Re:Details on Palladium from EFF's Seth Schoen...
on
The Power of Palladium
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· Score: 1
Not really... the real Trolls are completely on-topic, but just so uninformed, maddening and/or unpopular that no one can resist responding...
Flamebait is the same thing... good Flames are on-topic, but just so, well, inflammatory as to incite animosity.
That said, I think that it's a bit silly, and perhaps arrogant, to think that if someone disagrees with you that you must be right, regardless of how they choose to express it. In some cases, someone will disagree with you and you will be right... in other cases, they will be right. In other cases, both of you are wrong (or right), or there is no right and wrong for that particular thing. So, there are no hard and fast rules about correctness.
I would say that your parent poster's signature is one of those Off-Topic Trolls.
(Read: A gang is a group of people, not a group of people who kill other people.)
Well, I would say that's more of a clique. While your definition was accurate at one point in time, I don't think it's accurate anymore. When someone says gang, I think street-gang - a territorial semi-organized crime ring. And language is all about the common usage.
When I was an adolescent, I had friends, but I was never in a clique. In fact, the schools I went to as a child were pretty non-clique-ish. Except for those kids who aspired to join gangs... (In a Silicon Valley suburb... go figure.)
Well, he was talking about the spectrum of video games - it's unfortunate that he cited Pong as an example right before mentioning value systems, but it's still true... consider one of the most popular RPG series of all time: Ultima. The game practically established a religion. When I was a little kid, *I* wanted to embody the eight virtues. I guess I still do, to some degree.
ICQ was the first really successful IM client because it incorporated all of the above in a single program, and allowed anyone with a ppp account to connect to its servers.
ICQ was also really good about facilitating meeting new people over IM. The other IMs are targetted more at chatting with people you already know. ICQ has the "find random person to chat with" feature, where you could mark yourself "available for chat" and you'd show up on this list when people wanted to find someone to chat with. They also basically have searchable web-accessible profiles of all the users (of course 80% of them are blank). I guess it's goes in line with their name, "I seek you." All of the other IMs make it hard (or, rather, don't provide the facility for) to meet new people with the same interests. Probably to respect privacy and crap like that.
(which I found separately after scouring the comments here)
I think I can assemble the perfect keyboard. I suppose I should try the ps2->usb adapter that came with my mouse, but it seems that there might be more to it than that... if it doesn't work, I'll just order the adapter thing from usbgear... yay! With the adapter, it ends up being about $75 per keyboard, though.:|
I've been looking for a specific keyboard for a long time, and the PCKeyboard "Customizer" is close, but is not USB. Basically, I have these requirements, in order of priority:
* key layout with the backslash ABOVE the enter key... top row after the equals is fine, but second row after the close bracket is acceptable. Fourth row after shift is NOT. * USB * clicky * No windows keys.
Or, if there is some way to convert AT/PS2 keyboards to USB, then I'd just get that customizer and the adapter... I don't even know if that's feasible, so I haven't been looking for the adapter.
If anyone has any idea where to look, that's be great, I'll keep scanning the comments, though.
I'm not convinced that "Ignorance is not an excuse" is true in all cases. I think it depends on both a) what the potential consequences are and b) what amount of effort is required to not be ignorant.
In theory, I think that a lack of knowledge of the law is no excuse for breaking it... in reality, there are so absurdly many obscure, sometimes unintuitive, laws at all different "scopes" (city, county, state, country), that it's realistically impossible for anyone to know and keep up with them all, even if you spend all your time studying them. Not to mention that laws are generally written in obtuse legalese, so they are somewhat obfuscated for the general public. So, you have to decide when and where this matters. For murder, rape, traditional theft, reckless driving, etc... it's reasonably obvious that laws prohibit these things. Other things are non-obvious... there are several books about strange and stupid laws - most of which are not enforced (as they shouldn't be).
Now, why is this relevant to the discussion? Well, it's my personal belief that your average tech-savvy nerd college students, broke or not, do not have the domain knowledge to REALLY secure your computer, unless it happens to be an interest of theirs. I don't think really securing your computer against a halfway determined hacker is so easy that I would trust any old computer science student at the local university to do it. I wouldn't trust myself to do it!
This may even not be enough to say that these people are not always or completely responsible. But I admit to having an ulterior motive. I think the barriers to owning and using a computer are already too high. I think it's rare enough for people to educate themselves to the point where they can use a computer for what they really want, without throwing legal risks into the mess! I'm talking about home users, not corporate users, of course. I personally think it's more important that more people adopt computing as a way of life than Joe User takes responsibility when some bastard cracks his computer.
Now, there's another situation, where someone who has the knowledge and doesn't use it. This is like a doctor's obligation to help in a medical emergency. People (in the US, at least) are actually legally obligated to use their specific knowledge/skill in an emergency, if applicable. If you do not have that knowledge/skill that's needed, you are not responsible. It's most obvious how this applies to an MD, but for, say, a network administrator to have a wide-open network at home that gets used to propagate spam, or further hack the government, or whatever... then he/she could be considered at least partially responsible, only because they had the knowledge and didn't use it. (IANAL, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
"Greedy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil."
