Correct, apologies for my ambiguity. I trust addons. I don't trust plugins. That said, I don't use many plugins other than the ubiquitous Flash and Shockwave.
Given what I've seen done with Firefox addons, I'm quite confident that most of the functionality that traditionally used ActiveX can be safely and completely replicated with Javascript and XUL. After all, most of them are simple UI mods.
People who fund terrorist groups are frequently named as accomplices and tried as heinous criminals, so why aren't shareholders held accountable for crimes perpetrated with their money ?
The system is broken beyond repair. The world needs a new and improved system, built with security and reliability from the ground up. Sarbanes-Oxley is just a beard.
You would think so, wouldn't you ? Even Word and Excel have "compatibility modes" that emulate Wordperfect, AmiPro, 123 and Quattro, yet the MS Office is the dominant suite. I would expect an underdog to try even harder to make "switching" as painless as possible.
The big problem with free software is that without the lure of financial gain, most developers have no incentive to build in popular features, and the user has no leverage with which to influence the developer. It's effectively a stalemate. Free software is a beautiful thing, but the world is far from perfect.
So many bitter developers make me wonder what's wrong with the industry.
Yes, there are a lot of morons in the biz, most of them with better-paid jobs than you and I, but bashing me for being concerned about my productivity - that's uncalled for.
An afternoon should have been more than enough to get started, at least build a demo and play around with some of the GUI editors. That didn't happen. I spent five hours installing, crashing, reinstalling, and skimming through hundreds of pages of unrelated documentation to try and find out what I was doing wrong. Bash Microsoft all you want, I know for a fact that I could install it and have a simple app running in about 15 minutes because the interface is intuitive. I've seen students pick it up for the first time, build a simple IE-embedded "browser" in C++ and package it as a self-extracting installer... all in the space of a freeform 2-hour class. I wasn't holding their hand, and I wasn't giving them step-by-step instructions either. They fired it up, looked around, used the help system extensively and figured it out.
Eclipse could be every bit as easy, and now that a non-bitter poster clued me in to EasyEclipse.org, I actually have renewed my faith in this misunderstood IDE. I don't have time to learn it right now, but hopefully in the coming weeks I'll give it a shot and see what comes out of it.
For fuck sakes, this is 2008. After 30 years of mainstream computing, a little user-friendliness isn't too much to ask. But you, you're always going to be a bitter troll.
Actually I think a B.A. and 3 months of experience makes up three quarters of the unemployed techie population in my city, and they're all morons who aren't even worth the $13/hour call center job.
What's so wrong with a little usability anyway ? You're not an Xorg developer, are you ? I already know how to code using "old world" tools, command lines and makefiles. If this Eclipse thing is so great, I would expect it to increase my productivity, not get in the way.
Now why isn't something like this promoted in big bold letters on the Eclipse homepage ? Linux sucks for the same reason, it's near-impossible to get into unless you have someone tutor you. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux daily and I like it, but it's taken me years of experience with various distros and a few sessions of LFS before I felt confident enough to actually do stuff with it.
For any project to be successful, it needs a gentle learning curve. Make it uber-easy to get started, while still allowing lots of freedom to develop advanced skills at a comfortable pace.
Why commit ? Because nobody likes a player. What, you think Slashdot will still be around when you're 65 and lonely ?
Most people date with the intent of meeting someone that will put up with their bullshit over the long term. There are a bunch of people who date just to get around, but they're usually not upfront about their intentions. I liken these people to domain tasters, which I harshly despise. Players are one of the many reasons good guys don't have a chance in today's angry world.
In my book, punching such bastards is fair game. Winding up in the street is proof enough that they have poor judgment, running around spraying people with shitwater just confirms their worthlessness as human beings.
On one hand, we need better help for homeless people, but they need to be deserving of our help.
Funny, I thought I was the only one who thought Detroit was a shithole, and I'm Canadian!
City-bashing aside, the stock market is a dirty dirty thing, and this litigious bullshit is yet more evidence of that fact. So a handful of asstards sue Yahoo, get some settlement that comes out of shareholder money anyway, then run off with their loot. All they're doing is stealing from fellow shareholders, and giving some underperforming law firm a generous tithe.
