I started shopping for the DC games I always planned to get, but...
Soul Calibur - Discontinued
House of the Dead 2 - Discontinued
Hydro Thunder - Discontinued
Ready to Rumble - Discontinued
The list goes on and on, and it seems like the only games I can still buy in the original shrink wrap are the ones that nobody really wanted. I guess the only thing left to run is Cheap Linux Console.
I get mail all the time from spammers who not only send their message in another language whose charset my mail client doesn't accept, but whose email return addresses are invalid as well. If I give sufficient prior warning, do I attempt to bill the owners of the website advertised in these emails?
Umm, it's not actually paint. It's colored vegetable oil, with a gelatin shell. Totally biodegradable, water-soluble and usually gone after the next good rain.
As someone who has helped to set up and run paintball fields, I have to ask: how are state gamelands being ruined by paintball? To open a field, you need to obtain a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) for paintball, which entails a crapload of licensing prerequisites. Your neighbors generally have to agree to the fact that you're planning to run a paintball field. Fields that run paintball tournaments are explicitly set aside for such a purpose, and never been hosted on anything except private property. So what are you talking about?
I could go on further about paintball legal and environmental issues, but I gotta take my STO Autococker and light up a few people this morning. Ciao.
I've been playing paintball for almost four years now, and I've known about the Hellhound for almost two. It's already pretty well known in my circles (most paintballers over 25 seem to work in the IT industry anyway). I'm pretty upset that I could have submitted this article two years ago, but I felt it had no place on Slashdot.
Anyway, they do have paintball mortars - look at http://www.tippmannordnance.com/cgi-bin/store/secu reshop.cgi?action=now&now=mortar.htm&order_id=1318 19899. Keep in mind, this is not the same paintball company as Dennis Tippman Jr.'s page, different organization entirely. Quarter mile range. 75 foot blast diamter. This company also makes claymores (the curved "charges" that say "this side towards enemy") and landmines for paintball.
Getting back to the original Dennis Tippman Jr., he also manufactures grenades. While the Hellhound launches them via a spring loaded arm (hard to aim, and blast diameter in only 10ft.), true grenade launcher afficionados should consider an I&I CO2-powered grenade launcher - http://www.iisports.com/iisports/paintballstore/ti pp98wgrenades.html. More accuracy, and it's a great finishing touch when you bunker someone point blank... if you don't mind taking yourself out in the process.
While you guys are on Tippmans' page, take a gander at the Flatline - nice piece of engineering. In paintball, your shots are not allowed to go faster than 300 fps, 280 at some fields, even less on indoor fields. So, the designers at Tippmann created this barrel to put a backspin on the ball, giving it longer range without violating the velocity limit. We tend to call them "floaters", since the rounds seems to act like frisbees once they leave the gun (even to the point of occasionally moving off-course). Unfortunately, the act of putting a backspin on the ball places a lot of stress on it, so you'd better not be shooting the cheap thin-shelled crap that you can buy for $20/case.
Okay, so some fraction of my vehicle (or less) goes to the 20-meter-finishline in record time. In fact, I suspect that the whole vehicle (or pieces thereof) would go 20 meters in *all* directions, save for the ground, which we could measure concretely (no pun intended) by the depth of the remaining crater.
Just so that what I'm saying doesn't sound like crazytalk, ask yourself this: what spacefaring rocket *doesn't* expend most of its mass to get some vehicle to its destination?
I guess that would include me. I *intentionally* set up an IIS honeypot of sorts, collecting and running Code Red, Sircam, and Nimda, to show Microsoft that the biggest threat comes not from corporate servers, but from at-home enthusiasts who only partially know what they are doing.
Firewall? "What's that?" Security patches? "Too paranoid to use 'em." DoS/slashdot effect? "Aw, shucks - I'll just reimage my webserver. Hyuck, hyuck."
By perpetuating the spread of these tidbits of code, I hope to make at least a few companies wake up and realize that IIS is not a viable solution. For every one of me doing what I'm doing, there are hundreds of unwitting newbies doing the same thing, unknowingly. Yes, that includes PWS.
