I think I used to know a friend of this guy when I lived in Philly. This friend would say "I'm going out to meet with Shapeshifter" and he'd leave, and his girlfriend and I would make fun of him and call them "the Superfriends". Get it? 70's cartoon reference. These guys used to hang out at the so-called "Rainbow Gatherings" which were popular in the early 90's.
Using some applications is like going to a porn site. Thousands of windows popping up with ads for the software itself, the companies other products and services, etc. Like the Quicktime "update now/later" box that pops up every time you want to watch a friggin quicktime movie. Give me a break, when you go to buy a hammer at the hardware store it's not plastered with ads for other tools you can buy from Joe's tool shop. Ads that you can't get rid of, like they are engraved into the wood of the handle or something. It's a tool, you just want to use it. If I want another one, I'll go get it myself. This crap annoys me no end.
Remember those talking cameras? What if they had started saying "You know, our Pentax 1200-zero-XG takes much better than I do, why don't you throw me in the garbage and go buy it?" We'd be living in the movie Blade Runner, that's what.
THE WORD "IT'S" IS A CONTRACTION THAT ALWAYS MEANS "IT IS"! IT IS NOT THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN! THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN IS "ITS"!
WHEN YOU WANT TO SAY THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE OWNS SOMETHING, YOU SAY "ITS"
CORRECT: "It's making me sick how many times I have seen people screw this up." read this as "It is making me sick".
CORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot lift its head up."
INCORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot remember it's root password." try reading it as "The dinosaur cannot remember it is root password."
I can't stop people from being idiots. If there's anybody on this site who isn't a fucking asshole, be a pal and respond to this post in a way that shows you aren't. I don't know why I'm asking this.
Oh well, it's the internet, just a void that you shout into, no answer. Nobody there. Just a bunch of storefronts, but nobody behind the counter. A library with no librarian.
this is gonna kill my "Karma rating" even more
on
Microsoft Cracked
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· Score: 1
I'm tired of this goddamn site anyway, and it's sure not the fault of the people who set it up. What a great "community" -- a community of assholes, myself probably included. Oh, wait a minute -- sorry: very intelligent assholes.
this is gonna kill my "Karma rating"
on
Microsoft Cracked
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· Score: 1
I write software all day for a living. Pay me, give me time, and I'll do exactly what you say in your post. Or, give me a two week deadline, and I won't. And you, like the last person, are missing the point.
I tell you what, let's see you post your code on this site, "Anonymous Coward", and let's watch slashdot rip you to shreds. You made a mistake here, you could have done this differently/better, whatever -- watch the fun as you hastily justify your decisions.
My wife makes fun of my by talking in a nasally voice and saying "well, actually, blah blah blah." Don't forget you and I are just smart-ass computer nerds who are competitive and arrogant and think we're smarter than everyone else. The funniest, and worst, thing about slashdot is all the irritating know-it-alls that try to one-up each other. Shut up fucko.
Guess what I'm doing when I get home from work today? You guessed it -- I'm NOT going to be sitting in front of a computer.
Here's a concrete example of why secret OS source code makes it harder for developers. I'm so frustrated at this point I feel like trying to find these guys in St. Petersburg and ask them politely if they could answer a few questions.
Right now I am trying to write an app in Visual C++ that downloads a web page. There's this object called a "CInternetSession". To download a web page, you create one of these "CInternetSession" objects, then you call a method on it to return a "CHttpSession". Okay, fine.
The thing is, I have to repeatedly download the same web page over and over, at regular intervals. I need to optimize for performance because of other stuff that's going on in this program. It would be simpler and more modular if I created a new CInternetSession every time I download the page. Then I just put all the internet code in one function and be done with it. However, of course it would be faster to create the CInternetSession once and reuse it. Which is preferable depends on exactly how much of a performance hit using creation of a CInternetSession object will incur.
If I was writing this on Linux, I would just check out the source code and find out exactly what each of these objects do. But since they are "black boxes", I have to either 1) rig up a framework to run some tests 2) muck around searching the web and the microsoft site to see if I can get more info about what these functions actually do or 3) just say "screw it" and pick one and forget about it.
