The analogy isn't as bad as you think. Bill had very rich parents and had resources to incredibly computing resources at a young age. Plus he was pretty good at picking friends. Also, quite frankly, I don't think even Bill could have guessed what would have happened when he got that contract from IBM...you could call it a huge blunder on IBM's part, but I would say, like the rest of Bill's life, it's just a matter of dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time, not being afraid to screw people left and right, and having things handed to him. Not unlike a spoiled rich kid, actually.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know it was so popular (last I heard it was pretty unstable). But I still haven't got an answer to my question. So far we've found out that: - KDE, which is not a window manager, has something like the start button - Gnome, which is not a window manager, has something like the start button - fvmw has something like the start button Again: is there a window manager other than fvwm that has something like the start button?
The pop-up windows popped up because: (a) you're stupid enough to enable Javascript or any scripting of any kind (though, of course, ads are not limited to Javascript); (b) you asked your browser to specifically request those ads to be downloaded from a server; (c) you were looking at sites targetted towards adults with your eight year-old daughter; (d) all of the above. The point is, pornographers do not have the technical ability to throw pornographic pictures into a crowd as you suggested. The HTTP protocol ensures this. A better comparison would be opening a book in the library which appeared to be non-pornographic, but when you opened it, you were surprised to find that, indeed, it was pornographic (do libraries even carry pornographic books? oh well). Of course the world wide web does have some differences, those being mainly: - on a site-by-site (or book-by-book) basis, there is more pr0n on the web than there is in your library (unless you have a very strange librarian) - pr0n sites on the web generate revenue primarily (or at least secondarily) via click-throughs. There is no "leaf-through" revenue for book authors. This means that pr0n site authors have a nasty tendency to advertise falsley
But that's drifting a bit off topic. Creating a.porn TLD is a fine idea, but forcing people to use it is not because: - it would have to become international law (ha haha ha...ya, right) - it would have to be enforced internationally (Ha HAH AHAHAH...ya, right) - it would force people to define "pornography" or "indecedent material". This would be *extremely* difficult to do locally, and I dare say impossible to do internationally (e.g. there are many cultures who consider the face to be sexy or indecent, and some who treat the female breasts just like any other body part, such as your arm)
Actually the only window manager I've seen that has something similar to the start button is fvwm95 (and it's a bit dated now I think). kwm might have one too; I'm not sure.
Also, I can't think of any applications I run that are terribly similar to Microsoft's UI, with the exception of Abiword, and I suppose you could say that they copied Wordperfect and not Microsoft. I don't have anything against Microsoft's UI, but there are better ones, such as NeXT and MacOS, which you mentioned.
Indeed. They seemed to be hoping that her breasts would carry her (err, not literally). Admittedly her face does have a likeness to the original Lara as well, but I think they made a goof picking someone so immature (I don't think Lara is 16 years old).
Err actually both are not necessarily true. It is not difficult to find a situation where (a) the engine speed will decrease or remain constant; and (b) the speed of the car will decrease or remain constant when you floor the gas pedal (e.g. while going up a steep hill with a small engine or heavy load).
The name "accelerator" is a bit confusing because it implies that it will cause your car to accelerate. More often than not, it's used to keep your car at a constant speed, and oftentimes it will be used to slow the car down. Most people wisely don't call it an "accelerator".
Rather, most people call it a "gas pedal" and likewise use phrases like "giving it some gas" and "laying off the gas". This to me shows that they have a very good understanding of what the pedal does: it allows more gasoline into the fuel mixture. Also, it would seem that most people will not expect the gas pedal to cause any sort of positive acceleration when going up a steep hill (for example), so I'd say your assumption that most people just expect it to speed up the car is false. Also, your assumption that it doesn't matter would also seem to be false, otherwise extreme confusion would ensue when people would drive in hilly or mountainous parts.
This may seem off-topic, but it's not. Would it be too much to ask to give the populous at large the benefit of the doubt? Most people know what's going on with most things, and they don't need it to be overly dumbed down. The worst case of this is retarded software companies who make programs that mimic real-life devices in order to presumably make it "easier to use" (examples are CD players which look like real CD players, chat programs which look like telephones, e-mail programs which make analogies to snail mail protocols). Oftentimes, the program will be come out extremely crippled, and pretty much inferior in every way to its competitors. Also, it come out being a little bit condescending, which I'm sure can't help its sales. People know that an increase in gas in the fuel mixture in their car causes an increase in power because they've experienced it, not because there's a sticker that says "speed" or any such nonsense pasted on to it.
