"Checksums are generated for each HTML-bound section of that Web page and for the user-defined selection of text, and are then archived. When there is change in the text, the new and archived checksums are compared"
I don't fully understand this - it sounds like you are storing a checksum locally of an existing page, then comparing it to a checksum of a newer version of the page to see if is has changed. But in order to generate a checksum of the newer version, surely you have to *download* the newer version to generate the checksum in the first place? But if you've already downloaded it, whats the point of comparing checksums? Why not just use the latest version that you just downloaded? "Download current version, compare checksum, if checksum mismatch then, uhm.. uh.. download new version"?
Unless web servers already send CRCs of web pages in the headers.. that way you could just download the headers, but AFAIK they do not.
I guess there must be something really basic that I'm not seeing here.
Companies that take out patents like these aren't bothered with the masses, they go after the easy targets - large corporations - and generally the pricing is put at around the point where it becomes easier for the large corporation to just pay up than to fight back. This "business model" has worked quite well for others, e.g. Unisys. Or British Telekom with the "hyperlink" patent (although in that case it isn't their primary business model, just an extra source of revenue). By and large the masses ignore the.gif patent and the "hyperlink" patent. The companies who hold these patents usually can't be bothered, because they aren't going to make money suing every individual in sight who creates a hyperlink. And they certainly aren't going to sue individuals "on the principle of it", they couldn't be bothered about the principles.
So the money lies basically in "licensing" (sic) your patented "original" "technology" to corporations who can afford it easily enough.
Generally then this isn't so bad for the masses, as the masses may still continue to (for example) create hyperlinks (oh gracious thanks to BT).. it is only bad in that the costs of licensing patented technologies is usually passed on to the end user in one way or another (e.g. Adobe Photoshop will be ever so slightly more expensive since Adobe will be paying Unisys to allow them to include the.gif exporter).
In all likelihood, they almost certainly know this, and are probably just hoping that they are offered a (relatively) fat settlement rather than go to trial. I'm guessing thats why they are so loudly vocalising the completely ludicrous sum of "$5 billion" - to bargain down to a 'more realistic' settlement sum of perhaps a couple hundred mil. IANAL, but I would guess that they're actually *hoping* for as much as one or two hundred million, and that they're hoping that waving around these huge numbers provides incentment for a settlement offer in this region.
IANAL, so I could be talking complete crap, but considering your arguments, and that these lawyers aren't stupid, its all I can think of that makes much sense.
One can't help but notice the overwhelming bias against Intel and towards AMD on slashdot, to the point of zealousness (i.e. only noting the benchmarks where AMD is ahead but pretending not to see the benchmarks where Intel is ahead). These are both just huge corporations that only care about their bottom line --- what makes AMD a "good" company but Intel a "bad" company? I guess consumer branding and geurilla marketing really do work; AMD have succeeded at convincing their market that they are "cool" just as surely as Nike has convinced all the "cool" kids that brandishing the "Nike swoosh" is "cool". Think you're immune to corporate branding?
What amazes me is how incredibly short-sighted everyone here is. Can nobody here think long term, or even medium term? P4 at current marketed clock rates don't perform that great, but that was never really the intention - shrinking the die is going to make the P4 scale seriously well with high clock speeds, and we'll watch AMD struggling to keep up. Sure, a P4 at the same clock performs more poorly - but Intel will have much higher clock rates in the same price range, and ultimately, equivalent and/or better performance, particularly over the next 1 to 3 years, as Intel puts out CPUs with humongous clock rates. Intel isn't slashing their prices "in response to AMD", these price cuts are part of a longer term plan.
Yes, Intel's prices *would* be higher if AMD wasn't around, *much* higher, you can be sure of that, so having AMD around is a good thing --- but Intel isn't on any long-term downward slope here by any means. And yes, I know Intel is deliberately attempting to take advantage of the fact that the "general populace" buys based on clock speed (they know that the "general populace" will choose the 2000 MHz Intel over the 1500 MHz AMD in the same price range, even if the performance is about the same). But none of this implies that AMD is any nobler than Intel.
Of course this post will probably be modded down, as its just not "cool" to not be pro-AMD. Its not "cool" to not be pro-Nike, pro-Diesel, pro-Any-mainstream-brand. But thats different, right?
Re:umm... yeah. Take responsibility, hemos.
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I think you're wrong. I think a good teacher/lecturer can really make a subject, and a really bad one can break it.