Guess which choice I'm going with? You got it, #3. Proof positive that applications written for an open source OS have the capability, at least, to be much better quality than apps written for a traditional OS. Whether or not the OS itself is "better."
No, UNIX is an OS, and MS Windows is an OS plus a lot of other garbage that you don't really need. The guy who said UNIX is not an OS obviously needs a vacation, he's been thinking way too hard or has had too much coffee.
BTW, they should be breaking MS up into 3 companies, as follows:
1. an Applications Software company
2. an OS company
3. a GUI company
P.S.: I've had an unopened "CueCat" in my backpack for a couple of days. Just opened it up. The license I read online is not explicitly printed anywhere on the stuff that comes with it.
You also can't go through the previous scenario (see the message I'm replying to), but instead give your friend a baseball cap with a tag on it that says "to read some important information about this cap, go to central park and look under the bench on the uptown side, closest to the 72nd street gate", unless the tag explicitly stated that under the bench was the "use license" for this cap, and that it was not legal to wear the cap until the license was read. An agreement cannot be entered into without both parties knowing that they are entering into the agreement. This is a fundamental freedom that needs to be fought for.
This is different from laws. I am implicitly bound to abide all the laws of the country I live in whether I know what they are or not. Legal agreements are something else, they are restrictions that are above and beyond the law, that you willingly enter into with your own knowledge and consent. I know that that's bad English to say "enter into a restriction" but you know what I'm talking about here.
This is a really serious issue. They better just be bluffing.
The license agreement for this thing is one of these agreements that says as soon as you use the thing, you agree to the terms of the agreement. It says that they are loaning you the reader, not giving it to you. That might be okay, if they told you ahead of time what you were agreeing to. But they didn't.
It follows that I could:
1. write up an agreement that said "by wearing this baseball cap, you agree to give me $100".
2. casually go up to my friend and say, "hey, I've got this old Mets cap, you want it?"
3. Wait until I see him wearing it one day and then show him the agreement and say, "Dude, you owe me $100! Pay up!"
Pretty soon it will be illegal to say to your friend "Dude, 'Gladiator' sucked, don't go see it." The movie studio will sue you for cutting into their profits.
The real issue is this: it's obviously illegal to take something someone else did and make money off it. What these people want to do (DVD, etc) is make it so it's illegal to do anything that CUTS INTO THEIR PROFITS. So then it follows that they can make it illegal to be a competitor! Everyone wants a monopoly now.
I tried to put a fibonnacci sequence (like this, obviously: 010101101110111110111111110), but it won't take my submission, it keeps saying I didn't fill in the required fields. I even switched my birthdate to the European style (day/month/year instead of month/day/year)... anybody else have problems w/ this server?
I figure there's no way that the space aliens in question will be able to decipher the meaning of any human language, but if they do anything they will look for discernable patterns on the disk. Of course, it's a snowball's chance in hell but whatever.
When bad people do bad things with your tools
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 2
Contrast the Napster thing to the lawsuit against cigarrette corporations, and then let's compare it to the gun industry and the pantyhose industry (wait, this makes sense).
1. Cigarrettes have absolutely no beneficial or good use whatsoever. Every time a cigarrette is smoked, it does harm to someone -- there is no way to use a cigarrette without helping to slowly kill someone, maybe a few people w/ secondhand smoke, mostly yourself. You can't even use an unsmoked pack for a doorstop, it's too light.
2. Guns can be used to murder innocent people, but hey, you can hunt for deer or protect your home from intruders. Okay, so maybe it's stretching it a bit.
3. Napster can be used for evil (stealing music), but it can also be used for good purposes (gives up and coming bands a way to distribute their demos). Although I have to say that much of the music I've downloaded I know for a fact is "stolen", and the rest may very well be for all I know. Yeah, I know the music industry is corrupt, etc., but two wrongs don't make a right. Okay, so this could go either way.
4. The pantyhose industry makes products that are mostly used for good purposes (so women can wear them and feel like they look better), but every once in a while a bank robber puts a stocking over his/her face so the security cameras won't recognize him/her. C'mon, give 'em a break, they just wanted to make women beautiful, they didn't know this would happen!
