One of the major potential benefits of using class frameworks and object-oriented programming is to free code from heavy dependencies on underlying infrastructure through abstraction. And yes, I know it's not mandatory or anything, but the potential is staring you in the face and so it's silly not to take advantage of it. With.NET (and MFC, etc before it), Microsoft can't do too good of a job of this because to do so would take you off the Windows / Office / Servers / Visual Studio upgrade treadmill, from which they derive their income. There are plenty of libraries and frameworks out there that will allow you to build for Win9x (still!), NT/XP/Vista/2Kx/.net, OSX, Linux, etc. that offer exceptional stability between versions.
Yes, Microsoft has some decent tools out there (Visual Studio has come a long way since the first version), but their behavior here has been consistent for the two decades or so that Windows has been out - you will wind up doing some significant porting and testing between versions of their tools, because compatibility between versions is not a priority for them. Selling you upgrades it the priority. Adding value is not a priority - they'll give just enough additional value between versions to make enough people jump, thereby forcing even more people to jump to maintain compatibility with the first set. It's an endless treadmill. If you (or your company) chooses to spend the immense amount of time and money to run on this treadmill, that's perfectly fine with me. I'll just sit over here accomplishing far more per dollar of CapEx and per man-hour.
This case will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court, where its chances are unspectacular. Cases like this are usually filed in a court that the filing party knows or strongly suspects will be sympathetic to their claim - a practice known as "judge shopping". I would be absolutely shocked if this suit lost in the first round.
An organisation whose entire business model is now to resell the same product over and over again is hardly going to say that buying it once is enough. But in a world of "one dollar, one vote", who's going to stop them?
Besides, it's not a big deal to these people - record executives blow more money on cocaine in one year than the average person makes.
...you should be careful about trusting those DVD-Rs. Do you take care to store them in cool, dark places?
You're right... I'll have them buried with me when I die. In seriousness, yes, of course they are. And once I get a bigger home, the words "media-grade fire safe" come to mind.
Figure out what your data's work, come up with a budget for protecting it, and go from there. Without a reasonable budget, nobody can intelligently recommend specific solutions.
For myself, I'm using a VIA Epia motherboard (quiet, extremely low power consumption) with an Areca 4-channel SATA RAID controller w/ four Seagate 7200.9 250MB Drives in an hot-swap enclosure with extra cooling - configured in a RAID-5 array (all of my data), and two WD 160 GB drives on the IDE channels in a RAID-1 configuration (OS, programs). It's running Fedora Core 4 and SAMBA (and a bunch of other stuff). The performace is reasonable - I can saturate a 100Mbit LAN connection, which is all I really care about.
For off-line backup, I use Mitsui Archive Gold DVD-R disks - supposedly they're good for 300 years. I'll believe this 300 years from now if my discs still work, but it's the best available right now. I'd love to hear some feedback from people with more knowledge than myself in this area.
The most important thing - discipline. Store important stuff on the array, use rsync or whatever to synchronize with your PCs and laptops, and backup on schedule!
Since the guidelines themselves aren't enumerated in TFA, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that "unremoveable software installed without your permission that modifies the way your computer works and spies on you is bad if it's installed by a corporation with a net income of less than nine figures, but it's ok if it's installed by a corporation with a net income of nine figures or more, because they know more about your computer than you do, they know what's best for their customers, and they need to protect their 1920's-style business model."
My main desktop system stores programs, operating systems, and swap space on two 72GB Raptors in a RAID-0 array. Windows XP installed in 12 minutes, MS Office 2K3 installed so fast I throught the installer had crashed.
RAID-0 Raptors do indeed rock.
No, I do not store any user data whatsoever on this array or this machine for that matter (it's on a 1TB RAID-5 array on my server).
Oh come on, he happens to make this statement on the very day the DVD is set to be released? Sounds like a marketing gimmick to me... If the DVD sales are amazing - and they might be, considering the cult status of the show - he can then announce a miraculous comeback.
Personally, I liked the show, I really liked the movie, and I can see why both failed in the financial sense (bad marketing for both, episodes out of order and plot development much too slow in the show).
I sense a great disturbance in the electorate... as if millions of voices cried out in... No wait, I'm confusing that with millions of voices not giving a rat's ass. See ya, Diebold.