Calling someone "greedy" and a "capitalist" does not imply that "all capitalists are greedy," by any stretch of logic. Nor does it imply that "all greedy people are capitalists."
Think of it as a Venn Diagram with three intersecting circles. The evil, the greedy, and the capitalists. The aforementioned statement claims that Bill Gates lies in the intersection between the greedy circle and the capitalist circle.
This statement (taken alone) also makes no implications about the relative sizes of any of these regions.
Are all capitalists greedy? I don't think so, but, as a philosophy, it does tend to promote greediness. So perhaps a relatively large percentage of capitalists are also greedy. He didn't say that, I'm just speculating based on what I know about greed and capitalism.
Are all greedy people evil? Again, I don't think so. Greed is generally considered a bad thing, but it doesn't, by itself and in total, make people evil (by my definition of evil). I'm a little greedy, as are most people, but I care more about how my actions affect others than about feeding my gluttonous desires. At the very least I care about the latter enough to not do evil sorts of things (like pressing the button to kill someone and give me a million dollars). So I'm both greedy and not evil (by my definitions).
One major flaw with these analogies is that it requires a lot more knowledge and skill to keep a box secure than a gun (or car). I mean, say someone figures out enough of Linux to make, say, an MP3 server out of it, so that he can grab his MP3s from work and his other home machine. That's a good thing, right? Maybe even possible for someone who is computer-savvy-yet-not-really-technical. But this doesn't mean he has any idea about security... he/she may not even really be aware of the need for security. I think it's a lot easier to blame someone with a gun who isn't careful than a networked computer.
I think being security-aware is more of an IT thing... I don't think even your average programmer is that concerned about security. Man, they make me change my passwords at work all the time, it sucks.:)
I'm sick of being called 'unprincipled' and 'of weak morals' simply because of my agnostic, leaning-to athiest beliefs.
That's funny, I've been an agnostic, leaning slightly towards atheism, my whole life, and I've never been called 'unprinicpled' or 'of weak morals,' or anything of that sort.
That's funny... as a programmer, I have a pretty cynical attitude of people who work in computer retail, because you would really hope they know something about what they are selling, but usually they have no idea what they are talking about.
On the other hand, I don't expect everyone who owns or wants to own a computer to have to study up on the difference between AGP and PCI... I'm happy if they know the difference between "memory" and "hard disk". I mean, really, I own a car, but if I had to replace something in it, I would be just as clueless as those people ordering a video card for their laptop. Is that terrible?
I NEED a car for everyday life, because I live in suburban California, and this state was pretty much designed to be used with a car. But that's where the relationship with my car ends. On the other hand, I know a good deal about computers and use them constantly. I know the difference between volatile and persistant storage, AGP and PCI, L1 and L2 cache. Not because that I need to know these things for my job, but because that's what my interest is in. It's my job because it's my interest. I have only so much time to spend learning about things, and space in my brain to store it all, and I don't want to waste that learning about cars, which do not interest me at all. I imagine most people have the same attitude towards computers. Why shouldn't they? It's called "specialization" and has been around since the Industrial Age.
I do not expect a student who wants to play Dungeon Siege and write a paper with his computer to know or care about these things. But he may need a better video card for DS to be playable. I think it's up to you, the retail personnel, to help them figure out what they need. If you help them with that, then you are a good employee, better than most of the people out there at Fry's or Best Buy who have a one-track mind ("Extended Service Warranty... Extended Service Warranty...").
-If
More On Topic-er Postscript: I thought "Lindows" was a pretty funny name when I first heard about it - but the more I hear about this Wal-Mart/Lindows thing, the more I feel like it's a sleezy marketing gimmick. Even if the damn thing runs 95% of all windows binaries, I think it's not right to call it "Lindows," as most consumers (who pay the bills for everyone, by-the-way) would probably not catch the difference between Lindows and Windows, even if you disclaim it to high heaven. I would be concerned with Linux getting a bad reputation once people find that they got something other than they were expecting.
Realistically, though, if you design and test a site in IE5+, getting it to work on Moz1.0 is not that hard... It's not NEARLY like the effort that has to be put into NS4.x/IE5+ cross-browser support.
Even if you have heavy-duty DHTML stuff (assuming you weren't dumb enough to use visual basic), you just have to remove any IE extensions to the standard DOM API for scripting languages. I had written a little DHTML page that projected some 3D points and you could rotate them and such... I wrote it entirely in IE, no effort to be compatible. It took me less than an hour to get it working under Moz1.0. The changes were basically switching from document.all.x to document.getElementsById("x") (easy regexp replacement) and adding support for event handlers that take the event object as an argument, instead of window.event, which was 2 extra lines of code for each event handler. I'm sure there are other little tweaks, but most stuff just works in both browsers. You just have to go through and check it all, which is a bit of a pain.
