You know, most people who are fluent in a language are able to construct a short paragraph without resorting to profanity. Perhaps you might want to take a night class and finish up that GED, you ignorant cocksucker.
Oh -- 'Slashdot' is a proper noun. Those get capitalized in English.
It gets a lot of play because it's a cool piece of software and a lot of people use it. Their licensing model is about the very opposite of Microsoft's: use it for free and look at a small ad (that your eye will not notice after a week), or pay a bit and don't see the ad. I somehow can't see Microsoft adopting this.
No, it's not free. So what? This is a geek news site that discusses things of interest to the community, not a Free Software site. You don't complain when articles about Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights get posted, do you?
As a user of Opera since v.3.something, I'm nothing but impressed by how it's improved. It's a lot better at getting to most sites, especially if you tell it to pretend to be IE in the agent string. I don't do online banking, so I can't say how well it works everywhere. I sometimes have to use IE on a page it doesn't like, but it's damn rare.
Ah, the good old days
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Gentoo Games
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· Score: 1
HAHA I remember the oh so vital dos boot disk, trying to squeeze everything into upper memory so you could get that ~612K free. Tweaking EMM386.EXE, HIMEM.SYS and MSCDEX which was the bane of my existence. Those were the days, the days that I didn't mind a Microsoft operating system.
Well that's the problem, son! You should have been using QEMM. EMM386 was total shit. LOADHI was nice, though. It was great when DOS 5 came along and you could load much of COMMAND.COM into high memory as well.
I remember working on a DOS app that needed a CD, mouse, 640x480x256 graphics, a 1 meg chunk of EMS, *and* about 600K of conventional memory. I was very very proud of being able to load MSCDEX, mouse driver, Netware drivers and the VESA driver and STILL have something like 620 meg free. Lord forbid I should have to change a single bit of configuration, though. That was another hour of hair-pulling frustration. (No, this product did NOT sell very well. Management never understood why.)
Those were the days, when programmers were MEN. Beat that box into submission!!
These hacks won't let me change the UI, though
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OS X Hacks
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· Score: 1
Here's the OSX hack I want. Can I please get rid of the cutesy interface? If I could just
Get rid of the fanfold-paper background
Have square window corners
Lose those buttons. It looks like blue goo is going to squirt all over my screen when I click on one.
I'd go out and buy one in a hot minute (just as soon as I got a job). That's the only thing keeping me from having a Mac as my main machine (that and the lack of a job). For years, I've envied the way stuff on the Mac just works, but I could never bring myself to actually use one unless I had to (although I tried a number of times). I could never deal with the, um, idiosyncracies of the thing, like the way the keyboard was never really supported, and how Home and End always did the absolute wrong thing. So, I was undersandably excited when I heard about the new interface, it coming from the Next and all.
Imagine my dismay when I saw the first pictures of OSX. Ouch. If I just could have OSX with the OS9 interface, that would be great. The dock is really nice, though.
I understand Steve Jobs' reasons for not wanting to let people change the way it looks (less tech support, a desire to keep a specific Macintosh brand image, personal pride), but I don't agree with them. Just say that you won't support anything that's not factory stock, and let me do what I want with my computer.
No, you're thinking of I.P. Frehley, the brother of the guitarist from Kiss. Interesting thing - he's a network tech with a bladder control problem. Funny old world, isn't it?
Re:Unprofessional?
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SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Conversely, anyone here feel like they're BEING TREATED unprofessionally? The article makes it look like SCO has jumped to the conclusion that it's Linux fans doing the attack. If that is true, then SCO is acting unprofessionally themselves. How many fingers are they pointing at us?
Well, just who the hell do you think it is doing it? IBM? It's the same people who always do this shit - stupid kids that think they're making some kind of political statement by breaking stuff. This time, instead of saying "you can't stop us from trading music", it's "how dare you try to fuck with Linux you assholes!!" Yeah. Really mature.
Getting your buddies together and pointing all your zombied machines at someone's IP address and going "bang" does NOT constitute legitimate protest. Even if you don't care about SCO, this is screwing their ISP bigtime - they're knocking out 90% of their bandwidth, for crissake. All it does is reinforce every negative stereotype of Linux/Open Source/GPL people held by the rest of the world.
Even better would be to put the player in the AK itself and have the magazines be replacable hard drives or memory sticks. That way I can change musical styles in a *really* cool way, which is the entire point, right?
And wouldn't it be cool to carry my MP3 player slung over my back when I go to class or the airport? Imagine: extra battery packs and nice speakers built into the stock and barrel -- instant party device when I come by! Hell, put a microphone in the barrel for really easy recording of concerts, teachers, or just plain people outside the car.
What a great idea - it can't miss. I'm going out to the shop with my soldering rig right now!
"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"
Dave, I've been meaning to talk to you. I don't think you are pleasing her as much as you could. If you would increase your penis size, Dave, I believe this girl would like to meet you. Here is a video...
As I understand it, the problem comes where you have several computers, all generating their own sequence numbers. Especially if you have a mix of OSes, it will be obvious that there are multiple connections with diferent sequences. I'm not familiar with BSD's sequence rewriting (note to self: review ipfilter documentation) or ippersonality, but it sounds as if this problem is solved (for now).
