excellent idea. i agree that being able to go back and edit your posts is a BAD idea. that is what preview is for. however there are dozens of 'oops, i meant to say' comments all over the place on nearly every story, and being able to append to the story (much like Ebay allows you to append info but not change what is already there) would be good.
It is most efficient to use the DirectX API and develope an application for one platform, Windows, and have it run verbatim on the other platforms such as Linux using Wine.
i'd have to say that it would take a very, very incompetent development organisation to honestly think that developing for DirectX will allow your software to run 'verbatim' on Linux. Wine is not in any way associated with Microsoft, and do you wanna guess how many engineers they have ensuring that DirectX 8.0 breaks Wine as best as it can?
and another gripe. DirectX is not open source on the OTHER end as well (API is the front end you game developers write for, the 'other end' is the driver support for the video card). my video card is BAD-ASS. 64 MB framebuffer, 64 MB of texture, perfect OpenGL support. absolutely ZERO DirectX support. and absolutely this is as much the fault of the manufacturer's as Microsoft's, but hey, all your DirectX games I cannot buy, either, and i run windows. so perhaps if developers would bite the bullet and develop toward an open API they would find themselves with not only a linux, freebsd, and mac market, but a market on windows as well for those of us DirectX is not a solution.
I know this is sort of off-topic, but you can't mod me down!
i wonder how much of/. speak has found its way into/. readers' daily lives? i wonder if wil ever talks about getting 'modded down' for suggesting a dialogue change for a character?
I don't think there's anything evil here, but it sure is funny.
um... wrongo. almost everyone uses Word, at home and at work. people have stopped thinking for themselves when it comes to grammar and spelling - they just let Word find their mistakes. if Word decides that 'idiot' is no longer a valid word in the thesaurus, then quite simply it is no longer a valid word.
or maybe it is just my paranoia from having read 1984 last summer.
i ran msn.com through the validator at w3c.org. as you can see from the result, the validator doesn't even get through (as has been said before). but it is as easy to see that not even their 'sorry your web browser does not support this site' is not w3c standards compliant!
i would post the output of the validator, but hey, the 'lameness filter' killed that idea in a heartbeat.
you: But, aha, rating incorrectly will have to be made a crime, else those illegal pornographers will rate themselves as 'kid-friendly', dontchaknowit.
the article: operators would rate their Web sites by filling out an online form listing types of objectionable material, such as drug promotion, gambling or particular forms of nudity.
you: After all, if there isn't a _law_ forcing honest ratings, who can trust the ratings? They'll fail otherwise.
yup, no one pays any attention to sending their kids to R rated movies. okay, bad example... but it is not because they don't trust the ratings, but because they simply do not care. similar case here, rate the sites all you want, parents just don't care that much.
how about instead of making it a law (is there a law about movie ratings? i don't think so... it is a 'panel') why not have this form be submitted, and reviewed by such a 'panel', like with movies?
problem: there are only what, billions of web sites, most of them porn.
talk about a weird job.
"What do you do?"
"I review the level of depravation of porn sites. I spend 8 hours a day checking lists with items like 'beastiality?', 'homosexuality?', 'goats'. They pay me for this."
image thousands of such employees. imagine them all living in your neighborhood.
<sarcasm>
you are right. maybe they should make a law against kids under 18 looking at porn.
</sarcasm>
the filter is a stand-alone program parents will have to download and install
I have several problems with this, and they are not new or novel:
Parents know less about the computers than the kids
This is likely to be a Windows-only program, and most likely an IE-only program (I know, serious FUD alert, but who are we kidding here).
Like 99% of porn sites CARE if they are filtered because they do not rate themselves (the article mentioned blocking all sites which do not provide ratings).
