You are buying the most valuable thing you can "buy" in life.
Time..
And hey it may not be worth it to you but something has value as long as someone else is willing to pay for it.. the fact that people buy these accounts says they have value.
THis is all a bit much saying people are blowing money... *shrugs*
It may be worth it to someone to not play for 800000 hours to make a character (time is not an actual time it would take I have no idea, just that it is a lot of they are worth this much money)
Lets make a few statements and then go from there.
We will say in our ficticious example that.. there are 250 Milllion Americans.
Now there are 300 million of these phones. Okay 1/10 of 250 million is 25 million, if 1/10th of people used this phone thats 25 million, most of these people are going to buy more than one, assume that at least more than one phone per person.. thats 50 million phones easily. And if you can deliver it withthe cost of a calling card I bet you would see even more usage than that..from people who typically use calling cards for their long distance etc.. or just are on the go etc, make a trip grab a phone.. I thinkmarketing would have a lot to do with this, but dont forget the pones ARE disposable..:)
That is very true.. One of the first things you are going to do if you dream of entering a obfuscated program in this contest is totally read front back and carry with you for days on end a reference about how an ANSI C Compiler behaves. *exactly* How the preprocessor behaves and what its precise behavior is supposed to be, then your going to actually test it to find out if its really all true. A great book like "C A reference manual" It goes over excruiciating detail on how various parts of the language work.
Just by virtue of spending *so* much time figuring out how to push the language you are going to learn a whole lot.
Going reverse and actually reverse engineering one of these programs you may or may not learn as much, but chances are good you will be gifted with a good deal of insight about C:)
Ive tried and managed to undo several but some of these programs are truly works of art in the truest sense of the word art.
Okay so it may not be valuable in the sense regular art is however the sheer intelligence and amount of effort some people put into this the only word that comes to mind to express elegantly exactly what these programs are to a programmer is art:)
Heh, this was another admittance by a perl programmer that the language is designed to be obfuscated.
Okay okay so I am taking what you said and adding one step to it in that direction but it sure sounds like that is what you are saying;)
First you go on about how people can not worry about design and structure at all and talk about clever syntax rather than typing a dozen lines of.. (easier to read for a mortal) code.
Then you say perl is called obfuscated because its encouraged to be "cool" and learn these shrotcuts so that a lesser (mortal?!#@$) cant read the code?
Hmmn..:) I dont know but one could draw some itneresting lines of thinking from this kind of stuff..
You did a nice post in not actually saying any of that which makes it good in the sense that you are not saying good or bad or giving away anything about whether you think it is good or bad, but I think what gives it away is "reward those that know the language by not forcing them to be verbose - this can shopw off similar technique" So every day in the life of a perl guru is to see how many shrotcuts they can use and show off their technique, afterall they are being rewarded with the shrotcuts they spent hours learning to use when they could use a piece of code we could all grasp a bit easier.????
I used to drive a 1980 Monte Carlo that looked beat all to hell and back.....
I spent like 4,000 dollars on it and put over 150,000 miles on the rebuilt engine and drive train, why the hell do I need a newer car right?
So the car doesnt look so great, like i care.
I get pulled over, I only have a t-shirt on and its like 40 degrees, not cold when your moving from one indoor place to another.
I get pulled over because I was *REALLY* tired and was a little over the white line on my side of the road.
Im asked too.. walk a straight line, say the alphabet (which is kind of hard to do when your visibly shivering), and am asked like 30 different questions.
On top of that its like 3am saturday so i havent slept from a regular workday yet...
I was let go thankfully, but I was asked many times if i was drinking.
Once you get to senior level executives its not always good to jump around a lot, but its a small company, you sound obviously unhappy, and if your co-workers are really taltend and with low morale if you leave they can surely find more work elsewhere given the current demand patterns for IT workers... That leaves you with the guilt of causing the company to fold? If you are the one holding it up and management continually makes stupid decisions do you really want to be assocaited?
I think if you use a little psychology the reasons for why people become bored more often become quite evident.
Think back to Maslow(sp) and his hierarchy of needs. Once the absolutely needed items and objects in life are taken care of you are no longer sated by merely having food to eat. After you have food, shelter etc, you begin searching for companionship/things you may not really need to function in life...