I've had some pretty lousy CS lecturers (like you), but I don't hate CS. But the reason for this is that I already like programming and CompSci in general, and I'm guessing you did too. I liked it before studying it, and still like it afterwards.
But this is obviously not going to be the case for every single subject. Take a subject like Combinatorics (2nd and 3rd year level) - I didn't already like the subject. In fact I knew essentially nothing about it when I first took it. But I ended up actually somewhat liking it, simply because we had a good lecturer, who enjoyed his subject, and knew how to make it interesting.
The majority of students know extremely little about the subjects they're going to do at University - the experiences they have will very often be the introductions that these people will have to a subject. To try claim that the quality of the lecturing is not going to have an outcome on a students opinion of a subject is ridiculous - how can it not? The process of teaching is a dynamic two-way thing between student and teacher. A teacher who enjoys a subject can often show you the side of a subject that really is enjoyable. A teacher who doesn't, can't. You can't expect students to "magically" just pick up what is interesting and potentially enjoyable about subjects they know little or nothing about. In fact its basically by definition that students know little or nothing about a subject when they start out, otherwise it would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
I already knew I liked programming before I went to study at University. So a lousy lecturer wasn't going to change that. But many of my subjects I had no existing opinions about. Obviosly you can't possibly *really like* every single subject - but if I think back to Univ, virtually every subject has aspects to it that would be at least interesting.
You *might* be right about Hemos, it could well be that he just hated Geometry and finds it easier to blame the teacher. Many students do this. But to generalise this so far as to say that this is always the case, and that the teacher cannot make a difference, is flat out wrong.
Re:Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
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The New Flatland
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I found myself anticipating, for the whole time I was reading your post, the part where you would claim that this "proves" that all science must be rubbish, that "science is just another religion", and that it also somehow therefore "proves" creationism without a doubt. Did you forget to include that part or something? Your post honestly sounds like something ripped straight out of talk.origins. Sheesh, what a load of tripe.
Hehe .. "redundant" moderation [OT (OffTopic)]
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The New Flatland
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I see three posts about Sphereland were posted within a minute of each other (10:23, 10:23, 10:24).. obviously couldn't have been avoided..:) Too bad, just plain bad luck.
A "decent managed switch" isn't usually a cheap switch anymore, thus nullifying the original point, "use cheap switches". I'd rather have a cheap switch than a hub, anyday.
The "OT" I put in the title stands for "off-topic". Its a pretty standard spoiler, so that people can see from the subject line that the post is OT, and don't have to waste their time reading OT posts if they don't want to. So I realise its OT, and don't mind if it gets modded down as such.
If you read the article and you make it all the way to the fourth paragraph, you'll find this:
"It is still early in the development of this new generation of optical fibers. Even the most advanced of the new materials remain several years from widespread commercial use."
How did that get a "redundant"? I can't see any other posts explaining to newbies what "WIMP" stands for.
Re:Wow! UDDI! It all comes down to OOP and it suck
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I'm not sure if this is your sig or not, but attempting to shame someone (calling me computer illiterate) is much more trollish than me saying "The OOP is for shitidiots. Here's why
It's not my sig, and I apologize for apparently incorrectly perceiving you to be technically illiterate, but you came across as sounding as such in your post. You sounded like one of those people who've overheard clued-up people complaining about some software/technology, and then they also want to sound clued up, so they try repeat to others what the clued-up person said. It was either that, or you did know what you were talking about, but were deliberately I see where you're coming from now.
You're right, if you cut through the hype, there isn't much left. I try not to waste my time reading / listening to hype. Good design is difficult and time-consuming, no matter what paradigm (or paradigms) you choose; a lot of people do seem to get swept up in some rabid zealous mindset, believing steadfastly in some catchy stupid "rule" such as "everything must be a class", as if abiding by a few one-liners is some sort of magic bullet to producing good system design. I guess that could be perceived as a problem with OOP, but it's more a problem of rabid followers. I like the principles that "OO" encompasses, and I like working in C++, but I'm well aware that there is no 'magic bullet' in design. I won't strictly use OOP for something if it doesn't need to be. I do get a bit annoyed when media articles say crap like "OOP will finally make the goal of reusable components attainable". Thats pure BS. I don't believe that OO has done very much at all to increase the amount of code reuse in the industry. A good reusable C++ class library is no better at being reusable than a good C function library. Some people just seem to want to make every single thing they see an ActiveX control.
Thanks for a decent reply. Most people would probably just have "gone on the defense" and attacked back (probably myself included). I'm humbled:)
Now take your brainwashed twisted propaganda and FO, there's the door.
