If you use AdBlock or similar tools chances are that you (like me) didn't click any of the ads back when you did see them. So there is no loss in revenue for the companies (indeed one could argue that they save bandwidth, but I won't go there).
As others mentioned there are some ads that are genuinely intersting (for new products that one didn't know before) but those are too seldom for me, so i block each possible kind of ads (Web, Snailmail,...).
Maybe a server crashing during a load test ist not 'failure' after all?
Sometimes a load test is not asking "Does our server crash when it's slashdotted?" (as this is a rather boring question, with the answer beeing yes or no), but "What part of our server is mostly stressed by a serious slashdotting and which part(s) do we need to enhance/replace to make it more stable?".
The latter question has quite a lot of possible interesting answers ranging from hardware (the new IBM DeathStar failed!) via software (our ftp-servers have a fixed maximum of 5 connections) to wet-ware (our sysadmin was shocked by the amount of traffic, had a heart-attack and stumbled over the power cable).
When someone is serious about this question than a test that looks like a failure to someone else can be a huge success.
Remember: Noone ever told her it was illegal. The Secret Service had to investigate it because someone in the FBI thought (after a tip off from a fellow LJer) that this might be a threat. They checked that, found that it's not a threat and left. No legal humble-jumble involved.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the USA and strongly dislike the current way of politics there but can still understand that reaction by an agency that only exists to protect the president (and vice-president, and president-elected and what-not).
That's pretty much the same idea that was realized in each high-level language that is less than 10 years old (and several that are older):
1) Compile to some intermediate form (byte code or whatever you like to call it) 2a) Use an interpreter to run the result 2b) Compile the result to native code 3) Profit!
(Another added benefit is that the user doesn't have to care wether 2a or 2b is choosen, he won't see any difference apart from the speed-increase you'll most likely get from choosing 2b).
I don't think tccboot is in any way good for cross-platform stuff. If I wanted cross-platform I would have written in a high-level language that was designed to be cross-platform (Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Perl, Brainfuck... pick your poison).
Don't misunderstand me: tccboot is cool and it has a quite high geek value, but it's not The Next Big Thing!
xscreensaver has a very nice emulation for all kind of.sod (or ?sod for you DOS guys out there). It also includes NT and Win9x. And it can very easily be set up to pop up every 15 minutes. So this should not be a challange. ('though I'd _not_ turn off the option to see crash-screens of other OS', 'cause they often look much better, than these boring BSODs).
Well, it was probably a rethoric question, but the latest intel-c-compiler can indeed compile the linux-kernel. And I think that's a great engineering sucess, when you consider how many gcc-extension linux (yeah, I talk only of the kernel now) uses.
Re:Online Muds: Free and Non-commercial
on
Layoffs at WotC
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
MUDs are great, but they are different from Pen & Paper roleplaying games. Of course there are some MUDs (or MOOs, or M**s) that do focus on role-playing, many of them only focus on roll-playing (still lot's of fun, but different).
Personally I've found that sometimes playing a classic Pen & Paper Roleplaying game on IRC is a great, especially if the genre fits (Shadowrun comes to my mind). It allows the GM (or DM or whatever you call it) levels of seperations of the players that are much harder to achieve on the table. For example you can always pass little notes with information only one player knows around, but the note-passing alone will give the other players hints. On IRC, you just open a private channel and write whatever you want, there's more ways for the GM to manipulate the players in the interest of the story. One funny trick is to open private channels to each player and tell each of them that they see something special, and tell each player the same, then look how long it takes them to share this knowledge with each other, this allone can give you great insights into your group.
Exactly, most not-so-popular systems ( = everything, that's not D20) nowaday don't use levels. Even DSA (the most widely played RPG in Germany) which allways had... well, let's say beginners-friendly rules and settings stopped using levels in it's most current version (levels still exist, but they have almost no practical effect). Also level-less systems usually allow you much broader development of a character (but also much more specialication, which sometimes results in pure power-gaming).
Mozilla is a single application suite; it is small compared to either KDE or Gnome.
True, but this is only more reason to use advanced release management and QA tools. I'm not sure if KDE or Gnome has continuous builds or something, but I doubt it (at least I've never seen them) and in this respect it's true that they can learn a lot from Mozilla (or even use some of their code;-).
Well a simple check on the script generating the frontpage (who uses static pages? *g*) to take down the site the first time someone visits it with the referer beeing something on http://slashdot.org/.