Of course, if they want to take a closer look at what you're doing for a while, they can find out a lot. If they see Mac Updater, XP updater, and lots of FTPs to Debian packages, they'll have a pretty good idea that there's more than one machine out there. All I'd think they'd have to do is look at (HTTP? What do those update apps use?) connections to a fixed set of addresses. I don't even think that would concern their lawyers about privacy concerns.
In a way, if you're going through such effort, you're probably helping them out somehow by wrangling your own network into some resemblance of order.
Yeah, the gene pool of people with a clue will improve as all the ones who can't figure it out get busted by their ISPs. Eventually, only people who can secure a network will have DSL, and maybe the number of worms will decrease a little.
Just about every federal or military network utilizes NAT or has a VPN on it or allowing remote access to it. Laws of this nature will not pass if intelligent people object to them intelligently.
What laws? I don't think anyone has proposed an anti-NAT law yet. I seriously doubt that the federal government's ISP would get too tweaked about a few extra boxes behind the State Deparement's firewall. I bet it's not even against their TOS...
Everybody here is saying "just fix the NAT code to not decrement the TTL and we're cool", but it's not that easy. At the end of the article (you did read the article, right?) it refers to an AT&T research paper (PDF) on counting the number of hosts behind a NAT box. This is done by looking at packet sequence numbers, using the fact that each host generates its own sequence. This chart shows what happens. If you see one set of packets starting at 20,000 and another at 50,000, all overlapping in time, it's a good bet there are two hosts. It also points out that the default high port numbers NAT uses are another good clue to the presence of NAT.
Port numbers are easy to change, but if your ISP wants to do traffic analysis on your IP address, there's not a lot you can do to hide. I'm just very, very glad that I have an ISP that doesn't suck. In fact, they're pretty damn cool.
I'm sorry your teachers are so awful. It's depressing to be reminded of how easily a mediocre instructor can destroy someone's interest in learning by pounding stupid details into their head. It's good to see that she's taking the time to cover subtle distinctions like 'oxymoron' vs. 'verbal irony', but they shouldn't be more than a tangent to the main point. I suppose she's trying to be engaged, but more than a day of this is a waste of class time.
Unless the textbook publishers are hopelessly incompetent, the rules of (American) English that they give you are going to be pretty much the same from book to book. One reason they might not be is if they wanted to avoid some of the more complicated special cases (like indefinite pronouns, for instance) until a more advanced level. Unfortunately, random teacher Y may not be good at unteaching this heuristic. Then again, there *is* a lot to learn. You either have an ear for it or you do a lot of memorization.
Basically, if you want to do this right, you're going to have to teach yourself. There's nothing you need to know that you can't get from either Strunk & White or "The Associated Press Style Guide". Get these two (small) books, read a newspaper regularly (start with The New York Times), and listen to something like NPR or PBS (regardless of whether you agree with them, you have to hear the language spoken to get a feel for it). Check your spelling *in context* - if you're at all unsure about a word, look it up. Don't worry too much about what your teacher demands. In a few years, she won't matter at all. But if you can write a paragraph that validates against S&W or AP, you will have the respect of everyone you communicate with. Remember that spoken language is not written language and has less formal rules, and know when to use each, and you'll have the advantage over 90% of the rest of the population.
When I said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn, I should have been more precise: English is one of the harder languages for a non-native speaker to learn to use like a native. Since it came from so many different languages, we have large numbers of words that sound alike and look similar but have entirely different lingustic derivations. This gives us any number of spelling and conjugation rules that seem arbitrary (I before E except after C) but reflect the words' origins. Words like 'receive' and 'deceive' come from French, originally, otherwise 'ie' makes the long E sound, as in 'believe' and 'relieve', and 'ei' makes the long A sound in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'. Sort of. In general.
Yes, other languages have a lot of explicit parts of speech and combining rules, but they're, for the most part, regular. The canonical example is Latin, with what - 12 or 15 different formal forms for every tense and case. However, once you memorize the rules, you can pretty much use and write the language. You can't do that with English. Think of English as sort of like Perl, French or Spanish as like Java, and Latin as Ada for a pretty tenuous analogy. To extend it a little too far, think of something like Chinese or Japanese as like Lisp - elegant and descriptive, but requiring you to think in a completely different way.
Anyway, I'm sorry to be so longwinded. I react strongly to this topic because I think it's so important. I apologize if it sounded like I was jumping down your throat. My point is "Your teachers are idiots. Becoming proficient in your native language is important, much like becoming proficient in the language you program in." Or something like that. Good luck.
Well I'm sure glad to see this
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T-Shirt Cannon
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· Score: 3, Funny
This will simplify doing my laundry. Instead of washing my shirts, I can blow them over the fence into my neighbor's yard. Or across the street. At 160' range, I can probably fling them over the freeway. How wide is a freeway?
I wonder if I can use this for my old socks as well? That would be handy.
Nope, the winner does it right, you're a wanker. All the W3C projects are along one side, relevant organization info is along the other. The "A to Z crap" is commonly known as an "index".
