I was in a dot-bomb; we bombed out I think not so much because of a really stupid plan, just bad execution. There's an old saying, a class A person will do better with a class B plan than a class B person will do with a class A plan. I'll leave the company info in that we were an advertising dotcom, and we managed to swim around blindly with no direction until the Internet stock bubble burst and we were S.O.L.
Besides that, I hate Powerpoint, on principle alone. Explain stuff to me, or let me see it. We were trying to hire a developer, and while I was talking to the guy, explaining that no, 2600 mag wasn't named for an Atari and cool stuff like Linux on handhelds that he was having the geek hot sweats over, my CnEO (Chief non-executing officer) decides "enough of that, let me show him the Powerpoint slides". You can see the change where this guy realizes he's gonna have a tech-person clueless boss spinning directionless firing off orders from a random buzzword generator. He declined our offer.
I had to have talks with my CEO, try to get him on track sometimes. They had the idea "we're a startup, we don't have to be perfect" and I'm thinking, we have to strive for perfection more cause we have no cushion to fall back on. MS has billions to ride out a storm, we don't. When I asked him how many people he thought wanted to quit, he said he didn't care, I'm thinkin, this should make him anxious to find out and not lose half his staff, but he just wanted to end the convo with me. He missed a meeting with some investor bank because he forgot where it was supposed to be. We took 14 months to get a project manager, the CEO lying about it was one of the reasons I got so mad that I just didn't care anymore, and the whole place had that opinion of spinning our wheels and nobody cared. At least he was fully buzzword compliant, with team-building this and that (I tried to get a doctor's note - I can't teambuild today, I have a bad back. I can't do any team-building where I have to lift more than 20 pounds). And he often said "We have to build it perfect" and "we build it fast cause we just have to get it out there for people to see it" in the same paragraph without getting, or completely ignoring the contradiction.
Business plans often aren't the problem as much as those (mis)executing them.
Many companies advertising don't pay on clickthrough anymore, but based on some "completion" at the target site, where completion may be defined as making an order, wandering around at least a couple pages, whatever. If what you described actually became common, more and more advertisers would go to that model. All that would happen is wasted bandwidth.
Even simpler would be checking web logs, X clickthroughs should make X webpage requests and X image requests for each image on the page.
I didn't have one, but I heard from our Apple tech guy.
The Apple III was a much unloved "business" computer, essentially a business upgrade to the Apple ][ line. It was pretty expensive, $4k I think, which helped it be unloved.
It had some loose connectors in some of the chips. They weren't very snug in the bboard and could get loose. The Official Apple solution was to put the Apple on a hard surface, lift the front to roughly a 45 degree angle, and drop it to reseat the chips. I can imagine the look on the face of the owner upon seeing their expensive comp wandering to the the back room, a loud THUD, then returning with it "fixed".
Re:One area that the article did not touch on
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
Though yes, the base OS for TiVo is Linux, it isn't the base OS for PS/2. I guess a better phrase would be linux is available for PS/2.
No, unfortunately not. Do a google search for the Net/2 release of BSD, 4.4Lite and lawsuits. This was the BSD release (not FreeBSD, this was the original BSD codebase) after AT & T's (later Novell's) USL settled with Berkely. I can't find a great pointer, but I found this on a FreeBSD history:
Worse, the UNIX folks at AT&T picked 1992 to file a lawsuit against UC Berkeley. They claimed that the Berkeley folks stole UNIX trade secrets when they released their BSD code.
True, there was no AT&T code in the Net/2 release. But the Net/2 code was inspired by the AT&T code, so the argument ran.
But the vast majority of viruses and trojans and other serious security problems are the result of good-old-fashioned social engineering, getting people to open attachments and such. What else are they supposed to do to attachments? The entire reason for having them available in the first place is to open them.
Understand, having an application scriptable is not a bad thing, *IF* the user base is somewhat intelligent Microsoft sells itself at least somewhat on the base of ease of use. Less than Apple, but much more now, now that Linux is making inroads. If they sell themselves as "easy enough for anybody to use" then they can't complain and say the users are stupid. If it's easy, then there's no such thing as a stupid user.
The vast majority of script viruses can be traced to the combination of:
Files being executable based on filename extension.
Filename extensions being hidden by default in the shell (Explorer, IE, whatever you wanna call it).
Outlook inheriting the extension hiding of the shell, rule above.
A file sent (using the above rule) to look innocuous.
It being clicked on.
The email client being scriptable to the extent of allowing it to be mailed out. It also allows a payload (usually destructive) though not necessary to be a virus. See the original Word macro virus, Concept 1.
