Many companies find that changes in their external environment demand changes in their internal environment.
For example, when folks began downloading massive quantities of music from various Internet channels, corporations realized that this posed a threat to their current methods, as did the CD to tapes, tapes to LPs, LPs to live performances, etc. However, the top management and boards of directors of these large companies have no imagination, no style, no tact, no nothing. They know only one thing... It is commonly known as "the bottom line." What it means is, "We have the inalienable right to eternal perpetually increasing profits."
To continue our example of the music industry, we will note that instead of seeking ways to make the changes work for the company, the aforementioned managers and directors (hereinafter idiots) want to maintain stability in a business that is inherently unstable. This stability is artificial and is achieved through litigation, just as the artificial monopoly provided for "intellectual" property is achieved through law.
The idiots abuse the legal system in order to maintain their bottom line and will continue to do so as long as the courts allow it. The RIAA does this. The MPAA does this. Now SCO is jumping on the "e-Litigation" bandwagon. Who cares anyway... SCO is yesteryear's news. The future is Linux. And if there is some code in there that belongs to SCO, which I doubt, then it is already done because once released in Linux, it will remain in use forever. There will always be some server out there, some desktop out there, some strange hack that will contain this code for lack of being updated to the next version, which is "cleaned" of the offending code. What are you going to do? Make Linux illegal throughout the galaxy because of this? Hang Linus for it? Or, figure that the code wasn't making you any money anyway and spend the would-be litigation funds on marketing efforts, on product line expansion, on research and development, on performing services for valuable customers... and on the million other things that SCO might do, in order to secure a good bottom line through honest, ethical, and otherwise positive and constructive means?
Oh, wait... Their bottom line demands that they abuse the court system, as if they're betting on a semi-fixed basketball game.
I am sick of the extreme leftists screwing up everything in this country. The government spends money like there's no tomorrow, puts all kinds of expensive (and useless) programs into effect, and when the money suddenly runs out (like, hmmm... why in the world might that have happened?), they raise taxes even more. Oh, The Rich will pay for it. In other words, the people who earn 15% of all the money in this country should pay 30% of all the taxes. That really makes sense. But hey, let's be quick to give away their money, because to them, money grows on trees anyway, so it's really no big deal.
Like Oreo cookies? Well, the leftist extremists want to make them illegal wherever kids can buy them, supposedly because of transfatty acids. Now I don't exactly eat mountains of Oreo cookies, but if someone wants to eat them, this is supposed to be a free country! Ban those and the liberals, er, leftist extremists will have opened the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from places where kids can buy them, which opens the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from this country for everyone. Now under the excuse of "health," the government will be able to dictate what we eat. This is Big Brother. It doesn't matter if right wing extremists or left wing extremists do it... the legal system is supposed to be the bare minimum, with a good education system teaching people how to think and use common sense, and to suggest how they should eat healthy stuff, be polite to others, not smoke, not drink, not do drugs, etc. But the minute the government can dictate which FACIAL EXPRESSIONS you may employ when talking to someone, or which FOODS you may eat, or where your money, that YOU EARNED is going to go, that is extremism and it is wrong.
I'm very sorry... The liberals/leftist extremists have gained control over the media and the schools. They have screwed up the education system because some people are less intelligent than others, so in order to be fair and to avoid hurting someone's feelings, they have reduced the quality of education in order to level the playing field. And this results in a lot of people being idiots... USEFUL IDIOTS, as Lenin said (see link for references).
This is exactly what I need! While I don't watch television and therefore couldn't use a TiVo, I will definitely want one of these, especially since I am at work during my favorite talk radio crap and want to listen to it at different times.
The subject of mood altering audio signals is interesting to bring up. I have some interesting ideas about this.
I am certain that a lot of things affect moods. Audio is one of them. But I also believe that visual characteristics have a lot to do with mood. What's that Chinese art of interior decorating that is supposed to bring harmony? I forgot the name.
Mexico City (for those of you who don't know what D.F. stands for) is a heavily populated place. I've heard different accounts that it is the biggest city (or the third biggest) in the world, and I don't know if this means by population or by physical size. In any case, there is a LOT of traffic here. I have found that I am quite affected by "road rage," or let's just call it frustration behind the wheel, when I'm driving around town: Traffic moves along slowly. Going ten miles can take between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on the circumstances. It's just such a pain, and it is frustrating. Now, in my case, my frustration behind the wheel is caused by a number of factors:
The brain assigns attentional resources to things. For example, your eye can see pretty well all around but your brain assigns more attentional resources to the thing your eyes are pointing at. With so much to look at and notice in a big city, the brain works overtime. This causes stress, fatigue and frustration.
