What difference does the power drain of the chipset make if it still gives you 7 hours battery time? You might as well ask why we invaded Iraq if Osama bin Laden is in Afghanistan. You liberal types just don't know when to shut up...
Exactly, I spend more on music now than I ever have done, precisely because of the vastly increased exposure to it bittorrent has enabled. Although I abhor the RIAA's tactics, I decided several years ago that I could not put myself at risk from extortion at their hand, so I stopped Napstering altogether. Not surprisingly, my CD purchases have simultaneously dropped from hundreds per year to one or two.
Ironically, in the RIAA's analysis of the situation, I must almost certainly be accounted as someone who's stopped buying CD's because of illegal downloading, when in fact it is directly due to the actions of the recording industry itself.
In fairness to these scientists and engineers, often they have a need that isn't met by well trained software engineers and feel a desire to "get things right" by doing it themselves. I don't doubt that this is often their motivation, and quite possibly they can "get things right" with respect to their domain this way. Unfortunately, it's a virtual certainty that they will fuck up the software with respect to the domain of "programming" by doing this.
I've noticed that architects frequently ignore the usability of their creations with respect to those who will actually live and work in them every day, generally resulting in disaster. If I ever have the chance to control the architecture of a building I'm to work in, I'll definitely "get things right" by finding out the needs of the people who'll be working in the building and transmitting these requirements throughout the process to make sure that the building addresses them. I will not, however, skip hiring an architect and do the architectural designs and drawings myself, because I'm fully aware of the train wreck that would result.
Good programmers and bad programmers come from all walks of life. Your comment is similar to one from a bigot that attributes a certain property to people of a specific race. My point is not that engineers cannot be good programmers because they are engineers. My point is that there is a big difference between code written by someone whose primary discipline is programming and code written by someone whose primary discipline is engineering, or biology, or medecine, or library science.
Programming is a substantial discipline and takes decades to master--it's not just some sort of advanced touch typing.
Hackers like to think they can do everyone's job better even if it way out of their scope. I guess that's the difference between hackers and engineers, engineers understand that it takes managers, PHB's, marketing, sales, and production staff to make it work. Hackers think it just takes code.
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
It would certainly be easiest for them to just skip with the money, yes. But if they have more serious nefarious intent, or worse still, if they are specifically targetting you, it's not difficult at all to write a decryptor that will (a) seemingly restore your files, and (b) leave some other problem on your system.
it would be less work to give them a correct decryptor, than one that intentionally alters selective parts of a file. Correct decrypting will also give other people a reason to pay the ransom.
So all in all, I think I can trust them to not intentionally do something like that, since that is in both parties' interest. I have some prime Florida real estate that I believe will interest you. Could you please forward $1000 so that I can buy a computer with which to send you its description?
Wow! I am so bowled over by this man's rhetorical arguments. First there's this gem
Why do we need closed vehicles? We do.
I mean, that almost brings a tear to my eye.
As an industry, we plan to use open-source technologies, but we are not yet ready to play by the rules; but this needs to work the other way round too.
My god! Have you ever seen such compelling use of the English language? I think I'm going to swoon...
I played trumpet in my high school band. My senior year, I was first chair. I wasn't the greatest player in the world, but as it happened that year, I had no one that really challenged me for the chair. I've always regretted that I didn't have a little competition, as I think it would have made me a much better player, and I think I would have enjoyed it more.
What seems to be missing here, is the realization that if someone has encrypted your files without your permission (supposedly for ransom), there is no reason to trust them to restore the files correctly, and very good reasons not to trust them.
I suppose if the file in question was something like a manuscript for a novel, where the owner can more or less verify it by eye, and (importantly) there isn't that much downside if our opponent sneaks some changes in, that might be worthwhile. But in general...
Blah, it's been too long. I think the example I was reaching for was/%foo[bar]/. Again, what are the possibilities?
As far as $foo ending in a backslash, I don't know one way or the other, but I hope you're wrong, because that would be pretty hideous.
My larger point is that Perl is needlessly arcane, to the point of incomprehensibility for most people. (Quick: How does x +2 parse? If your answer is shorter than 100 words, it's probably wrong...)