Psychotic? Vengeful? You'd be, too, if you spent hundreds of dollars for an MCSE(SD) and MCDBA, only to wake up one morning with a Mandrake distro in one hand and realize it was all for naught.
Okay, I'm ranting, but it's only natural to feel a burning desire to destroy the cult you just escaped from.
For those of us who circumvent the DMCA through starting our own religion (see prior/. article a few days ago), how does this work? Who have we been praying too all this time ?:)
Too bad the SuSE distro treats all quotes and double quotes as control characters... Has anyone else noticed that the have to hit the single quote button twice to get a measly single quote output to the OS? And that if you hit other characters right after a quote, you sometimes get those funky foreign characters?
Ah, but "Lone Gunman"(note singular, not *men*), along with phrases like "Grassy Knoll", are often used in describing JFK's assassination. Too bad they had to shove Lee Harvey Oswald into the plot: Eva Harlowe - I forgot her middle name, but it's an anagram of Oswald's name.
If no one else spots it, the writers may want to get less subtle about it...
Byers: Eva, did your surgeon do, er, a complete job on you?
Harlowe: What? You want to check out my grassy knoll?
When I was younger and more foolish, there were plenty of places of business where you could come in to play network games. The same was also true at a good deal of gaming conventions I had been to.
Fact of the matter is, not everyone has their own network at home. Such businesses are where younger (read: poorer) people can congregate. It's more about the comraderie than anything else.
I'm currently reading through the EULA of Diablo II right now, and I'm not finding any provisions for obtaining a site license for the program. Hell, I'm not even finding any site licensing info anywhere on the Web!
I would consider the EULA unenforcable. Sorry.
They're going about it all wrong. Instead of coming out with algorithms that can detect combinations of fleshtones in images, they should make keyboards that can detect gizz on your fingers.
Solomon
"Is anyone else bothered by Dragonball Z when Boma is going through 16's code and you realize the android is programmed in Basic?"
Does anyone remember a concept from science fiction called Maxwell's Demon? The way it was supposed to work was to have a membrane between two chambers that would actively select warm molecules from one chamber and put them in the other, while grabbing cold molecules from the other chamber and putting them in the first one.
In essence, a membrane that would passively perform as an incredibly efficient heat pump.
The idea stuck pretty well in my head throughout high school; but when I got to college, Lo! And behold! My physics professors told me such a system could not exist, for the existence of such a passive system would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The very existence of Maxwell's Demon would allow for a perpetual motion machine (which, in all naive curiosity, I attempted to build in sixth grade. LOL). Even a Peltier junction requires energy (electricity) to work, and even that is not a truly effective heat pump: some of that energy is lost as heat, and contributes to the overall heat of the enclosed system. This is noticed if you suddenly cut the power to a Peltier junction - you will find that the entire loop is considerably warmer than room temperature.
So, here's my prediction: the carbon nanotube heat pump works great... in small quantities. If you try to engineer a membrane of these things in quantities humans can physically observe, we may find that individual tubes have their own resonant frequencies (remember, heat is being carried as sound energy one-way down the tube) which are close enough together so as to interfere with each other. Heat no longer flows one-way and resumes the entropic behavior we all know and love.
Remember, Kiddies, you heard it here first.
Solomon Kevin Chang
Futurestep.com
A division of Korn Kerry International
I think I have a fair amount of experience in the field, and I've seen some viruses that have damaged my hardware beyond all hope of repair:
5/21/94 - While engaging in the "Make Money Fast!" program back in college, an angry mob of Academic Computing staff stormed my dorm room and took out my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to do the chain letter thing anymore.
4/7/96 - I was caught by my coworkers while sending out copious amounts of spam endorsing the Barney the Purple Dinosaur fan club. My managers took out my machine with liberal applications of their baseball bats. I'm afraid to touch anything plush and furry anymore.
2/15/98 - While viewing pr0n on my notebook in the Deep South, a preacher ripped it out of my hands and beat on it mercilessly with a baseball bat. I'm afraid to jerk off anymore.
