They obviously haven't seen my hotmail account, which is 99% spam. But that's why I have it, so when I order something from an internet store they don't start spamvertizing at me or selling my email address to anyone and everyone else that wants to do so, and my "real" address stays relatively clean due to obscurity.
And 95% of the spam I get at my hotmail address does NOT have ANY remove-me method listed, regardless of if it might work or not, it just ain't there. Isn't a remove listing an absolute requirement by CAN-SPAM, and one that works at that??
I have got a few of the viagra style spams at my work email, but haven't paid enough attention to see if there's a remove link or not in those. But I'm sure that our IT group has its hands full keeping email filters up to par to make what I see only a few of them, and that credit most likely should NOT be given to the CAN-SPAM guys either.
I've also noticed some leaking into my "real" home email, I think mostly because I recently decided to move my email folders on disk off my NTFS partition onto a FAT32 partition so I can run Thunderbird in either Windows or Linux, and in the process of getting that to work the filters that it had learned got hosed and I have to start over.
By my observations, it's a dismal failure, but I've only got so many email accounts of my own to collect my empirical evidence from. The yardstick they used for measuring the level of success of this law must be flawed, or at least bent in half or something.
Is your bio posted somewhere that other people can edit? If so, someone might edit yours to speak of child molesting or something like that. Why should you be limited to placing comments in the story's forum and waiting for someone to come along, decide he believes you and edit the bio atricle on your behalf instead of correcting it yourself directly?
They want the company name, not the old computers. There's already Commodore branded MP3 players out there, I don't know if it's from the current owners or the previous one, but does it matter? Did they buy Commodore for Commodore's MP3 player technology? Did the current owner pick it up for Commodore's old media player, home media center, or GPS technologies?
Nah. Anything resembling media center/player stuff (CDTV or CD3) went to Gateway and Amiga Inc. instead of following the Commodore brand to Tulip and then to Yeahronimo. I don't think any of us ever heard of a GPS device from Commodore before they flopped in 1994. And we don't see anything in the article about PETs or Vic20's... As for the Commodore64, it's aready been put into one of them retro direct-to-TV joysticks to play some classic 8-bit games much like the cheap little pac-man or galaga gizmos in stores now, and apparently it's sold quite well.
It's pretty fun to do. A friend didn't want to fix his laptop himself but did want to save some money, so a few of us got togther and replaced his LCD backlight for him. It's really cool to see how many layers of various films are stacked up in there, as at least on this one we had to prety much completely disassemble the panel to get to the light tube.
My friend got slightly the wrong tube length, so the two ends are a bit dark. There's a coupel fingerprints inside the LCD now, and someone's eyelash. If you end up seriously tearing the thing apart liek we did, get some latex gloves or somethign to help with the fingerprints, and try not to shed during the operation.:)
> How's your sister like puzzle games? Such as the old Super Solvers series or Myst?
She likes a couple word scramble puzzle games on some web page these days, but I've never seen her interested in Myst or anything more graphical or environmental like that. Probably not the kinds of things that many here would consider a video game worth mentioning. Mostly simple things that don't really some with anything remotely resembling a time commitment as she's too busy with "more important things" these days to get into anything big like Myst. I don't know what Super Solvers is myself.
I think part of the reason not many women play videogames is not about the quality of the game characters, but is more about the popular genres of games.
My sister enjoyed the old Super Mario games in the 8bit Nintendo days, Pac man, and things like that. But she's not interested in Yet Another Doom Clone style gaming, doesn't want to run around pouring machine gun turret blasts at other people.
As much as we'd all like to have our very own Morgan Web for our girlfriend/wife, there's just a small number of women like that who are intrested in today's popular games.
Maybe that's hardwired psychology, maybe it's cultural bias when they were young, maybe it will change, maybe it won't. If the game develoers don't figure out a genre that appeals to the female masses, it'll stagnate IMHO, regardless of better roles for female characters.
