GPL'ed code can be used in commercial apps, but then you have to GPL those apps. Most companies would rather pay you to reinvent the wheel than GPL the code they paid you good money to write. Also, people who like GPL'ed stuff hate paying for it. If you released a GPL commercial office suite, you'd have to release the code as well, and other people would just fill in the rest and develop a free-as-in-beer version with the exact same features and functionality as your product. Thus making your product worthless. So in other words, the GPL community makes corporations avoid it like the plague.
Yeah, IMO gaming sites bitch way too much about response time when it's barely noticible. I used to play a LOT of counterstrike and I have a ViewSonic VX900 (mid-high end 19" LCD; probably about a year old.) It's only got a 25ms response time but I can't notice any motion blur. At all. I'd say go for the LCD that looks best, not the one that gaming sites say has the best response time. We all know gaming sites are obsessed with tech specs and benchmarks as opposed to real world performance anyway. Any LCD you buy is going to look a hundred times better than any CRT you buy anyway. I can't even use my old 21" CRT as a second monitor, it looks so bad in comparison to the beauty that is this 19" LCD. Anyway, if you're looking for an LCD, just get one with the best features and the resolution you want. It's still gonna look WAY better than your CRT, and you'll be happy.
Wow, posts this insulting are usually modded down as trolls or flamebait. The only difference is that this one is true. Guess that really says something about this whole thing;)
You act like EMP is this mythical super technology. Actually, it's really simple. All you do is build a really big electromagnet, wire it up to a bunch of really big capacitors, then fire it off and watch as every electronic device nearby is destroyed. It's pretty easy to shield against EMP though; indeed, pretty much all of our military vehicles are already EMP shielded. I'm pretty sure US military R&D have already thought of this, because they're really not dumb.
With SSH support, she would have no reason to actually be in the office, and could work from the middle of a cafe or (more often) traffic.
And when she runs into me and I throw her cellphone/pda/whatever ubergadget into a river, she better be ready to shell out $300 for a new one and however much it costs to fix my car. The last thing we need are people using ssh during traffic, cell phones are enough of a problem. Use it in a cafe, fine, but in traffic? People have been shot for less here (seriously, though this is Texas...) While it may be convenient for you, it sucks for the 100,000 other people who have to share the road with you. Just say no.
Seriously though, good schools can have bad departments. If your school didn't really give a crap about their CS department, but had world-class physics and math departments, you can still get shitty teachers. I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay $40,000 a year to go to Harvard and get an EE degree.
...and make no money in the process. Unfortunately, the corporate world is the only way to make money and advance. Even if you're a well skilled tech guy, you've gotta go to these sort of training seminars in order to be considered for promotion. Or you can work for a mom-and-pop place and worry about your paycheck bouncing twice a month (and still have no real chance for upward movement.) Unfortunately, learning how to think, be smarter, etc does not pay well. Just ask a college professor:)
Yes, but any security professional worth his salt knows how to hack. You have to know how to break the system in order to fix it. This includes probing your own code for holes; Microsoft could use people like this to just sit there and pick away at IIS (or some such server software) and find the holes before the software is released. This way nobody else finds them first. Of course, the potential for abuse is high, especially among high school kids, who have no fear of breaking the law, so I don't know that this is the appropriate place to do it. You've got to make sure the students are mature enough to handle the material before you teach it to them.
(And before you slashdot youngins chime in, yes, you may be ethical, but I doubt most of your classmates would be. And it's oh so tempting for a geek to show off how he can hack stuff because other people think it's cool..)
I really couldn't put this any better myself. Get the fuck out of the dorm room and go have some FUN, this is the best opportunity in your life to make friends, find a hobby you like, something. I rarely play computer games anymore. Console games are generally okay because those can be a hell of a lot of fun with friends, and most college guys, geeks or not, have a PS2 or an XBox (sports games are HUGE in college.) People in real life are way more interesting and enriching to your life than some dork you met on the internet playing UT2k3.