Now, which of these industries do we shut down: 1, 2, 3, or 4?
Answer: we shut down 3, because it's NOT a huge industry, it's just one guy! Easy, we can take him out like THAT! Plus, he's pitting himself against, you guessed it, another BIG industry!
Even if we assume that the maker of a tool can ever be held responsible for evil that is done with the tool, it's still obvious here that the real reason they are shutting down Napster has nothing to do with that.
Doubt anyone will read this but: I'm a nerd just like anyone on this site so I correct people when they make mistakes too. My wife makes fun of me and calls me a grognard (the meaning of which term she hasn't gotten quite right, BTW, but then there I go correcting her, right?) So, being that us nerds are smart, we nit-pick, annoy, and generally try to one-up each other by saying "You haven't gotten it quite right, now, it's ACTUALLY more like this..." In fact, the aforementioned wife has noted that the word "actually" has replaced the word "like" as the new throwaway word in conversation. Point? My point is that all the above people bickering about correct C grammar are probably right to some degree. There's a lot of truths, a lot of compilers, and what the standards bodies say isn't really what's important either -- what's important in real life is whether there's a user enjoying your program, or a user cursing at it because it crashes.
Yes. Typical decision maker has about 1% of the knowledge of microprocessor architecture that anyone posting on this thread has, and about 0.1% available time to think about their decision. So the way they solve the problem: big numbers = good. Note: I said typical, not every.
Slashdot Mirror
This is exactly what I was going to say.
A viable charity? How about: "help out the jock who made fun of you in 8th grade and is now working in a sandwich shop"
I think I used to know a friend of this guy when I lived in Philly. This friend would say "I'm going out to meet with Shapeshifter" and he'd leave, and his girlfriend and I would make fun of him and call them "the Superfriends". Get it? 70's cartoon reference. These guys used to hang out at the so-called "Rainbow Gatherings" which were popular in the early 90's.
Life is weird.
Using some applications is like going to a porn site. Thousands of windows popping up with ads for the software itself, the companies other products and services, etc. Like the Quicktime "update now/later" box that pops up every time you want to watch a friggin quicktime movie. Give me a break, when you go to buy a hammer at the hardware store it's not plastered with ads for other tools you can buy from Joe's tool shop. Ads that you can't get rid of, like they are engraved into the wood of the handle or something. It's a tool, you just want to use it. If I want another one, I'll go get it myself. This crap annoys me no end.
Remember those talking cameras? What if they had started saying "You know, our Pentax 1200-zero-XG takes much better than I do, why don't you throw me in the garbage and go buy it?" We'd be living in the movie Blade Runner, that's what.
why don't you use your head for thinking? That's what it was designed for...
Congrats on that one -- probably the first truly smart/clever quip I've seen on slashdot. Post more ;)
http://webster.commnet.edu/grammar/notorious.htme bPages/5.TechnicalCommunication/tc_2_Usa ge.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/csk/its.html
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~cs5014/fall.95/courseNotes/W
http://www.ossweb.com/article-6.html
Is that enough?
I'm not too terribly worried about the Boy Scouts of America checking to see whether I've stolen software.
Speaking of basic grammar --
EVERYONE PAY ATTENTION NOW!!!!
THE WORD "IT'S" IS A CONTRACTION THAT ALWAYS MEANS "IT IS"! IT IS NOT THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN! THE POSSESSIVE FORM OF THE PRONOUN IS "ITS"!
WHEN YOU WANT TO SAY THAT SOMETHING THAT IS NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE OWNS SOMETHING, YOU SAY "ITS"
CORRECT: "It's making me sick how many times I have seen people screw this up." read this as "It is making me sick".
CORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot lift its head up."
INCORRECT: "The dinosaur cannot remember it's root password." try reading it as "The dinosaur cannot remember it is root password."
(I am so sick of people making this mistake)
I can't stop people from being idiots. If there's anybody on this site who isn't a fucking asshole, be a pal and respond to this post in a way that shows you aren't. I don't know why I'm asking this.
