Napster is stealing. You have taken something for which you are expected to pay for - it is stealing. You have robbed the record stores and record companies of money that they would other wise have if you hadn't illegally copied their content - again, you are stealing.
And committing a crime (stealing) anonymously is cowardice, not civil disobedience. Being willing to sit in jail for committing a crime, in order to make a point - now, that is civil disobedience.
>>No surprise really - the statistics indicate that they have a high rate of attack on their unsecured systems yet i would be interested
>>how well they hide them - that is is the domain name of the network something which would attract their attention ?
>>Ceratinly the average home user would be very scared reading these statistics which is the point i guess but makes me wonder
>>are we scare mongering here ?
My home machine uses an ADSL connection to a local ISP. I am typically logged onto the net for 10-12 hours a day from that machine. As a firewall, I use ZoneAlarm - which throws up a dialog box when someone hits your machine. During a typical day, I get hit 4-8 times. Mostly due to random port scanners, I suspect. So, to answer your question, I don't believe that we are scare mongering here - I believe that there is a real issue with all of these script kiddies who have automated tools for finding vulnerable servers.
In the quest to post as many articles bashing M$, the quality of the posted articles is approaching the level of the World Weekly News.
The Headline "Nuclear Materials System Not Buggy" is misleading. When you read the article, the main two arguments for saying that M$ has buggy code are:
1). Users of SQL Server are able to code software that can screw up the database.
2). When you don't put a password on admin accounts, it causes a security vulnerability.
These two assertions are true for EVERY database server, not just M$. Anyone who has write/commit privileges to database tables has the ability to screw up the database - this is not a SQL Server issue. And if you don't put passwords on your accounts, it is your own damn fault for introducing a security vulnerability.
I'm all for M$ bashing - when they deserved to be bashed (and there are plenty of areas where they deserve this). But in this case, the article is nothing more than anti-M$ propoganda.
Call me a troll if you like - I will probably get modded as such, but it is increasingly frustrating to read/. The tag line, "News for Nerds", used to accurately describe/., but it seems that lately every fourth article is one which lambasts Microsoft. Articles such as this, looking for another reason to say "Microsoft Sucks", are becoming tiresome.
With a name like '/.', it is obvious that this is a pro-*nix site, which is fine. And I think that most people here will agree that they don't like Microsoft's business practices. Again, this is fine. However, to constantly look for articles for justification to say that "Microsoft Sucks" is infantile.
The childish behaviour is not limited to Microsoft bashing. Posts extolling the virtues of Napster (before they went corporate) and Gnutella as ways to pirate music such that they can "screw the man" are also childish. There may be reasons to disagree with existing copyright laws and the the policies of the RIAA, and perhaps the use of tools to steal music is your form of protest. If you firmly believe in your position, be civily disobedient. Send the RIAA a letter that you are going to steal music and you feel that you are justified in doing so. But to engange in this practice anonymously is not civil disobedience - it is criminal.
Similarly, articles posted on how to defeat serial number protection schemes are equally childish, and rather frightening to see on/. (See article posted earlier this morning). How long will it be before this is nothing more than a warez site when all of the articles deal with how to steal stuff - whether music, movies or software?
Switching services as soon as a provider starts charging for services is not the answer. At the most basic level, companies provide these services for free because they are trying to establish a base of user to whom they hope to charge for services or they want to sell advertising.
The linux community likes things to be 'free', as in beer and in speech. However, the free beer model doesn't work as well for hardware and services as it does for software. If an individual wants to make a contribution to 'free' software, where free refers to the cost (regardless of which license they prefer), then there is no cost involved for the user. They are volunteering their time - which does not require a cash outlay.
For free services on the net, which are typically provided by businesses, someone must pay for servers, bandwidth and people to keep the whole thing up and running. Depending upon the number of users of the service, this can become exceeding expensive. Businesses aren't charities, so in the end, they need the ability to generate money from the free services. The revenue can come from banner ads, subscription fees, or perhaps the service provides awareness of their other products which will lead to increased sales. However, in the end, there must be a financial justification for providing the service.