This is why an iBook is a perfect college laptop. It runs a very pretty, very advanced OS that has all the unix stuff you'll need for class coupled with a great development environment all ready to go. And Mac OS X doesn't run that many new, hot games. Not to mention the fact that you look way cooler sitting in a coffee shop playing on an iBook or PowerBook than you do with some boring old Thinkpad.
I spent my first year of college trying to be the perfect geek and I was miserable. One of the problems with CS is the misconception that people have that if you want to work in the tech industry, you need a CS degree. The reality is that if you want to program, you need a CS degree, anything else, well, any degree will do and job experience is more important anyway. I hate programming, but I'll probably work with computers once I get out of college and I'm a philosophy major now.
CS is a whole lot of work for a boring desk job when you get out (that doesn't even pay very well anymore) and it'll eat up your social time in a big way. And yes, social time IS important, a good network of friends and social outlets is as important to living a happy life as doing well in school, if not moreso. Just remember you can still get a good job in the computer industry even if you're not a CS major. Being happy is the most important thing, and if you'd be happier as an auto mechanic than a programmer, be an auto mechanic.
AOL's higher ups have enough clue to realize this wouldn't be used for much wide-scale P2P sharing; indeed, it's limited to 50 users so something like BitTorrent is still much better suited to piracy. Rather, AOL probably saw WASTE as a competitive edge, as it was developed so that employees working on projects at different AOL field offices could collaborate without having to worry if one of AOL's competitors (or their boss) was snooping. If it's GPLed, all of AOL's competitors get the same advantage, as AOL can't snoop on their conversations, though more than likely they're using secure VPNs or direct fiber links anyway.
So basically, I don't think this was a case of AOL being worried about piracy, this was a case of AOL wanting to protect their company secret. You really can't blame them either way, but regardless, it's too late. WASTE will continue to be developed just like Gnutella was, and Open Source developers will probably try and reverse engineer it and write their own version just to be safe and in the clear with respect to copyrights. But this is just speculation, I might be wrong.
Do you honestly think he would reply to such a question? He would more than likely deny the incident ever happened, get pissed off at slashdot readers, and generally get nowhere. Besides, bringing up every mistake this guy has made in the past gets nobody anywhere. I personally am glad slashdot didn't post said question. This is a tech site, not a gossip column. To post such a question would be irresponsible, pointless and plain wrong. Just because it's scandalous doesn't mean anyone cares.
It's usually someone who works at the theater who camcords the movie and puts it on the net. There's more space in the booth, you can do it easier without people noticing, plus you get the direct sound feed from the projector. You need a tripod to get a decent cam of a movie anyway, someone in a crowded theater is gonna knock it over. This won't change anything, the groups who dump these movies onto the net are smart, they'll figure something else out.
Of course, IANAL as well (trying to get into law school tho,) but if end users are sued, they might be able to sue the company that sold them the patent for fraud if they did it knowingly (misrepresenting a patented technology as unpatented) or negligence if not. Of course, this may have been tried before and failed, so who knows.
Yes, except all you really have to do is creat 10 GB of zeroed files, which also makes DC annoying, because people will have shit like "MATRIX REVOLUTIONS OMG.AVI" and it's a 700 meg file that contains nothing but zeros (or/dev/random.) Download a couple of these thinking they're legit and you'll realize how fucking worthless DC is.
So basically, IBM would be the only entity they could really sue. If I buy a product that violates a patent, I'm not responsible for violating the patent, the company who sold it to me is. Now there is a little sticky issue about who "owns" Linux, but if IBM "sold" (in this case committed the code to the Linux kernel) the code into the kernel then those duped by them should not be liable. Otherwise this leads to relatively easy bait-and-switch patent abuse. File a patent, start a dummy company, start giving the patented technology away, then sue everyone who took it.
