I haven't heard of any Linux viruses, btw... I know there are troyans, but they are harmless unless ran by root.
Don't bet the farm on that kind of track record. IMHO, people running Linux are much less likely to shoot e-mails containing binary executables to each other, for three reasons:
There's a decent chance there are compatibility issues
They would rather point folks to a URL from which the recipient can download stuff.
They know better than to send binary executable attachments.
Throw tens of thousands of casual users into this mix, and we'll see how long it is before Linux virii start appearing in force.
I think the author meant that MS would claim that NT SP3 and SP4 should qualify as two different operating systems under the rule, and therefore be considered for two segments.
Whatever the legal merits of the case, 3dfx is IMHO clearly behaving as a poor citizen of the open source community.
Ugh. I hate it when people throw out phrases like like this because they sound impressive.
Look - 3dfx is not a member of the open source community. The hardware is proprietary, the API (GLide) is proprietary, and the SDK is released under a license which does not permit you to modify and redistribute the code under any circumstances.
If you want to criticize 3dfx, fine, but they've never had any pretentions to open-sourcing their SDK, to my knowledge, and shouldn't be faulted for that.
If you're starting work on a new game, you use OpenGL. Period. It's cross-platform, and the performance is good and getting better thanks to everybody fighting over Quake frame rates.
I hate to say it, but don't forget about DirectX. I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but I'd guess that DirectX's penetration among game developers is much higher than OpenGL's.
As for competing on the merits of their products... fuhgeddaboudit. While their newest cards carry on their tradition of fast fill rates, visual quality isn't as good as much of the competition, and their "you don't really need 32-bit rendering" is killing them. (In the press, anyway. I haven't seen their sales figures recently.)
There is one thing that bothers me a bit and that I can't understand with "people like you". It seems as if the only thing that is important is money.
Ooof. I'm not the person to whom you responded, but I think I'll reply anyway.
I work (read: for money) in the computer field. That doesn't mean that money is all I care about, and it doesn't mean that I don't like my job. It means that I have a wife (and someday, I hope, kids) to support, and that I can't just sit around doing things I enjoy all day if I'm not going to get paid. If I don't get paid, I don't eat.
A lot of technical people I know - myself included - frequently find themselves being taken advantage of because they object less to putting in extra hours. It occurred to me a few weeks back that it wasn't fair for me to have to put in 50+ hours a week (which is about what I was doing) when company policy precluded me from being paid for more than 37.5.
This is something of a rambling message, I know. The upshot is: we're lucky enough to work in a field that we really like. That doesn't mean that we can afford to let others take advantage of us by taking on too much work.
Does Jon understand the WB's motivations?
on
Bootlegging Buffy
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· Score: 1
Okay - given that Warner Brothers is a big corporation, and therefore worthy of our suspicion from the get-go. But if you take their explanation at face value, I think Jon's assertion here falls apart.
What they've publically stated is that, because there are (I'm told - haven't been able to see it yet) kids running around, screaming, and getting killed in general, they felt that it would be disrespectful to show the episode so soon after Littleton. They didn't say that they believe that TV violence causes precipitates real violence, or that they were canning the episode entirely.
Maybe you don't trust the WB, and you think their justification for postponing the episode is bogus. But Jon doesn't address that here, and neither has anyone else (that I can see).
PS - Am I the only one who thinks that the WB has supplanted Fox as most willing to experiment with the lineup? Or am I smoking crack?
I was surprised to hear that several friends of mine were able to see TPM on opening day (after the midnight release, obviously) without waiting in line for longer than two minutes. I love it when hype machines break.
The Burma Shave company found a town called Mars, or Moers, or something like that in Pennsylvania, and gave him a vacation there for his efforts.
Mars, PA. Not too far from Pittsburgh. Even closer to Warrindale, which is where Fore Systems makes its home. The only non-big city I've ever been in where I've actually seen rats running through the streets. (At night, anyway.)