This guy must be an American. And this is how it's done in America. If you spill hot coffee on yourself, it's the store's fault g-darnit! If you break into a building and get hurt during your robbery, it's the building owner's fault! And if you buy something that don't work, heck, that's the manufacturer's fault for selling shoddy product!
It's not narly as rediculous as other lawsuits out there. If MS is knowingly selling junk, they deserve it and need to set things right. Will units that currently seem to work fine end up with this problem a few months from now? How hot do these things get when they crash? Hot enough to start a fire? To burn someone who touches it? Is the idea of preventing such possibilities really a bad idea?
If MS did all reasonable due process to prevent problems in their product then they'll come out clean at the end of such a lawsuit, and the guy with the bad machine will have a bad day. Doesnt' hurt you any either way, so what's the big deal?
And yes, I'm also an evil American. I've been giving Walmart grief for not following their own rules on the "limit one per customer" black friday sale items and selling the last 4 HP laptops to a single customer. I myself live too far away from that particular store location to do a lawsuit, and IMHO it'd be a pain to resolve the couple hundred bucks difference between their sale price and ordering something comparable, but I have certainly thought about it. (My sister was next in line and needed a laptop for grad school, and should have got one) Be glad I'm more of a lazy American than a bitter, greedy and litegous American.:p
There was something said about this that it wasnt' done as Ellison owns a giant chunk of stock.
But... You'd think they could figure out a way to make a divident payment divvied up between all shareholders other than Ellison... But then considering the given excuse, how many institutional shareholders does Ellison invest in, might he benefit from them getting their payment? How far do you go to make sure none of it at all can possibly find its way back into his pocket?
Even if he can deduct any of this off his taxes, there's still a limit to how useful it can be. Remember, deductions are nto refundable, in that they can take your tax liability down to zero, but not below zero so it can't itself give him a gigantic refund.
Surely he's already got his finances very carefully set up to take advantage of as many tax breaks as possible. This means he's in the lowest tax bracket he can possibly fit himself into, probably has lots of things fit into business expense categories that are usually personal expenses to most of us, and his bottom line tax liability is likely not nearly as large as one might think for someone in his financial position.
He won't likely have a $100million tax liability for such a charitable contribution to save him from. Whatever his liability will actually be, if he is allowed to deduct this contribution, I'd wager it'll hit the floor long before that $100million potential is exhausted.
Plus, as a court judgement situation instead of a "goodness of his heart" situation, it might not be a valid tax deduction item anyway.
> Also, does not the FCC require that the providers carry some of the God channels? What if no one wants to pay for it?
Surely the number of evangelists wearing Rolexes indicates that there should be plenty of people willing to pay for it.
And if not, well the genuine preachers among us are supposed to live a humble life without riches or vast material collections, are they not? Maybe it'll all move to public access channels and be taped in some guy's basement.
Wine has been trying to give us this world for some time. They've taken us a certain distance toward this destination as well. If it ever becomes "perfect", then one big part of that is done. If Cygwin ever becomes "perfect", then the x86 platform wil pretty much be OS-asgnostic to run nearly any app. DarWine can help bring MacOSX into the fold, and perhaps there will be something akin to cygwin to allow Windows to run MacOSX-x86 apps as well.
That's actually somethign I'd liek to see happen. I don't want to NEED any particular OS to play my favorite gaem or run some EDA tool I'm intersted in. I want to choose the best app for my particular needs, and I want to choose the best OS to run it on. I don't want the choice of the correct app force me to choose an OS I'd otherwise prefer to avoid.
Being an old Amiga nut still, I'd love to see something similar to Wine, that would allow me to run MacOSX-ppc apps and games on my PowerPC based Amiga machine. Sure, I've heard great things about OSX, but the realities of requiring certain apps for general use made me choose a WinAMD laptop instead of the iBook I pined for for many months. The Amiga is a toy to play with even more than the iBook would have been, but as I already have the thing due to my rediculous obsessive desires, it'd just be cool to run someone else's PPC apps on my oddball PPC hardware and OS. Of course that won't happen, but the situation described in this article doesn't necessarily need to be specific to the x86 platform.