Yet ANOTHER centralized, run by the big corporations 'standard' - one which is free for now, but absolutely no guarantee to play fair later. Wanna be on the web? Pay $$$ per year to our new 'Rating Compliance' group or you will be on the black list, baby!
again, the GPL does not restrict you from charging millions of dollars for your product. you only have to make source available to those who receive shipment of the binaries from you.
but what ends up happening is person A buys the product for $99, gets the source code for the GPL work and posts it for free.
the way companies seem to be dealing with this is by having a GPL component (such as Linux, etc) to their product, and a proprietary component, which are not linked together at all in binary form.
then when person A gets their source code for the product, they really only have the improvements to the GPL code, which is of course the whole point of GPL code (improvements come back to the community). person A doesn't break the business of the company selling the product for $99, because there is value being added in some form that simply distributing the GPL source does not have. the GPL component gets better, and the company makes money.
remember, free software does not equal free download of source code. it only means access to the source code from the person who shipped them a binary.
You work at the National Institutes of Health. Presumably you would have access to biological agents. I for one am GLAD they are searching people leaving bio labs.
A better question is, why haven't they had better security BEFORE?
There are certain things you have to give up to work certain jobs. Working in a Bio Research Lab, you're going to have to deal with people checking your bags going in and going out - at least I hope so. Companies that have bio agents and are NOT doing this kind of thing would be very, very liable for the agents which found their way outside their labs.
My advice for a good form of protest would be to come and leave from work completely naked. Of course then they'd still have to give random body cavity searches.
-sam
Re:Back in my day........
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 1
Maelstrom is now a GPL released game built on the SDL library. it runs on linux, windows, mac, and be. the original company, ambrosia software made some cool little games.
i played the heck out of maelstrom on the mac when i was in school. good
little sound effects. 'yahoo! all right!'
Due to the unexpectedly huge demand for the JBuilder Foundation download, our server has been overwhelmed. If you are considering downloading JBuilder Foundation, you are advised to wait until next week when demand has slackened.
-- Ben Matterson Online Manager Borland Developer Support Inprise/Borland
Yes, I agree that the 10k is quite a nice gesture, but I think even more important is the public, calm way in which they handled everything. They let people knew they heard them, then they did what was right. It's nice to know that a company is listening.
Wow, live-penguin-powered e-commerce solutions! I just hope they have them powering the system by running on a treadmill, not by, er... spontaneous penguin combustion.
About three times in the past few years I have experienced a 'net loss' due to back-hoe operators. How many 'call us before you dig' commercials does there have to be before people stop cutting wires. It is just a silly expense which is naturally passed down to consumers. These people should be wearing wireless net devices which can tell them where all pipes and trunks, etc are running through their work site so this can be avoided. woo. wonder how much this repair will cost and how long it will take. and how long it will be until another company does the same thing.
I've installed various systems over the years: DOS, Win 3.11, Win95, WinNT, Win98, Linux (Debian, Red Hat), Solaris x86, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.
What I would say is that DOS was the easiest:) but of course not as much cool stuff. Windows installs are simply easier than any *nix install for a novice, because of 1) autodetecting, 2) autodefaulting.
Microsoft worked their butt off to make sure people had stickers 'Win95 ready' or whatever they said on the front of their computers, which meant that Windows install would be able to correctly detect and use all the hardward within. Which usually meant evil plug-and-pray hardware, or better yet, windows-only hardware (software needed, like winmodems). Basically any piece of hardware out there is usable by Windows because the maker of that piece of hardware wants to be able to sell it. That's something we have to deal with, that hey, X windows configuration is something we have to look at if we want to improve (by far the hardest part of setting up Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris x86 was configuring my video card).
By autodefaulting, I mean that Windows will by default just be ready to take up the entire partition and install itself, whereas most current *nix distributions make you pick how big you want your/var file system to be, etc.
