Actually, 90% of RAC jobs fall into one of 3 categories:
1) I'm stupid but have a large trust fund. Do my homework. 2) I'm a cheapskate and want software that works exactly like $EXPENSIVE_COMMERCIAL_SOFTWARE but with some more features but costs less than half the retail of $EXPENSIVE_COMMERCIAL_SOFTWARE. 3) I'm delusional and want the impossible done. By tommorow. For under $50. And get full source-code & resale rights.
When I first heard about the site, it seemed like a good idea... a good way to pick up a few extra bucks, but then I realized it was just a bunch of sad, stupid people wanting ridiculous things done.
I'm sure that it'd be REALLY easy to pick up on undocumented instructions.. just compile with a "compile only, do not assemble" option and look at the output.
...and having been there before, you realize that "a one/two person startup company" is going to take more than hard-work to get off the ground. Technical prowess only goes so far; passion & vision are going to be needed to actually make it big. Without inspiration & creativity, he's just going to be another schmuck hammering out code to make a buck.
The original poster simply wants to run his own company for the money. It sounds to me like the only reason he wants to stay in IT is because it's what is on his resume; I'm sure he'd jump at a chance to sell chocolate covered lag-bolts if he could get rich off them.
Not infinite, there has to be some upper bound proportional to the population.
This assumes that the violation can only occur once per person, IE having an Ogg & an MP3 of the same track on my system only counts as one violation and having somebody give me a WMA of the same song would not be another violation.
And RTSes are any better? While there's slightly less RTS titles than there are FPSes, there's still a horde of uninspired, derivative games out there; How many times can you remake Dune 2 (or whatever you consider the seminal RTS)?
Besides, most RTSes have -some- flaw in the game balance that allows your to win, not neccessarily by applying strategy & thought but by abusing the game mechanics.
Yeah, it'd be hard to make a profit reselling. Even if you could sell burned CD/DVDs of "all research papers on gecko population dynamics from 1970-1998" to grad students, people, knowing they've got pirated data, are going to turn around & continue to pirate it. Considering the ease & low cost of duplicating large ammounts of data, the risk of distribution is going to greatly outweigh any potential rewards.
Besides, if the 'hacking' is as simple as using an open relay to mirror the site, the perp is most likely a skript kiddy that can't understand any of the aricles anyways.
What I really don't get are those channels that have the normal quotient of ads, but don't have any ads for products, only for the channel itself.
Showtime/HBO/etc are one example of this, another example is Noggin, an offshoot of Nickelodeon. I watch it for the Daria reruns, and for each episode, I'm getting something like 10-15min of adverts for fluffy pre-teen soap-operas and weird filler crap. After the 100th time I hear about who's the hottest chix0r at Degrassi Jr High, I'm beginning to miss having people trying to sell me car insurance, diapers and canned soup.
The guy from the cable-company said, in his response to the article, that having the CableCo run VOD from their central office would result in a lower cost for the consumer. In your experience, what are they charging for the VOD service?
Claims of "we can do it better and cheaper" are nice, but actually looking at the numbers is going to tell the truth.
First off, if you were a college student student that even HAD $20k/year that you could blow, nobody is going to fucking care; you pampered little trust-fund bitch.
And your 5-year relationship... don't get me started on how high school romances need to die after graduation. Most friends from high school are just that, high school friends, and you're going to lose them too, once you've moved on with your life and are no long being forced to spend 8hr/day with them.
Cry me a fucking river. You couldn't cut the mustard in school & became an obsessive, reclusive geek with no social life or social skills. OMG! Isn't that the classic negative stereotype?
Welcome to the fucking club. It doesn't matter what the fuck you do, unless you're a single mom who dropped out of HS and doesn't know who the fathers of ANY of her three children, nobody cares how you fucked up your life or really even wants to help. The sooner you realize that you're not going to get any help, sympathy or special treatment, the sooner you're going to stop being a victim & get your shit together and clean up your life yourself.
Heck, it'd be great if the author even had the source; he lost it all in a major HDD crash, which is why Buzz 2 never came out.
Just one of the additional bennefits of open souce. Or like Torvalds said,"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it;)"
Not to mention that many ISPs don't allow you to connect to SMTP servers other than their own, as a method of trimming back on spam. MSN, for example, is one of the major ISPs that block SMTP.