I'd also think that if all popular APIs were brought to all OSes, then a simple compiler flag could give us an x86 binary to run under any x86 OS, a different flag could generate a ppc binary to run on any ppc OS, another flag could generate an Arm9 binary to run on any arm9 OS, etc. with all binaries coming from the same app/game sources.
I'd also love to see the ability to change out one implementation of an API in a particular OS for another implementation of the same API for that same OS. If for some reason I might decide I'm not fond of Microsoft's implementation of tcp/ip, I'd like to swap the whole thing out for Jim-Bob's implementation of tcp/ip for Windows as one possible example. Kerberos thoughts anyone?? Or if I don't like George's implementation of sdl for FreeBSD, I'd like to be able to change out the whole thing for Sam's implemtnation of sdl for cygwin. Or whatever other combination of OS vendor and API vendor might ever appear that might work better than the default install for that CPU/OS.
What a world that would be, I'd love to see it someday.
so that any developer can jump into any part of a project and be able to figure out what's going on, without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code
Huh. I'v ehad to figure out someone else's code before, while I actually was working in software before my hardware design job. My employer licensed sources from a partner company for merging into my employer's larger system. One component of the messaging system had no documentation and virtually no commenting, and what rare comments were there were wrong. My task was to document the messages, their structures, and what each message type was used for so my coworkers could fill in the two ends of this communications system.
It was 2-space indented, which I had to change to my favorite 4-space indent, so I could see the flow of the code. 2 days. Understanding the flow, 3 days. Picking out the details of each message type, 4 days. Adding comments as I went along to help remember what I figured out earlier. 3 or 4 more days to type up a document for the thing for other coders to use. There were only 6 or 7 functions, and less than 10 message types. Still took a heck of a lot longer than a couple hours to ficure out what was going on in there.
That's 4-space indents, and spaces not tabs. Function and file headers, file headers basically for what the entire program does (not big ones, mostly perl or Cadence skill language scripting), and intelligent as I can comments of what I'm doing and more importantly WHY I'm doing it, so I can make sense of it myself long after I've forgotten what was going through my mind at the time.
My company doesn't really have any "standards", and most people don't format much at all and rarely, RARELY, comment anything whatsoever. The first thing I do when getting into someone else's code is to reformat it to my personal indentation style, as I get a better view of code flow with 4-space indents than single-space indents. I think single-space indents are pretty much meaningless as it's hard to follow without really paying attention to it, and sometimes you want to get a feel for where you are at a glance instead of at a study session.
I wish there was some company requirements, but we're electrical engineers not "real" programmers, and I guess no one else in the office cares if they can read their own code 6 months later.
Article infringes Amazon's new patent?!
on
Hardening Linux
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· Score: 1
OK, how many Amazon patent infringement jokes about this article will we see today?
If he'd tried to keep it he would have been sued into bankruptcy and then lost by default anyway. Isn't that how MS got hold of the "Internet Explorer" product name that was already copyrighted or trademarked by someone else? http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,13417,00 .html
Well, if I'm going to enjoy a TV how, I'd like to be able to see it. Cell phone screens are too small. Once upon a time I thought those Casio 1.5" TVs were neat, but coul dnever afford one in my childhood, and now don't think I would have really enjoyed it anyway. Too small. Would I have been able to read the big "01" painted on the side of the car in Dukes of Hazzard? Would I have been able to make out Mr. T's mohawk hair cut in the A-Team? Would one be able to tell what the gross stuff is that people are supposed to eat or sit in on those reality shows? Would I be able to see much of anything at all?