When I switched public schools in 6th grade, I started in the 'normal' curriculum. After two weeks they wouldn't let me take math class because kids were complaining because I was winning all the 'math games' and such. Exiled to the 'gifted and talented' classes, the few friends that I did manage to make in the first few weeks at a new school were now history. It wasn't enough that I had speech problems (my 8th grade history teacher made fun of me in front of the class for stuttering, that tought me to raise that little hand and try to join the discussions of the real people) or that I was new to the school, because I did well in math I was thrown into a whole new curriculum. I agree with a lot of your post, especially because there were many kids in my classes who were able to be 'popular' as well as being in the advanced classes, but that was mostly by feigning disinterest and underachieving. Kids who stick out and are obviously trying at school must be freaks. By high school I was skipping class like everyone else, trying to prove I wasn't so interested in classes after all. At least I managed not to fail out of college, unlike 80 percent of the people from my high school who I remained in contact with.
From the article... "we need more edisons, not more pop stars".
Is echoed by the song lyrics I posted, while I also stated that I was glad to be different from normal, much as the article talks about that being the fate of geeks.
I put up with being called a geek all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, and most of college thinking it was because i was poor and brought up quite a bit differently from all my classmates, and not because i actually thought differently because of possibly being slightly autistic. this article made me wonder about a lot of those things and i wrote that i was glad to be different, regardless of the cause. and for that i'm branded off-topic. doesn't make sense to me:)
This looks like a chicken-and-egg discussion. Are computer geeks autistic, which leads to their particular skills and lacks, or do their natural choices and desires lead them to their skills and lacks which make them appear autistic.
For instance I do not think that I am autistic or that I fall under the true parameters of "Asperger's Syndrome", but of course there are some similarities.
Normal or above-average IQ: nearly all people who are good with computers are intelligent. I only scores 1480 on the silly SAT, so probably I'm not a 'genius' but maybe I fall to 'above-average'.
Savantism: Studying computers with disregard for all else will lead to something like this, but for instance people like Bruce Perens can carry on intelligent discussions on a range of topics from computers (of course) to economics and even genetics.
Lacking human empathy: The current generation of computer people grew up in dark rooms and late night university computer labs, so of course they could be lacking in certain skills. But the people currently studying computers seem to have a much better handle on the empathy thing, and so I think this 'autism-geek' thing will pass.
Excellent Rote Memory: of course a computer geek will have this trait, after all, how many times do you have to look up the T568A and B cat-5 wiring schemes before you have it remembered? Much of computer knowledge is rote knowledge, this is why 'computer technology' is at the same time a good field and a lousy one, you can simply learn a lot of facts and find a job, even without actually understanding the principles and theory like a computer scientist would.
Fascination with fantasy worlds and arcane facts: I'll admit it, sure. But then again that is a description of my generation of computer people, not so much as current 'geeks' as a whole. I run into undergraduates every day who haven't read Tolkien or Heinlein, etc.
Facility with Math and/or Science: I won't touch this. Math is a fundamental requirement to really understanding computer science, and thus to be a geek you have to learn lots of math.
Physical awkwardness/funny gait: I play about every sport imaginable. I'm not really good at any but I don't feel awkward. I've been told my 'walk is unique' and have been recognised by it, but I think that has more to do with growing up in a rural area where I walked a lot that being autistic.
Before I make this post any longer, I'll add that I think all this geek-autism thing just seems like your standard stereotype. It fits pretty well for a lot of people, and fits horribly for a lot of people. And, as the next generation of world-savvy geeks rises up and shows what can happen when computers are mainstream and not something relegated to the post-midnight hours on college campuses, we'll see this geek-autism connection fall.
of course my seriously mis/under-informed opinion.
Yes, but if I were to steal someone's computer all I would have to do is throw out the NIC and buy my own (for 15 bucks or less, whatever). Putting a trackable serial number on the processor makes my machine that much more secure to theft, because sure they can take out my CPU and throw it away and buy a new one, but the CPU is the main cost of the computer in the first place...
Slashdot Mirror
maybe they'll let the rapists and armed robbers out to make room for the copyright infringers and pot smokers.
oh, wait... they already do that...