Since it's Detroit, maybe those who aren't suing should hire the police to assassinate the shit disturbers. Business as usual.
DVD was never about high compression. It wasn't even about good compression. It was simply what the idiot film industry had bought into, and Blu-Ray/HDDVD is no different.
Me, I'm still super happy with standard-resolution Xvid, or even HRHD (960x540). Hi-def is great for things like sports (that @#^$ing tiny puck), but for movies and primetime TV it doesn't matter so much. Since 99% of all I watch is movies and TV series, I'm hardly bothered.
If I'm satisfied with an outdated compression algo (Xvid) that crams 90 minutes into 700mb, going up to hi-def I wouldn't tolerate much more than 2 to 3gb per 90-minute film, or 1gb per TV episode. 25gb BluRay discs ? Ridiculous! Unless they pack an entire season of TV shows on it (hint: they won't). I've already seen some hi-def movies encoded to a 2gb x264 file, the quality was fantastic and I could discern no artifacting whatsoever... not on my TV, nor my high-end LCD monitor. If some teenage dirtbag on the internet can do it, why can't Hollywood ? Oh, silly me, it's because they couldn't brag about the "super high bitrate" and the increased difficulty to rip it to your Kaleidescape system.
Umm, criminals? They aren't the smartest bunch, you know.
So are you saying that all criminals are dumb ?
If they're so weak-minded, why is it that the great majority of murders and fraud cases go unsolved ? Just because Big Tyrone is too stoned to shut up in court, doesn't mean everyone else is such a braggart. What, you think smart people don't ever get violently angry at others ?
Whether this guy did it or not, they're going to need far stronger arguments than "Not having a car seat is weird, and having $8k in cash is weird, and we know murderers are weird so he must be guilty!"
You know what's even weirder ? Not having a car seat, because it's been replaced with a 21U half-rack full of (working) audio gear. Weird, yet my car was once configured as such, many years ago. Does that make me a suspected murdered ? It may be weird to North Americans, not so much to South Americans and Western Europeans, where outdoor DJ parties are commonplace and all you need is a few amplifiers, speakers and a bunch of car batteries.
I'm pretty sure the parent was referring to a one-time-use VNC server, as would be used in a remote tech support scenario. Dell uses that sort of thing.
Fine. ActiveX in a controlled environment can be useful in a backwards kind of way, even though I personally believe they should package such functionality as a standalone app in most corporate environments... but given how 99.44% of programmers aren't even worth the hot-dog meat, I guess we have to make compromises.
The one place where ActiveX does NOT belong, is on the intarwebs. I _far_ prefer the Firefox plugin system, where everything is Javascript and still runs in a sandbox. The petty little features that are most often built into ActiveX plugins are just as easily made into XUL, without all these retarded vulnerabilities. I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, but I trust sandboxed Javascript a LOT more than random bytecode.
Yet we see absolutely no effort by the labels to reduce the price per song that we pay and instead see them trying to reduce the amount paid to the artists that actually make the content that they are selling.
In my area, we call such people "small-time drug runners". They usually wind up dead when their greed exceeds that of their boss.
Maybe we need to appoint someone above the RIAA to keep them in check.
What was the RIAA doing in the 70's and 80's, during the explosion of home taping where everyone and their mothers were making mix-tapes for their friends and relatives ? Did they run around suing everyone that just happened to own a dubbing deck ?
The problem is that today, the concept of "friend" has expanded far beyond the dozen classmates and neighbors. On the internet, everyone is your "neighbor". The music industry was not prepared for this social shift, and the retail world doesn't have any idea how to adapt - it's quite likely not even possible. Distributors, wholesalers, retailers, they've all become obsolete overnight. Who needs a middleman when you can service the customer directly and all it takes is a free (or cheap) web host ?
The internet effectively disembowels a trillion-dollar industry with a single mouse click. If we must use analogies, then how about the farmer's market ? You go directly to the producer, pay a much better price for fresher produce. The grocery chain gets nothing, the truck drivers get nothing, the ad agency gets nothing... but the farmer's market, unlike the internet, is tied to a very specific physical location. You can't buy fresh tomatoes unless you live near the market. On the web, you can buy anything anywhere from anyone, and that's why the RIAA is in trouble. It's one company vs the world.
