don't forget that those physical tests are 'standing up straight', 'sitting still without fidgeting', and 'looking at things outside without squinting'.
Its a good job they didnt do psychological tests too - 'talking to other people without using IM' - or they'd have no computer experts at all!
You're absolutely right, free speech doesn't mean 'anything goes'. I wonder if the spam we get in our emails were to advocate Communism or other anti-american ideals, the pro-internet-free speechers in/. would still be fighting for it.
So 'Join our commune and share in $1000000' 'You too can look 10 years younger by being a Commie' 'join the taleban and help us kick the governemnts ass' 'get an islamic mortgage and save $$$' 'You too can have a penis as large as Comrade Lenins'
would be inappropriate, but 'girls banging their dogs' is Ok.??
Well many It companies have been seeing a non-profit oriented marketplace recently, as you can tell from the large number of redundancies and cutbacks.
Stardock isn't going away from a profit-oriented approach to running their business, they're simply trying a different way of getting you to part with your money.
Fair play to them, making a profit is what being a company is all about, you then spend that profit doing other things, like making new games and paying staff. The staff buy things with their wages whch pays for other worker's wages, who eventually buy Stardock's games. Everybody's happy, except people without wages/ too tight to pay/ idealogically opposed to everything, who feel a need to rip the original source off instead.
for the record, I don't have kids, my argument was hypothetical.
I still think you need to reevaluate your desire for freedom of speech (under any circumstances) with the needs of a civilised and well adjusted society. I know the perils of email spam, I know that 1 spammer getting your address can sell it to thousands of spammers, I have an account I never used and its full of spam. I also have another that I use everyday and its just starting to get spammed - perhaps its because I used it as my sourceforge address. In fact, when can I be sure I have an account that isnt going to be eventually caught by a spammer? never. So should I stop using email? Its a catch-22 situation, the email account I use everyday is going to get caught eventually, because I use it everyday.
The point, though, is that porn is not good for kids, and you don't have so much control over kids as you think you'd have. they get to see stuff at friend's houses, look over your shoudler which you're reading your mail, use the computers at school, etc etc. So.. is freedom of speech so important that kids will get to see this filth?
your central park analogy is flawed in 1 respect - email is an everyday thing. Like walking down the street. And there are poor drivers, lunatics with guns, muggers, gangs of youths out there - if your analogy held, either you'd give up email altogether or would never go outside your front door.
Sorry for the long posting. I do feel that there is no control over the crap I get in my mailbox and some of it is truly offensive. Whilst I agree that no-one should be persecuted for their beliefs, no freedom of speech argument should protect the people sending those emails out.
when you're older, and have little kids, and your daughter says 'daddy, can I be banged by a 12 inch cock like the lady says in my email', perhaps you'll change your mind.
If you sign messages, then you are restricting your freedom of anonymity - the govt can see exactly who sent what mail. Not a good prospect for you if they don't like what you said. So, really you *don't* want digitally signed email.
Personally, I want the email system to remain pretty much as it is, no intervention from the powers that be to 'protect' me from porn and gormless offers, but I also want the flood of spam to stop. Technology solutions may work, but generally by preventing freedom of expression, even in a small way. So that leaves social solutions - like sueing the contacts on the spam mail (every spam has a way of taking your money off you - find where it goes, you have the person/org responsible for it) - and setting up appropriate punishments. That doesn't restrict your freedom of speech, doesn't impair your ability to receive all those mails if you want them, does protect the rest of us.
However, I doubt the political will is there to implement a global solution, and that's the only one that will truly work. bummer.
you've obviously forgotten that the X-box is just phase 1 in Microsoft's quest to take over your home. When it has the internet link through your TV, a PVR function, video-on-demand, home automation labour-saving hookups... then they'll bring in the 'arcade licensing' model where you have to deposit a quarter to get the damn thing to open your curtains!
1 stamp would be enough to stop spammers - they're not ever going to see the reply-to mail Brainclone system sends out. (If they did have valid reply-to addresses, they would soon stop spamming!) If anyone not on your list (ie your friends when the system is started) receives a prohibitively large request for stamps they're not likely to email you again;-)
So the idea of choosing the number of stamps is a nice one, but doesn't pass the real-world test.
I also think you should make it 100% of the dosh goes to the ISP, you're far more likely to get responses then, and I doubt if end users care at all about the financial aspect as long as it doesn't cost them anything and they get no spam.