Oh well, it's the internet, just a void that you shout into, no answer. Nobody there. Just a bunch of storefronts, but nobody behind the counter. A library with no librarian.
I'm tired of this goddamn site anyway, and it's sure not the fault of the people who set it up. What a great "community" -- a community of assholes, myself probably included. Oh, wait a minute -- sorry: very intelligent assholes.
I write software all day for a living. Pay me, give me time, and I'll do exactly what you say in your post. Or, give me a two week deadline, and I won't. And you, like the last person, are missing the point.
I tell you what, let's see you post your code on this site, "Anonymous Coward", and let's watch slashdot rip you to shreds. You made a mistake here, you could have done this differently/better, whatever -- watch the fun as you hastily justify your decisions.
My wife makes fun of my by talking in a nasally voice and saying "well, actually, blah blah blah." Don't forget you and I are just smart-ass computer nerds who are competitive and arrogant and think we're smarter than everyone else. The funniest, and worst, thing about slashdot is all the irritating know-it-alls that try to one-up each other. Shut up fucko.
Guess what I'm doing when I get home from work today? You guessed it -- I'm NOT going to be sitting in front of a computer.
Bye fucko!
Thanks -- though this doesn't solve the overall problem (and I still don't know what those lower-level Win32 functions do) it's some help.
Here's a concrete example of why secret OS source code makes it harder for developers. I'm so frustrated at this point I feel like trying to find these guys in St. Petersburg and ask them politely if they could answer a few questions.
Right now I am trying to write an app in Visual C++ that downloads a web page. There's this object called a "CInternetSession". To download a web page, you create one of these "CInternetSession" objects, then you call a method on it to return a "CHttpSession". Okay, fine.
The thing is, I have to repeatedly download the same web page over and over, at regular intervals. I need to optimize for performance because of other stuff that's going on in this program. It would be simpler and more modular if I created a new CInternetSession every time I download the page. Then I just put all the internet code in one function and be done with it. However, of course it would be faster to create the CInternetSession once and reuse it. Which is preferable depends on exactly how much of a performance hit using creation of a CInternetSession object will incur.
If I was writing this on Linux, I would just check out the source code and find out exactly what each of these objects do. But since they are "black boxes", I have to either 1) rig up a framework to run some tests 2) muck around searching the web and the microsoft site to see if I can get more info about what these functions actually do or 3) just say "screw it" and pick one and forget about it.
Guess which choice I'm going with? You got it, #3. Proof positive that applications written for an open source OS have the capability, at least, to be much better quality than apps written for a traditional OS. Whether or not the OS itself is "better."
No, UNIX is an OS, and MS Windows is an OS plus a lot of other garbage that you don't really need. The guy who said UNIX is not an OS obviously needs a vacation, he's been thinking way too hard or has had too much coffee. BTW, they should be breaking MS up into 3 companies, as follows: 1. an Applications Software company 2. an OS company 3. a GUI company
By reading this post you agree to give me $100. Ha! Tricked you! Here's my address, check or money order please...
P.S.: I've had an unopened "CueCat" in my backpack for a couple of days. Just opened it up. The license I read online is not explicitly printed anywhere on the stuff that comes with it.
You also can't go through the previous scenario (see the message I'm replying to), but instead give your friend a baseball cap with a tag on it that says "to read some important information about this cap, go to central park and look under the bench on the uptown side, closest to the 72nd street gate", unless the tag explicitly stated that under the bench was the "use license" for this cap, and that it was not legal to wear the cap until the license was read. An agreement cannot be entered into without both parties knowing that they are entering into the agreement. This is a fundamental freedom that needs to be fought for.
This is different from laws. I am implicitly bound to abide all the laws of the country I live in whether I know what they are or not. Legal agreements are something else, they are restrictions that are above and beyond the law, that you willingly enter into with your own knowledge and consent. I know that that's bad English to say "enter into a restriction" but you know what I'm talking about here.
This is a really serious issue. They better just be bluffing.
