Shoot, we should start sharing a bunch of text files containing 1,000,000 millions lines of "The RIAA are a bunch of morons" (with some sort of binary scrambled encryption), add an.mp3 extension and put Metallica somewhere in the title, and start sharing it through the service widespread.
When these guys inevitably reach the courtroom, they bring in their expert computer witness...
Even addresses belonging to spam-fighters, sometimes, to get revenge.
This is the thing I can't understand. These guys need to have some sort of valid contact. How else do they pull off their deals/scams? If they give you a website url, DoS it. If the body of the email has an address, spam the crap out of that. Don't know what to do for phone numbers or addresses, but chances are if they're not legit they won't give out that information anyway...
I mean, there's got to be something. If they do this without giving you a contact, then there's no way to get any reward from the spam in the first place.
And if I get one more message about stocks, vacations or pr0n from the folks at tari.tari.it, I'm going to explode.
Seriously, these guys are idiots relying on sound bites. ESR and RMS would eat these idiots for lunch in a philosophical debate on software. They can't even sort out the differences between Open Source and the GPL.
It would definitely be in Red Hat's best interest to do this kind of thing, if for no other reason than to just say "Red Hat" alot and brand like crazy. (Microsoft is a master of this, just count the number of times you read MS, Windows, or Office brand names within an MSNBC article related to the tech industry) Given what IBM and Sun could gain, I can't see why they wouldn't do it either...
I've often toyed with the idea of trying to bring down a spammer by basically doing back to them what they do to us, sending them a million emails a second or DoSing their website until they crash. Is there any way to do this sort of thing? Yeah, there are ethical things to consider in this sort of technique, but I'm really starting to get fed up.
If you're keen on building games, you ought to be hanging out on sites that deal with them, like the Linux Game Development Centre or Gamasutra and such.
gamepower puts up a new review once a day. It's a pretty decent site all around, with all its reviews archived in a database, links to demos and patches, etc. -- the only thing it's missing is a regular feature.
I would suggest that if people like AC would stand up to the PHBs & their companies (or better yet, communicate with management before any of this comes down), we wouldn't NEED unions.
Unfortunately, office politics usually take a turn for the nasty the moment poor working conditions get mentioned in a non-union situation. People who butt heads with management over working relationships are often either frozen out if the argument is good or fired if the argument is handled badly. At the very least, the presence of a union encourages the management to take the matter seriously, because if they don't, the fallout can be massive. If it's a one-employee-complaining-at-a-time situation, the boss might not feel any pressure to take the matter seriously, because employees can be (and often are) replaced one employee at a time. And yeah, of course management is going to know which employees aren't replaceable, and it's this kind of employee that doesn't get this treatment is usually the kind of employee who doesn't have to worry about unpaid overtime if he/she doesn't want to.
I don't see how this is relevent. The idea of a Linux game not selling well doesn't make any sense -- wine runs software that was written for windows. The game sells just as well as it would sell if it were Windows platform only. They only stand to gain customers by having wine work well, otherwise, they just keep selling to Windows as usual, nothing is lost.
I'm really unsure as to the point you've expressed.
Actually, a quick read further down suggested that he should go for it and just charge the guy out the wazoo. I like that idea. If it'll get open source out there and more money in the hands of the programmers, it might have benefits that stretch to free software (if software modding as its own industry ever takes off).
Maybe the client is choosing your open source based solution because they want to be able to tweak some code.
Okay, but if they then ask for your help, the client is choosing your open source based solution because they want to have the freedom to tweak some code and then have you tell them how to untweak it. For the amount of money that they'd have to spend to get someone to help them in this way, they might as well hire a second programmer who can specialize in this. Unless it's like how it is at my friend's place, where people spend upwards of five to six figures a year on support contracts, I can't see how this could be properly implemented.
Programmers who are any good and can help customers in this way don't stay on the help desk very long. I really do think you're asking for trouble by having your help desk serve as a mod consulting service.
Once again, I think questions about this sort of thing are okay, so long as it's based on the original source code. The company could actually be of some real help here.
Your responsibility to provide support should end the moment the product's source code is tampered with by a customer. You can't be held responsible for what they do, unless you want to start answering questions for every single fork that's ever happened...
Besides, if it's open source, the guy should be able to revert back to a product's code base that you'll be able to help him with, no?
