Because the local jurisdictions can't afford their own crap, that's why. I live in a big city, not the biggest but definitely in the top ten in Canada. The police here are a joke. Hell one time I had a cop refuse to help me deal with a thief because they were more scared of the guy than I was. They're 98% traffic cops, and 2% mob-fearing rookies. They generate so much "income" from fines that they could probably build a ten storey solid-gold police monument, yet they still whine about being underpaid and they suck federal cock for a bigger budget every year. There's something wrong with the system, and the solution isn't higher fines or less cops.
You know what I would like ? I would like a police system that is COMPLETELY paid through federal funding. Take away the business aspect of generating income and let them focus on doing their goddamned job of protecting the peace. And give them a friggin' raise while we're at it, it makes no sense than a worthless office drone tabulating political contributions should make more money than someone who puts their health and safety at risk on a daily basis to ensure the safety of others. Police officers are supposed to be a public service, people we pay to keep crime under control. Maybe if they were paid decent wages, we could be a little more selective about who we entrust with the safety of others. Maybe take that thief-fearing 21-year old 5'2" little girl off the night watch and sit her weak ass in the mail room, had she gone in the guy's house, she would have been the one in need of saving and I've got enough pussy on my hands as it is.
How is an iPod educational ? I remember way back in the 90's when I was a student:P We didn't have MP3 course materials, we had audio cassettes. A portable cassette player in the 90's cost about $20. Then when CD burners got cheap, people were distributing discs. A portable CD player in the 2000's costs $20. iPod players cost $200 right now, and I doubt they'll ever be $20, not even the chinese knockoffs. I say stick to CD players. They're cheap, they're reliable, they're ubiquitous, they're well understood by even the dumbest members of society; all facts that do not apply to digital players at this point in time.
Of all the things going on in Michigan right now, this is not a priority. Just walk up to any state citizen and ask them what they think their government should be doing. The ones who answer "iPod!", just smack them over the head with a shovel! What most honest, self-supporting people in North America want from their government is less bullshit like this, and lower taxes. The more stuff the government buys with tax money, the closer we get to being full-on communists.
The "fucking obvious" problem is that you need a number to call to/from, and that number is not an IP address. The technical aspect of VoIP companies is trivial, just convert the sound to digital and ship it off to its destination... but the way things are today, you still need a POTS at the receiving end if they don't have VoIP. That's not technically difficult, it just requires money to rent the landlines from Ma Bell. VoIP "carriers" oversell landlines much like ISPs oversell bandwidth or modem banks, because not everyone uses everything all the time.
If all your friends and relatives, employers, partners, and local businesses were on VoIP, we wouldn't need the gateway because the PSTN would be obsolete. We're not there yet, and I don't think we'll ever be, not in my lifetime, because computers are unreliable. Even the standalone VoIP gateways are just embedded computers running outsourced software, they crap out every once in a while. The day they crap out on an emergency call is the day it will all come crashing down. The phone companies may be the axis of evil, but they usually provide quite dependable service, something the internet still hasn't mastered.
It's funny how Access owns the code, yet they're not doing a damned thing with it. They've halted distribution of a product that isn't competing with their business, and if history is any indicator, they aren't ever going to release any BeOS-related software ever. They are an IP company, they buy stuff up, sit on it for a while then license/resell to actual inventors and manufacturers for a profit. This kind of business is one the most revolting abuses of the 21st century, because all they do is kidnap information for a ransom, potentially hiding it away forever if no buyer comes along to pay their inflated price. This type of activity precisely underlines the need for patent reform. This doesn't help anyone except the people cashing the checks, ultimately IP-hoarding hurts everyone as it stymies technological progress. BeOS had some great concepts ten years ago, but through the company's pitfalls and this now legal bullshit, the then-modern real-time paradigm is now grossly outdated. Why don't we all go out and buy all the fresh fruits at the market, then sit on them for a few years and see what's left of them ? It's a waste, it's stupid and it's inconsiderate. Access is all those bad things!