Yeah, and I'm sure their opinion is 100% pure and unbisased. This could very well be a ploy to pressure Apple into complying. Also, even if it is true, Steve Jobs will send them packing for pre-announcing it.
* Asia Pacific and Australia www.au.ioccc.org - Sydney, Australia (34 0' S 151 0' E) * www.es.ioccc.org - Madrid, Spain (40 25' N 3 41' W)
* North America www0.us.ioccc.org - Sunnyvale California, US (37 22' N 122 02' W)
* www1.us.ioccc.org - Saint Paul, Minnesota US (44 57' N 93 06' W)
Interesting that they show the meatspace coordinates of the servers, but which major ISPs they're directly and / or closely connected to would be far more useful.
Slashdot doesn't need a science editor. All of the science you need can be found in the Bible. Now excuse us, we need to get to our Flat Earth Society Meeting.
Umm... most liberal? You are talking about the Democratic Party in the United States, right? Next you'll be telling me that the Republicans are practicing conservative fiscal policy... you know, small government, less spending, etc...
Thank you. It always floors me when I look at how emotional people get over one party or the other. If people would pay more attention to their actions than their rhetoric (especially over a period of time greater than a decade), they'd find they're disturbingly similar.
Myself, I vote for politicians (while holding my nose), not for parties.
MS isn't inherenty bad. They have just made more mistakes than others, but that can change. Did you ever stop to think that they might just want to do something right?
People who stay in abusive relationships all sound exactly alike...
I think you mean this jokingly and are being moderated as such, but I've known people in abusive relationships and you are dead on.
"If they think they can rebuid NOLA and the other towns hit hard by hurricanes in the gulf for only $62.5 billion...
Bzzzt. Wrong. He said that they've approved US$62.5B for the Gulf States for right now, to get things started. They don't know how much it's going to cost. People have been throwing the US$250B for NOLA number around but he says they're not getting that much (I've seen some critical analysis of that and it's actually funny - the number, not the situation). He doesn't want to raise taxes because he thinks it's bad for the economy.
Sounds like valid opinion to me - it's perfectly fine to disagree with it, but it's not so far out as to be insane or require a pee test. I'd imagine that the reason he doesn't have feedback is because a bunch of people would misread (either accidentally or deliberately) what he wrote and post a bunch of nonsense like what you started your post with. It'd be a shame if the "nasty liberals" you mention go around trolling sites misrepresenting him and discourage this sort of thing.
I've seen the problem described as "Teh US h4xx0r administration can cut off a country from the rest of the Internet". Pray tell, how? Block a range of IPs from making DNS requests? All it takes is one server in a neutral country to forward / cache those requests. If this did happen, you'd likely have about a million sysadmins jump to the task.
Like many political problems, the description is a lie. These countries want to be able to control the Internet (at least within their borders) themselves. They want to engage in suppression of free speech, and create impediments to global commerce. You can love or hate the US and the current administration, but over the last two-plus centuries, pray tell what other major country has done more to promote free speech? If you had to trust one other country or organization in this matter, which one would it be? The UN, where every crackpot dictator and totalitarian asshole is given a voice alongside the democratically elected crackpots and assholes? The EU, which doesn't even have a constitution yet? Russia? China? Iran? Yeah, right!
Yes, in theory, no one organization should control DNS and we should all join hands around the campfire and sing 'Kumbaya', but the real world is a rather fucked up place, and the US is probably the least of all evils in this case.
So perhaps a good way to eliminate some forms of anxiousness is to stop consuming caffeine.
Try not to be anxious about the hordes of Slashdotters now converging on your location with torches and pitchforks.
In all serousness, though, I eliminated caffeine from my diet for several years (I have an occasional bit now and then these days) and I felt much better physically and mentally afterwards.
What planet did you just get in from? Rambus is still very much alive and well and licensing technology. I would say that they deserved an ignomius death for their bullshit tactics with JDEC, but wishing don't make it so...
I can see Blackberry and Microsoft and Palm all forming a coalition to sue NTP into oblivion, since presumably the palm treo and even the smart phones made by motorola and others violate some aspects of NTPs patents, which sound overly broad.