The "creating 2.4 million jobs" bit is just butter to help grease this idea into the proper ears. That's state-government speak for "This is a good thing".
Allow me to translate this into plain english: This is a good thing. Broadband, even the cheap 512kbit stuff, is enabling refined efficiency across the board for all sorts of services. Anything that brings pertinent, timely information to great numbers of people causes ripple effects throughout society. It helps humankind inch forward as a lubric, progressive society. If a few public voices want to give that inch a push, they're effectively accelerating progress.
Twenty years ago, we got all our information from books, periodicals and TV - biased, slow-moving media. I think it's safe to say that people 20 years ago possessed less useful information, on average, than people today. I know it's not a quantifiable asset, but you can't deny the casual benefits brought forth by the web and instant messaging.
The moral of this story is: don't "hack" machines in your own country.
If they hadn't attacked Canadian computers, things would have been far more difficult for law enforcement as the damages would have been outside their jurisdiction. That's why Russians and Koreans attack USA machines... if they root their neighbor's box, it's a whole different ballgame.
Actually it says MoxFulder has self-esteem issues and can't commit, like every other person on these dating sites. And a slut too!
The problem with dating sites is, well, they're dating sites. They're the online analog of singles' night at the cheap bar, or the half-bred karaoke dump. Combine that low-quality pool with the social disdain for any sort of dating phenomenon, whether it's a hot-line or web site, and you find yourself with the dumbest situation in the world: lots of desperate clients with money, but no "product" to sell them. They sign up for a few months, date the same weirdos every other member has met (and rejected), then leave. Eventually the bucket runs dry and your site dies while everyone flocks to the new kid on the block. Worse, people recognize the morons from previous sites and give up more quickly with each new iteration.
This, like many other things on the net right now, is a passing fad. There's no money in it, nor anything else that doesn't involve nekkid people and tentacles.
I gave Eclipse a spin, just a few weeks ago. It was a confusing, frustrating and fruitless experience. I wasted a whole afternoon trying to get it working.
It's the same problem as any other plugin-based app: nobody cares about the app, all responsibility is delegated to the plugins. The hardest part is figuring out which plugins you want/need.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck. Eclipse didn't enable me to do that in a reasonable time frame, so I ditched it. Maybe I need a step-by-step tutorial to learn how to install/use it... rather humbling given how I started programming back in the early 80's!
Everyone says Eclipse is awesome, and I'd love to be one of those people, but right now I see Eclipse as just another bloated unstable Java app like every other.
If the cores aren't actually defective, then yes, AMD will make it relatively easy to unlock because that's what they were once famous for, with the Athlon XP.
If the cores are crap, then most likely they will lock them down securely to avoid bad PR. Enthusiasts like you and I understand that there are no guarantees once you start tweaking, but we're not the problem. The problem is shady vendors that unlock/overclock to defraud the client.
Example: I just finished building a cheap machine for my mother-in-law, using an Intel Core Duo E2160 - 1.8ghz stock, but even on a low-end board I managed to hit 3.0 ghz with ease. There are plenty of half-bred sons of bitches who would gladly charge an extra $250 for that system and claim it uses the top-end E6850 processor. This sort of thing is why multiplier locking was implemented in the first place. Back in the 80s and 90s this type of fraud was the norm rather than the exception.
Unlocked or not, I'm not buying a Phenom anytime soon and neither should you. They're weak compared to Intel's 2-year-old Conroe architecture, and by consequence that makes them overpriced. Worse still is the lack of quality motherboards for this young dumb processor. One can only hope they will improve over time, but I won't hold my breath. In my book, everything that came after the NForce4 Ultra has been absolute garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct, apologies for my ambiguity. I trust addons. I don't trust plugins. That said, I don't use many plugins other than the ubiquitous Flash and Shockwave.
Given what I've seen done with Firefox addons, I'm quite confident that most of the functionality that traditionally used ActiveX can be safely and completely replicated with Javascript and XUL. After all, most of them are simple UI mods.
People who fund terrorist groups are frequently named as accomplices and tried as heinous criminals, so why aren't shareholders held accountable for crimes perpetrated with their money ?