12/21/98 - I had gotten my AV up and running on my home PC, and was showing a special episode of Pokemon which had recently been withdrawn in Japan. I was showing this to some neighborhood kids, all of whom entered epileptic fits when watching a random sequence of flashing lights. That afternoon, several irate parents came over and smashed my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to watch cartoons anymore.
1/1/00 - While watching DVDs on my notebook, a bunch of DeCSS fanatics got upset because I was supporting "The Man". After losing my portable to a swarm of swinging baseball bats, I quickly developed an adverse reaction to the Movie Industry.
4/1/00 - I secretly set my roomie's X Server's scan refresh rate to 200 KHz. The monitor caught fire after he came back, and he spent the rest of the night hitting the machine with a basball bat. I guess this virus also affects Linux.
Now, I know that no one likes an alarmist, so I'm going to talk about it like calm rational creature...
WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This VIRUS seems to culminate in the *imminent* DESTRUCTION of one's computer via baseball bat!!! Don't let it happen to you! *SEVERAL* people have had their computers PHYSICALLY DESTROYED. You can protect yourself by giving out 100 copies of this letter, and fortune may smile on you; just add your name to the list below and send $500 to each person on the list.
1. Bill Gates 1 Microsoft Way
2. Paul Allen 1 Microsoft Wy.
3. Warren Buffet 3864 Skaru Yew Ave.
4. Solomon Kevin Chang 2107 W. Commonwealth Ave. #414 Alhambra, CA. 91803
When I receive payment, I will send you your very own Anti-Virus kit: a genuine 9mm Smith and Wesson Sigma Enhanced with two Hi-Cap Magazines filled with hollow point bullets. Instructions for use are an extra $60. Don't wait! Act now!
[since people have this nasty tendancy to create views that span multiple tables]
Okay, granted, just about anything that performs multiple joins against a bunch of different tables is going to slow down the query engine, but have you ever created a view without joins in in a properly normalized database? I'll let you in on a secret: my users and I know that running the monthly calculations (oodles of stored procs one right after another) take forever to do - they just let me know when they're starting, and then we all go out for coffee and a long lunch. I've played with several databases in my life, and I think I can safely say that taking a performance hit in the face of complex queries is pretty universal amongst all of them. And yes, I've thought about writing my own query engine, something that would be more efficient and put all those Oracle and SQL Server slowpokes to rest once and for all... Easier said than done. I realized, much to my chagrin, that Common Joe DBAs like me can write query engines that run pretty quickly <u>if</u> your Joins only deal with Indexed Fields. This is fine in a <i>properly</i> designed DB, I guess, until your other DBAs start to play Pin The Blame On The DBD. When you have to add functionality to allow Joins against Non-Indexed columns, you begin to acquire an appreciation for what the software developers who wrote your RDBMS had to go through - suddenly, waiting a measly 20 minutes for your DB View off a server with 250 other clients doesn't seem as bad anymore.:)
Skevin Database Design and Programming Disney Televentures
(Damn, carriage return didn't change fields in my browser. Oh well.)
From the article: "...Did Einstein invent his formula, E=mc2, or was it there all along, waiting to be discovered?"
Actually, he probably stole it.:) After all, he did spend his early years working in a patent office, verifying the claims of physicists wanting to patent new ideas. There. You can't say everyone who approves patents were entirely incompetent, can you? :)
Solomon Kevin Chang Database Design and Programming FutureStep.com
Lego Storm (See the link to ABC News)
on
Lego Machine Gun
·
· Score: 1
I know the subject sounds contradictory, but there IS a certain etiquette to suing someone: the amount you're suing for should always be higher than the actual amount you're willing to settle with. Producing an initially high figure is intended to simply get the attention of the legal department of the company you're attacking. In other words, do you really think Caldera truly expected to get $1.6G from Micros~1? Do you know anyone who has really expected to get what they sue for? Especially against Microsoft, you would need to heavily inflate the amount you "expect" from the settled suit.
