I think they still don't realize that. Someone should tell them and tell them now. Will you do it, or should I? How about you, Taco? You know the guys. GO TO THEIR OFFICE AND CLUB THEM OVER THE HEAD REPEATEDLY WHILE SCREAMING "YOU FRIGGING MORONS".
Well now, it seems that you are just being petty here, but I'll reply anyway.
Perhaps your not a part of tehir target market? Or is your ignorance always the blame of someone's marketing department?
As a matter of fact, my ignorance is the fault of marketing. It's not my job to know the name and purpose of every product on the market. It's marketing's job to make their product something I know about. If it weren't for marketing, "windows" would be something you open when the weather is warm, "oracle" would live in "delphi" and "ford" would be a stream crossing. It wouldn't be my fault for not associating these words with something else.
Now it seems to me that Curl must have a pretty good marketing department, since they got mentioned on/. even though their philosophy is 180 from a lot of people here. cURL OTOH, being Open Source, probably doesn't care about marketing, which is just one of many problems with OS/FS.
Being reasonable people, I don't think they have any intention of suing MIT
Read what I said again. You switched cURL with Curl.
No. Not trolling. I've dabbled in *NIX and have a BSD partition for when I absolutely need it, but I only fire it up every 6 months, sometimes longer.
I honestly had no idea there was something called cURL. The only time I had ever heard "curl" used in association with computing was in connection with Curl, the MIT-commercial partnership to which you linked. So, I retract my previous statements in regards to cURL.
Maybe I went off half-cocked, but then again if I made this mistake maybe others will too. Poor marketing on the part of cURL? If Curl is really "out to get people" maybe cURL should consider a pre-emptive name change to prevent lawsuits.
OK, so they took from BSD, gave to GPL, then mixed the result with something as absurdly proprietary as Curl. Are they trying to see how many people they can piss off with one OS?
As a BSD "thief", I get nothing.
If I were a GPL lover, I would get tainted with Curl.
As someone who appreciates a good commercial package, I am left with concerns that they will decide to turn it over to "the community" which is just a synonym for abandonment.
Of course, that's just me. They could please me by keeping the BSD codebase that they modified BSD, and then they could run whatever proprietary code they wanted on top of it.
I expect that others may be more or less difficult to please. Then of course there are the users, who don't care about any of that crap. If they can please the users it might be a moot point. This could end up being part of the "open monopoly" if it ran on x86.
Yet Another Storage Capacity Increase Article. or... News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters with a de-emphasis on "news", which this is surely not. Too bad The Onion doesn't take submissions. "Researchers conduct Research" would be a great title.
Slashdot is the perfect example of why ratings systems don't work. You can't really rate Slashdot. You'd have to rate individual posts. After all, each post is under the editorial control of the poster, not Slashdot. In a sense, Slashdot is a tiny little internet, and it already has its own form of filtering--moderation.
Of course unlike with a filter, Slashdot does not provide any way for the "parent" to keep the "child" from reading posts that have been moderated down. Many would argue that filters don't either.:)
However, if you backed me into a corner and forced me to rate Slashdot, I'd give it a PG. That's because it's not a "kiddy" site. It sometimes displays or links to material that ought to be in a more restricted category, but such material is almost always moderated down. In fact, Slashdot may actually teach a valuable lesson in that regard. The young reader probably develops some sense of what the community at large considers acceptable. Of course you can *link* to anything and presumeably rating on the other site would take care of it.
I guess, now that I think about it, the analogy to use is walking through the neighborhood. You don't keep your kid from going to the store because he might hear a stranger use dirty words. So, if the express purpose of the mailing list, newsgroup, or weblog is PG in nature, then it should be rated PG even though people sometimes abuse it.
And yes, that doesn't keep kids from using the group to exchange porn, just as they couldn't keep us from accessing some parent's stash "back in the day". So, to reiterate... ratings are just not very practical, which is why I don't like them... but they help us to maintain a certain fiction... which in strict logical terms is useless, but it probably serves a social function. After all, wasn't part of the thrill knowing you were doing something bad?
The article says it's just a re-hashed version of something that's been around for a while, and by that I assume they are referring to RSAC.
I don't see anything wrong with this. It's NOT censorship. TV programs have to label their content. Sure it's cryptic (quick, what's TV MPVD got in it?), but it doesn't stop people who don't care from watching the program. If something like RSAC became the standard for rating, it wouldn't stop people from viewing porn either. It would be the internet equivalent of labeling.