The system is broken beyond repair. The world needs a new and improved system, built with security and reliability from the ground up. Sarbanes-Oxley is just a beard.
You would think so, wouldn't you ? Even Word and Excel have "compatibility modes" that emulate Wordperfect, AmiPro, 123 and Quattro, yet the MS Office is the dominant suite. I would expect an underdog to try even harder to make "switching" as painless as possible.
The big problem with free software is that without the lure of financial gain, most developers have no incentive to build in popular features, and the user has no leverage with which to influence the developer. It's effectively a stalemate. Free software is a beautiful thing, but the world is far from perfect.
So many bitter developers make me wonder what's wrong with the industry.
Yes, there are a lot of morons in the biz, most of them with better-paid jobs than you and I, but bashing me for being concerned about my productivity - that's uncalled for.
An afternoon should have been more than enough to get started, at least build a demo and play around with some of the GUI editors. That didn't happen. I spent five hours installing, crashing, reinstalling, and skimming through hundreds of pages of unrelated documentation to try and find out what I was doing wrong. Bash Microsoft all you want, I know for a fact that I could install it and have a simple app running in about 15 minutes because the interface is intuitive. I've seen students pick it up for the first time, build a simple IE-embedded "browser" in C++ and package it as a self-extracting installer... all in the space of a freeform 2-hour class. I wasn't holding their hand, and I wasn't giving them step-by-step instructions either. They fired it up, looked around, used the help system extensively and figured it out.
Eclipse could be every bit as easy, and now that a non-bitter poster clued me in to EasyEclipse.org, I actually have renewed my faith in this misunderstood IDE. I don't have time to learn it right now, but hopefully in the coming weeks I'll give it a shot and see what comes out of it.
For fuck sakes, this is 2008. After 30 years of mainstream computing, a little user-friendliness isn't too much to ask. But you, you're always going to be a bitter troll.
Actually I think a B.A. and 3 months of experience makes up three quarters of the unemployed techie population in my city, and they're all morons who aren't even worth the $13/hour call center job.
What's so wrong with a little usability anyway ? You're not an Xorg developer, are you ? I already know how to code using "old world" tools, command lines and makefiles. If this Eclipse thing is so great, I would expect it to increase my productivity, not get in the way.
I love you!!!!
Now why isn't something like this promoted in big bold letters on the Eclipse homepage ? Linux sucks for the same reason, it's near-impossible to get into unless you have someone tutor you. Don't get me wrong, I use Linux daily and I like it, but it's taken me years of experience with various distros and a few sessions of LFS before I felt confident enough to actually do stuff with it.
For any project to be successful, it needs a gentle learning curve. Make it uber-easy to get started, while still allowing lots of freedom to develop advanced skills at a comfortable pace.
Why commit ? Because nobody likes a player. What, you think Slashdot will still be around when you're 65 and lonely ?
Most people date with the intent of meeting someone that will put up with their bullshit over the long term. There are a bunch of people who date just to get around, but they're usually not upfront about their intentions. I liken these people to domain tasters, which I harshly despise. Players are one of the many reasons good guys don't have a chance in today's angry world.
Nice use of a useless word, but I think the RIAA should quit while they're still in the green and reinvent itself as a nationwide broadband ISP.
Like Bugs Bunny once said, if you can't beat 'em, lick 'em.
In my book, punching such bastards is fair game. Winding up in the street is proof enough that they have poor judgment, running around spraying people with shitwater just confirms their worthlessness as human beings.
On one hand, we need better help for homeless people, but they need to be deserving of our help.
Easy: poverty.
Next question?
Funny, I thought I was the only one who thought Detroit was a shithole, and I'm Canadian!
City-bashing aside, the stock market is a dirty dirty thing, and this litigious bullshit is yet more evidence of that fact. So a handful of asstards sue Yahoo, get some settlement that comes out of shareholder money anyway, then run off with their loot. All they're doing is stealing from fellow shareholders, and giving some underperforming law firm a generous tithe.
Since it's Detroit, maybe those who aren't suing should hire the police to assassinate the shit disturbers. Business as usual.
DVD was never about high compression. It wasn't even about good compression. It was simply what the idiot film industry had bought into, and Blu-Ray/HDDVD is no different.