You also might want to give every ISP end user a free amount of stamps (1000 per month say) so that they don't get caught trying to send 1 mail to a friend who has not yet listed them. Letting an ISPs users (ie, not from @yahoo.com) use the mail system for free is very, very important, and 1000 free mails a month is way too few for a spammer to bother with.
I can't find the link I used to have about the iris, but thumbprint sensors definitely do recognise living fingers. Naturally, some of them will just be cheap units that can't.
Iris biometric devices also require some blood pulsing to be detected as well (as do fingerprint devices) so you cannot use a fancy glass eye, or an amputated eyeball.
Sorry guys, best go back to the privacy debate on this one.
give a man a console and he'll write log messages to it. Give him a GUI and he'll put them in a listbox that doesn't scroll properly and refreshes in a annoying flickery manner.
I think that one day you'll be posting to/. saying 'damn students, what do they know';-)
There's a lot of dodgy code out there - I think the problem is that its written too quickly, after all, once its finished, rewriting it or tweaking it to get it perfect isnt going to held the profits, doubly so when there are other projects to get cracking on (like all the bug fixes for previous projects....)
The reason people check in code that breaks the system is simply because it takes too long to verify that you've done it right - you've been coding all day, you've given it a quck test, everything seems to be OK. So in it goes... and breaks something else. you cannot test *everything*. This is just one of those things, and it is the standard you will be aiming at - the standard where you don't have enough time to get it perfect, you only have enough time to get it done.
I'm not saying that some students won't make good programmers, or that all pros are good (oh god no...) but that the difference between the projects you do at uni and the real world are miles apart. My 300 page document is for a fire mobilisation 3rd part app I have to integrate with our c&c system. it has to be 300 pages long because otherwise I wouldn't know what the messages were supposed to do or how to construct them - and getting it right in this case is quite important, hence the document has to be totally correct and complete. Incidentally, this c&c project (that has been developed over 15 years) is now over 100 Mb in 130 directories on disk of only source code (I deleted the objects to count it.) This is larger than normal, but still the kind of scale you'll probably be working with.
Normally my projects require about 10-20 pages of doc for anything reasonably serious, 3-4 pages for simple stuff. (though screen shots and diagrams pad them up considerably).
good luck with your course though, I'd be happy to answer any more questions you have, but please email them. Cheers.
Don''t forget that the 6 month project you do in Uni would take a professional 2 weeks. And that pro. would only have 2 weeks to get it finished because then he'd have another one to do, and document it so it can be maintained. Fortunately, the design is usually finished before he starts work on it...
I also think that you are joking comparing uni project documentation with real world docs. I have the GD92 fire mobilisation spec on my desk - 300 double sided pages. That's before I start on my specs and design, and reports.
you are making assumptions. Until the lack of programmers changed things, nearly all companies would not take grads until they've had 2 years experience. There is a reason for this, which has nothing to do with PHB's attitude, but more wth the Grad's attitude that he thinks he knows it all.
Possibly the reason open source is looked down on is the lack of professional documentation. Sure, quite a lot of packaged products come with huge sets of docco that have little content besides "click on the 'install' button to install our wonderful product", and less than perfect technical documentation, but O/S products generally have nothing more than a readme.txt that tells the user to visit the product web page and read some generated docs, or a user-supported forum. (which quite often has too much noise that a PHB will accept).
If a company could package O/S software with nice manuals and guaranteed 'support' then it'd gain much more acceptance, however, I suppose it would stop being 'free' software then.
you've just been lucky. One day someone will harvest your email address and then it'll spread around all the spam lists in the world.
This happened to me - with my paid-for ISP email account. Some korean got hold of it, now all I get are mails for teddy bear shops and porn in a foreign language. I never bothered to use that email account as I had others my friends knew about.
My hotmail account gets a fair few spams, but not nearly as many as that isp account.
The moral of this reply - it isn't MSs fault here. Stop being partisan and focus on the real bad guys at least for this thread.
the poster obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
a 'rubbish' 500Mhz CPU - 500,000,000 ops / sec a 5ms access time SCSI HDD - 200 ops / sec.
so what if the CPU on the RAID card is a pathetic 100MHz job, it'll still be able to keep up with the data flow from the HDD, even when that data is being burst through.
How much cache ram have you got on that RAID card is a better indication of performance improvements for your hardware.
Yow, you're gonna have a tough time if you ever work on very large systems.
for a small system, you need a different attitude to developing which does not work for large scale systems. No-one seems to consider this.