I understand the point of the article was to be humourous, but did it not occur to the guy to try Usenet? He could have gotten better help for free, and considering the unique and intriguing nature of the questions, he probably would've had no end to the number of people trying to outdo each other with suggestions on how to fix it...
Problem 1. How was his database structured? Was he doing the querying through Access, or VBA? Could he conceivably do it through VBA or VB instead? How were his connections set up? Was he explicitly closing one connection and then opening up another? Considering that one design flaw early on in the db design could bring into effect all sorts of problems down the road, the MS guy probably WOULD have to be a psychic to figure out what the initial factors were.
Problem 2. Forget Microsoft Graph. Does the guy have access to VBA and Excel 2000? There's no end to the charting you can do if you access the various Excel objects through a VB program. Yes, it does tend to bloat things and slow them down, and yes, you do need to look up a lot of extra documentation, but it's definitely doable, and if it's doable, it's been done and talked about on Usenet.
Problem 3. Look into the VB help files regarding the Common Dialog Control. You can create a pretty customized save dialog that looks just like the real thing in an MS Office ap. And yes, it would probably be a VB issue instead of an Access issue because it's a VB control, so being passed off to a programmer's help desk would seem pretty straightforward, IMO.
I mean, not to excuse MS help at all, but I think questions about various coding techniques and workarounds shouldn't be thrown on the shoulders of some guy who's trained to remind people to make sure their monitors are plugged in. It's probably beyond their scope (especially at $55 per problem), but he could have gotten it for free online. There's no end of people who get off showing how knowledgable they are (yeah yeah, myself included).
I think they'd have a chance at creating a good language if they followed Java's lead.
[[Insert cries of outrage]]
No, seriously. Java's got some knocks on it but the main problems are verbosity of code and the way it gets implemented (virtual machines, HTML converters, general slowness, etc.). If the new language were built in the same abstract way that Java is, you'd get a decent OO language with none of the ugly memory management techniques that a C coder has to go through. I'll still probably code in C, just because I like it and don't need objects for what I do and the speed is nice, but I think that for the average programmer, messing around with mallocs instead of "new" and arrays of chars instead of a string class is a real pain-in-the-butt price to pay for performance. I know these (strings and "new") are both aspects of C++ right now, but you've still got backwards compatibility (if you can call it that) with C and that means a bunch of confusion (ie: a bunch of C-string functions that don't work all that well with C++ strings, etc.). It's a huge mess to sort through, with C techniques available on the one hand and C++ techniques available on the other. And it's not like I've ever seen a C++ textbook aimed at beginners that didn't teach C fundamentals at the beginning. The overlap is practically assumed and accepted, and I think that's bad for the language.
I think if they went for simpler and more cleaned up, they'd make the language a lot more attractive. I don't think they should model it on C++, myself.
Although, I do have to admit that the time might be better spent working towards improving the supporting libraries with C++. One of the nice benefits of C++ is that, even though it can be a pain in the ass to build appropriate foundation classes, ones that get built nicely are a DREAM to work with. Of course, that's a language-irrelevent issue...
Don't know if it uses Checksumming or other things particular to this patent... Chances are they keep their techniques closed and proprietary, so they'd have to open them up to specifically challenge this patent.
Not necessarily. I worked in a government office that did up-to-the-minute online transcripts of meetings. We contracted out to an ISP the actual web posting of the transcripts, although we had to send them the transcripts themselves. The system wasn't particularly great, but we had software that did website checking and it was helpful to know how regularly a page was being updated without having to check a "Last Updated" comment every fifteen minutes.
Not sure what's being patented here. Checksumming web pages, or checking for updated web pages, or using checksumming to check for updated web pages? Or is it even more specific than this?
those exposed to violence are more violent. Anyone who says otherwise is only doing so because they enjoy violence and sex so much.
What drove the Columbine killers to kill was a lack of empathy for their fellow students. The average person who enjoys a good round of de_dust every now and then is no threat to society because this average person has friends in real life and can relate to others in non-destructive ways.
Here's a question for you, if E & R were driven to extreme acts of random violence as a result of video games, why didn't they start shooting at each other the moment they got the guns? Because they had empathy for each other -- it never would have occured to them to kill each other. Unfortunately, they couldn't extend that to the other students for whatever reason, but the video games had NOTHING to do with that.