The NIH site is uninspiring, dated, and seems to have been designed without expending any visible effort. The narrow-column design wastes space and the graphics are cutesy and unprofessional.
I'm sorry you've gotten so little out of your classses. The reason to learn to speak, read and write your native language correctly is so that you can function in the world around you, hopefully with the respect of those you come in contact with. The old wheeze about how "language is always changing, so whatever I want to say is right if enough people say it" is the lazy man's way out.
Grammar rules exist to give a coherent and consistent framework to a language. They are in the textbook because thay have been codified into "common" and "proper" usage over hundreds of years, with the general agreement of educated and literate speakers. English class is not intended to teach you the current slang, it is intended to teach you the current state of standard English. Language will change, on its own, as long as it is commonly spoken. It will *not* change rapidly, however, except to reflect change - technological and sociological, for instance. New words are added all the time, but the basic rules evolve.
You're a high school student, I assume. It's hard for you to have perspective on this issue. Trust me, when you're older, you will appreciate the ability to be able to express yourself clearly and precisely. Applying for a good job, trying to convince your girlfriend's father why you should marry his daughter, attempting to convince someone of the validity of your point of view, all are much more likely to work out in your favor if you can speak like Tony Blair and not Eminem.
As for 'oxymoron', I suspect your teacher was trying to show that there can be a very real point in the contradiction - "business ethics", for instance, is almost completely theoretical today, which is arguably a major cause of society's problems. Why this should have taken 5 weeks is a mystery.
By the way, I don't mean to be rude, but in your last sentence, I believe you meant "principle" (basic or underlying rule or assumption), and not "principal" (leader, person primarily responsible). English is a very funny language, having evolved from Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, and about every other language on earth. It's supposed to be (one of) the hardest languages to learn.
I have to say, as a prediction, this is not that much of a stretch. Everybody's been saying "everything integrated with the Internet" since 1995 or so. I completely agree; however, I don't think this is what these particular articles are trying to say. I don't think they were talking about data mining per se, where someone constructs huge database queries to try to predict future consumer buying habits. They seem to be refering to managers' ability to look at specific mappings of the state of their companies - inventory on hand, expected sales in the next week, current locations of all assets, etc., so as to try to get a picture of what's going on *right now*.
Obviously, you can't get more than a detail view on a specific thing at once because of the vast amount of data involved. A good example was the one about the airline and one view for the person responsible for in-air snacks versus the different view for the person who makes sure there is just the right amount of fuel at each airport. Imagine if you could generate a (realtime) picture of whatever interrelated information you wanted (inventory at the Delco brake factory and how it affects the production of Chevy Cavaliers in the next 48 hours, for instance) in a clean, clear format. That's what I think this is all about, and I suspect it's what the futurists had in mind all along, but it got lost in all the Brave New World hype pushed out by Wired and the other hustlers.
Data mining, as it refers to trying to predict future customer behavior based on past data, is nothing new and will always be with us, to the extent that it actually works and is cost-effective. Consumer companies have been doing market research for a long, long time and have it pretty much down to a science. Having the ability to look at more detailed information may not add enough of an effect to make it worth the effort and expense of setting up huge data centers just to get that last 2 percent.
As to your last point, about companies selling their own operating systems and web browsers, that's pretty much wishful thinking. There is no business reason I could think of to do this, and every reason not to (vast cost, consumer resistance, dubious benefits).
I'm not confused, it was the person who started this thread...
When I was doing active Windows development - the early/mid 1990's - this stuff didn't come free. It wasn't until Windows95 that Microsoft decided to stuff a bunch of formerly commercial and shareware utilities in with the OS. Even then, if you wanted more than bare bones, you had to buy something.
Even today, you don't get all that much, aside from the basic media stuff. Office covers basic productivity needs, but people still need educational software, interesting and useful utilities, screensavers, and I notice Eudora still sells pretty well, in spite of Outlook Express.
One of these days I'm going to start banging on some OSS code. A side effect of having done commercial consumer software is a heightened awareness of "fit and finish", if you want to call it that. Thanks for the encouragement.
I said: I'm not sure what other platform is left. Apple is just as well known for subsuming applications in with the OS, and you can't make money writing for Linux, so what can you do?
You said: Well, in the tax forms I just filled in, I reported about $120,000 of income last year. All of it was for software development on linux.
I was speaking from the point of view of the desktop software developer writing music/multimedia apps for the home user, which I think you were referring to in your original post (the one I jumped on). There, you can't sell Linux software. It's *very* good to know that one can make good money doing OSS development outside of driver and kernel work. There's hope for me after all...
I'm with you completely re the fears of Big American Corporations. It kind of goes along with the rest of the world's fears of Big American Government. The fears are mostly right - BAC and BAG are about the same thing these days. I personally think things would work much better with a lot more diversity - many small organisms are healthier for an environment than a few very large ones, which tend to choke off everything else (kind of like algae) [Insert other biological and Darwinian metaphors here as necessary].
