From "ILOVEYOU Virus": Do these "customers" really specifically ask for fully general scripts that attachments can execute, or do they only ask for certain features that can be implemented in many ways, some of which involve attachments that execute scripts? Do the customers who supposedly ask for these crazy things understand the consequences of them?
I think this is an underestimation of Microsoft's users. Sure, this stuff is dangerous to have and some of the things Melissa and ILOVEYOU have done should have been anticipated by the original designers of VBA and the ones integrating it into their product. But still, I have used scripting a lot to automate all kinds of tasks in a Windows-environment and I have to say it actually works quite well. People here don't just run attachments in an e-mail called "ILOVEYOU" and consequently turn off macros in a document unless they know beforehand what they do. But once you know what you're doing, the scripting environment that allows all these things is very powerful.
I think the main problem of Windows is that the design goal is to create an OS that is easy for everybody but turns out only to be safe for experienced users. Because apart from the occasional hole that turns up in the software directly (but that happens in all software), a Windows NT or 2000 box can be customized and used very safely.
About the webstandards... HTML won't be around forever, maybe XML will follow it up, maybe not, but what I wonder about: who decides in the end? Just the browsermakers or?
(And on a smaller not: when do you think HTML will be ditched permanently?)
I do wonder about players in multi-player games tampering with the code to give them godly powers -- or at lest demi-godly powers. How will such tampering be prevented, if at all?
It doesn't have to be - Black&White is a God-simulation.
Microsoft also offers the product for free under a restrictive license. This puts the competing company at a severe economic disadvantage. When the competitor folds, Microsoft is then free to jack up the prices. By then, the consumer base is hooked on that product. You can bet upgrades will force said consumer to use a new version in order for existing documents to work. Its all about monopoly practices.
It's not. It's about whether it's ok to attempt to overthrow a system by using dirty tricks. Using loopholes in legislation is the same thing as abusing the patent system for software: outdated rules allow you to create a situation the system should have prevented.
How will Fraunhofer learn from LAME? "Oh, those guys are using some dumb trick to do whatever the hell they want... Like we did when we patented the damn thing! I guess this kind of stuff is still ok!"
I know it's hard to stand by when it's so simple to get what you want, but if you can't do it the right way, there's no point anyway.
I think it's pretty pathetic that when Microsoft uses a loophole in an agreement to start exploiting someone else's technology to their own ends people use it as an example of MS' evil, but when some GNU project does the same thing they're applauded for their efforts...
Sure, I agree that software patents suck and that everybody should be allowed to write his own encoder if he wants to, but that's beside the point here.
What a joke... I'm on Windows2000 (hey if you need to run Windows, 2000 is pretty decent), so I just went to shockwave.com to play some Defender and after showing me all kinds of Shockwave stuff it tells me that to actually play the game, I need to have Shockwave 8 installed... Which I don't have (apparantly), so I get a link to autoinstall it. It starts downloading for a couple of minutes, shows me a movie with the text below "If you see the movie playing, the installation is complete" but I notice that the movie says I have Shockwave 7...
And indeed, the same message pops up: "Sorry, you need Shockwave 8 to play this game" AAAARRRGGGHHHH
Even when I go straight to the download-menu and select I want to download Shockwave 8, it tells me I already have it!
Anybody proficient in Macromedia website-navigation (Tarzan?) care to help me out?
The thing that sets this apart from another form of interfacing would be that the system will never interpret something differently than you intend it.
What I mean is: if you want to search for Java, a searchengine or voicerecognition system has to use the word to interpret what you mean. Is it coffee you want or the language? Not the case here: they're both "stored" in totally different brainpatterns, so there's never any ambiguity...
Which also means there could be a big problem: how can the software discover that you want some coffee? Since the whole concept of "coffee" is probably different for everybody, so patternmatching might not be sufficient - that's why at this moment all they can hear is a brain-wide "YEAH!!!". Anybody know more about how this can be accomplished in the future?
One of the main reasons I always want stuff printed (and I still read a lot of books) is because online help doesn't do much good when you don't have a computer nearby and you want to catch up on stuff beforehand (train) or when you're installing a new OS or something similar which means you can't use it for anything else at that moment.
A good alternative would be palmtop docs: I've already used my PalmV for reading docs. They're great for use in a train or somewhere else too! (And it saves paper)
I always thought the memorystick was the ideal memory for these cameras and although I'm very happy with it, I have to say that the ones with an FDD can be very handy also, especially if you make a lot of pictures with a computer nearby.