I agree that education is to teach you things. No student knows what job they're going to get at the end of the course so they'd better be prepared for something other than simple java progrmming;-)
first off OLEDB is a lovely technology, much better organised than ODBC, which was good in its day, and serves a very useful purpose being a lowest-common demoninator, but OLEDB is better.
OLEDB *can* run on top of ODBC, but there are native drivers for several commercial dbs out there. No windows programmer would use OLEDB for ODBC when accessing SQL Server for instance.
However, it is MS only, so this post is a little redundant. but just FYI.
... the author implies that COM was successful in its goals of interoperable component software, only failing to reach critical mass due to a failure by other vendors to support it. OMG's corba on the other hand was based on an incomplete standard, destined to failure due to Microsoft's decision not to support this 'doomed' standard. I would whole-heartedly disagree with this. Firstly, the distributed object technologies of CORBA are applicable to a different range of problems. Even overlooking the validity of this comparison, CORBA has seen massive support and is generally considered to be more successful than COM.
What on earth are both guys on about... the author claims that COM didn't reach critical mass becuase other vendors didn't support it!?!?!? You mean vendors like Sun, BEA etc. crazy idea that they ever would support COM, yet on the MS platform (which is the.NET platform), COM is pretty much the only way of writing apps today. *Everybody* supports COM on Windows.
As for CORBA being generally more successful than COM.. you mean '.. on unix' surely. CORBA doesn't even come close to the same level on MS platforms, and there's a lot more of those about that unix servers. (regardless of what anyone thinks of these different platforms).
I have noticed a strong tendency for authors (and MS staff) to sing the praises of.NET and denounce COM as some also-ran technology. The same people were singing the praises of COM just yesterday though. Its this hype that I find disquieting. I also think that its very pointless mentioning CORBA in a.NET discussion. the COM v CORBA discussions have been done to death, lets not continue them with a.NET v CORBA debate.
Well, its mostly here, except the connectivity is via USB not Firewire, and you need a PC to house the HDD and DVD recorder. Still... for £110 quid it isn;t bad.
are you quite sure about that... ebay runs isapi dlls (almost certainly written in plain old C) on Windows. FYI. ISAPI is IIS plugins. They are the lowest level of communicating with IIS and have a very simple C interface.
Possibly, but then all they would have to do is re-write the standard disclaimer in the small print... 'by not unchecking this checked box you agree to opt-in to our mailing list' then, 'we reserve the right to sell your name to other marketeers if you agree to opt in to our opt-in list', assuming there isn't just a single list that they all use in the first place.
If you ever want to sign up for one mailer, then expect to sign up to them all. Ain't it a nightmare!
Slashdot Mirror
don't forget that those physical tests are 'standing up straight', 'sitting still without fidgeting', and 'looking at things outside without squinting'.
Its a good job they didnt do psychological tests too - 'talking to other people without using IM' - or they'd have no computer experts at all!
You're absolutely right, free speech doesn't mean 'anything goes'. /. would still be fighting for it.
I wonder if the spam we get in our emails were to advocate Communism or other anti-american ideals, the pro-internet-free speechers in
So
'Join our commune and share in $1000000'
'You too can look 10 years younger by being a Commie'
'join the taleban and help us kick the governemnts ass'
'get an islamic mortgage and save $$$'
'You too can have a penis as large as Comrade Lenins'
would be inappropriate, but 'girls banging their dogs' is Ok.??
Well many It companies have been seeing a non-profit oriented marketplace recently, as you can tell from the large number of redundancies and cutbacks.
Stardock isn't going away from a profit-oriented approach to running their business, they're simply trying a different way of getting you to part with your money.
Fair play to them, making a profit is what being a company is all about, you then spend that profit doing other things, like making new games and paying staff. The staff buy things with their wages whch pays for other worker's wages, who eventually buy Stardock's games.
Everybody's happy, except people without wages/ too tight to pay/ idealogically opposed to everything, who feel a need to rip the original source off instead.
for the record, I don't have kids, my argument was hypothetical.
I still think you need to reevaluate your desire for freedom of speech (under any circumstances) with the needs of a civilised and well adjusted society. I know the perils of email spam, I know that 1 spammer getting your address can sell it to thousands of spammers, I have an account I never used and its full of spam. I also have another that I use everyday and its just starting to get spammed - perhaps its because I used it as my sourceforge address. In fact, when can I be sure I have an account that isnt going to be eventually caught by a spammer? never. So should I stop using email? Its a catch-22 situation, the email account I use everyday is going to get caught eventually, because I use it everyday.
