Although I halfheartedly support copyright and all that crap, I hate it when people go at it like this guy. In a sense it's like pirating the legal system, he's using a loophole or fallacy of the law to justify his blackmail-like tactics. "Give me money or I'll expose you and bleed your chequing account to death." Just one letter from this guy would probably ignite me to the point of hiring a bunch of big guys to go whack his brains out. It's basically what he's doing, although he's using financial strongarms instead of thugs. Same pressure, same rape of civil rights.
Sure we all need janitors and whatnot, but would you want a janitor going anywhere near your code ? Well just replace janitor with incompetent (not saying that janitors are incompetent though). I wouldn't want an incompetent fast-track college graduate MCSE idiot even touching a keyboard that's on the same workgroup as myself, because you know they'll find something creatively stupid to do with the build files. "Hey look, I made the Make script send us all email when the process fails" he says, then you fire up your mailreader and see 200 "make failed" messages while he was shotgun debugging his tweak. Yes, those morons.
If the students have CGI access, then there is little preventing them from running a port-forwarding doohicky to bypass the whole filter. Of course that might result in a little visit from your pointy-headed tech.
Since you seem to believe this is inevitable (well maybe it is), then it is also inevitable that there will be a need for some sort of easy-to-use software package that will handle these subscriptions. I think there is much to be earned for someone who can come up with a clean and efficient library to handle this stuff, with the possibility of Microsoft buying that someone out for huge wads of moolah, more than enough to fill a living room with Pengiun rack servers:)
The only way such an ideal anti-megaplex boycott could work is if the general population had brains. Many of us enjoy visiting the smaller cinemas which feature less hollywoodish films and more occult/interesting films. For example here in Ottawa we have the Mayfair theater which has only one humongous screen and a double-feature every evening, playing some of the better box-office hits but also digging out many historical reels that have marked generations of moviegoers with their cultural value. This week for example, there is a night of Hitchcock films, another one sports back-to-back musical biographies.
Now all that is quite nice for those of us with open minds, but for the rest of the cattle (which includes my S.O.), they just want to see flying cars, explosions and sex. The major demographic leans toward the crass of professionally botched up movies such as this Hannibal, which was nothing less than a travesty and insult to the original Silence of the Lambs, which was a truly serious and engrossing thriller. How serious can a movie be if I spent most of the time laughing aloud at the sheer mediocrity and absurdity of the screenplay ? The person next to me would say "That's not funny!", to which I replied "It is from my perspective". True, someone being hanged isn't funny, but the fact that the director went to such lengths to make it as gory as possible even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the storyline, now that's funny.
I went through the same experience just a few months ago with my mother's PC, which was then a 486/66 w/20mb ram. Installing a minimal slack setup took about an hour, just loading X was around 20 seconds. Netscape loaded up fast, it's while browsing from page to page that the delays would pile up. Clicking on a link would initiate the usual name-resolving/page-fetching phase, and once the page had begun downloading, the browser would just sit there for about 10 seconds before starting to draw. It did this for every downloaded element, images and all. This was on a cable modem through a decent (3com) nic.
Compare this with Win95 and IE 5.0, which does take perhaps 30 seconds to fire up, but once it's there your browsing is fairly swift. For those of you who preach about Opera, I just don't think it cuts the cream, mainly because its interface differs so greatly from the norm, which is a bad thing to put in front of computing neophytes. I personally keep it around on my work PC for those few sites that crash IE (it has some minor issues with Athlons).
What I would love to know is how the cops traced the napster users back to their homes. Although my napster registration goes way back a few years, I don't remember giving out any "Real Life" information, certainly not my address, and if I did, I surely didn't enter the true info simply because it's none of their business. They could easily find out generally where I'm living (based on my IP) but that's way too broad to finger it down to a home address. Puzzled, I am.
This was surely true 10 years ago, but today just take any assembler source file and read it through. You'll find alot of non-assembler text in there. It might be processor directives, or simplified function calls, mmx/3dnow macros, perhaps even OOP declarations. Assembler has developed into a semi-compiled language over the years, where you still have full control over the generated code, but the "assembler/compiler" supports added features that can help you write simpler, more readable code.
What if it is an existing couple developing a new relationship to a 3rd person on the net, for "fun and adventure" ? That's not adultery, that's just swingers shopping around. We occasionally drop into the local chatrooms looking for new partners (after a while it becomes dead easy to filter out the talkers from the doers). Why resort to chatrooms ? because our wonderfully protestant senators have decided that swing clubs were morally wrong.
