* About 85% of players were male.
* A "significant minority" (15%) adopt a character gender opposite to their own.
Could it be that the 15% of female players take on guys names?
Which means, of course, that there are no female characters in EQ.
I stopped playing EQ over a year ago, but from my experience there are fewer women playing as men then men playing as women (shock). Some do so just for the heck of it, some do it because they know they'll get more free stuff, some do it for a laugh, some for other reasons... and no, I never played a female character (excepting the few times I would play my GF-now-wife's cleric, which generally meant telling people that "this isn't the real player" and watching people die from late heals).
I'd say the cross gender number is about right... the male/female one seems a bit low from my experience (more like 80/20), but their sample set was considerably larger.
Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is
And we'll continue to see that... shocker... it doesn't make a bit of difference.
The limitation is not on the interface (parallel vs serial ATA), or on the bus (PCI vs insert_chipset_bus_here), but on the drives. There are no drives available that come anywhere close to saturating ATA/100 or ATA/133, so SATA/150 isn't going to help much. Ok, yeah, it'll help for the microsecond that you're reading from cache instead of from the drive itself, but that time period is so absurdly short it's not even statistical noise.
The advantages to SATA aren't in the bus speed arena... the improved cabling, hot swapping, and simplicity of hookup is what it's all about. I would've killed for SATA this weekend after spending an hour fiddling with 3 IDE drives and a CD-RW to get their master/slave jumpers correct (turned out that one was only happy with the master drive as cable select and the slave CD-ROM as slave -- anything else wouldn't be detected. Joy!).
As far as the number of channels go - 2 may be ok for now, but it's going to be deeply inadequate in the future. I'd hope that systems start appearing with 4 channels in 6 months, and 8 within a couple years. By which time standard ATA connectors may be gone entirely. (For more realistic estimates, change 6 mos to 1 year and 2 years to 5 years).
Which is why I said it wasn't so simple... neither was our support of Hussein (who was already in power btw, we didn't put him there), or pretty much anything in the Real World.
And frankly, I do consider the toppling of him to be fixing a problem we helped cause. But if we hadn't supported him in the late 70s and 80s then it's entirely possible that Iran would've taken over Iraq... which would've been disasterous for the entire Middle East (and thus the world).
Malaria kills almost 1 million world wide per year.
Yes, and at current fatality rates then SARS should kill right around 240 million people if it becomes a pandemic.
That's nearly the population of the US.
The "far less dangerous" bit ignores communicability . Malaria is a non-issue unless you're near mosquitos. SARS appears to be an issue if you're near other humans.
Before Gulf war 1 Iraq wasn't that badly off. 2 episodes of having the stuffing knocked out of them by the USA, with a decade of brutal sanctions in-between have reduced them to poverty. I'd say that the USA owes the ordinary people of Iraq big time.
Nice troll.
I don't suppose that ridding them of the dictator that caused the armed conflicts in the first place, along with the "brutal sanctions" counts for anything.
No, it's not that simple, but your statement ignored even more of reality.
I certainly agree that helping setup Internet services (once the far, far more critical needs are restored) would certainly help create a more democratic atmosphere. And while I don't think this should be done pro bono, I also take a dim view of what this company is doing - as another poster suggested, let an Iraqi company handle it when the time comes.
The entire point is that you may not KNOW if there's a patent involved or not. Sure, there's not a publicly known patent involved with PNG or OGG. That LZW patent (which affected GIF) was really well known now wasn't it?
As the prior poster said - what if it's discovered that part of OGG or PNG or whatever is patented? Then you're just as SOL as you are now.
And while I support going to less encumbered standards (such as OGG or PNG), the reality is that the entire patent system needs to be dramatically overhauled. Honestly I suspect most of the overhaul needs to occur at the court system, not the patent system (or the malpractice system, or whatever - it always boils down to the court system and it costing too much for the Right Thing to occur), but I also don't expect that to occur anytime soon.
Those free ATI drivers are just as free as the Nvidia drivers -- free to download, free to use, but the source code is not available. Thank you, drive through.