The bottom line on this is as follows:
The license agreement for this thing is one of these agreements that says as soon as you use the thing, you agree to the terms of the agreement. It says that they are loaning you the reader, not giving it to you. That might be okay, if they told you ahead of time what you were agreeing to. But they didn't.
It follows that I could:
1. write up an agreement that said "by wearing this baseball cap, you agree to give me $100".
2. casually go up to my friend and say, "hey, I've got this old Mets cap, you want it?"
3. Wait until I see him wearing it one day and then show him the agreement and say, "Dude, you owe me $100! Pay up!"
This kind of bullshit has got to stop.
Pretty soon it will be illegal to say to your friend "Dude, 'Gladiator' sucked, don't go see it." The movie studio will sue you for cutting into their profits.
The real issue is this: it's obviously illegal to take something someone else did and make money off it. What these people want to do (DVD, etc) is make it so it's illegal to do anything that CUTS INTO THEIR PROFITS. So then it follows that they can make it illegal to be a competitor! Everyone wants a monopoly now.
I tried to put a fibonnacci sequence (like this, obviously: 010101101110111110111111110), but it won't take my submission, it keeps saying I didn't fill in the required fields. I even switched my birthdate to the European style (day/month/year instead of month/day/year)... anybody else have problems w/ this server?
I figure there's no way that the space aliens in question will be able to decipher the meaning of any human language, but if they do anything they will look for discernable patterns on the disk. Of course, it's a snowball's chance in hell but whatever.
Contrast the Napster thing to the lawsuit against cigarrette corporations, and then let's compare it to the gun industry and the pantyhose industry (wait, this makes sense).
1. Cigarrettes have absolutely no beneficial or good use whatsoever. Every time a cigarrette is smoked, it does harm to someone -- there is no way to use a cigarrette without helping to slowly kill someone, maybe a few people w/ secondhand smoke, mostly yourself. You can't even use an unsmoked pack for a doorstop, it's too light.
2. Guns can be used to murder innocent people, but hey, you can hunt for deer or protect your home from intruders. Okay, so maybe it's stretching it a bit.
3. Napster can be used for evil (stealing music), but it can also be used for good purposes (gives up and coming bands a way to distribute their demos). Although I have to say that much of the music I've downloaded I know for a fact is "stolen", and the rest may very well be for all I know. Yeah, I know the music industry is corrupt, etc., but two wrongs don't make a right. Okay, so this could go either way.
4. The pantyhose industry makes products that are mostly used for good purposes (so women can wear them and feel like they look better), but every once in a while a bank robber puts a stocking over his/her face so the security cameras won't recognize him/her. C'mon, give 'em a break, they just wanted to make women beautiful, they didn't know this would happen!
Now, which of these industries do we shut down: 1, 2, 3, or 4?
Answer: we shut down 3, because it's NOT a huge industry, it's just one guy! Easy, we can take him out like THAT! Plus, he's pitting himself against, you guessed it, another BIG industry!
Even if we assume that the maker of a tool can ever be held responsible for evil that is done with the tool, it's still obvious here that the real reason they are shutting down Napster has nothing to do with that.
Doubt anyone will read this but: I'm a nerd just like anyone on this site so I correct people when they make mistakes too. My wife makes fun of me and calls me a grognard (the meaning of which term she hasn't gotten quite right, BTW, but then there I go correcting her, right?) So, being that us nerds are smart, we nit-pick, annoy, and generally try to one-up each other by saying "You haven't gotten it quite right, now, it's ACTUALLY more like this..." In fact, the aforementioned wife has noted that the word "actually" has replaced the word "like" as the new throwaway word in conversation. Point? My point is that all the above people bickering about correct C grammar are probably right to some degree. There's a lot of truths, a lot of compilers, and what the standards bodies say isn't really what's important either -- what's important in real life is whether there's a user enjoying your program, or a user cursing at it because it crashes.
Just fleecing their corporate customers?
Yes. Typical decision maker has about 1% of the knowledge of microprocessor architecture that anyone posting on this thread has, and about 0.1% available time to think about their decision. So the way they solve the problem: big numbers = good. Note: I said typical, not every.