My biggest question is how they plan on stopping abuse of their system. The program in principle seems like a relatively good idea (it's basically no different from a student telling a teacher that he/she thinks something is wrong with another student). However, there is a lot of room for abuse for any number of reasons. Mayber student A is mad at student B, so A turns B in by making up stuff. Or maybe A just wants to have a little fun. Who knows. But it ends up wasting lots of time and money and can be very embarassing for student B. All this without a way to track student A down.
So I think that perhaps the degree of anonymity should be restricted. Student A can be anonymous to the school unless it turns out to be a bad call, and then the school can find out who it was and punish the offender, or somthing like that.
My other question is how low key is this operation? When a (assumably legitamite) call is received, do they only tell the school, first try the parents and then maybe the school? I would hope that they _never_ intentionally call the media over something like this, but how would they prevent leaks by operators? Is that even possible? How secure is their database of calls?
(I guess this turned out to be more than 2 questions:)
Yes... the number of CD's is large. However, it takes so long to go from one cd to the next (at least the first one -- I haven't had time to get past it:) I wonder if there are so many CD's just to discourage burning them...
I think a text-to-speech engine might work, if it was good. That would save space, and be easy to use. Of course, if it was crappy, it wouldn't work.
I just think it was disappointing to see so much effort put into the cut scenes and the fighting module (both are very good graphically) and so seemingly little effort (comparitively) put into the rest of the game.
In this case the PlayStation has an inherant advantage over the PC because Final Fantasy was written for the Playstation, and ported to the PC (almost as an after thought). As a result, the controls are hard to use and doesn't seem to take full advantage of your system (mouse, other 90 keys, etc).
The one thing that really disappoints me in FF8 is the lack of voices. I'll probably get flamed on this, but I was watching my roommate play a game called Monkey Island 3 (or something like that) where the character walked around and talked to people to solve certain puzzles. In this game, the characters actually had voices, instead of reading what they say on the screen. I think it made the game much more fun to play (and watch).
I think because they were trying to affect the more traditional culture -- the culture which reacts to things like protests. And they got to inform some "ordinary" people, who probably would have never heard about the DMCA otherwise.
It would be neat to do a more distributed protest system -- maybe on a certain day LUGs all over the country protest at their individual cities/colleges/whatever. It seems that might have more of an effect on the general population than one protest in DC. Especially if local news picks up the story.
OK, I know this probably won't be a very popular opinion, but really, a gaping security hole? ActiveX controls are not any more of a security hole than any other executable. That said, you should definitely be wary before downloading and running any ActiveX control, just like you're wary of downloading and running programs. On a Windows 95/98 machine, both can cause a lot of problems (NT is a little more secure, but I'm sure there are ways to mess with it too).
But these security problems are not inherent to ActiveX, and ActiveX is not specifically designed with poor security. ActiveX is a set of COM interfaces that a particular library must implement. Personally, I think COM and interfaces are an excellent idea (in and of themselves -- I'm not refering to a sepecific implementation). COM allows programmers to write libraries that perform a service. And if someone wants to implement that service in a different way, they are free to do so -- they just have to implement the same interface. And because of GUIDs, it's completely distributed -- there's no central authority.
The only thing that COM (and ActiveX) doesn't address is untrusted components. That is a shortcoming, but until that's fixed, it's up to the user to trust or not trust the components that he/she is putting on his/her system.
GoHip is the untrusted source in this article, not COM.
Re:Cool XOR pointer trick for doubly-linked lists
on
The New Garbage Man
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· Score: 1
Assuming your switchbox doesn't alter the signal, I don't see any reason why a signal encrypted at the card and decrypted at the monitor would suffer from the use of a switchbox
I don't think it would have a problem, until I try to switch to a different computer. There would have to be an authentication process and a key switch, and the monitor may not know to do that. So basically, I'll be avoiding anything like this for a long time to come. If enough people do the same, this will go the way of DIVX.
How soon until they start "protecting" our keyboard connections? You know, so we don't type anything that's copy protected?:)
My question is why do this at all? What's the point? Make people by all new monitors? Prevent people from tapping your video cable?