I've recently been involved in a project in Pennsylvania called "Link to Learn". Minus all the politician-speak, it was a bunch of studies engineered to figure out how schools could get the most bang for their technology buck, with an emphasis on Internet connectivity.
While attending a meeting of several L2L testbed projects, my manager had the occasion to speak with a school administrator who had received beaucoups bucks from the state in order to get her school wired. When my boss inquired about how she'd approached the problem, she said that it was easy. Apparently, she'd purchased a score of HP Vectra computers - the ones with the little button on the keyboard that say "Internet".
My manager tried to break the news to her, but she was quite convinced that she was all set, and he didn't have the heart to ruin her day. The point of all this being - of course school muckity-mucks aren't buying software. They wouldn't know what to do with it.
But why would Joe Corporate MIS guy buy alpha? Yeah, great chips, great technology, obviously superior to anything else on the market, but real expensive.
We have a couple of DEC Alpha servers running where I work. As annoying as the hardware can be to replace (I've had Digital service guys actually tell me that no one should bother with their old stock tape backups), the systems were pretty much rock solid. Our most heavily trafficked one (which is doing secondary DNS for a couple dozen domains, bunches of SMTP and POP, and a respectable amount of web traffic) will hit an uptime of one year this Friday. Unless, of course, it crashes, in which case you'll read about my suicide on Saturday.
Yeah - I agree that the syntax in REBOL (given the tiny example that I looked at) is odd enough that I probably wouldn't want to spend the time learning it. And, come to think of it, I think that we need more people who have the theory down pat before they start calling themselves "developers."
My beef was that original rant came sounded to me like a rant against readable languages, rather than pro-"knowing what you're doing." Besides which, I'm really hyped on caffiene right now, and it looked like a good target for my extra energy.
I don't understand the people who have commented so far and their view that REBOL is a "good" language simply because it's "easier" than other languages. I think this is a common misconception that is evident in multiple areas of computer science -- that something is "good" because it's easy for the lay-person to pick it up and understand it.
Disclaimers first: I don't use VB, I hate NT, I've never looked at REBOL. That said, I disagree about as strongly as it's possible to disagree.
The reason I use programming languages which are easier to read and write - for the lay-person, or for the technical professional - is because it's faster. If I felt like it, I could probably sit down and write a CGI script using gcc that would talk to a MySQL server quite nicely. But why? I can write a PHP app to do exactly the same thing in a matter of minutes. It might be fun to try that as an exercise sometime, but I have to make my living this way, and I'd prefer not to have to re-invent the wheel every time I do.
Sorry. The reason people invented computers in the first place was because they wanted to do math problems that were too much of a pain in the ass to do otherwise. Much of the history of the advance of computer technology can be described in terms of people who were willing to expend a hell of a lot of effort so that they (or others) could get to be lazy somewhere down the line.
Anyway - I get the feeling the diehards are just going to hate me for this. So if you disagree with me, fine, go write your own database from the ground up in assembly code. I'm going to use whatever tools are available to me, and then I'm gonna play some Quake.
That's not the point: the security rating depends on (among other things), whether or not it's connected to a network, and whether or not it's under armed guard. The DOD doesn't say, "Oh, well, since it's under armed guard and not connected to a network, we won't bother assigning it a security rating." Instead, they take all methods of access into account when assigning the rating. Systems not connected to a network and under armed guard has a good shot at being a step or two higher than C2.
See "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD" (better known as the Orange Book) for details.
It'll be interesting if 3dfx reacts in the same way as it has to individuals producing Glide wrappers... which is to say, by threatening lawsuits. Since CL is one of their partners, I'll bet the lawyers at 3dfx will be kept on a much tighter leash.
hmmmm, a $120 million for lost revenues because they had to shut down their network for a few weeks?
Actually, that's not entirely unreasonable. I know that if the internal network where I work were shut down... well, we'd be screwed.