I'm afraid Microsoft and such are just making the situation worse, not that they'd ever believe (or admit) it. I'm not sure if this will eventually be a good thing or not.
The reason is simple: Their software more and more can not run on Windows unless they license it through Microsoft. The reason is that, if any component of MS Media Player wakes up and runs, their unapproved music programs stop working. Often, they need to be re-installed.
This behavior was documented in some of the earliest reviews of MP several years ago. It has gotten worse, as MP gets better at recognizing unapproved music software. The way to get off the hit list is to license your music software through Microsoft.
(Actually, there probably isn't an explicit "hit list". Rather, there appears to be an "approved list". If a program isn't on the list, it may have a lot of problems getting at some things that are locked by some component of MP. Some details of the MP implementation are hidden inside the binary, of course.)
All right, now that makes your point more clear. You'll understand why I thought you were a little paranoid, reading lines like "your code won't work unless you sign the rights over to Microsoft". Yeah, this is shitty behavior, much like the business with digital cameras and Microsoft's photo manager software pushing third-party stuff out of the way. Of course, Microsoft makes no bones about the fact that it wants to control the digital-media-path-blah for the world, so I'm not at all surprised something like this would happen.
I wonder, though, how much of this is evil intent and how much is just the arrogant "of course our code is going to run things" attitude. It sounds a lot like their usual business of not telling anyone how to write their code so as to avoid this mess unless they either dig really really deep, or "partner" up with Microsoft (typically a dom/dub relationship, and you *know* who's the submissive). My ~10 years of Windows programming experience has convinced me that once Microsoft had decided to have some new bit of technology, if you want to keep your hair and sanity, you had better just accept the fact that you're going to do it their way or else.
I sympathise with your friends' frustration. I haven't done consumer software for a few years, since the Win98 days, so I've been able to ignore a lot of this. I'd hate to have to develop for XP. However, I'm not sure what other platform is left. Apple is just as well known for subsuming applications in with the OS, and you can't make money writing for Linux, so what can you do?
Microsoft has been moving strongly to a "total experience" platform which doesn't allow any software that isn't on their approved list. So if you're a software developer, you are facing a market in which you can only sell to Microsoft, on their terms. If you try selling retail, you'll find that your software constantly breaks, until you sign the rights over to Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but what the *hell* are you talking about? The only thing I can imagine you're talking about is the "approved for Windows NN" logo campaign, which has been around since Windows 95 came out. The logo is completely optional (unless you want to sell your product in Office Depot or wherever it is) and does nothing but show that you comply with and support a bunch of Microsoft's latest pet technology. It does not force you to "sign over the rights" to anything, not even your soul.
Are you really trying to say that Microsoft is trying to control what software you can sell for Windows, and that you need to sell it through them? If you are, you'd better come up with a few shreds of proof.
If your software constantly breaks, then your code is broken and you'd better go fix it. That's about the size of it. Microsoft is a nasty corporation, but they're not stupid. More people developing for Windows means more copies of Windows sold. They like that.
Sheesh. The things that get "+5 Insightful" these days...
You know, you gotta give these guys credit, they give great quote. Their pronouncements are way more fun to listen too than ours. Come on, wouldn't you love to hear Rumsfield say, at a press conference, "We will crush and destroy these criminals like the odious cowards they are. Our glorious war machines will burn the godless heathens in their beds, and in their bunkers, and smite them where they stand. I shall personally remove Saddam's head with my sword and throw it to the mongrel dogs to eat."
Excellent rules. Based on experience *alone*, I agree with all of them. Evidence of more than one is a sign to run screaming back to a nice safe position in tech support.
Here are a few more, about as fatal:
1) Lots and lots of global variables. Any attempt to modify or replace any of them will lead to catastrophic failure. Needless to say, none of this is documented. Anywhere.
2) Functions with more than three or four parameters. Be especially wary of functions that interpret their parameters in different ways, and do several different things, based on the value of a certain parameter. See several of the Windows API routines for good examples.
3) Lots and lots of copy-and-pasted code. Each of the pastings will be identical, with the possible exception of a single variable name.
4) Homebrew schemes to do features that the language provides. Examples: New and exciting implementations of objects, vtables, strings, sorts, etc.
5) printf() or print() (or println()) statements for debug output strewn around everywhere. Double bonus points for having no scheme whatsoever for turning debug mode on or off, other than commenting each statement out.
6) Cutesey variable names. Examples: $Gandalf, int chewbacca, anything named after the programmer's girlfriend.
7) Any function of more than 200 lines.
8) Switch statements with more than 30 or so lines. Often a direct cause of 7).
9) Modules with more than 1000 lines of code. See 7) and 8).
10) All sorts of tight coupling between modules. Want to call foo()? You'd better link in bar, baz, blarf, yadayada, and about 25 others. Need a fred struct? You're gonna need an ethel, lucy, ricky, and littleRicky as well.
11) #include "global.h". Change one thing. Compile for 5 hours. Say no more.
12) Hardcoded stings. Everywhere.