It's obvious that Apple's market share will take a dip, MS just released Vista a few months ago. It doesn't mean there's less Apple users, only that there are new Windows users dividing the pie into smaller slices. Add the fact that the Intel macs are tons faster than their PPC predecessors, plus many people are dual-booting their macs nowadays. One thing I found quite comical, at least among the people I know, is how mac owners are more likely to pirate XP/Vista because well, it's not from Apple, and besides.. it's not their primary OS. I don't know if this is true in the rest of the world, maybe I just have too many piratey friends:)
I never gave much mindshare to these popularity polls, whether it's Windows vs Linux vs Mac, or Apache vs IIS, Emacs vs Vi.. yadda yadda. Statistics exist solely to be skewed, because there is no universal "truth" that pleases everyone. Even if you were to go door-to-door and ask everyone "Are you a Mac or a PC ?", some people would lie, and others would answer "both", and yet others would say "Bananas, now get off my porch Nancy-boy".
Heck, I couldn't even answer questions about my own computer portfolio, I sure as hell doubt someone on the internet could do any better. For one, how many machines do I have on this IP ? Maybe the spouse and I both use the same browser, does that count as 2 or just one ? Maybe I've got a half-dozen virtual machines running doing some simulated load testing, does that show up as 6 more Windows seats ? What if I spoof my UserAgent string to fool asshat sites like Profit42.com that shove Firefox ads in my face (because they make a buck off every referral) ? If my IP changes and I wipe my cookies, am I going to be counted a second time ? There are so many holes in this report, it's not even news!
Linux is great for custom jobs because the OS usually doesn't get in your way, whereas to do something unique on Windows often requires freaky API trickery. Just the fact that the OS is tied to the GUI and web browser can be a major pain. Just look at all those movie rental machines where tapping a certain invisible hotspot on the touchscreen would open up a command prompt or web browser. Under Linux, you can easily code your custom app to the framebuffer and not have to worry about the OS' built-in vulnerabilities.
Windows works for the average user, but I've always found it to be a massive failure for servers and appliances. It just tries to do too much, and everything is secretly tied together so that if one app is b0rked or misconfigured, everything else will get wonky. That and the huge pile of "undocumented" features and tweaks that are documented on MSDN, yet none of their developers ever cared to add an official setting in... wait for it... the settings dialog! I don't see why anyone should need to trundle through the registry on a production machine. If Microsoft can write an MSDN article on how to toggle a flag in the registry, they should assign a developer to patch the application or at least produce a configuration tool.
You hit it right on the head. Music equipment has largely been displaced by "home theater" garbage, and by garbage I mean a 6 inch "sub"-woofer and five puny 6-watt "satellites" whose tone is about as steady as a knocked-up Britney Spears. You can't go to the local megastore and buy music speakers, they don't have them anymore. They have multi-element bullshit home theater speakers, and if you're lucky the 16 year old salesperson might be able to recommend a set that's semi-decent, but in most cases he'll push you onto whatever earns him the biggest commission.
That leaves you with the specialty shops, where you add a zero to all the price tags. I've got a few stores down the street, they've been around for ages. They're quite spacious and breathy, in that there's plenty of empty space like it's a goddamned art gallery. The sales people wear Armani, and they talk with a stupid fake accent that's a hybrid of British, Ontarian (abooot) and ASSHOLE. The answer to any question about a certain product, is the next product up in price, kind of like Scientology.
The funny thing is I've never seen anyone enter either store, which is kind of odd when the daily throughfare is around 125 thousand in this particular area. Maybe it's because the shops look so friggin' hostile that nobody dares enter, still they must catch a few rich suckers to keep the business afloat.
I guess the point of my rant is that you can't point the blame on any single entity, whether it's the RIAA, or made-up Christian Rock peddling psychopaths, or the illiterate short-bus acts that dominate the charts, or the assholes that killed the stereo business, or the people who rip and share music online. It's either everyone's fault, or no one's (direct) fault. Every aspect of human life is changing at an ever-increasing pace, that's the product of population growth and technological advances. Businesses that flourished 20 years ago are going belly up because they've gone obsolete, the same as most of today's businesses will be dead in 2027. The RIAA can't stop the world from changing, they're just making this beachball a more miserable place to live on, and 20-40 years from now, when our grandchildren discover our old MP3 stash and ask about it, we'll have to tell them the sad tale of the music industry, much like our parents (or grandparents for some of you) told the story of Buddy Holly's tragic death.
putting a lot of smart, creative people together doesn't magically make profit.
Yep, you're right. Putting a lot of smart, creative people together with a SALES prick is a license to print money. Now if only we could get them to speak the same language, business would be a lot easier!
Creative babble: I like curves. Curves are nice. Transparent curves are better. Transparent curves with little waves in them. Yes, I like curves.