-sam
excellent idea. i agree that being able to go back and edit your posts is a BAD idea. that is what preview is for. however there are dozens of 'oops, i meant to say' comments all over the place on nearly every story, and being able to append to the story (much like Ebay allows you to append info but not change what is already there) would be good.
-sam
also, the pure antifreeze will eat through your belts and hoses. this will lead to a VERY hot engine...
-sam
someone set us up the babelfish?
sorry, it's late.
It is most efficient to use the DirectX API and develope an application for one platform, Windows, and have it run verbatim on the other platforms such as Linux using Wine.
i'd have to say that it would take a very, very incompetent development organisation to honestly think that developing for DirectX will allow your software to run 'verbatim' on Linux. Wine is not in any way associated with Microsoft, and do you wanna guess how many engineers they have ensuring that DirectX 8.0 breaks Wine as best as it can?
and another gripe. DirectX is not open source on the OTHER end as well (API is the front end you game developers write for, the 'other end' is the driver support for the video card). my video card is BAD-ASS. 64 MB framebuffer, 64 MB of texture, perfect OpenGL support. absolutely ZERO DirectX support. and absolutely this is as much the fault of the manufacturer's as Microsoft's, but hey, all your DirectX games I cannot buy, either, and i run windows. so perhaps if developers would bite the bullet and develop toward an open API they would find themselves with not only a linux, freebsd, and mac market, but a market on windows as well for those of us DirectX is not a solution.
-sam
further update, another /.-ism from his responses:
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
:)
uh oh. maybe he doesn't have that much experience here after all. he got the right, but didn't figure out that the opening tag would be missing.
I know this is sort of off-topic, but you can't mod me down!
/. speak has found its way into /. readers' daily lives? i wonder if wil ever talks about getting 'modded down' for suggesting a dialogue change for a character?
i wonder how much of
-sam
um... wrongo. almost everyone uses Word, at home and at work. people have stopped thinking for themselves when it comes to grammar and spelling - they just let Word find their mistakes. if Word decides that 'idiot' is no longer a valid word in the thesaurus, then quite simply it is no longer a valid word.
or maybe it is just my paranoia from having read 1984 last summer.
anyway...i ran msn.com through the validator at w3c.org. as you can see from the result, the validator doesn't even get through (as has been said before). but it is as easy to see that not even their 'sorry your web browser does not support this site' is not w3c standards compliant!
i would post the output of the validator, but hey, the 'lameness filter' killed that idea in a heartbeat.
-sam
please, please no laws!
you:
But, aha, rating incorrectly will have to be made a crime, else those illegal pornographers will rate themselves as 'kid-friendly', dontchaknowit.
the article:
operators would rate their Web sites by filling out an online form listing types of objectionable material, such as drug promotion, gambling or particular forms of nudity.
you:
After all, if there isn't a _law_ forcing honest ratings, who can trust the ratings? They'll fail otherwise.
yup, no one pays any attention to sending their kids to R rated movies. okay, bad example... but it is not because they don't trust the ratings, but because they simply do not care. similar case here, rate the sites all you want, parents just don't care that much.
how about instead of making it a law (is there a law about movie ratings? i don't think so... it is a 'panel') why not have this form be submitted, and reviewed by such a 'panel', like with movies?
problem: there are only what, billions of web sites, most of them porn.
talk about a weird job.
"What do you do?"
"I review the level of depravation of porn sites. I spend 8 hours a day checking lists with items like 'beastiality?', 'homosexuality?', 'goats'. They pay me for this."
image thousands of such employees. imagine them all living in your neighborhood.
<sarcasm>
you are right. maybe they should make a law against kids under 18 looking at porn.
</sarcasm>
anyway...
I have several problems with this, and they are not new or novel:
- Parents know less about the computers than the kids
- This is likely to be a Windows-only program, and most likely an IE-only program (I know, serious FUD alert, but who are we kidding here).
- Like 99% of porn sites CARE if they are filtered because they do not rate themselves (the article mentioned blocking all sites which do not provide ratings).
