Oh no, I think we've been cracked! Let's go look at the logs. Lesse, 2000 lines on my log (that's almost 34 pages full of information), and now I need to find all instances of the IP address 163.272.34.52... hmm...
How do you grep on a dot matrix output? (Or, if you're like me, just do a pattern search via less on paper?)
Hmm, line 324 - access from 163.22.32.521.. nope, not right... next line... access from 127.0.0.1... no, still not right... hmm...
Agreed, but that's what the bill states. In short terms, it is enforcing validation of age, prior to accessing the sites, not denial.
How old am I? No really, how old am I? Can you guess? Come on - tell you what, I'll say that I'm... uh, 21. Prove that I am. Am I really 17? 14? 38? How old am I?
Where do I live (no fair going through my past posts:))? How old do I have to be to access certain content? How do you know that I'm really me and not someone else who is using my computer? What's acceptable where I live? Am I allowed to download content that is unacceptable elsewhere? How do you know?
I worked with XML a while ago, and I'd have to agree: it is completely overhyped. Yes, it is better than a plain-text or (horrors) a digital file. However, it is by no means a method of trading data universally (yet). Before it can do that, people need to decide on schemas which explain how to structure a given form of data. Yeah, like that'll happen any time soon.
More fun - it being extensible, even if (for example) all car companies decide on a given schema, it is still possible for one company to break compatibility by adding new data. Say that the default schema doesn't have a place to list number of cup holders (it's an example, ok?:)), so it adds a field called <CUPHOLDERS> . And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars - well, this won't work with the offical standard, now... all this meta data being put off into nowhere...
Actually, what I was working on was trying to come up with a solution for that, involving RDF files. The theory was people could encode computer-readable examples of what the data meant and then dynamically create pages which would allow you to search through something. Unfortunately, I don't think a solution was ever reached.
Also, from the XML spec, "Terseness is of minimal importance." These XML files can be HUGE. Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text. But until there are universally agreed upon schemas, XML will remain just a method of creating a hierarchical structure to represent data.
Agreed - when I first got my +1 bonus, I didn't notice it, and almost posted something really dumb in reply to the thread I was in - it wasn't worth the +1 point.
I think there should be an option to set the default of the +1 bonus in the user settings, but there isn't. I think I'll file a bug report. (Or, more appropriately, a Request for Future Enhancement (RFE).)
Although which page should this option be on? Customize Homepage, Customizer Comments, or Edit User Info? I'm voting for Edit User Info.
Ironically enough, that is the purpose of C--: to replace C as portable assembler. C is an actual programming language; assembly is really just a set of names for opcodes. (Ok, it's more than that, but basically, every instruction in assembly has a one-on-one correspondance with some opcode. Ignoring fun things like macros and the like...)
This basically is a scheme to get money out of people who don't actually live in New Hampshire, since a vast majority of NH property is owned by people who live in other states. (Vacation homes and the like.)
More than likely, he's afraid of a lawsuit coming against him from Dr. Dre or Metallica or the next group to sue Napster et. al about pirating music online. Bet you that this is so that he can print out the e-mail, put it somewhere safe, and then claim that all people he gave this to had said that they were using it for the purposes of preventing further copyright violation.
Given the money that the RIAA and various artists are willing to spend fighting this thing, it seems quite understandable that he would want to say something like that. It's not really an evil ploy, I'm sure, just a method of keeping himself out of the courts.
Who does this guy think he is? You have to e-mail him and tell him why you want the program before he'll give it to you?
He's just covering his ass - if the RIAA finds this thing and discovers that it can be used to pirate music (by searching through it) he can say that he went through a reasonable precaution to prevent people for using it illegally. This is probably actually SAFER (legally) than requiring people to use a click-through licence saying that they'll be good with his program - he can get the e-mail and show it in court. Basically, he can point to the e-mail and say "see, they said they wanted to remove all their songs from gnutella, not that they wanted to create a complete collection of all of Metallica's songs on MP3." Much safer than saying "see, I said they could only use it if they'd play nice."
Homer has got to be one of the biggest failures ever, but he's still funny and the Simpson's are on TV. Although Homer does have control (sometimes) of his life, so I guess that doen't really compare with what he was saying... oh well.
I'd think that in an open source world, porting to a new platform would be fairly easy, assuming you could get the kernel and compiler ported. The real problem comes with device drivers for the new platform and any legacy assembly code.
Once you've ported the compiler, I'd expect that the only really difficult part would be porting the kernel and supporting required devices. All nice programs (ie, programs written in C/C++ and not in assembly, or those not programmed for a specific hardware set) should port right over.
It would be some work initally, but once enough of the standard libraries that programs required where ported, all the user programs should just be a recompile away.
After all, there are Linux versions for Alpha, Sparc, PPC,...
As some one of the above comments mentioned, the auto-complete feature of Visual C++ is very, VERY nice. With classes, as soon as you type the. or the -> it lists all the possible variables and functions available in that class. Very nice, and quite a timesaver. Still some problems with it (like it works alphabetically, not by what you use most often, so if you need to call getAllElementsFromRight() often but don't care about calling getAllElementsFromLeft() it gets annoying, but beyond that...)