Now, the "stupid user" is only involved at #5. A malicious virus writer at stage 4, Microsoft is involved at all other 4 stages. His clarity of decision to click on this is actively hindered by #3. The thought "I need to show filename extensions in my shell, which is actually some kind of window thing, and I need to remember to 'make all windows like this' to have it be an overall shell thing and therefore inherited in Outlook to be able to make rational decisions about clicking on extensions" is fairly complex for most users.
Other OSes (UNIX, MacOS) could never have the same type of viruses.
Unix files can only be executed if their is a conscious decision by the user. Classic MacOS (<= 9) requires a bunch of metadata to make an app executable. I'm not saying MS could change this (they designed it, but too much legacy) but they must realize that the filename is critical, and protect the system accordingly.
Other OSes don't do this, but wouldn't cause viruses anyway, see #1. On Windows, doesn't cause viruses.
This is the thing that allows viruses to spread on windows. Email and viewing stuff in the shell are two separate things. The design parameters are different, one is local, meaning you can more or less trust the content. The other is coming from an unknown, untrusted source. Filtering filename extensions here hides executable content and is DANGEROUS.
UNIXen require action to make something executable. MacOS executables are obvious, can't hide content (ignoring trojans at the moment).
It being clicked on does nothing in UNIX, a MacOS person could click on it, but would know its executable.
I can't speak for all email clients, but the ones I know of aren't scriptable to the extent that Outlook is.
(there are exceptions of course, scripts should NEVER run without user authorization, This isn't the limit of Outlook problems, Outlook inherits all IE display bugs, including allowing certain OCXes to be run from mail. Though patched now, these allowed file level access. My running joke was "Outlook: making the Good Times hoax real."
I'm not going to hammer them for giving us greater flexibility. In these cases flexibility came at a huge price. A thorough design review might have caught some of mistakes.
I heard a bunch of songs on Play though P2P. This sold me on the album - I got sowered by music by hearing the same stuff over and over on the radio. Side note: I love hearing other stations calling themselves alternative, you're still Top 40, just a different 40. Napster was great, I bought 3 or 4 albums because of getting stuff from there. Play was one I bought, I had heard of Moby, to be homnest wasn't sure who he was. Downloaded Porcelain and a couple other tunes and I bought the album.
Now I don't consider myself the average downloader, I don't know if I am. Maybe nobody else pays for downloads. Idunno, and I don't think Moby does either.
One possible explanation for 18's lack of success ironically is Play's success. It became Moby's measuring stick. Play was groundbreaking, a bunch of songs that were great. A singular event. A lot of folks bought his next album (18) with expectations of the same groundbreaking record. From what I hear, it's good, not the same. So people bought heavy numbers initially, then word of mouth hit him. Moby may not think of this, or may not want to admit this, but it is a plausible explanation.
I remember Public Enemy and Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Black, their 4th album. Their 2nd album (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) redefined rap. Their 3rd (Fear of a Black Planet) was even better. Apocalypse was well above average for the time, but not up to the standards of the previous too. Instead of being revelled for consistently having above average albums, they were reviled for having substandard (their own high standard). Took years to recover.
Well, none of them ignore security, but OpenBSD is the most conscious. Quick and dirty comparo, a bit of a FAQ:
FreeBSD: Balls out performance on Intel. OpenBSD: Most security conscious, most stared at source code. NetBSD: Most portable. If it's got 32 bits and a MMU, it's got NetBSD.
There is some code sharing between these. I know the USB subsystem is shared among them (hell, it has CVS tags for NetBSD and FreeBSD) and probably some others. They talk amongst themselves too, and notify each other of problems.
Its info page on my GNU/Linux box says assert is a GNU extension.
The assert that the info page is talking about is a command line argument, a weird gcc-ism. This can be safely ignored. If you're really interested, it's kind of a -D__OSType__, but umm, different. Try gcc -v -E - and look for all the -A..s if you're really interested to see what's set. Ignore this, any code that uses this should be shredded and the coder shot. It doesn't give any advantage, and it locks you to gcc. And while you're shooting the coder, shoot the gcc guy who called it assert, just adds to confusion unnecessarily.
The assert() that's your best coding friend is a debugging thing. It allows you to check important conditions that could lead to bugs. It's a macro that's turned off by -DNDEBUG, so on your release version, one compile switch and no check or runtime penalty.
