true that that is probably closer to what Einstein did than what you and your fellow 'great minds' at IBM do, and I think the world needs more Einsteins than Republican apologists. Actually, I know a few IBM engineers, and they're certainly not the narrow-minded 'great minds' that you appear to hang out with. IBM does have a very large budget for pure research, but I'm fairly certain you've never been in personal contact with any of those engineers.

    Finally, shame on you for presuming to know what the compassionate thing to do for our children is - 'don't give them false hopes about what can't be achieved' might be a good strategy to keep someone with your own limited capacities on track, but you should understand that at least half of those children are smarter than you are (by definition), so it's not likely they'd listen to you anyway, even if you knew what could and couldn't be achieved. It's pretty obvious that you don't.

  21. Open Source O'Reilly on OSDLab Gets New Sponsors, New Projects · · Score: 1

    I see that Tim O'Reilly is on the board. Yeah, the guy who sells his crappy software for outrageous prices (WebBoard - 1799$/$2999, WebSite Professional - $995) in an explicitly closed-source manner.

    It sure helps the credibility of Enterprise Linux to have backers like that.

  22. Re:The smell of O'Rielly on Understanding the Linux Kernel · · Score: 1

    is the smell of hypocrisy.

    While Tim O'Reilly goes around pretending to be a champion of open source, their outlandishly priced (and inferior) software (WebBoard - 1799$/$2999, WebSite Professional - $995) is anything but. Until they practice what they preach, I refuse to buy anything from O'Reilly. My copy center copy of this book is really good, though - highly recommended introduction to the kernel. Kudos to the authors!

  23. Make them eat their own dog food on Stuffing Junkmail Postage-Paid Envelopes? · · Score: 1

    Let's see, what do I have a lot of that I want to get rid of? How about junk mail?!!! Send their own stuff back to them or better yet, send them another junk mailer's junk mail. Be sure to include the postage paid envelope - if they're as stupid as they assume everyone else is, it'll become a self-sustaining feedback loop and the rest of us will never get junk mail again.

  24. Natural Language on Michael Abrash on Games Programming · · Score: 4

    I myself am on the verge of spending some serious cycles on NL programming (adding 'smart' bots to a MUD) and am curious what about NLP he didn't find satisfying. Seems to me NLP is one of those 'deep knowledge areas the industry is moving to'.

    Well, at least in all the games I've ever played the AIs are stupid as fu**, especially when it comes to language, so obviously somebody needs to look into it.

  25. JSP is a Sun marketing tool... on Web Development With JSP · · Score: 2
    designed solely to convert 'programmers' familiar with ASP. See the following for a good discussion :

    The Problems with JSP

    There are plenty of better alternatives out there - this article mentions some, just search past slashdot for more.