The ATI Radeon 9700 and 9800 lines are superior to the Nvidia Geforce FX from a hardware point of view, so that's a good reason to buy them. But drivers continue to not be a good reason to buy ATI - they have a poor history on support and their Linux support is certainly not better than that of Nvidia.
DVD doesn't have the bandwidth for HDTV. Ignoring the storage issues (less than an half hour of HDTV quality video will fit on a 4.7G recordable DVD), DVD doesn't have the bandwidth. HDTV tops out at 22 Mbps, while DVD has a 10 Mbps cap. So either you throw out over half the video data or you hope that all your HDTV is broadcast in 480p.
AdCritic didn't shutdown due to industry pressure, copyright violation, or anything else like that. It shutdown due to popularity - the bandwidth bill was too damn big and they were losing too much money.
It has since re-opened, but it's now a pay-your-own-way site.
Just search Google for Adcritic and shutdown if you want more info.
It's worth noting that this will not work on Series2 TiVo's (which is all that's been sold for well over a year now). The S2 TiVo's are locked down much tighter (at least with current software) and haven't been hacked completely. Yet. Last I read the hacking was progressing, but it's going to involve replacing the BIOS - in most cases physically by desoldering the old one and soldering in a new one.
You can still get a S1 TiVo on eBay if that's what you want. But you won't get any future software upgrades (S1 are not getting 4.0, due out any day), new features (no HMO - although most (but not all) of its features can be hacked in to one extent or another), and wow are they slow. If you're really, really into hacking the boxes and that's what makes you happy then I'd advise a S1 TiVo. If you just want things to work, get an S2.
What happened to the good ol' days when I games were DOS-based
What "good ole days" were you recalling?
Personally, I remember having to generate complex and hairy config.sys and autoexec.bat files that had menuing choices for all the different setups that games wanted. Some wanted extended memory. Some wanted expanded. Some had issues if you had both available, others had problems if you didn't have both available. Some had problems with QEMM, some with EMM386, some with ANSI.SYS, some with various memory blocks (go off and tweak your QEMM/EMM386 to exclude those blocks!), some with mouse drivers loaded, some without mouse drivers, some bitched about not having enough low memory free, some bitched about having too much low memory free, yadda yadda yadda.
While there are many good things to be said about older games, that they were DOS-based is not one of them.
If either of these companies wished to build a true PVR, they'd do well to license Tivo software for their boxes
I'd think so, you'd think so, but they don't think so. Why? I dunno. Licensing from either TiVo or Replay would've saved them years of development time (SciAtl has been having particular nightmares here), as well as remove some legal issues (like the fact that TiVo can probably sue them for patent violations).
What these companies are building are "thin client PVR's", where almost all the intelligence is at the head end, where it can't be tampered with.
Which, of course, is the real reason that neither wants to license from TiVo or Replay. The two models are pretty drastically different (possibly different enough to obviate most of the patents), and it lets SciAtl/Moto sell head end units at obscene markups and the cable companies can give the boxes away for "free".
And since the storage is being done at the head end I don't think it's an issue for what the channels are broadcast as - there's usually plenty of bandwidth between the cable heads and the central distribution point - the bandwidth crunch doesn't occur until you start going to cable nodes or individual houses.
To bad congress/FCC can't legislate a Digital cable standard so TV's could come equiped from the factory
There is one now, approved by the FCC even, and created by the cable companies themselves. It was mandated into existence by the FCC. One day we may even see the cable companies comply with it! The CE manufacturers have stated that they expect digital cable ready TVs to hit the market in the Summer of 2004. I guess we'll see what happens then. I'm not real familiar with the standard, so I don't know what (if any) provisions it has for outputs from the TV or DRM.
The major player in PVR land is DirectTV followed by EchoStar
Actually you have it backwards. Echostar has far, far more 500-series receivers out there than there are DirecTiVo's.
Makes great sense since there's a kluge with an IR Blaster you need to do with Tivo
Not quite true. TiVo's have a serial port on them that can control DirecTV receivers (and some cable boxes - notably the Motorola DCT-2000 series) if the receiver has a "low speed data port".
