Why on earth would I give that to my boss? It's called *personal* for a reason. Personnel can have it if they insist (I can almost see a reason for them to have it, although as I live alone there's no-one there to notify in the extremely unlikely event of an accident), everyone else can go whistle. Of course, I'm a developer not a sysadmin or support programmer, so I don't do "on call".
My real name, address, phone number, is on file. But it says "gulliver" on my card. It can say whatever the fuck I want it to say. I sign reciepts "SpongeBob" all the time, and I have a Visa issued to "Peanut".
It appears that your sig is correct; you do in fact need no instructions to know how to rock.
Why did this girl feel as though she couldn't talk to her parents?
Because she was a teenager? It's pretty damn common - in fact, in my limited experience, it's more common than not. I had (and still have) great parents; I couldn't confide in them as a teenager either. That wasn't their fault, it was mine - I was a moody, angst-ridden bundle of hyperactive hormones.
He says he wants an RPG that can be finished in 10-12 hours instead of the 40+ most of them are..
If I'm spending £35 (about $65, give or take) on a game, I want it to last. I do not want it to be over quite possibly in a day (or certainly a weekend).
But there was just enough anecdotal "evidence" of pirates completely eviscerating sales of games that shipped without copy protection that management was terrified to try and ship without it.
It's a good job you didn't tell them about gamecopyworld, they'd have died of fright.
Cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere are performing essentially this exact experiment right now, and have been since the planet formed. If there were any chance of a black hole forming and destroying the earth on a geological time scale, it would've happened already.
Besides, the resultant black hole would be absolutely minute - much much smaller than a proton. At that scale, even the densest of earthly materials is just so much empty space. The mean free path of any such hole would be absolutely huge, meaning that the chances of it getting close enough to even a small handful of atoms to swallow them as it passes through the planet are absolutely tiny.
Dan Simmons called this "The Big Mistake"
Dan Simmons writes science fiction. Perhaps you should try reading a little less sci-fi and a little more real science before yelling at people.
Except that the TPM is designed to be tamper-resistent. How are you supposed to hack something like that, where the only unencrypted copies are inside the chips and not on the busses?
At some point, the signal is unencrypted; it has to be in order for the viewer to be able to understand it. If TPM actually is impossible to circumvent (and if it is, I'll buy a hat and eat it), then you can attack the monitor/TV, intercepting and recording the signals to the panel or even the individual transistors. If that's too much hassle, just point a high quality camera (on a tripod) at a high quality panel and record it that way.
DRM can not work. All it can do is make it harder to copy the content, it cannot render it impossible.
Or we could just us a unix security model, and when something wants to sudo, force it to ask the console user for a password.
That only happens if you're not running as root. On Windows, if you're not logged in as a member of the Administrators group, either you'll be prompted for some credentials (rare) or it'll fail with an error (much more common).
Don't blame MS because people run as admin; blame third party software developers for assuming people do, and for requiring admin access even when they don't need it.
Problem solved and you won't have to worry about them coming back later and claiming that your locally stored copy is also a copyright violation too.
A number of years ago I worked on a particular website for a company here in the UK. The site's terms and conditions page contained a clause specifically disallowing caching of any of their content, either on a server or locally.
(Un?)Luckily I was new enough and lowly enough in my job at the time that I wasn't in a position to tell them just how ridiculously fucking stupid they were being.
Can't spread anything to anyone if you're at home alone, no matter how much you (or they) cough and sneeze. That's the point - by limiting the amount of social mixing, you limit the spread of the pandemic.
It's also why it's utterly stupid to expect employees to come in when they're sick; not only will they be under-performing the whole time, they'll spread it to their colleagues too.
you know damned well, without having to read the fine print, that you are buying shared bandwidth, if you are paying less then $100 per Mb/s per month
I know that and you know that and he knows that; we all know that. Aren't we clever?
My parents don't know that, and they're sold exactly the same package in exactly the same way. My non-techy friends don't know either, and nor do their friends, and so on.