Re:Wow! UDDI! It all comes down to OOP and it suck
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If you operate on the principle that OOP sucks (ie, is for shitheads), then every structure built on top of it is also going to suck by definition, not including it's own inherent suck properties
Get a clue. "OOP" is merely a term describing a collective of design principles which include, mainly, modularity (encapsulation), inheritance and "generic programming". It is merely a small set of design principles which actually make sense, all of which (with the exception of polymorphism) were already in widespread use before the term "OOP" came into existence, and none were ever disputed as being good ideas until they fell under the umbrella term "OOP". An "OO language" is merely a language that provides some syntactic constructs for ideas such as encapsulation and inheritance, but this is merely as a convenience to programmers doing good design already (one of the best examples is the "gtk+" toolkit, object oriented, but implemented in C rather than C++, so it's packed with ugly, hacky typecast macros and a crude inheritance structure whereby a "derived" struct includes an instance of the "parent" struct as its first member. Urgh).
But at the same time, it could hurt if it's interfaces are poorly developed (see Win32 API for an example).
Get a clue. The Win32 API is not OO. The term "spaghetti" comes to mind.
Why do people with almost no knowledge about something insist on making the loudest noise about it? Seriously, I suggest you go learn more about what OOP really is before you go making a bigger fool of yourself. It seems to me all you've read is a few mainstream-media articles from the 80's which over-hyped "OOP" as some "revolutionary technology" that was going to change the world. Please. What self-respecting computer scientist can't see through media hype? You probably haven't noticed, but mainstream media overhypes EVERYTHING as a "revolutionary technology that is going to change the world". Thats how they sell their crap.
Yeah I know I'm feeding the trolls. I just couldn't help myself, so this troll scores a "decent" 8/10 on my personal troll-o-meter.
if you used IE you could read a pdf in the browser without necessarily downloading it
Thats one helluva impressive feature! Gosh, I wonder how they did it? I mean, how would the Acrobat plugin know what to actually display on the screen without downloading the file first? Also, is it faster than a normal download? Would be really cool if I could listen to mp3's without having to download 'em first, it takes so damn long on my 33.6 modem. Perhaps if I used IE I could do that.
OK OK.. I know what you meant, I'm just fooling around. It doesn't really make much sense the way you put it. The browser *has* to download the file. Anything else would be black magic.
"Isn't there some corollary to Moore's law that states "No matter how fast the hardware is there are millions of software developers working to bring that hardware to its knees"
Haven't heard it phrased like that, but the one I heard was "Gate's Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months".
I'm wary of anyone who puts forth an argument using these words. They are most commonly just a cheap way of trying to give one's statement(s) extra "weight" in an argument, without having to worry about the hassles of actually backing up your arguments with references. It also has the additional benefit of discouraging people from disagreeing, since the fact is obviously so "well known", then if you don't happen to agree with it, you must be in a small minority and are probably wrong, so you keep quiet so as not to sound stupid.
I can't say I've ever read a scientific research paper that began with "it's a well known fact".
Related variations of this are "it's a little known fact..", "experts say..", and of course the real marketing derivative, "scientists tell us..".
The sad thing is that these things work on most people. I wish they'd teach all these cheap tricks in school. Perhaps the public would spot these things then, and be harder to fool. Then again, most sheeple probably prefer having their opinions handed to them on a platter, rather than having to form opinions themselves.
Sorry.. this isn't a response to your post at all, just a general OT rambling..
The problem here is that even if you had, say, only MP3's of CDs they already actually owned (I know its unlikely but entirely possible), those police raiding the place are not going to give a shit, they're going to arrest you anyway. It is highly unlikely that you're going to be able to convince them by saying "but look, these MP3's here, they're from the CDs sitting on my shelf there". Their policy would probably be more along the lines of "arrest first, ask questions later". I doubt they'd even bother to try check if what you were saying was true. This might seem relatively benign in the context of mp3's, given that the majority of mp3's are probably illegal, but the underlying principle that you're "forgiving" here is an incredibly dangerous concept - the idea that you can be arrested and held simply for having an mp3 on your computer, whether it is a legal mp3 or not. Checking if an MP3 is legal is not necessarily easy, since there are a variety of cases where an MP3 might be legal. It could be a recording of a friend of yours who has a band. It could be material that is no longer copyrighted, or never was. It could be music that can be downloaded for free from a musician's website (http://www.holemusic.com/audio/index.html) or from sites like http://www.mp3.com/. It might not be music, it may be comedy MP3's. How thorough do you expect the authorities will be in checking? If we begin to give this sort of power to the authorities, we're all going to be in deep shit. Go see "in the name of the father" for a good true story on what happens when you start giving authorities too much power.