Think about what living in modern times makes "needed" things to live, you really need a car or you are SOL unless you are in a massively suburban type place where mass transit is very effective (laughs about Atlanta...)
Its just a simple fact that very few Americans go hungry nor are homeless so the mindset has developed that (in my opinon) people have become complacent with things they take for granted.
I can think of times/places NOW where people would be down on their knees praising their respective higher power for the fact they get an education and free food at school.
Yet.. more and more an emphasis is placed on "keeping" attention of children in school because they become bored easily?
That just says a lot about the state of a societies parenting habits and way of thinking.
So anyhow, I will quite rambling, I just really think that allowing things like education to be entertaining are hypocritical.
On the contrary, I believe this means Linux is still NOT mainstream.
You can use GNOME because who the hell outside of a small 5percent of the computer world has ever seen it?
says to me they wanted something possibly with a windows-esque look taht is fresh and different. Just one possible viewpoint but a pretty decent one... anyways
No, Its not half-assed if its the only thing that works is it? Its status quo until Microsoft stops shoveling non-standards-compliant browswers at the public, and everyone else follos suite and the world is a perfect place.
Thats what it means.
It has nothing to do with doing it half-assed...
I would gladly spend the time and effort if I knew my style sheets worked on EVERY platform and I knew that everything worked like it should every where
It doesnt, so I hit the biggest audience with the biggest impact in the least amount of time I can.
You basically state some common sense and a little bit of design guidelines from some of the real big names whose philosophy is to keep it simple and make the content usable.
In a perfect world you can get away with no design elements in your HTML, you can get away with no gifs to space elements out.
In an imperfect world.... There is internet explorer and netscape.
But one day it occured to me how irrelevant Linux is to most people.
When we are spec'ing sites out and we want some cool functionality enhancing feature... and I say but.... it will take me an extra day to get this cross-browser and working on all versions of netscape...
Well that is when netscape suddenly becomes less relevant. I get it working for one popular version in windows and that is it, support it from there and up and in Moz6, that is it.
Sure its nice to live in the world where I dont have to know a little about my client to do anything remotely interesting.
I think if people dont like *useful* and functional javascript and flash then its time to quit livining the stoneage (get outta LYNX, no one has the time nor budget to cater to *everyone!* Its a matter of practicality
If I can sucessfully run my business and design my sites to fit 95% of the shoes which is all that matters when your a small development team on a tight budget trying to make a project be really awesome you just can't spend those extra 5 hours doing everything to make everyone happy.
Yeah so a lot of sites out there are using non complinat kludge, so I dont always right standard and compliant HTML, I dont write slopy HTML, but I violate a couple of your rules and all I can say is come out of the stoneages and live with it.
Sit down and play with stuff! Get familiar with the system
Tinker try this command and that.
Reenforce your tinkering/experimentation with a few HOWTO's and maybe the odd book or two here and there
Its not like writing assembler!!!
You can play around read manpages, play with stuff, read a few howto's thumb through a book for a particular chapter.
I will admit some tasks are daunting, big ones being getting a good HD partioning shceme, dual booting OS, and getting X up and running, nothing else posed a significant challenge for me (YMMV)
I didnt sit there and read a book, im not a genius I just learend it through experimentation and thuming through a book on how to do something specific.
Its not a black art and im really not trying to sound eliteist either
it is just a matter of playing around and DONT be afraid to use the system and mess it up, its your first install heaven knows we all have trashed an installation or two beyond recognition.
Thats what holds so many people back, they see this complex computer in front of them, and beyond MS word they just freeze afraid to click anything for frea it may explode, dont be afraid:-)
You can store the transaction number which does not contain the CC number at all or a way to generally access the account AND just MAYBE the last 4 numbers of the card.
I have written several e-com sites and dealt with cybercash and authorize.net... customers HAVE gotten their money back on purchases but we dont store credit cards plain and simple.
And if you REALLY must store them oh please oh please encrypt the damn things and store the private key EXTERNALLY, the simple version is you have to type the thing eery time, typically we make the customer enter it in twice just for verification because I personally have only worked with one site where we stored (encrypted using a public key with priavte keys far from the net) which was only for bad cases or customer service, the process to retrieve a CC from the DB was pretty easy but still took human intervention.