Spam in comments are bad enough, but spam within the actual story description is kind of annoying. The product in question doesn't even have anything to do with the story whatsoever. Guess what, probably every MTA in existence can use RBL, and most of them do it by default.
No offence, but you must be pretty sad if you consider "typing in your name" to be equivalent to "programming in your favourite language". Or, wait a second, could you be talking out of your ass without actually reading the original post?
I don't think you know what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with the kernel whatsoever, unless you consider the 0.3ms gain from accessing/usr as opposed to/usr/local to be a criterion for filesystem layout standards.
IINM, the Linux console already does Unicode (more or less). Each Unicode character set has 65536 characters, whereas VGA text mode can only have a 512 character charset, so there is some mapping that goes on (hence the Linux charmaps).
Ehh I don't know that you could make it *that* much worse than what we've seen so far. These email worms aren't quite as effective as spreading, I guess, since there are enough non-idiots to stop it eventually. Something like the Morrison worm (except actually carrying a decent payload) would be ideal. So there are two problems to worry about: the payload, and the method of propagation.
As for the payload, there's not a lot you can do (that's interesting) without *a lot* of patience. I suppose you could make a worm which reformats the hard drive, etc., which would force everyone to reinstall and dig out the back-ups. Not really all that more exciting than the ILOVEYOU worm. In order to do some *real* data damage, one would have to destroy back-ups, but those are usually stored off-site (e.g. not even in the same room as a computer), so that would make it pretty difficult. Plus, it wouldn't really be all *that* interesting.
What would be interesting is to get it to spawn a virus which would "play tricks" on you. You send an e-mail to your boss, and the virus randomly and subtly changes your message into something damaging. Or it could discreetly yet "sloppily" download child pr0n in order to get you arrested. It could discreetly send "realistic" emails to your friends and family, etc. in order to ruin your live. Combine that with the power of a good worm (so that it propagates on its own) and you would have some very interesting results. Trying to get any of these to work *well* though (so that your tampered e-mails to your boss are actually believable) would take an incredible amount of work and patience.
As for the method of propagation, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to get a good worm going. The Morrison worm was a wake-up call of sorts, and now almost all Unices have switched to (more or less) secure daemons. Plus the Unix market is so fragmented that a worm wouldn't get very far (e.g. you might be able to make a worm that gets through old Solaris boxes all right, but not on BSD boxes). Except through poorly configured web servers (and things like Back Orifice, which would be pretty difficult to put into a worm), it's hard to run arbitrary code remotely on a Windows box. DOSes are pretty common, but that doesn't do much good for a worm. Basically what you're left with on the Windows/MacOS/... side of things are these "worms" that require intervention by stupid computer users. Melissa and ILOVEYOU have shown us that there is quite a considerable number of idiots out there, but not quite enough I don't think.
If the worm were subtle, though, it might work a little bit better. Instead of sending out 50 e-mails immediately, trashing your hard drive, etc., let it stay dormant for a while. At random intervals (every week or so), let it change one of your emails so that it attaches "oh yes and here's document X which I think you should look at" along with a trojaned.doc file (or maybe even a.vbs? hee hee). The trojaned.doc would then drop a virus which would play mind games with you (as mentioned earlier), as well as add itself to your autoexec.bat (or something) so that it can e-mail some of your friends at a later date. The key (ho ho) is to be pretty low key. Symantec and McAfee and what not might pick up on it after a while, but it takes some *serious* damage in order for it to make the news. Once someone commits suicide because of the mind-games the virus/worm is playing, then it might make it on CNN or maybe even 20/20 or something.
Anyway it's not entirely clear as to whether this approach would to more damage than the "explosion" kind of damage that Melissa, ILOVEYOU and the Morisson worm did. Basically all they did is waste some man-hours and cause some headaches for sysadmins, but nothing really interesting/evil.