Oh... and did you note the "DirecTiVo" bit above? Yup - the PVR capabilites for DirecTV are licensed from TiVo. At one point it the boxes were still controlled by TiVo, but it's flip flopped - all service and billing is now done directly through DirecTV and DTV pays TiVo a licensing fee for the hardware and software.
the bigger question is: will SONICBlue release the specs of their service, so that others can now provide it ? Would TiVo release these specs if they were going under? Or will the bankruptcy court treat these as trade secrets, worth some monetary value to the creditors, and prevent the release?
TiVo stated once upon a time that they'd do this. Fat chance. A judge will certainly rule that this is information of value and prohibit any official release of information.
That said, there are TiVo hackers that have figured it all out already, at least for Series1 boxes. The S2 boxes are locked down more tightly (although it's being cracked very, very slowly), so dunno about that yet. DirecTiVo's aren't even under the perview of TiVo anymore, so unless DirecTV went tits up you'd still have service on them.
Will the people who forked over the $300 (or whatever) for "lifetime service" be considered creditors too? Shouldn't they be?
They are considered creditors. Of the lowest class (which is pretty much where creditors are anyway in bankruptcy court). Most creditors are lucky to see ten cents on the dollar after bankruptcy court, so it may be that you'd get a few more months or weeks of service and that'd be it. Depends on how the judge rules... with the obvious issue that pissing off your customers is not a good way to get out of bankruptcy. Based on that I'd be surprised if any judge would invalidate the lifetime service option.
Oh, you mean what happens if the company went really and truely bankrupt? And nobody bought the assets? Well, then you're still being treated like a creditor. And you're getting the same thing any other creditor in your situation would get - absolutely nothing. The various bits of IP may be sold off, but that doesn't mean you'll get access to any of it - including things like how to download scheduling data.
I suggest you look into what happened to any one of the failed "Internet PC" companies to see what would happen to your hardware. Unless you hack it, you're going to wind up with a large doorstop.
Does Tivo now have any reason to compete? I see no reason to.
Depends on if TiVo wants to continue existing or not.
Both Scientific American and Motorola are developing PVRs for cable set top box's. And these two companies have huge existing relationships with the cable companies (as in - they sell virtually everything the cable companies need to do business). If you have a cable STB right now take a look at it - it's almost certainly made by one of these two companies (General Instruments are OEM'd Motorola boxes).
AOL is also working on the Mystero box or whatever crappy name it has. Dish Network has their own PVR.
None of these are comparable to TiVo on a feature basis, and often they're missing really big features, but to a lot of people all that matters is price -- and all of them beat TiVo on that because the companies can afford to give the hardware away for free and charge an additional monthly service charge to pay it back as well as pay for providing service.
So yeah, TiVo does have reason to compete. Lots of them.
Since the only source of information on this is the Springfield News article back-dated to Dec 4, 2002 (even the Carthage Chamber of Commerce doesn't have any info on this) it is a joke.
Admittedly, the best one that's been posted to/. all day (well... I find the repeated evil bit postings funny, simply because they tweak the nose of all the whiners). It managed to sound just real enough, had nice anecdotal information (like Carthage, MI - where Butterball (a subsidiary of ConAgra) has a 7.8M turkey/year processing plant) and included references to enough "outside" sources to fool the idle. Which is what April Fool's day is all about anyway.
Better yet, there are a few comments from users that either fell for the joke or are playing along with it.
Yes, because leaving meat out all day to be cooked at a later time is a great idea!
George Foreman Grills, Inc. is not liable for any health problems that may occur due to the use of this product. In fact, we made it to kill off silly fools just like you.
How would it be a defacto standard if only one person used it? After more than 10 years of C++ don't you think that such a thing would have arisen if it was going to?
It has. It's called the STL, and when used properly it fixes nearly every complaint the columnist had.
Studies have shown that programmer productivity, measured by lines of code over time, varies little between languages.
Great! Now let's move on to some benchmark that actually matters. Lines of code over time has never been a good benchmark. Better ones are number of bugs, time to milestone, number of milestones accomplished on time, and user satisfaction. No, none of them are perfect. Welcome to reality.
the low-level constructs that C and C++ programmers spend time managing are the same ones that can get them into trouble
Sure, if you code using no libraries and are a dumbass about it. Heck, you can avoid most of the vulnerabilities he's talking about in C++ just by using std::string. Most of the other worries can be eliminated by using decent libraries like boost (its pointer templates are great) or Loki. In C it's a bit harder, but there's secure string and memory libraries available there too (I recently poked around in vsftp which is straight C code and uses wrappers for all string functions).