S. Kevin Chang Database Design and Programming Disney Televentures
You make it sound as if us VB Programmers were some kind of Junkie, which I assure you, is not the case-... wait a minute, my compiler just crashed: I forgot to renew the license on a proprietary control. Now, where was I? Oh yes, I find it reprehensible of you to consider us as addicts dependent on some closed source slaver who only wants to bleed us dry-... Hold on... Hmm, it seems to make my vendor's updated control work, I have to get my company to license the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). Okay, done... In no way whatsoever are we shackled by the-... Ooh! Yes! Microsoft's $150/hour tech support line no longer has me on hold! Gotta go!
S. Kevin Chang Database Design and Programming Disney Televentures Burbank, CA.
This could explain what really happened to the mars polar lander...
Heuters December 20, 1999 Key personnel at NASA have finally completed evaluations as to the true reasons behind the loss of the $165 million Mars Polar Lander. "Our graphics department did not meet our media deadlines," one NASA spokesman comments. "Some of the graphic artists we've hired have had the gall to claim that Maya and Bryce were inappropriate software tools for rendering a realistic representation of what the surface of the Red Planet might look like. Why, they didn't even have any preliminary prototype 3D models that we could just quickly shade and pass off to the American public! It is unfortunate that outside agencies do not realize the crux of NASA's funding resides in their continuing ability to dupe America into putting tax money into our 'space program'." "I don't know what NASA was thinking," reflects an animatronic Senator John Glenn from the dungeon-like interior of Disney Studios in Burbank. "In my day, we never relied on that fancy schmancy CGI stuff. We had real people, working up a real sweat, building a lifesize studio set that Neil and I could walk around. It was something you could see and touch, rather than the digital innards of some newfangled virtual environment... But I can't blame NASA: our greedy, self-obsessed government has slashed our funding over the years, and NASA's Special Effects Budget has been hit pretty hard. You always cut corners where you can, and we've had to slowly replace our nice set model workshop with a room full of contractors and one big Renderfarm. With that many computers, you have to fuck up somewhere." Glenn further adds that he would one day like to replace Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland. While it may seem improbable that, in a special effects production studio like NASA, the sudden cessation of a large scale project on the magnitude of the Mars Polar Lander would cost 165 million dollars, Heuters has questioned the contractors themselves for further answers. "They gave us crappy equipment," quotes Brandon Perlow, an astronomically expensive modeller/designer. "They promised me a really good Octane, or something that would have the Reality Engine logo on it... But [on] my first day at NASA, all I had to work with was this lousy POS O2! They gave a goddamn Toaster and expected me to do work on it! Sorry, gotta run: there's sushi downstairs." One NASA representative responded to the complaint by explaining that the refit cost of equipping every contractor with an SGI Onyx Reality Engine would run the department 65 million dollars. "We've already tightened our belts as far as they'll go," one representative intones from regret. "We can't ask for that kind of additional funding from a government that requires a blowjob from every female White House intern. We have no choice but to shut the project down and let all the contractors go." Then what of the remaining 100 million dollars? "That figure comes from all the projected merchandising profits prior to the cancellation of the Mars Polar Lander Project," concludes key researchers at NASA. "But that's just a rough figure - it's not like we're rocket scientists."
Solomon Kevin Chang Database Design and Programming Disney Televentures
Remember in the book when Andrew's law firm decides to not to pay one of their janitors "...because he's obviously a robot..." due to the fact that he has a prosthetic heart. An absurd claim indeed, but deliberately made to set a precedent that blurs the line between human and robot, thus facilitating Andrew's growing claim on his own humanity. Too bad they just cut the scene out; it would have been useful to the plot engine to ambiguate (is that even a word?!) the boundary between Andrew and the human race.
Solomon Kevin Chang Database Design and Programming Disney Televentures (Yeah, sorry, it was my parent company that did the film)
Slashdot Mirror
I started shopping for the DC games I always planned to get, but...
Soul Calibur - Discontinued
House of the Dead 2 - Discontinued
Hydro Thunder - Discontinued
Ready to Rumble - Discontinued
The list goes on and on, and it seems like the only games I can still buy in the original shrink wrap are the ones that nobody really wanted. I guess the only thing left to run is Cheap Linux Console.