I, for one, have this neat little switch, which allows me to have 1 monitor on 3 computers. Will this new encryption thing prevent this in the future?
I guess they mightbe worried about people hooking their VCRs up to video stream and recording their DVDs, or something. It doesn't seem like it's worth trying to break something that already works. (can you imagine all the tech support problems something like this will generate?)
Can anyone think of a useful application of this sort of thing?
When I read it, I noticed that Wired asked "Is it true that the number of women in computer science is actually declining?" and Borg evaded the question: "There is a drop in percentage of women getting bachelor degrees in computer science and engineering." [emphasis added]
In my experience as a CS major, I don't see the number of women in CS dropping, but that the number of men in CS increasing faster than the number of women. Now, her point is still valid (there are less women in CS relatively than men), but the fact that she manipulated (or seemed to manipulate) the facts by her presentation of them makes her argument less desirable.
I do agree with most of what she's saying -- there are less females in CS, and that is a Bad Thing. However, I don't think she realizes that colleges can only educate X number of people and that if more women are admitted, less men are (I take this from her comment about how there wouldn't be a job shortage in IT if women had gone into CS as much as men did).
I also worry about to many statistics. I have a female CS friend who doesn't want to be in CS anymore (just like there are lots of people in lots of majors who change after a year or so -- they decide they don't like it). Well, she's having a hard time switching, because of resistance to loosing a female from the CS dept. Now, is this truely what we want? Everyone should be able to choose to study CS or not. Statistics should not play a part in it.
hehe... I find it interesting that Konqueror was given such rave reviews, even though it is an *integrated* browser. I seem to recall something about a company making an integrated browser and a whole bunch of people upset by it:)
Just kidding! I actually like IE, and if Konqueror is as good as IE than I'd probably start using it (of course, then I'd have to switch to KDE).
Of course, I'm kindof in a good mood: quakefest starts today -- lots of fun!
I think this is one of the big philosophical parts of the movie. I took an intro to philosophy course last semester, and found myself thinking about the matrix when we studied some skeptics, like Hume and (kindof) Descartes. Descartes wasn't really a skeptic, but he started one of his books (the one we looked at -- Meditations) by first trying to doubt everything. Well, if you're trying to imagine a scenereo where what you see isn't really real, you can easily imagine a Matrix type scenereo. In the same way Descartes (initially) said we can't tell whether the reality we perceive is real of if it's some sort of dream. Of course, I was dissappointed when I tried to mention this, and found that most people hadn't ever seen the Matrix. So no real discussion ever came about, but I think it helped me a little bit. (and that's all the really counts, because no one else exists, right?:P )
OTOH, I don't know how you could make a whole course out of the movie...
Yes, and yes. However, to your last question, no, because science is a type of religion. Religions seek to find answers to life's questions. Most religions go about this by divine inspiration, but there are other ways. Scientists try to answer lifes questions through experiments. Science and religion have traditionally been considered opposites, but in reality, they have the same goals. For example, creation vs evolution: they try to both explain how we (humans) came to be here, but from completely different angles.
However, the types of questions that scientists typically don't ask are the ethical ones. Science gathers knowledge, but doesn't say what to do with that knowledge. That is the real problem with the genetic research. The information is not bad, but it could be misused.
Here's a computer example: connecting all our computers together in one giant network wasn't a bad idea, in fact, it had a lot of potential for good (like/.). However, there are some people who misuse the Internet to crack other people's boxes and mess stuff up. There is no strong ethical code of conduct for Internet users, and that still remains a problem.
So what's the answer? I don't know. Religion has provided mankind with ethical guidance (of some sort) for centuries. But with the quick pace of technology, it seems to be having trouble keeping up. We all know murder is wrong (almost every major religion precludes it in most circumstances), but how many religions say that cracking is wrong? How many say creating a new species is wrong?
Hopefully, everything will work out for the best. In fact, I have a lot of faith that eventually, things will be better. But I don't know if that will be in 10 or 100 or 1000 years. We may never get to see the better world, but it will come (unless, of course, we completely destroy ourselves in the process)
OK, here's my view (I hope I'm not rehashing too much from other people)...