I think the biggest problem with AIs is that the focus of a whether or not something makes a successful AI is whether or not it beats you. I think that's a red herring because ultimately it leads the programmer to think that there's a right and a wrong way of programming AI, and where the AI fails, other things (like cheating) make up for it. It also leads to the programmer relying on techniques that'd lead to exploits by users. I think there's a huge difference between the sort of user that wants to play the game and the sort of user that wants to beat the game. You don't pick up a novel with the intent of rearranging all the words in ways that you like better. Why do some people then reverse-engineer their games? I guess because games aren't like art for everybody. Plus, I think, for those people, you're never going to satisfy them.
I think that a successful AI model will attempt to model human thinking, and the wide variety of human thinking out there. Instead of trying to perfect Data, we should try making other artificial life forms to counter-balance him. It could end up that one of your life forms falls short, but this happens with people all the time in real life, so in a way, it's a bit of a success. Plus, it'll sort of lead to the success of life forms better suited to the environment that you've built, sort of like Darwin, which is also the way it is in real life.
Instead of trying to force an image of ourselves onto the character, maybe we should try to force verisimilitude onto the situation the character is in.
A great number of graphic cards are automatically detected and 3D acceleration is operational without further configuration, such as Matrox G200/G400, Voodoo III/V/Banshee, Intel i810 & i815, ATI Rage 128/Pro, 3D Rage XL/EC, 3D Rage LT, Nvidia, GeForce I, II...
Does anyone know if this means that, out of the box, my Voodoo3 will be detected and appropriate drivers will be installed for it? Or will I still have to go through the extra steps of downloading Mesa and DRI and recompiling XFree to have DRI support etc.?
Slashdot Mirror
This "solution" involves slowly introducing new hardware.
Well, it's an inconvenient solution, but there's really no other alternative. Every software-oriented solution gets cracked.
Of course, this might lead to a new breed of hardware-oriented hacker (ie: 3l33t s0lder0r).
What a relief. We haven't had a patents discussion in almost three days. I was starting to twitch.
Saw that two seconds after I posted it. I guess it'd need a compression too...
Shoot, we should start sharing a bunch of text files containing 1,000,000 millions lines of "The RIAA are a bunch of morons" (with some sort of binary scrambled encryption), add an .mp3 extension and put Metallica somewhere in the title, and start sharing it through the service widespread.
When these guys inevitably reach the courtroom, they bring in their expert computer witness...
Even addresses belonging to spam-fighters, sometimes, to get revenge.
This is the thing I can't understand. These guys need to have some sort of valid contact. How else do they pull off their deals/scams? If they give you a website url, DoS it. If the body of the email has an address, spam the crap out of that. Don't know what to do for phone numbers or addresses, but chances are if they're not legit they won't give out that information anyway...
I mean, there's got to be something. If they do this without giving you a contact, then there's no way to get any reward from the spam in the first place.
And if I get one more message about stocks, vacations or pr0n from the folks at tari.tari.it, I'm going to explode.
Seriously, these guys are idiots relying on sound bites. ESR and RMS would eat these idiots for lunch in a philosophical debate on software. They can't even sort out the differences between Open Source and the GPL.
It would definitely be in Red Hat's best interest to do this kind of thing, if for no other reason than to just say "Red Hat" alot and brand like crazy. (Microsoft is a master of this, just count the number of times you read MS, Windows, or Office brand names within an MSNBC article related to the tech industry) Given what IBM and Sun could gain, I can't see why they wouldn't do it either...
I've often toyed with the idea of trying to bring down a spammer by basically doing back to them what they do to us, sending them a million emails a second or DoSing their website until they crash. Is there any way to do this sort of thing? Yeah, there are ethical things to consider in this sort of technique, but I'm really starting to get fed up.
here
If you're keen on building games, you ought to be hanging out on sites that deal with them, like the Linux Game Development Centre or Gamasutra and such.
gamepower puts up a new review once a day. It's a pretty decent site all around, with all its reviews archived in a database, links to demos and patches, etc. -- the only thing it's missing is a regular feature.
I would suggest that if people like AC would stand up to the PHBs & their companies (or better yet, communicate with management before any of this comes down), we wouldn't NEED unions.
