I thought the issue with the R4 cartridge was that it circumvented the RSA check by the console. Reverse-engineering or bypassing copy-protection systems violates the DMCA. It might be bullshit, but it's still illegal enough that EBay won't touch it with a 10" pole.
Five guitar buttons, five-card poker. At least the hardware fits the application.
As for why to do it? Just do monkey around with hardware, of course. Myself, I added a foot-switch to my RB guitar, since the 5-way switch is too much of a pain to hit while playing. Totally superfluous, but I had fun doing it.
If you want to pick up women, playing a real guitar is much more effective.
If your goal is to pick up women, might as well go whole hog and ditch the video games, trolling message boards, studying IT/Engineering/Science/anything remotely geeky. It's just what you enjoy doing, FWIW.
The problem with my school's CS program is that they continued to require writing proper syntax code throughout all 4 years, rather than simply learning how to step through a process in pseudo-code. So instead of reinforcing proper visualisation of a program's execution, we got penalized for not remembering the exact name of a C++ library function.
While a photograph might run afoul due to copyright issues, this case is different. It would be like you drawing a caricature of someone, and more specifically a public figure. While it is undeniably a use of their likeness, it is still created entirely by you, and therefor a protected artistic work.
Good call on the term limits. Rather, it was his political party that was voted out of power.
As for the 'questionable' election, several thousand votes in one district is a significantly smaller irregularity than in the recent elections in Iran or Afghanistan.
I understand the purpose of the case, and the reasons it would be necessitated for certain builds. However, I don't believe that most people who build that kind of machine really need everything they put into it. And if they do, are you certain that this $700 case would perform significantly better than a $200-400 case to justify the additional cost? Couldn't 90% of the heat issue be solved with proper air ducting? I don't see the need to thermally isolate individual HDDs, when one or two fans on all of them is just as effective and much less costly.
Especially since one can build a new machine for less than that total.
I'd love to meet the person who builds a machine that has thermal demands that necessitate a kit like this, then actually pushes the machine enough that he couldn't have gotten by spending 1/3rd of the price.
It still would have been a democracy, rather than theocracy, lack of diverse choice does not change that. We still have two independant parties who have differing policy goals, even if nearly every federally elected official is a protestant Christian.
I'm less interested in being de-authenticated from my web logins. I'm much more interested in finding a way to deauthenticate website security certificates. When a malicious website obtains a security certificate, how do you remove it?
Nor is the U.S. led and controlled by a radically conservative theocracy with a demonstrated intent to export insurrection with the stated goal of complete domination.
True, however this has only been the case since the beginning of this year.
Agreed on the led, but not on the controlled. We voted out a leader because we didn't like the direction our country was headed. Iran is led by a non-elected religious figure in perpetuity, and attempts to vote in even a new figurehead were met with violent opression.
It's disingenuous to claim that those are the same thing.
However, as it is impossible to measure the quantum properties of these particles without collapsing them into a non-super state, how do we know that the entanglement wasn't just the two particles gaining the same properties at the moment of entanglement? Obviously, this would result in them having the same properties once measured.
How do we know that this super state exists, when it is impossible to measure? If a piece of equipment paints two balls a random color and puts them in separate boxes aren't the balls, by the same definition, in a super state as we can't know their color until we open the box? And can they be said to be entangled, as once you open the first box and observe that the ball inside is for example red, the other ball will also be red even though it has yet to be "measured"?
IANAQP, but this is pretty much correct. For the most part, the particles do get their properties matched upon creation, so your analogy is initially correct. However, the property could be one randomly determined while in the separate boxes, yet the second ball still matches the properties of the first ball after opening. This is basically the 'quantum-ness' that is, in general, incredibly confusing.
There's a reason even Einstein mocked this as "spooky action at a distance" and said that if it were true he would rather be a cobbler or a casino employee. It's confusing and not completely understood. However, while Einstein believed it to be measurement error, it's it a pretty well established phenomenon now.
This is most likely attributed to increased reaction times and removal of the instinct to over-correct in these situations. The physics of GTA are intentionally dumbed-down in order to make the game more fun. For example, pulling the hand brake while going through a curve rarely has the same effect as in GTA.
Too much faith in driving abilities from GTA could do more harm than good. A driving simulator (iRacing, Forza, Gran Turismo) would give better instruction, but only in specific circumstances (using a wheel with force feedback, etc). Don't underestimate that simply by having increased reflexes from years of gaming has an effect, rather than assuming specific knowledge gained.
Because they still need to pay the distributer (D2D or Steam, for example), marketing costs, and just a smaller amount of distribution cost. Remember that this $30-35 needs to pay the developers as well, so it's not like that cash is all gravy.