A lot of these are direct consequences of a design that evolved over time, as opposed to having been designed in the first place. This is especially common in projects that started off with the programmers banging out code right after the first project meeting, instead of actually working it out on paper or a whiteboard beforehand.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, most people who are fluent in a language are able to construct a short paragraph without resorting to profanity. Perhaps you might want to take a night class and finish up that GED, you ignorant cocksucker.
Oh -- 'Slashdot' is a proper noun. Those get capitalized in English.
It gets a lot of play because it's a cool piece of software and a lot of people use it. Their licensing model is about the very opposite of Microsoft's: use it for free and look at a small ad (that your eye will not notice after a week), or pay a bit and don't see the ad. I somehow can't see Microsoft adopting this.
No, it's not free. So what? This is a geek news site that discusses things of interest to the community, not a Free Software site. You don't complain when articles about Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights get posted, do you?
As a user of Opera since v.3.something, I'm nothing but impressed by how it's improved. It's a lot better at getting to most sites, especially if you tell it to pretend to be IE in the agent string. I don't do online banking, so I can't say how well it works everywhere. I sometimes have to use IE on a page it doesn't like, but it's damn rare.
HAHA I remember the oh so vital dos boot disk, trying to squeeze everything into upper memory so you could get that ~612K free. Tweaking EMM386.EXE, HIMEM.SYS and MSCDEX which was the bane of my existence. Those were the days, the days that I didn't mind a Microsoft operating system.
Well that's the problem, son! You should have been using QEMM. EMM386 was total shit. LOADHI was nice, though. It was great when DOS 5 came along and you could load much of COMMAND.COM into high memory as well.
I remember working on a DOS app that needed a CD, mouse, 640x480x256 graphics, a 1 meg chunk of EMS, *and* about 600K of conventional memory. I was very very proud of being able to load MSCDEX, mouse driver, Netware drivers and the VESA driver and STILL have something like 620 meg free. Lord forbid I should have to change a single bit of configuration, though. That was another hour of hair-pulling frustration. (No, this product did NOT sell very well. Management never understood why.)
Those were the days, when programmers were MEN. Beat that box into submission!!
I'd go out and buy one in a hot minute (just as soon as I got a job). That's the only thing keeping me from having a Mac as my main machine (that and the lack of a job). For years, I've envied the way stuff on the Mac just works, but I could never bring myself to actually use one unless I had to (although I tried a number of times). I could never deal with the, um, idiosyncracies of the thing, like the way the keyboard was never really supported, and how Home and End always did the absolute wrong thing. So, I was undersandably excited when I heard about the new interface, it coming from the Next and all.
Imagine my dismay when I saw the first pictures of OSX. Ouch. If I just could have OSX with the OS9 interface, that would be great. The dock is really nice, though.
I understand Steve Jobs' reasons for not wanting to let people change the way it looks (less tech support, a desire to keep a specific Macintosh brand image, personal pride), but I don't agree with them. Just say that you won't support anything that's not factory stock, and let me do what I want with my computer.
No, you're thinking of I.P. Frehley, the brother of the guitarist from Kiss. Interesting thing - he's a network tech with a bladder control problem. Funny old world, isn't it?
Conversely, anyone here feel like they're BEING TREATED unprofessionally? The article makes it look like SCO has jumped to the conclusion that it's Linux fans doing the attack. If that is true, then SCO is acting unprofessionally themselves. How many fingers are they pointing at us?
Well, just who the hell do you think it is doing it? IBM? It's the same people who always do this shit - stupid kids that think they're making some kind of political statement by breaking stuff. This time, instead of saying "you can't stop us from trading music", it's "how dare you try to fuck with Linux you assholes!!" Yeah. Really mature.
Getting your buddies together and pointing all your zombied machines at someone's IP address and going "bang" does NOT constitute legitimate protest. Even if you don't care about SCO, this is screwing their ISP bigtime - they're knocking out 90% of their bandwidth, for crissake. All it does is reinforce every negative stereotype of Linux/Open Source/GPL people held by the rest of the world.
Even better would be to put the player in the AK itself and have the magazines be replacable hard drives or memory sticks. That way I can change musical styles in a *really* cool way, which is the entire point, right?
And wouldn't it be cool to carry my MP3 player slung over my back when I go to class or the airport? Imagine: extra battery packs and nice speakers built into the stock and barrel -- instant party device when I come by! Hell, put a microphone in the barrel for really easy recording of concerts, teachers, or just plain people outside the car.
What a great idea - it can't miss. I'm going out to the shop with my soldering rig right now!
"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"
Dave, I've been meaning to talk to you. I don't think you are pleasing her as much as you could. If you would increase your penis size, Dave, I believe this girl would like to meet you. Here is a video...
Perhaps the 'enlargement' process actually makes you sterile. That would help the problem.
As I understand it, the problem comes where you have several computers, all generating their own sequence numbers. Especially if you have a mix of OSes, it will be obvious that there are multiple connections with diferent sequences. I'm not familiar with BSD's sequence rewriting (note to self: review ipfilter documentation) or ippersonality, but it sounds as if this problem is solved (for now).