Consider/. The service here is free, but who provides the service? The motto is "news for nerds", but the content typically is narrowly focused on linux, open source, free software and similar ideas - which is a more narrow focus than they had several years ago. Why is this? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the owner of/. is in the linux business, i.e. if linux were to fade away, they would be out of business?/. is a great service, but it is a self-serving service.
I see a lot of post here complaining about the evils of banner ads. Should I ignore the 'Think Geek' banner that is flashing incesantly at the top of my screen right now? Or, should I go check out their products and perhaps buy something of interest so they will continue to provide financial support for/., so this service can remain free? Considering that I like/. and I would like to see it stick around, perhaps I will go look for something to buy as soon as I post this comment.
In the end, someone must pay the bills, and that requires cash, and if there is no cash generation, then the service will end. While services may end, the open source revolution will remain, because the cost of participation is time, not money.
C, although often abused and maligned, it the perfect language. It is well suited for writing compilers and device drivers. It is equally well suited to writing full blown applications. Does anyone remember WordPerfect for Dos or Word for Windows that ran in under 300K of memory?
As for classes, they are certainly easier to impliment in C++, but well structured C code can be made to behave very similarly, and without much extra effort. The class implimentation in perl seems rather odd and unintuitive.
One of the coolest things that I saw for high school science was a home built cloud chamber. For any aspiring physics nerds, it was WAY cool.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~adf4/cloud.html
You can also cheaply build your own X-Ray machine
http://www.noah.org/science/x-ray/
Even if M$ had a.Net platform for Linux, would anyone actually us it? Linux users aren't typically supportive of M$ products, and considering that.Net probably won't be open source, thereby limiting the freedom of the users, what motivation is there for Linux users to embrace the technology?
If I am not mistaken, Corel had already announced that it was considering getting out of the linux business BEFORE Microsoft put $135M into the company. And it's stock had already tanked before Microsoft put enough money in the company to keep it solvent for a little while longer.
I have no idea what Microsoft's intentions were with the deal, but Corel was a dead duck before Microsoft arrived.
From the perspective of a typical palm geek, one who is interested in using the built in applications or downloading a useful application for the palm device from some web site, why should I care about the underlying OS? Palm geeks use their Palm as an appliance - just turn it on and use it. They don't care whether it is using PalmOS, CE or Linux - they just want cool apps.
From a developers perspective, maybe linux would be cool on a palm device - but this has little to do with marketability of the product to the masses.
is that so many browsers don't render pages correctly.
- There is a clearly articulated definition of what tags are supported
- there is a clearly articulated definition of what the tags are supposed to do and how they are to be rendered
My question is why do so many browser not render correctly? What is so hard? One of the hardest parts of programming is requirements definition for the software being written, and getting the customer/boss to clearly articulate what they want the software to do and how it should perform. Once you have the iron-clad requirements written down, the rest of the work is a piece of cake - it is implimentation and testing against the requirements.
In the case of HTML, where there are clear definitions for 3.2 and 4.0, a list of what is deprecated and what is supported, if web page authors stuck to the STANDARD and not use browser specific tags, then there is no reason that the page should not display identically on each persons browser. I find it unfathomable that this is not the case.
One of the first things that you notice about humans are that we are competitive animals. We compete in everything.
- who is bigger, faster, stronger.
- who makes more money
- who has had the biggest impact in the Open Source moment?
Why do/.ers hold RMS and ESR in such high regard? It is because they have made some of the most notible contributions to the Open Souce movement.
Which motivation has had the largest impact on Open Source - contributing to the gift culture or an attempt to overthrow Microsoft? Take Linux magazine which sports the line "The magazine of the revolution". A revolution is not a contribution to a "gift culture", it is an overthrow of the established. Its an attempt to win.
And as Al Davis says, "It's about winning, baby". Maybe this isn't the way things are supposed to be, but this is the way that things are.
If the history of computer security has taught us anything, it has taught us that there is no software that is crackproof.