Sales babble: Bigger, faster, CURVIER curves. How many curves you need ? I've got a boat full of curvy curves and they're calling your name: "Cletus, your life is meaningless if you don't buy curves!". Ask me about our extended curving plans!
Me, I'm just your average lone wolf coder. I hate both the creative hippies and the obnoxious sales types. And I have no money. I rest my case.
Firmware can only do so much. They're basically taking advantage of the JTAG debugging circuitry. It's the kind of thing you use during design, then usually you just strip off the connector/header before shipping. You could completely remove the JTAG and be safe that way, but that means reworking the circuit one last time _without_ debugging functionality, where a lot of things can go wrong and you have no way of tracing them... well, not without pulling out your grand-daddy's digital probe and frequency counter.
JTAG vulnerabilities are one way that satellite hackers (I refuse to call them "testers") pull decryption keys from dish receivers. You could think of JTAG as the hardware equivalent to a software debugging interrupt, where you can read/write to the bus and send commands to many components of the device.
I go through this process often enough that I've got a folder full of registry tweaks, and I copy any software installation media to a USB hard drive. Then I keep an up-to-date customized Windows install repository. Reinstalling my OS involves about an hour from format to fully-functional desktop. I could automate it further but I really can't be bothered; I'm perfectly OK with double-clicking a dozen installers in rapid sequence, it's way faster and easier than shuffling discs. It gives me the opportunity to tweak even further, if I've learned anything since the last reinstall:)
I used to be able to house it all on a single DVD-R, but every year it seems my work apps double in size for nothing. It's actually a good thing because having it on a hard drive means I can update it anytime, whenever I get a new patch or device driver.
Regardless of your opinion of NIN's artistic integrity, Trent Reznor is a self-produced artist. His label, Nothing Records, is in limbo right now over legal woes with his former manager and business partner, John Malm Jr. It is still legally operating, but the owners are going through rough times as Reznor recently won a law suit against Malm for a significant chunk of money. It is speculated that one will buy out the other's half at some point in the near future.
What I'd like to know is what authority does the RIAA have in these matters ? Can they legally "defend" an independent label ? Were they called upon to pursue litigation by either Reznor (unlikely) or Malm (very likely, but I never liked him to begin with) ? Could this be a sign that the RIAA's members release so much filth that they can't even keep track of what's theirs ? It's somewhat common for the RIAA to claim damages on things they don't even own, as many suits have been thrown out of court on such premises.
correlation, causation, blah blah blah. The government has CREATED these so-called anarchists because gov't has repeatedly shown its citizens that it is completely incapable of serving their interests. It used to be, when your government went berserk and stopped listening to its people, you'd build up a militia and storm the capital to "take back your country" by force. We haven't really needed to do that in a long time so people have gotten out of shape when it comes to defending their rights. There are diplomatic ways, but the current system you have makes these impractical. Voting has failed, civil unrest would probably be met by civil counter-unrest thanks to the huge number of weak-minded gun-toting nuts, and all you want to do is say "Is it 2008 yet ? I can't wait for this Bush guy to be gone". Geeee... I wish I could patiently will away everything I don't like in this world, but I'm not telekinetic.
Why the hell would China invade the US ? We already buy all their horrible electronics and bootleg movies. It's not like Americans make good slaves, and they have everything to lose by killing their #1 customers.
Here's my proposal: Do away with all weaponry and defense research, it's all a waste of time, money and life. Just sort all people by their intelligence and trustworthiness, then starting from the center of the country, start spreading them out in concentric rings from smartest to dumbest until you have a nice thick shield of imbeciles all over the coast. That will slow down the enemy's invasion and allow the ones in the middle more time to jump into planes and fly over to Canada, plus their higher intellect will greatly improve their odds of being accepted as citizens. The rest we'll just turn into hot-dog sausages for our Pogos (the better version of what you call corn dogs). And if those crazy invaders are too stupid to stop at the US/Canada border, we'll be well equipped to hold them back since we have a higher number of firearms per capita! If we can take down a half-ton moose, I'm pretty sure our rifles could stop a human or two.
Hey, better to enjoy what you have now, than spend all your time and money worrying about who might try to kill you. It seems to work well up here.
"espionage operations" don't pay for anything, trigger-happy right-wingers pay for everything! You don't profit from espionage unless you're casing a bank.
Yep... XML parsers are everywhere, and they're mostly slow and resource-intensive because XML is often the bluntest tool for the kind of tasks it's applied to. XML indeed is a merging of data and structure, and that's precisely what irks me about it. The structure is repeated for every data record in the file. There is so much redundancy that it's nauseating to a tweak freak such as myself. The fact that it compresses well doesn't excuse the bloat.