Now, blow that picture up to computer monitor size. Video iTunes sounds like a neat idea, but I ain't gonna watch anything at iPod resolution on my 19" monitor. Blocky and pixellated like there's no tomorrow. It'd probably make my eyes hurt. No thanks.
Now, I could see a cellphone with a big memory capacity being somewhat of a portable Tivo. Maybe it could receive and store a TV show while you're driving a long distance, so you can't go home anc copy a recording there before watching it at your destination that doesn't have a DVR, like maybe visiting your parents who still haven't figured out how to work their now ancient VCR. Or you're on your way to some business conference thing and don't want to be stuck with the limited channel offerings or expensive pay-per-view junk of the hotel you're stuck in for the next week.
But such cellphone recordings when connected to TV or monitor for playback should look good, not like they were obviously blown up from a 1 inch screen resolution. The phone should be able to play back anyway in case no large screen is available on the plane, or to preview what's already stored so you can choose and delete some old show to make room for a new recording.
I say $8 is too much because for most things I don't need or want to keep it after watching. For $1 I can rent it for an evening from a Red Box. There are a few that I've bought the DVD before watching and been quite disappointed, but I was dumb enough to buy instead of rent. Or if what I want isn't at a Red Box, I can go to Blockbuster and still pay less than $8 to watch it.
Now, if I want to keep something, $8 might be a fair price, assuming the quality compares well with a DVD. They can leave out the special features and commentary from this $8 download, I rarely watch those things anyway.
But in the end it might still not be worth it, if it's too heavily DRMed then my MythTV box connected to my TV won't play it back, and if so then it's worth exactly zero to me.
Maybe it's not your idea of worthy pay, but in some parts of the world it might be pretty darn good pay for the time to do the task.
Just imagine setting up a sweatshop in some 3rd world country, invest enough training to get people doing well, then get them going, pay them part and keep some portion of each item reward for "the company".
> Now that GPU's are becomming more and more programmable, and more and more >general~purpose, what, really, is the difference between a GPU and a standard CPU?
> Imagine using PCI cards with a handful of FPGAs on board to provide...
I thought of something like that some years ago, a project that would have provided a hardware codec system for the old Amiga computers. Since their 68K CPUs topped out at 66MHz when overclocked, the things barely play back mp3s at full quality, and mpeg video quickly gets unpleasant, while mpeg4/divx is unwatchable. Those with PPC upgrades had it a little better, but I never had one at the time, and even today those rare cards sell for over US$700 if you can find one at all.Ick! An FPGA on a card would have been way cheaper.
A reconfigurable FPGA would let you swap in and out various audio or video codecs as needed, could act as an encrypt.decruption accelerator for something like dnetc client, protein folding accelerator, seti, or any number of other things. Alas, laziness won out, and now I have a PC that handles the things I wanted to do well enough in software on CPU.
I got a 10% this year as well. Last year they handed out 4%. The 5 years before that there was nothing at all. Heck, they didn't even do performance reviews. And I'd bet the only reason they gave out relatively nice raises this year was that a few key engineers left for greener pastures very recently, and they're afraid of losing more of those worth keeping.
But just because one gets a 10% single raise doesn't mean he's ahead of inflation in the long run. 14% raise over 6 or 7 years? I'm still a ways behind inflation...
The resolution is possibly also like a built-in broadcast flag thing. They don't want you cracking the DRM and passing good looking copies around the net. They don't want people to want cracked videos, even if it means the low quality makes us not want to buy the original either.
> The find the server and seize it according to the law. If it is > overseas, they work with the local government.
And if friendly working with the local government doesn't work out, then the CIA goes in full-barrel and sets things right.
I can't wait for that episode of Alias, Ms. Garner going in to add the URLs of American businesses back into the DNS servers of EU so we can send emails back and forth to our friends again, do business again, and of course use the overseas download mirrors for linux distros.
Slashdot Mirror
They obviously haven't seen my hotmail account, which is 99% spam. But that's why I have it, so when I order something from an internet store they don't start spamvertizing at me or selling my email address to anyone and everyone else that wants to do so, and my "real" address stays relatively clean due to obscurity.