Would be easier on his ressources and leave us some more bandwidth to/. other sites.
Of course you can't do any real secret strings, but those aren't really possible with binaries as well. But if you use "Re" + "dH" + "at" in your code instead of "RedHat" (or whatever your language of choice uses for string concatenation) it will not be found by joe coder (or sed). And for his hypothetical situation to happen the string doesn't have to be unfindable, but only unfound.
I'd give you a +1 Insightful if I wouldn't reply now;-)
I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I think you miss one point.
I have yet to meet a serious java developer who has any interest in.NET
In my opinion every serious Java developer should have some interest in.NET. (wow,.NET at the end of a sentence looks... stupid) At least so much as to take a closer look at it, 'cause it's the one Java-Competitor that has the most similarities (I'm sure there are some that are closer to java, but they don't have the same kind of PR-department working for them). This alone is reason enough to have some interest in in Java. Additionally when you'll be told by your boss that you'll have to use.NET 'cause it's so cool and you tell him "But Java is so much better!" you should at least be able to tell him why it is better (No, "because Java is not a Microsoft-Product" will definitely not work)
It seems to me that.NET took pretty much every idea from Java (not to say that Java invented it, but they used it) and added some little things. I took a closer look at.NET (especially C#), 'cause I wanted to know what I won't use (I avoid Microsoft-Products, but I also avoid flaming them without arguments). C# is basically Java with some syntactical sugar and the unsafe keyword. That means that you can do pretty much anything you can do in Java in.NET as well (except for having real Platform independence before 2008).
I love Mozilla and use it exclusively at work, but I still have to say, that it's somewhat bloated (it got much better, but it's still bad). This bloat is not bad code or lazy programmers, but by design. A Product that works exactly the same on all platform has to be either very small or bloated. Mozilla has choosen to go the second way. They build an entire Toolkit with an XML-UI-Description language. This Toolkit works on Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS (Classic), Mac OS X, HP-UX, FreeBSD, QNX, BeOS and <insert-your-favourite-OS-here-except-if-it-is- CP/M>. This is very, very hard to do in a small & non-bloated way. Luckily I have a sufficiently fast PC to be able to use it nevertheless, the only time the Mozilla-Bloat still hits me is after long periods of not using Mozilla (see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76831 for details).
Why is it ok to not abide by a MS EULA, but not ok to not abide by a FSF EULA?
It's been mentioned before: The funny thing about the GNU GPL is that it doesn't take away any rights/freedoms but only grants them. So if you don't agree with the GPL you may still use the software, but you must not modify the code or redistribute it (which is kind of "the default license"). IANAL, thats the way I think it works and all.
Is java an idea that never lived up to its hype of being cross-platform or do most web designers need a serious lesson in programming?
Java did live up to the hype, but no on the desktop 'though. Java is very much alive on the server side. Client side java pretty much never existed on the big scale ('though there are some very good client side java programms). Applets were killed by old and incompatible implementations of the JVM (not only Microsofts, but others as well). The Problem is/was that most Browsers shipped with a Version 1.1 JDK, which is just plain old and outdated. Microsoft never even shipped anything more up to date. You can use plugins to use more up-to-date versions of Java, but that's quite some trouble. And most Applets are just used as a flash-replacement and for this it really isn't worth to download the Plugin.
RMS argued that the bit about "all your modifications are belong to us" was really denying you the rights he finds important. I beg to differ.
That's not his critique. What he said is that they don't grant you unlimited rights on the code, but require you to grant unlimitied rights on your modification. That's quite a difference. He even mentiones that "... this does not by itself disqualify the license as a free software license...".
vim is all about those wierd keystrokes you learn that funnily enough grow on you and multiply your productivity.
Of course, but the real beauty of KVim is the KPart. You can use the kvim kpart to edit any textfile in konqueror without opening another terminal and/or window. This is great for hybrid users who love the CLI/Shell but use konqueror or any other file manager every now and then. I usually use graphical file managers primarily for browsing (the local filesystem, not the web) and not for doing real work (like moving files around and editing text files). The KVim kpart might change this a bit.
Somehow all this "Mozilla 1.0 will be shipped Real Soon Now (tm)" articles remind me of some guy running around with an "The End Is Near!"-sign, but I fail to find an analogy for all the "All your AOL browsers are belong to us!" comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds a bit like the painstation. I've had the chance to play with that thing once and it is kind of fun ... for 5 minutes at last.