Way back when XML was "the next big thing", I instinctively assumed it was an open data interchange format, the kind you would use to migrate databases from MySQL to Oracle or whatever. I never thought people would use it for every asinine little chore, in places where readability is pointless and platform neutrality is not required. XML is a human format, computers are not humans, the tags just get in the way. Now instead of doing a simple fputs/fgets into a data structure, you have to run the thing through a heavy-duty parser that takes a thousand times longer to decipher the mess. How is that an improvement ? Sure, the data is human-readable but humans don't process it, computers do.
(blinks rapidly) Not gonna happen. Not only would it be more work than it's worth to somehow reimplement these application languages using browser scripting, but an idiot-friendly solution to web development already exists:.Net
It's only a license to print money if there's no cheaper, better alternative (and you somehow prevent clones from popping up).
Yep bullies are cowards, but a crushed coward, much like an Atari 2600 game scrolling too far left, can quickly wrap around and turn into a crazed psycho. If the RIAA starts losing a string of bullying suits, they will come up with a more devious tactic. It doesn't matter what they do, they're big business, they can get away with murder if needed. It's not like today's government's going to do much about it, as long as they keep the bribes flowing.
It's not about being closed-minded, it's about ignoring the consequences of one's acts. If someone were to make threats to me in real life (and weren't armed enough to back it up), they're going to need facial reconstruction surgery by the time I'm done with them. At the very least they're going to be prosecuted and ostracized.
If someone were to make threats over the phone, a quick call to the cops and a phone trace later, they're getting court papers served. Easy.
If someone mails me threats, the first thing I do is 1. hire an investigator and 2. call the cops... just because I really don't trust cops.
If someone makes threats on my blog, I can't do squat. The cops won't help me because apparently they've never heard of the internet. People don't take it seriously, when really it's just another method of communication, hardly any different from phone or mail. It carries words from anywhere to anywhere else, so why is an online threat less serious than a phone threat ? My address and phone number are publicly available from a whois lookup, really if someone doesn't like me online, it would be trivial for them to harass me in real life. The big difference is that it's pretty hard for me to throw an online aggressor off my 7th floor balcony.
Control... see the problem with these conspiracy theories is that people don't specifically pursue greater control, it's usually a side effect of something else, an extension of law enforcement. Control is the weak minded man's reaction to something they're not prepared for. The USA isn't prepared to let the rest of the world compete with them (and beat them silly), so they're trying to control the internet by hijacking ICANN. Religious groups aren't prepared to deal with same-sex relationships and free thought, so they try to control these freedom whores with lies and fear. Losing one's rights is just the system's way to simplify a problem they created but can't solve.
Haven't you guys ever played Monopoly ? Google probably doesn't want the glorified pile of funk that is DoubleClick, because AdSense is far friendlier and more successful than DoubleClick ever was. However, Microsoft DOES want DoubleClick because they want to compete with AdSense, somehow, in a bastardized half-assed rip-off kind of way like everything else they've released in the past 30 years. If Google ends up buying DoubleClick, just to keep it away from Microsoft, it's a smart strategic move and one that Google can afford, especially if it means protecting their ad business. We all know how Microsoft plays... they don't care if they lose tons of money, as long as they drag everyone else down with 'em, then when the time is right they' pounce on their tired enemies. They're like chinese computer importers, only less puny!
Google buying DC is kind of like a good monopoly player buying a single lot they don't want, just to keep someone else from completing their set and building friggin hotels. Believe me, buying St. James Place for $180 now is way better than paying your opponent $950 rent later. Same idea here!
Finally someone with a brain! I thought I was the only guy who sees XML for the bloated non-solution that it is! Of course, the internets love acronyms (see AJAX). Personally, I prefer fast and lean binary encoding (with complete documentation of its structures) but all these late generation programmers are allergic to anything that existed before 1998:P
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Because the local jurisdictions can't afford their own crap, that's why. I live in a big city, not the biggest but definitely in the top ten in Canada. The police here are a joke. Hell one time I had a cop refuse to help me deal with a thief because they were more scared of the guy than I was. They're 98% traffic cops, and 2% mob-fearing rookies. They generate so much "income" from fines that they could probably build a ten storey solid-gold police monument, yet they still whine about being underpaid and they suck federal cock for a bigger budget every year. There's something wrong with the system, and the solution isn't higher fines or less cops.