I wouldn't travel the world with 5 ten-packs of 3.5" disks though:) But it's good if you have a laptop with you.
SQL-queries need to be parsed by the database-server and then converted into a set of instructions. A stored procedure is converted (compiled) when you define the stored procedure - so instead of parsing the query and then creating some internal commands, a stored procedure can run right away. Besides not needing the parse-step, stored procedures can also remain in memory once they are used once, making them even faster (no reading from disk required.)
The parsing is usually not much of a problem, but when a query is executed several times each minute or even second, the performance-difference starts to show.
Also, stored procedures have a huge advantage when moving lots of data: imagine you want to store a picture of 50kb in a database. In SQL, you'd have to convert the 50kb of binary data to a string, making it twice as big and then sending it to the database-server, which needs to convert it back. This takes lots of time. With a stored procedure you can just tell the database-server: "Hey I got 50kb of stuff coming for stored proc #3" and that's that:)
Optimize your queries. Don't use more queries than you absolutely need to. For instance, a lot of people show the latest n items and also show the latest date the page was altered. Instead of querying twice, just use the date on the most recently dated item in the recordset the first query got you (assuming it returns the adddate.)
Use cache. When someone requests your page, simply check if the database changed since the previous hit - if not, then show him cache you generated.
Use your database. I've seen loads of sites using very advanced database-software that supports stuff like stored procedures, triggers and views, but the developer only uses it for raw SQL-querying. Stored procedures for instance do wonders for performance.
So the best thing to do first when building a high-performance database-driven website is contemplate and set up a datamodel. It's essential (get some books)
The Hellmouth posts are unique. They belong in the public domain. In fact, they cry out to be there.
Hmm, that's your view ofcourse - what if someone feels that Metallica MP3s are so unique that they belong in the public domain? The whole problem with these posts is the difference in intention - music and books are intended for wide distribution, the only difference between copying and selling is the money involved. In this case, a lot of messages might have been posted without intending them to be reproduced in such a massive way. Ever.
If you think being a BSD-user in the US means you're in a small community, then have a look in Europe. Really, I've stopped asking people about it: some people have heard about it. Nobody uses it. Except for a couple of ISPs ofcourse.
At least in the US enough people can be found to hold a BOF.
FreeNet is not such a bad idea. I was very hesistant towards it at first because I was afraid it would increase the amount of garbage like child-pornography on the net, but with legislation like this soon to take the world by storm, maybe firing up a new Universe on another port is not such a bad idea after all:)
The advantage we have right now is basically that the Internet is still a bit of a technocracy - those who understand the technology can use it to circumvent the rules. But for how long? I fear some conservatives will ultimately attempt to ban the Internet once they discover encryption and other methods make it impossible to control completely.
Right now I have a 64mb Rio that holds about 65-70 mins. of high quality music and I think that's actually enough. Changing the content is so simple that it's not much of a problem to do it daily.
The point with a portable mp3-cd player is that at some point in time, there are usually about 5-7 tracks that I like the most and want to listen to when travelling to work. Having to burn a couple of tracks on a cd every other day is actually more of a hassle than just uploading some new mp3s to my Rio.
I guess it's good for travelling long distances though: a couple of cds can hold the entire work of your favorite band. But for day-to-day, it's not the most practical thing.
Pretty strange that an article generally discussing some of the recent developments surrounding FreeBSD turns out to be used as a tool for Apple-bashing. And then the author turns out to be a macweek.com-columnist too.
I wonder if the next Zelda to come out (probably for the Dolphin) will also be strategically versioned, for instance... Zelda 10? Or are software-companies the only ones dumb enough to engage in these practices?:)
Also, are Final Fantasy #2-9 supposed to be contradicting or was the success of Final Fantasy #1 totally unexpected?:)
and it appears that this is the radical sort of "freedom" to which you refer. You apparently would like to be free to grab someone else's source code, modify or extend it, and then resell it as a proprietary, binaries-only product, so you could gather profits, those profits enforced by copyright law.
You almost understand. I would like to be free to do so yes, but even if I would do it, I would not expect my profits to be enforced by copyright law. You see, I want the same freedom for everybody.