The problem with wiretapping, as I see it, is one of responsibility. In the real world, if the police want to search your home, they have to convince a judge that there's at least some reason to do so. Fair enough. "We want to search John's house because this Frank says John is selling drugs in there". So the police get their warrent and look around. Whether or not John is committing a crime (selling drugs), he KNOWS he's being searched and can see the warrent.
Now, with wiretapping, it's different. The police just want to listen in to what John is saying to his friends. But John doesn't know he's being searched. He has no reason to suspect he's being searched (especially if he hasn't committed a crime). If he doesn't even know he's being searched, how can he verify if a warrent has even been issued?
This is the fundamental problem with wiretapping. If the police show up at your door and ask to search your house and don't have a warrent, you can tell them to go away. You can refuse their request to search. But with wiretapping, you can't refuse because they never even ask (assuming they don't really have a warrent). Now I don't know exactly what sort of safeguards against unwarrented wiretaps there are, but I can imagine there are ways around them if someone wanted to (i.e. for personal gain).
I don't have much issue with warrented wiretaps, because they ARE WARRENTED. Some judge somewhere is convinced that there's at least some good reason to tap your phone. I assume the warrents also specify things like for how long the tap can go on and what sort of data can be gathered. But it's the potential for abuse that I take issue with. Who will stop the abusers? With real-world searches, it's the one being searched (and his/her attorney). But in wiretapping, by definition, the one being searched doesn't know and cannot prevent an illegal wiretap. Depending on the honesty and integrety of law enforcement agencies, though 99% of the time is a good bet, is not good 100% of the time. It's that last 1% that worries me.
I was browsing the site earlier and it got slow and then stopped working. A tracert gets to the firewall (firewall.maxware.no), but nothing after that. Too bad, since I was even thinking about registering, too...
I'll have to remember to check back some other time.
I would have to agree. Several things make it good:
1) Intellisense. It may not be perfect (or even work all the time), but it sure helps you to save time if you can't remember what exactly the name of that function was or what order it's parameters went in.
2) Edit and continue. REALLY COOL. This is something I miss when I'm using other languages (except the rare occasion when I'm back in VB:)
3) MSDN. This is a really great help system. Lots of documentation. It's also relatively clean -- well formatted and not hard to read. The online version (msdn.microsoft.com) is also very nice.
4) Remote debugging. Answers the problem: "It works fine on MY machine -- why doesn't it work on YOUR machine?" Granted, you only really get to use this every once in a while, but I still find it to be a really cool feature.
Now I know that Linux has some great dev tools too, but being (relatively) new to Linux, I don't know them. Personally, I find that VC++ is a great tool for (at minimum) those features listed above.
Some things I've noticed while looking around their site: 1) Their primary purpose is to make money (and to "have fun"). I don't know if I'd want to go to a moon base made by someone wanting solely to make money. I wouldn't put it past some managers (who will stay safely on Earth) to cut corners somewhere. And something like that would be disasterous. Their official policy:
To keep costs under control, the spacecraft are built using commercial aircraft standards and procedures.
I don't know if that's good or bad. Are aircraft standards good enough for spacecraft? A spacecraft can't just land somewhere if something goes wrong. OTOH, most all airplane flights have no problems (except maybe delays at airports).
2) Having a lunar colony created by a corporation is not too far fetched. The first European colonies in America were funded by corporations. Unfortunately, the first English colony, Roanoke, was a miserable failure -- everyone was gone (presumed dead) a few years after they arrived. Jamestown (the second attempt) also had a bad record with many people dying the first winter.
3) The lunar colony won't succeed until people have a good reason to leave Earth (i.e. escape a big brother government). Right now, I don't think we have that sort of intolerable situation.
Overall, I think it's a good idea (in principle). One must be wary and not but one's complete trust in this particular company until they prove themselves.