We already expect labeling for TV programs and food, why not on-line content? The only real problem I have with it is that it's a hassle for small web-sites, which is why I expect these systems haven't caught on too well. I mean, as a general rule I don't have "trash" on my site, but if I feel the need to post frontal nudity to make a point about something, or say "fuck" somwhere, I don't want to have to worry about losing my content rating.
So for me, the choice is "be on gaurd all the time" or "not care about content rating". So far, the former has been the more appealing choice and I expect it's like that for most people.
What they need is a category for sites where the content is "not for children" but on the other hand is "not catering strictly to the prurient interest". In other words, simple categories like G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X, XX, XXX and XP (the P stands for Puke). RSAC is just too complicated; it tries to do "fine grained" content filtering.
Of course another big problem with all this is that there is simply too much content on the net. It's one thing for volunteers to rate movies and TV; there are only so many hours of it per year. Rating the net would just take way too long. So, we are left either with people rating their own stuff, or companies trying to rate it. Everybody has their own opinion about where the cut-off for a particular rating is, so there is no way to trust the rating. Even if there were, you can't put any legal teeth to it because content providers would have to open themselves up for a law suit. So, the content provider is still going to choose "not rated" as their rating.
The bottom line? Teach your children well; and let them live in fear of the librarian seeing something over their shoulder, just like we lived in fear of the teacher finding our stash.
I've never understood that whole business of turning the thing on. How do they know the switch isn't connected to a presurized nerve gas cylinder or a wad of C-4?
So, the real question is whether or not the DMCA applies in relationships between employer and employee. If that's the case, then people can start telling their bosses that they are not allowed to document changes because of the law.
Yep. That did it. Among other things, Nimda resets some settings. Even though I am Nimda-free now, I guess that was one of the things it whacked... although I could swear I checked it before.../me rescans...
Slashdot used to cache, so that when I hit the back button on my browser the old page was still there. If I wanted to see the new comments all I had to do was hit refresh.
Now/. runs the script when I hit back. This has to be putting an additional dynamic load on your servers. Ummm... are you sure this doesn't account for your increased traffic?:)
Maybe it's just an IE issue. I've gone through all the settings in IE and I don't see how it could be on my end. This is especially bad for me because I'm stuck with a modem and can only get 28.8 because of the crappy phone lines. PLEASE bring back caching if you can.
Wow... that is quite devious. It never occured to me that "device" would mean software, so I stand corrected and it appears that this law threatens all software, not just Free Software.
The Free Software advocates would do well not to exclude those of us in the copyrighted freeware and shareware communities. We are all threatened. Come on! If terrorism can unite Russia, Pakistan, and the US then surely something as stupid as this law can unite software developers.
What say Free Software advocates? Will you smoke the peace pipe and unite with us?
...from a previous dialog in which I participated on USENET regarding this issue (notice, I'm $teve, MUFTI is one of my rivals from the Left):
Joerg Scheurich aka MUFTI wrote in
message news:slrn9sdulh.n6m.rusmufti@helpdesk.rus.uni-stut tgart.de...
> In article , Andrea
wrote:
> > It seems to me that provisions in a new law being presented to
> > Congress from the entertainment industry called SSSCA would make
> > creating works of art and science using text based programs illegal.
>
> No. Following
>
> http://cryptome.org/sssca.htm
>
> it only makes it illegal, to distribute data without certified security
> technology.
Can you site a section? The only thing that comes close to that is Section
102 which says:
"An interactive computer service shall store and transmit with
integrity any security measure associated with certified security
technologies that is used in connection with copyrighted material or other
protected content such service transmits or stores."
My interpretation of this is that the service must preserve security
measures in the content, but only to the extent that the content contains
such measures in the first place. So, if the VRML file contains no security
measures, they are fine providing the file with no security measures.
The real heart of the bill is the prohibition agains "insecure" hardware.
This reminds me of the V-chip legislation. They required TV manufacturers
to put the stupid V-chip in the TV, but I have never heard of anybody using
the V-chip to block objectionable programs. It's just something that sits
there and adds (according to some sources) as much as $5 to the retail cost
of a TV.
So, what is likely to happen is that the same people who use formats like
WMF and RA to transmit data will continue to do so. It will be harder to
hack WMF and RA files, and it will be illegal to do so.
People who choose to use "insecure" formats like HTML and VRML will go about
business as usual. In order to really foul things up they would have to
explicitly state that using an "insecure" format implies forfeiture of IP,
thus compelling people to use "secure" formats. This bill does not do that,
and I don't think any subsequent bills are likely to do that.