Me, I'm still super happy with standard-resolution Xvid, or even HRHD (960x540). Hi-def is great for things like sports (that @#^$ing tiny puck), but for movies and primetime TV it doesn't matter so much. Since 99% of all I watch is movies and TV series, I'm hardly bothered.
If I'm satisfied with an outdated compression algo (Xvid) that crams 90 minutes into 700mb, going up to hi-def I wouldn't tolerate much more than 2 to 3gb per 90-minute film, or 1gb per TV episode. 25gb BluRay discs ? Ridiculous! Unless they pack an entire season of TV shows on it (hint: they won't). I've already seen some hi-def movies encoded to a 2gb x264 file, the quality was fantastic and I could discern no artifacting whatsoever... not on my TV, nor my high-end LCD monitor. If some teenage dirtbag on the internet can do it, why can't Hollywood ? Oh, silly me, it's because they couldn't brag about the "super high bitrate" and the increased difficulty to rip it to your Kaleidescape system.
Fuck BluRay, that's my stance.
Umm, criminals? They aren't the smartest bunch, you know.
So are you saying that all criminals are dumb ?
If they're so weak-minded, why is it that the great majority of murders and fraud cases go unsolved ? Just because Big Tyrone is too stoned to shut up in court, doesn't mean everyone else is such a braggart. What, you think smart people don't ever get violently angry at others ?
Whether this guy did it or not, they're going to need far stronger arguments than "Not having a car seat is weird, and having $8k in cash is weird, and we know murderers are weird so he must be guilty!"
You know what's even weirder ? Not having a car seat, because it's been replaced with a 21U half-rack full of (working) audio gear. Weird, yet my car was once configured as such, many years ago. Does that make me a suspected murdered ? It may be weird to North Americans, not so much to South Americans and Western Europeans, where outdoor DJ parties are commonplace and all you need is a few amplifiers, speakers and a bunch of car batteries.
I'm pretty sure the parent was referring to a one-time-use VNC server, as would be used in a remote tech support scenario. Dell uses that sort of thing.
Fine. ActiveX in a controlled environment can be useful in a backwards kind of way, even though I personally believe they should package such functionality as a standalone app in most corporate environments... but given how 99.44% of programmers aren't even worth the hot-dog meat, I guess we have to make compromises.
The one place where ActiveX does NOT belong, is on the intarwebs. I _far_ prefer the Firefox plugin system, where everything is Javascript and still runs in a sandbox. The petty little features that are most often built into ActiveX plugins are just as easily made into XUL, without all these retarded vulnerabilities. I'm not saying Firefox is perfect, but I trust sandboxed Javascript a LOT more than random bytecode.
Novell stopped writing software a decade ago. Now they write malware. I applaud Microsoft for disabling that garbage.
Yet we see absolutely no effort by the labels to reduce the price per song that we pay and instead see them trying to reduce the amount paid to the artists that actually make the content that they are selling.
In my area, we call such people "small-time drug runners". They usually wind up dead when their greed exceeds that of their boss.
Maybe we need to appoint someone above the RIAA to keep them in check.
Wrong.
The punishment for file-sharing is a civil trial designed to suck out all your money.
The punishment for theft is a municipal fine (or state fine if you're that good), maybe some jail time.
Big difference, *HUGE*.
What was the RIAA doing in the 70's and 80's, during the explosion of home taping where everyone and their mothers were making mix-tapes for their friends and relatives ? Did they run around suing everyone that just happened to own a dubbing deck ?
The problem is that today, the concept of "friend" has expanded far beyond the dozen classmates and neighbors. On the internet, everyone is your "neighbor". The music industry was not prepared for this social shift, and the retail world doesn't have any idea how to adapt - it's quite likely not even possible. Distributors, wholesalers, retailers, they've all become obsolete overnight. Who needs a middleman when you can service the customer directly and all it takes is a free (or cheap) web host ?
The internet effectively disembowels a trillion-dollar industry with a single mouse click. If we must use analogies, then how about the farmer's market ? You go directly to the producer, pay a much better price for fresher produce. The grocery chain gets nothing, the truck drivers get nothing, the ad agency gets nothing... but the farmer's market, unlike the internet, is tied to a very specific physical location. You can't buy fresh tomatoes unless you live near the market. On the web, you can buy anything anywhere from anyone, and that's why the RIAA is in trouble. It's one company vs the world.