Quickie example: #include <assert.h>
int getSomethingFromArray(struct array *ptr, int elem) {
assert(ptr != NULL); /* ptr should NEVER be NULL */
assert(elem >= 0 && elem arraySize); /* check bound */
return ptr->elems[elem]; }
Contrived example, but you get the point. ptr should never be NULL, if it is, somethings wrong. If you violate the array bounds, something else is wrong. So in either case, the associated assert() blows up, core dumps, and you see from the core file where it trashed. Once you debug it and get ready to ship, define -DNDEBUG and the assert()s become empty statements, and the compiler eliminates them. It's pretty cool.
assert() has it's rules on how and where to use, and any good C book will tell you these rules. You should also be comfortable with looking at core dumps with your debugger, at least stack traces to see where it crashed. if you get a core, try: gdb progname core and once you're in there, type where.
And as a general rule, if it seems that something is a lot of work, chances are someone else thought that, and either has written the stuff for you, or there's a better way. Us programmers is lazy. In this case, the NDEBUG define strips everything, no need for sed. May you code in interesting times.
The Palm Emulator, POSE, has something like this. Gremlins they call it. They randomly hit your app with events and keypresses and other random stuff. Let it run for as long as you want, or infinite. You control the random seed, so it's reproducable too.
In my opinion, one of the best ways to get rid of bugs is code reviews. I've been in a couple organizations, and we did code reviews at both. Both helped getting better code out, and had other side enefits.
Plusses
Analysis doesn't just catch bugs, but design decisions. No amount of QA of compiled code will show you a bad design, yet this is where a lot of problems occur.
Careful analysis finds bugs that are hard to test, like when the world is crashing around you. How often do you simulate low memory situations?
It helps disseminate knowledge in the organization. Someone has a technique or an algorithm. It comes up as a suggestion in a code review, and now others know of it too. I learned a few things in code reviews I never knew to ask. Some developers will never ask because of ego issues, but will hear of them in code reviews.
Fosters a sense of responsibility in the code. If someone is going to see tis, then the code has to be of better quality. I can't just write garbage and hope it gets by QA.
Problems? of course...
Managing egos, easily the biggest problem. Have to reinforce that this isn't a witch hunt, just to get better code. The code review leader can't let himself get caught in an argument, cause it will disrupt the meeting and foster resentment in the developer.
Time. Developers hate meetings. It's best to have a few developers in the meeting, the many eyes approach, but how do you get some guy on a deadline with his stuff to look though someone else's code? Need to foster a team feeling, hard to do sometimes. Also, make sure you limit the time in the meeting, you get diminishing returns after a while, an hour, maybe two. Anything more is a waste of time.
Bill Gates [apbonline.com], has reportedly driven without a license
He also has a Porsche 959. The 959 was never EPA cleared for the US. $250,000 car, at the time the height of technology, I'd bet my ass he drives it. I doubt he'd ever get busted tho, no cop would realize its a 959, think it's just a tricked out 911.
Yes, this is a very biased "news" source. In some respects, so be it. The Slashdot guys never said anything else. It started as a bunch of guys doing a weblog, and grew from there. Because of the power of the site, folks seem to want it to be some unbiased news source. It could be, but it isn't, it still pretty much is run by the same couple guys who have no urges to be Sam Donaldson. So you have to filter stuff. Both the stories, and the replies.
That said, yes it is more important, for a couple reasons.
The IIS bug gives you permissions on a remote machine. Yes it uses something that shouldn't be on (a service currently only used for remote password changing) but by default this is on. MS policy of having many features on. Why have something on by default that only someone that understands it and therefore is knowledgable enough to turn it on?
Microsoft has battled Open Source recently on the bug front, saying how it's less secure. Here's a remote hole in an MS product, which has had numerous remote holes before. I can't remember the last Apache remote hole, years ago, and it gave you only permissions as what you configured the server as, usually nobody or some other non-privileged user.
So though Slashdot is biased (and never has claimed different) I do agree with the perceived importance of the holes.
If you were a manager, which documents would you be willing to allow to go away? Which contract would you be willing to sacrifice? Ironically, not even Word has 100% compatibility across formats. I've munged several docs with pictures across versions.
Word doc format is a moving target. As a manager, will you be willing to wait x months until OpenOffice groks the format, codes it, and has a release, while folks send you stuff that you can't read or act on?
I consider the doc thing a bigger lock in some ways than the OS. Normal folks don't think OSes, memory protection and all that. They care about work, getting stuff done. If the OS crashes and takes their app with them, yeah, that pisses them off, cause they lost work. The product of that work is locked into documents. If they can't get into those, or even just have a perception they can't, they won't change.
you can always dethrone an application by superior features.