And 95% of the spam I get at my hotmail address does NOT have ANY remove-me method listed, regardless of if it might work or not, it just ain't there. Isn't a remove listing an absolute requirement by CAN-SPAM, and one that works at that??
I have got a few of the viagra style spams at my work email, but haven't paid enough attention to see if there's a remove link or not in those. But I'm sure that our IT group has its hands full keeping email filters up to par to make what I see only a few of them, and that credit most likely should NOT be given to the CAN-SPAM guys either.
I've also noticed some leaking into my "real" home email, I think mostly because I recently decided to move my email folders on disk off my NTFS partition onto a FAT32 partition so I can run Thunderbird in either Windows or Linux, and in the process of getting that to work the filters that it had learned got hosed and I have to start over.
By my observations, it's a dismal failure, but I've only got so many email accounts of my own to collect my empirical evidence from. The yardstick they used for measuring the level of success of this law must be flawed, or at least bent in half or something.
Is your bio posted somewhere that other people can edit? If so, someone might edit yours to speak of child molesting or something like that. Why should you be limited to placing comments in the story's forum and waiting for someone to come along, decide he believes you and edit the bio atricle on your behalf instead of correcting it yourself directly?
They want the company name, not the old computers. There's already Commodore branded MP3 players out there, I don't know if it's from the current owners or the previous one, but does it matter? Did they buy Commodore for Commodore's MP3 player technology? Did the current owner pick it up for Commodore's old media player, home media center, or GPS technologies?
Nah. Anything resembling media center/player stuff (CDTV or CD3) went to Gateway and Amiga Inc. instead of following the Commodore brand to Tulip and then to Yeahronimo. I don't think any of us ever heard of a GPS device from Commodore before they flopped in 1994. And we don't see anything in the article about PETs or Vic20's... As for the Commodore64, it's aready been put into one of them retro direct-to-TV joysticks to play some classic 8-bit games much like the cheap little pac-man or galaga gizmos in stores now, and apparently it's sold quite well.
It's pretty fun to do. A friend didn't want to fix his laptop himself but did want to save some money, so a few of us got togther and replaced his LCD backlight for him. It's really cool to see how many layers of various films are stacked up in there, as at least on this one we had to prety much completely disassemble the panel to get to the light tube.
:)
My friend got slightly the wrong tube length, so the two ends are a bit dark. There's a coupel fingerprints inside the LCD now, and someone's eyelash. If you end up seriously tearing the thing apart liek we did, get some latex gloves or somethign to help with the fingerprints, and try not to shed during the operation.
> How's your sister like puzzle games? Such as the old Super Solvers series or Myst?
She likes a couple word scramble puzzle games on some web page these days, but I've never seen her interested in Myst or anything more graphical or environmental like that. Probably not the kinds of things that many here would consider a video game worth mentioning. Mostly simple things that don't really some with anything remotely resembling a time commitment as she's too busy with "more important things" these days to get into anything big like Myst. I don't know what Super Solvers is myself.
I think part of the reason not many women play videogames is not about the quality of the game characters, but is more about the popular genres of games.
My sister enjoyed the old Super Mario games in the 8bit Nintendo days, Pac man, and things like that. But she's not interested in Yet Another Doom Clone style gaming, doesn't want to run around pouring machine gun turret blasts at other people.
As much as we'd all like to have our very own Morgan Web for our girlfriend/wife, there's just a small number of women like that who are intrested in today's popular games.
Maybe that's hardwired psychology, maybe it's cultural bias when they were young, maybe it will change, maybe it won't. If the game develoers don't figure out a genre that appeals to the female masses, it'll stagnate IMHO, regardless of better roles for female characters.