While driving around town, there are a lot of noises going on, like the sounds of other cars or your own. My car shakes when it idles and barely runs when it does. In addition, things rattle and squeak, and my keychain, of all things, swings back and forth and makes little (barely audible but certainly there) metallic ringing sounds. These are all sounds that my brain processes and tries to put in the background.
I have to accomplish a lot of things during the day, but traffic wastes a lot of time.
But here is my favorite part: The *shapes* of cars, of all things, pisses me off the most. Seriously... it's as if all I look at the whole time is the ass end of ugly cars. When the driver in front of me pushes on the gas after being stopped, the back end of his car moves down a couple of inches from the "recoil" of his car suddenly moving forward. When he stops, the back end of his car seems to rise up a few inches. Pay attention to this as you're driving around and you'll see it too. Now the part that pisses me off is this: That rising of the back end that I just mentioned? It looks like a dog raising its ass at you as an insult. For some reason, my brain associates the shape and motion of the decelerating car in front of me with dogs that insult you by sticking their ass in the air, as dogs do when you want to put a leash on them, give them a bath, or anything else that the dog doesn't want. And it's almost true: It's as if the driver in front of you is insulting you by stopping instead of getting the fuck out of your way. I can't explain how much this pisses me off.
Now all of this might sound totally psycho to you but I'm serious... people can't explain why they are the nicest people but turn into total bastards when they get in a car. It's not just sound waves that can piss you off... it's everything that your brain has to assign resources to, like motion and shape. I think this is why we associate certain feelings with certain faces, colors, shapes, body language, etc.
P.d., the worst road rage I've ever had was yelling profanities at the top of my lungs, and that only happened once when I was three hours late to work because I slept too long at my girlfriend's house and couldn't get to work fast enough. But that's how life is in the big city... I just go home in the evening and have some tequila. Because Denial is a river in Egypt.
d00d. You are asking if there is room for old programmers who just got started. In other words, the kinds of people of take some Java class at the local community college and subsequently call themselves programmers. My answer is: Yes and no. Please, let me explain:
I kind of wish that you had asked a different question: Are there jobs for old programmers who have been in the industry for 30 years. The answer is, "Fuck yeah!" Old programmers were around when computers were big, clunky and SLOW. They know that computers are intended for computing, a rather unobvious fact that you would never infer from the name. They know that problems are solved with algorithms, which are closely tied to mathematics and principles of electronics, and which must operate efficiently, as opposed to the contemporary method of programming, in which problems are solved with a million billion if..then..else statements that could be replaced by two lines of assembly.
aside() { These facts, in my opinion, illustrate the reason that old computers like the Apple II are still being hacked and used: There is something remarkable, something aesthetic, something that is simply challenging and yet so utterly simple about the design of old computers. The software that runs on them has a small set of rules to follow, as opposed to the entire universes of information involved in modern computers with three million billion logic gates in the space of a speck of dust. I am a younger member of the programming community and yet I can totally relate to the old timers who really understood their shit, as opposed to the geeks of today who need a calculator to convert between hex and binary. That's why I order a lot of these cheap 8- and 16-bit processors from Digi-Key and program all sorts of fun stuff with them. My dream is to build my own computer architecture, where the central processing unit is an entire board, rather than a single chip... kind of like in the old timers' days. It'll be slow as molasses going uphill, but NetBSD will run on it anyway.}/* aside */
So back to the question you asked in the beginning... is there any place in the workforce for old timers just getting started? If they have a lot of experience in electronic engineering and mathematics, and if they have a genuine ability to get their way with computers through this knowledge, then, yes, there is probably a place for them. Most likely, it will involve more work in the fields with which they are already experienced, with some programming involved, which they might have done before anyway. However, if they are janitors who ask questions like, "I just bought a computer. It has 256 gigahertz and 800 megabytes. Is that good? I got a Dell. Is that better than Fujitsu?", who are trying to jump on the high tech bandwagon, then, uh, no.
Violates the DMCA, does it? Or, as I called it in my company's new EULA, the Holy Bible?
Let me tell you something: If I buy an Xbox, it BELONGS to me. It is mine. It becomes my property. It is no longer the property of Microsoft, or the store that sold it to me, or the video game makers who make programs for it, or the RIAA, or the MPAA, or some marijuana dealer who sells stolen stereos out of the back of his stolen pickup truck. The Xbox becomes MINE because I have PAID for the damn thing. If it is my property, I can do whatever the fsck I damn please with it, including:
Smashing the thing to bits with a sledge hammer, videotaping the process, and put the video all over the Internet.
Drilling a hole into the central processing unit and/or memory, again, videotaping the process.
Remove the chips from it and build an experimental garage opener out of the damn thing.
Solder blue LEDs to it.
Put a modchip that allows me to run PalmOS on the thing so I can use it as a really big PDA at the office.
Put it on eBay and try to charge $500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 USD for it, even though nobody would bid.