There is nothing wrong, as you say, with merely trying to prevent theft. Thats not the problem here though. Sure, the authorities should have some means of preventing this sort of theft - but indiscriminate raids backed by a witch-hunt mentality and combined with media propaganda is not it. How much faith do you have in the technical abilities and knowledge of your local police?
Drivers, the eternal OS acceptance problem. Whatever happened to Intel's Universal Driver architecture stuff?
The OpenSource community always bitches and moans about vendors creating proprietary standards. So why hasn't the community produced a serious cross-platform universal driver interface? Sure, it would be a lot of work, and take a lot of thought and design, but imagine the benefits; hardware developers could write their drivers once, and the device could work (with little or not porting efforts) on Windows, BeOS, MacOS, Linux, BSD etc. If the OSS community fails to produce open standards to begin with, what right do they have to complain about proprietary driver standards? Why should it be n times the amount of work for a hardware vendor to support n Operating Systems? Not sure how possible this is, but if it was possible to create a single set of open driver standards for various types of hardware, then write some wrappers from this layer to the Windows driver layer, it could well be possible for a company to use such a standard and get Windows drivers with no extra troubles.
I haven't written many hardware drivers myself, so I probably don't have a very good idea just how difficult it would be to do this. I imagine it would be very difficult, but would be very powerful and useful too.
Microsoft provides Windows Media Services, free with purchase of Windows 2000
Uh - explain this one to me - you purchase Windows 2000, but Windows Media Services that comes with it are "free"? If its part of a product that you purchase, doesn't it, uh, you know, cost money then? If you buy Win2K are some parts of it free while you pay for the others? Which parts are "free"? Which parts do you pay for? How ridiculous. It's like saying, I purchased a car, but I got the steering wheel and the distributor for free.
By and large, "real world" law enforcement is effective, even if you want it not to be to support an argument about law enforcement on the Internet. Sure nobody cares much about the odd bit of speeding, but by and large it is really not easy to get away with serious crimes like rape and murder. The unabomber was caught, Timothy McVeigh was caught, most serial killers are caught (even if it takes some time). I don't know what the statistics are, but it really isn't that easy to get away with such crimes. I remember reading somewhere that there are something like over 30 common oversights made by murderers that police can look for when investigating a murder to find the murderer. Personally, how do you rate your chances of robbing a bank and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of murdering someone and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of breaking into someones house and stealing a whole bunch of stuff and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of stealing a car and getting away with it? These are all fairly "common" crimes. Do you believe that you have anywhere near as good a chance of getting away with these as you have of getting away with speeding? If you *really* believe that the real world is too big to effectively police, I challenge you to commit one of each of the abovementioned crimes. Think you can get away with it? I doubt it.
Above and beyond that, my whole point was that it is far far easier to police the Internet than it is to police real life. So even if "real world" policing is "only" something like 30% effective, Internet policing can easily be 70% effective or more. Say what you like about anonymous remailers and anonymous ISP services; the fact is, it is damn near impossible to really do anything anonymously on the Internet. And this is *now*, when the technologies are all still "new" and "raw", and law enforcement agencies have only really begun to learn about them, install snooping devices etc (e.g. Carnivore). I don't know about the states, but I live in a developing country (South Africa), and even here it is essentially impossible to log on to the internet "anonymously" - none of the ISPs offer the ability to connect "anonymously" to begin with (the way AOL does in the states with the AOL cd's), you *have to* first sign a contract with your full banking details, credit card number etc. And even if you do use someone else's account, or you forge your details, its still easy enough for the police to find out where you dialled in from. Basically, you've got one fat chance in hell of getting away with breaking the law on the Net (e.g. posting child porn or whatever). Your best (and only) shot at anonymity is to be an experienced hacker, who can either dead-end the "paper-trail" (logs, wiping logs) or leave a long enough "paper-trail" to make it too difficult to get caught.
The police don't enforce simple traffic laws because its not a high enough priority and their resources are limited, yes. But the Internet is much cheaper and easier to monitor than the roads are. Once the capability of fully monitoring the internet is in place, it will be as easy to detect "petty crimes" as it will be to detect serious crimes.