But if you watch Steam's pricing, they frequently have games half-off for a weekend.
I dunno, being able to see the other desktops is certainly a boon. Also, how is 'CTRL+ALT+arrow key' easier than 'touch the desktop that looks like the one you want'? Hell, even your grandmother could do the second one.
It's probably not worth the money for most people right now, but if PC enthusiasts cared about how much it cost to make their e-peens bigger, we wouldn't have titanium computer cases with elaborite window artwork showcasing a UV-reactive liquid cooling setup in the shape of the Ark of the Covenant.
The German people are very touchy about the subject, quite understandably. They may have gone overboard to prevent a relapse, but consider the following:
Imagine the KKK were to gain a majority of the House, Senate, and gain the Presidency. Imagine the military leaders are also members of the KKK. The government then violently cracks down on dissent and encourages vandalism of any property that does not belong to a 'white' person. Soon, members of other races are rounded up into forced labor and publicly hanged. The government then invades neighboring nations (with the stated intent of annexing them) and ignites a war that spans the globe.
After it was all over, do you not expect there would be a MASSIVE backlash to prevent the KKK from returning? Whether this was the correct decision or not, it's something that the Germans are as guarded against preventing as Americans are for slavery, if not more so.
Good code is maintainable, no matter what language it's written in. Bad code is unmaintainable no matter the language as well. I think the proof is in the pudding: COBOL programs that have been maintained successfully for decades can continue to be maintained. Until new hardware/software will no longer support COBOL, it's probably not worth the risk to rewrite it. If you need to write a new program, perhaps starting with a modern language will make it better, but there should be no rush to replace working code as long as it is expected to continue working.
A good programmer can be taught COBOL (or any language) and maintain it. If you're not hiring good coders, you have bigger problems than what language your software is written in. A COBOL program is more succeptible to some issues, just as modern languages are at risk from other issues. And I seriously doubt that a 10-minute change in Java would take 6 months in COBOL. Do you have some way to back this claim up?
Especially, you mentioned "bloated executables" -- if/usr/bin/myapp is ten megs instead of a few hundred kilobytes, seriously, how much does ten megs of disk/RAM cost?
So, we're assuming 100x larger programs here. Adding 100x the RAM does not make performance equal. Programs run out of cache, not RAM, but even making that 100x bigger won't make performance equal, since the data needs to get there still. Even if the memory bandwidth is made 100x higher, still not the same performance due to the RAM's set-up time for reads and writes, as well as HDD/SSD access time.
You also ignore that your 100x larger program probably has additional instructions performing type-casting, error-handling, and all those other things that make the language 'safe'. So, instead of hiring programmers that avoid these errors in the first place, your code must check for them every single operation, whether your code is good or not. Hint, most of these errors are found and fixed quickly. This is additional processing time, which requires additional hardware to perform at the same speed.
I concurr that The Big Picture is more complicated. While you've shown there could be a small benefit to rewriting the COBOL to make it accessable to programmers who can't be bothered to learn it (are these the programmers you want?), you haven't mitigated the risk of inducing errors with a rewrite or of failing to meet run-time performance. Especially since most of these systems can't run as a cluster easily (they would require parallel processing techniques, which are additionally risky).
I fail to see why you think that COBOL, a language that has successfully been running business apps for decades, is so unacceptable that it must be replaced with a new general-purpose language immediately.
I've seen the JVM (that's one that is capitalized!) crash multiple times on more complex programs. One was a digital logic architect program written by a professor and several graduate students. After several years of development, it still crashed frequently on large projects, due to the JVM running out of memory. Crashes were common enough that we had to convince the professor to add an auto-save to make it less un-usable. Not saying it's due to Java specifically, but it did seem to be linked to the virtual machine.
Regardless, I have yet to see a compelling argument to rewrite COBOL code in Java or any other 'modern' language. If the COBOL works, and will continue to in the near future, what is the benefit of a lengthy rewrite? Does the cost of design, development, verification, testing, and deployment provide at least as much benefit (in dollars/time) to the company? Is it worth the risk to replace a system that has worked well for decades with one that could introduce a serious compunding error that doesn't manifest itself until years down the line?
Perhaps some modern language might be a best fit for a newly written program, but I'm still not convinced. While I can't say for certain that COBOL will compile to be any faster than the equivalent Java, my experience with high-level languages tells me that they tend to create bloated executables. This isn't a bad thing for a general-purpose language with expansive libraries that can do everything, but for these kinds of transactions a special-purpose language should be able to outperform.
tl;dr You may have a case for new programs, but it makes no sense to rewrite working COBOL.