- Yet ANOTHER centralized, run by the big corporations 'standard' - one which is free for now, but absolutely no guarantee to play fair later. Wanna be on the web? Pay $$$ per year to our new 'Rating Compliance' group or you will be on the black list, baby!
anyway...again, the GPL does not restrict you from charging millions of dollars for your product. you only have to make source available to those who receive shipment of the binaries from you.
but what ends up happening is person A buys the product for $99, gets the source code for the GPL work and posts it for free.
the way companies seem to be dealing with this is by having a GPL component (such as Linux, etc) to their product, and a proprietary component, which are not linked together at all in binary form.
then when person A gets their source code for the product, they really only have the improvements to the GPL code, which is of course the whole point of GPL code (improvements come back to the community). person A doesn't break the business of the company selling the product for $99, because there is value being added in some form that simply distributing the GPL source does not have. the GPL component gets better, and the company makes money.
remember, free software does not equal free download of source code. it only means access to the source code from the person who shipped them a binary.
anyway...
You work at the National Institutes of Health. Presumably you would have access to biological agents. I for one am GLAD they are searching people leaving bio labs.
A better question is, why haven't they had better security BEFORE?
There are certain things you have to give up to work certain jobs. Working in a Bio Research Lab, you're going to have to deal with people checking your bags going in and going out - at least I hope so. Companies that have bio agents and are NOT doing this kind of thing would be very, very liable for the agents which found their way outside their labs.
My advice for a good form of protest would be to come and leave from work completely naked. Of course then they'd still have to give random body cavity searches.
-sam
Maelstrom is now a GPL released game built on the SDL library. it runs on linux, windows, mac, and be. the original company, ambrosia software made some cool little games.
i played the heck out of maelstrom on the mac when i was in school. good
little sound effects. 'yahoo! all right!'
-sam
Yes, I agree that the 10k is quite a nice gesture, but I think even more important is the public, calm way in which they handled everything. They let people knew they heard them, then they did what was right. It's nice to know that a company is listening.
Wow, live-penguin-powered e-commerce solutions! I just hope they have them powering the system by running on a treadmill, not by, er... spontaneous penguin combustion.
About three times in the past few years I have experienced a 'net loss' due to back-hoe operators. How many 'call us before you dig' commercials does there have to be before people stop cutting wires. It is just a silly expense which is naturally passed down to consumers. These people should be wearing wireless net devices which can tell them where all pipes and trunks, etc are running through their work site so this can be avoided. woo. wonder how much this repair will cost and how long it will take. and how long it will be until another company does the same thing.
I've installed various systems over the years: DOS, Win 3.11, Win95, WinNT, Win98, Linux (Debian, Red Hat), Solaris x86, FreeBSD, OpenBSD.
:) but of course not as much cool stuff. Windows installs are simply easier than any *nix install for a novice, because of 1) autodetecting, 2) autodefaulting.
/var file system to be, etc.
What I would say is that DOS was the easiest
Microsoft worked their butt off to make sure people had stickers 'Win95 ready' or whatever they said on the front of their computers, which meant that Windows install would be able to correctly detect and use all the hardward within. Which usually meant evil plug-and-pray hardware, or better yet, windows-only hardware (software needed, like winmodems). Basically any piece of hardware out there is usable by Windows because the maker of that piece of hardware wants to be able to sell it. That's something we have to deal with, that hey, X windows configuration is something we have to look at if we want to improve (by far the hardest part of setting up Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris x86 was configuring my video card).
By autodefaulting, I mean that Windows will by default just be ready to take up the entire partition and install itself, whereas most current *nix distributions make you pick how big you want your
Anyway...
When I switched public schools in 6th grade, I started in the 'normal' curriculum. After two weeks they wouldn't let me take math class because kids were complaining because I was winning all the 'math games' and such.