Slashdot Mirror
"Checksums are generated for each HTML-bound section of that Web page and for the user-defined selection of text, and are then archived. When there is change in the text, the new and archived checksums are compared"
I don't fully understand this - it sounds like you are storing a checksum locally of an existing page, then comparing it to a checksum of a newer version of the page to see if is has changed. But in order to generate a checksum of the newer version, surely you have to *download* the newer version to generate the checksum in the first place? But if you've already downloaded it, whats the point of comparing checksums? Why not just use the latest version that you just downloaded? "Download current version, compare checksum, if checksum mismatch then, uhm .. uh .. download new version"?
Unless web servers already send CRCs of web pages in the headers .. that way you could just download the headers, but AFAIK they do not.
I guess there must be something really basic that I'm not seeing here.
Companies that take out patents like these aren't bothered with the masses, they go after the easy targets - large corporations - and generally the pricing is put at around the point where it becomes easier for the large corporation to just pay up than to fight back. This "business model" has worked quite well for others, e.g. Unisys. Or British Telekom with the "hyperlink" patent (although in that case it isn't their primary business model, just an extra source of revenue). By and large the masses ignore the .gif patent and the "hyperlink" patent. The companies who hold these patents usually can't be bothered, because they aren't going to make money suing every individual in sight who creates a hyperlink. And they certainly aren't going to sue individuals "on the principle of it", they couldn't be bothered about the principles.
So the money lies basically in "licensing" (sic) your patented "original" "technology" to corporations who can afford it easily enough.
Generally then this isn't so bad for the masses, as the masses may still continue to (for example) create hyperlinks (oh gracious thanks to BT) .. it is only bad in that the costs of licensing patented technologies is usually passed on to the end user in one way or another (e.g. Adobe Photoshop will be ever so slightly more expensive since Adobe will be paying Unisys to allow them to include the .gif exporter).
How about, "Generally, I want what's best for the American People"
In all likelihood, they almost certainly know this, and are probably just hoping that they are offered a (relatively) fat settlement rather than go to trial. I'm guessing thats why they are so loudly vocalising the completely ludicrous sum of "$5 billion" - to bargain down to a 'more realistic' settlement sum of perhaps a couple hundred mil. IANAL, but I would guess that they're actually *hoping* for as much as one or two hundred million, and that they're hoping that waving around these huge numbers provides incentment for a settlement offer in this region.
IANAL, so I could be talking complete crap, but considering your arguments, and that these lawyers aren't stupid, its all I can think of that makes much sense.
One can't help but notice the overwhelming bias against Intel and towards AMD on slashdot, to the point of zealousness (i.e. only noting the benchmarks where AMD is ahead but pretending not to see the benchmarks where Intel is ahead). These are both just huge corporations that only care about their bottom line --- what makes AMD a "good" company but Intel a "bad" company? I guess consumer branding and geurilla marketing really do work; AMD have succeeded at convincing their market that they are "cool" just as surely as Nike has convinced all the "cool" kids that brandishing the "Nike swoosh" is "cool". Think you're immune to corporate branding?
What amazes me is how incredibly short-sighted everyone here is. Can nobody here think long term, or even medium term? P4 at current marketed clock rates don't perform that great, but that was never really the intention - shrinking the die is going to make the P4 scale seriously well with high clock speeds, and we'll watch AMD struggling to keep up. Sure, a P4 at the same clock performs more poorly - but Intel will have much higher clock rates in the same price range, and ultimately, equivalent and/or better performance, particularly over the next 1 to 3 years, as Intel puts out CPUs with humongous clock rates. Intel isn't slashing their prices "in response to AMD", these price cuts are part of a longer term plan.
Yes, Intel's prices *would* be higher if AMD wasn't around, *much* higher, you can be sure of that, so having AMD around is a good thing --- but Intel isn't on any long-term downward slope here by any means. And yes, I know Intel is deliberately attempting to take advantage of the fact that the "general populace" buys based on clock speed (they know that the "general populace" will choose the 2000 MHz Intel over the 1500 MHz AMD in the same price range, even if the performance is about the same). But none of this implies that AMD is any nobler than Intel.
Of course this post will probably be modded down, as its just not "cool" to not be pro-AMD. Its not "cool" to not be pro-Nike, pro-Diesel, pro-Any-mainstream-brand. But thats different, right?
I think you're wrong. I think a good teacher/lecturer can really make a subject, and a really bad one can break it.
I've had some pretty lousy CS lecturers (like you), but I don't hate CS. But the reason for this is that I already like programming and CompSci in general, and I'm guessing you did too. I liked it before studying it, and still like it afterwards.