Well they could just burn it to CD or whatever Sega is using now (I think it's CD). Certainly you can burn a CD for under $10. Using an entire CD for a single Genesis game might be a bit overboard, but oh well:).
This sounds more like DiVX than a "cool step" to me. Why don't they just sell you the game for $10 and let you be happy? Fewer problems for you, fewer problems for them, fewer problems for everyone and everyone is happy.
OK first the off-topic part: your ideas on treating child molestors and rapists is interesting, but honestly I can't remember the last time I'd heard such sweeping generalisations. Is it too much to ask that people who are disrupting society be judged on an individual basis instead of being treated as "molestors" or "rapists"? As far as I can tell, rapists look different from one another and, woah shit, they might even be different people.
As to the topic on-hand, judging people on the filenames they're interested in is extremely poor, especially in the shady world of pr0nography. It's not difficult to find pictures of (what appear to be) 20 year olds saved under filenames which contain "14" or "15" or what have you (presumably indicating their age). Likewise, it's not difficult to find "very questionable" material passed off (possibly accidentally) as adult. It's not impossible to believe that if someone were *really* into pr0n, they'd be willing to take their chances and get some of the supposedly pre-15 year old pr0n just because there are so many post-18 year olds in the mix.
If you've ever used *shudder* Alta Vista to search for anything (even something as banal as, say, garden hose), no doubt 70% of the hits will be pr0n sites. Many of them offer child pr0nography and are presumably just a bunch of banner ads with kiddie pr0n terminology scattered about. I'm doubtful that everyone going to one of those sites is sincerely interested in getting some kiddie pr0n.
Overall, their methodology is pretty weak and it seems as though they were just going for sensationalism.
I must admit I've fallen behind in terms of Java (the last time I touched it was over a year ago at school). The Micro Edition VM looks interesting, I must say. Of course it wouldn't be able to handle Java programs that use all those whiz-bang APIs, but those aren't very likely to be run on embedded systems anyway.
As for the C portability thing, I maintain that a C implementation having a bit of slack is a good thing. The C standard gives you lower bounds (which are very necessary), but allows the implementation to decide what's most efficient where. It's true that it does lead to a lot of errors, but putting more restrictions on data sizes seems a bit short-sighted; teaching proper coding techniques would be a better solution. I say it's short-sighted because it appears as though eventually whatever numbers Sun assigned to the data types is going to have to change. Plus, it makes things quite difficult for some embedded systems most likely (though I'm just talking out of my ass on this one). The common example would be the Cray (or at least one of the Crays), in which the char, short, int and long (the long *could* be 64; I'm not sure) are all 32 bits in size. This is perfectly fine in C, but it seems like it could lead to performance problems in Java while trying to "emulate" unnatural integer sizes. It seems as though 128 bit integers are going to hit us eventually, too. If Java has their integer sizes set in stone, that could, again, lead to performance problems (not to mention the difficulty in implementing the VM and/or library).
Anyway I'm still skeptical about Java. Other than last year when I was taking Java at school (and apart from my web browsers, I guess), I've never had a Java implementation installed, mainly because I've never needed it. I'd like to say that Sun should have just released native compilers from the start, but I guess I could be proven wrong...Java could someday take over the world in an orgy of portability and it would be extremely cool. Right now source compatibility still looks more attractive than binary compatibility. If you don't have access to the source, well, there's always emulation, and Java VMs are essentially emulation anyway, right? Actually to be completely honest, I'm glad for Java because there is a pretty good Sokoban applet. If it weren't for the Java in my web-browser, I would have had to install Gnome in order to play one of the Gnome Sokoban games (which probably wouldn't be as good anyway).
Your example of Java vs C is a poor one. If your code depends on a certain data type (e.g. int) being of a certain size, it is wrong. It is just plain wrong. There has never been and there never will be a situation where assuming the size of any data type is considered acceptable. Problems do arise when sending data across a network or disk, but these are easily overcome, especially when used in conjunction with an already written library. Even in this situation though, where problems with alignment, data type sizes, and endianness are large, there is never reason to assume anything. The problem can be overcome, and has been overcome uncountable times, using ISO C.