On what grounds? Having a patent upheld by various courts hardly ranks as tortious behaviour. They would have to prove that NTP damaged them in some significant manner through illegal activity or breach of contract. Fat chance of that.
It's obvious the US patent system is broken.
Unless you're an entity with the ability to spam the patent system. The system of granting patents is thoroughly screwed up right now (lack of resources to properly review applications), which favors this unethical but entirely legal behavior. So what we need to do is fix the approval system. What we're getting in the way of 'reform' - 'first to file', rather than 'first to invent' is going to encourage the current spamming problem to an even greater degree and remove incentives for inventors with fewer resources to file patents. In other words, we'll get Microsoft's definition of 'Freedom to innovate'.
I get the feeling the whole screen-scratch thing is being propagated by a small but vocal (hello, Apple customers) community. My fiancee has had hers for a few weeks now, and no problems whatsoever. Of course, she keeps it in a case when it's in her purse, and doesn't rub sharp / abrasive objects against it.
That is, if you treat it as if it were small and somewhat fragile (duh!), you don't seem to have problems.
I don't know how he did it, but it was a hell of a brilliant move - establish a 'brand' that's your own name, so as you travel from company to company you can always keep your brand...
Slashdot Mirror
One of the major potential benefits of using class frameworks and object-oriented programming is to free code from heavy dependencies on underlying infrastructure through abstraction. And yes, I know it's not mandatory or anything, but the potential is staring you in the face and so it's silly not to take advantage of it. With .NET (and MFC, etc before it), Microsoft can't do too good of a job of this because to do so would take you off the Windows / Office / Servers / Visual Studio upgrade treadmill, from which they derive their income. There are plenty of libraries and frameworks out there that will allow you to build for Win9x (still!), NT/XP/Vista/2Kx/.net, OSX, Linux, etc. that offer exceptional stability between versions.
Yes, Microsoft has some decent tools out there (Visual Studio has come a long way since the first version), but their behavior here has been consistent for the two decades or so that Windows has been out - you will wind up doing some significant porting and testing between versions of their tools, because compatibility between versions is not a priority for them. Selling you upgrades it the priority. Adding value is not a priority - they'll give just enough additional value between versions to make enough people jump, thereby forcing even more people to jump to maintain compatibility with the first set. It's an endless treadmill. If you (or your company) chooses to spend the immense amount of time and money to run on this treadmill, that's perfectly fine with me. I'll just sit over here accomplishing far more per dollar of CapEx and per man-hour.
This case will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court, where its chances are unspectacular. Cases like this are usually filed in a court that the filing party knows or strongly suspects will be sympathetic to their claim - a practice known as "judge shopping". I would be absolutely shocked if this suit lost in the first round.
Figure out what your data's work, come up with a budget for protecting it, and go from there. Without a reasonable budget, nobody can intelligently recommend specific solutions.
For myself, I'm using a VIA Epia motherboard (quiet, extremely low power consumption) with an Areca 4-channel SATA RAID controller w/ four Seagate 7200.9 250MB Drives in an hot-swap enclosure with extra cooling - configured in a RAID-5 array (all of my data), and two WD 160 GB drives on the IDE channels in a RAID-1 configuration (OS, programs). It's running Fedora Core 4 and SAMBA (and a bunch of other stuff). The performace is reasonable - I can saturate a 100Mbit LAN connection, which is all I really care about.
For off-line backup, I use Mitsui Archive Gold DVD-R disks - supposedly they're good for 300 years. I'll believe this 300 years from now if my discs still work, but it's the best available right now. I'd love to hear some feedback from people with more knowledge than myself in this area.
The most important thing - discipline. Store important stuff on the array, use rsync or whatever to synchronize with your PCs and laptops, and backup on schedule!
Since the guidelines themselves aren't enumerated in TFA, I'm going to hazard a guess and say that "unremoveable software installed without your permission that modifies the way your computer works and spies on you is bad if it's installed by a corporation with a net income of less than nine figures, but it's ok if it's installed by a corporation with a net income of nine figures or more, because they know more about your computer than you do, they know what's best for their customers, and they need to protect their 1920's-style business model."