But this is obviously not going to be the case for every single subject. Take a subject like Combinatorics (2nd and 3rd year level) - I didn't already like the subject. In fact I knew essentially nothing about it when I first took it. But I ended up actually somewhat liking it, simply because we had a good lecturer, who enjoyed his subject, and knew how to make it interesting.
The majority of students know extremely little about the subjects they're going to do at University - the experiences they have will very often be the introductions that these people will have to a subject. To try claim that the quality of the lecturing is not going to have an outcome on a students opinion of a subject is ridiculous - how can it not? The process of teaching is a dynamic two-way thing between student and teacher. A teacher who enjoys a subject can often show you the side of a subject that really is enjoyable. A teacher who doesn't, can't. You can't expect students to "magically" just pick up what is interesting and potentially enjoyable about subjects they know little or nothing about. In fact its basically by definition that students know little or nothing about a subject when they start out, otherwise it would kind of defeat the whole purpose.
I already knew I liked programming before I went to study at University. So a lousy lecturer wasn't going to change that. But many of my subjects I had no existing opinions about. Obviosly you can't possibly *really like* every single subject - but if I think back to Univ, virtually every subject has aspects to it that would be at least interesting.
You *might* be right about Hemos, it could well be that he just hated Geometry and finds it easier to blame the teacher. Many students do this. But to generalise this so far as to say that this is always the case, and that the teacher cannot make a difference, is flat out wrong.
I found myself anticipating, for the whole time I was reading your post, the part where you would claim that this "proves" that all science must be rubbish, that "science is just another religion", and that it also somehow therefore "proves" creationism without a doubt. Did you forget to include that part or something? Your post honestly sounds like something ripped straight out of talk.origins. Sheesh, what a load of tripe.
I see three posts about Sphereland were posted within a minute of each other (10:23, 10:23, 10:24) .. obviously couldn't have been avoided .. :) Too bad, just plain bad luck.
A "decent managed switch" isn't usually a cheap switch anymore, thus nullifying the original point, "use cheap switches". I'd rather have a cheap switch than a hub, anyday.
The "OT" I put in the title stands for "off-topic". Its a pretty standard spoiler, so that people can see from the subject line that the post is OT, and don't have to waste their time reading OT posts if they don't want to. So I realise its OT, and don't mind if it gets modded down as such.
Anyone got a guess on the availability?
If you read the article and you make it all the way to the fourth paragraph, you'll find this:
"It is still early in the development of this new generation of optical fibers. Even the most advanced of the new materials remain several years from widespread commercial use."
How did that get a "redundant"? I can't see any other posts explaining to newbies what "WIMP" stands for.
I'm not sure if this is your sig or not, but attempting to shame someone (calling me computer illiterate) is much more trollish than me saying "The OOP is for shitidiots. Here's why
It's not my sig, and I apologize for apparently incorrectly perceiving you to be technically illiterate, but you came across as sounding as such in your post. You sounded like one of those people who've overheard clued-up people complaining about some software/technology, and then they also want to sound clued up, so they try repeat to others what the clued-up person said. It was either that, or you did know what you were talking about, but were deliberately I see where you're coming from now.
You're right, if you cut through the hype, there isn't much left. I try not to waste my time reading / listening to hype. Good design is difficult and time-consuming, no matter what paradigm (or paradigms) you choose; a lot of people do seem to get swept up in some rabid zealous mindset, believing steadfastly in some catchy stupid "rule" such as "everything must be a class", as if abiding by a few one-liners is some sort of magic bullet to producing good system design. I guess that could be perceived as a problem with OOP, but it's more a problem of rabid followers. I like the principles that "OO" encompasses, and I like working in C++, but I'm well aware that there is no 'magic bullet' in design. I won't strictly use OOP for something if it doesn't need to be. I do get a bit annoyed when media articles say crap like "OOP will finally make the goal of reusable components attainable". Thats pure BS. I don't believe that OO has done very much at all to increase the amount of code reuse in the industry. A good reusable C++ class library is no better at being reusable than a good C function library. Some people just seem to want to make every single thing they see an ActiveX control.
Thanks for a decent reply. Most people would probably just have "gone on the defense" and attacked back (probably myself included). I'm humbled :)
Clearly, this must be WJWD: http://www.theonion.com/onion3417/abortion_clinic_ attack.html
Now take your brainwashed twisted propaganda and FO, there's the door.