Somehow, Simm City comes to mind.
I get mail all the time from spammers who not only send their message in another language whose charset my mail client doesn't accept, but whose email return addresses are invalid as well. If I give sufficient prior warning, do I attempt to bill the owners of the website advertised in these emails?
Solomon
I hesistate to think what would happen if it *did* arrived, crushed and leaking. Would dad still sign for it?
I can just see it now: "Here you go, Mr. Duff. I'll just set it down on your carpet while you sign for it..."
Umm, it's not actually paint. It's colored vegetable oil, with a gelatin shell. Totally biodegradable, water-soluble and usually gone after the next good rain.
As someone who has helped to set up and run paintball fields, I have to ask: how are state gamelands being ruined by paintball? To open a field, you need to obtain a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) for paintball, which entails a crapload of licensing prerequisites. Your neighbors generally have to agree to the fact that you're planning to run a paintball field. Fields that run paintball tournaments are explicitly set aside for such a purpose, and never been hosted on anything except private property. So what are you talking about?
I could go on further about paintball legal and environmental issues, but I gotta take my STO Autococker and light up a few people this morning. Ciao.
Solomon
I've been playing paintball for almost four years now, and I've known about the Hellhound for almost two. It's already pretty well known in my circles (most paintballers over 25 seem to work in the IT industry anyway). I'm pretty upset that I could have submitted this article two years ago, but I felt it had no place on Slashdot.
u reshop.cgi?action=now&now=mortar.htm&order_id=1318 19899. Keep in mind, this is not the same paintball company as Dennis Tippman Jr.'s page, different organization entirely. Quarter mile range. 75 foot blast diamter. This company also makes claymores (the curved "charges" that say "this side towards enemy") and landmines for paintball.
i pp98wgrenades.html. More accuracy, and it's a great finishing touch when you bunker someone point blank... if you don't mind taking yourself out in the process.
Anyway, they do have paintball mortars - look at http://www.tippmannordnance.com/cgi-bin/store/sec
Getting back to the original Dennis Tippman Jr., he also manufactures grenades. While the Hellhound launches them via a spring loaded arm (hard to aim, and blast diameter in only 10ft.), true grenade launcher afficionados should consider an I&I CO2-powered grenade launcher - http://www.iisports.com/iisports/paintballstore/t
While you guys are on Tippmans' page, take a gander at the Flatline - nice piece of engineering. In paintball, your shots are not allowed to go faster than 300 fps, 280 at some fields, even less on indoor fields. So, the designers at Tippmann created this barrel to put a backspin on the ball, giving it longer range without violating the velocity limit. We tend to call them "floaters", since the rounds seems to act like frisbees once they leave the gun (even to the point of occasionally moving off-course). Unfortunately, the act of putting a backspin on the ball places a lot of stress on it, so you'd better not be shooting the cheap thin-shelled crap that you can buy for $20/case.
Solomon
Okay, so some fraction of my vehicle (or less) goes to the 20-meter-finishline in record time. In fact, I suspect that the whole vehicle (or pieces thereof) would go 20 meters in *all* directions, save for the ground, which we could measure concretely (no pun intended) by the depth of the remaining crater.
Just so that what I'm saying doesn't sound like crazytalk, ask yourself this: what spacefaring rocket *doesn't* expend most of its mass to get some vehicle to its destination?
I guess that would include me. I *intentionally* set up an IIS honeypot of sorts, collecting and running Code Red, Sircam, and Nimda, to show Microsoft that the biggest threat comes not from corporate servers, but from at-home enthusiasts who only partially know what they are doing.
Firewall? "What's that?" Security patches? "Too paranoid to use 'em." DoS/slashdot effect? "Aw, shucks - I'll just reimage my webserver. Hyuck, hyuck."
By perpetuating the spread of these tidbits of code, I hope to make at least a few companies wake up and realize that IIS is not a viable solution. For every one of me doing what I'm doing, there are hundreds of unwitting newbies doing the same thing, unknowingly. Yes, that includes PWS.