Of course, if they want to take a closer look at what you're doing for a while, they can find out a lot. If they see Mac Updater, XP updater, and lots of FTPs to Debian packages, they'll have a pretty good idea that there's more than one machine out there. All I'd think they'd have to do is look at (HTTP? What do those update apps use?) connections to a fixed set of addresses. I don't even think that would concern their lawyers about privacy concerns.
In a way, if you're going through such effort, you're probably helping them out somehow by wrangling your own network into some resemblance of order.
Yeah, the gene pool of people with a clue will improve as all the ones who can't figure it out get busted by their ISPs. Eventually, only people who can secure a network will have DSL, and maybe the number of worms will decrease a little.
Yes, but the article just says "they can tell", it doesn't say anything about a proposed law. Calm down, there's nothing to get paranoid about. Yet.
Just about every federal or military network utilizes NAT or has a VPN on it or allowing remote access to it. Laws of this nature will not pass if intelligent people object to them intelligently.
What laws? I don't think anyone has proposed an anti-NAT law yet. I seriously doubt that the federal government's ISP would get too tweaked about a few extra boxes behind the State Deparement's firewall. I bet it's not even against their TOS...
(The rest of us, yeah, we gotta worry)
Everybody here is saying "just fix the NAT code to not decrement the TTL and we're cool", but it's not that easy. At the end of the article (you did read the article, right?) it refers to an AT&T research paper (PDF) on counting the number of hosts behind a NAT box. This is done by looking at packet sequence numbers, using the fact that each host generates its own sequence. This chart shows what happens. If you see one set of packets starting at 20,000 and another at 50,000, all overlapping in time, it's a good bet there are two hosts. It also points out that the default high port numbers NAT uses are another good clue to the presence of NAT.
Port numbers are easy to change, but if your ISP wants to do traffic analysis on your IP address, there's not a lot you can do to hide. I'm just very, very glad that I have an ISP that doesn't suck. In fact, they're pretty damn cool.
I'm sorry your teachers are so awful. It's depressing to be reminded of how easily a mediocre instructor can destroy someone's interest in learning by pounding stupid details into their head. It's good to see that she's taking the time to cover subtle distinctions like 'oxymoron' vs. 'verbal irony', but they shouldn't be more than a tangent to the main point. I suppose she's trying to be engaged, but more than a day of this is a waste of class time.
Unless the textbook publishers are hopelessly incompetent, the rules of (American) English that they give you are going to be pretty much the same from book to book. One reason they might not be is if they wanted to avoid some of the more complicated special cases (like indefinite pronouns, for instance) until a more advanced level. Unfortunately, random teacher Y may not be good at unteaching this heuristic. Then again, there *is* a lot to learn. You either have an ear for it or you do a lot of memorization.
Basically, if you want to do this right, you're going to have to teach yourself. There's nothing you need to know that you can't get from either Strunk & White or "The Associated Press Style Guide". Get these two (small) books, read a newspaper regularly (start with The New York Times), and listen to something like NPR or PBS (regardless of whether you agree with them, you have to hear the language spoken to get a feel for it). Check your spelling *in context* - if you're at all unsure about a word, look it up. Don't worry too much about what your teacher demands. In a few years, she won't matter at all. But if you can write a paragraph that validates against S&W or AP, you will have the respect of everyone you communicate with. Remember that spoken language is not written language and has less formal rules, and know when to use each, and you'll have the advantage over 90% of the rest of the population.
When I said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn, I should have been more precise: English is one of the harder languages for a non-native speaker to learn to use like a native. Since it came from so many different languages, we have large numbers of words that sound alike and look similar but have entirely different lingustic derivations. This gives us any number of spelling and conjugation rules that seem arbitrary (I before E except after C) but reflect the words' origins. Words like 'receive' and 'deceive' come from French, originally, otherwise 'ie' makes the long E sound, as in 'believe' and 'relieve', and 'ei' makes the long A sound in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'. Sort of. In general.
Yes, other languages have a lot of explicit parts of speech and combining rules, but they're, for the most part, regular. The canonical example is Latin, with what - 12 or 15 different formal forms for every tense and case. However, once you memorize the rules, you can pretty much use and write the language. You can't do that with English. Think of English as sort of like Perl, French or Spanish as like Java, and Latin as Ada for a pretty tenuous analogy. To extend it a little too far, think of something like Chinese or Japanese as like Lisp - elegant and descriptive, but requiring you to think in a completely different way.
Anyway, I'm sorry to be so longwinded. I react strongly to this topic because I think it's so important. I apologize if it sounded like I was jumping down your throat. My point is "Your teachers are idiots. Becoming proficient in your native language is important, much like becoming proficient in the language you program in." Or something like that. Good luck.
This will simplify doing my laundry. Instead of washing my shirts, I can blow them over the fence into my neighbor's yard. Or across the street. At 160' range, I can probably fling them over the freeway. How wide is a freeway?
I wonder if I can use this for my old socks as well? That would be handy.
Nope, the winner does it right, you're a wanker. All the W3C projects are along one side, relevant organization info is along the other. The "A to Z crap" is commonly known as an "index".
The NIH site is uninspiring, dated, and seems to have been designed without expending any visible effort. The narrow-column design wastes space and the graphics are cutesy and unprofessional.