> I see no reason why VRML can not be distributed via https with
> a ssl encryption.
>
> If this law will be reality in the USA, a certified ssl encryption will
> come.
Yes, they will have something certified, but the way I see it there won't be
any requirement for you to use it with VRML, HTML, or anything else.
Don't get me wrong. This is a bad law. It allocates over half a billion
dollars to do some research when an industry standard consortium probably
would have done it without wasting our taxes. You know what we will get for
the money? Probably a slightly modified version of some security software
that is already available as a free download, accompanied by a 1600-page
looseleaf bound anesthesia document.
So what if you are a guy with calico colored hair who wears a skirt? Can you fix our problems? Yes? Great? That's what I've seen before, and I expect it will remain that way as long as we have the attitude that "diversity" and stuff like that matters.
When times were good, this was especially so. I used to describe the interview process to people like this:
Interviewer I see you have a felony drug conviction... oh wait. You answered that question about TCP/IP correctly. You're hired!
Interviewee Great. When do I start?
Of course now that people are being layed off left and right, it won't be quite this easy. OTOH, if the guy has a great resume I bet they still don't care what he looks like.
As for the guy in the article, he was just a bum. Even "back in the day" performance mattered. It might have taken a few months back then, but anybody who didn't perform got let go sooner or later; with no regard to race, creed, or hair color.
It's the sound of the American far right. They're shooting target practice. Maybe Bin Laden was right--we will create more Usamas. It's just that we won't create them in the Middle East. We will create them in our own back yard. Anybody wanna go into the mountains of Wyoming, Idaho, Montanna, and West Virginia to fingerprint them Bible-believin', gun-toten, God-fearen' good-ol boys and give them a number so that they "may neither buy nor sell"? Volunteers? Janet Reno? Anybody?
Maybe some wealthy Saudis will end up funding our mujahidin. Yes!!! Now it all makes sense. Their plan is for that to happen, so that the Arabs can experience "blow-back". Wow! It's pure genius. Carry on, fellas.
Which of the following scenarios demonstates civil behavior:
A. Hey look everybody! Bill has a chive on his tooth!
B. Psst. Bill. You've got a chive on your tooth.
If you said A, congratulations. You are a brain dead follower of Slashthink.
How does this analogy apply to the situation? Think about it. Wouldn't it be better if companies (including MS) were given a little lead time before bugs are announced to the world? Perhaps a month would be the standard. Then, and only then, you could use public embarassment as the tool of last resort; not the first.
It's funny you should link that, because I was going to cite it as a reference for why all software does have bugs. Read this quote from the article:
But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
Notice how they said it was bug-free, but then they immediately contradicted themselves. Yes, the software is very close to being bug-free. BTW, for those not familiar with the article, it's a description of the highly disciplined process that NASA goes through to develop software for the space shuttle. Indeed, this is a case where "mission critical" is to be taken quite literally, and they still can't achieve perfection. Nobody is perfect.
Petfood, people food, pizza, or anything else delivered via Internet interactions that would be more easily and cheaply done via traditional methods. If you like, you can simply substitute the sock puppet as a symbol for this.
Game rooms at the company, despite the fact that every survey, both statistical and anecdotal made it painfully obvious that what most employees really wanted were saner hours and/or more money. Every once in a while I still see pitches from companies bragging about the company game room, so some of them still haven't got the clue.
Stock options I personally had options at 40 for a company that was trading at 60. Company now trades below 5. At least I didn't exercise my options and end up in debt to the IRS.
20-something millionaires For the few who made it, it was great. For the rest of us, we had to put up with all the people who wondered why we weren't millionaires; why we weren't driving Lexi and buying mansions. When the crash came, it actually made a lot of us feel better
(from INTERCAL)The Sieve of Erosthenes test for prime numbers up to 65535 took over seventeen hours on a SPARC--it requires only a half second using C.
and
(from SMETANA)
The language has two instructions: "Swap step n with step m", and "Go to step p".
Slashdot Mirror
I think they still don't realize that. Someone should tell them and tell them now. Will you do it, or should I? How about you, Taco? You know the guys. GO TO THEIR OFFICE AND CLUB THEM OVER THE HEAD REPEATEDLY WHILE SCREAMING "YOU FRIGGING MORONS".
Horse. Barn. Door.
Well now, it seems that you are just being petty here, but I'll reply anyway.