These guys are established authors
on
Free Books Online
·
· Score: 1
I haven't heard of these authors either, but this is mainly due to the fact that I typically don't read pulp fiction. However a quick search on Amazon ( forgive me all you boycotters out there, but their reader review section is informative), showed that Amazon is selling books by all of these authors and that most of their books are fairly well reviewed by the readers.
Most of the authors averaged about 3.5/5 for their books, but Eric Flint averaged 4/5 and K. D. Wentworth averaged 4.5/5. The rating of these books is on par with the "popular" authors like Stephen King.
It may be that the difference between a "no-name" author and a popular author is a simple matter of fate which allows one to get name exposure in the marketplace - and nothing to do with writing ability. After Stephen King first became popular, he managed to produce quite a few mediocre books that made their way to the best sellers list - not because they were good books, but because he had a sufficiently large established audience of readers.
For these authors on Baen, some of whom have had quite favorable reviews of their works, then perhaps the only thing seperating them from being "Popular" is that they don't have a large following - and, if Eric Flint is correct in his assumption, that if enough people find these works and like them, then these authors will generate more sales and become "popular" authors.
>>This is the first release to the 2.2 tree in quite some time,
>> so it's probably worth updating on those machines which can afford a reboot.
This is going to be a problem for one of my coworkers. I work for a company that does cross-platform development where I program the windows software and he programs the linux software. Several months back, we made a wager regarding whose machine would stay up the longest before a reboot - the loser of the wager must wear a t-shirt of the others choosing. If I win, then he must wear a "Windows Rocks" or "I love Bill" shirt, and if he wins, I must wear a "Linux Rocks" or "I love Linus" shirt.
He likes to remain current with the software on his machine and will download and recompile the latest code for the tools on his machine. However, since the kernal changes will require a reboot, what will he do? I think that it will be a fun day at work today.
(moderator - before modding me down as a troll or flame, please note that I do use RH6 at home)
When the Playstation debuted, the games that were originally released at that time were not any good. Warhawk was one of the first games out on the market and everyone thought that it was great... until the second generation of games came on the market. The original Ridge Racer, which was an awesome game when it was released, fails miserably in comparison to Gran Turismo, which was released a couple of years later.
When a new console is initially debuted, it takes the software developers some time to figure out what the machine is really capable of doing, and how to take advantage of the hardware. And as is the case of the Playstation, the software developers would complain to Sony to open up more of the functions provided by the dedicated processors such as the texturing, matrix and graphics processors.
It was only after the second playstation developers conference, when they opened up more of what was going on under the covers, and provided the developers with more technical details of what the hardware was doing, allowing the programmers to access the hardware directly instead of using the Sony API's, that the quality of games began to increase.
And I expect that it will be the same with the PS2 - after the developers hack on the box for a year and start to understand the hardware better, they will demand better access to the hardware of the box - and when Sony opens this up, the quality and sophistication of the games will skyrocket.
I concur with the previous poster in that you don't need to be concerned regarding screwing things up since your code will be reviewed, but I would point out to the authors that you are a newbie.
There are good programmers, bad programmers and new programmers. A lot of "mistakes" are made by new programmers - that is how they learn the craft of programming, and a lot of mistakes are made by bad programmers who will never be any good at programming. If you qualify yourself as a newbie, then if you make mistakes, the authors will be willing to review with you the things that you did correctly and provide some insight into why some of the things that you did are wrong. If you don't qualify yourself as a newbie, they might just disregard changes that you send it, and you won't get any constructive feedback that will help you become a better programmer. One of the quickest ways to become a good programmer is to have a mentor who will help point you in the right direction.
>>Actually I find that running it on my 400MHz
>>machine is painful. At best. That's when it's
>> not crashing or getting confused by frames
When software is written by amateurs who think that they are programmers, then the fallacy that more eyes to look at the code leads to better code is exposed, as a bunch of amateurs looking at the code doesn't create a better product.
Hate M$oft all you want, but IE beats the hell out of netscape and previous versions of Opera. I haven't looked at the newest version of Opera yet, so I will withold judgement on its quality.