How would you dethrone Word, if everyone needs to have Word file support, and Microsoft doesn't give you the file format? Data is your business, he who contgrols the data (and a couple good shoot 'em up games) controls the desktop.
As far as I can tell (and I'm fairly confident in this) is all new feature development always occurs on the CVS trunk. A while before a new release they cut a cvs tag and branch it. Once they branch for release, there are no new features added on the tag branch, unless they're very necessary for stability. All cool stuff goes on the trunk.
So if you want to think about it, yes, while 1.0 was branched but before release, they were making the changes on the trunk that eventually would be 1.1.
Of course, nothing is stopping the API from changing from 1.0 to 1.1 no matter when the tags were cut. Thats up to Mozilla discipline, but considering the long gestation of the 1.0 release, I'd say they had plenty of beta time to make their changes before the 1.0 freeze. But if you're concerned about API stability don't pay any attention to the chronology of releases. The tags are the important thing.
that it is rather well written perl code, and but it is still unmaintainable due to it's ugly syntax.
In my personal opinion, those two statements form an oxymoron, if it was well written, it would be maintainable. If you can't maintain it, it may be correct code, but it's not well written.
One of Perl's biggest faults (and others would say it's strengths) is that it's probably one of the more free form languages. The syntax isn't "ugly" it is kind of an empty vessel. If you want to write your Perl resembling tight shell code, you can. If you want to write it so it resembles some product of a random dictionary generator, you can. The language doesn't enforce any style, it is up to the programmer to enforce this.
The free form style is probably an aid in small tasks, where you just want to get things done, and are likely to throw the script away. It is a hindrance in larger projects where maintenance problems arise. To have well written Perl code requires more discipline from the programmer. Pick a style, enforce it. Don't use the cool tricks of the language as much just to show that you know them.
First, a funny.... It cited compatibility problems, namely among users trying to receive Microsoft World documents.
My sentiments exactly.
Second... now I haven't thought this all the way through, but one way of helping the software community would be to open up the Word and Excel format, give detailed specs of the formats to all past and current formats, and then require any changed to that format to be released as spec form for n months before the release of Office apps.
The closed nature of Word Docs (especially, though other Office docs have issues too) has several problems:
No interoperability with other software. Can't migrate from Word to other software.
No interoperability with other versions of Word. Everyone has had one of those Word files that were all gobbledegook because it was one or two versions old. This....
Forces upgrades, if one person gets the new Word, everyone does.
Makes archiving near impossible. Anyone here can open my old Word 2.0 for mac?
So with those, you get a monopoly on Office software, tremendous lock-in, and money to burn to try to open up other environments. Now, not that they don't have the right to sell software, but they are a monopoly. I believe this will do more to end that monopoly than hiding IE on the desktop.
This also helps Microsoft in a way. There are some people who don't want to use Word because they're worried about having their information locked in to a proprietary format. This will endure they can always get at their data.
I just burned a copy of this for a friend (finally got off my ass) so that's why I remembered this
A few years ago, Public Enemy came up with a remix album, Bring The Noise 2000. 27 tracks, moslty remixes, but a couple new ones to keep it interesting. They wanted to release it, their record label Def Jam, said no. OK, we've got these tracks, and we want folks to hear em. So they converted to MP3 and released them on the net. I was lucky enough to get them all, not a bad album.
Once Def Jam found out, they told PE to stop. Basically, their contract says Def Jam has the rights to all their songs. Kind of weird, yeah, they technically own (in an IP sense) the tracks, but they don't want to do anything with them. PE didn't deprive them of revenue, because they didn't want to sell them. This rift cemented PE dropping the label and they released a single called Swindler's Lust, which contained the chorus If you don't own the masters/the Masters own you. They went to AtomicPop, and released one album There's A Poison Going On with the previously released as MP3 Swindler's Lust track before Atomic Pop kinda imploded. The album was for $8 dowloaded, $10 for a physical one with Chuck D's autograph (which I bought). I later saw the album for $17.99 at Virgin Megastore.
OK, so whats the point? 1) record labels are kind of slimey. They sign you, give you a huge advance against your sales, and that locks you in. Odd that they talk about "artists rights" in P2P talks when they generally squash artists rights themselves. See: Prince and that whole T.A.F.K.A.P. crap, that was due to a fight with Warner about him using his born name.
2) the entire industry is ripping us off on CDs. I get an autographed copy sent to my house for $10, meanwhile I have to spend $14-$18 for anything at a store. CD's are cheap as hell to burn, no moving parts. A cassette needs oxide layers on plastic, glued to two leaders, on a two part spool, with a case, fasteners, and the little sponge thingy to ensure contact with the read head. But CDs are still $3-4 more? Hows this happen, how does every label still charge $18? No one got the bright idea that their costs have dropped in the last 10 years so lets see if we can cut the price some?