Unfortunately, office politics usually take a turn for the nasty the moment poor working conditions get mentioned in a non-union situation. People who butt heads with management over working relationships are often either frozen out if the argument is good or fired if the argument is handled badly. At the very least, the presence of a union encourages the management to take the matter seriously, because if they don't, the fallout can be massive. If it's a one-employee-complaining-at-a-time situation, the boss might not feel any pressure to take the matter seriously, because employees can be (and often are) replaced one employee at a time. And yeah, of course management is going to know which employees aren't replaceable, and it's this kind of employee that doesn't get this treatment is usually the kind of employee who doesn't have to worry about unpaid overtime if he/she doesn't want to.
How much of the internet's backbone lies geographically within the United States?
Anybody see where I'm going with this?
I don't see how this is relevent. The idea of a Linux game not selling well doesn't make any sense -- wine runs software that was written for windows. The game sells just as well as it would sell if it were Windows platform only. They only stand to gain customers by having wine work well, otherwise, they just keep selling to Windows as usual, nothing is lost.
I'm really unsure as to the point you've expressed.
Actually, a quick read further down suggested that he should go for it and just charge the guy out the wazoo. I like that idea. If it'll get open source out there and more money in the hands of the programmers, it might have benefits that stretch to free software (if software modding as its own industry ever takes off).
Maybe the client is choosing your open source based solution because they want to be able to tweak some code.
Okay, but if they then ask for your help, the client is choosing your open source based solution because they want to have the freedom to tweak some code and then have you tell them how to untweak it. For the amount of money that they'd have to spend to get someone to help them in this way, they might as well hire a second programmer who can specialize in this. Unless it's like how it is at my friend's place, where people spend upwards of five to six figures a year on support contracts, I can't see how this could be properly implemented.
Programmers who are any good and can help customers in this way don't stay on the help desk very long. I really do think you're asking for trouble by having your help desk serve as a mod consulting service.
Once again, I think questions about this sort of thing are okay, so long as it's based on the original source code. The company could actually be of some real help here.
Your responsibility to provide support should end the moment the product's source code is tampered with by a customer. You can't be held responsible for what they do, unless you want to start answering questions for every single fork that's ever happened...
Besides, if it's open source, the guy should be able to revert back to a product's code base that you'll be able to help him with, no?
I understand the point of the article was to be humourous, but did it not occur to the guy to try Usenet? He could have gotten better help for free, and considering the unique and intriguing nature of the questions, he probably would've had no end to the number of people trying to outdo each other with suggestions on how to fix it...
Problem 1. How was his database structured? Was he doing the querying through Access, or VBA? Could he conceivably do it through VBA or VB instead? How were his connections set up? Was he explicitly closing one connection and then opening up another? Considering that one design flaw early on in the db design could bring into effect all sorts of problems down the road, the MS guy probably WOULD have to be a psychic to figure out what the initial factors were.
Problem 2. Forget Microsoft Graph. Does the guy have access to VBA and Excel 2000? There's no end to the charting you can do if you access the various Excel objects through a VB program. Yes, it does tend to bloat things and slow them down, and yes, you do need to look up a lot of extra documentation, but it's definitely doable, and if it's doable, it's been done and talked about on Usenet.
Problem 3. Look into the VB help files regarding the Common Dialog Control. You can create a pretty customized save dialog that looks just like the real thing in an MS Office ap. And yes, it would probably be a VB issue instead of an Access issue because it's a VB control, so being passed off to a programmer's help desk would seem pretty straightforward, IMO.
I mean, not to excuse MS help at all, but I think questions about various coding techniques and workarounds shouldn't be thrown on the shoulders of some guy who's trained to remind people to make sure their monitors are plugged in. It's probably beyond their scope (especially at $55 per problem), but he could have gotten it for free online. There's no end of people who get off showing how knowledgable they are (yeah yeah, myself included).
Searched the archives for pr0n.
Results 1 - 10 of about 23,200,000,000. Search took 0.15 seconds.
Did you mean: porn?
There is also a profound resistance to OO thoery in the C language camp that I still can't quite understand, but that is another story...
Probably because we understand that the difference between y = foo(mystruct, x) and y = myclass.foo(x) is pretty darned academic.
Better get the asbestos suits out...
Random thoughts...
I think they'd have a chance at creating a good language if they followed Java's lead.