This guy must be an American. And this is how it's done in America. If you spill hot coffee on yourself, it's the store's fault g-darnit! If you break into a building and get hurt during your robbery, it's the building owner's fault! And if you buy something that don't work, heck, that's the manufacturer's fault for selling shoddy product!
:p
It's not narly as rediculous as other lawsuits out there. If MS is knowingly selling junk, they deserve it and need to set things right. Will units that currently seem to work fine end up with this problem a few months from now? How hot do these things get when they crash? Hot enough to start a fire? To burn someone who touches it? Is the idea of preventing such possibilities really a bad idea?
If MS did all reasonable due process to prevent problems in their product then they'll come out clean at the end of such a lawsuit, and the guy with the bad machine will have a bad day. Doesnt' hurt you any either way, so what's the big deal?
And yes, I'm also an evil American. I've been giving Walmart grief for not following their own rules on the "limit one per customer" black friday sale items and selling the last 4 HP laptops to a single customer. I myself live too far away from that particular store location to do a lawsuit, and IMHO it'd be a pain to resolve the couple hundred bucks difference between their sale price and ordering something comparable, but I have certainly thought about it. (My sister was next in line and needed a laptop for grad school, and should have got one) Be glad I'm more of a lazy American than a bitter, greedy and litegous American.
There was something said about this that it wasnt' done as Ellison owns a giant chunk of stock.
But... You'd think they could figure out a way to make a divident payment divvied up between all shareholders other than Ellison... But then considering the given excuse, how many institutional shareholders does Ellison invest in, might he benefit from them getting their payment? How far do you go to make sure none of it at all can possibly find its way back into his pocket?
Even if he can deduct any of this off his taxes, there's still a limit to how useful it can be. Remember, deductions are nto refundable, in that they can take your tax liability down to zero, but not below zero so it can't itself give him a gigantic refund.
Surely he's already got his finances very carefully set up to take advantage of as many tax breaks as possible. This means he's in the lowest tax bracket he can possibly fit himself into, probably has lots of things fit into business expense categories that are usually personal expenses to most of us, and his bottom line tax liability is likely not nearly as large as one might think for someone in his financial position.
He won't likely have a $100million tax liability for such a charitable contribution to save him from. Whatever his liability will actually be, if he is allowed to deduct this contribution, I'd wager it'll hit the floor long before that $100million potential is exhausted.
Plus, as a court judgement situation instead of a "goodness of his heart" situation, it might not be a valid tax deduction item anyway.
> Also, does not the FCC require that the providers carry some of the God channels? What if no one wants to pay for it?
Surely the number of evangelists wearing Rolexes indicates that there should be plenty of people willing to pay for it.
And if not, well the genuine preachers among us are supposed to live a humble life without riches or vast material collections, are they not? Maybe it'll all move to public access channels and be taped in some guy's basement.
> I am sure that eventualy artists will move to a label that treats it's customers with a bit more respect.
Sony will likely call your bluff here, as they know there is no such thing today as a label that treats its customers with any respect.
Wine has been trying to give us this world for some time. They've taken us a certain distance toward this destination as well. If it ever becomes "perfect", then one big part of that is done. If Cygwin ever becomes "perfect", then the x86 platform wil pretty much be OS-asgnostic to run nearly any app. DarWine can help bring MacOSX into the fold, and perhaps there will be something akin to cygwin to allow Windows to run MacOSX-x86 apps as well.
That's actually somethign I'd liek to see happen. I don't want to NEED any particular OS to play my favorite gaem or run some EDA tool I'm intersted in. I want to choose the best app for my particular needs, and I want to choose the best OS to run it on. I don't want the choice of the correct app force me to choose an OS I'd otherwise prefer to avoid.