Overall if your storing them as plain text you DESERVE to be hacked big time.
That is just how it is
Excuse the formatting of my post I just wanted to mention this, thanks.
This was not necesarilly all that flamebait of a post, but oh wait he said linux sucks without sounding to intelligent.. ooops, the post actually is not that bad spelling aside
He has a pretty good point... Man hours are man hours no way of getting around them. So his opinon is linux will always be a server and want to be a desktop, dont flame him for it prove him wrong.
When he speaks he just speaks in very certain terms, Okay I was being sarcastic, very obvious and pointed sarcasm, I like him I am serious about that
And now your doing the same thing I did making you a hypocrit by pretending to know my knowledge level, At least I was being sarcastic and trying to be a little cyinically humurous.
Lighten up, I know nothing about OpenBSD, What Theo De Raadt knows, how old he is or anything other than what he said in this article... anyways I tend to not evaluate something after JUST saying I have no idea about it nor the parameters it works in, even in the context of security you cant speak with certainty it will or will not improve something, most likely it will not, but how do we really know?
Slashdot Mirror
You are missing something..
You are buying the most valuable thing you can "buy" in life.
Time..
And hey it may not be worth it to you but something has value as long as someone else is willing to pay for it.. the fact that people buy these accounts says they have value.
THis is all a bit much saying people are blowing money... *shrugs*
It may be worth it to someone to not play for 800000 hours to make a character (time is not an actual time it would take I have no idea, just that it is a lot of they are worth this much money)
Jeremy
Lets make a few statements and then go from there.
:)
We will say in our ficticious example that.. there are 250 Milllion Americans.
Now there are 300 million of these phones. Okay 1/10 of 250 million is 25 million, if 1/10th of people used this phone thats 25 million, most of these people are going to buy more than one, assume that at least more than one phone per person.. thats 50 million phones easily. And if you can deliver it withthe cost of a calling card I bet you would see even more usage than that..from people who typically use calling cards for their long distance etc.. or just are on the go etc, make a trip grab a phone.. I thinkmarketing would have a lot to do with this, but dont forget the pones ARE disposable..
Jeremy
That is very true.. One of the first things you are going to do if you dream of entering a obfuscated program in this contest is totally read front back and carry with you for days on end a reference about how an ANSI C Compiler behaves. *exactly* How the preprocessor behaves and what its precise behavior is supposed to be, then your going to actually test it to find out if its really all true. A great book like "C A reference manual" It goes over excruiciating detail on how various parts of the language work.
:)
:)
Just by virtue of spending *so* much time figuring out how to push the language you are going to learn a whole lot.
Going reverse and actually reverse engineering one of these programs you may or may not learn as much, but chances are good you will be gifted with a good deal of insight about C
Ive tried and managed to undo several but some of these programs are truly works of art in the truest sense of the word art.
Okay so it may not be valuable in the sense regular art is however the sheer intelligence and amount of effort some people put into this the only word that comes to mind to express elegantly exactly what these programs are to a programmer is art
My two cents..
Jeremy
Heh, this was another admittance by a perl programmer that the language is designed to be obfuscated.
;)
:) I dont know but one could draw some itneresting lines of thinking from this kind of stuff..
Okay okay so I am taking what you said and adding one step to it in that direction but it sure sounds like that is what you are saying
First you go on about how people can not worry about design and structure at all and talk about clever syntax rather than typing a dozen lines of.. (easier to read for a mortal) code.
Then you say perl is called obfuscated because its encouraged to be "cool" and learn these shrotcuts so that a lesser (mortal?!#@$) cant read the code?
Hmmn..
You did a nice post in not actually saying any of that which makes it good in the sense that you are not saying good or bad or giving away anything about whether you think it is good or bad, but I think what gives it away is "reward those that know the language by not forcing them to be verbose - this can shopw off similar technique" So every day in the life of a perl guru is to see how many shrotcuts they can use and show off their technique, afterall they are being rewarded with the shrotcuts they spent hours learning to use when they could use a piece of code we could all grasp a bit easier.????