Or something more modern. Anything by Chuck Palahniuk is pretty good. He was the author of Fight Club, which is a good read, but short. Survivor was also excellent. Hell, I don't think he's written a bad book. The only real problem with his writing is that it all kinda sounds the same, but he really is an incredible writer. If you liked the movie Fight Club, you probably shouldn't bother with the book, but you'd be insane not to check out some of Palahniuk's other books.
Yeah but sue him where? He can still program cool stuff that interests him from the Netherlands (iirc that's where he's from.) I don't think the Netherlands would be too friendly towards a dumb US patent law case. They'd probably just say "No jurisdiction, do it in the US." In which case it'd be Elcomsoft all over again. Except that nobody likes SCO so they'd probably lose.
Al-Jazeera is owned by the sultan of Bahrain. But that's besides the point, because most Americans think Fox News is silly. They're not reporters, they're rumormongers. It's to give people a "conservative bias" news channel as opposed to a liberal bias one. I don't even consider Fox News a reputable news source, they repeatedly will report rumors as fact in an attempt to "scoop" the other networks and be seen as a real news source. If you fling enough shit, you're bound to hit paydirt sometime.
DVD-R discs have gotten cheap. Like, less than $1 cheap. And the drives are around $200. Anyway sorry for being an asshole, I had a shitty day yesterday and needed to blow off some steam. Regardless, removable media is better for archival because hard drives have high failure rates compared to removables. What's the chance that hard drive is going to work in 5 years? 10 years? The DVD media would be printed in an easily readable format, so if he wants to watch the Sopranos 10 years from now, he doesn't have to go to ancientvideocodecs.com and find a copy of DivX for Windows We Own The World Edition, he can just stick it in a DVD player and watch it.
I realize this:) But phone numbers are front to back, and it wouldn't be too hard to have the.phone root resolve things backwards. Basically, the point is to provide an interface as close to what we have today as possible, because it works and people know it well.
Slashdot Mirror
GPL'ed code can be used in commercial apps, but then you have to GPL those apps. Most companies would rather pay you to reinvent the wheel than GPL the code they paid you good money to write. Also, people who like GPL'ed stuff hate paying for it. If you released a GPL commercial office suite, you'd have to release the code as well, and other people would just fill in the rest and develop a free-as-in-beer version with the exact same features and functionality as your product. Thus making your product worthless. So in other words, the GPL community makes corporations avoid it like the plague.
Yeah, IMO gaming sites bitch way too much about response time when it's barely noticible. I used to play a LOT of counterstrike and I have a ViewSonic VX900 (mid-high end 19" LCD; probably about a year old.) It's only got a 25ms response time but I can't notice any motion blur. At all. I'd say go for the LCD that looks best, not the one that gaming sites say has the best response time. We all know gaming sites are obsessed with tech specs and benchmarks as opposed to real world performance anyway. Any LCD you buy is going to look a hundred times better than any CRT you buy anyway. I can't even use my old 21" CRT as a second monitor, it looks so bad in comparison to the beauty that is this 19" LCD. Anyway, if you're looking for an LCD, just get one with the best features and the resolution you want. It's still gonna look WAY better than your CRT, and you'll be happy.
Wow, posts this insulting are usually modded down as trolls or flamebait. The only difference is that this one is true. Guess that really says something about this whole thing ;)
You act like EMP is this mythical super technology. Actually, it's really simple. All you do is build a really big electromagnet, wire it up to a bunch of really big capacitors, then fire it off and watch as every electronic device nearby is destroyed. It's pretty easy to shield against EMP though; indeed, pretty much all of our military vehicles are already EMP shielded. I'm pretty sure US military R&D have already thought of this, because they're really not dumb.
With SSH support, she would have no reason to actually be in the office, and could work from the middle of a cafe or (more often) traffic.
And when she runs into me and I throw her cellphone/pda/whatever ubergadget into a river, she better be ready to shell out $300 for a new one and however much it costs to fix my car. The last thing we need are people using ssh during traffic, cell phones are enough of a problem. Use it in a cafe, fine, but in traffic? People have been shot for less here (seriously, though this is Texas...) While it may be convenient for you, it sucks for the 100,000 other people who have to share the road with you. Just say no.