Exiled to the 'gifted and talented' classes, the few friends that I did manage to make in the first few weeks at a new school were now history. It wasn't enough that I had speech problems (my 8th grade history teacher made fun of me in front of the class for stuttering, that tought me to raise that little hand and try to join the discussions of the real people) or that I was new to the school, because I did well in math I was thrown into a whole new curriculum.
I agree with a lot of your post, especially because there were many kids in my classes who were able to be 'popular' as well as being in the advanced classes, but that was mostly by feigning disinterest and underachieving. Kids who stick out and are obviously trying at school must be freaks. By high school I was skipping class like everyone else, trying to prove I wasn't so interested in classes after all.
At least I managed not to fail out of college, unlike 80 percent of the people from my high school who I remained in contact with.
I completely agree. I was fairly much a klutz until 6 or so years of Tae Kwon Do.
How is this off-topic?
:)
From the article...
"we need more edisons, not more pop stars".
Is echoed by the song lyrics I posted, while I also stated that I was glad to be different from normal, much as the article talks about that being the fate of geeks.
I put up with being called a geek all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, and most of college thinking it was because i was poor and brought up quite a bit differently from all my classmates, and not because i actually thought differently because of possibly being slightly autistic. this article made me wonder about a lot of those things and i wrote that i was glad to be different, regardless of the cause. and for that i'm branded off-topic. doesn't make sense to me
This looks like a chicken-and-egg discussion. Are computer geeks autistic, which leads to their particular skills and lacks, or do their natural choices and desires lead them to their skills and lacks which make them appear autistic.
For instance I do not think that I am autistic or that I fall under the true parameters of "Asperger's Syndrome", but of course there are some similarities.
Normal or above-average IQ: nearly all people who are good with computers are intelligent. I only scores 1480 on the silly SAT, so probably I'm not a 'genius' but maybe I fall to 'above-average'.
Savantism: Studying computers with disregard for all else will lead to something like this, but for instance people like Bruce Perens can carry on intelligent discussions on a range of topics from computers (of course) to economics and even genetics.
Lacking human empathy: The current generation of computer people grew up in dark rooms and late night university computer labs, so of course they could be lacking in certain skills. But the people currently studying computers seem to have a much better handle on the empathy thing, and so I think this 'autism-geek' thing will pass.
Excellent Rote Memory: of course a computer geek will have this trait, after all, how many times do you have to look up the T568A and B cat-5 wiring schemes before you have it remembered? Much of computer knowledge is rote knowledge, this is why 'computer technology' is at the same time a good field and a lousy one, you can simply learn a lot of facts and find a job, even without actually understanding the principles and theory like a computer scientist would.
Fascination with fantasy worlds and arcane facts: I'll admit it, sure. But then again that is a description of my generation of computer people, not so much as current 'geeks' as a whole. I run into undergraduates every day who haven't read Tolkien or Heinlein, etc.
Facility with Math and/or Science: I won't touch this. Math is a fundamental requirement to really understanding computer science, and thus to be a geek you have to learn lots of math.
Physical awkwardness/funny gait: I play about every sport imaginable. I'm not really good at any but I don't feel awkward. I've been told my 'walk is unique' and have been recognised by it, but I think that has more to do with growing up in a rural area where I walked a lot that being autistic.
Before I make this post any longer, I'll add that I think all this geek-autism thing just seems like your standard stereotype. It fits pretty well for a lot of people, and fits horribly for a lot of people. And, as the next generation of world-savvy geeks rises up and shows what can happen when computers are mainstream and not something relegated to the post-midnight hours on college campuses, we'll see this geek-autism connection fall.
of course my seriously mis/under-informed opinion.
i am sam i am.
Yes, but if I were to steal someone's computer all I would have to do is throw out the NIC and buy my own (for 15 bucks or less, whatever). Putting a trackable serial number on the processor makes my machine that much more secure to theft, because sure they can take out my CPU and throw it away and buy a new one, but the CPU is the main cost of the computer in the first place...