Sure, it is about people lusting for total strangers, which is just fine in our mentality. There is no harm done to the S.O. (no matter what you prudes will say), therefore there is no adultery committed. Geez, with all the sex and freakiness on the net, I'd expect people to take this all with a grain of salt.
The irony is that if we were to imagine such a scenario where someone had patented lunar landing, then asteroid landing would be likely to be free of this patent litigation over some technicality such as "People don't know asteroids but everyone knows what the moon is". Stupid marketroid reasoning at its finest, that's the state of IP legislation today. Smart lawyers defeat smart patents. I think i'll patent "Exertion of legal knowledge in a courtroom in order to protect the guilty" and have all lawyers shot. Twenty years ago, they said computers were the future. Wrong, law is the future.
Sure, so we purchase the medium, not the data. Someone please explain then why buying and selling pirated software on CD's is illegal ? You're buying the media, which just happens to have data that might be interpreted as something copyrighted. To other people, they might stick it in their cd player and call it noise techno (assuming their player doesn't silence out data tracks). The RIAA has so many friggin loopholes to patch, it's no wonder they resort to such mindless lawsuits to cover their ignorant asses. At least Amway is better designed from the start, though just as fraudulous.
The problem with compression algorithms is that they're being based on absolutely unrelated crap that just happens to be distantly similar, like this whole blab about physics theory. When talking about data compression, entropy is simply the opposite of redundancy. You have some boring repetitive data, and you have some interesting unique data. Get rid of the repetitive data, and shrink the unique data as much as possible.
Why hasn't anyone brought up the topic of pattern-based and lookup-based compression ? What happened to the ancient compressors that had a table of frequently recurring strings that were replaced by a single 9-bit code. In a sense, it was a very bastardized form of indexing. For text files you could associate each dictionary word with a short numeric code, that lookup table being included in the executable. Since both the sender and receiver need the (de)compressor anyways, you're just moving oft-used data out of the target files and keeping only one copy inside the executable itself. For example if you have a bunch of PNG files that share similar header info, you could store a PNG header template in the compressor, which would then only include the varying attributes. This is a poor example since since a PNG header might be only a few hundred bytes, which would then be whacked down to perhaps 20-30 bytes, but the same theory can apply to virtually any standardized format. In fact it doesn't need to be bound to any particular format, as long as you have a way to spot these "template" constructs. This, combined with the generic shrinking power of Gzip/Bzip2 could yield moderately better results than just blind compression.
I read through the article, and although it would seem that ADDA (the accused fan mfg) isn't exactly playing nice, it is them who should be sued yet again, not NVidia and Creative. If someone clones your patented product and rips you off, sue that organisation, not its clients. This is just a lame ploy to score some easy cash without actually doing anything.
Sunon is well known for making so-so fans, not crap, but not amazing either. In the growing overclocking market of insane cooling gadgetry they just fall short and they're jealous. If they were looking to put their foot down and make a point, they'd go right against ADDA to stop their operations, but they're going after industry giants Creative and NVidia, who obviously have deeper pockets even though they have little control over the production of these fans, aside from their buying power.
I just don't get it. Two hubless wheels and a lawnmower engine. 1500 bucks ? Go fsck yourself! I could get one of those giant mail-order-brides for less than that and she'd just carry my fat ass all over the place.
Let`s look at this wonderful dilemma : Anyone pointing a gun should be shot. Yes I hate guns, even when cops use them, because such devices are simply TOO effective. Shooting on first sight is for rednecks.
I firmly believe in non-deadly weapons that allow the policeperson to disable the suspect and analyze the situation with a calm mind, without causing serious injury or death, like sticky nets or other non-bloody gadgets. Then if it really was an armed little prick, just beat the crap out of him and feed him to the sharks, but if it was just a kid playing laser tag then maybe it would be a good idea to apologize and help him/her get up.
Not only would this reduce public unrest (and thus random violence), it would also keep the stress levels down for these police enforcers since they would have the peace of mind that they can just use their non-deadly weapons without fear of striking the innocent. It is well known that a cop that slays an innocent might as well turn the gun around and commit suicide. It is not only bad press for the establishment, but that person will be taunted and aggressed for years to come.
I`m not at all suggesting an end to violence. I ain`t no hippy (in fact, I`d like to give a swift kick in the ass to all hippies reading this). There will always be quite a number of unfortunate morons that are just too retarded to listen unless you shove a fist down their throat, however they are still the minority in our "civilised" society, therefore protecting the innocent should be more important than stopping the criminals. Conscientious and sparing use of deadly force is what I believe to be the first step toward that ideal.