The point, though, is that porn is not good for kids, and you don't have so much control over kids as you think you'd have. they get to see stuff at friend's houses, look over your shoudler which you're reading your mail, use the computers at school, etc etc. So.. is freedom of speech so important that kids will get to see this filth?
your central park analogy is flawed in 1 respect - email is an everyday thing. Like walking down the street. And there are poor drivers, lunatics with guns, muggers, gangs of youths out there - if your analogy held, either you'd give up email altogether or would never go outside your front door.
Sorry for the long posting. I do feel that there is no control over the crap I get in my mailbox and some of it is truly offensive. Whilst I agree that no-one should be persecuted for their beliefs, no freedom of speech argument should protect the people sending those emails out.
when you're older, and have little kids, and your daughter says 'daddy, can I be banged by a 12 inch cock like the lady says in my email', perhaps you'll change your mind.
I think you want to read that mail again.
If you sign messages, then you are restricting your freedom of anonymity - the govt can see exactly who sent what mail. Not a good prospect for you if they don't like what you said.
So, really you *don't* want digitally signed email.
Personally, I want the email system to remain pretty much as it is, no intervention from the powers that be to 'protect' me from porn and gormless offers, but I also want the flood of spam to stop. Technology solutions may work, but generally by preventing freedom of expression, even in a small way. So that leaves social solutions - like sueing the contacts on the spam mail (every spam has a way of taking your money off you - find where it goes, you have the person/org responsible for it) - and setting up appropriate punishments. That doesn't restrict your freedom of speech, doesn't impair your ability to receive all those mails if you want them, does protect the rest of us.
However, I doubt the political will is there to implement a global solution, and that's the only one that will truly work. bummer.
you've obviously forgotten that the X-box is just phase 1 in Microsoft's quest to take over your home. When it has the internet link through your TV, a PVR function, video-on-demand, home automation labour-saving hookups... then they'll bring in the 'arcade licensing' model where you have to deposit a quarter to get the damn thing to open your curtains!
;-)
Then they'll make even more profit
1 stamp would be enough to stop spammers - they're not ever going to see the reply-to mail Brainclone system sends out. (If they did have valid reply-to addresses, they would soon stop spamming!) ;-)
If anyone not on your list (ie your friends when the system is started) receives a prohibitively large request for stamps they're not likely to email you again
So the idea of choosing the number of stamps is a nice one, but doesn't pass the real-world test.
I also think you should make it 100% of the dosh goes to the ISP, you're far more likely to get responses then, and I doubt if end users care at all about the financial aspect as long as it doesn't cost them anything and they get no spam.
You also might want to give every ISP end user a free amount of stamps (1000 per month say) so that they don't get caught trying to send 1 mail to a friend who has not yet listed them. Letting an ISPs users (ie, not from @yahoo.com) use the mail system for free is very, very important, and 1000 free mails a month is way too few for a spammer to bother with.
I can't find the link I used to have about the iris, but thumbprint sensors definitely do recognise living fingers. Naturally, some of them will just be cheap units that can't.
/ 0, aid,103535,00.asp
http://pcworld.shopping.yahoo.com/yahoo/article
describes how one security chap worked around the finger print sensor, with a plastic bag of warm water!
If I find the iris link today, I'll post. (come to think of it, it may not have been so much pulsing, as just the blood colour in the veins).
Iris biometric devices also require some blood pulsing to be detected as well (as do fingerprint devices) so you cannot use a fancy glass eye, or an amputated eyeball.
Sorry guys, best go back to the privacy debate on this one.
give a man a console and he'll write log messages to it. Give him a GUI and he'll put them in a listbox that doesn't scroll properly and refreshes in a annoying flickery manner.
There's a lot of dodgy code out there - I think the problem is that its written too quickly, after all, once its finished, rewriting it or tweaking it to get it perfect isnt going to held the profits, doubly so when there are other projects to get cracking on (like all the bug fixes for previous projects....)
The reason people check in code that breaks the system is simply because it takes too long to verify that you've done it right - you've been coding all day, you've given it a quck test, everything seems to be OK. So in it goes... and breaks something else. you cannot test *everything*. This is just one of those things, and it is the standard you will be aiming at - the standard where you don't have enough time to get it perfect, you only have enough time to get it done.
I'm not saying that some students won't make good programmers, or that all pros are good (oh god no...) but that the difference between the projects you do at uni and the real world are miles apart. My 300 page document is for a fire mobilisation 3rd part app I have to integrate with our c&c system. it has to be 300 pages long because otherwise I wouldn't know what the messages were supposed to do or how to construct them - and getting it right in this case is quite important, hence the document has to be totally correct and complete.