Canada blows. :)
Seriously though, good schools can have bad departments. If your school didn't really give a crap about their CS department, but had world-class physics and math departments, you can still get shitty teachers. I sure as hell wouldn't want to pay $40,000 a year to go to Harvard and get an EE degree.
...and make no money in the process. Unfortunately, the corporate world is the only way to make money and advance. Even if you're a well skilled tech guy, you've gotta go to these sort of training seminars in order to be considered for promotion. Or you can work for a mom-and-pop place and worry about your paycheck bouncing twice a month (and still have no real chance for upward movement.) Unfortunately, learning how to think, be smarter, etc does not pay well. Just ask a college professor :)
Welcome to college.
Yes, but any security professional worth his salt knows how to hack. You have to know how to break the system in order to fix it. This includes probing your own code for holes; Microsoft could use people like this to just sit there and pick away at IIS (or some such server software) and find the holes before the software is released. This way nobody else finds them first. Of course, the potential for abuse is high, especially among high school kids, who have no fear of breaking the law, so I don't know that this is the appropriate place to do it. You've got to make sure the students are mature enough to handle the material before you teach it to them.
(And before you slashdot youngins chime in, yes, you may be ethical, but I doubt most of your classmates would be. And it's oh so tempting for a geek to show off how he can hack stuff because other people think it's cool..)
I really couldn't put this any better myself. Get the fuck out of the dorm room and go have some FUN, this is the best opportunity in your life to make friends, find a hobby you like, something. I rarely play computer games anymore. Console games are generally okay because those can be a hell of a lot of fun with friends, and most college guys, geeks or not, have a PS2 or an XBox (sports games are HUGE in college.) People in real life are way more interesting and enriching to your life than some dork you met on the internet playing UT2k3.
This is why an iBook is a perfect college laptop. It runs a very pretty, very advanced OS that has all the unix stuff you'll need for class coupled with a great development environment all ready to go. And Mac OS X doesn't run that many new, hot games. Not to mention the fact that you look way cooler sitting in a coffee shop playing on an iBook or PowerBook than you do with some boring old Thinkpad.
I spent my first year of college trying to be the perfect geek and I was miserable. One of the problems with CS is the misconception that people have that if you want to work in the tech industry, you need a CS degree. The reality is that if you want to program, you need a CS degree, anything else, well, any degree will do and job experience is more important anyway. I hate programming, but I'll probably work with computers once I get out of college and I'm a philosophy major now.
CS is a whole lot of work for a boring desk job when you get out (that doesn't even pay very well anymore) and it'll eat up your social time in a big way. And yes, social time IS important, a good network of friends and social outlets is as important to living a happy life as doing well in school, if not moreso. Just remember you can still get a good job in the computer industry even if you're not a CS major. Being happy is the most important thing, and if you'd be happier as an auto mechanic than a programmer, be an auto mechanic.
AOL's higher ups have enough clue to realize this wouldn't be used for much wide-scale P2P sharing; indeed, it's limited to 50 users so something like BitTorrent is still much better suited to piracy. Rather, AOL probably saw WASTE as a competitive edge, as it was developed so that employees working on projects at different AOL field offices could collaborate without having to worry if one of AOL's competitors (or their boss) was snooping. If it's GPLed, all of AOL's competitors get the same advantage, as AOL can't snoop on their conversations, though more than likely they're using secure VPNs or direct fiber links anyway.
So basically, I don't think this was a case of AOL being worried about piracy, this was a case of AOL wanting to protect their company secret. You really can't blame them either way, but regardless, it's too late. WASTE will continue to be developed just like Gnutella was, and Open Source developers will probably try and reverse engineer it and write their own version just to be safe and in the clear with respect to copyrights. But this is just speculation, I might be wrong.