Just because we know that doesn't mean it's ok; we're in the business, or nearly so. Most people aren't, and can't be expected to know unless you tell them.
Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: DirectX is a family of related technologies, providing APIs for accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, sound, networking, input, etc. OpenGL is the equivalent of Direct3D, which is only a part of DirectX. OpenGL cannot and will not ever replace DX, but could potentially replace D3D.
However, my money's on the vast majority of the problems being driver-related. For example, there have been reports of Nvidia being sued for their Vista driver support (or lack thereof). MS has a long track record of working very hard to maintain backwards compatibility across releases of DX; that's one of the reasons why it's getting so big, all of the old stuff is still in there. Not to say that some of the problems won't be due to Vista too, but I'd be surprised if it's anything like all of them.
It makes no business sense for MSFT to fund NT development when Linux is available for free.
That really depends on whether or not you believe that NT offers any compelling advantages over Linux. If you do, then it may well be worth your while investing in developing it in order to keep those advantages. It also assumes that the cost to port Windows to Linux (or Linux to Windows) would be more than offset by the savings on dropping support for NT. It also assumes that the legal issues are straightforward and present no problems. None of these things are obvious to me; just because Apple managed to do it with BSD doesn't mean that MS could do it with Linux.
I also fail to see why Linus would care. He's said time and again that the politics of it doesn't matter to him, he just enjoys writing code. There's nothing that MS could do to Linux under GPL2 that they couldn't do under GPL3, other than sue and continue to use it. As they appear to have no interest in using it anyway, I don't see what difference relicensing Linux under GPL3 would do, even if it were possible. (Remember, individual contributors tend to retain copyright, and would all have to agree)
Both are now in Microsoft Windows with nothing more than a credit line to the original developers buried somewhere.
So what? Given that a network stack is a fundamental part of a modern operating system, and that poorly written, incompatible and vulnerable network stacks would degrade the entire network for everyone on it, surely it's better that MS used a tried and tested stack rather than going it alone and producing a buggy, not quite compatible version of their own?
Besides which, it was clearly the intention of the authors in using the licence that it could be used in closed-source products, and MS are complying with the letter and the spirit of the licence; "use it as you see fit, just credit us".
So what? You don't seriously think that catching these companies is going to rely on them posting from their own network, do you? That could be avoided simply by sending an employee down the road to an internet cafe...
Enforcing this isn't going to be easy, but Tor really doesn't make it any harder.
Companies are considered people because this enables them to limit their financial liability and encourages their directors to take greater risks.
In what way does that require the corporation to be a person? Surely it's just as easy for the law to say "directors and other employees of corporations are protected from personal financial liability in the event of corporate financial liability" as it is to say "corporations are people"? The former, while possibly becoming a long list, limits the protection and rights to exactly what they need to be. The latter potentially opens up all sorts of problems.
To draw an analogy to computing (yes, I realise that's the wrong way...), when setting up a firewall you don't allow all except known bad stuff, you block all except known good stuff. It's a little more work, but a damn sight safer in the long run.
Treating corporations as people is a shortcut that leads to all sorts of potential abuses and excesses. It's not even as though your country has a shortage of people able and willing to sit down and thrash out the details of a saner law...
Geolocation of IP addresses is pretty much a black art as well - there's far too much variability by IP address to try and localise to the precision needed for bombing the source.
Sourceforge suggests a mirror based on geolocation of your IP address. It always suggests a German mirror for me, despite the fact that I'm in London and there's a mirror in Kent (100 miles away).
Bombing based on geolocation of IP addresses isn't going to happen any time soon (not that that would be the source for their bombing target anyway, even the US military isn't that indiscriminate)
It seems likely that the (small) marginal cost of producing an OpenOffice CD is about the same as that of producing an MS Office CD.
It would cost me about 20p to produce a CD copy of MS Office for someone. It cost MS millions of dollars to produce the first copy of MS Office.
That's the real issue here, and one that's not easily solved; the first copy of any major software application costs an incredible amount of money to produce. You either have to find people willing to work for free (and supply most of their own tools, etc), or work out a way to recoup the initial investment.