Psychotic? Vengeful? You'd be, too, if you spent hundreds of dollars for an MCSE(SD) and MCDBA, only to wake up one morning with a Mandrake distro in one hand and realize it was all for naught.
Okay, I'm ranting, but it's only natural to feel a burning desire to destroy the cult you just escaped from.
Skevin
"the First Ever Multiple Arcade Laserdisc Emulator! =] DAPHNE is a program that ..."
We should just call it F.E.M.A.L.E.
Solomon Chang
For those of us who circumvent the DMCA through starting our own religion (see prior /. article a few days ago), how does this work? Who have we been praying too all this time ? :)
Solomon
Too bad the SuSE distro treats all quotes and double quotes as control characters... Has anyone else noticed that the have to hit the single quote button twice to get a measly single quote output to the OS? And that if you hit other characters right after a quote, you sometimes get those funky foreign characters?
Solomon
Ah, but "Lone Gunman"(note singular, not *men*), along with phrases like "Grassy Knoll", are often used in describing JFK's assassination. Too bad they had to shove Lee Harvey Oswald into the plot: Eva Harlowe - I forgot her middle name, but it's an anagram of Oswald's name.
If no one else spots it, the writers may want to get less subtle about it...
Byers: Eva, did your surgeon do, er, a complete job on you?
Harlowe: What? You want to check out my grassy knoll?
Skevin
Hmm, someone's been watching a little too much Anime...
Skevin
When I was younger and more foolish, there were plenty of places of business where you could come in to play network games. The same was also true at a good deal of gaming conventions I had been to.
Fact of the matter is, not everyone has their own network at home. Such businesses are where younger (read: poorer) people can congregate. It's more about the comraderie than anything else.
I'm currently reading through the EULA of Diablo II right now, and I'm not finding any provisions for obtaining a site license for the program. Hell, I'm not even finding any site licensing info anywhere on the Web!
I would consider the EULA unenforcable. Sorry.
Solomon Kevin Chang
They're going about it all wrong. Instead of coming out with algorithms that can detect combinations of fleshtones in images, they should make keyboards that can detect gizz on your fingers.
Solomon
"Is anyone else bothered by Dragonball Z when Boma is going through 16's code and you realize the android is programmed in Basic?"
Does anyone remember a concept from science fiction called Maxwell's Demon? The way it was supposed to work was to have a membrane between two chambers that would actively select warm molecules from one chamber and put them in the other, while grabbing cold molecules from the other chamber and putting them in the first one.
In essence, a membrane that would passively perform as an incredibly efficient heat pump.
The idea stuck pretty well in my head throughout high school; but when I got to college, Lo! And behold! My physics professors told me such a system could not exist, for the existence of such a passive system would violate the laws of thermodynamics. The very existence of Maxwell's Demon would allow for a perpetual motion machine (which, in all naive curiosity, I attempted to build in sixth grade. LOL). Even a Peltier junction requires energy (electricity) to work, and even that is not a truly effective heat pump: some of that energy is lost as heat, and contributes to the overall heat of the enclosed system. This is noticed if you suddenly cut the power to a Peltier junction - you will find that the entire loop is considerably warmer than room temperature.
So, here's my prediction: the carbon nanotube heat pump works great... in small quantities. If you try to engineer a membrane of these things in quantities humans can physically observe, we may find that individual tubes have their own resonant frequencies (remember, heat is being carried as sound energy one-way down the tube) which are close enough together so as to interfere with each other. Heat no longer flows one-way and resumes the entropic behavior we all know and love.
Remember, Kiddies, you heard it here first.
Solomon Kevin Chang
Futurestep.com
A division of Korn Kerry International
Oh come now, for one-way thermal superconductivity, the answer is obvious (at least to any coder)...
Processor at one end, your cup of coffee at the other.
Skevin
I think I have a fair amount of experience in the field, and I've seen some viruses that have damaged my hardware beyond all hope of repair:
5/21/94 - While engaging in the "Make Money Fast!" program back in college, an angry mob of Academic Computing staff stormed my dorm room and took out my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to do the chain letter thing anymore.