[[Insert cries of outrage]]
No, seriously. Java's got some knocks on it but the main problems are verbosity of code and the way it gets implemented (virtual machines, HTML converters, general slowness, etc.). If the new language were built in the same abstract way that Java is, you'd get a decent OO language with none of the ugly memory management techniques that a C coder has to go through. I'll still probably code in C, just because I like it and don't need objects for what I do and the speed is nice, but I think that for the average programmer, messing around with mallocs instead of "new" and arrays of chars instead of a string class is a real pain-in-the-butt price to pay for performance. I know these (strings and "new") are both aspects of C++ right now, but you've still got backwards compatibility (if you can call it that) with C and that means a bunch of confusion (ie: a bunch of C-string functions that don't work all that well with C++ strings, etc.). It's a huge mess to sort through, with C techniques available on the one hand and C++ techniques available on the other. And it's not like I've ever seen a C++ textbook aimed at beginners that didn't teach C fundamentals at the beginning. The overlap is practically assumed and accepted, and I think that's bad for the language.
I think if they went for simpler and more cleaned up, they'd make the language a lot more attractive. I don't think they should model it on C++, myself.
Although, I do have to admit that the time might be better spent working towards improving the supporting libraries with C++. One of the nice benefits of C++ is that, even though it can be a pain in the ass to build appropriate foundation classes, ones that get built nicely are a DREAM to work with. Of course, that's a language-irrelevent issue...
Disco Watchman
Don't know if it uses Checksumming or other things particular to this patent... Chances are they keep their techniques closed and proprietary, so they'd have to open them up to specifically challenge this patent.
Not necessarily. I worked in a government office that did up-to-the-minute online transcripts of meetings. We contracted out to an ISP the actual web posting of the transcripts, although we had to send them the transcripts themselves. The system wasn't particularly great, but we had software that did website checking and it was helpful to know how regularly a page was being updated without having to check a "Last Updated" comment every fifteen minutes.
Not sure what's being patented here. Checksumming web pages, or checking for updated web pages, or using checksumming to check for updated web pages? Or is it even more specific than this?
Er...
Read the subject header.
those exposed to violence are more violent. Anyone who says otherwise is only doing so because they enjoy violence and sex so much.
What drove the Columbine killers to kill was a lack of empathy for their fellow students. The average person who enjoys a good round of de_dust every now and then is no threat to society because this average person has friends in real life and can relate to others in non-destructive ways.
Here's a question for you, if E & R were driven to extreme acts of random violence as a result of video games, why didn't they start shooting at each other the moment they got the guns? Because they had empathy for each other -- it never would have occured to them to kill each other. Unfortunately, they couldn't extend that to the other students for whatever reason, but the video games had NOTHING to do with that.
I think the biggest problem with AIs is that the focus of a whether or not something makes a successful AI is whether or not it beats you. I think that's a red herring because ultimately it leads the programmer to think that there's a right and a wrong way of programming AI, and where the AI fails, other things (like cheating) make up for it. It also leads to the programmer relying on techniques that'd lead to exploits by users. I think there's a huge difference between the sort of user that wants to play the game and the sort of user that wants to beat the game. You don't pick up a novel with the intent of rearranging all the words in ways that you like better. Why do some people then reverse-engineer their games? I guess because games aren't like art for everybody. Plus, I think, for those people, you're never going to satisfy them.
I think that a successful AI model will attempt to model human thinking, and the wide variety of human thinking out there. Instead of trying to perfect Data, we should try making other artificial life forms to counter-balance him. It could end up that one of your life forms falls short, but this happens with people all the time in real life, so in a way, it's a bit of a success. Plus, it'll sort of lead to the success of life forms better suited to the environment that you've built, sort of like Darwin, which is also the way it is in real life.
Instead of trying to force an image of ourselves onto the character, maybe we should try to force verisimilitude onto the situation the character is in.
Just a random ramble.
Taken from the press release...
A great number of graphic cards are automatically detected and 3D acceleration is operational without further configuration, such as Matrox G200/G400, Voodoo III/V/Banshee, Intel i810 & i815, ATI Rage 128/Pro, 3D Rage XL/EC, 3D Rage LT, Nvidia, GeForce I, II...
Does anyone know if this means that, out of the box, my Voodoo3 will be detected and appropriate drivers will be installed for it? Or will I still have to go through the extra steps of downloading Mesa and DRI and recompiling XFree to have DRI support etc.?