I'm sure people were complaining in 1979 about how Galaxian was just a Space Invaders clone, and how surely that indicated that originality in the video game medium was dead.
Why aren't there any original games being made? That questions is logically flawed. Why aren't original games on the best-seller lists? Simply, because people would rather play something more familiar.
The point is that Microsoft can only maintain its monopoly in the for-pay sector if it maintains the illusion that it's the standard.
Earth to Slashdot guy: right now Microsoft IS THE STANDARD.
If Linux and other open-source alternatives can't win over the non-profits on the basis of their merits or on their price, it's going to stay that way for a while still.
As if sheep that had been killed by toxic chemicals wasn't appetizing enough, let's cook it by subjecting it to a jet of high-temperature carbon monoxide gas! Good Eats!
It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
But you also multiply the potential points of failure, no? "Big iron" such as mainframes and enterprise-class servers (AS/400 and so forth) undergo much stricter QA testing than any off-the-shelf workstation component you can buy.
When I first encountered this system (where you have to enter process numbers and "AX" to send commands: for example "1234AX Y" to answer a y or n question a cobol program asks for) I thought they were kidding. Nope, this is how some banks actually process work, transactions, and reports/statements.
And it makes perfect sense. Why waste processor cycles on idling while you wait for the user to give a response? Just ask the question, go off and work on some other processes, and then when the user sends back "my answer is Y, and the question it is an answer to was 1234," act on it.
The end user should never have to concern themselves with such details as process numbers, though. That's what the client interface layer is for.
The software industry really has no concept of best practices, no leadership, no authority body. The fact that buffer overflows still happen is stunning.
Is it?
Computer programming is about 50 years old. Bridge-building dates back thousands of years, to the ancient civilizations.
And you expect the one discipline to be as mature as the other already?
More complex software not only means more things to go wrong but also means that the hardware never really gets a chance to outpace the needs of the software.
I don't know if I agree with this... my desktop PC is a 3 1/2-year-old PII-400, and with the exception of decoding certain Divx video files, there's nothing in my typical routine that the old boy can't keep up with.
Sure, if I were a gamer the situation might be different, but in general I feel that the hardware that's currently available now is more than is needed to run the software that's currently available now.
MS and Disney are owned and controled mostly by a very small number of people (Bill Gates, et al.) That's who they represent.
No. They represent everyone who works for the company, from the owners down to administrative assistants.
Microsoft exists to make Microsoft Corp. richer, not just to line Bill Gates' pockets.
How the hell can you have a functioning democracy, when one person with resouces far beyond those of most people (Bill G.) can contribute as much of his money as he wants to buying influence?
It's not Bill G.'s money. It's Microsoft Corp.'s money. Do you understand the difference?
For one, how do you know that MS is the only possible way these people could be employed?...Two, how do you [sic] that this is the best possible why [sic] these people could be employed?
Irrelevant. It's how they are CURRENTLY employed which matters.
Your biggest failure is to consider the costs to society of these company's actions.
That's not my job. I elect legislators to do that for me.
By licensing the offending code, Microsoft is essentially backing SCO up here by saying "They have a legitimate claim on this code and should be paid licensing fees."
Unfortunately for both Microsoft and SCO, a contract between those two parties has essentially no bearing on the SCO v. IBM lawsuit -- which could end up invalidating SCO's claims to proprietorship of certain Unix concepts altogether.
So far as I can tell, we've essentially made being a free thinker illegal in the United States.
And yet, you're still free to post whiny crap like this on Slashdot without even a remote risk of censure or injury.
Go to hell.
(And before you mod me down as flamebait, check the last line of parent's post. This is satire, and if you don't recognize it as such you're a dumbass.)
You said: The claims section more or less reads exactly as I would sketch out a DNS batch query lookup. and also: And the really interesting bit - for country TLDs (.uk), it "display[s] a predetermined number of domains based on the gross domestic product of the associated countries". Wierd.
If you think the country TLD/GDP thing is "wierd", why do you claim that you would have done the same thing?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon do something as opposed to writing a script that does it?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon manually separate chaff from cotton fibers as opposed to building a machine (or "gin", if you will) that does it?