I'm sorry you've gotten so little out of your classses. The reason to learn to speak, read and write your native language correctly is so that you can function in the world around you, hopefully with the respect of those you come in contact with. The old wheeze about how "language is always changing, so whatever I want to say is right if enough people say it" is the lazy man's way out.
Grammar rules exist to give a coherent and consistent framework to a language. They are in the textbook because thay have been codified into "common" and "proper" usage over hundreds of years, with the general agreement of educated and literate speakers. English class is not intended to teach you the current slang, it is intended to teach you the current state of standard English. Language will change, on its own, as long as it is commonly spoken. It will *not* change rapidly, however, except to reflect change - technological and sociological, for instance. New words are added all the time, but the basic rules evolve.
You're a high school student, I assume. It's hard for you to have perspective on this issue. Trust me, when you're older, you will appreciate the ability to be able to express yourself clearly and precisely. Applying for a good job, trying to convince your girlfriend's father why you should marry his daughter, attempting to convince someone of the validity of your point of view, all are much more likely to work out in your favor if you can speak like Tony Blair and not Eminem.
As for 'oxymoron', I suspect your teacher was trying to show that there can be a very real point in the contradiction - "business ethics", for instance, is almost completely theoretical today, which is arguably a major cause of society's problems. Why this should have taken 5 weeks is a mystery.
By the way, I don't mean to be rude, but in your last sentence, I believe you meant "principle" (basic or underlying rule or assumption), and not "principal" (leader, person primarily responsible). English is a very funny language, having evolved from Latin, Greek, French, German, Arabic, and about every other language on earth. It's supposed to be (one of) the hardest languages to learn.
I have to say, as a prediction, this is not that much of a stretch. Everybody's been saying "everything integrated with the Internet" since 1995 or so. I completely agree; however, I don't think this is what these particular articles are trying to say. I don't think they were talking about data mining per se, where someone constructs huge database queries to try to predict future consumer buying habits. They seem to be refering to managers' ability to look at specific mappings of the state of their companies - inventory on hand, expected sales in the next week, current locations of all assets, etc., so as to try to get a picture of what's going on *right now*.
Obviously, you can't get more than a detail view on a specific thing at once because of the vast amount of data involved. A good example was the one about the airline and one view for the person responsible for in-air snacks versus the different view for the person who makes sure there is just the right amount of fuel at each airport. Imagine if you could generate a (realtime) picture of whatever interrelated information you wanted (inventory at the Delco brake factory and how it affects the production of Chevy Cavaliers in the next 48 hours, for instance) in a clean, clear format. That's what I think this is all about, and I suspect it's what the futurists had in mind all along, but it got lost in all the Brave New World hype pushed out by Wired and the other hustlers.
Data mining, as it refers to trying to predict future customer behavior based on past data, is nothing new and will always be with us, to the extent that it actually works and is cost-effective. Consumer companies have been doing market research for a long, long time and have it pretty much down to a science. Having the ability to look at more detailed information may not add enough of an effect to make it worth the effort and expense of setting up huge data centers just to get that last 2 percent.
As to your last point, about companies selling their own operating systems and web browsers, that's pretty much wishful thinking. There is no business reason I could think of to do this, and every reason not to (vast cost, consumer resistance, dubious benefits).
I'm not confused, it was the person who started this thread...
When I was doing active Windows development - the early/mid 1990's - this stuff didn't come free. It wasn't until Windows95 that Microsoft decided to stuff a bunch of formerly commercial and shareware utilities in with the OS. Even then, if you wanted more than bare bones, you had to buy something.
Even today, you don't get all that much, aside from the basic media stuff. Office covers basic productivity needs, but people still need educational software, interesting and useful utilities, screensavers, and I notice Eudora still sells pretty well, in spite of Outlook Express.
One of these days I'm going to start banging on some OSS code. A side effect of having done commercial consumer software is a heightened awareness of "fit and finish", if you want to call it that. Thanks for the encouragement.
I said:
I'm not sure what other platform is left. Apple is just as well known for subsuming applications in with the OS, and you can't make money writing for Linux, so what can you do?
You said:
Well, in the tax forms I just filled in, I reported about $120,000 of income last year. All of it was for software development on linux.
I was speaking from the point of view of the desktop software developer writing music/multimedia apps for the home user, which I think you were referring to in your original post (the one I jumped on). There, you can't sell Linux software. It's *very* good to know that one can make good money doing OSS development outside of driver and kernel work. There's hope for me after all...
I'm with you completely re the fears of Big American Corporations. It kind of goes along with the rest of the world's fears of Big American Government. The fears are mostly right - BAC and BAG are about the same thing these days. I personally think things would work much better with a lot more diversity - many small organisms are healthier for an environment than a few very large ones, which tend to choke off everything else (kind of like algae) [Insert other biological and Darwinian metaphors here as necessary].
I'm afraid Microsoft and such are just making the situation worse, not that they'd ever believe (or admit) it. I'm not sure if this will eventually be a good thing or not.