The first time I read Dune and its three successors ( there were only four Dune books at the time), which was about 18 years ago when I was a sophmore in high school, it seemed that I was reading some of the most profound science fiction ever written. Frank had written a compelling story that had a lot of profound ideas regarding religion, government, society and politics.
I re-read Dune four years later when I was a sophmore in college, and I was terribly disappointed. The wonderful story that I had read as a high-schooler was gone and instead what I read was a diatribe on Franks views on religion and government, etc. What made it worse to read is that when Frank had a point that he wanted to make, he repeated the idea over and over and over and over until he was pretty sure that the reader, regardless of how dim-witted, would get the point. Unfortunately, I was a bit more critical of a reader at the time, and I found his repetition hard to endure.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that the story behind the books is a good story, but Frank is a better story teller than a writer. Hopefully, the miniseries will be done well and not dumbed down to the masses - as Frank's book were.
Which is more important - open standards or better technology? If someone were to develop a superior technology - and made easily available to everyone - should users refuse to use it because it wasn't an open standard? Why would anyone choose to use something that was commonly known to be inferior when better alternatives were available?
If the DjVu format is good and if they want it to gain acceptance, then they will create versions of the product for popular OS's. Given the number of servers that run on Apache/linux, it would only be a matter of time before tools were created that could be used for this platform.
It seems to me that if you recieve any compensation from the school in the form or tuition, room and board or a stipend, then you are a defacto employee of the university, so any intellectual property rights are owned by the university - as in the work created is a work for hire. To prevent this ownership, students will need to get the university to waive those rights - which I doubt that the university would agree to.
... as Sega has done something similar in the past. Many years ago, back in 1995, a Sega graphics card was distributed by Creative that used the nVidia nV1 chip. The card sucked and sold poorly, but that was mainly due to the fact that the initial set of drivers sucked and the nV1 chip was not well supported by the developer community. (The chip only supported quads and not triangles, and nVidia's suggestion was to redo the models and graphics engine of existing games so they would look good on the card).
The original sega game card had connectors such that you could use the controllers from the Sega console to play your games on the PC.
I find it curious that the previous post has been moderated as a Troll. I believe that the tone of the poster may be flippant - however, pragmatically speaking, I believe that his point has some validity.
Has/. come to the point where one cannot have differing opinions of the majority without being modded down as irrelevant or a troll?
I don't see the benefit to Microsoft for orchestrating this theft.
Since the theft has occured and is in public, it brings to light a lot of questions regarding the security of NT (I'm assuming that their servers are NT). A MS loss.
If Microsoft says that they are using *nix servers to discredit *nix hackers, then it is basically an open admission that *nix is a better server solution than NT. Again, a MS loss.
Opressive application of litigation? They would only be able to go against the perpetrators of the crime and anyone using the stolen code. The rule of thumb for/.ers and anyone else is to stay away from the code.
Discredit Open Source? MS surely sees Open Source as a threat to their business model, but to pull a stunt to discredit open source is a bad PR campaign. A few years ago, Open Source did not have respect or legitimacy from the "corporate" community, but with IBM throwing some muscle behind Open Source, it now has legitimacy from the business community. Forget the arguments regarding Open Source code being rock solid and around for a long time, the historical perception of Open Souce - from the perspective of the "corporate" community - is that it was just a bunch of software hacked out by every Tom, Dick and Harry. Now that some big corporate plays are getting behind Open Source, it is only beginning to see widespread respectibility from the suits.
Re:This could be the greatest thing to happen sinc
on
Microsoft Cracked
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· Score: 1
>> No seriously, imagine forced open source.
I don't see any advantage to having the MS source "open" as a result of a hackers actions.
The information was gained illegally, so the possession or use of this information becomes illegal. The US judicial system does frown upon corporate espionage, which is how this would be considered. I believe that this would be illegal in most EU countries in regards to copyright laws.