Perhaps your not a part of tehir target market? Or is your ignorance always the blame of someone's marketing department?
As a matter of fact, my ignorance is the fault of marketing. It's not my job to know the name and purpose of every product on the market. It's marketing's job to make their product something I know about. If it weren't for marketing, "windows" would be something you open when the weather is warm, "oracle" would live in "delphi" and "ford" would be a stream crossing. It wouldn't be my fault for not associating these words with something else.
Now it seems to me that Curl must have a pretty good marketing department, since they got mentioned on /. even though their philosophy is 180 from a lot of people here. cURL OTOH, being Open Source, probably doesn't care about marketing, which is just one of many problems with OS/FS.
Being reasonable people, I don't think they have any intention of suing MIT
Read what I said again. You switched cURL with Curl.
No. Not trolling. I've dabbled in *NIX and have a BSD partition for when I absolutely need it, but I only fire it up every 6 months, sometimes longer.
I honestly had no idea there was something called cURL. The only time I had ever heard "curl" used in association with computing was in connection with Curl, the MIT-commercial partnership to which you linked. So, I retract my previous statements in regards to cURL.
Maybe I went off half-cocked, but then again if I made this mistake maybe others will too. Poor marketing on the part of cURL? If Curl is really "out to get people" maybe cURL should consider a pre-emptive name change to prevent lawsuits.
OK, so they took from BSD, gave to GPL, then mixed the result with something as absurdly proprietary as Curl. Are they trying to see how many people they can piss off with one OS?
As a BSD "thief", I get nothing.
If I were a GPL lover, I would get tainted with Curl.
As someone who appreciates a good commercial package, I am left with concerns that they will decide to turn it over to "the community" which is just a synonym for abandonment.
Of course, that's just me. They could please me by keeping the BSD codebase that they modified BSD, and then they could run whatever proprietary code they wanted on top of it.
I expect that others may be more or less difficult to please. Then of course there are the users, who don't care about any of that crap. If they can please the users it might be a moot point. This could end up being part of the "open monopoly" if it ran on x86.
Yet Another Storage Capacity Increase Article. or... News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters with a de-emphasis on "news", which this is surely not. Too bad The Onion doesn't take submissions. "Researchers conduct Research" would be a great title.
Slashdot is the perfect example of why ratings systems don't work. You can't really rate Slashdot. You'd have to rate individual posts. After all, each post is under the editorial control of the poster, not Slashdot. In a sense, Slashdot is a tiny little internet, and it already has its own form of filtering--moderation.
Of course unlike with a filter, Slashdot does not provide any way for the "parent" to keep the "child" from reading posts that have been moderated down. Many would argue that filters don't either. :)
However, if you backed me into a corner and forced me to rate Slashdot, I'd give it a PG. That's because it's not a "kiddy" site. It sometimes displays or links to material that ought to be in a more restricted category, but such material is almost always moderated down. In fact, Slashdot may actually teach a valuable lesson in that regard. The young reader probably develops some sense of what the community at large considers acceptable. Of course you can *link* to anything and presumeably rating on the other site would take care of it.
I guess, now that I think about it, the analogy to use is walking through the neighborhood. You don't keep your kid from going to the store because he might hear a stranger use dirty words. So, if the express purpose of the mailing list, newsgroup, or weblog is PG in nature, then it should be rated PG even though people sometimes abuse it.
And yes, that doesn't keep kids from using the group to exchange porn, just as they couldn't keep us from accessing some parent's stash "back in the day". So, to reiterate... ratings are just not very practical, which is why I don't like them... but they help us to maintain a certain fiction... which in strict logical terms is useless, but it probably serves a social function. After all, wasn't part of the thrill knowing you were doing something bad?
The article says it's just a re-hashed version of something that's been around for a while, and by that I assume they are referring to RSAC.
I don't see anything wrong with this. It's NOT censorship. TV programs have to label their content. Sure it's cryptic (quick, what's TV MPVD got in it?), but it doesn't stop people who don't care from watching the program. If something like RSAC became the standard for rating, it wouldn't stop people from viewing porn either. It would be the internet equivalent of labeling.
We already expect labeling for TV programs and food, why not on-line content? The only real problem I have with it is that it's a hassle for small web-sites, which is why I expect these systems haven't caught on too well. I mean, as a general rule I don't have "trash" on my site, but if I feel the need to post frontal nudity to make a point about something, or say "fuck" somwhere, I don't want to have to worry about losing my content rating.