The reason is simple: Their software more and more can not run on Windows unless they license it through Microsoft. The reason is that, if any component of MS Media Player wakes up and runs, their unapproved music programs stop working. Often, they need to be re-installed.
This behavior was documented in some of the earliest reviews of MP several years ago. It has gotten worse, as MP gets better at recognizing unapproved music software. The way to get off the hit list is to license your music software through Microsoft.
(Actually, there probably isn't an explicit "hit list". Rather, there appears to be an "approved list". If a program isn't on the list, it may have a lot of problems getting at some things that are locked by some component of MP. Some details of the MP implementation are hidden inside the binary, of course.)
All right, now that makes your point more clear. You'll understand why I thought you were a little paranoid, reading lines like "your code won't work unless you sign the rights over to Microsoft". Yeah, this is shitty behavior, much like the business with digital cameras and Microsoft's photo manager software pushing third-party stuff out of the way. Of course, Microsoft makes no bones about the fact that it wants to control the digital-media-path-blah for the world, so I'm not at all surprised something like this would happen.
I wonder, though, how much of this is evil intent and how much is just the arrogant "of course our code is going to run things" attitude. It sounds a lot like their usual business of not telling anyone how to write their code so as to avoid this mess unless they either dig really really deep, or "partner" up with Microsoft (typically a dom/dub relationship, and you *know* who's the submissive). My ~10 years of Windows programming experience has convinced me that once Microsoft had decided to have some new bit of technology, if you want to keep your hair and sanity, you had better just accept the fact that you're going to do it their way or else.
I sympathise with your friends' frustration. I haven't done consumer software for a few years, since the Win98 days, so I've been able to ignore a lot of this. I'd hate to have to develop for XP. However, I'm not sure what other platform is left. Apple is just as well known for subsuming applications in with the OS, and you can't make money writing for Linux, so what can you do?
Are you the "BSD is dying" guy?
Microsoft has been moving strongly to a "total experience" platform which doesn't allow any software that isn't on their approved list. So if you're a software developer, you are facing a market in which you can only sell to Microsoft, on their terms. If you try selling retail, you'll find that your software constantly breaks, until you sign the rights over to Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but what the *hell* are you talking about? The only thing I can imagine you're talking about is the "approved for Windows NN" logo campaign, which has been around since Windows 95 came out. The logo is completely optional (unless you want to sell your product in Office Depot or wherever it is) and does nothing but show that you comply with and support a bunch of Microsoft's latest pet technology. It does not force you to "sign over the rights" to anything, not even your soul.
Are you really trying to say that Microsoft is trying to control what software you can sell for Windows, and that you need to sell it through them? If you are, you'd better come up with a few shreds of proof.
If your software constantly breaks, then your code is broken and you'd better go fix it. That's about the size of it. Microsoft is a nasty corporation, but they're not stupid. More people developing for Windows means more copies of Windows sold. They like that.
Sheesh. The things that get "+5 Insightful" these days...
You know, you gotta give these guys credit, they give great quote. Their pronouncements are way more fun to listen too than ours. Come on, wouldn't you love to hear Rumsfield say, at a press conference, "We will crush and destroy these criminals like the odious cowards they are. Our glorious war machines will burn the godless heathens in their beds, and in their bunkers, and smite them where they stand. I shall personally remove Saddam's head with my sword and throw it to the mongrel dogs to eat."
Hell, I'd watch Fox News to see that.
Excellent rules. Based on experience *alone*, I agree with all of them. Evidence of more than one is a sign to run screaming back to a nice safe position in tech support.
Here are a few more, about as fatal:
1) Lots and lots of global variables. Any attempt to modify or replace any of them will lead to catastrophic failure. Needless to say, none of this is documented. Anywhere.
2) Functions with more than three or four parameters. Be especially wary of functions that interpret their parameters in different ways, and do several different things, based on the value of a certain parameter. See several of the Windows API routines for good examples.
3) Lots and lots of copy-and-pasted code. Each of the pastings will be identical, with the possible exception of a single variable name.
4) Homebrew schemes to do features that the language provides. Examples: New and exciting implementations of objects, vtables, strings, sorts, etc.
5) printf() or print() (or println()) statements for debug output strewn around everywhere. Double bonus points for having no scheme whatsoever for turning debug mode on or off, other than commenting each statement out.
6) Cutesey variable names. Examples: $Gandalf, int chewbacca, anything named after the programmer's girlfriend.
7) Any function of more than 200 lines.
8) Switch statements with more than 30 or so lines. Often a direct cause of 7).
9) Modules with more than 1000 lines of code. See 7) and 8).
10) All sorts of tight coupling between modules. Want to call foo()? You'd better link in bar, baz, blarf, yadayada, and about 25 others. Need a fred struct? You're gonna need an ethel, lucy, ricky, and littleRicky as well.
11) #include "global.h". Change one thing. Compile for 5 hours. Say no more.
12) Hardcoded stings. Everywhere.
A lot of these are direct consequences of a design that evolved over time, as opposed to having been designed in the first place. This is especially common in projects that started off with the programmers banging out code right after the first project meeting, instead of actually working it out on paper or a whiteboard beforehand.