3) Related to #2, CDs cost too much. Labels worry about dropping sales, make the cost reachable to folks. $10 is a good price point, and if a small label thinks that's profitable (maybe not Atomic Pop did go under, but it may be to other factors) a multi-national conglomerate can make money at that point. I have 200 CDs or so, just bought some last week, but they cost too much.
I'm not justifying piracy, you play by the rules. It's just in this case, the decks stacked a lot to the house, and I'm not too surprised there are folks who cheat also.
Leaps of faith take many forms, and none were stranger to the world of 1990's than the possibility that people might buy objects they've never touched from people they've never met and send money to addresses they've never seen on the basis of a bunch of colored stars summarizing a community's collective opinion.
Granted the whole auction thing is a leap of faith, but it's not all that much stranger than many things we do. Just a different form.
For years folks would call up Sears, tell them a product ID number and a credit card number, and then some time later, somethig willshow up on their door. Never touched, never seen, the whole transaction in "telephonespace" as opposed to cyberspace. "Revolutionary" Amazon didn't create a new business, it just eliminated the printed catalog and telephone operators. Oddly enough, now I see Amazon inserts in my paper occasionally.
Buying software, you're going to give somebody some money for a stream of ones and zeroes, which will replace the random stream of zeroes on your hard drive with one (you're hoping) thats less random. If there's a problem, a piece of paper says you didn't buy the software, just the right to use it, so you don't even own it, much less have a right to complain.
Money itself, it's just scraps of paper. Printed with faces of guys I never met, cause they're like, dead. The paper is exactly the same (at least in the US) but because this has a number 50 on it, it's worth more than this one. No intrinsic difference, just put a "0" here, and it's worth 10 times more than this other, pretty much equivalent scrap of paper.
Or maybe you dodn't even have the scraps - I have direct deposit, and then I pay for a lot of junk with my credit card (save on those ATM fees). At direct deposit time, some number called my "checking balance" is increased somewhere, and this other number on this piece of plastic identifies me, and then they subtract the purchase amount from my "credit balance" thingy, and then after a while, I log on to a computer, and send some of the checking balance numbers to my credit balance number.
Not to poke fun at the reviewer, eBay is interesting, it is a leap of faith and it is one of the few working models on the net, and has been making money since it's inception. Just realize there are leaps of faith all around you. the human mind does well with abstraction, large parts of our daily life revolve around that.
Slashdot Mirror
P-Code is a dead language!!!!
Oh wait, damn that was a bad troll....
I was in a dot-bomb; we bombed out I think not so much because of a really stupid plan, just bad execution. There's an old saying, a class A person will do better with a class B plan than a class B person will do with a class A plan. I'll leave the company info in that we were an advertising dotcom, and we managed to swim around blindly with no direction until the Internet stock bubble burst and we were S.O.L.
Besides that, I hate Powerpoint, on principle alone. Explain stuff to me, or let me see it. We were trying to hire a developer, and while I was talking to the guy, explaining that no, 2600 mag wasn't named for an Atari and cool stuff like Linux on handhelds that he was having the geek hot sweats over, my CnEO (Chief non-executing officer) decides "enough of that, let me show him the Powerpoint slides". You can see the change where this guy realizes he's gonna have a tech-person clueless boss spinning directionless firing off orders from a random buzzword generator. He declined our offer.
I had to have talks with my CEO, try to get him on track sometimes. They had the idea "we're a startup, we don't have to be perfect" and I'm thinking, we have to strive for perfection more cause we have no cushion to fall back on. MS has billions to ride out a storm, we don't. When I asked him how many people he thought wanted to quit, he said he didn't care, I'm thinkin, this should make him anxious to find out and not lose half his staff, but he just wanted to end the convo with me. He missed a meeting with some investor bank because he forgot where it was supposed to be. We took 14 months to get a project manager, the CEO lying about it was one of the reasons I got so mad that I just didn't care anymore, and the whole place had that opinion of spinning our wheels and nobody cared. At least he was fully buzzword compliant, with team-building this and that (I tried to get a doctor's note - I can't teambuild today, I have a bad back. I can't do any team-building where I have to lift more than 20 pounds). And he often said "We have to build it perfect" and "we build it fast cause we just have to get it out there for people to see it" in the same paragraph without getting, or completely ignoring the contradiction.