The other problem is sites that throw up NS4.7 pages based on the User-Agent HTTP header... that sucks. They will work, but are usually lamer versions of the site. So far, I've only seen this on msn, hotmail, and msdn... microsoft-owned webfronts.
The web is already quite usable with Moz1.0 - and that which isn't could be made so RELATIVELY easily, I expect. I don't see this as a barrier to AOL switching, if they have other reasons for it. Actually, I'd like to hear about specific major sites that DON'T work with Moz1.0... even if they are usable, but obviously broken/ugly/etc... what sites are the major offenders?
As with everything, of course, it depends on severity. I was always fairly good with my punctuation, spelling, and grammar. But, still, requirements for an improvisational situation shouldn't be as strict as those for one where you have a lot of planning time and so on.
This would be like if an English prof told you to write a term paper and you did extensive research but lost points for bad grammar. It matters, but is it enough to dismiss the research done?
This is why partial credit is so important. Yes, grammar errors on an in-depth research paper should cost points. Should they get an F on the paper because of it? Probably not. The analogy also doesn't work because papers are done ahead of time, not on the fly. (At least research papers.) This would be comparable to compile errors on a programming project, which would be unacceptable. How badly do they take off points for grammar on an essay test question? Not too badly, most of the time. They are more interested in what you have to say.
A better analogy is arithmetic errors on math exams (like linear algebra, calculus). It should cost points, but not the whole test. You do want to test what they learned in that class - if you want to test whether they know how to do a matrix multiplication, you should give them a grade that reflects that, even if they forgot to carry a one.
I think it's more important to be able to get a design (API, datamodel, etc...) down on paper than the code itself.
just wait untill the boss finds out that your spending your payed hours learning how to code when school should have taght it to you...
Well, I don't think that's fair at all... You are paid to do a job, and it's easy to be effective without memorizing tedious information. Compilers are better at finding missing semicolons or parentheses that you are. Why not let them do it? You might know what a library function does, and how to use it, but maybe you forgot the order of the arguments. Sure, a guess probably won't compile, but it doesn't mean you are a bad programmer. I'd rather work with someone who has a strong grasp of OOAD and can learn the specifics on the fly than someone who can write code that compiles every time out of the gate, but doesn't "get" the whole "objects" thing. (At least in my case, where we work in an OO environment.)
Part of being a good programmer is using the right tools to maximize your effectiveness. The compiler is a great syntactic and semantic validator. Let it do that for you. The manual is much better at retaining information about specifics. Let it do that for you. As long as you can use these tools to craft quality code, then you are being effective. There's insignificant cost to running the compiler twice as often, or looking something up in a manual or on the web. You tend to memorize the things you use really often, but what you use can change from project to project, or release to release. It's hard for an employer to find someone who already knows everything exactly that they want... and when they get them, they may not be as effective/productive as someone who has to learn part of it on the job.
If it's a class in Specific Language X Syntax, then maybe that makes sense, but that's a useless class. At my school, we did a lot of hand-writing code on tests, but usually pseudocode was sufficient to get full marks, and you could get good partial credit if you had the basic idea. The focus was not on details like syntax, but on the concepts, ideas, paradigms of the subject (compilers, operating systems, computer graphics, or whatever).
You are hurting yourself if you stop learning once you are out of school. Technology is always moving and changing, and what's available and how to use it might change on you, you have to adapt. You should always be learning, 1 year after school, 10 years after school... why stop? No one I know at anyplace I've worked ever expected anyone to know everything about what they were supposed to do. They care about results... providing those requires being able to learn effectively on the job, because who knows what you might be doing next release, next project, next company... Being versatile will get you exceeding expectations all the time. Success is rarely about what you know, but how quickly and how well you learn, and whether you can make use of it.
Apache is a web server... iPlanet is a J2EE implementation. Apache is a great web server... iPlanet is a shitty J2EE implementation. True, iPlanet will serve up web pages, but if you aren't developing an enterprise-level web application, then it's like using a hammer to push the thumbtack into the wall. A broken hammer, but a hammmer. (I've done this by the way, and the plastic part of the thumbtack will break before the wall gives.)
I use weblogic 5.1 at work, and I guess it's okay. I mainly deal with the servlet side of things, as opposed to EJBs or JMS or any of that, and the servlets that it generates are not that efficient. Nor is the generation itself efficient (which doesn't impact runtime, but does impact my sanity as I reload pages). Anyway, wl5.1 feels like molasses in January in Greenland, but I'm sure it's not as bad as it feels.
At my previous company, we used Resin, which was pretty nice, but it's not a complete J2EE solution, it's just a small and fast servlet container.
If I were to start a new project, and I needed JMS/EJB/etc, I would probably investigate JBoss, which is OSS. If needed just a servlet engine but MIGHT need the other stuff in the future, I'd use Tomcat (also developed by our friends at Apache)... if I just wanted a servlet engine and that's it, I'd probably stick with Resin, which has the source available and is free for non-commercial use.