4/7/96 - I was caught by my coworkers while sending out copious amounts of spam endorsing the Barney the Purple Dinosaur fan club. My managers took out my machine with liberal applications of their baseball bats. I'm afraid to touch anything plush and furry anymore.
2/15/98 - While viewing pr0n on my notebook in the Deep South, a preacher ripped it out of my hands and beat on it mercilessly with a baseball bat. I'm afraid to jerk off anymore.
12/21/98 - I had gotten my AV up and running on my home PC, and was showing a special episode of Pokemon which had recently been withdrawn in Japan. I was showing this to some neighborhood kids, all of whom entered epileptic fits when watching a random sequence of flashing lights. That afternoon, several irate parents came over and smashed my computer with baseball bats. I'm afraid to watch cartoons anymore.
1/1/00 - While watching DVDs on my notebook, a bunch of DeCSS fanatics got upset because I was supporting "The Man". After losing my portable to a swarm of swinging baseball bats, I quickly developed an adverse reaction to the Movie Industry.
4/1/00 - I secretly set my roomie's X Server's scan refresh rate to 200 KHz. The monitor caught fire after he came back, and he spent the rest of the night hitting the machine with a basball bat. I guess this virus also affects Linux.
Now, I know that no one likes an alarmist, so I'm going to talk about it like calm rational creature...
WARNING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This VIRUS seems to culminate in the *imminent* DESTRUCTION of one's computer via baseball bat!!! Don't let it happen to you! *SEVERAL* people have had their computers PHYSICALLY DESTROYED. You can protect yourself by giving out 100 copies of this letter, and fortune may smile on you; just add your name to the list below and send $500 to each person on the list.
1. Bill Gates
1 Microsoft Way
2. Paul Allen
1 Microsoft Wy.
3. Warren Buffet
3864 Skaru Yew Ave.
4. Solomon Kevin Chang
2107 W. Commonwealth Ave. #414
Alhambra, CA. 91803
When I receive payment, I will send you your very own Anti-Virus kit: a genuine 9mm Smith and Wesson Sigma Enhanced with two Hi-Cap Magazines filled with hollow point bullets. Instructions for use are an extra $60. Don't wait! Act now!
Skevin
[since people have this nasty tendancy to create views that span multiple tables]
:)
Okay, granted, just about anything that performs multiple joins against a bunch of different tables is going to slow down the query engine, but have you ever created a view without joins in in a properly normalized database? I'll let you in on a secret: my users and I know that running the monthly calculations (oodles of stored procs one right after another) take forever to do - they just let me know when they're starting, and then we all go out for coffee and a long lunch.
I've played with several databases in my life, and I think I can safely say that taking a performance hit in the face of complex queries is pretty universal amongst all of them.
And yes, I've thought about writing my own query engine, something that would be more efficient and put all those Oracle and SQL Server slowpokes to rest once and for all...
Easier said than done. I realized, much to my chagrin, that Common Joe DBAs like me can write query engines that run pretty quickly <u>if</u> your Joins only deal with Indexed Fields. This is fine in a <i>properly</i> designed DB, I guess, until your other DBAs start to play Pin The Blame On The DBD.
When you have to add functionality to allow Joins against Non-Indexed columns, you begin to acquire an appreciation for what the software developers who wrote your RDBMS had to go through - suddenly, waiting a measly 20 minutes for your DB View off a server with 250 other clients doesn't seem as bad anymore.
Skevin
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
(Damn, carriage return didn't change fields in my browser. Oh well.)
:) After all, he did spend his early years working in a patent office, verifying the claims of physicists wanting to patent new ideas.
From the article:
"...Did Einstein invent his formula, E=mc2, or was it there all along, waiting to be discovered?"
Actually, he probably stole it.
There. You can't say everyone who approves patents were entirely incompetent, can you?
:)
Solomon Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
FutureStep.com
I think we've just found the next candidate for the UK's Intelligence Agency's hiring spree. It might not hold a candle up to
Skevin - "I want to protest the DeCSS ruling but my boss won't let me"
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
Burbank, CA.