So for me, the choice is "be on gaurd all the time" or "not care about content rating". So far, the former has been the more appealing choice and I expect it's like that for most people.
What they need is a category for sites where the content is "not for children" but on the other hand is "not catering strictly to the prurient interest". In other words, simple categories like G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X, XX, XXX and XP (the P stands for Puke). RSAC is just too complicated; it tries to do "fine grained" content filtering.
Of course another big problem with all this is that there is simply too much content on the net. It's one thing for volunteers to rate movies and TV; there are only so many hours of it per year. Rating the net would just take way too long. So, we are left either with people rating their own stuff, or companies trying to rate it. Everybody has their own opinion about where the cut-off for a particular rating is, so there is no way to trust the rating. Even if there were, you can't put any legal teeth to it because content providers would have to open themselves up for a law suit. So, the content provider is still going to choose "not rated" as their rating.
The bottom line? Teach your children well; and let them live in fear of the librarian seeing something over their shoulder, just like we lived in fear of the teacher finding our stash.
All well and good, unless the terrorist wants to kill the gaurds and all the people near the head of the line.
I've never understood that whole business of turning the thing on. How do they know the switch isn't connected to a presurized nerve gas cylinder or a wad of C-4?
So, the real question is whether or not the DMCA applies in relationships between employer and employee. If that's the case, then people can start telling their bosses that they are not allowed to document changes because of the law.
Ooops! I guess I spoke too soon. I have it set to NEVER check for new pages, and it still doesn't cache. Dunno. Don't ya love computers sometimes?
Yep. That did it. Among other things, Nimda resets some settings. Even though I am Nimda-free now, I guess that was one of the things it whacked... although I could swear I checked it before... /me rescans...
Slashdot used to cache, so that when I hit the back button on my browser the old page was still there. If I wanted to see the new comments all I had to do was hit refresh.
Now /. runs the script when I hit back. This has to be putting an additional dynamic load on your servers. Ummm... are you sure this doesn't account for your increased traffic? :)
Maybe it's just an IE issue. I've gone through all the settings in IE and I don't see how it could be on my end. This is especially bad for me because I'm stuck with a modem and can only get 28.8 because of the crappy phone lines. PLEASE bring back caching if you can.
Wow... that is quite devious. It never occured to me that "device" would mean software, so I stand corrected and it appears that this law threatens all software, not just Free Software.
The Free Software advocates would do well not to exclude those of us in the copyrighted freeware and shareware communities. We are all threatened. Come on! If terrorism can unite Russia, Pakistan, and the US then surely something as stupid as this law can unite software developers.
What say Free Software advocates? Will you smoke the peace pipe and unite with us?
...from a previous dialog in which I participated on USENET regarding this issue (notice, I'm $teve, MUFTI is one of my rivals from the Left):
t tgart.de...
Joerg Scheurich aka MUFTI wrote in
message news:slrn9sdulh.n6m.rusmufti@helpdesk.rus.uni-stu
> In article , Andrea
wrote:
> > It seems to me that provisions in a new law being presented to
> > Congress from the entertainment industry called SSSCA would make
> > creating works of art and science using text based programs illegal.
>
> No. Following
>
> http://cryptome.org/sssca.htm
>
> it only makes it illegal, to distribute data without certified security
> technology.
Can you site a section? The only thing that comes close to that is Section
102 which says:
"An interactive computer service shall store and transmit with
integrity any security measure associated with certified security
technologies that is used in connection with copyrighted material or other
protected content such service transmits or stores."
My interpretation of this is that the service must preserve security
measures in the content, but only to the extent that the content contains
such measures in the first place. So, if the VRML file contains no security
measures, they are fine providing the file with no security measures.
The real heart of the bill is the prohibition agains "insecure" hardware.
This reminds me of the V-chip legislation. They required TV manufacturers
to put the stupid V-chip in the TV, but I have never heard of anybody using
the V-chip to block objectionable programs. It's just something that sits
there and adds (according to some sources) as much as $5 to the retail cost
of a TV.
So, what is likely to happen is that the same people who use formats like
WMF and RA to transmit data will continue to do so. It will be harder to
hack WMF and RA files, and it will be illegal to do so.
People who choose to use "insecure" formats like HTML and VRML will go about
business as usual. In order to really foul things up they would have to
explicitly state that using an "insecure" format implies forfeiture of IP,
thus compelling people to use "secure" formats. This bill does not do that,
and I don't think any subsequent bills are likely to do that.