Maybe it's not OSS, maybe it's just Apache that kicks much ass. Xerces/Xalan/Tomcat/Struts/Apache. Damn, you have everything there for web application development (in Java anyway), and it's good and you can read the code, which I've used many times before. I've cursed weblogic many times for not being able to read the code (of course JAD helps for that sometimes).
My point is, iPlanet is not the counterexample to Apache, or Tomcat, or JBoss... iPlanet is horribly broken and bad. Which is strange, since it emerged from Netscape Application Server, which has been around for, well, since before I knew what the hell an Application Server was. Weblogic (maybe 6.1 or 7.0 is much better, we need to upgrade) works and is popular, but is horribly, HORRIBLY expensive for a production license.
The Afterburner is a great product...as long as you are not the one to install it.
I agree entirely... A friend and I spent 4 hours in the clean(ish) room at my dad's work getting the thing installed, and even though we were super careful, we still got visible dust in there.
It probably didn't help that we got wasted at a bar before hand...
I'm kidding, you silly people! It takes more than 6 Kamikazes and 3 shots of Jaegermeister to get me drunk!
Anyway, we had some parts left over afterwards, and it rattles a bit now, but the GBA is way more usable than when I bought it. Even though the B key doesn't work anymore...
There has to be some point when games will be so perfect, they don't need to bump up the number of triangles rendered per second, no?
Don't hold your breath... I don't think we can talk about perfection unless we have the capability to do absolutely photorealistic rendering in real-time (and, for perfection, at a framerate that surpasses our ability to percieve improvement, whatever that is... 60Hz?). Right now, even pre-rendered computer generated movies like Final Fantasy don't look photorealistic... just close... so it's not even a matter of throwing speed at it yet... we need new techniques for rendering that are faster than the somewhat brute-force raytracing method, and also produces more realistic imagery. It might not be triangles at all, who knows? Then we'd need hardware to accelerate whatever that is.
In theory this point probably exists, once the computer's ability to generate imagery surpasses our human ability to detect flaws in it, but I wouldn't expect this in my lifetime. I mean, once you've mastered generating 2D imagery, then we go to holograms or other 3D imagery, and so on.
And even if we get to the point where generated imaging is a "solved" problem, there will ALWAYS be things to use the extra cycles for... especially with games!
I'd actually like to see someone take the Onion's kids explanation of why the Sept. terrorist attacks happened seriously.
I was trying to find the humor in this article, but I think it WAS a serious article. The only inaccuracy that I could find is that it implied that Afghanistan is an Arab nation, which it is not. But it's not a funny sort of inaccuracy. I guess the funniest thing about it is that it assumes the parent already knows all this and just needs help structuring an explanation for their child, when, in reality, probably 90% of Americans would learn something significant about the situation by reading it.
Reading The Onion is like reading Slashdot on April Fool's Day... most of it is false and intended to be funny, but you never know. Most of the The Onion's humor is just bluntly exposing some real factor of our society that most of us don't want to acknowledge - usually then taken to an extreme. There's an intellectual aspect to it that I've always appreciated.
I'm by no means an expert, but from what I've gathered, there were two Shahs before the revolution. The first one was very strict, and wasn't very well liked. His son, on the other hand, was generally better liked, and more of a benign ruler than a dictator... Though I'm sure he had his secret police and whatnot. The point is that now the situation over there is much worse than it was before the revolution, even if it's wasn't a shining democracy. I think that this is the result of a religious dictatorship versus a monarchy-style dictatorship. Neither are good, but people have a lot harder time disagreeing with a priest, and then having a gun to your head doesn't help either.
Is it hard to ship the DVD's around? Do you have to get a special box or anything?
No, it's brilliant... they mail you an envelope with the DVD inside (it's just a sleeve, you don't get a case). When you open the envelope, and tear off a part of it, what's left is the return envelope, postage paid! You don't even have to lick it closed, it's got adhesive protected by a plastic strip you just pull off.
I signed up last week, I've already got 3 DVDs, returned one, and one more is on the way, and I'm still on my 10 day free trial period.
They have a rating system on the site, where they try to recommend stuff a la Amazon based on your ratings, but it doesn't seem to work very well - probably not a large enough sample set... or their heuristics just suck. Amazon usually recommends stuff that's somewhat interesting, NetFlix just recommends random stuff.
I just started on NetFlix this week. I live right by them, apparantly, because it takes one business day to get my movies via mail, and one day to send them back. So far it has worked out great. I put off signing up because they send unsolicited emails, and use pop-under ads, but obviously my ideals fall by the wayside for the sake of convenience...
Slashdot Mirror
Not really... the real Trolls are completely on-topic, but just so uninformed, maddening and/or unpopular that no one can resist responding...
Flamebait is the same thing... good Flames are on-topic, but just so, well, inflammatory as to incite animosity.