If you operate on the principle that OOP sucks (ie, is for shitheads), then every structure built on top of it is also going to suck by definition, not including it's own inherent suck properties
Get a clue. "OOP" is merely a term describing a collective of design principles which include, mainly, modularity (encapsulation), inheritance and "generic programming". It is merely a small set of design principles which actually make sense, all of which (with the exception of polymorphism) were already in widespread use before the term "OOP" came into existence, and none were ever disputed as being good ideas until they fell under the umbrella term "OOP". An "OO language" is merely a language that provides some syntactic constructs for ideas such as encapsulation and inheritance, but this is merely as a convenience to programmers doing good design already (one of the best examples is the "gtk+" toolkit, object oriented, but implemented in C rather than C++, so it's packed with ugly, hacky typecast macros and a crude inheritance structure whereby a "derived" struct includes an instance of the "parent" struct as its first member. Urgh).
But at the same time, it could hurt if it's interfaces are poorly developed (see Win32 API for an example).
Get a clue. The Win32 API is not OO. The term "spaghetti" comes to mind.
Why do people with almost no knowledge about something insist on making the loudest noise about it? Seriously, I suggest you go learn more about what OOP really is before you go making a bigger fool of yourself. It seems to me all you've read is a few mainstream-media articles from the 80's which over-hyped "OOP" as some "revolutionary technology" that was going to change the world. Please. What self-respecting computer scientist can't see through media hype? You probably haven't noticed, but mainstream media overhypes EVERYTHING as a "revolutionary technology that is going to change the world". Thats how they sell their crap.
Yeah I know I'm feeding the trolls. I just couldn't help myself, so this troll scores a "decent" 8/10 on my personal troll-o-meter.
if you used IE you could read a pdf in the browser without necessarily downloading it
Thats one helluva impressive feature! Gosh, I wonder how they did it? I mean, how would the Acrobat plugin know what to actually display on the screen without downloading the file first? Also, is it faster than a normal download? Would be really cool if I could listen to mp3's without having to download 'em first, it takes so damn long on my 33.6 modem. Perhaps if I used IE I could do that.
OK OK .. I know what you meant, I'm just fooling around. It doesn't really make much sense the way you put it. The browser *has* to download the file. Anything else would be black magic.
"Isn't there some corollary to Moore's law that states "No matter how fast the hardware is there are millions of software developers working to bring that hardware to its knees"
Haven't heard it phrased like that, but the one I heard was "Gate's Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months".
Hey, I thought that was pretty funny :). Why mod it down?
It is well known that the development ..
I'm wary of anyone who puts forth an argument using these words. They are most commonly just a cheap way of trying to give one's statement(s) extra "weight" in an argument, without having to worry about the hassles of actually backing up your arguments with references. It also has the additional benefit of discouraging people from disagreeing, since the fact is obviously so "well known", then if you don't happen to agree with it, you must be in a small minority and are probably wrong, so you keep quiet so as not to sound stupid.
I can't say I've ever read a scientific research paper that began with "it's a well known fact".
Related variations of this are "it's a little known fact ..", "experts say ..", and of course the real marketing derivative, "scientists tell us ..".
The sad thing is that these things work on most people. I wish they'd teach all these cheap tricks in school. Perhaps the public would spot these things then, and be harder to fool. Then again, most sheeple probably prefer having their opinions handed to them on a platter, rather than having to form opinions themselves.
Sorry .. this isn't a response to your post at all, just a general OT rambling ..
Looks potentially useful, at a glance. Haven't had a detailed look. Would be ideal if it could be used for Linux and Windows drivers too.
The problem here is that even if you had, say, only MP3's of CDs they already actually owned (I know its unlikely but entirely possible), those police raiding the place are not going to give a shit, they're going to arrest you anyway. It is highly unlikely that you're going to be able to convince them by saying "but look, these MP3's here, they're from the CDs sitting on my shelf there". Their policy would probably be more along the lines of "arrest first, ask questions later". I doubt they'd even bother to try check if what you were saying was true. This might seem relatively benign in the context of mp3's, given that the majority of mp3's are probably illegal, but the underlying principle that you're "forgiving" here is an incredibly dangerous concept - the idea that you can be arrested and held simply for having an mp3 on your computer, whether it is a legal mp3 or not. Checking if an MP3 is legal is not necessarily easy, since there are a variety of cases where an MP3 might be legal. It could be a recording of a friend of yours who has a band. It could be material that is no longer copyrighted, or never was. It could be music that can be downloaded for free from a musician's website (http://www.holemusic.com/audio/index.html) or from sites like http://www.mp3.com/. It might not be music, it may be comedy MP3's. How thorough do you expect the authorities will be in checking? If we begin to give this sort of power to the authorities, we're all going to be in deep shit. Go see "in the name of the father" for a good true story on what happens when you start giving authorities too much power.