Business plans often aren't the problem as much as those (mis)executing them.
Many companies advertising don't pay on clickthrough anymore, but based on some "completion" at the target site, where completion may be defined as making an order, wandering around at least a couple pages, whatever. If what you described actually became common, more and more advertisers would go to that model. All that would happen is wasted bandwidth.
Even simpler would be checking web logs, X clickthroughs should make X webpage requests and X image requests for each image on the page.
I didn't have one, but I heard from our Apple tech guy.
The Apple III was a much unloved "business" computer, essentially a business upgrade to the Apple ][ line. It was pretty expensive, $4k I think, which helped it be unloved.
It had some loose connectors in some of the chips. They weren't very snug in the bboard and could get loose. The Official Apple solution was to put the Apple on a hard surface, lift the front to roughly a 45 degree angle, and drop it to reseat the chips. I can imagine the look on the face of the owner upon seeing their expensive comp wandering to the the back room, a loud THUD, then returning with it "fixed".
Though yes, the base OS for TiVo is Linux, it isn't the base OS for PS/2. I guess a better phrase would be linux is available for PS/2.
Also check out this lawsuit summary.
A microsoft ad. Coincidence, irony, poetic justice... You decide.
What else are they supposed to do to attachments? The entire reason for having them available in the first place is to open them.
Understand, having an application scriptable is not a bad thing, *IF* the user base is somewhat intelligent
Microsoft sells itself at least somewhat on the base of ease of use. Less than Apple, but much more now, now that Linux is making inroads. If they sell themselves as "easy enough for anybody to use" then they can't complain and say the users are stupid. If it's easy, then there's no such thing as a stupid user.
The vast majority of script viruses can be traced to the combination of:
Now, the "stupid user" is only involved at #5. A malicious virus writer at stage 4, Microsoft is involved at all other 4 stages. His clarity of decision to click on this is actively hindered by #3. The thought "I need to show filename extensions in my shell, which is actually some kind of window thing, and I need to remember to 'make all windows like this' to have it be an overall shell thing and therefore inherited in Outlook to be able to make rational decisions about clicking on extensions" is fairly complex for most users.
Other OSes (UNIX, MacOS) could never have the same type of viruses.
(there are exceptions of course, scripts should NEVER run without user authorization,
This isn't the limit of Outlook problems, Outlook inherits all IE display bugs, including allowing certain OCXes to be run from mail. Though patched now, these allowed file level access. My running joke was "Outlook: making the Good Times hoax real."
I'm not going to hammer them for giving us greater flexibility.
In these cases flexibility came at a huge price. A thorough design review might have caught some of mistakes.
I heard a bunch of songs on Play though P2P. This sold me on the album - I got sowered by music by hearing the same stuff over and over on the radio. Side note: I love hearing other stations calling themselves alternative, you're still Top 40, just a different 40. Napster was great, I bought 3 or 4 albums because of getting stuff from there. Play was one I bought, I had heard of Moby, to be homnest wasn't sure who he was. Downloaded Porcelain and a couple other tunes and I bought the album.
Now I don't consider myself the average downloader, I don't know if I am. Maybe nobody else pays for downloads. Idunno, and I don't think Moby does either.
One possible explanation for 18's lack of success ironically is Play's success. It became Moby's measuring stick. Play was groundbreaking, a bunch of songs that were great. A singular event. A lot of folks bought his next album (18) with expectations of the same groundbreaking record. From what I hear, it's good, not the same. So people bought heavy numbers initially, then word of mouth hit him. Moby may not think of this, or may not want to admit this, but it is a plausible explanation.
I remember Public Enemy and Apocalypse '91: The Enemy Strikes Black, their 4th album. Their 2nd album (It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back) redefined rap. Their 3rd (Fear of a Black Planet) was even better. Apocalypse was well above average for the time, but not up to the standards of the previous too. Instead of being revelled for consistently having above average albums, they were reviled for having substandard (their own high standard). Took years to recover.
Well, none of them ignore security, but OpenBSD is the most conscious. Quick and dirty comparo, a bit of a FAQ:
FreeBSD: Balls out performance on Intel.
OpenBSD: Most security conscious, most stared at source code.
NetBSD: Most portable. If it's got 32 bits and a MMU, it's got NetBSD.
There is some code sharing between these. I know the USB subsystem is shared among them (hell, it has CVS tags for NetBSD and FreeBSD) and probably some others. They talk amongst themselves too, and notify each other of problems.
inetd=a microsoft product.
Hunh, What? Did I miss something? From the FreeBSD man page:
HISTORY
The inetd command appeared in 4.3BSD.