If you use AdBlock or similar tools chances are that you (like me) didn't click any of the ads back when you did see them. So there is no loss in revenue for the companies (indeed one could argue that they save bandwidth, but I won't go there).
...).
As others mentioned there are some ads that are genuinely intersting (for new products that one didn't know before) but those are too seldom for me, so i block each possible kind of ads (Web, Snailmail,
... that should be a good start.
Maybe a server crashing during a load test ist not 'failure' after all?
Sometimes a load test is not asking "Does our server crash when it's slashdotted?" (as this is a rather boring question, with the answer beeing yes or no), but "What part of our server is mostly stressed by a serious slashdotting and which part(s) do we need to enhance/replace to make it more stable?".
The latter question has quite a lot of possible interesting answers ranging from hardware (the new IBM DeathStar failed!) via software (our ftp-servers have a fixed maximum of 5 connections) to wet-ware (our sysadmin was shocked by the amount of traffic, had a heart-attack and stumbled over the power cable).
When someone is serious about this question than a test that looks like a failure to someone else can be a huge success.
Remember: Noone ever told her it was illegal. The Secret Service had to investigate it because someone in the FBI thought (after a tip off from a fellow LJer) that this might be a threat. They checked that, found that it's not a threat and left. No legal humble-jumble involved.
Disclaimer: I'm not from the USA and strongly dislike the current way of politics there but can still understand that reaction by an agency that only exists to protect the president (and vice-president, and president-elected and what-not).
That's pretty much the same idea that was realized in each high-level language that is less than 10 years old (and several that are older):
... pick your poison).
1) Compile to some intermediate form (byte code or whatever you like to call it)
2a) Use an interpreter to run the result
2b) Compile the result to native code
3) Profit!
(Another added benefit is that the user doesn't have to care wether 2a or 2b is choosen, he won't see any difference apart from the speed-increase you'll most likely get from choosing 2b).
I don't think tccboot is in any way good for cross-platform stuff. If I wanted cross-platform I would have written in a high-level language that was designed to be cross-platform (Python, Ruby, Java, C#, Perl, Brainfuck
Don't misunderstand me: tccboot is cool and it has a quite high geek value, but it's not The Next Big Thing!
D'Oh! And I was just planning to get this t-shirt!
xscreensaver has a very nice emulation for all kind of .sod (or ?sod for you DOS guys out there). It also includes NT and Win9x. And it can very easily be set up to pop up every 15 minutes. So this should not be a challange. ('though I'd _not_ turn off the option to see crash-screens of other OS', 'cause they often look much better, than these boring BSODs).
Well, it was probably a rethoric question, but the latest intel-c-compiler can indeed compile the linux-kernel. And I think that's a great engineering sucess, when you consider how many gcc-extension linux (yeah, I talk only of the kernel now) uses.
MUDs are great, but they are different from Pen & Paper roleplaying games. Of course there are some MUDs (or MOOs, or M**s) that do focus on role-playing, many of them only focus on roll-playing (still lot's of fun, but different).
Personally I've found that sometimes playing a classic Pen & Paper Roleplaying game on IRC is a great, especially if the genre fits (Shadowrun comes to my mind). It allows the GM (or DM or whatever you call it) levels of seperations of the players that are much harder to achieve on the table. For example you can always pass little notes with information only one player knows around, but the note-passing alone will give the other players hints. On IRC, you just open a private channel and write whatever you want, there's more ways for the GM to manipulate the players in the interest of the story. One funny trick is to open private channels to each player and tell each of them that they see something special, and tell each player the same, then look how long it takes them to share this knowledge with each other, this allone can give you great insights into your group.
Exactly, most not-so-popular systems ( = everything, that's not D20) nowaday don't use levels. Even DSA (the most widely played RPG in Germany) which allways had ... well, let's say beginners-friendly rules and settings stopped using levels in it's most current version (levels still exist, but they have almost no practical effect). Also level-less systems usually allow you much broader development of a character (but also much more specialication, which sometimes results in pure power-gaming).
True, but this is only more reason to use advanced release management and QA tools. I'm not sure if KDE or Gnome has continuous builds or something, but I doubt it (at least I've never seen them) and in this respect it's true that they can learn a lot from Mozilla (or even use some of their code ;-).