Reproduction is extremely cheap, quick and easy; production is none of those things.
Yes; it's clearly illegal because it is explicitly against the law. You're not allowed to take that sort of picture of a minor, and under the age of 18 in that state, that's exactly what you are.
There are plenty of other possibilities, but they mostly rely on the law not being as it is.
Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.
You can say exactly the same thing about hardware though; the net effect is that you'll never upgrade.
Upgrade when it's right for you to upgrade. If Vista has a feature that you are willing to pay for, or some must-have piece of software is Vista-only, then upgrade. If not, don't.
Besides, how far did Vista's release slip? What makes you think the next release will be on time?
That puts incentive to make software you're proud of, documented for the next phase of development
I completely disagree. Someone who knows that he's going to be the one maintaining software until its EOLed has *no* incentive to write documentation - he doesn't need it, he already knows it all. (Yes I know that's a fallacy, but it'll be a very common attitude) Also, I personally make more effort to make software I can be proud of when I know that other people are likely to be exposed to it. The stuff I do at work, that other people on the team are going to be touching, and that the support department will eventually be supporting, is of a much higher quality than most of the crap I churn out at home to scratch an itch.
Also, the last thing you want to do is take your best and brightest developers and shove them into support. If they're any good and have any ambition, they'll stick it out for a little while before becoming bored and leaving, taking their knowledge and talent with them. Maintenance programming and development are different jobs, requiring different skills and different attitudes. You can't turn a developer into a maintenance programmer (or vice versa) by decree, they have to want to make the switch and have the right aptitude.
Slashdot Mirror
if the boss has your home/personal cell number
Why on earth would I give that to my boss? It's called *personal* for a reason. Personnel can have it if they insist (I can almost see a reason for them to have it, although as I live alone there's no-one there to notify in the extremely unlikely event of an accident), everyone else can go whistle. Of course, I'm a developer not a sysadmin or support programmer, so I don't do "on call".
My real name, address, phone number, is on file. But it says "gulliver" on my card. It can say whatever the fuck I want it to say. I sign reciepts "SpongeBob" all the time, and I have a Visa issued to "Peanut".
It appears that your sig is correct; you do in fact need no instructions to know how to rock.
Why did this girl feel as though she couldn't talk to her parents?
Because she was a teenager? It's pretty damn common - in fact, in my limited experience, it's more common than not. I had (and still have) great parents; I couldn't confide in them as a teenager either. That wasn't their fault, it was mine - I was a moody, angst-ridden bundle of hyperactive hormones.
He says he wants an RPG that can be finished in 10-12 hours instead of the 40+ most of them are..
If I'm spending £35 (about $65, give or take) on a game, I want it to last. I do not want it to be over quite possibly in a day (or certainly a weekend).
But there was just enough anecdotal "evidence" of pirates completely eviscerating sales of games that shipped without copy protection that management was terrified to try and ship without it.
It's a good job you didn't tell them about gamecopyworld, they'd have died of fright.
Cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere are performing essentially this exact experiment right now, and have been since the planet formed. If there were any chance of a black hole forming and destroying the earth on a geological time scale, it would've happened already.
Besides, the resultant black hole would be absolutely minute - much much smaller than a proton. At that scale, even the densest of earthly materials is just so much empty space. The mean free path of any such hole would be absolutely huge, meaning that the chances of it getting close enough to even a small handful of atoms to swallow them as it passes through the planet are absolutely tiny.
Dan Simmons called this "The Big Mistake"
Dan Simmons writes science fiction. Perhaps you should try reading a little less sci-fi and a little more real science before yelling at people.
Except that the TPM is designed to be tamper-resistent. How are you supposed to hack something like that, where the only unencrypted copies are inside the chips and not on the busses?
At some point, the signal is unencrypted; it has to be in order for the viewer to be able to understand it. If TPM actually is impossible to circumvent (and if it is, I'll buy a hat and eat it), then you can attack the monitor/TV, intercepting and recording the signals to the panel or even the individual transistors. If that's too much hassle, just point a high quality camera (on a tripod) at a high quality panel and record it that way.