Remember that to a company developing software, the most costly expense is usually time, for the simple reason that greedy computer geeks like us occasionally expect paychecks. The thing that makes most of these figures ridiculous is that in most cases, the time wasn't wasted: the source code wasn't gone, just copied, and there's little to suggest that any of these "victims" lost a sale because someone else snagged it using the stolen code. But to have your network shut down for a week... I don't know the details of Nokia's claim here, but that's bad juju.
Re:Intellectual Property
on
DOJ vs NSI
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· Score: 2
So, it appears to me that the public who is NSI's collective customer 'owns' the information in WHOIS. Do they have a legitimate legal claim of intellectual property?
Arguably, yes. Let's say I run a market research firm, and I publish a report on the buying habits of consumers between the ages of 15 and 30. All of the consumers whose statistics are used to form the report own their own spending behavior, but they don't own the content of the report.
To bring the case closer to home: if I'm Time magazine, no company can simply compel me to turn over my list of subscriber information. It's a valuable commodity, and I can sell it to (and for however much) I choose/can get away with.
NSI could easily argue that "the public" isn't really their customer at all: it's the domain name registrants. Since all the people in the WHOIS database are their clients, they're likely to argue that they shouldn't be compelled to turn over the nature of the business relationship to anyone who wants to know. In any other context, it'd be entirely reasonable, but the public nature of the Internet has turned this issue sticky.
Main Entry: optimization
Pronunciation: "äp-t&-m&-'zA-sh&n Function: noun Date: 1857 : an act, process, or methodology of making something (as a design, system, or decision) as fully perfect, functional, or effective as possible; specifically : the mathematical procedures (as finding the maximum of a function) involved in this
By the way: I think you mean, "definitely." Not "definately."
The idea here is that physical assets (like workstations) can be secured with much less difficulty than stuff attached to a network. File this one under the axiom, "a chain is only as good as it's weakest link."
A computer that you can only access by sitting down in front of it can be kept under armed guard & video cameras. That tends to discourage hacking attempts.
Fuhgetabbowdit. All it will take is one failure of this model - a legal team that tries the OSS model to win a case and loses. Then, it'll be opened up to lawsuits from the client, who will claim that the reason the claim was lost was because the legal team "leaked" crucial strategic information to opposing counsel.
It's a shame, in a sense: I'm not at all sure that our current "adversarial" method of assigning guilt/responsibility in a court of law is at all the way to go, but once you're there, you're committed. The system can make adversaries out of anyone - even a lawyer and his client.
Enh. Oh well. I'm operating on 3 hours of sleep, so this probably wasn't as well worded as I'd like it to be. C'est la vie.
In fact, I'll be more specific. For a guy who has been fascinated with that particular philosophical question (how "self" can come out of the goo of everyday matter) since high school... this book was, quite literally, life changing. And, ironically, I don't even feel that my grasp of the concepts in the book are as good as they should be.
Ironically, I find that Jon's writing is at its best when confronted with an outpouring of e-mail - usually in response to tragedy. This was a very well written piece, Jon: junior high hasn't seemed so recent in my memory in years.
I have to agree. Web site designers are terrified to use PNGs on their site because they know that a sizeable percentage of their viewers can't... well, view 'em. And browser support for them still isn't where it should be.
JPEG 2K might be God's own personal image format, but if a format falls in a forest and no one is around to implement it, does it make for pretty pictures?
Slashdot Mirror
Throw tens of thousands of casual users into this mix, and we'll see how long it is before Linux virii start appearing in force.
I think the author meant that MS would claim that NT SP3 and SP4 should qualify as two different operating systems under the rule, and therefore be considered for two segments.
Ugh. I hate it when people throw out phrases like like this because they sound impressive.
Look - 3dfx is not a member of the open source community. The hardware is proprietary, the API (GLide) is proprietary, and the SDK is released under a license which does not permit you to modify and redistribute the code under any circumstances.
If you want to criticize 3dfx, fine, but they've never had any pretentions to open-sourcing their SDK, to my knowledge, and shouldn't be faulted for that.