Incidentally, this c&c project (that has been developed over 15 years) is now over 100 Mb in 130 directories on disk of only source code (I deleted the objects to count it.) This is larger than normal, but still the kind of scale you'll probably be working with.
Normally my projects require about 10-20 pages of doc for anything reasonably serious, 3-4 pages for simple stuff. (though screen shots and diagrams pad them up considerably).
good luck with your course though, I'd be happy to answer any more questions you have, but please email them.
Cheers.
I also think that you are joking comparing uni project documentation with real world docs. I have the GD92 fire mobilisation spec on my desk - 300 double sided pages. That's before I start on my specs and design, and reports.
you are making assumptions. Until the lack of programmers changed things, nearly all companies would not take grads until they've had 2 years experience. There is a reason for this, which has nothing to do with PHB's attitude, but more wth the Grad's attitude that he thinks he knows it all.
If a company could package O/S software with nice manuals and guaranteed 'support' then it'd gain much more acceptance, however, I suppose it would stop being 'free' software then.
you've just been lucky. One day someone will harvest your email address and then it'll spread around all the spam lists in the world.
This happened to me - with my paid-for ISP email account. Some korean got hold of it, now all I get are mails for teddy bear shops and porn in a foreign language.
I never bothered to use that email account as I had others my friends knew about.
My hotmail account gets a fair few spams, but not nearly as many as that isp account.
The moral of this reply - it isn't MSs fault here. Stop being partisan and focus on the real bad guys at least for this thread.
yep, 1 operation can be 'get a contiguous chunk of a meg'. now, how does that affect the CPU load instead of RAM 'load'?
the poster obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.
a 'rubbish' 500Mhz CPU - 500,000,000 ops / sec
a 5ms access time SCSI HDD - 200 ops / sec.
so what if the CPU on the RAID card is a pathetic 100MHz job, it'll still be able to keep up with the data flow from the HDD, even when that data is being burst through.
How much cache ram have you got on that RAID card is a better indication of performance improvements for your hardware.
Yow, you're gonna have a tough time if you ever work on very large systems.
;-)
for a small system, you need a different attitude to developing which does not work for large scale systems. No-one seems to consider this.
I agree that education is to teach you things. No student knows what job they're going to get at the end of the course so they'd better be prepared for something other than simple java progrmming
When will people start calling SQL 'SQuirreL' ?
;-)
sounds much nicer, and fluffier, to me; and besides, where else would you long-term persist your nuts except in a Database!
first off OLEDB is a lovely technology, much better organised than ODBC, which was good in its day, and serves a very useful purpose being a lowest-common demoninator, but OLEDB is better.
OLEDB *can* run on top of ODBC, but there are native drivers for several commercial dbs out there. No windows programmer would use OLEDB for ODBC when accessing SQL Server for instance.
However, it is MS only, so this post is a little redundant. but just FYI.
What on earth are both guys on about... the author claims that COM didn't reach critical mass becuase other vendors didn't support it!?!?!? You mean vendors like Sun, BEA etc. crazy idea that they ever would support COM, yet on the MS platform (which is the
As for CORBA being generally more successful than COM.. you mean '.. on unix' surely. CORBA doesn't even come close to the same level on MS platforms, and there's a lot more of those about that unix servers. (regardless of what anyone thinks of these different platforms).
I have noticed a strong tendency for authors (and MS staff) to sing the praises of
I also think that its very pointless mentioning CORBA in a
Well, its mostly here, except the connectivity is via USB not Firewire, and you need a PC to house the HDD and DVD recorder.
? v_ id=3425
Still... for £110 quid it isn;t bad.
http://myahead.com/go/look/product.show_product
are you quite sure about that... ebay runs isapi dlls (almost certainly written in plain old C) on Windows.
FYI. ISAPI is IIS plugins. They are the lowest level of communicating with IIS and have a very simple C interface.
and they'll say 'yeah sure dad, no-one uses worm viruses anymore, they're rubbish'
Possibly, but then all they would have to do is re-write the standard disclaimer in the small print... 'by not unchecking this checked box you agree to opt-in to our mailing list' then, 'we reserve the right to sell your name to other marketeers if you agree to opt in to our opt-in list', assuming there isn't just a single list that they all use in the first place.
If you ever want to sign up for one mailer, then expect to sign up to them all. Ain't it a nightmare!