What Java does offer that C doesn't (besides garbage collection, dynamic type checking, syntactic sugar, etc.) is a standard graphics/toolkit library. The myriad of C graphics/toolkit libraries is annoying, and swing and awt and whatever else Java has simplifies that greatly. This has its drawback, though.
Relatively speaking, Java is horridly unportable. There are Java implementations for what, maybe a dozen platforms? Probably less. The added standards of pixel graphics capabilities make it more difficult to create new implementations, too. Try making a Java implementation for the PDP-8 or the ENIAC. It might not even be possible. The example may seem trivial, but this means that it would be pretty difficult to run a Java program using awt in an embedded system without a screen or any input devices whatsoever.
Java is fine for some things (or so I'm told), but it cannot be considered portable when considered to the majority of languages out there. C is arguably the most portable language on the planet, and it will probably remain that way for many decades. If there are any portability problems with a C program it is because the code is either wrong, or it is not standard C. Usually it's a mixture of both, but case number one is alarmingly common. It pains me to see "size of int... 4" in configure scripts. There is no excuse for that.
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New technology models duzn't succeed if all dey offa' be betta', fasta' o' cheapa' alternatives t' de established amoset leaders. Dey gots'ta offa' benefits t' de usa' dat de old technology model could not deliva'. De PC wuz not betta', fasta' o' even cheapa' (on some pa'-usa' basis) dan de mini-clunka' uh de late '70s. But it dun did deliva' benefits t' its users dat miniclunkers could not.
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The bestest analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we crucify cars. Just asketh the question, "Wouldst thee crucify a gas-chariot with the hood welded shut? Nobody knows but Jesus." and we all answer an emphatic "Goddamn this." So asketh the follow-unto question, "Whatsoever doth thee know about modern internal-combustion engines?" and the answer for most of us is, "Not much."
Did you even bother reading JK's article? He wants Metallica to be compensated; he just doesn't think that their methods were good. I don't recall reading Jon ever saying "you should all rip off Metallica" or anything like that.
It's not hard to get a list of people who trade Metallica mp3s? OK then, just how would you suggest doing that? Just off the top of my head, the closest I could come up with is doing a search for 'metallica' and writing down everyone who had it available for trade. Unfortunately, according to my experience with Napster, it is just as likely for metallica_unforgiven.mp3 to be command.com renamed as it is for it to be an actual mp3. This means that one would have to download all the Metallica mp3s available to test them to see if they actually are Metallica mp3s -- quite a boring task when you're testing over 300000 people.
Just to expand on your "everyone fitting into Texas" idea:
assuming: - everyone were to live on one acre (approx. 4047 square metres) of land (like you suggested) - there are 6e9 people living on this planet
then we would require 2.4282e13 square metres of land. If we were to put this in a giant square (to simplify the math -- damn that pi), the square would need to be about 4.928e6 metres (or 4928 km) on each side. Considering that the earth is approximately 6371 km in radius, I find it unlikely that everyone could fit into Texas.
In fact, if we use the number 13e12 square metres as the total land mass of the Earth (though that number should probably be lower -- not many people would want to live in Antarctica), then the average amount of land per person is about 2167 square metres. If the average person were to live in a square (go to hell, pi!), then they would live in a square about 47 metres on each side. This is considerably larger than the average suburban house lot (phew), but I must say it's not very impressive. Personally I don't see the benefits of a larger population outweighing the costs. It seems like about 15 of the 6 billion people (okay, slight exaggeration) are living in poverty. If one were to 'average' out the quality of living, it would be extremely poor. But that's because we (or more accurately, our governments) are so dumb, you say! True, but I doubt increasing our population will move us into some sort of utopia, no matter how efficient our resource mangling.
You know the 1024-cylinder limit wasn't really *that* bad. You had to create one more partition than usual. I'm glad it's gone too, but I've never heard anyone really complain about it.
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The analogy isn't as bad as you think. Bill had very rich parents and had resources to incredibly computing resources at a young age. Plus he was pretty good at picking friends. Also, quite frankly, I don't think even Bill could have guessed what would have happened when he got that contract from IBM...you could call it a huge blunder on IBM's part, but I would say, like the rest of Bill's life, it's just a matter of dumb luck, being in the right place at the right time, not being afraid to screw people left and right, and having things handed to him. Not unlike a spoiled rich kid, actually.