Step 1: Build replicator
Step 2: Make a ton of uber-weapons
Step 3: Blow away the old-tech competition
Step 4: ?
Step 5: WORLD DOMINATION.
Fuck profit!
The "creating 2.4 million jobs" bit is just butter to help grease this idea into the proper ears. That's state-government speak for "This is a good thing".
Allow me to translate this into plain english: This is a good thing. Broadband, even the cheap 512kbit stuff, is enabling refined efficiency across the board for all sorts of services. Anything that brings pertinent, timely information to great numbers of people causes ripple effects throughout society. It helps humankind inch forward as a lubric, progressive society. If a few public voices want to give that inch a push, they're effectively accelerating progress.
Twenty years ago, we got all our information from books, periodicals and TV - biased, slow-moving media. I think it's safe to say that people 20 years ago possessed less useful information, on average, than people today. I know it's not a quantifiable asset, but you can't deny the casual benefits brought forth by the web and instant messaging.
The moral of this story is: don't "hack" machines in your own country.
If they hadn't attacked Canadian computers, things would have been far more difficult for law enforcement as the damages would have been outside their jurisdiction. That's why Russians and Koreans attack USA machines... if they root their neighbor's box, it's a whole different ballgame.
Actually it says MoxFulder has self-esteem issues and can't commit, like every other person on these dating sites. And a slut too!
The problem with dating sites is, well, they're dating sites. They're the online analog of singles' night at the cheap bar, or the half-bred karaoke dump. Combine that low-quality pool with the social disdain for any sort of dating phenomenon, whether it's a hot-line or web site, and you find yourself with the dumbest situation in the world: lots of desperate clients with money, but no "product" to sell them. They sign up for a few months, date the same weirdos every other member has met (and rejected), then leave. Eventually the bucket runs dry and your site dies while everyone flocks to the new kid on the block. Worse, people recognize the morons from previous sites and give up more quickly with each new iteration.
This, like many other things on the net right now, is a passing fad. There's no money in it, nor anything else that doesn't involve nekkid people and tentacles.
I gave Eclipse a spin, just a few weeks ago. It was a confusing, frustrating and fruitless experience. I wasted a whole afternoon trying to get it working.
It's the same problem as any other plugin-based app: nobody cares about the app, all responsibility is delegated to the plugins. The hardest part is figuring out which plugins you want/need.
Me, I don't want to figure it out. I just want something that works. Click, type, compile, collect paycheck. Eclipse didn't enable me to do that in a reasonable time frame, so I ditched it. Maybe I need a step-by-step tutorial to learn how to install/use it... rather humbling given how I started programming back in the early 80's!
Everyone says Eclipse is awesome, and I'd love to be one of those people, but right now I see Eclipse as just another bloated unstable Java app like every other.
Yes and no.
If the cores aren't actually defective, then yes, AMD will make it relatively easy to unlock because that's what they were once famous for, with the Athlon XP.
If the cores are crap, then most likely they will lock them down securely to avoid bad PR. Enthusiasts like you and I understand that there are no guarantees once you start tweaking, but we're not the problem. The problem is shady vendors that unlock/overclock to defraud the client.
Example: I just finished building a cheap machine for my mother-in-law, using an Intel Core Duo E2160 - 1.8ghz stock, but even on a low-end board I managed to hit 3.0 ghz with ease. There are plenty of half-bred sons of bitches who would gladly charge an extra $250 for that system and claim it uses the top-end E6850 processor. This sort of thing is why multiplier locking was implemented in the first place. Back in the 80s and 90s this type of fraud was the norm rather than the exception.
Unlocked or not, I'm not buying a Phenom anytime soon and neither should you. They're weak compared to Intel's 2-year-old Conroe architecture, and by consequence that makes them overpriced. Worse still is the lack of quality motherboards for this young dumb processor. One can only hope they will improve over time, but I won't hold my breath. In my book, everything that came after the NForce4 Ultra has been absolute garbage.