It's not even a XENIX thing, well before then. What are you confusing it with, or are you just a troll?
only bsd you have an graphical installation is Solaris
Solaris 2 (what folks generally call Solaris) is SVR4, not BSD. SunOS = 4.1.4 was BSD. SunOS 4 was retoractively called Solaris, in a marketing move.
Its info page on my GNU/Linux box says assert is a GNU extension.
/* ptr should NEVER be NULL */
/* check bound */
The assert that the info page is talking about is a command line argument, a weird gcc-ism. This can be safely ignored. If you're really interested, it's kind of a -D__OSType__, but umm, different. Try gcc -v -E - and look for all the -A..s if you're really interested to see what's set. Ignore this, any code that uses this should be shredded and the coder shot. It doesn't give any advantage, and it locks you to gcc. And while you're shooting the coder, shoot the gcc guy who called it assert, just adds to confusion unnecessarily.
The assert() that's your best coding friend is a debugging thing. It allows you to check important conditions that could lead to bugs. It's a macro that's turned off by -DNDEBUG, so on your release version, one compile switch and no check or runtime penalty.
Quickie example:
#include <assert.h>
int getSomethingFromArray(struct array *ptr, int elem)
{
assert(ptr != NULL);
assert(elem >= 0 && elem arraySize);
return ptr->elems[elem];
}
Contrived example, but you get the point. ptr should never be NULL, if it is, somethings wrong. If you violate the array bounds, something else is wrong. So in either case, the associated assert() blows up, core dumps, and you see from the core file where it trashed. Once you debug it and get ready to ship, define -DNDEBUG and the assert()s become empty statements, and the compiler eliminates them. It's pretty cool.
assert() has it's rules on how and where to use, and any good C book will tell you these rules. You should also be comfortable with looking at core dumps with your debugger, at least stack traces to see where it crashed. if you get a core, try:
gdb progname core
and once you're in there, type where.
And as a general rule, if it seems that something is a lot of work, chances are someone else thought that, and either has written the stuff for you, or there's a better way. Us programmers is lazy. In this case, the NDEBUG define strips everything, no need for sed.
May you code in interesting times.
The Palm Emulator, POSE, has something like this. Gremlins they call it. They randomly hit your app with events and keypresses and other random stuff. Let it run for as long as you want, or infinite. You control the random seed, so it's reproducable too.
Plusses
Problems? of course...
Bill Gates [apbonline.com], has reportedly driven without a license
He also has a Porsche 959. The 959 was never EPA cleared for the US. $250,000 car, at the time the height of technology, I'd bet my ass he drives it. I doubt he'd ever get busted tho, no cop would realize its a 959, think it's just a tricked out 911.
Look which /. subjects seem to get most attention.
OK, so now I just need to find a job involving hot grits in my pants, goatse.cx, and Natalie Portman. Check
That said, yes it is more important, for a couple reasons.
So though Slashdot is biased (and never has claimed different) I do agree with the perceived importance of the holes.
I consider the doc thing a bigger lock in some ways than the OS. Normal folks don't think OSes, memory protection and all that. They care about work, getting stuff done. If the OS crashes and takes their app with them, yeah, that pisses them off, cause they lost work. The product of that work is locked into documents. If they can't get into those, or even just have a perception they can't, they won't change.
you can always dethrone an application by superior features.
How would you dethrone Word, if everyone needs to have Word file support, and Microsoft doesn't give you the file format? Data is your business, he who contgrols the data (and a couple good shoot 'em up games) controls the desktop.
As far as I can tell (and I'm fairly confident in this) is all new feature development always occurs on the CVS trunk. A while before a new release they cut a cvs tag and branch it. Once they branch for release, there are no new features added on the tag branch, unless they're very necessary for stability. All cool stuff goes on the trunk.
So if you want to think about it, yes, while 1.0 was branched but before release, they were making the changes on the trunk that eventually would be 1.1.
Of course, nothing is stopping the API from changing from 1.0 to 1.1 no matter when the tags were cut. Thats up to Mozilla discipline, but considering the long gestation of the 1.0 release, I'd say they had plenty of beta time to make their changes before the 1.0 freeze. But if you're concerned about API stability don't pay any attention to the chronology of releases. The tags are the important thing.
that it is rather well written perl code,
and
but it is still unmaintainable due to it's ugly syntax.
In my personal opinion, those two statements form an oxymoron, if it was well written, it would be maintainable. If you can't maintain it, it may be correct code, but it's not well written.