Being an old Amiga nut still, I'd love to see something similar to Wine, that would allow me to run MacOSX-ppc apps and games on my PowerPC based Amiga machine. Sure, I've heard great things about OSX, but the realities of requiring certain apps for general use made me choose a WinAMD laptop instead of the iBook I pined for for many months. The Amiga is a toy to play with even more than the iBook would have been, but as I already have the thing due to my rediculous obsessive desires, it'd just be cool to run someone else's PPC apps on my oddball PPC hardware and OS. Of course that won't happen, but the situation described in this article doesn't necessarily need to be specific to the x86 platform.
I'd also think that if all popular APIs were brought to all OSes, then a simple compiler flag could give us an x86 binary to run under any x86 OS, a different flag could generate a ppc binary to run on any ppc OS, another flag could generate an Arm9 binary to run on any arm9 OS, etc. with all binaries coming from the same app/game sources.
I'd also love to see the ability to change out one implementation of an API in a particular OS for another implementation of the same API for that same OS. If for some reason I might decide I'm not fond of Microsoft's implementation of tcp/ip, I'd like to swap the whole thing out for Jim-Bob's implementation of tcp/ip for Windows as one possible example. Kerberos thoughts anyone?? Or if I don't like George's implementation of sdl for FreeBSD, I'd like to be able to change out the whole thing for Sam's implemtnation of sdl for cygwin. Or whatever other combination of OS vendor and API vendor might ever appear that might work better than the default install for that CPU/OS.
What a world that would be, I'd love to see it someday.
so that any developer can jump into any part of a project and be able to figure out what's going on, without wasting a couple hours just to figure out the code
Huh. I'v ehad to figure out someone else's code before, while I actually was working in software before my hardware design job. My employer licensed sources from a partner company for merging into my employer's larger system. One component of the messaging system had no documentation and virtually no commenting, and what rare comments were there were wrong. My task was to document the messages, their structures, and what each message type was used for so my coworkers could fill in the two ends of this communications system.
It was 2-space indented, which I had to change to my favorite 4-space indent, so I could see the flow of the code. 2 days. Understanding the flow, 3 days. Picking out the details of each message type, 4 days. Adding comments as I went along to help remember what I figured out earlier. 3 or 4 more days to type up a document for the thing for other coders to use. There were only 6 or 7 functions, and less than 10 message types. Still took a heck of a lot longer than a couple hours to ficure out what was going on in there.
That's 4-space indents, and spaces not tabs. Function and file headers, file headers basically for what the entire program does (not big ones, mostly perl or Cadence skill language scripting), and intelligent as I can comments of what I'm doing and more importantly WHY I'm doing it, so I can make sense of it myself long after I've forgotten what was going through my mind at the time.
My company doesn't really have any "standards", and most people don't format much at all and rarely, RARELY, comment anything whatsoever. The first thing I do when getting into someone else's code is to reformat it to my personal indentation style, as I get a better view of code flow with 4-space indents than single-space indents. I think single-space indents are pretty much meaningless as it's hard to follow without really paying attention to it, and sometimes you want to get a feel for where you are at a glance instead of at a study session.
I wish there was some company requirements, but we're electrical engineers not "real" programmers, and I guess no one else in the office cares if they can read their own code 6 months later.
OK, how many Amazon patent infringement jokes about this article will we see today?
If he'd tried to keep it he would have been sued into bankruptcy and then lost by default anyway. Isn't that how MS got hold of the "Internet Explorer" product name that was already copyrighted or trademarked by someone else? http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,13417,00 .html
Well, if I'm going to enjoy a TV how, I'd like to be able to see it. Cell phone screens are too small. Once upon a time I thought those Casio 1.5" TVs were neat, but coul dnever afford one in my childhood, and now don't think I would have really enjoyed it anyway. Too small. Would I have been able to read the big "01" painted on the side of the car in Dukes of Hazzard? Would I have been able to make out Mr. T's mohawk hair cut in the A-Team? Would one be able to tell what the gross stuff is that people are supposed to eat or sit in on those reality shows? Would I be able to see much of anything at all?