My main desktop system stores programs, operating systems, and swap space on two 72GB Raptors in a RAID-0 array. Windows XP installed in 12 minutes, MS Office 2K3 installed so fast I throught the installer had crashed.
RAID-0 Raptors do indeed rock.
No, I do not store any user data whatsoever on this array or this machine for that matter (it's on a 1TB RAID-5 array on my server).
Oh come on, he happens to make this statement on the very day the DVD is set to be released? Sounds like a marketing gimmick to me... If the DVD sales are amazing - and they might be, considering the cult status of the show - he can then announce a miraculous comeback.
Personally, I liked the show, I really liked the movie, and I can see why both failed in the financial sense (bad marketing for both, episodes out of order and plot development much too slow in the show).
When the elections board voted on certifications, they used Diebold machines to tabulate...
I sense a great disturbance in the electorate... as if millions of voices cried out in... No wait, I'm confusing that with millions of voices not giving a rat's ass. See ya, Diebold.
Yeah, and I'm sure their opinion is 100% pure and unbisased. This could very well be a ploy to pressure Apple into complying. Also, even if it is true, Steve Jobs will send them packing for pre-announcing it.
Slashdot doesn't need a science editor. All of the science you need can be found in the Bible. Now excuse us, we need to get to our Flat Earth Society Meeting.
Sincerely,
The State of Kansas Board of Education.
PS: You're all going to burn! Burn, I tell you!!!
Myself, I vote for politicians (while holding my nose), not for parties.
Sounds like valid opinion to me - it's perfectly fine to disagree with it, but it's not so far out as to be insane or require a pee test. I'd imagine that the reason he doesn't have feedback is because a bunch of people would misread (either accidentally or deliberately) what he wrote and post a bunch of nonsense like what you started your post with. It'd be a shame if the "nasty liberals" you mention go around trolling sites misrepresenting him and discourage this sort of thing.
I've seen the problem described as "Teh US h4xx0r administration can cut off a country from the rest of the Internet". Pray tell, how? Block a range of IPs from making DNS requests? All it takes is one server in a neutral country to forward / cache those requests. If this did happen, you'd likely have about a million sysadmins jump to the task.
Like many political problems, the description is a lie. These countries want to be able to control the Internet (at least within their borders) themselves. They want to engage in suppression of free speech, and create impediments to global commerce. You can love or hate the US and the current administration, but over the last two-plus centuries, pray tell what other major country has done more to promote free speech? If you had to trust one other country or organization in this matter, which one would it be? The UN, where every crackpot dictator and totalitarian asshole is given a voice alongside the democratically elected crackpots and assholes? The EU, which doesn't even have a constitution yet? Russia? China? Iran? Yeah, right!
Yes, in theory, no one organization should control DNS and we should all join hands around the campfire and sing 'Kumbaya', but the real world is a rather fucked up place, and the US is probably the least of all evils in this case.
In all serousness, though, I eliminated caffeine from my diet for several years (I have an occasional bit now and then these days) and I felt much better physically and mentally afterwards.
On what grounds? Having a patent upheld by various courts hardly ranks as tortious behaviour. They would have to prove that NTP damaged them in some significant manner through illegal activity or breach of contract. Fat chance of that. Unless you're an entity with the ability to spam the patent system. The system of granting patents is thoroughly screwed up right now (lack of resources to properly review applications), which favors this unethical but entirely legal behavior. So what we need to do is fix the approval system. What we're getting in the way of 'reform' - 'first to file', rather than 'first to invent' is going to encourage the current spamming problem to an even greater degree and remove incentives for inventors with fewer resources to file patents. In other words, we'll get Microsoft's definition of 'Freedom to innovate'.
I get the feeling the whole screen-scratch thing is being propagated by a small but vocal (hello, Apple customers) community. My fiancee has had hers for a few weeks now, and no problems whatsoever. Of course, she keeps it in a case when it's in her purse, and doesn't rub sharp / abrasive objects against it.
That is, if you treat it as if it were small and somewhat fragile (duh!), you don't seem to have problems.
I don't know how he did it, but it was a hell of a brilliant move - establish a 'brand' that's your own name, so as you travel from company to company you can always keep your brand...
Mandatory Penny Arcade reference.
Excellent Quote!