It is my view that keeping people honest just because they'll be thrown in jail otherwise, doesn't really solve any problems or create a better society. I know I would not rip people who create opensource software off, simply because they couldn't sue me. I wouldn't rip them off, because I understand the importance of keeping it open and free.
I don't need others to make ethical decisions for me, since I am perfectly capable of doing that myself.
It really amazes me how quiet this section is... Even when you multiply the amount of follow-ups to this message by a thousand, it's still not much...:(
I just wonder how they're going to work out a scheme to make the game interesting for everybody without having a universe where 99% of the population is Senior Jedi Knight:)
The problem is: if you want to make this play like the real SW universe, only a couple of players could be a Jedi and the majority would have to be stormtrooper, tusken raider, ewok, etc. I can see people registering 10.000 times just so they get to be a Jedi and stuff like that. I hope they solve this in a cool way - I wouldn't mind playing a stormtrooper.
They're fond of patents and they expect everybody to respect the status quo. You can quote them, review them or buy their machines. About the only thing you can't do, is use their colors; because then they sue you. They drag the human race downward.
Although a lot of people I talk to think Matrox or 3Dfx are to be the biggest competitors for nVidia, I think ATI is a more worthy opponent: they're huge, since they're selling about a billion of chipsets daily to a lot of large OEMs (Gateway, Dell) so they've got the financial strength to take on nVidia's roadmap. And besides, their previous efforts (like the dual Rage Pro Maxx) were already quite good.
I hope they'll use this chipset to target the hardcore gamers and start a good battle against nVidia's supremacy. Like the AMD vs. Intel thing, us consumers will only benefit:)
You'll probably get lots of replies about the funkiest hardware available, but for the extensibility of your service I would simply suggest to make your datamodel as generic as possible. The reason Amazon could easily switch to selling other things besides books would be because their database-tables don't contain any book-specific information. Crosstable until you drop:)
Also, a lot of functionality can be implemented at a lot of different levels. If you're using a powerful and fast database like Oracle, then use its features to do as much as possible.
And finally: optimize your queries. It matters a great deal whether a single page in your site is constructed from 10 or 20 different queries.
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Do these "customers" really specifically ask for fully general scripts that attachments can execute, or do they only ask for certain features that can be implemented in many ways, some of which involve attachments that execute scripts? Do the customers who supposedly ask for these crazy things understand the consequences of them?
I think this is an underestimation of Microsoft's users. Sure, this stuff is dangerous to have and some of the things Melissa and ILOVEYOU have done should have been anticipated by the original designers of VBA and the ones integrating it into their product. But still, I have used scripting a lot to automate all kinds of tasks in a Windows-environment and I have to say it actually works quite well. People here don't just run attachments in an e-mail called "ILOVEYOU" and consequently turn off macros in a document unless they know beforehand what they do. But once you know what you're doing, the scripting environment that allows all these things is very powerful.
I think the main problem of Windows is that the design goal is to create an OS that is easy for everybody but turns out only to be safe for experienced users. Because apart from the occasional hole that turns up in the software directly (but that happens in all software), a Windows NT or 2000 box can be customized and used very safely.
(And on a smaller not: when do you think HTML will be ditched permanently?)
It doesn't have to be - Black&White is a God-simulation.
So tell me, how do Gods cheat? :)
It's not. It's about whether it's ok to attempt to overthrow a system by using dirty tricks. Using loopholes in legislation is the same thing as abusing the patent system for software: outdated rules allow you to create a situation the system should have prevented.
How will Fraunhofer learn from LAME? "Oh, those guys are using some dumb trick to do whatever the hell they want... Like we did when we patented the damn thing! I guess this kind of stuff is still ok!"
I know it's hard to stand by when it's so simple to get what you want, but if you can't do it the right way, there's no point anyway.
Sure, I agree that software patents suck and that everybody should be allowed to write his own encoder if he wants to, but that's beside the point here.
And indeed, the same message pops up: "Sorry, you need Shockwave 8 to play this game" AAAARRRGGGHHHH
Even when I go straight to the download-menu and select I want to download Shockwave 8, it tells me I already have it!
Anybody proficient in Macromedia website-navigation (Tarzan?) care to help me out?
What I mean is: if you want to search for Java, a searchengine or voicerecognition system has to use the word to interpret what you mean. Is it coffee you want or the language? Not the case here: they're both "stored" in totally different brainpatterns, so there's never any ambiguity...