One of Perl's biggest faults (and others would say it's strengths) is that it's probably one of the more free form languages. The syntax isn't "ugly" it is kind of an empty vessel. If you want to write your Perl resembling tight shell code, you can. If you want to write it so it resembles some product of a random dictionary generator, you can. The language doesn't enforce any style, it is up to the programmer to enforce this.
The free form style is probably an aid in small tasks, where you just want to get things done, and are likely to throw the script away. It is a hindrance in larger projects where maintenance problems arise. To have well written Perl code requires more discipline from the programmer. Pick a style, enforce it. Don't use the cool tricks of the language as much just to show that you know them.
It cited compatibility problems, namely among users trying to receive Microsoft World documents.
My sentiments exactly.
Second... now I haven't thought this all the way through, but one way of helping the software community would be to open up the Word and Excel format, give detailed specs of the formats to all past and current formats, and then require any changed to that format to be released as spec form for n months before the release of Office apps.
The closed nature of Word Docs (especially, though other Office docs have issues too) has several problems:
So with those, you get a monopoly on Office software, tremendous lock-in, and money to burn to try to open up other environments. Now, not that they don't have the right to sell software, but they are a monopoly. I believe this will do more to end that monopoly than hiding IE on the desktop.
This also helps Microsoft in a way. There are some people who don't want to use Word because they're worried about having their information locked in to a proprietary format. This will endure they can always get at their data.
Questions, comments, snide remarks?
I just burned a copy of this for a friend (finally got off my ass) so that's why I remembered this
A few years ago, Public Enemy came up with a remix album, Bring The Noise 2000. 27 tracks, moslty remixes, but a couple new ones to keep it interesting. They wanted to release it, their record label Def Jam, said no. OK, we've got these tracks, and we want folks to hear em. So they converted to MP3 and released them on the net. I was lucky enough to get them all, not a bad album.
Once Def Jam found out, they told PE to stop. Basically, their contract says Def Jam has the rights to all their songs. Kind of weird, yeah, they technically own (in an IP sense) the tracks, but they don't want to do anything with them. PE didn't deprive them of revenue, because they didn't want to sell them. This rift cemented PE dropping the label and they released a single called Swindler's Lust, which contained the chorus If you don't own the masters/the Masters own you. They went to AtomicPop, and released one album There's A Poison Going On with the previously released as MP3 Swindler's Lust track before Atomic Pop kinda imploded. The album was for $8 dowloaded, $10 for a physical one with Chuck D's autograph (which I bought). I later saw the album for $17.99 at Virgin Megastore.
OK, so whats the point?
1) record labels are kind of slimey. They sign you, give you a huge advance against your sales, and that locks you in. Odd that they talk about "artists rights" in P2P talks when they generally squash artists rights themselves. See: Prince and that whole T.A.F.K.A.P. crap, that was due to a fight with Warner about him using his born name.
2) the entire industry is ripping us off on CDs. I get an autographed copy sent to my house for $10, meanwhile I have to spend $14-$18 for anything at a store. CD's are cheap as hell to burn, no moving parts. A cassette needs oxide layers on plastic, glued to two leaders, on a two part spool, with a case, fasteners, and the little sponge thingy to ensure contact with the read head. But CDs are still $3-4 more? Hows this happen, how does every label still charge $18? No one got the bright idea that their costs have dropped in the last 10 years so lets see if we can cut the price some?
3) Related to #2, CDs cost too much. Labels worry about dropping sales, make the cost reachable to folks. $10 is a good price point, and if a small label thinks that's profitable (maybe not Atomic Pop did go under, but it may be to other factors) a multi-national conglomerate can make money at that point. I have 200 CDs or so, just bought some last week, but they cost too much.
I'm not justifying piracy, you play by the rules. It's just in this case, the decks stacked a lot to the house, and I'm not too surprised there are folks who cheat also.
Granted the whole auction thing is a leap of faith, but it's not all that much stranger than many things we do. Just a different form.
Or maybe you dodn't even have the scraps - I have direct deposit, and then I pay for a lot of junk with my credit card (save on those ATM fees). At direct deposit time, some number called my "checking balance" is increased somewhere, and this other number on this piece of plastic identifies me, and then they subtract the purchase amount from my "credit balance" thingy, and then after a while, I log on to a computer, and send some of the checking balance numbers to my credit balance number.
Not to poke fun at the reviewer, eBay is interesting, it is a leap of faith and it is one of the few working models on the net, and has been making money since it's inception. Just realize there are leaps of faith all around you. the human mind does well with abstraction, large parts of our daily life revolve around that.