Somehow, I find this hard to believe. In my experiences with Verizon's tech support, they staff the front-line tech support with barely-literate workers who read through a script to make sure that you actually have your hardware plugged in correctly.
That you actually get to a person who actually understands a computer, rather than simply regurgites a script, without first having gone through the first-level BS is mind-boggling.
I was helping a friend with his DSL, 'cuz it went down. I checked everything I could, and couldn't get it to come up. Since he's not too tech-savy, he had me call the tech support. The lady that answered ran me through the generic checklist, with no results. Twice.
When she started going through the spiel about how the ticked was going to be elevated & sent off to 'senior techs' or something, I spoke up, and asked her to confirm that the network settings on the PC were correct, as confirming network settings was not on her checklist.
I mean, the _first_ thing I look at when I'm looking at an unknown system with network problems is the network configuration. In this case, they were, but I was suprised that it wasn't part of the script.
The network config turned out to be correct. I think it was something down on their system, as the problem simply disappeared & the connection came back up 6hr later.
Come on, every publication worth reading has a spot for stuff like this. This is perfect material for a last-page article in an appropriate publication.
The used computer market has always been a strange one. On one hand, you've got the knowlegable geeks who just want to give stuff a good home & know what the product is really worth, selling things for next to nothing. On the other, you've got people trying to sell their 5 year old machines for almost-new prices.
Most businesses I've seen that stock used computer equipment tend to unreasonably inflate the price on used hardware. I think for many of them, it's a bait & switch tactic. If the older, slower, used hardware is ridiculously overpriced, it's far easier to upsell the customer to a new machine for 'only a little bit more'.
Considering that the article uses Scientific Workplace as an example of the software that's going to be run, this is highly unlikely.
To some extent, I mirror the feelings of the 'troll'. I've been noticing a lot of people comming into the open source looking for free beer and if they can't find it, expecting others to buy them a beer. They feel that they are entitled to have the community serve them.
What's even worse are those people that hear about this 'free software' thing, and want drop in replacements for expensive proprietary software that interfaces into the lowest levels of windows. There's reasons people don't write free versions of this stuff.
Most of the problems that are solved by going into the plumbing of windows (the win32 API is ugly, awkward, and when you get to the lower levels, very poorly documented) are either non-issues under Linux (such as the firewall post the other day) or have trivial solutions under Linux.
First off, remember that Vorbis is a perceptual encoding scheme like MP3. What it does is breaks the sound at a given time into a number of components. The 'less important' components are filtered out, and the remaning ones are written to your file.
For bitrate peeling to work, the sound data, when it's written, needs to be organized in such a way that it's trivial to look at the sound components and again figure out which ones can be thrown away to achieve the desired bitrate....and do it quickly w/o a large expenditure of processing power.
Idealy, throwing away the least significant n frequency bands would give better results than just dropping every n'th packet.
Bitrate peeling is a briliant idea, and would be a major win for Vorbis if they ever actually provide an implementation of it. It's something that the format supposedly supports, but right now it's still just a hypothetical application.
Let me know when they've got something working THEN I'll be impressed
I was hoping. If I could get some karma out of my CS degree, it'd be more than I've been able to get from it yet, considering the dismal state of the economy. Now is not the time to be a fresh graduate.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. Rather than the the ISAs growing to resemble existing HLLs, many CISC architectures have complex instructions giving a higher-level idea of what the CPU is doing. The x86 even has text-manipulation opcodes, and the VAX (commonly refered to as the epitome of CISC computing) has 8 different ways to interpret the value of a register.
RISC machines are intended to be programmed by compilers; CISC are designed to make life easier for programmers.
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer CISC = Complex...
The basic idea of (most) RISC chip designs, such as the MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC & Sparc, was to have a large number of general purpose registers, fixed length instructions that could only refer to those registers, and only a handful of instructions that specifically read/wrote to main memory (which is why they're also referred to as 'load/store' architectures). This simplistic design allowed them to push clock speeds without too much trouble. RISC processors were also adopted superscalar designs (having multiple execution units, allowing the execution of multiple instructions 'simultaniously') before their CISC counterparts.