DRM can not work. All it can do is make it harder to copy the content, it cannot render it impossible.
Did Captain Copyright even have "super powers", or was he just a muscular and dandily-attired dude
You mean like Batman? He always gets called a superhero too, despite not having any super powers that I'm aware of.
Or we could just us a unix security model, and when something wants to sudo, force it to ask the console user for a password.
That only happens if you're not running as root. On Windows, if you're not logged in as a member of the Administrators group, either you'll be prompted for some credentials (rare) or it'll fail with an error (much more common).
Don't blame MS because people run as admin; blame third party software developers for assuming people do, and for requiring admin access even when they don't need it.
Problem solved and you won't have to worry about them coming back later and claiming that your locally stored copy is also a copyright violation too.
A number of years ago I worked on a particular website for a company here in the UK. The site's terms and conditions page contained a clause specifically disallowing caching of any of their content, either on a server or locally.
(Un?)Luckily I was new enough and lowly enough in my job at the time that I wasn't in a position to tell them just how ridiculously fucking stupid they were being.
"Coughs and sneezes spread diseases".
Can't spread anything to anyone if you're at home alone, no matter how much you (or they) cough and sneeze. That's the point - by limiting the amount of social mixing, you limit the spread of the pandemic.
It's also why it's utterly stupid to expect employees to come in when they're sick; not only will they be under-performing the whole time, they'll spread it to their colleagues too.
you know damned well, without having to read the fine print, that you are buying shared bandwidth, if you are paying less then $100 per Mb/s per month
I know that and you know that and he knows that; we all know that. Aren't we clever?
My parents don't know that, and they're sold exactly the same package in exactly the same way. My non-techy friends don't know either, and nor do their friends, and so on.
Just because we know that doesn't mean it's ok; we're in the business, or nearly so. Most people aren't, and can't be expected to know unless you tell them.
IT's the copy protections and cheat prevention software that needs admin in the newer games.
That, and often opening the registry hive read/write when all it really needs is read only.
Either way, it's braindead and wouldn't pass MS's "Designed for XP" certification, as by the definition of the cert, it isn't.
Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: DirectX is a family of related technologies, providing APIs for accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, sound, networking, input, etc. OpenGL is the equivalent of Direct3D, which is only a part of DirectX. OpenGL cannot and will not ever replace DX, but could potentially replace D3D.
However, my money's on the vast majority of the problems being driver-related. For example, there have been reports of Nvidia being sued for their Vista driver support (or lack thereof). MS has a long track record of working very hard to maintain backwards compatibility across releases of DX; that's one of the reasons why it's getting so big, all of the old stuff is still in there. Not to say that some of the problems won't be due to Vista too, but I'd be surprised if it's anything like all of them.
I've never quite understood how any government can be convinced to collect taxes for a non-government enterprise
Well, is the levy applied to the price before or after sales tax/VAT?
If before, then there's your answer.
It makes no business sense for MSFT to fund NT development when Linux is available for free.
That really depends on whether or not you believe that NT offers any compelling advantages over Linux. If you do, then it may well be worth your while investing in developing it in order to keep those advantages. It also assumes that the cost to port Windows to Linux (or Linux to Windows) would be more than offset by the savings on dropping support for NT. It also assumes that the legal issues are straightforward and present no problems. None of these things are obvious to me; just because Apple managed to do it with BSD doesn't mean that MS could do it with Linux.
I also fail to see why Linus would care. He's said time and again that the politics of it doesn't matter to him, he just enjoys writing code. There's nothing that MS could do to Linux under GPL2 that they couldn't do under GPL3, other than sue and continue to use it. As they appear to have no interest in using it anyway, I don't see what difference relicensing Linux under GPL3 would do, even if it were possible. (Remember, individual contributors tend to retain copyright, and would all have to agree)
Both are now in Microsoft Windows with nothing more than a credit line to the original developers buried somewhere.