Delimiters for those of us who are either too sloppy/lazy/defiant to create "properly formatted code"... I hope you won't take this the wrong way, but until you work that out, thank you for not using Python.:-)
The main thing I got from there was that Java, far from being a programming language, is also a platform. True, but it's far from clear that this is a good thing. In many ways it's a synonym for "doesn't work and play well with others".
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly, is that in dog?
Having used MS support, I have very limited expectations. Fortunately (no pun intended), there are alternative, more-reliable sources for Microsoft support.
Ironically, in the RIAA's analysis of the situation, I must almost certainly be accounted as someone who's stopped buying CD's because of illegal downloading, when in fact it is directly due to the actions of the recording industry itself.
I've noticed that architects frequently ignore the usability of their creations with respect to those who will actually live and work in them every day, generally resulting in disaster. If I ever have the chance to control the architecture of a building I'm to work in, I'll definitely "get things right" by finding out the needs of the people who'll be working in the building and transmitting these requirements throughout the process to make sure that the building addresses them. I will not, however, skip hiring an architect and do the architectural designs and drawings myself, because I'm fully aware of the train wreck that would result.
Programming is a substantial discipline and takes decades to master--it's not just some sort of advanced touch typing.
Harumph. I can see a niche for FORTRAN, but I don't think it should be taught (or used) as a primary/first language for anyone.
Although, in my own defense, I have also seen highly paid biologists writing their own (crappy) code...
I have news: Everyone thinks they can do it all.
Since you mention engineers, I'll start with them. I've seen a lot of code written by engineers, and it's been uniformly horrid. Many schools still teach FORTRAN as their first/main language. Good god.
I see a lot of code written by scientists. Not one would think of letting an untrained programmer run their wet lab assays, but they think nothing of having graduate biologists write their programs. Guess what, it's even worse than engineer code!
In an ideal world, we'd all farm out the stuff we're not good at to people trained to do it. I'm not holding my breath...
It would certainly be easiest for them to just skip with the money, yes. But if they have more serious nefarious intent, or worse still, if they are specifically targetting you, it's not difficult at all to write a decryptor that will (a) seemingly restore your files, and (b) leave some other problem on your system.
My suggestion is to forget the chair and give him a 20-minute hummer...
I saw Yoda do this in Star Wars III. Or maybe it was Grover--they sound so much alike...
I played trumpet in my high school band. My senior year, I was first chair. I wasn't the greatest player in the world, but as it happened that year, I had no one that really challenged me for the chair. I've always regretted that I didn't have a little competition, as I think it would have made me a much better player, and I think I would have enjoyed it more.
I suppose if the file in question was something like a manuscript for a novel, where the owner can more or less verify it by eye, and (importantly) there isn't that much downside if our opponent sneaks some changes in, that might be worthwhile. But in general...
Most people aren't programmers, let alone Perl programmers. No one in Japan cares that I can't read Kanji. How is that interesting?
By "most people", I meant "most Perl programmers" as well...Blah, it's been too long. I think the example I was reaching for was /%foo[bar]/. Again, what are the possibilities?
As far as $foo ending in a backslash, I don't know one way or the other, but I hope you're wrong, because that would be pretty hideous.
My larger point is that Perl is needlessly arcane, to the point of incomprehensibility for most people. (Quick: How does x +2 parse? If your answer is shorter than 100 words, it's probably wrong...)
Because I took the time to learn Perl.
How about /@foo[bar]/? What are the possibilities?
That depends what $foo contains. What if it ended with a single backslash?
What if $foo's value ended in a single backslash?? Would that matter here?
Obviously I'm not very knowledgeable about Perl, but I believe my larger point is being made here.
$foo is a scalar. [bar] is a literal string. %arr is a hash. You're missing a closing parenthesis.
Yeah, the paren's wrong--my mistake. Any of the obvious fixes works.How do you know that $foo is not an array? Why would [bar] be a literal string rather than a regular expression that matches one of 'b', 'a', or 'r'?
I hope that if I ever write something like this, someone will point out to me how clueless I sound. :-)
I think I wrote my last Basic in 1983. Take my word for it, Python may have it's problems, but it's nothing like Basic.