In contrast to the simplicity of the RISC systems, there are the CISC chips, such as the x86 and the old VAX processors, which tried to make their instructions resemble high-level languages, as well as having a smaller number of registers, many of them having a special purpose. With variable length instructions, and many different modes of operation for each instruction, the CISC methodology generaly resulted in much larger, more complex chip designs that were harder to speed up, pipeline & make superscalar.
To compare the two, lets take a simple operation, such as taking two numbers from memory & adding them together. A generic RISC system would do something like: 1) load 1st number into Register 1 2) load 2nd number into Register 2 3) add the value in R1 to R2, putting the value in R3 4) copy the value from Register 3 to memory...and not have any other way to solve the problem
where a CISC chip, would more likely do something more like: 1)add the value at memory location 1 to the value at memory location 2, and store in a special Accumulator register 2) copy the Accumulator register back to memory
The difference being that where the RISC machine only had one addition operation (register+register->register), the CISC machine would have a handful of them, depending on where the data came from (memory (using multiple forms of reference), registers, constants, and various combinations).
In the early 80s, the RISC/CISC debate was a hot one in accademia, and RISC won out there, by virtue of its simplicity & easy of improvement. By the mid 80s, the debate was starting again in industry, as a number of RISC chips started entering the marketplace, where Intel's x86 architecture won by virtue of the IBM PC.
The whole debate is pretty much a moot point now, since Intel's new x86 chips have RISC cores wrapped by a thin layer to translate the complex instructions. As an added bonus, the new 64b x86 systems should be adding a bunch of extra registers, further negating the penalty of the architecture.
Of course, with the increasing size of mega-corps, with their fingers in more pies than Sara Lee has in her kitchen, I don't htink it'll be long before separate arms of the same corporate conglomeration take eachother to court, not realizing that they are aspects of the same entity.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, 90% of RAC jobs fall into one of 3 categories:
1) I'm stupid but have a large trust fund. Do my homework.
2) I'm a cheapskate and want software that works exactly like $EXPENSIVE_COMMERCIAL_SOFTWARE but with some more features but costs less than half the retail of $EXPENSIVE_COMMERCIAL_SOFTWARE.
3) I'm delusional and want the impossible done. By tommorow. For under $50. And get full source-code & resale rights.
When I first heard about the site, it seemed like a good idea... a good way to pick up a few extra bucks, but then I realized it was just a bunch of sad, stupid people wanting ridiculous things done.
I'm sure that it'd be REALLY easy to pick up on undocumented instructions.. just compile with a "compile only, do not assemble" option and look at the output.
...and having been there before, you realize that "a one/two person startup company" is going to take more than hard-work to get off the ground. Technical prowess only goes so far; passion & vision are going to be needed to actually make it big. Without inspiration & creativity, he's just going to be another schmuck hammering out code to make a buck.
The original poster simply wants to run his own company for the money. It sounds to me like the only reason he wants to stay in IT is because it's what is on his resume; I'm sure he'd jump at a chance to sell chocolate covered lag-bolts if he could get rich off them.
Not infinite, there has to be some upper bound proportional to the population.
This assumes that the violation can only occur once per person, IE having an Ogg & an MP3 of the same track on my system only counts as one violation and having somebody give me a WMA of the same song would not be another violation.
And RTSes are any better? While there's slightly less RTS titles than there are FPSes, there's still a horde of uninspired, derivative games out there; How many times can you remake Dune 2 (or whatever you consider the seminal RTS)?
Besides, most RTSes have -some- flaw in the game balance that allows your to win, not neccessarily by applying strategy & thought but by abusing the game mechanics.
Yeah, it'd be hard to make a profit reselling. Even if you could sell burned CD/DVDs of "all research papers on gecko population dynamics from 1970-1998" to grad students, people, knowing they've got pirated data, are going to turn around & continue to pirate it. Considering the ease & low cost of duplicating large ammounts of data, the risk of distribution is going to greatly outweigh any potential rewards.
Besides, if the 'hacking' is as simple as using an open relay to mirror the site, the perp is most likely a skript kiddy that can't understand any of the aricles anyways.
What kind of lowsy wife does this guy have if she doesn't even know how to fry an egg?