You forgot to mention 'feed you 3 times a day and keep you clean and healthy'.
Let's be fair, they were kept otherwise healthy, aside from the paralysis thing.
That said, resposible medical research on non-human animals sure beats the alternative: medical research on humans with the given condition. Of course, it's difficult to convince people to let you induce conditions, and if you take advantage of their socio-economic status to get them to sign up you're even worse. Don't even start with the loss of funding as soon as something goes wrong.
Stable, reliable, well-understood, and bug-free are true of many more recent languages.
Yup, JAVA never crashes, C# is easily understood, C++ is free of bloat, and interpreted languages run faster./s
I dispute that it's the best suited to the purpose for which it's used. Show me a construct in COBOL that wouldn't be much easier in something modern -- even Java, if we have to.
COBOL isn't used because it's easier to write than your JAVA or other new language. It's used because it was designed with business transactions in mind and is reliable. If you have to give up reliability or predictability to gain readability or 'modern-ness' (as has often been my experience with JAVA), it's not a good fit for businesses who can hire additional programmers to produce reliable code.
Regardless, if COBOL works well for the application already, then some modern language would have to one hell of a lot better to rewrite these applications for the incremental improvement to be worth the cost and risk involved with a complete rewrite.
Since the goal of this project was manufacturability, I would assume a spray coating would be better. However, this could also interfere with the 'no-fastener' properties if it were too thick.
This is why you should leave the computer plugged IN, but turned off at the power supply when working on them, also maintain contact with them usually via a strap.
Which is the biggest problem with this idea: the case is non-conductive, and therefor liable to build a static-electric charge. This is bad. It's pretty obvious that this guy is an Industrial Engineer, rather than an Electrical.
It's generally suggested to keep non-conductive materials at least 6 inches from parts without a conductive chassis. So this case is alright for the optical drive, though the HDD control circuits could be damaged. And don't even get me started on the motherboard. A conductive coating on the interior could fix this issue, but it isn't mentioned explicitly. I'd hope one gets added eventually, otherwise this case could end up creating additional electronic waste due to ESD.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the issue with the R4 cartridge was that it circumvented the RSA check by the console. Reverse-engineering or bypassing copy-protection systems violates the DMCA. It might be bullshit, but it's still illegal enough that EBay won't touch it with a 10" pole.
Reminds me more of Children of Men.
or be a Greg Brady type nerd who walks around with a Pignose battery-powered amp and cheap electric guitar at all times. :)
If only somebody would create a guitar that create audible music through well designed acoustical properties, rather than electric power...
Of course, the guy who brings the guitar to the party is always much more of a tool and a loner than even the guys playing guitar hero.
Five guitar buttons, five-card poker. At least the hardware fits the application.
As for why to do it? Just do monkey around with hardware, of course. Myself, I added a foot-switch to my RB guitar, since the 5-way switch is too much of a pain to hit while playing. Totally superfluous, but I had fun doing it.
If you want to pick up women, playing a real guitar is much more effective.
If your goal is to pick up women, might as well go whole hog and ditch the video games, trolling message boards, studying IT/Engineering/Science/anything remotely geeky. It's just what you enjoy doing, FWIW.
The problem with my school's CS program is that they continued to require writing proper syntax code throughout all 4 years, rather than simply learning how to step through a process in pseudo-code. So instead of reinforcing proper visualisation of a program's execution, we got penalized for not remembering the exact name of a C++ library function.
While a photograph might run afoul due to copyright issues, this case is different. It would be like you drawing a caricature of someone, and more specifically a public figure. While it is undeniably a use of their likeness, it is still created entirely by you, and therefor a protected artistic work.
Good call on the term limits. Rather, it was his political party that was voted out of power.
As for the 'questionable' election, several thousand votes in one district is a significantly smaller irregularity than in the recent elections in Iran or Afghanistan.
I understand the purpose of the case, and the reasons it would be necessitated for certain builds. However, I don't believe that most people who build that kind of machine really need everything they put into it. And if they do, are you certain that this $700 case would perform significantly better than a $200-400 case to justify the additional cost? Couldn't 90% of the heat issue be solved with proper air ducting? I don't see the need to thermally isolate individual HDDs, when one or two fans on all of them is just as effective and much less costly.
Especially since one can build a new machine for less than that total.
I'd love to meet the person who builds a machine that has thermal demands that necessitate a kit like this, then actually pushes the machine enough that he couldn't have gotten by spending 1/3rd of the price.
It still would have been a democracy, rather than theocracy, lack of diverse choice does not change that. We still have two independant parties who have differing policy goals, even if nearly every federally elected official is a protestant Christian.