You know what I would like ? I would like a police system that is COMPLETELY paid through federal funding. Take away the business aspect of generating income and let them focus on doing their goddamned job of protecting the peace. And give them a friggin' raise while we're at it, it makes no sense than a worthless office drone tabulating political contributions should make more money than someone who puts their health and safety at risk on a daily basis to ensure the safety of others. Police officers are supposed to be a public service, people we pay to keep crime under control. Maybe if they were paid decent wages, we could be a little more selective about who we entrust with the safety of others. Maybe take that thief-fearing 21-year old 5'2" little girl off the night watch and sit her weak ass in the mail room, had she gone in the guy's house, she would have been the one in need of saving and I've got enough pussy on my hands as it is.
How is an iPod educational ? I remember way back in the 90's when I was a student :P We didn't have MP3 course materials, we had audio cassettes. A portable cassette player in the 90's cost about $20. Then when CD burners got cheap, people were distributing discs. A portable CD player in the 2000's costs $20. iPod players cost $200 right now, and I doubt they'll ever be $20, not even the chinese knockoffs. I say stick to CD players. They're cheap, they're reliable, they're ubiquitous, they're well understood by even the dumbest members of society; all facts that do not apply to digital players at this point in time.
Of all the things going on in Michigan right now, this is not a priority. Just walk up to any state citizen and ask them what they think their government should be doing. The ones who answer "iPod!", just smack them over the head with a shovel! What most honest, self-supporting people in North America want from their government is less bullshit like this, and lower taxes. The more stuff the government buys with tax money, the closer we get to being full-on communists.
The "fucking obvious" problem is that you need a number to call to/from, and that number is not an IP address. The technical aspect of VoIP companies is trivial, just convert the sound to digital and ship it off to its destination... but the way things are today, you still need a POTS at the receiving end if they don't have VoIP. That's not technically difficult, it just requires money to rent the landlines from Ma Bell. VoIP "carriers" oversell landlines much like ISPs oversell bandwidth or modem banks, because not everyone uses everything all the time.
If all your friends and relatives, employers, partners, and local businesses were on VoIP, we wouldn't need the gateway because the PSTN would be obsolete. We're not there yet, and I don't think we'll ever be, not in my lifetime, because computers are unreliable. Even the standalone VoIP gateways are just embedded computers running outsourced software, they crap out every once in a while. The day they crap out on an emergency call is the day it will all come crashing down. The phone companies may be the axis of evil, but they usually provide quite dependable service, something the internet still hasn't mastered.
It's funny how Access owns the code, yet they're not doing a damned thing with it. They've halted distribution of a product that isn't competing with their business, and if history is any indicator, they aren't ever going to release any BeOS-related software ever. They are an IP company, they buy stuff up, sit on it for a while then license/resell to actual inventors and manufacturers for a profit. This kind of business is one the most revolting abuses of the 21st century, because all they do is kidnap information for a ransom, potentially hiding it away forever if no buyer comes along to pay their inflated price. This type of activity precisely underlines the need for patent reform. This doesn't help anyone except the people cashing the checks, ultimately IP-hoarding hurts everyone as it stymies technological progress. BeOS had some great concepts ten years ago, but through the company's pitfalls and this now legal bullshit, the then-modern real-time paradigm is now grossly outdated. Why don't we all go out and buy all the fresh fruits at the market, then sit on them for a few years and see what's left of them ? It's a waste, it's stupid and it's inconsiderate. Access is all those bad things!
It's obvious that Apple's market share will take a dip, MS just released Vista a few months ago. It doesn't mean there's less Apple users, only that there are new Windows users dividing the pie into smaller slices. Add the fact that the Intel macs are tons faster than their PPC predecessors, plus many people are dual-booting their macs nowadays. One thing I found quite comical, at least among the people I know, is how mac owners are more likely to pirate XP/Vista because well, it's not from Apple, and besides.. it's not their primary OS. I don't know if this is true in the rest of the world, maybe I just have too many piratey friends :)
I never gave much mindshare to these popularity polls, whether it's Windows vs Linux vs Mac, or Apache vs IIS, Emacs vs Vi.. yadda yadda. Statistics exist solely to be skewed, because there is no universal "truth" that pleases everyone. Even if you were to go door-to-door and ask everyone "Are you a Mac or a PC ?", some people would lie, and others would answer "both", and yet others would say "Bananas, now get off my porch Nancy-boy".