On a side note, VC++ was "innovated" by some company that Microsoft bought out, so...
This always annoys we when a thread changes topics from the one that the story is about and people start marking posts offtopic. No, they are NOT off topic - they're on topic, in the thread! This post is definately on the topic of the parent, but it's just moved off the topic of the article.
And that's where some really interesting, completely off topic discussions come - from pointing out one part of something that was on topic and taking it in a new direction. Maybe the article was overrated, but it wasn't off topic.
And the education system is still getting fallout from that. But I still remembering my class getting one of our teachers sidetracked onto the topic of the location of the stars in Super Mario 64...
Besides, I think MA was voted something like second best state in the country to live in, so it can't be all bad.:) (Not that I remember the criteria for "best state" but...)
Yeah, I'd get that too - that'd be awesome. I remember one long-period (it's a double-length period, part of Massachusetts ed. reform - damn glad I've graduated from public school now...) study hall, I spent the entire time in the school library going through five or so back years of "Selling It." Some really cool stuff...
They call it the "Golden Cocoon Award" (maybe "Golden Cocoon Award of Overpacking" or something like that) and they sometimes show it as part of a feature that they always (at least, last I checked) run on the very last page of the magazine about strange marketting techniques or just plain stupid ploys. There isn't necessarily a Golden Cocoon handed out every issues, they just give them out as they run across deserving products.
Based on the results from Wired, I think that most of the test images were pornographic - hey, we found a 100% success rate because of our 1,000 test images, we included three icons from the desktop - and none of them were tagged pornographic.
(After, of course, they removed the manilla folder icon and replaced it with another...)
How many other people think that the developer wanted an excuse to go browse porno sites for "test images" so that they could create this thing?
BOSS: So, what is this suggested project?
DEVELOPER: Uh, we want to create a program which can determine if a picture is pornographic or not. I request the position of obtaining test pictures. I'll need the company VISA too.
BOSS: Sorry, that'll be my job. I'll be glad to help with that portion.
DEVELOPER: Yeah, but I have more... uh, experience, in, um, finding, er, them, uh, yeah.
SYS. ADMIN: We'll need more bandwidth for this project too, and I'll extended the capability of the web server on the alt.binaries.* and alt.sex.* news groups by 500%, OK?
BOSS: Approved! Now get to work, I've got some... research to do for this project.
DEVELOPER and SYS. ADMIN leave the office, and head back to their respective offices to obtain "test images." BOSS looses his belt, and...
MR. GARBUS: You have called him a lay witness. This is the man who's the head of the MPAA, who for 34 years has been the head of the MPAA, who has testified endless times before various groups about his legal interpretation of the DMCA. And you don't permit him to answer questions about the DMCA. Do you find that surprising?
Good point there - he's lobbied for these laws, yet accoring to his lawyer, Valenti isn't even competent enough to answer questions about the DMCA!
LADDER! Wow, I remember that game - I used to play it all the time when I was about four! I made SO many levels for it on the old DEC Rainbow - it was so much fun...
I actually made a QBASIC port of it once (hey, I was still learning to program...).
I expect that more people stick in the easter egg, expect them never to really be found, and then show them to their friends & family in a production product.
Besides, it makes for a good "party trick" to know that the secret thing you put in an app actually made it into production.
Most easter eggs in production software seems to be hidden scrolling credits listing everyone possibly involved in the development of the application.
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Oh no, I think we've been cracked! Let's go look at the logs. Lesse, 2000 lines on my log (that's almost 34 pages full of information), and now I need to find all instances of the IP address 163.272.34.52... hmm...
How do you grep on a dot matrix output? (Or, if you're like me, just do a pattern search via less on paper?)
Hmm, line 324 - access from 163.22.32.521 .. nope, not right... next line... access from 127.0.0.1... no, still not right... hmm...
How old am I? No really, how old am I? Can you guess? Come on - tell you what, I'll say that I'm... uh, 21. Prove that I am. Am I really 17? 14? 38? How old am I?
Where do I live (no fair going through my past posts :))? How old do I have to be to access certain content? How do you know that I'm really me and not someone else who is using my computer? What's acceptable where I live? Am I allowed to download content that is unacceptable elsewhere? How do you know?
More fun - it being extensible, even if (for example) all car companies decide on a given schema, it is still possible for one company to break compatibility by adding new data. Say that the default schema doesn't have a place to list number of cup holders (it's an example, ok? :)), so it adds a field called <CUPHOLDERS> . And they create a special car browser to display the number of cupholders in their cars - well, this won't work with the offical standard, now... all this meta data being put off into nowhere...
Actually, what I was working on was trying to come up with a solution for that, involving RDF files. The theory was people could encode computer-readable examples of what the data meant and then dynamically create pages which would allow you to search through something. Unfortunately, I don't think a solution was ever reached.
Also, from the XML spec, "Terseness is of minimal importance." These XML files can be HUGE. Maybe the data format of the future will be GZipped XML files, as compression works fairly well on text. But until there are universally agreed upon schemas, XML will remain just a method of creating a hierarchical structure to represent data.