Which also means there could be a big problem: how can the software discover that you want some coffee? Since the whole concept of "coffee" is probably different for everybody, so patternmatching might not be sufficient - that's why at this moment all they can hear is a brain-wide "YEAH!!!". Anybody know more about how this can be accomplished in the future?
What is according to you, the silliest thing that happens in the entire HHGTTG series?
A good alternative would be palmtop docs: I've already used my PalmV for reading docs. They're great for use in a train or somewhere else too! (And it saves paper)
I wouldn't travel the world with 5 ten-packs of 3.5" disks though :) But it's good if you have a laptop with you.
The parsing is usually not much of a problem, but when a query is executed several times each minute or even second, the performance-difference starts to show.
Also, stored procedures have a huge advantage when moving lots of data: imagine you want to store a picture of 50kb in a database. In SQL, you'd have to convert the 50kb of binary data to a string, making it twice as big and then sending it to the database-server, which needs to convert it back. This takes lots of time. With a stored procedure you can just tell the database-server: "Hey I got 50kb of stuff coming for stored proc #3" and that's that :)
- Optimize your queries. Don't use more queries than you absolutely need to. For instance, a lot of people show the latest n items and also show the latest date the page was altered. Instead of querying twice, just use the date on the most recently dated item in the recordset the first query got you (assuming it returns the adddate.)
- Use cache. When someone requests your page, simply check if the database changed since the previous hit - if not, then show him cache you generated.
- Use your database. I've seen loads of sites using very advanced database-software that supports stuff like stored procedures, triggers and views, but the developer only uses it for raw SQL-querying. Stored procedures for instance do wonders for performance.
So the best thing to do first when building a high-performance database-driven website is contemplate and set up a datamodel. It's essential (get some books)At least in the US enough people can be found to hold a BOF.
The advantage we have right now is basically that the Internet is still a bit of a technocracy - those who understand the technology can use it to circumvent the rules. But for how long? I fear some conservatives will ultimately attempt to ban the Internet once they discover encryption and other methods make it impossible to control completely.
The point with a portable mp3-cd player is that at some point in time, there are usually about 5-7 tracks that I like the most and want to listen to when travelling to work. Having to burn a couple of tracks on a cd every other day is actually more of a hassle than just uploading some new mp3s to my Rio.
I guess it's good for travelling long distances though: a couple of cds can hold the entire work of your favorite band. But for day-to-day, it's not the most practical thing.
Pretty strange that an article generally discussing some of the recent developments surrounding FreeBSD turns out to be used as a tool for Apple-bashing. And then the author turns out to be a macweek.com-columnist too.
Also, are Final Fantasy #2-9 supposed to be contradicting or was the success of Final Fantasy #1 totally unexpected? :)
You almost understand. I would like to be free to do so yes, but even if I would do it, I would not expect my profits to be enforced by copyright law. You see, I want the same freedom for everybody.
It is my view that keeping people honest just because they'll be thrown in jail otherwise, doesn't really solve any problems or create a better society. I know I would not rip people who create opensource software off, simply because they couldn't sue me. I wouldn't rip them off, because I understand the importance of keeping it open and free.
I don't need others to make ethical decisions for me, since I am perfectly capable of doing that myself.
It really amazes me how quiet this section is... Even when you multiply the amount of follow-ups to this message by a thousand, it's still not much... :(
The problem is: if you want to make this play like the real SW universe, only a couple of players could be a Jedi and the majority would have to be stormtrooper, tusken raider, ewok, etc. I can see people registering 10.000 times just so they get to be a Jedi and stuff like that. I hope they solve this in a cool way - I wouldn't mind playing a stormtrooper.
I'm not sure about being an ewok though...
You can quote them, review them or buy their machines.
About the only thing you can't do, is use their colors;
because then they sue you. They drag the human race downward.
Think different, the judge did.
I hope they'll use this chipset to target the hardcore gamers and start a good battle against nVidia's supremacy. Like the AMD vs. Intel thing, us consumers will only benefit :)
(Another cool article on the charisma is here.)
Also, a lot of functionality can be implemented at a lot of different levels. If you're using a powerful and fast database like Oracle, then use its features to do as much as possible.
And finally: optimize your queries. It matters a great deal whether a single page in your site is constructed from 10 or 20 different queries.
Just my 2 cents...
The correct link is here...