Now, blow that picture up to computer monitor size. Video iTunes sounds like a neat idea, but I ain't gonna watch anything at iPod resolution on my 19" monitor. Blocky and pixellated like there's no tomorrow. It'd probably make my eyes hurt. No thanks.
Now, I could see a cellphone with a big memory capacity being somewhat of a portable Tivo. Maybe it could receive and store a TV show while you're driving a long distance, so you can't go home anc copy a recording there before watching it at your destination that doesn't have a DVR, like maybe visiting your parents who still haven't figured out how to work their now ancient VCR. Or you're on your way to some business conference thing and don't want to be stuck with the limited channel offerings or expensive pay-per-view junk of the hotel you're stuck in for the next week.
But such cellphone recordings when connected to TV or monitor for playback should look good, not like they were obviously blown up from a 1 inch screen resolution. The phone should be able to play back anyway in case no large screen is available on the plane, or to preview what's already stored so you can choose and delete some old show to make room for a new recording.
If the use of my idle CPU is mandatory, do I get compensation for my electric bill?
I say $8 is too much because for most things I don't need or want to keep it after watching. For $1 I can rent it for an evening from a Red Box. There are a few that I've bought the DVD before watching and been quite disappointed, but I was dumb enough to buy instead of rent. Or if what I want isn't at a Red Box, I can go to Blockbuster and still pay less than $8 to watch it.
Now, if I want to keep something, $8 might be a fair price, assuming the quality compares well with a DVD. They can leave out the special features and commentary from this $8 download, I rarely watch those things anyway.
But in the end it might still not be worth it, if it's too heavily DRMed then my MythTV box connected to my TV won't play it back, and if so then it's worth exactly zero to me.
Maybe it's not your idea of worthy pay, but in some parts of the world it might be pretty darn good pay for the time to do the task.
Just imagine setting up a sweatshop in some 3rd world country, invest enough training to get people doing well, then get them going, pay them part and keep some portion of each item reward for "the company".
You know someone will do this...
> Now that GPU's are becomming more and more programmable, and more and more
>general~purpose, what, really, is the difference between a GPU and a standard CPU?
The monitor output?
> Imagine using PCI cards with a handful of FPGAs on board to provide...
I thought of something like that some years ago, a project that would have provided a hardware codec system for the old Amiga computers. Since their 68K CPUs topped out at 66MHz when overclocked, the things barely play back mp3s at full quality, and mpeg video quickly gets unpleasant, while mpeg4/divx is unwatchable. Those with PPC upgrades had it a little better, but I never had one at the time, and even today those rare cards sell for over US$700 if you can find one at all.Ick! An FPGA on a card would have been way cheaper.
A reconfigurable FPGA would let you swap in and out various audio or video codecs as needed, could act as an encrypt.decruption accelerator for something like dnetc client, protein folding accelerator, seti, or any number of other things. Alas, laziness won out, and now I have a PC that handles the things I wanted to do well enough in software on CPU.
I got a 10% this year as well. Last year they handed out 4%. The 5 years before that there was nothing at all. Heck, they didn't even do performance reviews. And I'd bet the only reason they gave out relatively nice raises this year was that a few key engineers left for greener pastures very recently, and they're afraid of losing more of those worth keeping.
But just because one gets a 10% single raise doesn't mean he's ahead of inflation in the long run. 14% raise over 6 or 7 years? I'm still a ways behind inflation...
The resolution is possibly also like a built-in broadcast flag thing. They don't want you cracking the DRM and passing good looking copies around the net. They don't want people to want cracked videos, even if it means the low quality makes us not want to buy the original either.
> The find the server and seize it according to the law. If it is
> overseas, they work with the local government.
And if friendly working with the local government doesn't work out, then the CIA goes in full-barrel and sets things right.
I can't wait for that episode of Alias, Ms. Garner going in to add the URLs of American businesses back into the DNS servers of EU so we can send emails back and forth to our friends again, do business again, and of course use the overseas download mirrors for linux distros.