Heck, I couldn't even answer questions about my own computer portfolio, I sure as hell doubt someone on the internet could do any better. For one, how many machines do I have on this IP ? Maybe the spouse and I both use the same browser, does that count as 2 or just one ? Maybe I've got a half-dozen virtual machines running doing some simulated load testing, does that show up as 6 more Windows seats ? What if I spoof my UserAgent string to fool asshat sites like Profit42.com that shove Firefox ads in my face (because they make a buck off every referral) ? If my IP changes and I wipe my cookies, am I going to be counted a second time ? There are so many holes in this report, it's not even news!
Linux is great for custom jobs because the OS usually doesn't get in your way, whereas to do something unique on Windows often requires freaky API trickery. Just the fact that the OS is tied to the GUI and web browser can be a major pain. Just look at all those movie rental machines where tapping a certain invisible hotspot on the touchscreen would open up a command prompt or web browser. Under Linux, you can easily code your custom app to the framebuffer and not have to worry about the OS' built-in vulnerabilities.
Windows works for the average user, but I've always found it to be a massive failure for servers and appliances. It just tries to do too much, and everything is secretly tied together so that if one app is b0rked or misconfigured, everything else will get wonky. That and the huge pile of "undocumented" features and tweaks that are documented on MSDN, yet none of their developers ever cared to add an official setting in... wait for it... the settings dialog! I don't see why anyone should need to trundle through the registry on a production machine. If Microsoft can write an MSDN article on how to toggle a flag in the registry, they should assign a developer to patch the application or at least produce a configuration tool.
Because you try 3-4 different browsers in sequence until you find one that renders the page properly. Safari is one steaming pile of crap.
You hit it right on the head. Music equipment has largely been displaced by "home theater" garbage, and by garbage I mean a 6 inch "sub"-woofer and five puny 6-watt "satellites" whose tone is about as steady as a knocked-up Britney Spears. You can't go to the local megastore and buy music speakers, they don't have them anymore. They have multi-element bullshit home theater speakers, and if you're lucky the 16 year old salesperson might be able to recommend a set that's semi-decent, but in most cases he'll push you onto whatever earns him the biggest commission.
That leaves you with the specialty shops, where you add a zero to all the price tags. I've got a few stores down the street, they've been around for ages. They're quite spacious and breathy, in that there's plenty of empty space like it's a goddamned art gallery. The sales people wear Armani, and they talk with a stupid fake accent that's a hybrid of British, Ontarian (abooot) and ASSHOLE. The answer to any question about a certain product, is the next product up in price, kind of like Scientology.
The funny thing is I've never seen anyone enter either store, which is kind of odd when the daily throughfare is around 125 thousand in this particular area. Maybe it's because the shops look so friggin' hostile that nobody dares enter, still they must catch a few rich suckers to keep the business afloat.
I guess the point of my rant is that you can't point the blame on any single entity, whether it's the RIAA, or made-up Christian Rock peddling psychopaths, or the illiterate short-bus acts that dominate the charts, or the assholes that killed the stereo business, or the people who rip and share music online. It's either everyone's fault, or no one's (direct) fault. Every aspect of human life is changing at an ever-increasing pace, that's the product of population growth and technological advances. Businesses that flourished 20 years ago are going belly up because they've gone obsolete, the same as most of today's businesses will be dead in 2027. The RIAA can't stop the world from changing, they're just making this beachball a more miserable place to live on, and 20-40 years from now, when our grandchildren discover our old MP3 stash and ask about it, we'll have to tell them the sad tale of the music industry, much like our parents (or grandparents for some of you) told the story of Buddy Holly's tragic death.
putting a lot of smart, creative people together doesn't magically make profit.
Yep, you're right. Putting a lot of smart, creative people together with a SALES prick is a license to print money. Now if only we could get them to speak the same language, business would be a lot easier!
Creative babble: I like curves. Curves are nice. Transparent curves are better. Transparent curves with little waves in them. Yes, I like curves.
Sales babble: Bigger, faster, CURVIER curves. How many curves you need ? I've got a boat full of curvy curves and they're calling your name: "Cletus, your life is meaningless if you don't buy curves!". Ask me about our extended curving plans!
Me, I'm just your average lone wolf coder. I hate both the creative hippies and the obnoxious sales types. And I have no money. I rest my case.