Oh, sorry, I didn't know it was so popular (last I heard it was pretty unstable). But I still haven't got an answer to my question. So far we've found out that:
- KDE, which is not a window manager, has something like the start button
- Gnome, which is not a window manager, has something like the start button
- fvmw has something like the start button
Again: is there a window manager other than fvwm that has something like the start button?
The pop-up windows popped up because:
.porn TLD is a fine idea, but forcing people to use it is not because:
(a) you're stupid enough to enable Javascript or any scripting of any kind (though, of course, ads are not limited to Javascript);
(b) you asked your browser to specifically request those ads to be downloaded from a server;
(c) you were looking at sites targetted towards adults with your eight year-old daughter;
(d) all of the above.
The point is, pornographers do not have the technical ability to throw pornographic pictures into a crowd as you suggested. The HTTP protocol ensures this. A better comparison would be opening a book in the library which appeared to be non-pornographic, but when you opened it, you were surprised to find that, indeed, it was pornographic (do libraries even carry pornographic books? oh well). Of course the world wide web does have some differences, those being mainly:
- on a site-by-site (or book-by-book) basis, there is more pr0n on the web than there is in your library (unless you have a very strange librarian)
- pr0n sites on the web generate revenue primarily (or at least secondarily) via click-throughs. There is no "leaf-through" revenue for book authors. This means that pr0n site authors have a nasty tendency to advertise falsley
But that's drifting a bit off topic. Creating a
- it would have to become international law (ha haha ha...ya, right)
- it would have to be enforced internationally (Ha HAH AHAHAH...ya, right)
- it would force people to define "pornography" or "indecedent material". This would be *extremely* difficult to do locally, and I dare say impossible to do internationally (e.g. there are many cultures who consider the face to be sexy or indecent, and some who treat the female breasts just like any other body part, such as your arm)
You just listed a bunch of software that no one uses. Is fvwm really the only the window manager with something like the start button then?
Actually the only window manager I've seen that has something similar to the start button is fvwm95 (and it's a bit dated now I think). kwm might have one too; I'm not sure.
Also, I can't think of any applications I run that are terribly similar to Microsoft's UI, with the exception of Abiword, and I suppose you could say that they copied Wordperfect and not Microsoft. I don't have anything against Microsoft's UI, but there are better ones, such as NeXT and MacOS, which you mentioned.
Indeed. They seemed to be hoping that her breasts would carry her (err, not literally). Admittedly her face does have a likeness to the original Lara as well, but I think they made a goof picking someone so immature (I don't think Lara is 16 years old).
Err actually both are not necessarily true. It is not difficult to find a situation where (a) the engine speed will decrease or remain constant; and (b) the speed of the car will decrease or remain constant when you floor the gas pedal (e.g. while going up a steep hill with a small engine or heavy load).
The name "accelerator" is a bit confusing because it implies that it will cause your car to accelerate. More often than not, it's used to keep your car at a constant speed, and oftentimes it will be used to slow the car down. Most people wisely don't call it an "accelerator".
Rather, most people call it a "gas pedal" and likewise use phrases like "giving it some gas" and "laying off the gas". This to me shows that they have a very good understanding of what the pedal does: it allows more gasoline into the fuel mixture. Also, it would seem that most people will not expect the gas pedal to cause any sort of positive acceleration when going up a steep hill (for example), so I'd say your assumption that most people just expect it to speed up the car is false. Also, your assumption that it doesn't matter would also seem to be false, otherwise extreme confusion would ensue when people would drive in hilly or mountainous parts.
This may seem off-topic, but it's not. Would it be too much to ask to give the populous at large the benefit of the doubt? Most people know what's going on with most things, and they don't need it to be overly dumbed down. The worst case of this is retarded software companies who make programs that mimic real-life devices in order to presumably make it "easier to use" (examples are CD players which look like real CD players, chat programs which look like telephones, e-mail programs which make analogies to snail mail protocols). Oftentimes, the program will be come out extremely crippled, and pretty much inferior in every way to its competitors. Also, it come out being a little bit condescending, which I'm sure can't help its sales. People know that an increase in gas in the fuel mixture in their car causes an increase in power because they've experienced it, not because there's a sticker that says "speed" or any such nonsense pasted on to it.