So what? Given that a network stack is a fundamental part of a modern operating system, and that poorly written, incompatible and vulnerable network stacks would degrade the entire network for everyone on it, surely it's better that MS used a tried and tested stack rather than going it alone and producing a buggy, not quite compatible version of their own?
Besides which, it was clearly the intention of the authors in using the licence that it could be used in closed-source products, and MS are complying with the letter and the spirit of the licence; "use it as you see fit, just credit us".
So what? You don't seriously think that catching these companies is going to rely on them posting from their own network, do you? That could be avoided simply by sending an employee down the road to an internet cafe...
Enforcing this isn't going to be easy, but Tor really doesn't make it any harder.
Companies are considered people because this enables them to limit their financial liability and encourages their directors to take greater risks.
In what way does that require the corporation to be a person? Surely it's just as easy for the law to say "directors and other employees of corporations are protected from personal financial liability in the event of corporate financial liability" as it is to say "corporations are people"? The former, while possibly becoming a long list, limits the protection and rights to exactly what they need to be. The latter potentially opens up all sorts of problems.
To draw an analogy to computing (yes, I realise that's the wrong way...), when setting up a firewall you don't allow all except known bad stuff, you block all except known good stuff. It's a little more work, but a damn sight safer in the long run.
Treating corporations as people is a shortcut that leads to all sorts of potential abuses and excesses. It's not even as though your country has a shortage of people able and willing to sit down and thrash out the details of a saner law...
Geolocation of IP addresses is pretty much a black art as well - there's far too much variability by IP address to try and localise to the precision needed for bombing the source.
Sourceforge suggests a mirror based on geolocation of your IP address. It always suggests a German mirror for me, despite the fact that I'm in London and there's a mirror in Kent (100 miles away).
Bombing based on geolocation of IP addresses isn't going to happen any time soon (not that that would be the source for their bombing target anyway, even the US military isn't that indiscriminate)
It seems likely that the (small) marginal cost of producing an OpenOffice CD is about the same as that of producing an MS Office CD.
It would cost me about 20p to produce a CD copy of MS Office for someone. It cost MS millions of dollars to produce the first copy of MS Office.
That's the real issue here, and one that's not easily solved; the first copy of any major software application costs an incredible amount of money to produce. You either have to find people willing to work for free (and supply most of their own tools, etc), or work out a way to recoup the initial investment.
Reproduction is extremely cheap, quick and easy; production is none of those things.
Because way back when, they promised that they never would. A good few people would be really, really pissed if they went back on that promise.
Yes; it's clearly illegal because it is explicitly against the law. You're not allowed to take that sort of picture of a minor, and under the age of 18 in that state, that's exactly what you are.
There are plenty of other possibilities, but they mostly rely on the law not being as it is.
Surely it is better to wait and see what they come up with next.
You can say exactly the same thing about hardware though; the net effect is that you'll never upgrade.
Upgrade when it's right for you to upgrade. If Vista has a feature that you are willing to pay for, or some must-have piece of software is Vista-only, then upgrade. If not, don't.
Besides, how far did Vista's release slip? What makes you think the next release will be on time?
That puts incentive to make software you're proud of, documented for the next phase of development
I completely disagree. Someone who knows that he's going to be the one maintaining software until its EOLed has *no* incentive to write documentation - he doesn't need it, he already knows it all. (Yes I know that's a fallacy, but it'll be a very common attitude) Also, I personally make more effort to make software I can be proud of when I know that other people are likely to be exposed to it. The stuff I do at work, that other people on the team are going to be touching, and that the support department will eventually be supporting, is of a much higher quality than most of the crap I churn out at home to scratch an itch.
Also, the last thing you want to do is take your best and brightest developers and shove them into support. If they're any good and have any ambition, they'll stick it out for a little while before becoming bored and leaving, taking their knowledge and talent with them. Maintenance programming and development are different jobs, requiring different skills and different attitudes. You can't turn a developer into a maintenance programmer (or vice versa) by decree, they have to want to make the switch and have the right aptitude.