Personally I think that amish people shouldn't be using computers and posting to slashdot. Did you know that video games stimulate rapid development of a child's math and logic skills ? Did you also know that being dexterous and quick on the reflexes is a good thing ?
Would you prefer to have people just watch TV instead without exerting any mental effort ? It doesn't take much brains to flip through 255 channels of boring, artificially flavored crap. How many episodes of V.I.P. can a person watch before going completely braindead and becoming yet another dead-end welfare statistic ?
And to riposte your statement that children enter the "real world" crippled and disillusioned, well you're looking at the scene through stained glass. They're not crippled, their view of reality is merely different. They can see through the FUD and spot what's wrong with the world, even though they probably lack the power to do anything about it. Games are, for the most part, an art form. Art is a means to freeze life into concrete reality. Therefore games are indirectly teaching about life, something you must have abandoned long ago.
The big obstacle that's slowing down open source in the workplace is simply the fact that corporations are run by fascist idiots that are already seconds away from a burnout. They like the peace of mind that comes when you pay big bucks for software and support.
Although PHP and PostgreSQL are excellent products (I'd stay away from MySql for anything bigger than my own box), they just can't offer the same level of support as Microsoft or Oracle or any other dependable names (dependable in the business sense, even though their software grows suckier on a daily basis). Call Microsoft and if they can't fix you up on the phone, they will send someone over to assist you the next day. Sure, this comes with a hefty bill, but at least it's available for those who need it.
Also, if there is a shortage of knowledgeable PHP consultants, then what will happen when the present consultant takes a hike, or gets shot in the head by a microsoft employee, or just gives up on your project because he sucks ? You'll be screwed without and will need to search far and wide again to find a replacement. MSSQL/VB dinks are a dime a dozen. Cheap scammy colleges spew thousands of them out every semester.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I halfheartedly support copyright and all that crap, I hate it when people go at it like this guy. In a sense it's like pirating the legal system, he's using a loophole or fallacy of the law to justify his blackmail-like tactics. "Give me money or I'll expose you and bleed your chequing account to death." Just one letter from this guy would probably ignite me to the point of hiring a bunch of big guys to go whack his brains out. It's basically what he's doing, although he's using financial strongarms instead of thugs. Same pressure, same rape of civil rights.
I don`t know about you, but I wouldn`t buy a PDA that forced me to Wince in order to do anything. Ha. Ha. Ha. WinCE. *bang*
Sure we all need janitors and whatnot, but would you want a janitor going anywhere near your code ? Well just replace janitor with incompetent (not saying that janitors are incompetent though). I wouldn't want an incompetent fast-track college graduate MCSE idiot even touching a keyboard that's on the same workgroup as myself, because you know they'll find something creatively stupid to do with the build files. "Hey look, I made the Make script send us all email when the process fails" he says, then you fire up your mailreader and see 200 "make failed" messages while he was shotgun debugging his tweak. Yes, those morons.
That just doesn't sound right.. imagine yapping to your buddies "So I was playing with Seaman the other day". Just plain sick.
If the students have CGI access, then there is little preventing them from running a port-forwarding doohicky to bypass the whole filter. Of course that might result in a little visit from your pointy-headed tech.
Since you seem to believe this is inevitable (well maybe it is), then it is also inevitable that there will be a need for some sort of easy-to-use software package that will handle these subscriptions. I think there is much to be earned for someone who can come up with a clean and efficient library to handle this stuff, with the possibility of Microsoft buying that someone out for huge wads of moolah, more than enough to fill a living room with Pengiun rack servers :)
"embrace" is a Microsoft buzzword.. Sun doesn't embrace, they "leverage".
"Oh my God, this guy is really the half-brother of that guy who is the sister of so-and-so,"
Game Design Tip #13 : Make sure your game heroes are somehow related to Boy George.
The only way such an ideal anti-megaplex boycott could work is if the general population had brains. Many of us enjoy visiting the smaller cinemas which feature less hollywoodish films and more occult/interesting films. For example here in Ottawa we have the Mayfair theater which has only one humongous screen and a double-feature every evening, playing some of the better box-office hits but also digging out many historical reels that have marked generations of moviegoers with their cultural value. This week for example, there is a night of Hitchcock films, another one sports back-to-back musical biographies.
Now all that is quite nice for those of us with open minds, but for the rest of the cattle (which includes my S.O.), they just want to see flying cars, explosions and sex. The major demographic leans toward the crass of professionally botched up movies such as this Hannibal, which was nothing less than a travesty and insult to the original Silence of the Lambs, which was a truly serious and engrossing thriller. How serious can a movie be if I spent most of the time laughing aloud at the sheer mediocrity and absurdity of the screenplay ? The person next to me would say "That's not funny!", to which I replied "It is from my perspective". True, someone being hanged isn't funny, but the fact that the director went to such lengths to make it as gory as possible even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the storyline, now that's funny.