What I really don't get are those channels that have the normal quotient of ads, but don't have any ads for products, only for the channel itself.
Showtime/HBO/etc are one example of this, another example is Noggin, an offshoot of Nickelodeon. I watch it for the Daria reruns, and for each episode, I'm getting something like 10-15min of adverts for fluffy pre-teen soap-operas and weird filler crap. After the 100th time I hear about who's the hottest chix0r at Degrassi Jr High, I'm beginning to miss having people trying to sell me car insurance, diapers and canned soup.
The guy from the cable-company said, in his response to the article, that having the CableCo run VOD from their central office would result in a lower cost for the consumer. In your experience, what are they charging for the VOD service?
Claims of "we can do it better and cheaper" are nice, but actually looking at the numbers is going to tell the truth.
What do you want? A fucking cookie?
First off, if you were a college student student that even HAD $20k/year that you could blow, nobody is going to fucking care; you pampered little trust-fund bitch.
And your 5-year relationship... don't get me started on how high school romances need to die after graduation. Most friends from high school are just that, high school friends, and you're going to lose them too, once you've moved on with your life and are no long being forced to spend 8hr/day with them.
Cry me a fucking river. You couldn't cut the mustard in school & became an obsessive, reclusive geek with no social life or social skills. OMG! Isn't that the classic negative stereotype?
Welcome to the fucking club. It doesn't matter what the fuck you do, unless you're a single mom who dropped out of HS and doesn't know who the fathers of ANY of her three children, nobody cares how you fucked up your life or really even wants to help. The sooner you realize that you're not going to get any help, sympathy or special treatment, the sooner you're going to stop being a victim & get your shit together and clean up your life yourself.
Heck, it'd be great if the author even had the source; he lost it all in a major HDD crash, which is why Buzz 2 never came out.
;)"
Just one of the additional bennefits of open souce. Or like Torvalds said,"Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it
Not to mention that many ISPs don't allow you to connect to SMTP servers other than their own, as a method of trimming back on spam. MSN, for example, is one of the major ISPs that block SMTP.
Somehow, I find this hard to believe. In my experiences with Verizon's tech support, they staff the front-line tech support with barely-literate workers who read through a script to make sure that you actually have your hardware plugged in correctly.
That you actually get to a person who actually understands a computer, rather than simply regurgites a script, without first having gone through the first-level BS is mind-boggling.
Here's one for you on Verizon DSL support...
I was helping a friend with his DSL, 'cuz it went down. I checked everything I could, and couldn't get it to come up. Since he's not too tech-savy, he had me call the tech support. The lady that answered ran me through the generic checklist, with no results. Twice.
When she started going through the spiel about how the ticked was going to be elevated & sent off to 'senior techs' or something, I spoke up, and asked her to confirm that the network settings on the PC were correct, as confirming network settings was not on her checklist.
I mean, the _first_ thing I look at when I'm looking at an unknown system with network problems is the network configuration. In this case, they were, but I was suprised that it wasn't part of the script.
The network config turned out to be correct. I think it was something down on their system, as the problem simply disappeared & the connection came back up 6hr later.
Come on, every publication worth reading has a spot for stuff like this. This is perfect material for a last-page article in an appropriate publication.
The used computer market has always been a strange one. On one hand, you've got the knowlegable geeks who just want to give stuff a good home & know what the product is really worth, selling things for next to nothing. On the other, you've got people trying to sell their 5 year old machines for almost-new prices.
Most businesses I've seen that stock used computer equipment tend to unreasonably inflate the price on used hardware. I think for many of them, it's a bait & switch tactic. If the older, slower, used hardware is ridiculously overpriced, it's far easier to upsell the customer to a new machine for 'only a little bit more'.
You, my friend got ripped off paying $2500 for a single-ended SCSI drive.
Considering that the article uses Scientific Workplace as an example of the software that's going to be run, this is highly unlikely.
To some extent, I mirror the feelings of the 'troll'. I've been noticing a lot of people comming into the open source looking for free beer and if they can't find it, expecting others to buy them a beer. They feel that they are entitled to have the community serve them.