If *nix is a superior OS to Windows, and you have the source code for *nix, then where is the desire to have the microsoft source? This would be a step backwards, which in the software world, is downright stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Napster is stealing. You have taken something for which you are expected to pay for - it is stealing. You have robbed the record stores and record companies of money that they would other wise have if you hadn't illegally copied their content - again, you are stealing.
And committing a crime (stealing) anonymously is cowardice, not civil disobedience. Being willing to sit in jail for committing a crime, in order to make a point - now, that is civil disobedience.
>>No surprise really - the statistics indicate that they have a high rate of attack on their unsecured systems yet i would be interested
>>how well they hide them - that is is the domain name of the network something which would attract their attention ?
>>Ceratinly the average home user would be very scared reading these statistics which is the point i guess but makes me wonder
>>are we scare mongering here ?
My home machine uses an ADSL connection to a local ISP. I am typically logged onto the net for 10-12 hours a day from that machine. As a firewall, I use ZoneAlarm - which throws up a dialog box when someone hits your machine. During a typical day, I get hit 4-8 times. Mostly due to random port scanners, I suspect. So, to answer your question, I don't believe that we are scare mongering here - I believe that there is a real issue with all of these script kiddies who have automated tools for finding vulnerable servers.
In the quest to post as many articles bashing M$, the quality of the posted articles is approaching the level of the World Weekly News.
The Headline "Nuclear Materials System Not Buggy" is misleading. When you read the article, the main two arguments for saying that M$ has buggy code are:
1). Users of SQL Server are able to code software that can screw up the database.
2). When you don't put a password on admin accounts, it causes a security vulnerability.
These two assertions are true for EVERY database server, not just M$. Anyone who has write/commit privileges to database tables has the ability to screw up the database - this is not a SQL Server issue. And if you don't put passwords on your accounts, it is your own damn fault for introducing a security vulnerability.
I'm all for M$ bashing - when they deserved to be bashed (and there are plenty of areas where they deserve this). But in this case, the article is nothing more than anti-M$ propoganda.
Call me a troll if you like - I will probably get modded as such, but it is increasingly frustrating to read /. The tag line, "News for Nerds", used to accurately describe /., but it seems that lately every fourth article is one which lambasts Microsoft. Articles such as this, looking for another reason to say "Microsoft Sucks", are becoming tiresome.
/. (See article posted earlier this morning). How long will it be before this is nothing more than a warez site when all of the articles deal with how to steal stuff - whether music, movies or software?
With a name like '/.', it is obvious that this is a pro-*nix site, which is fine. And I think that most people here will agree that they don't like Microsoft's business practices. Again, this is fine. However, to constantly look for articles for justification to say that "Microsoft Sucks" is infantile.
The childish behaviour is not limited to Microsoft bashing. Posts extolling the virtues of Napster (before they went corporate) and Gnutella as ways to pirate music such that they can "screw the man" are also childish. There may be reasons to disagree with existing copyright laws and the the policies of the RIAA, and perhaps the use of tools to steal music is your form of protest. If you firmly believe in your position, be civily disobedient. Send the RIAA a letter that you are going to steal music and you feel that you are justified in doing so. But to engange in this practice anonymously is not civil disobedience - it is criminal.
Similarly, articles posted on how to defeat serial number protection schemes are equally childish, and rather frightening to see on
Switching services as soon as a provider starts charging for services is not the answer. At the most basic level, companies provide these services for free because they are trying to establish a base of user to whom they hope to charge for services or they want to sell advertising.
/. The service here is free, but who provides the service? The motto is "news for nerds", but the content typically is narrowly focused on linux, open source, free software and similar ideas - which is a more narrow focus than they had several years ago. Why is this? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the owner of /. is in the linux business, i.e. if linux were to fade away, they would be out of business? /. is a great service, but it is a self-serving service.
/., so this service can remain free? Considering that I like /. and I would like to see it stick around, perhaps I will go look for something to buy as soon as I post this comment.
The linux community likes things to be 'free', as in beer and in speech. However, the free beer model doesn't work as well for hardware and services as it does for software. If an individual wants to make a contribution to 'free' software, where free refers to the cost (regardless of which license they prefer), then there is no cost involved for the user. They are volunteering their time - which does not require a cash outlay.