How much did the distributor pay for the license of Windows he was selling to the customer? Probably not the full retail price of Windows that a consumer would pay off the shelf. Not being in the OEM business, I don't know what these prices are myself, but I imagine they're much less than the retail price. Like it or not, PC prices would NOT go down that much (they'd go down some, though) without all the bundled software (there are of course exceptions like bundling Office).
Along those same lines -- what's to stop those porn sites from calling themselves "educational"? Their high moral quality?
The sites could even make an argument that they are "educational" -- children would learn all sorts of things there. Not good things, but they'd still learn.
So now if we have porn sites calling themselves "educational", no only will they not be blocked, they'll be explicitly let into the schools! So much for protecting our children.
When will people realize that information is neither good nor bad -- it's what we do with it that counts. Instructions on how to build a nuculear bomb are morally netural; building one and exploding it in a city is morally wrong.
Living in ignorance is not a solution -- it's a problem.
I definitely agree. I might even be willing (God forbid) to use something like MSN if it was free. Probably not just on principle, though.:) But lots of other people wouldn't care.
Free is a powerful force. I'm using a "free" ISP right now (for the summer until I get back to Ethernet at college:) called NetZero. I can't complain too much, because it's completely free. I just have to ignore some ads. Easy enough. I wouldn't be surprised if these things undercut local ISPs and Linux (it only works in Windows becaues of the ad window) more than MSN would. Even MSN wouldn't be completely free (you'd have to sign up to buy stuff from MS according to the article).
So, a company who (in theory) doesn't really card that much about who wins the OS wars, is actually promoting Windows. They really don't have much of a stake in Windows, but they're promoting it, nonetheless. It those companies that are innocently promoting Windows over alternatives like Linux that will really hurt Linux.
I don't have a copy of Netscape here (I'm at work), so I can't confirm this, but in looking at the source code I would suspect that Netscape is dying in the function "done()" at line 89. That function tries to access the object "Windows" which seems to be a DIV declared on line 96. This function is being executed from the "onload" attribute of the BODY tag on line 55.
It seems that netscape is trying to execute this function before loading the DIV, while IE (and Mozilla) has either loaded it already or scanned the file to find that object.
As for what is correct in this situation, it would have to depend on when the "onload" function should be called -- before the page is fully loaded or after. IMHO, I'd probably have to say that IE and Mozilla are probably doing it right (no error vs. error).
I don't know why there is a spacing problem in Netscape (but I wouldn't be too surprised if it's intentional). Anybody know if Netscape or IE is interpreting the HTML "wrong" (please don't define "right" as what netscape does -- define it as you'd expect a browser to behave)?
When connecting an older style, "AT" power supply to a motherboard, the two-part power connector offers a marvellous opportunity for destruction. Make sure at all costs to avoid the plug configuration shown below. This configuration, with the black wires towards the centre, will cause the computer to work perfectly. Reversing the two plugs so that the red wires are towards the centre will, gratifyingly, destroy the motherboard.
If only I had know that when I was putting together my new Linux box:) Fortunately, there was no damage, the computer just wouldn't turn on. All I can say is that someone wasn't thinking when they made it so you can switch the two conectors...
Measuring by lines of code is dumb. Depending on your style, you could end up with hundreds of lines difference for the same program. And besides, more lines of code isn't necessarily good -- it could just be inefficient. We don't grade surgeons on the number of incisions they make do we? And we don't grade painters based on the number of paintings they paint. Number isn't everything; quality is much more important.
What kind of moron runs a macro-laced Micro$oft file from someone they don't know? Anyone who does that deserves what they get.
Except everyone who got this Melissa virus got it from someone they DID know. Fortunately, all I've heard about the virus came from news sites (no first-hand knowledge), but it seems that the message is designed to fool the recipiant into opening the document. If you didn't know about the virus, you'll just think some friend of yours sent you something important, and you'll probably open it. Chances are that you'll ignore Word's warning about a possible macro virus, and run it anyway. Once you do that, it's all over -- the virus has spread to all your friends. Melissa spread so easily because it seemed to come from a trusted source, not becaue everyone who got it and spread it was a moron.