I know the subject sounds contradictory, but there IS a certain etiquette to suing someone: the amount you're suing for should always be higher than the actual amount you're willing to settle with. Producing an initially high figure is intended to simply get the attention of the legal department of the company you're attacking. In other words, do you really think Caldera truly expected to get $1.6G from Micros~1? Do you know anyone who has really expected to get what they sue for?
Especially against Microsoft, you would need to heavily inflate the amount you "expect" from the settled suit.
S. Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
You make it sound as if us VB Programmers were some kind of Junkie, which I assure you, is not the case-... wait a minute, my compiler just crashed: I forgot to renew the license on a proprietary control.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, I find it reprehensible of you to consider us as addicts dependent on some closed source slaver who only wants to bleed us dry-... Hold on...
Hmm, it seems to make my vendor's updated control work, I have to get my company to license the Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE). Okay, done...
In no way whatsoever are we shackled by the-... Ooh! Yes! Microsoft's $150/hour tech support line no longer has me on hold! Gotta go!
S. Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
Burbank, CA.
This could explain what really happened to the mars polar lander...
Heuters December 20, 1999
Key personnel at NASA have finally completed evaluations as to the true reasons behind the loss of the $165 million Mars Polar Lander.
"Our graphics department did not meet our media deadlines," one NASA spokesman comments. "Some of the graphic artists we've hired have had the gall to claim that Maya and Bryce were inappropriate software tools for rendering a realistic representation of what the surface of the Red Planet might look like. Why, they didn't even have any preliminary prototype 3D models that we could just quickly shade and pass off to the American public! It is unfortunate that outside agencies do not realize the crux of NASA's funding resides in their continuing ability to dupe America into putting tax money into our 'space program'."
"I don't know what NASA was thinking," reflects an animatronic Senator John Glenn from the dungeon-like interior of Disney Studios in Burbank. "In my day, we never relied on that fancy schmancy CGI stuff. We had real people, working up a real sweat, building a lifesize studio set that Neil and I could walk around. It was something you could see and touch, rather than the digital innards of some newfangled virtual environment... But I can't blame NASA: our greedy, self-obsessed government has slashed our funding over the years, and NASA's Special Effects Budget has been hit pretty hard. You always cut corners where you can, and we've had to slowly replace our nice set model workshop with a room full of contractors and one big Renderfarm. With that many computers, you have to fuck up somewhere."
Glenn further adds that he would one day like to replace Abraham Lincoln at Disneyland.
While it may seem improbable that, in a special effects production studio like NASA, the sudden cessation of a large scale project on the magnitude of the Mars Polar Lander would cost 165 million dollars, Heuters has questioned the contractors themselves for further answers. "They gave us crappy equipment," quotes Brandon Perlow, an astronomically expensive modeller/designer. "They promised me a really good Octane, or something that would have the Reality Engine logo on it... But [on] my first day at NASA, all I had to work with was this lousy POS O2! They gave a goddamn Toaster and expected me to do work on it! Sorry, gotta run: there's sushi downstairs."
One NASA representative responded to the complaint by explaining that the refit cost of equipping every contractor with an SGI Onyx Reality Engine would run the department 65 million dollars.
"We've already tightened our belts as far as they'll go," one representative intones from regret. "We can't ask for that kind of additional funding from a government that requires a blowjob from every female White House intern. We have no choice but to shut the project down and let all the contractors go."
Then what of the remaining 100 million dollars?
"That figure comes from all the projected merchandising profits prior to the cancellation of the Mars Polar Lander Project," concludes key researchers at NASA. "But that's just a rough figure - it's not like we're rocket scientists."
Solomon Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
Remember in the book when Andrew's law firm decides to not to pay one of their janitors "...because he's obviously a robot..." due to the fact that he has a prosthetic heart. An absurd claim indeed, but deliberately made to set a precedent that blurs the line between human and robot, thus facilitating Andrew's growing claim on his own humanity. Too bad they just cut the scene out; it would have been useful to the plot engine to ambiguate (is that even a word?!) the boundary between Andrew and the human race.
Solomon Kevin Chang
Database Design and Programming
Disney Televentures
(Yeah, sorry, it was my parent company that did the film)