That said, I think that it's a bit silly, and perhaps arrogant, to think that if someone disagrees with you that you must be right, regardless of how they choose to express it. In some cases, someone will disagree with you and you will be right... in other cases, they will be right. In other cases, both of you are wrong (or right), or there is no right and wrong for that particular thing. So, there are no hard and fast rules about correctness.
I would say that your parent poster's signature is one of those Off-Topic Trolls.
-DG
(Read: A gang is a group of people, not a group of people who kill other people.)
Well, I would say that's more of a clique. While your definition was accurate at one point in time, I don't think it's accurate anymore. When someone says gang, I think street-gang - a territorial semi-organized crime ring. And language is all about the common usage.
When I was an adolescent, I had friends, but I was never in a clique. In fact, the schools I went to as a child were pretty non-clique-ish. Except for those kids who aspired to join gangs... (In a Silicon Valley suburb... go figure.)
-If
Well, he was talking about the spectrum of video games - it's unfortunate that he cited Pong as an example right before mentioning value systems, but it's still true... consider one of the most popular RPG series of all time: Ultima. The game practically established a religion. When I was a little kid, *I* wanted to embody the eight virtues. I guess I still do, to some degree.
-If
ICQ was the first really successful IM client because it incorporated all of the above in a single program, and allowed anyone with a ppp account to connect to its servers.
ICQ was also really good about facilitating meeting new people over IM. The other IMs are targetted more at chatting with people you already know. ICQ has the "find random person to chat with" feature, where you could mark yourself "available for chat" and you'd show up on this list when people wanted to find someone to chat with. They also basically have searchable web-accessible profiles of all the users (of course 80% of them are blank). I guess it's goes in line with their name, "I seek you." All of the other IMs make it hard (or, rather, don't provide the facility for) to meet new people with the same interests. Probably to respect privacy and crap like that.
-If
Hmm, with http://store.yahoo.com/pckeyboards/cus101usenon.ht ml and http://www.usbgear.com/usa/item_92.html
:|
(which I found separately after scouring the comments here)
I think I can assemble the perfect keyboard. I suppose I should try the ps2->usb adapter that came with my mouse, but it seems that there might be more to it than that... if it doesn't work, I'll just order the adapter thing from usbgear... yay! With the adapter, it ends up being about $75 per keyboard, though.
-If
Oh, yeah, and:
* Not ergonomic - standard keyboard shape and size.
-If
I've been looking for a specific keyboard for a long time, and the PCKeyboard "Customizer" is close, but is not USB. Basically, I have these requirements, in order of priority:
* key layout with the backslash ABOVE the enter key... top row after the equals is fine, but second row after the close bracket is acceptable. Fourth row after shift is NOT.
* USB
* clicky
* No windows keys.
Or, if there is some way to convert AT/PS2 keyboards to USB, then I'd just get that customizer and the adapter... I don't even know if that's feasible, so I haven't been looking for the adapter.
If anyone has any idea where to look, that's be great, I'll keep scanning the comments, though.
-If
I'm not convinced that "Ignorance is not an excuse" is true in all cases. I think it depends on both a) what the potential consequences are and b) what amount of effort is required to not be ignorant.
In theory, I think that a lack of knowledge of the law is no excuse for breaking it... in reality, there are so absurdly many obscure, sometimes unintuitive, laws at all different "scopes" (city, county, state, country), that it's realistically impossible for anyone to know and keep up with them all, even if you spend all your time studying them. Not to mention that laws are generally written in obtuse legalese, so they are somewhat obfuscated for the general public. So, you have to decide when and where this matters. For murder, rape, traditional theft, reckless driving, etc... it's reasonably obvious that laws prohibit these things. Other things are non-obvious... there are several books about strange and stupid laws - most of which are not enforced (as they shouldn't be).
Now, why is this relevant to the discussion? Well, it's my personal belief that your average tech-savvy nerd college students, broke or not, do not have the domain knowledge to REALLY secure your computer, unless it happens to be an interest of theirs. I don't think really securing your computer against a halfway determined hacker is so easy that I would trust any old computer science student at the local university to do it. I wouldn't trust myself to do it!
This may even not be enough to say that these people are not always or completely responsible. But I admit to having an ulterior motive. I think the barriers to owning and using a computer are already too high. I think it's rare enough for people to educate themselves to the point where they can use a computer for what they really want, without throwing legal risks into the mess! I'm talking about home users, not corporate users, of course. I personally think it's more important that more people adopt computing as a way of life than Joe User takes responsibility when some bastard cracks his computer.
Now, there's another situation, where someone who has the knowledge and doesn't use it. This is like a doctor's obligation to help in a medical emergency. People (in the US, at least) are actually legally obligated to use their specific knowledge/skill in an emergency, if applicable. If you do not have that knowledge/skill that's needed, you are not responsible. It's most obvious how this applies to an MD, but for, say, a network administrator to have a wide-open network at home that gets used to propagate spam, or further hack the government, or whatever... then he/she could be considered at least partially responsible, only because they had the knowledge and didn't use it. (IANAL, so please correct me if I'm mistaken.)