Slashdot Mirror
My biggest question is how they plan on stopping abuse of their system. The program in principle seems like a relatively good idea (it's basically no different from a student telling a teacher that he/she thinks something is wrong with another student). However, there is a lot of room for abuse for any number of reasons. Mayber student A is mad at student B, so A turns B in by making up stuff. Or maybe A just wants to have a little fun. Who knows. But it ends up wasting lots of time and money and can be very embarassing for student B. All this without a way to track student A down.
:)
So I think that perhaps the degree of anonymity should be restricted. Student A can be anonymous to the school unless it turns out to be a bad call, and then the school can find out who it was and punish the offender, or somthing like that.
My other question is how low key is this operation? When a (assumably legitamite) call is received, do they only tell the school, first try the parents and then maybe the school? I would hope that they _never_ intentionally call the media over something like this, but how would they prevent leaks by operators? Is that even possible? How secure is their database of calls?
(I guess this turned out to be more than 2 questions
Yes... the number of CD's is large. However, it takes so long to go from one cd to the next (at least the first one -- I haven't had time to get past it :) I wonder if there are so many CD's just to discourage burning them...
I think a text-to-speech engine might work, if it was good. That would save space, and be easy to use. Of course, if it was crappy, it wouldn't work.
I just think it was disappointing to see so much effort put into the cut scenes and the fighting module (both are very good graphically) and so seemingly little effort (comparitively) put into the rest of the game.
In this case the PlayStation has an inherant advantage over the PC because Final Fantasy was written for the Playstation, and ported to the PC (almost as an after thought). As a result, the controls are hard to use and doesn't seem to take full advantage of your system (mouse, other 90 keys, etc).
The one thing that really disappoints me in FF8 is the lack of voices. I'll probably get flamed on this, but I was watching my roommate play a game called Monkey Island 3 (or something like that) where the character walked around and talked to people to solve certain puzzles. In this game, the characters actually had voices, instead of reading what they say on the screen. I think it made the game much more fun to play (and watch).
I think because they were trying to affect the more traditional culture -- the culture which reacts to things like protests. And they got to inform some "ordinary" people, who probably would have never heard about the DMCA otherwise.
It would be neat to do a more distributed protest system -- maybe on a certain day LUGs all over the country protest at their individual cities/colleges/whatever. It seems that might have more of an effect on the general population than one protest in DC. Especially if local news picks up the story.
OK, I know this probably won't be a very popular opinion, but really, a gaping security hole? ActiveX controls are not any more of a security hole than any other executable. That said, you should definitely be wary before downloading and running any ActiveX control, just like you're wary of downloading and running programs. On a Windows 95/98 machine, both can cause a lot of problems (NT is a little more secure, but I'm sure there are ways to mess with it too).
But these security problems are not inherent to ActiveX, and ActiveX is not specifically designed with poor security. ActiveX is a set of COM interfaces that a particular library must implement. Personally, I think COM and interfaces are an excellent idea (in and of themselves -- I'm not refering to a sepecific implementation). COM allows programmers to write libraries that perform a service. And if someone wants to implement that service in a different way, they are free to do so -- they just have to implement the same interface. And because of GUIDs, it's completely distributed -- there's no central authority.
The only thing that COM (and ActiveX) doesn't address is untrusted components. That is a shortcoming, but until that's fixed, it's up to the user to trust or not trust the components that he/she is putting on his/her system.
GoHip is the untrusted source in this article, not COM.
Assuming your switchbox doesn't alter the signal, I don't see any reason why a signal encrypted at the card and decrypted at the monitor would suffer from the use of a switchbox
:)
I don't think it would have a problem, until I try to switch to a different computer. There would have to be an authentication process and a key switch, and the monitor may not know to do that. So basically, I'll be avoiding anything like this for a long time to come. If enough people do the same, this will go the way of DIVX.
How soon until they start "protecting" our keyboard connections? You know, so we don't type anything that's copy protected?
My question is why do this at all? What's the point? Make people by all new monitors? Prevent people from tapping your video cable?
I, for one, have this neat little switch, which allows me to have 1 monitor on 3 computers. Will this new encryption thing prevent this in the future?