There is nothing wrong, as you say, with merely trying to prevent theft. Thats not the problem here though. Sure, the authorities should have some means of preventing this sort of theft - but indiscriminate raids backed by a witch-hunt mentality and combined with media propaganda is not it. How much faith do you have in the technical abilities and knowledge of your local police?
You're the dumbass if you can't see how braindamaged your argument is.
Drivers, the eternal OS acceptance problem. Whatever happened to Intel's Universal Driver architecture stuff?
The OpenSource community always bitches and moans about vendors creating proprietary standards. So why hasn't the community produced a serious cross-platform universal driver interface? Sure, it would be a lot of work, and take a lot of thought and design, but imagine the benefits; hardware developers could write their drivers once, and the device could work (with little or not porting efforts) on Windows, BeOS, MacOS, Linux, BSD etc. If the OSS community fails to produce open standards to begin with, what right do they have to complain about proprietary driver standards? Why should it be n times the amount of work for a hardware vendor to support n Operating Systems? Not sure how possible this is, but if it was possible to create a single set of open driver standards for various types of hardware, then write some wrappers from this layer to the Windows driver layer, it could well be possible for a company to use such a standard and get Windows drivers with no extra troubles.
I haven't written many hardware drivers myself, so I probably don't have a very good idea just how difficult it would be to do this. I imagine it would be very difficult, but would be very powerful and useful too.
Microsoft provides Windows Media Services, free with purchase of Windows 2000
Uh - explain this one to me - you purchase Windows 2000, but Windows Media Services that comes with it are "free"? If its part of a product that you purchase, doesn't it, uh, you know, cost money then? If you buy Win2K are some parts of it free while you pay for the others? Which parts are "free"? Which parts do you pay for? How ridiculous. It's like saying, I purchased a car, but I got the steering wheel and the distributor for free.
By and large, "real world" law enforcement is effective, even if you want it not to be to support an argument about law enforcement on the Internet. Sure nobody cares much about the odd bit of speeding, but by and large it is really not easy to get away with serious crimes like rape and murder. The unabomber was caught, Timothy McVeigh was caught, most serial killers are caught (even if it takes some time). I don't know what the statistics are, but it really isn't that easy to get away with such crimes. I remember reading somewhere that there are something like over 30 common oversights made by murderers that police can look for when investigating a murder to find the murderer. Personally, how do you rate your chances of robbing a bank and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of murdering someone and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of breaking into someones house and stealing a whole bunch of stuff and getting away with it? How do you rate your chances of stealing a car and getting away with it? These are all fairly "common" crimes. Do you believe that you have anywhere near as good a chance of getting away with these as you have of getting away with speeding? If you *really* believe that the real world is too big to effectively police, I challenge you to commit one of each of the abovementioned crimes. Think you can get away with it? I doubt it.
Above and beyond that, my whole point was that it is far far easier to police the Internet than it is to police real life. So even if "real world" policing is "only" something like 30% effective, Internet policing can easily be 70% effective or more. Say what you like about anonymous remailers and anonymous ISP services; the fact is, it is damn near impossible to really do anything anonymously on the Internet. And this is *now*, when the technologies are all still "new" and "raw", and law enforcement agencies have only really begun to learn about them, install snooping devices etc (e.g. Carnivore). I don't know about the states, but I live in a developing country (South Africa), and even here it is essentially impossible to log on to the internet "anonymously" - none of the ISPs offer the ability to connect "anonymously" to begin with (the way AOL does in the states with the AOL cd's), you *have to* first sign a contract with your full banking details, credit card number etc. And even if you do use someone else's account, or you forge your details, its still easy enough for the police to find out where you dialled in from. Basically, you've got one fat chance in hell of getting away with breaking the law on the Net (e.g. posting child porn or whatever). Your best (and only) shot at anonymity is to be an experienced hacker, who can either dead-end the "paper-trail" (logs, wiping logs) or leave a long enough "paper-trail" to make it too difficult to get caught.
The police don't enforce simple traffic laws because its not a high enough priority and their resources are limited, yes. But the Internet is much cheaper and easier to monitor than the roads are. Once the capability of fully monitoring the internet is in place, it will be as easy to detect "petty crimes" as it will be to detect serious crimes.