There's no need to move to a different language - although I definitely agree with different languages for different purposes - but you definitely need to know how to write things properly in the language you do use.
And while he acknowledges that high-level languages aren't immune to security bugs, he also seems to forget that most high level languages are written in lower level ones (such as Perl being written in C). A mistake in the code that creates the high level code can leave the entire thing wide open and you're back to square one. On the upside you only have to patch the language. On the downside you have dozens or hundreds of vulnerable programs instead of one or two.
Of course, the author also seems to forget that not everything was written in the past two or three years. Just how old is lpr? Is rewriting it - in any language - really going to be worth it?
Finally, the author's list of vulnerable programs at the start starkly contrasts with his suggestions at the end. Of the six listed four (kernel, openssl, mysql, and glibc) are not applicable for rewriting in high level code - by the author's own admission. One of them (openssl) is not even a language issue - it's implementation. The last two could, in theory, be written in high level languages, but lpr seriously predates Perl or Python. Mutt might have been a candidate for a high level language though - so 1 out of the 6 is a viable gripe.
The author does make a good point... it's just buried in his pointless bashing of C/C++. You need to know your tools, and you need to know how to code securely. The tools can help, but if you don't code securely then all they can do is block the more egregious sins... and those are rarely the ones that get exploited (they get blocked or patched quickly).
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* About 85% of players were male.
* A "significant minority" (15%) adopt a character gender opposite to their own.
Could it be that the 15% of female players take on guys names?
Which means, of course, that there are no female characters in EQ.
I stopped playing EQ over a year ago, but from my experience there are fewer women playing as men then men playing as women (shock). Some do so just for the heck of it, some do it because they know they'll get more free stuff, some do it for a laugh, some for other reasons... and no, I never played a female character (excepting the few times I would play my GF-now-wife's cleric, which generally meant telling people that "this isn't the real player" and watching people die from late heals).
I'd say the cross gender number is about right... the male/female one seems a bit low from my experience (more like 80/20), but their sample set was considerably larger.
Now we can test serial ATA to see how good it REALLY is
And we'll continue to see that... shocker... it doesn't make a bit of difference.
The limitation is not on the interface (parallel vs serial ATA), or on the bus (PCI vs insert_chipset_bus_here), but on the drives. There are no drives available that come anywhere close to saturating ATA/100 or ATA/133, so SATA/150 isn't going to help much. Ok, yeah, it'll help for the microsecond that you're reading from cache instead of from the drive itself, but that time period is so absurdly short it's not even statistical noise.
The advantages to SATA aren't in the bus speed arena... the improved cabling, hot swapping, and simplicity of hookup is what it's all about. I would've killed for SATA this weekend after spending an hour fiddling with 3 IDE drives and a CD-RW to get their master/slave jumpers correct (turned out that one was only happy with the master drive as cable select and the slave CD-ROM as slave -- anything else wouldn't be detected. Joy!).
As far as the number of channels go - 2 may be ok for now, but it's going to be deeply inadequate in the future. I'd hope that systems start appearing with 4 channels in 6 months, and 8 within a couple years. By which time standard ATA connectors may be gone entirely. (For more realistic estimates, change 6 mos to 1 year and 2 years to 5 years).
Which is why I said it wasn't so simple... neither was our support of Hussein (who was already in power btw, we didn't put him there), or pretty much anything in the Real World.
And frankly, I do consider the toppling of him to be fixing a problem we helped cause. But if we hadn't supported him in the late 70s and 80s then it's entirely possible that Iran would've taken over Iraq... which would've been disasterous for the entire Middle East (and thus the world).
Malaria kills almost 1 million world wide per year.
Yes, and at current fatality rates then SARS should kill right around 240 million people if it becomes a pandemic.
That's nearly the population of the US.
The "far less dangerous" bit ignores communicability . Malaria is a non-issue unless you're near mosquitos. SARS appears to be an issue if you're near other humans.