I hate to say it, but don't forget about DirectX. I dislike MS as much as the next guy, but I'd guess that DirectX's penetration among game developers is much higher than OpenGL's.
As for competing on the merits of their products... fuhgeddaboudit. While their newest cards carry on their tradition of fast fill rates, visual quality isn't as good as much of the competition, and their "you don't really need 32-bit rendering" is killing them. (In the press, anyway. I haven't seen their sales figures recently.)
Ooof. I'm not the person to whom you responded, but I think I'll reply anyway.
I work (read: for money) in the computer field. That doesn't mean that money is all I care about, and it doesn't mean that I don't like my job. It means that I have a wife (and someday, I hope, kids) to support, and that I can't just sit around doing things I enjoy all day if I'm not going to get paid. If I don't get paid, I don't eat.
A lot of technical people I know - myself included - frequently find themselves being taken advantage of because they object less to putting in extra hours. It occurred to me a few weeks back that it wasn't fair for me to have to put in 50+ hours a week (which is about what I was doing) when company policy precluded me from being paid for more than 37.5.
This is something of a rambling message, I know. The upshot is: we're lucky enough to work in a field that we really like. That doesn't mean that we can afford to let others take advantage of us by taking on too much work.
Okay - given that Warner Brothers is a big corporation, and therefore worthy of our suspicion from the get-go. But if you take their explanation at face value, I think Jon's assertion here falls apart.
What they've publically stated is that, because there are (I'm told - haven't been able to see it yet) kids running around, screaming, and getting killed in general, they felt that it would be disrespectful to show the episode so soon after Littleton. They didn't say that they believe that TV violence causes precipitates real violence, or that they were canning the episode entirely.
Maybe you don't trust the WB, and you think their justification for postponing the episode is bogus. But Jon doesn't address that here, and neither has anyone else (that I can see).
PS - Am I the only one who thinks that the WB has supplanted Fox as most willing to experiment with the lineup? Or am I smoking crack?
I was surprised to hear that several friends of mine were able to see TPM on opening day (after the midnight release, obviously) without waiting in line for longer than two minutes. I love it when hype machines break.
Mars, PA. Not too far from Pittsburgh. Even closer to Warrindale, which is where Fore Systems makes its home. The only non-big city I've ever been in where I've actually seen rats running through the streets. (At night, anyway.)
Avoid at all costs.
I've recently been involved in a project in Pennsylvania called "Link to Learn". Minus all the politician-speak, it was a bunch of studies engineered to figure out how schools could get the most bang for their technology buck, with an emphasis on Internet connectivity.
While attending a meeting of several L2L testbed projects, my manager had the occasion to speak with a school administrator who had received beaucoups bucks from the state in order to get her school wired. When my boss inquired about how she'd approached the problem, she said that it was easy. Apparently, she'd purchased a score of HP Vectra computers - the ones with the little button on the keyboard that say "Internet".
My manager tried to break the news to her, but she was quite convinced that she was all set, and he didn't have the heart to ruin her day. The point of all this being - of course school muckity-mucks aren't buying software. They wouldn't know what to do with it.
Yeah - I agree that the syntax in REBOL (given the tiny example that I looked at) is odd enough that I probably wouldn't want to spend the time learning it. And, come to think of it, I think that we need more people who have the theory down pat before they start calling themselves "developers."
My beef was that original rant came sounded to me like a rant against readable languages, rather than pro-"knowing what you're doing." Besides which, I'm really hyped on caffiene right now, and it looked like a good target for my extra energy.
Disclaimers first: I don't use VB, I hate NT, I've never looked at REBOL. That said, I disagree about as strongly as it's possible to disagree.
The reason I use programming languages which are easier to read and write - for the lay-person, or for the technical professional - is because it's faster. If I felt like it, I could probably sit down and write a CGI script using gcc that would talk to a MySQL server quite nicely. But why? I can write a PHP app to do exactly the same thing in a matter of minutes. It might be fun to try that as an exercise sometime, but I have to make my living this way, and I'd prefer not to have to re-invent the wheel every time I do.