Ridley Scott is a mere hollywood puppet.
I went through the same experience just a few months ago with my mother's PC, which was then a 486/66 w/20mb ram. Installing a minimal slack setup took about an hour, just loading X was around 20 seconds. Netscape loaded up fast, it's while browsing from page to page that the delays would pile up. Clicking on a link would initiate the usual name-resolving/page-fetching phase, and once the page had begun downloading, the browser would just sit there for about 10 seconds before starting to draw. It did this for every downloaded element, images and all. This was on a cable modem through a decent (3com) nic.
Compare this with Win95 and IE 5.0, which does take perhaps 30 seconds to fire up, but once it's there your browsing is fairly swift. For those of you who preach about Opera, I just don't think it cuts the cream, mainly because its interface differs so greatly from the norm, which is a bad thing to put in front of computing neophytes. I personally keep it around on my work PC for those few sites that crash IE (it has some minor issues with Athlons).
What I would love to know is how the cops traced the napster users back to their homes. Although my napster registration goes way back a few years, I don't remember giving out any "Real Life" information, certainly not my address, and if I did, I surely didn't enter the true info simply because it's none of their business. They could easily find out generally where I'm living (based on my IP) but that's way too broad to finger it down to a home address. Puzzled, I am.
Wohoo! Debug.com!
This was surely true 10 years ago, but today just take any assembler source file and read it through. You'll find alot of non-assembler text in there. It might be processor directives, or simplified function calls, mmx/3dnow macros, perhaps even OOP declarations. Assembler has developed into a semi-compiled language over the years, where you still have full control over the generated code, but the "assembler/compiler" supports added features that can help you write simpler, more readable code.
Let's play "what if" :
What if it is an existing couple developing a new relationship to a 3rd person on the net, for "fun and adventure" ? That's not adultery, that's just swingers shopping around. We occasionally drop into the local chatrooms looking for new partners (after a while it becomes dead easy to filter out the talkers from the doers). Why resort to chatrooms ? because our wonderfully protestant senators have decided that swing clubs were morally wrong.
Sure, it is about people lusting for total strangers, which is just fine in our mentality. There is no harm done to the S.O. (no matter what you prudes will say), therefore there is no adultery committed. Geez, with all the sex and freakiness on the net, I'd expect people to take this all with a grain of salt.
The irony is that if we were to imagine such a scenario where someone had patented lunar landing, then asteroid landing would be likely to be free of this patent litigation over some technicality such as "People don't know asteroids but everyone knows what the moon is". Stupid marketroid reasoning at its finest, that's the state of IP legislation today. Smart lawyers defeat smart patents. I think i'll patent "Exertion of legal knowledge in a courtroom in order to protect the guilty" and have all lawyers shot. Twenty years ago, they said computers were the future. Wrong, law is the future.
Sure, so we purchase the medium, not the data. Someone please explain then why buying and selling pirated software on CD's is illegal ? You're buying the media, which just happens to have data that might be interpreted as something copyrighted. To other people, they might stick it in their cd player and call it noise techno (assuming their player doesn't silence out data tracks). The RIAA has so many friggin loopholes to patch, it's no wonder they resort to such mindless lawsuits to cover their ignorant asses. At least Amway is better designed from the start, though just as fraudulous.
Here's some annoyance for that whiz-bang "sturdy" laptop : blue screens!
The problem with compression algorithms is that they're being based on absolutely unrelated crap that just happens to be distantly similar, like this whole blab about physics theory. When talking about data compression, entropy is simply the opposite of redundancy. You have some boring repetitive data, and you have some interesting unique data. Get rid of the repetitive data, and shrink the unique data as much as possible.
Why hasn't anyone brought up the topic of pattern-based and lookup-based compression ? What happened to the ancient compressors that had a table of frequently recurring strings that were replaced by a single 9-bit code. In a sense, it was a very bastardized form of indexing. For text files you could associate each dictionary word with a short numeric code, that lookup table being included in the executable. Since both the sender and receiver need the (de)compressor anyways, you're just moving oft-used data out of the target files and keeping only one copy inside the executable itself. For example if you have a bunch of PNG files that share similar header info, you could store a PNG header template in the compressor, which would then only include the varying attributes. This is a poor example since since a PNG header might be only a few hundred bytes, which would then be whacked down to perhaps 20-30 bytes, but the same theory can apply to virtually any standardized format. In fact it doesn't need to be bound to any particular format, as long as you have a way to spot these "template" constructs. This, combined with the generic shrinking power of Gzip/Bzip2 could yield moderately better results than just blind compression.