-If
"Greedy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil."
Calling someone "greedy" and a "capitalist" does not imply that "all capitalists are greedy," by any stretch of logic. Nor does it imply that "all greedy people are capitalists."
Think of it as a Venn Diagram with three intersecting circles. The evil, the greedy, and the capitalists. The aforementioned statement claims that Bill Gates lies in the intersection between the greedy circle and the capitalist circle.
This statement (taken alone) also makes no implications about the relative sizes of any of these regions.
Are all capitalists greedy? I don't think so, but, as a philosophy, it does tend to promote greediness. So perhaps a relatively large percentage of capitalists are also greedy. He didn't say that, I'm just speculating based on what I know about greed and capitalism.
Are all greedy people evil? Again, I don't think so. Greed is generally considered a bad thing, but it doesn't, by itself and in total, make people evil (by my definition of evil). I'm a little greedy, as are most people, but I care more about how my actions affect others than about feeding my gluttonous desires. At the very least I care about the latter enough to not do evil sorts of things (like pressing the button to kill someone and give me a million dollars). So I'm both greedy and not evil (by my definitions).
-If
One major flaw with these analogies is that it requires a lot more knowledge and skill to keep a box secure than a gun (or car). I mean, say someone figures out enough of Linux to make, say, an MP3 server out of it, so that he can grab his MP3s from work and his other home machine. That's a good thing, right? Maybe even possible for someone who is computer-savvy-yet-not-really-technical. But this doesn't mean he has any idea about security... he/she may not even really be aware of the need for security. I think it's a lot easier to blame someone with a gun who isn't careful than a networked computer.
:)
I think being security-aware is more of an IT thing... I don't think even your average programmer is that concerned about security. Man, they make me change my passwords at work all the time, it sucks.
-If
We've had the tech for years with video games, but the art form hasn't really been tried.
Video games are not art? Wha'chu talkin bout?
-DG
I'm sick of being called 'unprincipled' and 'of weak morals' simply because of my agnostic, leaning-to athiest beliefs.
That's funny, I've been an agnostic, leaning slightly towards atheism, my whole life, and I've never been called 'unprinicpled' or 'of weak morals,' or anything of that sort.
-If
That's funny... as a programmer, I have a pretty cynical attitude of people who work in computer retail, because you would really hope they know something about what they are selling, but usually they have no idea what they are talking about.
On the other hand, I don't expect everyone who owns or wants to own a computer to have to study up on the difference between AGP and PCI... I'm happy if they know the difference between "memory" and "hard disk". I mean, really, I own a car, but if I had to replace something in it, I would be just as clueless as those people ordering a video card for their laptop. Is that terrible?
I NEED a car for everyday life, because I live in suburban California, and this state was pretty much designed to be used with a car. But that's where the relationship with my car ends. On the other hand, I know a good deal about computers and use them constantly. I know the difference between volatile and persistant storage, AGP and PCI, L1 and L2 cache. Not because that I need to know these things for my job, but because that's what my interest is in. It's my job because it's my interest. I have only so much time to spend learning about things, and space in my brain to store it all, and I don't want to waste that learning about cars, which do not interest me at all. I imagine most people have the same attitude towards computers. Why shouldn't they? It's called "specialization" and has been around since the Industrial Age.
I do not expect a student who wants to play Dungeon Siege and write a paper with his computer to know or care about these things. But he may need a better video card for DS to be playable. I think it's up to you, the retail personnel, to help them figure out what they need. If you help them with that, then you are a good employee, better than most of the people out there at Fry's or Best Buy who have a one-track mind ("Extended Service Warranty... Extended Service Warranty...").
-If
More On Topic-er Postscript:
I thought "Lindows" was a pretty funny name when I first heard about it - but the more I hear about this Wal-Mart/Lindows thing, the more I feel like it's a sleezy marketing gimmick. Even if the damn thing runs 95% of all windows binaries, I think it's not right to call it "Lindows," as most consumers (who pay the bills for everyone, by-the-way) would probably not catch the difference between Lindows and Windows, even if you disclaim it to high heaven. I would be concerned with Linux getting a bad reputation once people find that they got something other than they were expecting.
Realistically, though, if you design and test a site in IE5+, getting it to work on Moz1.0 is not that hard... It's not NEARLY like the effort that has to be put into NS4.x/IE5+ cross-browser support.
Even if you have heavy-duty DHTML stuff (assuming you weren't dumb enough to use visual basic), you just have to remove any IE extensions to the standard DOM API for scripting languages. I had written a little DHTML page that projected some 3D points and you could rotate them and such... I wrote it entirely in IE, no effort to be compatible. It took me less than an hour to get it working under Moz1.0. The changes were basically switching from document.all.x to document.getElementsById("x") (easy regexp replacement) and adding support for event handlers that take the event object as an argument, instead of window.event, which was 2 extra lines of code for each event handler. I'm sure there are other little tweaks, but most stuff just works in both browsers. You just have to go through and check it all, which is a bit of a pain.