For free services on the net, which are typically provided by businesses, someone must pay for servers, bandwidth and people to keep the whole thing up and running. Depending upon the number of users of the service, this can become exceeding expensive. Businesses aren't charities, so in the end, they need the ability to generate money from the free services. The revenue can come from banner ads, subscription fees, or perhaps the service provides awareness of their other products which will lead to increased sales. However, in the end, there must be a financial justification for providing the service.
Consider
I see a lot of post here complaining about the evils of banner ads. Should I ignore the 'Think Geek' banner that is flashing incesantly at the top of my screen right now? Or, should I go check out their products and perhaps buy something of interest so they will continue to provide financial support for
In the end, someone must pay the bills, and that requires cash, and if there is no cash generation, then the service will end. While services may end, the open source revolution will remain, because the cost of participation is time, not money.
C, although often abused and maligned, it the perfect language. It is well suited for writing compilers and device drivers. It is equally well suited to writing full blown applications. Does anyone remember WordPerfect for Dos or Word for Windows that ran in under 300K of memory?
As for classes, they are certainly easier to impliment in C++, but well structured C code can be made to behave very similarly, and without much extra effort. The class implimentation in perl seems rather odd and unintuitive.
It doesn't have to be expensive to be cool.
One of the coolest things that I saw for high school science was a home built cloud chamber. For any aspiring physics nerds, it was WAY cool.
http://www.lns.cornell.edu/~adf4/cloud.html
You can also cheaply build your own X-Ray machine
http://www.noah.org/science/x-ray/
Even if M$ had a .Net platform for Linux, would anyone actually us it? Linux users aren't typically supportive of M$ products, and considering that .Net probably won't be open source, thereby limiting the freedom of the users, what motivation is there for Linux users to embrace the technology?
If I am not mistaken, Corel had already announced that it was considering getting out of the linux business BEFORE Microsoft put $135M into the company. And it's stock had already tanked before Microsoft put enough money in the company to keep it solvent for a little while longer.
I have no idea what Microsoft's intentions were with the deal, but Corel was a dead duck before Microsoft arrived.
From the perspective of a typical palm geek, one who is interested in using the built in applications or downloading a useful application for the palm device from some web site, why should I care about the underlying OS? Palm geeks use their Palm as an appliance - just turn it on and use it. They don't care whether it is using PalmOS, CE or Linux - they just want cool apps.
From a developers perspective, maybe linux would be cool on a palm device - but this has little to do with marketability of the product to the masses.
is that so many browsers don't render pages correctly.
- There is a clearly articulated definition of what tags are supported
- there is a clearly articulated definition of what the tags are supposed to do and how they are to be rendered
My question is why do so many browser not render correctly? What is so hard? One of the hardest parts of programming is requirements definition for the software being written, and getting the customer/boss to clearly articulate what they want the software to do and how it should perform. Once you have the iron-clad requirements written down, the rest of the work is a piece of cake - it is implimentation and testing against the requirements.
In the case of HTML, where there are clear definitions for 3.2 and 4.0, a list of what is deprecated and what is supported, if web page authors stuck to the STANDARD and not use browser specific tags, then there is no reason that the page should not display identically on each persons browser. I find it unfathomable that this is not the case.
One of the first things that you notice about humans are that we are competitive animals. We compete in everything.
/.ers hold RMS and ESR in such high regard? It is because they have made some of the most notible contributions to the Open Souce movement.
- who is bigger, faster, stronger.
- who makes more money
- who has had the biggest impact in the Open Source moment?
Why do
Which motivation has had the largest impact on Open Source - contributing to the gift culture or an attempt to overthrow Microsoft? Take Linux magazine which sports the line "The magazine of the revolution". A revolution is not a contribution to a "gift culture", it is an overthrow of the established. Its an attempt to win.
And as Al Davis says, "It's about winning, baby". Maybe this isn't the way things are supposed to be, but this is the way that things are.