Before Gulf war 1 Iraq wasn't that badly off. 2 episodes of having the stuffing knocked out of them by the USA, with a decade of brutal sanctions in-between have reduced them to poverty. I'd say that the USA owes the ordinary people of Iraq big time.
Nice troll.
I don't suppose that ridding them of the dictator that caused the armed conflicts in the first place, along with the "brutal sanctions" counts for anything.
No, it's not that simple, but your statement ignored even more of reality.
I certainly agree that helping setup Internet services (once the far, far more critical needs are restored) would certainly help create a more democratic atmosphere. And while I don't think this should be done pro bono, I also take a dim view of what this company is doing - as another poster suggested, let an Iraqi company handle it when the time comes.
And, of course, let's not forget that you can use an external modem on TiVo's as well.
The OP was too clueless to look up any of this himself though, so I suspect he'll just continue bitching.
So Tivo users will have the same functionality as Replay 4000+ users do?
Leaving out the music bit is rather big - this is replacing a SLiMP3 or a Rio Receiver after all. That pays for HMO by itself.
But, hey, let us know when your Replay will be able to do things TiVo does, like Season Passes, Wishlists, etc.
After all, they might be able to add this kind of basic functionality before they go bankrupt for a third time.
That's non-viable.
The entire point is that you may not KNOW if there's a patent involved or not. Sure, there's not a publicly known patent involved with PNG or OGG. That LZW patent (which affected GIF) was really well known now wasn't it?
As the prior poster said - what if it's discovered that part of OGG or PNG or whatever is patented? Then you're just as SOL as you are now.
And while I support going to less encumbered standards (such as OGG or PNG), the reality is that the entire patent system needs to be dramatically overhauled. Honestly I suspect most of the overhaul needs to occur at the court system, not the patent system (or the malpractice system, or whatever - it always boils down to the court system and it costing too much for the Right Thing to occur), but I also don't expect that to occur anytime soon.
This is a result of my only seing LOTR:FOTR twice and LOTR:TTT once, but seeing SW:ESB and SW:ROJ far too many times :)
I can already see thousands of rabid open source fanatics imitating Gollum over this...
"It isss OGG, so it isss good! Yes!"
"Nooo! DRM! Hateful it is!"
etc.
Those free ATI drivers are just as free as the Nvidia drivers -- free to download, free to use, but the source code is not available. Thank you, drive through.
The ATI Radeon 9700 and 9800 lines are superior to the Nvidia Geforce FX from a hardware point of view, so that's a good reason to buy them. But drivers continue to not be a good reason to buy ATI - they have a poor history on support and their Linux support is certainly not better than that of Nvidia.
DVD doesn't have the bandwidth for HDTV. Ignoring the storage issues (less than an half hour of HDTV quality video will fit on a 4.7G recordable DVD), DVD doesn't have the bandwidth. HDTV tops out at 22 Mbps, while DVD has a 10 Mbps cap. So either you throw out over half the video data or you hope that all your HDTV is broadcast in 480p.
AdCritic didn't shutdown due to industry pressure, copyright violation, or anything else like that. It shutdown due to popularity - the bandwidth bill was too damn big and they were losing too much money.
It has since re-opened, but it's now a pay-your-own-way site.
Just search Google for Adcritic and shutdown if you want more info.
... that this is the one that didn't suck.
It's worth noting that this will not work on Series2 TiVo's (which is all that's been sold for well over a year now). The S2 TiVo's are locked down much tighter (at least with current software) and haven't been hacked completely. Yet. Last I read the hacking was progressing, but it's going to involve replacing the BIOS - in most cases physically by desoldering the old one and soldering in a new one.
You can still get a S1 TiVo on eBay if that's what you want. But you won't get any future software upgrades (S1 are not getting 4.0, due out any day), new features (no HMO - although most (but not all) of its features can be hacked in to one extent or another), and wow are they slow. If you're really, really into hacking the boxes and that's what makes you happy then I'd advise a S1 TiVo. If you just want things to work, get an S2.
What happened to the good ol' days when I games were DOS-based
What "good ole days" were you recalling?