The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side.
Don't forget that because of an idiosyncrasy in the way X client/server communications are conceptualized, the X SERVER is the thing with a display and input devices, and the CLIENTS are the machines running applications (which may or may not be remote to the X console) that request I/O services from the server.
So you've got it backwards, unless you think X has it backwards, in which case you've got it forwards.
It seems that the only law these days is "He who can afford the best, most impressive lawyer wins."
I can see how someone could be fooled into believing this, if the only news they get about what's happening in the courts is the fearmongering they read in "Your Rights Online."
I suggest you obtain a copy of the verdict records from a court that deals with a wide variety of cases. Ten bucks says you'll come to the conclusion that regardless of who the legal counsel is on both sides, justice is truly served far more often than not.
Why don't we just create a system where we all only accept mail that has been PGP encrypted with our public keys?
PGP has been around for what, 10 years now?
And yet, few people outside of the Geekdom use it or even know what it is, most mail clients don't have integrated support for it, and those who don't use it wonder why messages from people who do are tagged with a bunch of gibberish.
The adoption rate of PGP has been extremely slow, and at the rate it's been going I don't think we'll ever see it as a required part of a global email system.
Slashdot Mirror
$2600 buys about 50 used Atari 2600's.
(imagine a Beowulf cluster...?)
I assume that they have to find the breach before it can be reported...so... don't find security breaches.
Any security professional employed by a reputable company will cough and sputter at the idiocy of such a suggestion.
Of course, that doesn't preclude bean-counters or decision-makers from higher up from forcing such a policy into effect anyway...
Q. When was the FCC sold to the telco's and the media?
A. Next Tuesday.
All the Windows source files will now be properly formatted and indented!
The president of Penn State is an idiot. Definitely NOT acting in the best interest of the students.
Well to be fair, this IS Penn State we're talking about...
Bitch, bitch, bitch. Moan, moan, moan.
Bitch, moan, whine.
I'm sure people were complaining in 1979 about how Galaxian was just a Space Invaders clone, and how surely that indicated that originality in the video game medium was dead.
Why aren't there any original games being made? That questions is logically flawed. Why aren't original games on the best-seller lists? Simply, because people would rather play something more familiar.
That '1' of yours, is it 5V DC, or 3.3V?
The music industry can start by not charging $24 for a crap-ass CD with one good song. If CD's were $5 a pop, I'd buy hundreds, not 1 to 5 a year.
5 CDs @ $24 ea. = $120
100 CDs @ $5 ea. = $500
???
The point is that Microsoft can only maintain its monopoly in the for-pay sector if it maintains the illusion that it's the standard.
Earth to Slashdot guy: right now Microsoft IS THE STANDARD.
If Linux and other open-source alternatives can't win over the non-profits on the basis of their merits or on their price, it's going to stay that way for a while still.
Have they tried contacting the resume-spammer and telling him not to send any more copies of the resume?
As if sheep that had been killed by toxic chemicals wasn't appetizing enough, let's cook it by subjecting it to a jet of high-temperature carbon monoxide gas! Good Eats!
A1 sauce though? Yuck.
It's a simple matter of economics: it costs less to design, construct, implement, maintain and re-tool the different components of a distributed system as opposed to that of a mainframe.
But you also multiply the potential points of failure, no? "Big iron" such as mainframes and enterprise-class servers (AS/400 and so forth) undergo much stricter QA testing than any off-the-shelf workstation component you can buy.
When I first encountered this system (where you have to enter process numbers and "AX" to send commands: for example "1234AX Y" to answer a y or n question a cobol program asks for) I thought they were kidding. Nope, this is how some banks actually process work, transactions, and reports/statements.
And it makes perfect sense. Why waste processor cycles on idling while you wait for the user to give a response? Just ask the question, go off and work on some other processes, and then when the user sends back "my answer is Y, and the question it is an answer to was 1234," act on it.
The end user should never have to concern themselves with such details as process numbers, though. That's what the client interface layer is for.
The software industry really has no concept of best practices, no leadership, no authority body. The fact that buffer overflows still happen is stunning.
Is it?