Spam in comments are bad enough, but spam within the actual story description is kind of annoying. The product in question doesn't even have anything to do with the story whatsoever. Guess what, probably every MTA in existence can use RBL, and most of them do it by default.
I think "copyresponsibility" would be better than "copywrong". Who really cares, though?
No offence, but you must be pretty sad if you consider "typing in your name" to be equivalent to "programming in your favourite language". Or, wait a second, could you be talking out of your ass without actually reading the original post?
I don't think you know what you're talking about. This has nothing to do with the kernel whatsoever, unless you consider the 0.3ms gain from accessing /usr as opposed to /usr/local to be a criterion for filesystem layout standards.
IINM, the Linux console already does Unicode (more or less). Each Unicode character set has 65536 characters, whereas VGA text mode can only have a 512 character charset, so there is some mapping that goes on (hence the Linux charmaps).
You could probably just spend those 10 years learning Japanese. You'll undoubtedly end up a lot better than it will, too.
Ehh I don't know that you could make it *that* much worse than what we've seen so far. These email worms aren't quite as effective as spreading, I guess, since there are enough non-idiots to stop it eventually. Something like the Morrison worm (except actually carrying a decent payload) would be ideal. So there are two problems to worry about: the payload, and the method of propagation.
.doc file (or maybe even a .vbs? hee hee). The trojaned .doc would then drop a virus which would play mind games with you (as mentioned earlier), as well as add itself to your autoexec.bat (or something) so that it can e-mail some of your friends at a later date. The key (ho ho) is to be pretty low key. Symantec and McAfee and what not might pick up on it after a while, but it takes some *serious* damage in order for it to make the news. Once someone commits suicide because of the mind-games the virus/worm is playing, then it might make it on CNN or maybe even 20/20 or something.
As for the payload, there's not a lot you can do (that's interesting) without *a lot* of patience. I suppose you could make a worm which reformats the hard drive, etc., which would force everyone to reinstall and dig out the back-ups. Not really all that more exciting than the ILOVEYOU worm. In order to do some *real* data damage, one would have to destroy back-ups, but those are usually stored off-site (e.g. not even in the same room as a computer), so that would make it pretty difficult. Plus, it wouldn't really be all *that* interesting.
What would be interesting is to get it to spawn a virus which would "play tricks" on you. You send an e-mail to your boss, and the virus randomly and subtly changes your message into something damaging. Or it could discreetly yet "sloppily" download child pr0n in order to get you arrested. It could discreetly send "realistic" emails to your friends and family, etc. in order to ruin your live. Combine that with the power of a good worm (so that it propagates on its own) and you would have some very interesting results. Trying to get any of these to work *well* though (so that your tampered e-mails to your boss are actually believable) would take an incredible amount of work and patience.
As for the method of propagation, it seems like it's getting harder and harder to get a good worm going. The Morrison worm was a wake-up call of sorts, and now almost all Unices have switched to (more or less) secure daemons. Plus the Unix market is so fragmented that a worm wouldn't get very far (e.g. you might be able to make a worm that gets through old Solaris boxes all right, but not on BSD boxes). Except through poorly configured web servers (and things like Back Orifice, which would be pretty difficult to put into a worm), it's hard to run arbitrary code remotely on a Windows box. DOSes are pretty common, but that doesn't do much good for a worm. Basically what you're left with on the Windows/MacOS/... side of things are these "worms" that require intervention by stupid computer users. Melissa and ILOVEYOU have shown us that there is quite a considerable number of idiots out there, but not quite enough I don't think.
If the worm were subtle, though, it might work a little bit better. Instead of sending out 50 e-mails immediately, trashing your hard drive, etc., let it stay dormant for a while. At random intervals (every week or so), let it change one of your emails so that it attaches "oh yes and here's document X which I think you should look at" along with a trojaned
Anyway it's not entirely clear as to whether this approach would to more damage than the "explosion" kind of damage that Melissa, ILOVEYOU and the Morisson worm did. Basically all they did is waste some man-hours and cause some headaches for sysadmins, but nothing really interesting/evil.