Personally, I remember having to generate complex and hairy config.sys and autoexec.bat files that had menuing choices for all the different setups that games wanted. Some wanted extended memory. Some wanted expanded. Some had issues if you had both available, others had problems if you didn't have both available. Some had problems with QEMM, some with EMM386, some with ANSI.SYS, some with various memory blocks (go off and tweak your QEMM/EMM386 to exclude those blocks!), some with mouse drivers loaded, some without mouse drivers, some bitched about not having enough low memory free, some bitched about having too much low memory free, yadda yadda yadda.
While there are many good things to be said about older games, that they were DOS-based is not one of them.
If either of these companies wished to build a true PVR, they'd do well to license Tivo software for their boxes
I'd think so, you'd think so, but they don't think so. Why? I dunno. Licensing from either TiVo or Replay would've saved them years of development time (SciAtl has been having particular nightmares here), as well as remove some legal issues (like the fact that TiVo can probably sue them for patent violations).
What these companies are building are "thin client PVR's", where almost all the intelligence is at the head end, where it can't be tampered with.
Which, of course, is the real reason that neither wants to license from TiVo or Replay. The two models are pretty drastically different (possibly different enough to obviate most of the patents), and it lets SciAtl/Moto sell head end units at obscene markups and the cable companies can give the boxes away for "free".
And since the storage is being done at the head end I don't think it's an issue for what the channels are broadcast as - there's usually plenty of bandwidth between the cable heads and the central distribution point - the bandwidth crunch doesn't occur until you start going to cable nodes or individual houses.
To bad congress/FCC can't legislate a Digital cable standard so TV's could come equiped from the factory
There is one now, approved by the FCC even, and created by the cable companies themselves. It was mandated into existence by the FCC. One day we may even see the cable companies comply with it! The CE manufacturers have stated that they expect digital cable ready TVs to hit the market in the Summer of 2004. I guess we'll see what happens then. I'm not real familiar with the standard, so I don't know what (if any) provisions it has for outputs from the TV or DRM.
The major player in PVR land is DirectTV followed by EchoStar
Actually you have it backwards. Echostar has far, far more 500-series receivers out there than there are DirecTiVo's.
Makes great sense since there's a kluge with an IR Blaster you need to do with Tivo
Not quite true. TiVo's have a serial port on them that can control DirecTV receivers (and some cable boxes - notably the Motorola DCT-2000 series) if the receiver has a "low speed data port".
Oh... and did you note the "DirecTiVo" bit above? Yup - the PVR capabilites for DirecTV are licensed from TiVo. At one point it the boxes were still controlled by TiVo, but it's flip flopped - all service and billing is now done directly through DirecTV and DTV pays TiVo a licensing fee for the hardware and software.
Er... yeah.
Particularly bad brain fart given that I live in Atlanta.
the bigger question is: will SONICBlue release the specs of their service, so that others can now provide it ? Would TiVo release these specs if they were going under? Or will the bankruptcy court treat these as trade secrets, worth some monetary value to the creditors, and prevent the release?
TiVo stated once upon a time that they'd do this. Fat chance. A judge will certainly rule that this is information of value and prohibit any official release of information.
That said, there are TiVo hackers that have figured it all out already, at least for Series1 boxes. The S2 boxes are locked down more tightly (although it's being cracked very, very slowly), so dunno about that yet. DirecTiVo's aren't even under the perview of TiVo anymore, so unless DirecTV went tits up you'd still have service on them.
Will the people who forked over the $300 (or whatever) for "lifetime service" be considered creditors too? Shouldn't they be?
They are considered creditors. Of the lowest class (which is pretty much where creditors are anyway in bankruptcy court). Most creditors are lucky to see ten cents on the dollar after bankruptcy court, so it may be that you'd get a few more months or weeks of service and that'd be it. Depends on how the judge rules... with the obvious issue that pissing off your customers is not a good way to get out of bankruptcy. Based on that I'd be surprised if any judge would invalidate the lifetime service option.
Oh, you mean what happens if the company went really and truely bankrupt? And nobody bought the assets? Well, then you're still being treated like a creditor. And you're getting the same thing any other creditor in your situation would get - absolutely nothing. The various bits of IP may be sold off, but that doesn't mean you'll get access to any of it - including things like how to download scheduling data.