Jeremy
That was my thinking.
I used to drive a 1980 Monte Carlo that looked beat all to hell and back.....
I spent like 4,000 dollars on it and put over 150,000 miles on the rebuilt engine and drive train, why the hell do I need a newer car right?
So the car doesnt look so great, like i care.
I get pulled over, I only have a t-shirt on and its like 40 degrees, not cold when your moving from one indoor place to another.
I get pulled over because I was *REALLY* tired and was a little over the white line on my side of the road.
Im asked too.. walk a straight line, say the alphabet (which is kind of hard to do when your visibly shivering), and am asked like 30 different questions.
On top of that its like 3am saturday so i havent slept from a regular workday yet...
I was let go thankfully, but I was asked many times if i was drinking.
Jeremy
Once you get to senior level executives its not always good to jump around a lot, but its a small company, you sound obviously unhappy, and if your co-workers are really taltend and with low morale if you leave they can surely find more work elsewhere given the current demand patterns for IT workers... That leaves you with the guilt of causing the company to fold? If you are the one holding it up and management continually makes stupid decisions do you really want to be assocaited?
I would not, thats my opinon at least.
Jeremy
In part I agree as well..
I think if you use a little psychology the reasons for why people become bored more often become quite evident.
Think back to Maslow(sp) and his hierarchy of needs. Once the absolutely needed items and objects in life are taken care of you are no longer sated by merely having food to eat. After you have food, shelter etc, you begin searching for companionship/things you may not really need to function in life...
Think about what living in modern times makes "needed" things to live, you really need a car or you are SOL unless you are in a massively suburban type place where mass transit is very effective (laughs about Atlanta...)
Its just a simple fact that very few Americans go hungry nor are homeless so the mindset has developed that (in my opinon) people have become complacent with things they take for granted.
I can think of times/places NOW where people would be down on their knees praising their respective higher power for the fact they get an education and free food at school.
Yet.. more and more an emphasis is placed on "keeping" attention of children in school because they become bored easily?
That just says a lot about the state of a societies parenting habits and way of thinking.
So anyhow, I will quite rambling, I just really think that allowing things like education to be entertaining are hypocritical.
Jeremy
Reduction in the growth rate when compared as a ratio to the GDP growth rate :)
Jeremy
Carpet.. welded to the ground silly, read da article :)
On the contrary, I believe this means Linux is still NOT mainstream.
You can use GNOME because who the hell outside of a small 5percent of the computer world has ever seen it?
says to me they wanted something possibly with a windows-esque look taht is fresh and different. Just one possible viewpoint but a pretty decent one... anyways
Jeremy
No, Its not half-assed if its the only thing that works is it? Its status quo until Microsoft stops shoveling non-standards-compliant browswers at the public, and everyone else follos suite and the world is a perfect place.
Thats what it means.
It has nothing to do with doing it half-assed...
I would gladly spend the time and effort if I knew my style sheets worked on EVERY platform and I knew that everything worked like it should every where
It doesnt, so I hit the biggest audience with the biggest impact in the least amount of time I can.
Jeremy
I find myself in ideology agreeing with you.
You basically state some common sense and a little bit of design guidelines from some of the real big names whose philosophy is to keep it simple and make the content usable.
In a perfect world you can get away with no design elements in your HTML, you can get away with no gifs to space elements out.
In an imperfect world.... There is internet explorer and netscape.
But one day it occured to me how irrelevant Linux is to most people.
When we are spec'ing sites out and we want some cool functionality enhancing feature... and I say but.... it will take me an extra day to get this cross-browser and working on all versions of netscape...
Well that is when netscape suddenly becomes less relevant. I get it working for one popular version in windows and that is it, support it from there and up and in Moz6, that is it.
Sure its nice to live in the world where I dont have to know a little about my client to do anything remotely interesting.
I think if people dont like *useful* and functional javascript and flash then its time to quit livining the stoneage (get outta LYNX, no one has the time nor budget to cater to *everyone!* Its a matter of practicality
If I can sucessfully run my business and design my sites to fit 95% of the shoes which is all that matters when your a small development team on a tight budget trying to make a project be really awesome you just can't spend those extra 5 hours doing everything to make everyone happy.