Sounds like those "3l!+3 w@r3z d00dz" ascii-munging scripts, but with a more reasonable ruleset.
Bah.
I read through the article, and although it would seem that ADDA (the accused fan mfg) isn't exactly playing nice, it is them who should be sued yet again, not NVidia and Creative. If someone clones your patented product and rips you off, sue that organisation, not its clients. This is just a lame ploy to score some easy cash without actually doing anything.
Sunon is well known for making so-so fans, not crap, but not amazing either. In the growing overclocking market of insane cooling gadgetry they just fall short and they're jealous. If they were looking to put their foot down and make a point, they'd go right against ADDA to stop their operations, but they're going after industry giants Creative and NVidia, who obviously have deeper pockets even though they have little control over the production of these fans, aside from their buying power.
I just don't get it. Two hubless wheels and a lawnmower engine. 1500 bucks ? Go fsck yourself! I could get one of those giant mail-order-brides for less than that and she'd just carry my fat ass all over the place.
No thanks.
Let`s look at this wonderful dilemma : Anyone pointing a gun should be shot. Yes I hate guns, even when cops use them, because such devices are simply TOO effective. Shooting on first sight is for rednecks. I firmly believe in non-deadly weapons that allow the policeperson to disable the suspect and analyze the situation with a calm mind, without causing serious injury or death, like sticky nets or other non-bloody gadgets. Then if it really was an armed little prick, just beat the crap out of him and feed him to the sharks, but if it was just a kid playing laser tag then maybe it would be a good idea to apologize and help him/her get up. Not only would this reduce public unrest (and thus random violence), it would also keep the stress levels down for these police enforcers since they would have the peace of mind that they can just use their non-deadly weapons without fear of striking the innocent. It is well known that a cop that slays an innocent might as well turn the gun around and commit suicide. It is not only bad press for the establishment, but that person will be taunted and aggressed for years to come. I`m not at all suggesting an end to violence. I ain`t no hippy (in fact, I`d like to give a swift kick in the ass to all hippies reading this). There will always be quite a number of unfortunate morons that are just too retarded to listen unless you shove a fist down their throat, however they are still the minority in our "civilised" society, therefore protecting the innocent should be more important than stopping the criminals. Conscientious and sparing use of deadly force is what I believe to be the first step toward that ideal.
Personally I think that amish people shouldn't be using computers and posting to slashdot. Did you know that video games stimulate rapid development of a child's math and logic skills ? Did you also know that being dexterous and quick on the reflexes is a good thing ?
Would you prefer to have people just watch TV instead without exerting any mental effort ? It doesn't take much brains to flip through 255 channels of boring, artificially flavored crap. How many episodes of V.I.P. can a person watch before going completely braindead and becoming yet another dead-end welfare statistic ?
And to riposte your statement that children enter the "real world" crippled and disillusioned, well you're looking at the scene through stained glass. They're not crippled, their view of reality is merely different. They can see through the FUD and spot what's wrong with the world, even though they probably lack the power to do anything about it. Games are, for the most part, an art form. Art is a means to freeze life into concrete reality. Therefore games are indirectly teaching about life, something you must have abandoned long ago.
The big obstacle that's slowing down open source in the workplace is simply the fact that corporations are run by fascist idiots that are already seconds away from a burnout. They like the peace of mind that comes when you pay big bucks for software and support.
Although PHP and PostgreSQL are excellent products (I'd stay away from MySql for anything bigger than my own box), they just can't offer the same level of support as Microsoft or Oracle or any other dependable names (dependable in the business sense, even though their software grows suckier on a daily basis). Call Microsoft and if they can't fix you up on the phone, they will send someone over to assist you the next day. Sure, this comes with a hefty bill, but at least it's available for those who need it.
Also, if there is a shortage of knowledgeable PHP consultants, then what will happen when the present consultant takes a hike, or gets shot in the head by a microsoft employee, or just gives up on your project because he sucks ? You'll be screwed without and will need to search far and wide again to find a replacement. MSSQL/VB dinks are a dime a dozen. Cheap scammy colleges spew thousands of them out every semester.
Ok.. will someone explain to me how a #2 post can be "Redundant" when the first post was just a first post ?
Geez moderators, browsing at "+2 newest first" isn't exactly bright.