I think there should be an option to set the default of the +1 bonus in the user settings, but there isn't. I think I'll file a bug report. (Or, more appropriately, a Request for Future Enhancement (RFE).)
Although which page should this option be on? Customize Homepage, Customizer Comments, or Edit User Info? I'm voting for Edit User Info.
Ironically enough, that is the purpose of C--: to replace C as portable assembler. C is an actual programming language; assembly is really just a set of names for opcodes. (Ok, it's more than that, but basically, every instruction in assembly has a one-on-one correspondance with some opcode. Ignoring fun things like macros and the like...)
ninja.org is already taken, unfortunately...
As is ninja.com, but ninja.cx seems to be open...
This basically is a scheme to get money out of people who don't actually live in New Hampshire, since a vast majority of NH property is owned by people who live in other states. (Vacation homes and the like.)
Given the money that the RIAA and various artists are willing to spend fighting this thing, it seems quite understandable that he would want to say something like that. It's not really an evil ploy, I'm sure, just a method of keeping himself out of the courts.
He's just covering his ass - if the RIAA finds this thing and discovers that it can be used to pirate music (by searching through it) he can say that he went through a reasonable precaution to prevent people for using it illegally. This is probably actually SAFER (legally) than requiring people to use a click-through licence saying that they'll be good with his program - he can get the e-mail and show it in court. Basically, he can point to the e-mail and say "see, they said they wanted to remove all their songs from gnutella, not that they wanted to create a complete collection of all of Metallica's songs on MP3." Much safer than saying "see, I said they could only use it if they'd play nice."
It's a lovely, lawyer filled, world we live in.
Homer has got to be one of the biggest failures ever, but he's still funny and the Simpson's are on TV. Although Homer does have control (sometimes) of his life, so I guess that doen't really compare with what he was saying... oh well.
Once you've ported the compiler, I'd expect that the only really difficult part would be porting the kernel and supporting required devices. All nice programs (ie, programs written in C/C++ and not in assembly, or those not programmed for a specific hardware set) should port right over.
It would be some work initally, but once enough of the standard libraries that programs required where ported, all the user programs should just be a recompile away.
After all, there are Linux versions for Alpha, Sparc, PPC, ...
On a side note, VC++ was "innovated" by some company that Microsoft bought out, so...
And that's where some really interesting, completely off topic discussions come - from pointing out one part of something that was on topic and taking it in a new direction. Maybe the article was overrated, but it wasn't off topic.
And the education system is still getting fallout from that. But I still remembering my class getting one of our teachers sidetracked onto the topic of the location of the stars in Super Mario 64...
Besides, I think MA was voted something like second best state in the country to live in, so it can't be all bad. :) (Not that I remember the criteria for "best state" but...)
Yeah, I'd get that too - that'd be awesome. I remember one long-period (it's a double-length period, part of Massachusetts ed. reform - damn glad I've graduated from public school now...) study hall, I spent the entire time in the school library going through five or so back years of "Selling It." Some really cool stuff...
They call it the "Golden Cocoon Award" (maybe "Golden Cocoon Award of Overpacking" or something like that) and they sometimes show it as part of a feature that they always (at least, last I checked) run on the very last page of the magazine about strange marketting techniques or just plain stupid ploys. There isn't necessarily a Golden Cocoon handed out every issues, they just give them out as they run across deserving products.
(After, of course, they removed the manilla folder icon and replaced it with another...)
BOSS: So, what is this suggested project?
DEVELOPER: Uh, we want to create a program which can determine if a picture is pornographic or not. I request the position of obtaining test pictures. I'll need the company VISA too.
BOSS: Sorry, that'll be my job. I'll be glad to help with that portion.
DEVELOPER: Yeah, but I have more... uh, experience, in, um, finding, er, them, uh, yeah.
SYS. ADMIN: We'll need more bandwidth for this project too, and I'll extended the capability of the web server on the alt.binaries.* and alt.sex.* news groups by 500%, OK?
BOSS: Approved! Now get to work, I've got some... research to do for this project.
DEVELOPER and SYS. ADMIN leave the office, and head back to their respective offices to obtain "test images." BOSS looses his belt, and...
Good point there - he's lobbied for these laws, yet accoring to his lawyer, Valenti isn't even competent enough to answer questions about the DMCA!
I actually made a QBASIC port of it once (hey, I was still learning to program...).
Well, that was a nice bit of nostaligia - thanks!
Be careful with the noooooooow, it also get's pissy about many letters in a row....
What is with "Invalid Form Key"? Half my posts are prevented because it keeps popping up - it's getting to be annoying.
Was this posted on the wrong article? I think you MEANT to post it to Identification By Typing and NOT to Ask Slashdot: Easter Eggs in Open Source?.
Besides, it makes for a good "party trick" to know that the secret thing you put in an app actually made it into production.
Most easter eggs in production software seems to be hidden scrolling credits listing everyone possibly involved in the development of the application.
Well, OK, maybe that isn't REALLY an easter egg...