If the history of computer security has taught us anything, it has taught us that there is no software that is crackproof.
I haven't heard of these authors either, but this is mainly due to the fact that I typically don't read pulp fiction. However a quick search on Amazon ( forgive me all you boycotters out there, but their reader review section is informative), showed that Amazon is selling books by all of these authors and that most of their books are fairly well reviewed by the readers.
Most of the authors averaged about 3.5/5 for their books, but Eric Flint averaged 4/5 and K. D. Wentworth averaged 4.5/5. The rating of these books is on par with the "popular" authors like Stephen King.
It may be that the difference between a "no-name" author and a popular author is a simple matter of fate which allows one to get name exposure in the marketplace - and nothing to do with writing ability. After Stephen King first became popular, he managed to produce quite a few mediocre books that made their way to the best sellers list - not because they were good books, but because he had a sufficiently large established audience of readers.
For these authors on Baen, some of whom have had quite favorable reviews of their works, then perhaps the only thing seperating them from being "Popular" is that they don't have a large following - and, if Eric Flint is correct in his assumption, that if enough people find these works and like them, then these authors will generate more sales and become "popular" authors.
>>This is the first release to the 2.2 tree in quite some time,
>> so it's probably worth updating on those machines which can afford a reboot.
This is going to be a problem for one of my coworkers. I work for a company that does cross-platform development where I program the windows software and he programs the linux software. Several months back, we made a wager regarding whose machine would stay up the longest before a reboot - the loser of the wager must wear a t-shirt of the others choosing. If I win, then he must wear a "Windows Rocks" or "I love Bill" shirt, and if he wins, I must wear a "Linux Rocks" or "I love Linus" shirt.
He likes to remain current with the software on his machine and will download and recompile the latest code for the tools on his machine. However, since the kernal changes will require a reboot, what will he do? I think that it will be a fun day at work today.
(moderator - before modding me down as a troll or flame, please note that I do use RH6 at home)
When the Playstation debuted, the games that were originally released at that time were not any good. Warhawk was one of the first games out on the market and everyone thought that it was great... until the second generation of games came on the market. The original Ridge Racer, which was an awesome game when it was released, fails miserably in comparison to Gran Turismo, which was released a couple of years later.
When a new console is initially debuted, it takes the software developers some time to figure out what the machine is really capable of doing, and how to take advantage of the hardware. And as is the case of the Playstation, the software developers would complain to Sony to open up more of the functions provided by the dedicated processors such as the texturing, matrix and graphics processors.
It was only after the second playstation developers conference, when they opened up more of what was going on under the covers, and provided the developers with more technical details of what the hardware was doing, allowing the programmers to access the hardware directly instead of using the Sony API's, that the quality of games began to increase.
And I expect that it will be the same with the PS2 - after the developers hack on the box for a year and start to understand the hardware better, they will demand better access to the hardware of the box - and when Sony opens this up, the quality and sophistication of the games will skyrocket.
I concur with the previous poster in that you don't need to be concerned regarding screwing things up since your code will be reviewed, but I would point out to the authors that you are a newbie.
There are good programmers, bad programmers and new programmers. A lot of "mistakes" are made by new programmers - that is how they learn the craft of programming, and a lot of mistakes are made by bad programmers who will never be any good at programming. If you qualify yourself as a newbie, then if you make mistakes, the authors will be willing to review with you the things that you did correctly and provide some insight into why some of the things that you did are wrong. If you don't qualify yourself as a newbie, they might just disregard changes that you send it, and you won't get any constructive feedback that will help you become a better programmer. One of the quickest ways to become a good programmer is to have a mentor who will help point you in the right direction.
>>Actually I find that running it on my 400MHz
>>machine is painful. At best. That's when it's
>> not crashing or getting confused by frames
When software is written by amateurs who think that they are programmers, then the fallacy that more eyes to look at the code leads to better code is exposed, as a bunch of amateurs looking at the code doesn't create a better product.