> I see no reason why VRML can not be distributed via https with
> a ssl encryption.
>
> If this law will be reality in the USA, a certified ssl encryption will
> come.
Yes, they will have something certified, but the way I see it there won't be
any requirement for you to use it with VRML, HTML, or anything else.
Don't get me wrong. This is a bad law. It allocates over half a billion
dollars to do some research when an industry standard consortium probably
would have done it without wasting our taxes. You know what we will get for
the money? Probably a slightly modified version of some security software
that is already available as a free download, accompanied by a 1600-page
looseleaf bound anesthesia document.
> so long
> MUFTI
--$teve
So what if you are a guy with calico colored hair who wears a skirt? Can you fix our problems? Yes? Great? That's what I've seen before, and I expect it will remain that way as long as we have the attitude that "diversity" and stuff like that matters.
When times were good, this was especially so. I used to describe the interview process to people like this:
Interviewer I see you have a felony drug conviction... oh wait. You answered that question about TCP/IP correctly. You're hired!
Interviewee Great. When do I start?
Of course now that people are being layed off left and right, it won't be quite this easy. OTOH, if the guy has a great resume I bet they still don't care what he looks like.
As for the guy in the article, he was just a bum. Even "back in the day" performance mattered. It might have taken a few months back then, but anybody who didn't perform got let go sooner or later; with no regard to race, creed, or hair color.
Don't forget that flat bread you get at Indian restaurants.
It's the sound of the American far right. They're shooting target practice. Maybe Bin Laden was right--we will create more Usamas. It's just that we won't create them in the Middle East. We will create them in our own back yard. Anybody wanna go into the mountains of Wyoming, Idaho, Montanna, and West Virginia to fingerprint them Bible-believin', gun-toten, God-fearen' good-ol boys and give them a number so that they "may neither buy nor sell"? Volunteers? Janet Reno? Anybody?
Maybe some wealthy Saudis will end up funding our mujahidin. Yes!!! Now it all makes sense. Their plan is for that to happen, so that the Arabs can experience "blow-back". Wow! It's pure genius. Carry on, fellas.
Oh terrific. The AIP movement wins, and we all end up being tracked. No thank-you.
Which of the following scenarios demonstates civil behavior:
A. Hey look everybody! Bill has a chive on his tooth!
B. Psst. Bill. You've got a chive on your tooth.
If you said A, congratulations. You are a brain dead follower of Slashthink.
How does this analogy apply to the situation? Think about it. Wouldn't it be better if companies (including MS) were given a little lead time before bugs are announced to the world? Perhaps a month would be the standard. Then, and only then, you could use public embarassment as the tool of last resort; not the first.
It's funny you should link that, because I was going to cite it as a reference for why all software does have bugs. Read this quote from the article:
But how much work the software does is not what makes it remarkable. What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats : the last three versions of the program -- each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
Notice how they said it was bug-free, but then they immediately contradicted themselves. Yes, the software is very close to being bug-free. BTW, for those not familiar with the article, it's a description of the highly disciplined process that NASA goes through to develop software for the space shuttle. Indeed, this is a case where "mission critical" is to be taken quite literally, and they still can't achieve perfection. Nobody is perfect.
X2X "plays", as in P2P, B2B, B2C.
Petfood, people food, pizza, or anything else delivered via Internet interactions that would be more easily and cheaply done via traditional methods. If you like, you can simply substitute the sock puppet as a symbol for this.
Game rooms at the company, despite the fact that every survey, both statistical and anecdotal made it painfully obvious that what most employees really wanted were saner hours and/or more money. Every once in a while I still see pitches from companies bragging about the company game room, so some of them still haven't got the clue.
Stock options I personally had options at 40 for a company that was trading at 60. Company now trades below 5. At least I didn't exercise my options and end up in debt to the IRS.
20-something millionaires For the few who made it, it was great. For the rest of us, we had to put up with all the people who wondered why we weren't millionaires; why we weren't driving Lexi and buying mansions. When the crash came, it actually made a lot of us feel better
What do you mean that 286 isn't a new PC? It's new to me!!!
It has to be a toss up between:
(from INTERCAL)The Sieve of Erosthenes test for prime numbers up to 65535 took over seventeen hours on a SPARC--it requires only a half second using C.
and
(from SMETANA) The language has two instructions: "Swap step n with step m", and "Go to step p".
I must have an admirer! Why don't you show your face? Are you a shy girl?