I'm less interested in being de-authenticated from my web logins. I'm much more interested in finding a way to deauthenticate website security certificates. When a malicious website obtains a security certificate, how do you remove it?
Nor is the U.S. led and controlled by a radically conservative theocracy with a demonstrated intent to export insurrection with the stated goal of complete domination.
True, however this has only been the case since the beginning of this year.
Agreed on the led, but not on the controlled. We voted out a leader because we didn't like the direction our country was headed. Iran is led by a non-elected religious figure in perpetuity, and attempts to vote in even a new figurehead were met with violent opression.
It's disingenuous to claim that those are the same thing.
However, as it is impossible to measure the quantum properties of these particles without collapsing them into a non-super state, how do we know that the entanglement wasn't just the two particles gaining the same properties at the moment of entanglement? Obviously, this would result in them having the same properties once measured.
How do we know that this super state exists, when it is impossible to measure? If a piece of equipment paints two balls a random color and puts them in separate boxes aren't the balls, by the same definition, in a super state as we can't know their color until we open the box? And can they be said to be entangled, as once you open the first box and observe that the ball inside is for example red, the other ball will also be red even though it has yet to be "measured"?
IANAQP, but this is pretty much correct. For the most part, the particles do get their properties matched upon creation, so your analogy is initially correct. However, the property could be one randomly determined while in the separate boxes, yet the second ball still matches the properties of the first ball after opening. This is basically the 'quantum-ness' that is, in general, incredibly confusing.
There's a reason even Einstein mocked this as "spooky action at a distance" and said that if it were true he would rather be a cobbler or a casino employee. It's confusing and not completely understood. However, while Einstein believed it to be measurement error, it's it a pretty well established phenomenon now.
This is most likely attributed to increased reaction times and removal of the instinct to over-correct in these situations. The physics of GTA are intentionally dumbed-down in order to make the game more fun. For example, pulling the hand brake while going through a curve rarely has the same effect as in GTA.
Too much faith in driving abilities from GTA could do more harm than good. A driving simulator (iRacing, Forza, Gran Turismo) would give better instruction, but only in specific circumstances (using a wheel with force feedback, etc). Don't underestimate that simply by having increased reflexes from years of gaming has an effect, rather than assuming specific knowledge gained.
Because they still need to pay the distributer (D2D or Steam, for example), marketing costs, and just a smaller amount of distribution cost. Remember that this $30-35 needs to pay the developers as well, so it's not like that cash is all gravy.
But if you watch Steam's pricing, they frequently have games half-off for a weekend.
Of course, we don't have VAT tax in the US, either.
I dunno, being able to see the other desktops is certainly a boon. Also, how is 'CTRL+ALT+arrow key' easier than 'touch the desktop that looks like the one you want'? Hell, even your grandmother could do the second one.
It's probably not worth the money for most people right now, but if PC enthusiasts cared about how much it cost to make their e-peens bigger, we wouldn't have titanium computer cases with elaborite window artwork showcasing a UV-reactive liquid cooling setup in the shape of the Ark of the Covenant.
The German people are very touchy about the subject, quite understandably. They may have gone overboard to prevent a relapse, but consider the following:
Imagine the KKK were to gain a majority of the House, Senate, and gain the Presidency. Imagine the military leaders are also members of the KKK. The government then violently cracks down on dissent and encourages vandalism of any property that does not belong to a 'white' person. Soon, members of other races are rounded up into forced labor and publicly hanged. The government then invades neighboring nations (with the stated intent of annexing them) and ignites a war that spans the globe.
After it was all over, do you not expect there would be a MASSIVE backlash to prevent the KKK from returning? Whether this was the correct decision or not, it's something that the Germans are as guarded against preventing as Americans are for slavery, if not more so.
Maintainability.
Good code is maintainable, no matter what language it's written in. Bad code is unmaintainable no matter the language as well. I think the proof is in the pudding: COBOL programs that have been maintained successfully for decades can continue to be maintained. Until new hardware/software will no longer support COBOL, it's probably not worth the risk to rewrite it. If you need to write a new program, perhaps starting with a modern language will make it better, but there should be no rush to replace working code as long as it is expected to continue working.
A good programmer can be taught COBOL (or any language) and maintain it. If you're not hiring good coders, you have bigger problems than what language your software is written in. A COBOL program is more succeptible to some issues, just as modern languages are at risk from other issues. And I seriously doubt that a 10-minute change in Java would take 6 months in COBOL. Do you have some way to back this claim up?