Firmware can only do so much. They're basically taking advantage of the JTAG debugging circuitry. It's the kind of thing you use during design, then usually you just strip off the connector/header before shipping. You could completely remove the JTAG and be safe that way, but that means reworking the circuit one last time _without_ debugging functionality, where a lot of things can go wrong and you have no way of tracing them... well, not without pulling out your grand-daddy's digital probe and frequency counter.
JTAG vulnerabilities are one way that satellite hackers (I refuse to call them "testers") pull decryption keys from dish receivers. You could think of JTAG as the hardware equivalent to a software debugging interrupt, where you can read/write to the bus and send commands to many components of the device.
I go through this process often enough that I've got a folder full of registry tweaks, and I copy any software installation media to a USB hard drive. Then I keep an up-to-date customized Windows install repository. Reinstalling my OS involves about an hour from format to fully-functional desktop. I could automate it further but I really can't be bothered; I'm perfectly OK with double-clicking a dozen installers in rapid sequence, it's way faster and easier than shuffling discs. It gives me the opportunity to tweak even further, if I've learned anything since the last reinstall :)
I used to be able to house it all on a single DVD-R, but every year it seems my work apps double in size for nothing. It's actually a good thing because having it on a hard drive means I can update it anytime, whenever I get a new patch or device driver.
Regardless of your opinion of NIN's artistic integrity, Trent Reznor is a self-produced artist. His label, Nothing Records, is in limbo right now over legal woes with his former manager and business partner, John Malm Jr. It is still legally operating, but the owners are going through rough times as Reznor recently won a law suit against Malm for a significant chunk of money. It is speculated that one will buy out the other's half at some point in the near future.
What I'd like to know is what authority does the RIAA have in these matters ? Can they legally "defend" an independent label ? Were they called upon to pursue litigation by either Reznor (unlikely) or Malm (very likely, but I never liked him to begin with) ? Could this be a sign that the RIAA's members release so much filth that they can't even keep track of what's theirs ? It's somewhat common for the RIAA to claim damages on things they don't even own, as many suits have been thrown out of court on such premises.
Apple is a niche market company. They cater to the non-average computer user. This is perfectly targeted to their unique customer base.
The average MS Office drone isn't going to drop 4 grand on a computer because their work isn't worth it.
Not quite, but you could spread the lag over 8 simultaneous documents assuming you have that many keyboards!
correlation, causation, blah blah blah. The government has CREATED these so-called anarchists because gov't has repeatedly shown its citizens that it is completely incapable of serving their interests. It used to be, when your government went berserk and stopped listening to its people, you'd build up a militia and storm the capital to "take back your country" by force. We haven't really needed to do that in a long time so people have gotten out of shape when it comes to defending their rights. There are diplomatic ways, but the current system you have makes these impractical. Voting has failed, civil unrest would probably be met by civil counter-unrest thanks to the huge number of weak-minded gun-toting nuts, and all you want to do is say "Is it 2008 yet ? I can't wait for this Bush guy to be gone". Geeee... I wish I could patiently will away everything I don't like in this world, but I'm not telekinetic.
Why the hell would China invade the US ? We already buy all their horrible electronics and bootleg movies. It's not like Americans make good slaves, and they have everything to lose by killing their #1 customers.
Here's my proposal: Do away with all weaponry and defense research, it's all a waste of time, money and life. Just sort all people by their intelligence and trustworthiness, then starting from the center of the country, start spreading them out in concentric rings from smartest to dumbest until you have a nice thick shield of imbeciles all over the coast. That will slow down the enemy's invasion and allow the ones in the middle more time to jump into planes and fly over to Canada, plus their higher intellect will greatly improve their odds of being accepted as citizens. The rest we'll just turn into hot-dog sausages for our Pogos (the better version of what you call corn dogs). And if those crazy invaders are too stupid to stop at the US/Canada border, we'll be well equipped to hold them back since we have a higher number of firearms per capita! If we can take down a half-ton moose, I'm pretty sure our rifles could stop a human or two.
Hey, better to enjoy what you have now, than spend all your time and money worrying about who might try to kill you. It seems to work well up here.
"espionage operations" don't pay for anything, trigger-happy right-wingers pay for everything! You don't profit from espionage unless you're casing a bank.
Yep... XML parsers are everywhere, and they're mostly slow and resource-intensive because XML is often the bluntest tool for the kind of tasks it's applied to. XML indeed is a merging of data and structure, and that's precisely what irks me about it. The structure is repeated for every data record in the file. There is so much redundancy that it's nauseating to a tweak freak such as myself. The fact that it compresses well doesn't excuse the bloat.