The other problem is sites that throw up NS4.7 pages based on the User-Agent HTTP header... that sucks. They will work, but are usually lamer versions of the site. So far, I've only seen this on msn, hotmail, and msdn... microsoft-owned webfronts.
The web is already quite usable with Moz1.0 - and that which isn't could be made so RELATIVELY easily, I expect. I don't see this as a barrier to AOL switching, if they have other reasons for it. Actually, I'd like to hear about specific major sites that DON'T work with Moz1.0... even if they are usable, but obviously broken/ugly/etc... what sites are the major offenders?
-If
As with everything, of course, it depends on severity. I was always fairly good with my punctuation, spelling, and grammar. But, still, requirements for an improvisational situation shouldn't be as strict as those for one where you have a lot of planning time and so on.
-If
This would be like if an English prof told you to write a term paper and you did extensive research but lost points for bad grammar. It matters, but is it enough to dismiss the research done?
This is why partial credit is so important. Yes, grammar errors on an in-depth research paper should cost points. Should they get an F on the paper because of it? Probably not. The analogy also doesn't work because papers are done ahead of time, not on the fly. (At least research papers.) This would be comparable to compile errors on a programming project, which would be unacceptable. How badly do they take off points for grammar on an essay test question? Not too badly, most of the time. They are more interested in what you have to say.
A better analogy is arithmetic errors on math exams (like linear algebra, calculus). It should cost points, but not the whole test. You do want to test what they learned in that class - if you want to test whether they know how to do a matrix multiplication, you should give them a grade that reflects that, even if they forgot to carry a one.
I think it's more important to be able to get a design (API, datamodel, etc...) down on paper than the code itself.
-If
just wait untill the boss finds out that your spending your payed hours learning how to code when school should have taght it to you...
Well, I don't think that's fair at all... You are paid to do a job, and it's easy to be effective without memorizing tedious information. Compilers are better at finding missing semicolons or parentheses that you are. Why not let them do it? You might know what a library function does, and how to use it, but maybe you forgot the order of the arguments. Sure, a guess probably won't compile, but it doesn't mean you are a bad programmer. I'd rather work with someone who has a strong grasp of OOAD and can learn the specifics on the fly than someone who can write code that compiles every time out of the gate, but doesn't "get" the whole "objects" thing. (At least in my case, where we work in an OO environment.)
Part of being a good programmer is using the right tools to maximize your effectiveness. The compiler is a great syntactic and semantic validator. Let it do that for you. The manual is much better at retaining information about specifics. Let it do that for you. As long as you can use these tools to craft quality code, then you are being effective. There's insignificant cost to running the compiler twice as often, or looking something up in a manual or on the web. You tend to memorize the things you use really often, but what you use can change from project to project, or release to release. It's hard for an employer to find someone who already knows everything exactly that they want... and when they get them, they may not be as effective/productive as someone who has to learn part of it on the job.
If it's a class in Specific Language X Syntax, then maybe that makes sense, but that's a useless class. At my school, we did a lot of hand-writing code on tests, but usually pseudocode was sufficient to get full marks, and you could get good partial credit if you had the basic idea. The focus was not on details like syntax, but on the concepts, ideas, paradigms of the subject (compilers, operating systems, computer graphics, or whatever).
You are hurting yourself if you stop learning once you are out of school. Technology is always moving and changing, and what's available and how to use it might change on you, you have to adapt. You should always be learning, 1 year after school, 10 years after school... why stop? No one I know at anyplace I've worked ever expected anyone to know everything about what they were supposed to do. They care about results... providing those requires being able to learn effectively on the job, because who knows what you might be doing next release, next project, next company... Being versatile will get you exceeding expectations all the time. Success is rarely about what you know, but how quickly and how well you learn, and whether you can make use of it.
-If
Damn, I only have a +1 Mace of Boring... But, I have a Cloak of Inconsequence, as well, I think it balances out.
-If
Apache is a web server... iPlanet is a J2EE implementation. Apache is a great web server... iPlanet is a shitty J2EE implementation. True, iPlanet will serve up web pages, but if you aren't developing an enterprise-level web application, then it's like using a hammer to push the thumbtack into the wall. A broken hammer, but a hammmer. (I've done this by the way, and the plastic part of the thumbtack will break before the wall gives.)
I use weblogic 5.1 at work, and I guess it's okay. I mainly deal with the servlet side of things, as opposed to EJBs or JMS or any of that, and the servlets that it generates are not that efficient. Nor is the generation itself efficient (which doesn't impact runtime, but does impact my sanity as I reload pages). Anyway, wl5.1 feels like molasses in January in Greenland, but I'm sure it's not as bad as it feels.
At my previous company, we used Resin, which was pretty nice, but it's not a complete J2EE solution, it's just a small and fast servlet container.