I suggest you look into what happened to any one of the failed "Internet PC" companies to see what would happen to your hardware. Unless you hack it, you're going to wind up with a large doorstop.
Does Tivo now have any reason to compete? I see no reason to.
Depends on if TiVo wants to continue existing or not.
Both Scientific American and Motorola are developing PVRs for cable set top box's. And these two companies have huge existing relationships with the cable companies (as in - they sell virtually everything the cable companies need to do business). If you have a cable STB right now take a look at it - it's almost certainly made by one of these two companies (General Instruments are OEM'd Motorola boxes).
AOL is also working on the Mystero box or whatever crappy name it has. Dish Network has their own PVR.
None of these are comparable to TiVo on a feature basis, and often they're missing really big features, but to a lot of people all that matters is price -- and all of them beat TiVo on that because the companies can afford to give the hardware away for free and charge an additional monthly service charge to pay it back as well as pay for providing service.
So yeah, TiVo does have reason to compete. Lots of them.
Since the only source of information on this is the Springfield News article back-dated to Dec 4, 2002 (even the Carthage Chamber of Commerce doesn't have any info on this) it is a joke.
/. all day (well... I find the repeated evil bit postings funny, simply because they tweak the nose of all the whiners). It managed to sound just real enough, had nice anecdotal information (like Carthage, MI - where Butterball (a subsidiary of ConAgra) has a 7.8M turkey/year processing plant) and included references to enough "outside" sources to fool the idle. Which is what April Fool's day is all about anyway.
Admittedly, the best one that's been posted to
Better yet, there are a few comments from users that either fell for the joke or are playing along with it.
Bravo.
Yes, because leaving meat out all day to be cooked at a later time is a great idea!
George Foreman Grills, Inc. is not liable for any health problems that may occur due to the use of this product. In fact, we made it to kill off silly fools just like you.
How would it be a defacto standard if only one person used it? After more than 10 years of C++ don't you think that such a thing would have arisen if it was going to?
It has. It's called the STL, and when used properly it fixes nearly every complaint the columnist had.
Studies have shown that programmer productivity, measured by lines of code over time, varies little between languages.
Great! Now let's move on to some benchmark that actually matters. Lines of code over time has never been a good benchmark. Better ones are number of bugs, time to milestone, number of milestones accomplished on time, and user satisfaction. No, none of them are perfect. Welcome to reality.
the low-level constructs that C and C++ programmers spend time managing are the same ones that can get them into trouble
Sure, if you code using no libraries and are a dumbass about it. Heck, you can avoid most of the vulnerabilities he's talking about in C++ just by using std::string. Most of the other worries can be eliminated by using decent libraries like boost (its pointer templates are great) or Loki. In C it's a bit harder, but there's secure string and memory libraries available there too (I recently poked around in vsftp which is straight C code and uses wrappers for all string functions).
There's no need to move to a different language - although I definitely agree with different languages for different purposes - but you definitely need to know how to write things properly in the language you do use.
And while he acknowledges that high-level languages aren't immune to security bugs, he also seems to forget that most high level languages are written in lower level ones (such as Perl being written in C). A mistake in the code that creates the high level code can leave the entire thing wide open and you're back to square one. On the upside you only have to patch the language. On the downside you have dozens or hundreds of vulnerable programs instead of one or two.
Of course, the author also seems to forget that not everything was written in the past two or three years. Just how old is lpr? Is rewriting it - in any language - really going to be worth it?
Finally, the author's list of vulnerable programs at the start starkly contrasts with his suggestions at the end. Of the six listed four (kernel, openssl, mysql, and glibc) are not applicable for rewriting in high level code - by the author's own admission. One of them (openssl) is not even a language issue - it's implementation. The last two could, in theory, be written in high level languages, but lpr seriously predates Perl or Python. Mutt might have been a candidate for a high level language though - so 1 out of the 6 is a viable gripe.
The author does make a good point... it's just buried in his pointless bashing of C/C++. You need to know your tools, and you need to know how to code securely. The tools can help, but if you don't code securely then all they can do is block the more egregious sins... and those are rarely the ones that get exploited (they get blocked or patched quickly).