Yeah so a lot of sites out there are using non complinat kludge, so I dont always right standard and compliant HTML, I dont write slopy HTML, but I violate a couple of your rules and all I can say is come out of the stoneages and live with it.
Jeremy
Someone else said it, this was probably OCR'd ;)
Hence all the terrible spellings which just dont fit given the highly technical nature, who misspells working?
Jeremy
Some of us cant choose what systems we use at work.... :-)
Jeremy
The key thing to remember is that these books were voted on... Not selected by amazon people
Jeremy
Same setup here, same errors.
Jeremy
That has to do with the size of the comment, not the "length" on screen. Size in bytes not screen space
Jeremy
There already is pay per use software...
Think everquest..., think all those pay by the hour games.....
Sure you get an hour but what if MSWord.NET running from joe bob's server did the same thing?
Jeremy
That is why you can download the betas?
No more vapourous than a dev kernel, thanks.
Jeremy
Biggest help for me...
:-)
Was not wondering where I could find help.
Sit down and play with stuff! Get familiar with the system
Tinker try this command and that.
Reenforce your tinkering/experimentation with a few HOWTO's and maybe the odd book or two here and there
Its not like writing assembler!!!
You can play around read manpages, play with stuff, read a few howto's thumb through a book for a particular chapter.
I will admit some tasks are daunting, big ones being getting a good HD partioning shceme, dual booting OS, and getting X up and running, nothing else posed a significant challenge for me (YMMV)
I didnt sit there and read a book, im not a genius I just learend it through experimentation and thuming through a book on how to do something specific.
Its not a black art and im really not trying to sound eliteist either
it is just a matter of playing around and DONT be afraid to use the system and mess it up, its your first install heaven knows we all have trashed an installation or two beyond recognition.
Thats what holds so many people back, they see this complex computer in front of them, and beyond MS word they just freeze afraid to click anything for frea it may explode, dont be afraid
Jeremy
Mmmk, thanx.. That makes sense.
:-P Thanks for buzzing me back :-)
Shouldnt these people still be encrypting with PKI infrastructure all of their credit card numbers?
Im not super familiar with credit cards and such just my (obviously) limited view of things..
Jeremy
BZZZZT
You can store the transaction number which does not contain the CC number at all or a way to generally access the account AND just MAYBE the last 4 numbers of the card.
I have written several e-com sites and dealt with cybercash and authorize.net... customers HAVE gotten their money back on purchases but we dont store credit cards plain and simple.
And if you REALLY must store them oh please oh please encrypt the damn things and store the private key EXTERNALLY, the simple version is you have to type the thing eery time, typically we make the customer enter it in twice just for verification because I personally have only worked with one site where we stored (encrypted using a public key with priavte keys far from the net) which was only for bad cases or customer service, the process to retrieve a CC from the DB was pretty easy but still took human intervention.
Overall if your storing them as plain text you DESERVE to be hacked big time.
That is just how it is
Excuse the formatting of my post I just wanted to mention this, thanks.
Jeremy
This was not necesarilly all that flamebait of a post, but oh wait he said linux sucks without sounding to intelligent.. ooops, the post actually is not that bad spelling aside
He has a pretty good point... Man hours are man hours no way of getting around them. So his opinon is linux will always be a server and want to be a desktop, dont flame him for it prove him wrong.
Oh well.. moderators suck
Jeremy
Why dont you get a user account so we can discuss name calling and vulgarity directed at a person?
Jeremy
Thats not what I was pointing out.
When he speaks he just speaks in very certain terms, Okay I was being sarcastic, very obvious and pointed sarcasm, I like him I am serious about that
And now your doing the same thing I did making you a hypocrit by pretending to know my knowledge level, At least I was being sarcastic and trying to be a little cyinically humurous.
Lighten up, I know nothing about OpenBSD, What Theo De Raadt knows, how old he is or anything other than what he said in this article... anyways I tend to not evaluate something after JUST saying I have no idea about it nor the parameters it works in, even in the context of security you cant speak with certainty it will or will not improve something, most likely it will not, but how do we really know?
Jeremy