Well they could just burn it to CD or whatever Sega is using now (I think it's CD). Certainly you can burn a CD for under $10. Using an entire CD for a single Genesis game might be a bit overboard, but oh well :).
This sounds more like DiVX than a "cool step" to me. Why don't they just sell you the game for $10 and let you be happy? Fewer problems for you, fewer problems for them, fewer problems for everyone and everyone is happy.
Oh please. I'm sure there isn't a man among us who doesn't know the inner workings of the Internet pr0nography scene. I say it's common knowledge.
OK first the off-topic part: your ideas on treating child molestors and rapists is interesting, but honestly I can't remember the last time I'd heard such sweeping generalisations. Is it too much to ask that people who are disrupting society be judged on an individual basis instead of being treated as "molestors" or "rapists"? As far as I can tell, rapists look different from one another and, woah shit, they might even be different people.
As to the topic on-hand, judging people on the filenames they're interested in is extremely poor, especially in the shady world of pr0nography. It's not difficult to find pictures of (what appear to be) 20 year olds saved under filenames which contain "14" or "15" or what have you (presumably indicating their age). Likewise, it's not difficult to find "very questionable" material passed off (possibly accidentally) as adult. It's not impossible to believe that if someone were *really* into pr0n, they'd be willing to take their chances and get some of the supposedly pre-15 year old pr0n just because there are so many post-18 year olds in the mix.
If you've ever used *shudder* Alta Vista to search for anything (even something as banal as, say, garden hose), no doubt 70% of the hits will be pr0n sites. Many of them offer child pr0nography and are presumably just a bunch of banner ads with kiddie pr0n terminology scattered about. I'm doubtful that everyone going to one of those sites is sincerely interested in getting some kiddie pr0n.
Overall, their methodology is pretty weak and it seems as though they were just going for sensationalism.
I must admit I've fallen behind in terms of Java (the last time I touched it was over a year ago at school). The Micro Edition VM looks interesting, I must say. Of course it wouldn't be able to handle Java programs that use all those whiz-bang APIs, but those aren't very likely to be run on embedded systems anyway.
As for the C portability thing, I maintain that a C implementation having a bit of slack is a good thing. The C standard gives you lower bounds (which are very necessary), but allows the implementation to decide what's most efficient where. It's true that it does lead to a lot of errors, but putting more restrictions on data sizes seems a bit short-sighted; teaching proper coding techniques would be a better solution. I say it's short-sighted because it appears as though eventually whatever numbers Sun assigned to the data types is going to have to change. Plus, it makes things quite difficult for some embedded systems most likely (though I'm just talking out of my ass on this one). The common example would be the Cray (or at least one of the Crays), in which the char, short, int and long (the long *could* be 64; I'm not sure) are all 32 bits in size. This is perfectly fine in C, but it seems like it could lead to performance problems in Java while trying to "emulate" unnatural integer sizes. It seems as though 128 bit integers are going to hit us eventually, too. If Java has their integer sizes set in stone, that could, again, lead to performance problems (not to mention the difficulty in implementing the VM and/or library).
Anyway I'm still skeptical about Java. Other than last year when I was taking Java at school (and apart from my web browsers, I guess), I've never had a Java implementation installed, mainly because I've never needed it. I'd like to say that Sun should have just released native compilers from the start, but I guess I could be proven wrong...Java could someday take over the world in an orgy of portability and it would be extremely cool. Right now source compatibility still looks more attractive than binary compatibility. If you don't have access to the source, well, there's always emulation, and Java VMs are essentially emulation anyway, right? Actually to be completely honest, I'm glad for Java because there is a pretty good Sokoban applet. If it weren't for the Java in my web-browser, I would have had to install Gnome in order to play one of the Gnome Sokoban games (which probably wouldn't be as good anyway).
Your example of Java vs C is a poor one. If your code depends on a certain data type (e.g. int) being of a certain size, it is wrong. It is just plain wrong. There has never been and there never will be a situation where assuming the size of any data type is considered acceptable. Problems do arise when sending data across a network or disk, but these are easily overcome, especially when used in conjunction with an already written library. Even in this situation though, where problems with alignment, data type sizes, and endianness are large, there is never reason to assume anything. The problem can be overcome, and has been overcome uncountable times, using ISO C.