Especially, you mentioned "bloated executables" -- if /usr/bin/myapp is ten megs instead of a few hundred kilobytes, seriously, how much does ten megs of disk/RAM cost?
So, we're assuming 100x larger programs here. Adding 100x the RAM does not make performance equal. Programs run out of cache, not RAM, but even making that 100x bigger won't make performance equal, since the data needs to get there still. Even if the memory bandwidth is made 100x higher, still not the same performance due to the RAM's set-up time for reads and writes, as well as HDD/SSD access time.
You also ignore that your 100x larger program probably has additional instructions performing type-casting, error-handling, and all those other things that make the language 'safe'. So, instead of hiring programmers that avoid these errors in the first place, your code must check for them every single operation, whether your code is good or not. Hint, most of these errors are found and fixed quickly. This is additional processing time, which requires additional hardware to perform at the same speed.
I concurr that The Big Picture is more complicated. While you've shown there could be a small benefit to rewriting the COBOL to make it accessable to programmers who can't be bothered to learn it (are these the programmers you want?), you haven't mitigated the risk of inducing errors with a rewrite or of failing to meet run-time performance. Especially since most of these systems can't run as a cluster easily (they would require parallel processing techniques, which are additionally risky).
I fail to see why you think that COBOL, a language that has successfully been running business apps for decades, is so unacceptable that it must be replaced with a new general-purpose language immediately.
I've seen the JVM (that's one that is capitalized!) crash multiple times on more complex programs. One was a digital logic architect program written by a professor and several graduate students. After several years of development, it still crashed frequently on large projects, due to the JVM running out of memory. Crashes were common enough that we had to convince the professor to add an auto-save to make it less un-usable. Not saying it's due to Java specifically, but it did seem to be linked to the virtual machine.
Regardless, I have yet to see a compelling argument to rewrite COBOL code in Java or any other 'modern' language. If the COBOL works, and will continue to in the near future, what is the benefit of a lengthy rewrite? Does the cost of design, development, verification, testing, and deployment provide at least as much benefit (in dollars/time) to the company? Is it worth the risk to replace a system that has worked well for decades with one that could introduce a serious compunding error that doesn't manifest itself until years down the line?
Perhaps some modern language might be a best fit for a newly written program, but I'm still not convinced. While I can't say for certain that COBOL will compile to be any faster than the equivalent Java, my experience with high-level languages tells me that they tend to create bloated executables. This isn't a bad thing for a general-purpose language with expansive libraries that can do everything, but for these kinds of transactions a special-purpose language should be able to outperform.
tl;dr You may have a case for new programs, but it makes no sense to rewrite working COBOL.
You forgot to mention 'feed you 3 times a day and keep you clean and healthy'.
Let's be fair, they were kept otherwise healthy, aside from the paralysis thing.
That said, resposible medical research on non-human animals sure beats the alternative: medical research on humans with the given condition. Of course, it's difficult to convince people to let you induce conditions, and if you take advantage of their socio-economic status to get them to sign up you're even worse. Don't even start with the loss of funding as soon as something goes wrong.
Stable, reliable, well-understood, and bug-free are true of many more recent languages.
Yup, JAVA never crashes, C# is easily understood, C++ is free of bloat, and interpreted languages run faster. /s
I dispute that it's the best suited to the purpose for which it's used. Show me a construct in COBOL that wouldn't be much easier in something modern -- even Java, if we have to.
COBOL isn't used because it's easier to write than your JAVA or other new language. It's used because it was designed with business transactions in mind and is reliable. If you have to give up reliability or predictability to gain readability or 'modern-ness' (as has often been my experience with JAVA), it's not a good fit for businesses who can hire additional programmers to produce reliable code.
Regardless, if COBOL works well for the application already, then some modern language would have to one hell of a lot better to rewrite these applications for the incremental improvement to be worth the cost and risk involved with a complete rewrite.
Since the goal of this project was manufacturability, I would assume a spray coating would be better. However, this could also interfere with the 'no-fastener' properties if it were too thick.
This is why you should leave the computer plugged IN, but turned off at the power supply when working on them, also maintain contact with them usually via a strap.
Which is the biggest problem with this idea: the case is non-conductive, and therefor liable to build a static-electric charge. This is bad. It's pretty obvious that this guy is an Industrial Engineer, rather than an Electrical.
It's generally suggested to keep non-conductive materials at least 6 inches from parts without a conductive chassis. So this case is alright for the optical drive, though the HDD control circuits could be damaged. And don't even get me started on the motherboard. A conductive coating on the interior could fix this issue, but it isn't mentioned explicitly. I'd hope one gets added eventually, otherwise this case could end up creating additional electronic waste due to ESD.