I guess they mightbe worried about people hooking their VCRs up to video stream and recording their DVDs, or something. It doesn't seem like it's worth trying to break something that already works. (can you imagine all the tech support problems something like this will generate?)
Can anyone think of a useful application of this sort of thing?
When I read it, I noticed that Wired asked "Is it true that the number of women in computer science is actually declining?" and Borg evaded the question: "There is a drop in percentage of women getting bachelor degrees in computer science and engineering." [emphasis added]
In my experience as a CS major, I don't see the number of women in CS dropping, but that the number of men in CS increasing faster than the number of women. Now, her point is still valid (there are less women in CS relatively than men), but the fact that she manipulated (or seemed to manipulate) the facts by her presentation of them makes her argument less desirable.
I do agree with most of what she's saying -- there are less females in CS, and that is a Bad Thing. However, I don't think she realizes that colleges can only educate X number of people and that if more women are admitted, less men are (I take this from her comment about how there wouldn't be a job shortage in IT if women had gone into CS as much as men did).
I also worry about to many statistics. I have a female CS friend who doesn't want to be in CS anymore (just like there are lots of people in lots of majors who change after a year or so -- they decide they don't like it). Well, she's having a hard time switching, because of resistance to loosing a female from the CS dept. Now, is this truely what we want? Everyone should be able to choose to study CS or not. Statistics should not play a part in it.
hehe... I find it interesting that Konqueror was given such rave reviews, even though it is an *integrated* browser. I seem to recall something about a company making an integrated browser and a whole bunch of people upset by it :)
Just kidding! I actually like IE, and if Konqueror is as good as IE than I'd probably start using it (of course, then I'd have to switch to KDE).
Of course, I'm kindof in a good mood: quakefest starts today -- lots of fun!
I think this is one of the big philosophical parts of the movie. I took an intro to philosophy course last semester, and found myself thinking about the matrix when we studied some skeptics, like Hume and (kindof) Descartes. Descartes wasn't really a skeptic, but he started one of his books (the one we looked at -- Meditations) by first trying to doubt everything. Well, if you're trying to imagine a scenereo where what you see isn't really real, you can easily imagine a Matrix type scenereo. In the same way Descartes (initially) said we can't tell whether the reality we perceive is real of if it's some sort of dream. :P )
Of course, I was dissappointed when I tried to mention this, and found that most people hadn't ever seen the Matrix. So no real discussion ever came about, but I think it helped me a little bit. (and that's all the really counts, because no one else exists, right?
OTOH, I don't know how you could make a whole course out of the movie...
Yes, and yes. However, to your last question, no, because science is a type of religion. Religions seek to find answers to life's questions. Most religions go about this by divine inspiration, but there are other ways. Scientists try to answer lifes questions through experiments. Science and religion have traditionally been considered opposites, but in reality, they have the same goals. For example, creation vs evolution: they try to both explain how we (humans) came to be here, but from completely different angles.
/.). However, there are some people who misuse the Internet to crack other people's boxes and mess stuff up. There is no strong ethical code of conduct for Internet users, and that still remains a problem.
However, the types of questions that scientists typically don't ask are the ethical ones. Science gathers knowledge, but doesn't say what to do with that knowledge. That is the real problem with the genetic research. The information is not bad, but it could be misused.
Here's a computer example: connecting all our computers together in one giant network wasn't a bad idea, in fact, it had a lot of potential for good (like
So what's the answer? I don't know. Religion has provided mankind with ethical guidance (of some sort) for centuries. But with the quick pace of technology, it seems to be having trouble keeping up. We all know murder is wrong (almost every major religion precludes it in most circumstances), but how many religions say that cracking is wrong? How many say creating a new species is wrong?
Hopefully, everything will work out for the best. In fact, I have a lot of faith that eventually, things will be better. But I don't know if that will be in 10 or 100 or 1000 years. We may never get to see the better world, but it will come (unless, of course, we completely destroy ourselves in the process)
OK, here's my view (I hope I'm not rehashing too much from other people)...