Well a simple check on the script generating the frontpage (who uses static pages? *g*) to take down the site the first time someone visits it with the referer beeing something on http://slashdot.org/.
/. other sites.
Would be easier on his ressources and leave us some more bandwidth to
Of course you can't do any real secret strings, but those aren't really possible with binaries as well. But if you use "Re" + "dH" + "at" in your code instead of "RedHat" (or whatever your language of choice uses for string concatenation) it will not be found by joe coder (or sed). And for his hypothetical situation to happen the string doesn't have to be unfindable, but only unfound.
I'd give you a +1 Insightful if I wouldn't reply now ;-)
I pretty much agree with everything you say, but I think you miss one point.
In my opinion every serious Java developer should have some interest in .NET. (wow, .NET at the end of a sentence looks ... stupid) At least so much as to take a closer look at it, 'cause it's the one Java-Competitor that has the most similarities (I'm sure there are some that are closer to java, but they don't have the same kind of PR-department working for them). This alone is reason enough to have some interest in in Java. Additionally when you'll be told by your boss that you'll have to use .NET 'cause it's so cool and you tell him "But Java is so much better!" you should at least be able to tell him why it is better (No, "because Java is not a Microsoft-Product" will definitely not work)
It seems to me that .NET took pretty much every idea from Java (not to say that Java invented it, but they used it) and added some little things. I took a closer look at .NET (especially C#), 'cause I wanted to know what I won't use (I avoid Microsoft-Products, but I also avoid flaming them without arguments). C# is basically Java with some syntactical sugar and the unsafe keyword. That means that you can do pretty much anything you can do in Java in .NET as well (except for having real Platform independence before 2008).
I love Mozilla and use it exclusively at work, but I still have to say, that it's somewhat bloated (it got much better, but it's still bad). This bloat is not bad code or lazy programmers, but by design. A Product that works exactly the same on all platform has to be either very small or bloated. Mozilla has choosen to go the second way. They build an entire Toolkit with an XML-UI-Description language. This Toolkit works on Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS (Classic), Mac OS X, HP-UX, FreeBSD, QNX, BeOS and <insert-your-favourite-OS-here-except-if-it-is- CP/M>. This is very, very hard to do in a small & non-bloated way. Luckily I have a sufficiently fast PC to be able to use it nevertheless, the only time the Mozilla-Bloat still hits me is after long periods of not using Mozilla (see http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76831 for details).
So we just have to bribe the right people to make Bart write the DeCSS source code or another interesting message on the blackboard during the intro.
It's been mentioned before: The funny thing about the GNU GPL is that it doesn't take away any rights/freedoms but only grants them. So if you don't agree with the GPL you may still use the software, but you must not modify the code or redistribute it (which is kind of "the default license"). IANAL, thats the way I think it works and all.
Sorry to disappoint you, but most of the time they are not done in flash, but just simple links in the surrounding HTML.
Java did live up to the hype, but no on the desktop 'though. Java is very much alive on the server side. Client side java pretty much never existed on the big scale ('though there are some very good client side java programms). Applets were killed by old and incompatible implementations of the JVM (not only Microsofts, but others as well). The Problem is/was that most Browsers shipped with a Version 1.1 JDK, which is just plain old and outdated. Microsoft never even shipped anything more up to date. You can use plugins to use more up-to-date versions of Java, but that's quite some trouble. And most Applets are just used as a flash-replacement and for this it really isn't worth to download the Plugin.
I don't know which audience they are targetting, but they definitely got me, at least with the new PowerBook ... *drool*
That's not his critique. What he said is that they don't grant you unlimited rights on the code, but require you to grant unlimitied rights on your modification. That's quite a difference. He even mentiones that "... this does not by itself disqualify the license as a free software license ...".
But that was different! The ones who your founding fathers fought had a different oppinion, therefore they were bad!
Of course, but the real beauty of KVim is the KPart. You can use the kvim kpart to edit any textfile in konqueror without opening another terminal and/or window. This is great for hybrid users who love the CLI/Shell but use konqueror or any other file manager every now and then. I usually use graphical file managers primarily for browsing (the local filesystem, not the web) and not for doing real work (like moving files around and editing text files). The KVim kpart might change this a bit.
Somehow all this "Mozilla 1.0 will be shipped Real Soon Now (tm)" articles remind me of some guy running around with an "The End Is Near!"-sign, but I fail to find an analogy for all the "All your AOL browsers are belong to us!" comments.