Computer programming is about 50 years old. Bridge-building dates back thousands of years, to the ancient civilizations.
And you expect the one discipline to be as mature as the other already?
More complex software not only means more things to go wrong but also means that the hardware never really gets a chance to outpace the needs of the software.
I don't know if I agree with this... my desktop PC is a 3 1/2-year-old PII-400, and with the exception of decoding certain Divx video files, there's nothing in my typical routine that the old boy can't keep up with.
Sure, if I were a gamer the situation might be different, but in general I feel that the hardware that's currently available now is more than is needed to run the software that's currently available now.
MS and Disney are owned and controled mostly by a very small number of people (Bill Gates, et al.) That's who they represent.
No. They represent everyone who works for the company, from the owners down to administrative assistants.
Microsoft exists to make Microsoft Corp. richer, not just to line Bill Gates' pockets.
How the hell can you have a functioning democracy, when one person with resouces far beyond those of most people (Bill G.) can contribute as much of his money as he wants to buying influence?
It's not Bill G.'s money. It's Microsoft Corp.'s money. Do you understand the difference?
For one, how do you know that MS is the only possible way these people could be employed?...Two, how do you [sic] that this is the best possible why [sic] these people could be employed?
Irrelevant. It's how they are CURRENTLY employed which matters.
Your biggest failure is to consider the costs to society of these company's actions.
That's not my job. I elect legislators to do that for me.
Too much defending the weird instead of defending the righteous cost the ACLU any chance of my support.
Examples?
Microsoft's ongoing commitment to respecting intellectual property and the IT community's healthy exchange of IP through licensing.
He's talking about the GNU Public License, right?
Well... he COULD be.
By licensing the offending code, Microsoft is essentially backing SCO up here by saying "They have a legitimate claim on this code and should be paid licensing fees."
Unfortunately for both Microsoft and SCO, a contract between those two parties has essentially no bearing on the SCO v. IBM lawsuit -- which could end up invalidating SCO's claims to proprietorship of certain Unix concepts altogether.
So far as I can tell, we've essentially made being a free thinker illegal in the United States.
And yet, you're still free to post whiny crap like this on Slashdot without even a remote risk of censure or injury.
Go to hell.
(And before you mod me down as flamebait, check the last line of parent's post. This is satire, and if you don't recognize it as such you're a dumbass.)
(Okay, NOW mod me down as flamebait.)
You said:
The claims section more or less reads exactly as I would sketch out a DNS batch query lookup.
and also:
And the really interesting bit - for country TLDs (.uk), it "display[s] a predetermined number of domains based on the gross domestic product of the associated countries". Wierd.
If you think the country TLD/GDP thing is "wierd", why do you claim that you would have done the same thing?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon do something as opposed to writing a script that does it?
So what exactly is the difference between having a human/monkey/pigeon manually separate chaff from cotton fibers as opposed to building a machine (or "gin", if you will) that does it?
The way I see X being slow is that widgets need to be on server-side instead of client-side.
Don't forget that because of an idiosyncrasy in the way X client/server communications are conceptualized, the X SERVER is the thing with a display and input devices, and the CLIENTS are the machines running applications (which may or may not be remote to the X console) that request I/O services from the server.
So you've got it backwards, unless you think X has it backwards, in which case you've got it forwards.
It seems that the only law these days is "He who can afford the best, most impressive lawyer wins."
I can see how someone could be fooled into believing this, if the only news they get about what's happening in the courts is the fearmongering they read in "Your Rights Online."
I suggest you obtain a copy of the verdict records from a court that deals with a wide variety of cases. Ten bucks says you'll come to the conclusion that regardless of who the legal counsel is on both sides, justice is truly served far more often than not.
Why don't we just create a system where we all only accept mail that has been PGP encrypted with our public keys?
PGP has been around for what, 10 years now?
And yet, few people outside of the Geekdom use it or even know what it is, most mail clients don't have integrated support for it, and those who don't use it wonder why messages from people who do are tagged with a bunch of gibberish.
The adoption rate of PGP has been extremely slow, and at the rate it's been going I don't think we'll ever see it as a required part of a global email system.