The problem with wiretapping, as I see it, is one of responsibility. In the real world, if the police want to search your home, they have to convince a judge that there's at least some reason to do so. Fair enough. "We want to search John's house because this Frank says John is selling drugs in there". So the police get their warrent and look around. Whether or not John is committing a crime (selling drugs), he KNOWS he's being searched and can see the warrent.
Now, with wiretapping, it's different. The police just want to listen in to what John is saying to his friends. But John doesn't know he's being searched. He has no reason to suspect he's being searched (especially if he hasn't committed a crime). If he doesn't even know he's being searched, how can he verify if a warrent has even been issued?
This is the fundamental problem with wiretapping. If the police show up at your door and ask to search your house and don't have a warrent, you can tell them to go away. You can refuse their request to search. But with wiretapping, you can't refuse because they never even ask (assuming they don't really have a warrent). Now I don't know exactly what sort of safeguards against unwarrented wiretaps there are, but I can imagine there are ways around them if someone wanted to (i.e. for personal gain).
I don't have much issue with warrented wiretaps, because they ARE WARRENTED. Some judge somewhere is convinced that there's at least some good reason to tap your phone. I assume the warrents also specify things like for how long the tap can go on and what sort of data can be gathered. But it's the potential for abuse that I take issue with. Who will stop the abusers? With real-world searches, it's the one being searched (and his/her attorney). But in wiretapping, by definition, the one being searched doesn't know and cannot prevent an illegal wiretap. Depending on the honesty and integrety of law enforcement agencies, though 99% of the time is a good bet, is not good 100% of the time. It's that last 1% that worries me.
I was browsing the site earlier and it got slow and then stopped working. A tracert gets to the firewall (firewall.maxware.no), but nothing after that. Too bad, since I was even thinking about registering, too...
I'll have to remember to check back some other time.
I would have to agree. Several things make it good:
:)
1) Intellisense. It may not be perfect (or even work all the time), but it sure helps you to save time if you can't remember what exactly the name of that function was or what order it's parameters went in.
2) Edit and continue. REALLY COOL. This is something I miss when I'm using other languages (except the rare occasion when I'm back in VB
3) MSDN. This is a really great help system. Lots of documentation. It's also relatively clean -- well formatted and not hard to read. The online version (msdn.microsoft.com) is also very nice.
4) Remote debugging. Answers the problem: "It works fine on MY machine -- why doesn't it work on YOUR machine?" Granted, you only really get to use this every once in a while, but I still find it to be a really cool feature.
Now I know that Linux has some great dev tools too, but being (relatively) new to Linux, I don't know them.
Personally, I find that VC++ is a great tool for (at minimum) those features listed above.
Some things I've noticed while looking around their site:
1) Their primary purpose is to make money (and to "have fun"). I don't know if I'd want to go to a moon base made by someone wanting solely to make money. I wouldn't put it past some managers (who will stay safely on Earth) to cut corners somewhere. And something like that would be disasterous. Their official policy:
To keep costs under control, the spacecraft are built using commercial aircraft standards and procedures.
I don't know if that's good or bad. Are aircraft standards good enough for spacecraft? A spacecraft can't just land somewhere if something goes wrong. OTOH, most all airplane flights have no problems (except maybe delays at airports).
2) Having a lunar colony created by a corporation is not too far fetched. The first European colonies in America were funded by corporations. Unfortunately, the first English colony, Roanoke, was a miserable failure -- everyone was gone (presumed dead) a few years after they arrived. Jamestown (the second attempt) also had a bad record with many people dying the first winter.
3) The lunar colony won't succeed until people have a good reason to leave Earth (i.e. escape a big brother government). Right now, I don't think we have that sort of intolerable situation.
Overall, I think it's a good idea (in principle). One must be wary and not but one's complete trust in this particular company until they prove themselves.
How much did the distributor pay for the license of Windows he was selling to the customer? Probably not the full retail price of Windows that a consumer would pay off the shelf. Not being in the OEM business, I don't know what these prices are myself, but I imagine they're much less than the retail price. Like it or not, PC prices would NOT go down that much (they'd go down some, though) without all the bundled software (there are of course exceptions like bundling Office).