What's even worse are those people that hear about this 'free software' thing, and want drop in replacements for expensive proprietary software that interfaces into the lowest levels of windows. There's reasons people don't write free versions of this stuff.
Most of the problems that are solved by going into the plumbing of windows (the win32 API is ugly, awkward, and when you get to the lower levels, very poorly documented) are either non-issues under Linux (such as the firewall post the other day) or have trivial solutions under Linux.
I've always been a fan of sub-8bit sound. MP3ing some cymbals at a really low rate and then bringing back to wav gives a nice effect, too.
Here's my understanding of the idea...
...and do it quickly w/o a large expenditure of processing power.
First off, remember that Vorbis is a perceptual encoding scheme like MP3. What it does is breaks the sound at a given time into a number of components. The 'less important' components are filtered out, and the remaning ones are written to your file.
For bitrate peeling to work, the sound data, when it's written, needs to be organized in such a way that it's trivial to look at the sound components and again figure out which ones can be thrown away to achieve the desired bitrate.
Idealy, throwing away the least significant n frequency bands would give better results than just dropping every n'th packet.
Bitrate peeling is a briliant idea, and would be a major win for Vorbis if they ever actually provide an implementation of it. It's something that the format supposedly supports, but right now it's still just a hypothetical application.
Let me know when they've got something working THEN I'll be impressed
I was hoping. If I could get some karma out of my CS degree, it'd be more than I've been able to get from it yet, considering the dismal state of the economy. Now is not the time to be a fresh graduate.
Perhaps I worded that poorly. Rather than the the ISAs growing to resemble existing HLLs, many CISC architectures have complex instructions giving a higher-level idea of what the CPU is doing. The x86 even has text-manipulation opcodes, and the VAX (commonly refered to as the epitome of CISC computing) has 8 different ways to interpret the value of a register.
RISC machines are intended to be programmed by compilers; CISC are designed to make life easier for programmers.
I think you mean CISC.
...
...and not have any other way to solve the problem
RISC = Reduced Instruction Set Computer
CISC = Complex
The basic idea of (most) RISC chip designs, such as the MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC & Sparc, was to have a large number of general purpose registers, fixed length instructions that could only refer to those registers, and only a handful of instructions that specifically read/wrote to main memory (which is why they're also referred to as 'load/store' architectures). This simplistic design allowed them to push clock speeds without too much trouble. RISC processors were also adopted superscalar designs (having multiple execution units, allowing the execution of multiple instructions 'simultaniously') before their CISC counterparts.
In contrast to the simplicity of the RISC systems, there are the CISC chips, such as the x86 and the old VAX processors, which tried to make their instructions resemble high-level languages, as well as having a smaller number of registers, many of them having a special purpose. With variable length instructions, and many different modes of operation for each instruction, the CISC methodology generaly resulted in much larger, more complex chip designs that were harder to speed up, pipeline & make superscalar.
To compare the two, lets take a simple operation, such as taking two numbers from memory & adding them together. A generic RISC system would do something like:
1) load 1st number into Register 1
2) load 2nd number into Register 2
3) add the value in R1 to R2, putting the value in R3
4) copy the value from Register 3 to memory
where a CISC chip, would more likely do something more like:
1)add the value at memory location 1 to the value at memory location 2, and store in a special Accumulator register
2) copy the Accumulator register back to memory
The difference being that where the RISC machine only had one addition operation (register+register->register), the CISC machine would have a handful of them, depending on where the data came from (memory (using multiple forms of reference), registers, constants, and various combinations).
In the early 80s, the RISC/CISC debate was a hot one in accademia, and RISC won out there, by virtue of its simplicity & easy of improvement. By the mid 80s, the debate was starting again in industry, as a number of RISC chips started entering the marketplace, where Intel's x86 architecture won by virtue of the IBM PC.
The whole debate is pretty much a moot point now,
since Intel's new x86 chips have RISC cores wrapped by a thin layer to translate the complex instructions. As an added bonus, the new 64b x86 systems should be adding a bunch of extra registers, further negating the penalty of the architecture.
Of course, with the increasing size of mega-corps, with their fingers in more pies than Sara Lee has in her kitchen, I don't htink it'll be long before separate arms of the same corporate conglomeration take eachother to court, not realizing that they are aspects of the same entity.