Sorry. The reason people invented computers in the first place was because they wanted to do math problems that were too much of a pain in the ass to do otherwise. Much of the history of the advance of computer technology can be described in terms of people who were willing to expend a hell of a lot of effort so that they (or others) could get to be lazy somewhere down the line.
Anyway - I get the feeling the diehards are just going to hate me for this. So if you disagree with me, fine, go write your own database from the ground up in assembly code. I'm going to use whatever tools are available to me, and then I'm gonna play some Quake.
See "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD" (better known as the Orange Book) for details.
It'll be interesting if 3dfx reacts in the same way as it has to individuals producing Glide wrappers... which is to say, by threatening lawsuits. Since CL is one of their partners, I'll bet the lawyers at 3dfx will be kept on a much tighter leash.
Remember that to a company developing software, the most costly expense is usually time, for the simple reason that greedy computer geeks like us occasionally expect paychecks. The thing that makes most of these figures ridiculous is that in most cases, the time wasn't wasted: the source code wasn't gone, just copied, and there's little to suggest that any of these "victims" lost a sale because someone else snagged it using the stolen code. But to have your network shut down for a week... I don't know the details of Nokia's claim here, but that's bad juju.
Arguably, yes. Let's say I run a market research firm, and I publish a report on the buying habits of consumers between the ages of 15 and 30. All of the consumers whose statistics are used to form the report own their own spending behavior, but they don't own the content of the report.
To bring the case closer to home: if I'm Time magazine, no company can simply compel me to turn over my list of subscriber information. It's a valuable commodity, and I can sell it to (and for however much) I choose/can get away with.
NSI could easily argue that "the public" isn't really their customer at all: it's the domain name registrants. Since all the people in the WHOIS database are their clients, they're likely to argue that they shouldn't be compelled to turn over the nature of the business relationship to anyone who wants to know. In any other context, it'd be entirely reasonable, but the public nature of the Internet has turned this issue sticky.
The following is quoted from the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary
By the way: I think you mean, "definitely." Not "definately."The idea here is that physical assets (like workstations) can be secured with much less difficulty than stuff attached to a network. File this one under the axiom, "a chain is only as good as it's weakest link."
A computer that you can only access by sitting down in front of it can be kept under armed guard & video cameras. That tends to discourage hacking attempts.
Fuhgetabbowdit. All it will take is one failure of this model - a legal team that tries the OSS model to win a case and loses. Then, it'll be opened up to lawsuits from the client, who will claim that the reason the claim was lost was because the legal team "leaked" crucial strategic information to opposing counsel.
It's a shame, in a sense: I'm not at all sure that our current "adversarial" method of assigning guilt/responsibility in a court of law is at all the way to go, but once you're there, you're committed. The system can make adversaries out of anyone - even a lawyer and his client.
Enh. Oh well. I'm operating on 3 hours of sleep, so this probably wasn't as well worded as I'd like it to be. C'est la vie.
Argh! You gave away the non-existant ending!
Me too. :)
:)
In fact, I'll be more specific. For a guy who has been fascinated with that particular philosophical question (how "self" can come out of the goo of everyday matter) since high school... this book was, quite literally, life changing. And, ironically, I don't even feel that my grasp of the concepts in the book are as good as they should be.
Looks like now is a good time to re-read.
Ironically, I find that Jon's writing is at its best when confronted with an outpouring of e-mail - usually in response to tragedy. This was a very well written piece, Jon: junior high hasn't seemed so recent in my memory in years.
Oh, sure. And we all know what bastions of egalitarianism among students private/parochial schools are.
I have to agree. Web site designers are terrified to use PNGs on their site because they know that a sizeable percentage of their viewers can't... well, view 'em. And browser support for them still isn't where it should be.
JPEG 2K might be God's own personal image format, but if a format falls in a forest and no one is around to implement it, does it make for pretty pictures?