Along those same lines -- what's to stop those porn sites from calling themselves "educational"? Their high moral quality?
The sites could even make an argument that they are "educational" -- children would learn all sorts of things there. Not good things, but they'd still learn.
So now if we have porn sites calling themselves "educational", no only will they not be blocked, they'll be explicitly let into the schools! So much for protecting our children.
When will people realize that information is neither good nor bad -- it's what we do with it that counts. Instructions on how to build a nuculear bomb are morally netural; building one and exploding it in a city is morally wrong.
Living in ignorance is not a solution -- it's a problem.
I heard about this on NPR last night. There's a 4 1/2 minute RealAudio recording at: /19990901.atc.16.ram
http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/atc
I definitely agree. I might even be willing (God forbid) to use something like MSN if it was free. Probably not just on principle, though. :) But lots of other people wouldn't care.
Free is a powerful force. I'm using a "free" ISP right now (for the summer until I get back to Ethernet at college :) called NetZero. I can't complain too much, because it's completely free. I just have to ignore some ads. Easy enough. I wouldn't be surprised if these things undercut local ISPs and Linux (it only works in Windows becaues of the ad window) more than MSN would. Even MSN wouldn't be completely free (you'd have to sign up to buy stuff from MS according to the article).
So, a company who (in theory) doesn't really card that much about who wins the OS wars, is actually promoting Windows. They really don't have much of a stake in Windows, but they're promoting it, nonetheless. It those companies that are innocently promoting Windows over alternatives like Linux that will really hurt Linux.
I don't have a copy of Netscape here (I'm at work), so I can't confirm this, but in looking at the source code I would suspect that Netscape is dying in the function "done()" at line 89. That function tries to access the object "Windows" which seems to be a DIV declared on line 96. This function is being executed from the "onload" attribute of the BODY tag on line 55.
It seems that netscape is trying to execute this function before loading the DIV, while IE (and Mozilla) has either loaded it already or scanned the file to find that object.
As for what is correct in this situation, it would have to depend on when the "onload" function should be called -- before the page is fully loaded or after. IMHO, I'd probably have to say that IE and Mozilla are probably doing it right (no error vs. error).
I don't know why there is a spacing problem in Netscape (but I wouldn't be too surprised if it's intentional). Anybody know if Netscape or IE is interpreting the HTML "wrong" (please don't define "right" as what netscape does -- define it as you'd expect a browser to behave)?
Being able to think and work in hexadecimal would be neat, but I think it would take some getting used to doing fractions and decimals in hex.
This kind of struck home (among other things :)
:) Fortunately, there was no damage, the computer just wouldn't turn on. All I can say is that someone wasn't thinking when they made it so you can switch the two conectors...
When connecting an older style, "AT" power supply to a motherboard, the two-part power connector offers a marvellous opportunity for destruction. Make sure at all costs to avoid the plug configuration shown below.
This configuration, with the black wires towards the centre, will cause the computer to work perfectly. Reversing the two plugs so that the red wires are towards the centre will, gratifyingly, destroy the motherboard.
If only I had know that when I was putting together my new Linux box
Measuring by lines of code is dumb. Depending on your style, you could end up with hundreds of lines difference for the same program. And besides, more lines of code isn't necessarily good -- it could just be inefficient. We don't grade surgeons on the number of incisions they make do we? And we don't grade painters based on the number of paintings they paint. Number isn't everything; quality is much more important.
What kind of moron runs a macro-laced Micro$oft file from someone they don't know? Anyone who does that deserves what they get.
Except everyone who got this Melissa virus got it from someone they DID know. Fortunately, all I've heard about the virus came from news sites (no first-hand knowledge), but it seems that the message is designed to fool the recipiant into opening the document. If you didn't know about the virus, you'll just think some friend of yours sent you something important, and you'll probably open it. Chances are that you'll ignore Word's warning about a possible macro virus, and run it anyway. Once you do that, it's all over -- the virus has spread to all your friends. Melissa spread so easily because it seemed to come from a trusted source, not becaue everyone who got it and spread it was a moron.