Do you honestly think he would reply to such a question? He would more than likely deny the incident ever happened, get pissed off at slashdot readers, and generally get nowhere. Besides, bringing up every mistake this guy has made in the past gets nobody anywhere. I personally am glad slashdot didn't post said question. This is a tech site, not a gossip column. To post such a question would be irresponsible, pointless and plain wrong. Just because it's scandalous doesn't mean anyone cares.
It's usually someone who works at the theater who camcords the movie and puts it on the net. There's more space in the booth, you can do it easier without people noticing, plus you get the direct sound feed from the projector. You need a tripod to get a decent cam of a movie anyway, someone in a crowded theater is gonna knock it over. This won't change anything, the groups who dump these movies onto the net are smart, they'll figure something else out.
er, that should read "...sue the company that sold them the patented technology...". Whoops!
Of course, IANAL as well (trying to get into law school tho,) but if end users are sued, they might be able to sue the company that sold them the patent for fraud if they did it knowingly (misrepresenting a patented technology as unpatented) or negligence if not. Of course, this may have been tried before and failed, so who knows.
Yes, except all you really have to do is creat 10 GB of zeroed files, which also makes DC annoying, because people will have shit like "MATRIX REVOLUTIONS OMG.AVI" and it's a 700 meg file that contains nothing but zeros (or /dev/random.) Download a couple of these thinking they're legit and you'll realize how fucking worthless DC is.
Being fucked up on coke and peyote != prophecy
So basically, IBM would be the only entity they could really sue. If I buy a product that violates a patent, I'm not responsible for violating the patent, the company who sold it to me is. Now there is a little sticky issue about who "owns" Linux, but if IBM "sold" (in this case committed the code to the Linux kernel) the code into the kernel then those duped by them should not be liable. Otherwise this leads to relatively easy bait-and-switch patent abuse. File a patent, start a dummy company, start giving the patented technology away, then sue everyone who took it.
Or something more modern. Anything by Chuck Palahniuk is pretty good. He was the author of Fight Club, which is a good read, but short. Survivor was also excellent. Hell, I don't think he's written a bad book. The only real problem with his writing is that it all kinda sounds the same, but he really is an incredible writer. If you liked the movie Fight Club, you probably shouldn't bother with the book, but you'd be insane not to check out some of Palahniuk's other books.
Linus could end up owning SCO.
So you mean he'd lose and owning SCO would be his punishment?
Yeah but sue him where? He can still program cool stuff that interests him from the Netherlands (iirc that's where he's from.) I don't think the Netherlands would be too friendly towards a dumb US patent law case. They'd probably just say "No jurisdiction, do it in the US." In which case it'd be Elcomsoft all over again. Except that nobody likes SCO so they'd probably lose.
Al-Jazeera is owned by the sultan of Bahrain. But that's besides the point, because most Americans think Fox News is silly. They're not reporters, they're rumormongers. It's to give people a "conservative bias" news channel as opposed to a liberal bias one. I don't even consider Fox News a reputable news source, they repeatedly will report rumors as fact in an attempt to "scoop" the other networks and be seen as a real news source. If you fling enough shit, you're bound to hit paydirt sometime.
A pile of dog shit is sexier than some females. Anna Nicole Smith? All I gotta say.
DVD-R discs have gotten cheap. Like, less than $1 cheap. And the drives are around $200. Anyway sorry for being an asshole, I had a shitty day yesterday and needed to blow off some steam. Regardless, removable media is better for archival because hard drives have high failure rates compared to removables. What's the chance that hard drive is going to work in 5 years? 10 years? The DVD media would be printed in an easily readable format, so if he wants to watch the Sopranos 10 years from now, he doesn't have to go to ancientvideocodecs.com and find a copy of DivX for Windows We Own The World Edition, he can just stick it in a DVD player and watch it.
I realize this :) But phone numbers are front to back, and it wouldn't be too hard to have the .phone root resolve things backwards. Basically, the point is to provide an interface as close to what we have today as possible, because it works and people know it well.