Way back when XML was "the next big thing", I instinctively assumed it was an open data interchange format, the kind you would use to migrate databases from MySQL to Oracle or whatever. I never thought people would use it for every asinine little chore, in places where readability is pointless and platform neutrality is not required. XML is a human format, computers are not humans, the tags just get in the way. Now instead of doing a simple fputs/fgets into a data structure, you have to run the thing through a heavy-duty parser that takes a thousand times longer to decipher the mess. How is that an improvement ? Sure, the data is human-readable but humans don't process it, computers do.
(blinks rapidly) Not gonna happen. Not only would it be more work than it's worth to somehow reimplement these application languages using browser scripting, but an idiot-friendly solution to web development already exists: .Net
It's only a license to print money if there's no cheaper, better alternative (and you somehow prevent clones from popping up).
The elected Federal Government officials need to undo some of their wrongful actions, and then take a pay cut and stop passing laws just to pass laws.
:P
Given those are the three hardest things for the average male to do, I think the only way out is down
1. Admitting fault, and fixing it - not acceptable in a proud nation, where we still see apology as a sign of weakness
2. Voluntarily taking a pay cut - this goes against the tenets of capitalism
3. Stop creating bullshit work - see #2
Some more progressive societies could cleanly pull it off, none of them are located in North America.
Yep bullies are cowards, but a crushed coward, much like an Atari 2600 game scrolling too far left, can quickly wrap around and turn into a crazed psycho. If the RIAA starts losing a string of bullying suits, they will come up with a more devious tactic. It doesn't matter what they do, they're big business, they can get away with murder if needed. It's not like today's government's going to do much about it, as long as they keep the bribes flowing.
It's not about being closed-minded, it's about ignoring the consequences of one's acts. If someone were to make threats to me in real life (and weren't armed enough to back it up), they're going to need facial reconstruction surgery by the time I'm done with them. At the very least they're going to be prosecuted and ostracized.
If someone were to make threats over the phone, a quick call to the cops and a phone trace later, they're getting court papers served. Easy.
If someone mails me threats, the first thing I do is 1. hire an investigator and 2. call the cops... just because I really don't trust cops.
If someone makes threats on my blog, I can't do squat. The cops won't help me because apparently they've never heard of the internet. People don't take it seriously, when really it's just another method of communication, hardly any different from phone or mail. It carries words from anywhere to anywhere else, so why is an online threat less serious than a phone threat ? My address and phone number are publicly available from a whois lookup, really if someone doesn't like me online, it would be trivial for them to harass me in real life. The big difference is that it's pretty hard for me to throw an online aggressor off my 7th floor balcony.
Control... see the problem with these conspiracy theories is that people don't specifically pursue greater control, it's usually a side effect of something else, an extension of law enforcement. Control is the weak minded man's reaction to something they're not prepared for. The USA isn't prepared to let the rest of the world compete with them (and beat them silly), so they're trying to control the internet by hijacking ICANN. Religious groups aren't prepared to deal with same-sex relationships and free thought, so they try to control these freedom whores with lies and fear. Losing one's rights is just the system's way to simplify a problem they created but can't solve.
Haven't you guys ever played Monopoly ? Google probably doesn't want the glorified pile of funk that is DoubleClick, because AdSense is far friendlier and more successful than DoubleClick ever was. However, Microsoft DOES want DoubleClick because they want to compete with AdSense, somehow, in a bastardized half-assed rip-off kind of way like everything else they've released in the past 30 years. If Google ends up buying DoubleClick, just to keep it away from Microsoft, it's a smart strategic move and one that Google can afford, especially if it means protecting their ad business. We all know how Microsoft plays... they don't care if they lose tons of money, as long as they drag everyone else down with 'em, then when the time is right they' pounce on their tired enemies. They're like chinese computer importers, only less puny!
Google buying DC is kind of like a good monopoly player buying a single lot they don't want, just to keep someone else from completing their set and building friggin hotels. Believe me, buying St. James Place for $180 now is way better than paying your opponent $950 rent later. Same idea here!
Finally someone with a brain! I thought I was the only guy who sees XML for the bloated non-solution that it is! Of course, the internets love acronyms (see AJAX). Personally, I prefer fast and lean binary encoding (with complete documentation of its structures) but all these late generation programmers are allergic to anything that existed before 1998 :P