... 4" in configure scripts. There is no excuse for that.
What Java does offer that C doesn't (besides garbage collection, dynamic type checking, syntactic sugar, etc.) is a standard graphics/toolkit library. The myriad of C graphics/toolkit libraries is annoying, and swing and awt and whatever else Java has simplifies that greatly. This has its drawback, though.
Relatively speaking, Java is horridly unportable. There are Java implementations for what, maybe a dozen platforms? Probably less. The added standards of pixel graphics capabilities make it more difficult to create new implementations, too. Try making a Java implementation for the PDP-8 or the ENIAC. It might not even be possible. The example may seem trivial, but this means that it would be pretty difficult to run a Java program using awt in an embedded system without a screen or any input devices whatsoever.
Java is fine for some things (or so I'm told), but it cannot be considered portable when considered to the majority of languages out there. C is arguably the most portable language on the planet, and it will probably remain that way for many decades. If there are any portability problems with a C program it is because the code is either wrong, or it is not standard C. Usually it's a mixture of both, but case number one is alarmingly common. It pains me to see "size of int
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4 eg24Mple, tHi5 w00D b int3res71nG:
New technology models duzn't succeed if all dey offa' be betta', fasta' o' cheapa' alternatives t' de established amoset leaders. Dey gots'ta offa' benefits t' de usa' dat de old technology model could not deliva'. De PC wuz not betta', fasta' o' even cheapa' (on some pa'-usa' basis) dan de mini-clunka' uh de late '70s. But it dun did deliva' benefits t' its users dat miniclunkers could not.
0r 3vin 7HiS:
The bestest analogy that illustrates this benefit is with the way we crucify cars. Just asketh the question, "Wouldst thee crucify a gas-chariot with the hood welded shut? Nobody knows but Jesus." and we all answer an emphatic "Goddamn this." So asketh the follow-unto question, "Whatsoever doth thee know about modern internal-combustion engines?" and the answer for most of us is, "Not much."
Did you even bother reading JK's article? He wants Metallica to be compensated; he just doesn't think that their methods were good. I don't recall reading Jon ever saying "you should all rip off Metallica" or anything like that.
It's not hard to get a list of people who trade Metallica mp3s? OK then, just how would you suggest doing that? Just off the top of my head, the closest I could come up with is doing a search for 'metallica' and writing down everyone who had it available for trade. Unfortunately, according to my experience with Napster, it is just as likely for metallica_unforgiven.mp3 to be command.com renamed as it is for it to be an actual mp3. This means that one would have to download all the Metallica mp3s available to test them to see if they actually are Metallica mp3s -- quite a boring task when you're testing over 300000 people.
Just to expand on your "everyone fitting into Texas" idea:
assuming:
- everyone were to live on one acre (approx. 4047 square metres) of land (like you suggested)
- there are 6e9 people living on this planet
then we would require 2.4282e13 square metres of land. If we were to put this in a giant square (to simplify the math -- damn that pi), the square would need to be about 4.928e6 metres (or 4928 km) on each side. Considering that the earth is approximately 6371 km in radius, I find it unlikely that everyone could fit into Texas.
In fact, if we use the number 13e12 square metres as the total land mass of the Earth (though that number should probably be lower -- not many people would want to live in Antarctica), then the average amount of land per person is about 2167 square metres. If the average person were to live in a square (go to hell, pi!), then they would live in a square about 47 metres on each side. This is considerably larger than the average suburban house lot (phew), but I must say it's not very impressive. Personally I don't see the benefits of a larger population outweighing the costs. It seems like about 15 of the 6 billion people (okay, slight exaggeration) are living in poverty. If one were to 'average' out the quality of living, it would be extremely poor. But that's because we (or more accurately, our governments) are so dumb, you say! True, but I doubt increasing our population will move us into some sort of utopia, no matter how efficient our resource mangling.
Woo.
You know the 1024-cylinder limit wasn't really *that* bad. You had to create one more partition than usual. I'm glad it's gone too, but I've never heard anyone really complain about it.