Hate M$oft all you want, but IE beats the hell out of netscape and previous versions of Opera. I haven't looked at the newest version of Opera yet, so I will withold judgement on its quality.
The first time I read Dune and its three successors ( there were only four Dune books at the time), which was about 18 years ago when I was a sophmore in high school, it seemed that I was reading some of the most profound science fiction ever written. Frank had written a compelling story that had a lot of profound ideas regarding religion, government, society and politics.
I re-read Dune four years later when I was a sophmore in college, and I was terribly disappointed. The wonderful story that I had read as a high-schooler was gone and instead what I read was a diatribe on Franks views on religion and government, etc. What made it worse to read is that when Frank had a point that he wanted to make, he repeated the idea over and over and over and over until he was pretty sure that the reader, regardless of how dim-witted, would get the point. Unfortunately, I was a bit more critical of a reader at the time, and I found his repetition hard to endure.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that the story behind the books is a good story, but Frank is a better story teller than a writer. Hopefully, the miniseries will be done well and not dumbed down to the masses - as Frank's book were.
Which is more important - open standards or better technology? If someone were to develop a superior technology - and made easily available to everyone - should users refuse to use it because it wasn't an open standard? Why would anyone choose to use something that was commonly known to be inferior when better alternatives were available?
If the DjVu format is good and if they want it to gain acceptance, then they will create versions of the product for popular OS's. Given the number of servers that run on Apache/linux, it would only be a matter of time before tools were created that could be used for this platform.
It seems to me that if you recieve any compensation from the school in the form or tuition, room and board or a stipend, then you are a defacto employee of the university, so any intellectual property rights are owned by the university - as in the work created is a work for hire. To prevent this ownership, students will need to get the university to waive those rights - which I doubt that the university would agree to.
... as Sega has done something similar in the past. Many years ago, back in 1995, a Sega graphics card was distributed by Creative that used the nVidia nV1 chip. The card sucked and sold poorly, but that was mainly due to the fact that the initial set of drivers sucked and the nV1 chip was not well supported by the developer community. (The chip only supported quads and not triangles, and nVidia's suggestion was to redo the models and graphics engine of existing games so they would look good on the card).
The original sega game card had connectors such that you could use the controllers from the Sega console to play your games on the PC.
I find it curious that the previous post has been moderated as a Troll. I believe that the tone of the poster may be flippant - however, pragmatically speaking, I believe that his point has some validity.
/. come to the point where one cannot have differing opinions of the majority without being modded down as irrelevant or a troll?
Has
I don't see the benefit to Microsoft for orchestrating this theft.
/.ers and anyone else is to stay away from the code.
Since the theft has occured and is in public, it brings to light a lot of questions regarding the security of NT (I'm assuming that their servers are NT). A MS loss.
If Microsoft says that they are using *nix servers to discredit *nix hackers, then it is basically an open admission that *nix is a better server solution than NT. Again, a MS loss.
Opressive application of litigation? They would only be able to go against the perpetrators of the crime and anyone using the stolen code. The rule of thumb for
Discredit Open Source? MS surely sees Open Source as a threat to their business model, but to pull a stunt to discredit open source is a bad PR campaign. A few years ago, Open Source did not have respect or legitimacy from the "corporate" community, but with IBM throwing some muscle behind Open Source, it now has legitimacy from the business community. Forget the arguments regarding Open Source code being rock solid and around for a long time, the historical perception of Open Souce - from the perspective of the "corporate" community - is that it was just a bunch of software hacked out by every Tom, Dick and Harry. Now that some big corporate plays are getting behind Open Source, it is only beginning to see widespread respectibility from the suits.
>> No seriously, imagine forced open source.
I don't see any advantage to having the MS source "open" as a result of a hackers actions.
The information was gained illegally, so the possession or use of this information becomes illegal. The US judicial system does frown upon corporate espionage, which is how this would be considered. I believe that this would be illegal in most EU countries in regards to copyright laws.
If *nix is a superior OS to Windows, and you have the source code for *nix, then where is the desire to have the microsoft source? This would be a step backwards, which in the software world, is downright stupid.