If I were to start a new project, and I needed JMS/EJB/etc, I would probably investigate JBoss, which is OSS. If needed just a servlet engine but MIGHT need the other stuff in the future, I'd use Tomcat (also developed by our friends at Apache)... if I just wanted a servlet engine and that's it, I'd probably stick with Resin, which has the source available and is free for non-commercial use.
Maybe it's not OSS, maybe it's just Apache that kicks much ass. Xerces/Xalan/Tomcat/Struts/Apache. Damn, you have everything there for web application development (in Java anyway), and it's good and you can read the code, which I've used many times before. I've cursed weblogic many times for not being able to read the code (of course JAD helps for that sometimes).
My point is, iPlanet is not the counterexample to Apache, or Tomcat, or JBoss... iPlanet is horribly broken and bad. Which is strange, since it emerged from Netscape Application Server, which has been around for, well, since before I knew what the hell an Application Server was. Weblogic (maybe 6.1 or 7.0 is much better, we need to upgrade) works and is popular, but is horribly, HORRIBLY expensive for a production license.
-If
The Afterburner is a great product...as long as you are not the one to install it.
I agree entirely... A friend and I spent 4 hours in the clean(ish) room at my dad's work getting the thing installed, and even though we were super careful, we still got visible dust in there.
It probably didn't help that we got wasted at a bar before hand...
I'm kidding, you silly people! It takes more than 6 Kamikazes and 3 shots of Jaegermeister to get me drunk!
Anyway, we had some parts left over afterwards, and it rattles a bit now, but the GBA is way more usable than when I bought it. Even though the B key doesn't work anymore...
-If
There has to be some point when games will be so perfect, they don't need to bump up the number of triangles rendered per second, no?
Don't hold your breath... I don't think we can talk about perfection unless we have the capability to do absolutely photorealistic rendering in real-time (and, for perfection, at a framerate that surpasses our ability to percieve improvement, whatever that is... 60Hz?). Right now, even pre-rendered computer generated movies like Final Fantasy don't look photorealistic... just close... so it's not even a matter of throwing speed at it yet... we need new techniques for rendering that are faster than the somewhat brute-force raytracing method, and also produces more realistic imagery. It might not be triangles at all, who knows? Then we'd need hardware to accelerate whatever that is.
In theory this point probably exists, once the computer's ability to generate imagery surpasses our human ability to detect flaws in it, but I wouldn't expect this in my lifetime. I mean, once you've mastered generating 2D imagery, then we go to holograms or other 3D imagery, and so on.
And even if we get to the point where generated imaging is a "solved" problem, there will ALWAYS be things to use the extra cycles for... especially with games!
-If
I'd actually like to see someone take the Onion's kids explanation of why the Sept. terrorist attacks happened seriously.
I was trying to find the humor in this article, but I think it WAS a serious article. The only inaccuracy that I could find is that it implied that Afghanistan is an Arab nation, which it is not. But it's not a funny sort of inaccuracy. I guess the funniest thing about it is that it assumes the parent already knows all this and just needs help structuring an explanation for their child, when, in reality, probably 90% of Americans would learn something significant about the situation by reading it.
Reading The Onion is like reading Slashdot on April Fool's Day... most of it is false and intended to be funny, but you never know. Most of the The Onion's humor is just bluntly exposing some real factor of our society that most of us don't want to acknowledge - usually then taken to an extreme. There's an intellectual aspect to it that I've always appreciated.
-If
I'm by no means an expert, but from what I've gathered, there were two Shahs before the revolution. The first one was very strict, and wasn't very well liked. His son, on the other hand, was generally better liked, and more of a benign ruler than a dictator... Though I'm sure he had his secret police and whatnot. The point is that now the situation over there is much worse than it was before the revolution, even if it's wasn't a shining democracy. I think that this is the result of a religious dictatorship versus a monarchy-style dictatorship. Neither are good, but people have a lot harder time disagreeing with a priest, and then having a gun to your head doesn't help either.
-If
Is it hard to ship the DVD's around? Do you have to get a special box or anything?
No, it's brilliant... they mail you an envelope with the DVD inside (it's just a sleeve, you don't get a case). When you open the envelope, and tear off a part of it, what's left is the return envelope, postage paid! You don't even have to lick it closed, it's got adhesive protected by a plastic strip you just pull off.
I signed up last week, I've already got 3 DVDs, returned one, and one more is on the way, and I'm still on my 10 day free trial period.
They have a rating system on the site, where they try to recommend stuff a la Amazon based on your ratings, but it doesn't seem to work very well - probably not a large enough sample set... or their heuristics just suck. Amazon usually recommends stuff that's somewhat interesting, NetFlix just recommends random stuff.
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I just started on NetFlix this week. I live right by them, apparantly, because it takes one business day to get my movies via mail, and one day to send them back. So far it has worked out great. I put off signing up because they send unsolicited emails, and use pop-under ads, but obviously my ideals fall by the wayside for the sake of convenience...
-If