Or, anything else that I might desire.
I don't know what liberal democrats came up with this retarded DMCA but it has to get off the books faster than shit going through a tin horn, or the next set of anti freedom legislation is going to bring us yet another step closer to BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
Security, huh? From the company that can't avoid the temptation to put scripting capabilities into the darnedest things? And for whom? The users that don't know the difference between a DOS prompt and a BSOD? Who can't figure out how to copy a file to a floppy disk (in WINDOWS!!!) and need to pay someone to do it? (I swear to God, some lady telephoned me and offered to pay me $80 USD to copy a file to a floppy disk, couldn't tell me how large it was (I asked to see if it would even fit), and I had to convince her to find a nearby geek to show her how to do it because anybody who charges for that is a dirty thieving son of a bitch. But I said it in nicer words.)
Ok. Let me get this straight. There are people in some African country that send out emails with schemes like, "We need to transfer 500 million dollars into a bank account but we need your help! Give us all of your private information, including your name, SSN, bank account numbers, etc., and we will open an account in your name to perform this transfer. To compensate you, we will give you 20% of the money." And people answer emails like that and give out their personal information. Or, someone sticks a sign on a bank drop box that reads, "Out of order. Leave deposits with guard." And obviously dresses like a guard and stands next to the drop box with a cart, collecting deposits. (As if a BOX can be out of order!!!!!) There are thousands of schemes like this... these two come from Frank Abagnale's book The Art of the Steal. He jacked millions of dollars himself, so he should know: People are unconscious! They don't think about security. Heck, America can't figure out how to secure its borders when thousands of years ago, China came up with a solution that can be seen from space. If people can't figure out how to secure a border, which is a physical thing that is well documented and understood by everyone (just look at a map), how the heck do you expect to secure computer networks when people don't understand (or want to understand) the complex computer internals that need to be understood in order to combat this problem?
Let me ask you a question... When was the last time you were rooted? On your desktop? Running Windows? I honestly doubt that anybody here has ever been compromised, even if running Windows 24x7 with an Internet connection and no firewall of any kind. You know why? Because most folks here understand what security means, at least conceptually, and wouldn't be stupid enough to enter their password (not that it secures anything under Windows) into some bogus window. Do you honestly think that putting your dog's name (or any other information, for that matter) into a window is going to solve any security problems for Joe Shmoe? NO WAY!
The way I see things is simple: Market security to corporations. Sell them computer security services in which their entire network is secured against attack, and more importantly, their data is backed up. But the home Joe Shmoe users... let them screw up their computers with the biggest security threats: All these stupid screensavers, cursors, sounds, graphics, clutter, junk, crap, downloads, viruses, MS Outlook, and all the crap they download and execute without thinking... When their computer crashes and they come crying to me, I'll continue saying what I've been saying for the past ten years, "Where are your backups? Oh, you didn't make any?! Well, the only way I can fix this computer is by blowing everything off and reinstalling. Oh, well... Maybe you should take it to [insert name of a computer repair shop that charges outrageous prices to reinstall Windows for you] and have them fix it. They understand these things better than I do."
If Microsoft really wanted to combat security problems, and I am 100% serious about what I am saying here, then they would forget all this B.S. and convince users to keep the clutter and the CRAP off their computers. Secondly, they would convince people to back up their data. Windows might suck, but I'm always more concerned about the mechan
Choose MY company's alternative and get stuck with OUR innovative EULA:
Mikreausauft Corporation
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA)
1. By us having written this license agreement, you have agreed to be bound by its terms. Such bondage shall commence at the instant this document is written and shall persist for all of eternity or until the universe self destructs, whichever happens last, and applies even if you are unaware of such application.
2. You agree that you wish to be bound by the terms of this agreement and that if any statement or clause in this agreement is found unenforceable by a court of law, such a clause will still remain in effect. The previous statement includes itself. You agree to challenge the judge in said court of law to a duel.
3. PRICE. You agree that all of your physical and/or intellectual property now belongs to Mikreausauft Corporation, including but not limited to all of your money, your house(s), your car(s), your personal belongings and those of your family, friends, coworkers and enemies, and any other property that used to belong to you or any of the aforementioned people, and any other property. You agree that under the terms of this license agreement, we are doing you a huge favor by allowing you to pretend that what used to be your property still is, but that may change at any moment without prior notice. You agree that at any time, with or without notice of any kind, we, including our agents and representatives, may enter into the property that used to be yours in order to search and/or access any property therein, as it belongs to us and it is our right to access it. You agree that such search and seizure shall commence with or without a search warrant, with or without your permission, and with or without any other such legal procedure. You agree that you forfeit the right to due process and may be arrested by us or any of our agents and representatives for any reason and without the right to a fair trial, if one is given at all. You agree that you are our slave forever and ever and that you have no rights under this agreement. You agree that you have signed your soul over to us, that we own you, and that you are our material property to do with as we please. You agree that because Mikreausauft Corporation is a huge multibillion dollar multinational corporation, Mikreausauft Corporation is entitled under the laws of the universe and by divine privelege to eternal perpetually increasing profits.
3. GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you the following rights: Not applicable.
4. LIMITATIONS. You may NOT use the software product that you have paid for. You may NOT return the product for a full or partial refund. You may NOT install the product on any number of computers, including but not limited to zero, one, two, any negative number, any positive number, any rational or irrational number, any real number, any complex number, any imaginary number, any infinite number, any number on any number system or mathematical theory now known, later developed or previously forgotten, any number in any base system, including but not limited to binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal or any other base system, any number expressed in any numeral system including but not limited to the Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, or any other numeral system, any number recorded by any method or by any means, including but not limited to numbers stored in the digital memory banks of any storage and retrieval system, numbers written on paper, refrigerator magnets, cavemen scribblings or engravings on granite boulders or any other type of rock material, or any other number. The software product may NOT be used by any number of processors on the allowed number of computers. The software product may NOT be used on any day of the week, including but not limited to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, any day with a name in any language, or any other day. You may NOT reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, twist, spin, poke, prod, mutilate, cut o
The way I see it, the federal government should ban all software from this country that isn't manufactured by Microsoft. Only Microsoft makes reliable software. The rest of the software industry produces bugs and problems that cost businesses some $60,000,000,000.00 a year. Oh, well. (By the way, drink normal Guinness, the stuff that tastes good. The extra stout stuff is crap. I used to think that was the only Guinness there was and as a result I hated Guinness. Not anymore. I started drinking the good stuff and let me tell you... it is GOOD!!! Negra Modelo is still my favorite bottled beer. Guinness is to be enjoyed from the tap... none of this bottle or can bullshit.)
Ding! You are correct. I am a "Mission: Impossible" fanatic. Remember the story a day or two back about "which video game has affected you most?" Well, if the question was "which television series has affected you most," my answer would certainly be "Mission: Impossible." My career in technology is based significantly on what I saw in those episodes.
Hey. I ain't paying $95.00 for a 6 page report. If the report was 1,000 pages long, I might consider such a thing reasonable.
Even if I was a large business with many millions of dollars, I still wouldn't buy this report. How do I know that this report, for which I would pay $95.00, even contains what I need? And, no, I don't care if this is published by Gartner or anyone else for that matter. There simply CANNOT be so much work or valuable information in a six page report that it calls for such an outrageous price. If it was $95.00 for a subscription to 6 months of valuable business information, that would be reasonable. But a six page report? That I can't even examine before buying? I don't know about you, but this sounds like a pretty stupid business decision to make. There are longer reviews of Linux on the cheapest websites that probably contain information of similar quality, even without the research that Gartner put into it. But then, if you're an exec who is so STUPID that you don't know that there will STILL be costs incurred in the maintainance of any computer system, plus a cost to modify your system and procedures, then you're stupid enough to pay $95.00 for a six page report that tells you that.
Not that I'm taking sides or backing up you or the parent, but...
Windows 3.1 had code embedded in it that detected if it was running on DR-DOS, and if so, caused Windows to crash and otherwise behave unreliably. (The evidence was presented in court and Microsoft had to pay fines many years later. These amounted to a slap on the wrist for them.) Is there a point to what I'm saying? Yes! A company that puts deliberate bugs into their software in order to crush a competitor might also put special code to detect that an application is Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or whatever, and show your username next to it as opposed to Admin, just to make people like you feel good. I have no evidence to prove or disprove anything said in my post or in the parent posts. But I'm trying to make a point... Remember the old adage about not believing everything you read? That applies to computer software, too, and probably more so than anywhere else, as people have this way of believing what computers tell them.
Hey, there might be 100 million lines of code in Windows... It might only take 20 or so to put your username next to something that has admin privs.
I have a similar dilemma relating to things that I recorded over the years. One of the things I am most concerned about, actually, is the collection of Mission Impossible episodes that my father recorded, both from the original series and from the "new" Mission Impossible. I don't even have half of the episodes, and some of the ones I did have were recorded over by idiots, and I am very protective of the ones I do have.
Being the laggard that I am, I still do not own a DVD player. I have decided that when ALL of the Mission Impossible episodes from every generation of this series are released in a boxed set of DVDs, I will buy a DVD player. Until then, I don't need a DVD player.
Oh, and by the way... those so called "Mission Impossible" movies with Tom Cruise in them? They suck.
If you think otherwise, then nobody would or could set up a website where people can post stuff, because the owners of such a website could be sued for the contents posted by other people. It would literally be impossible to run such a site without terrible legal risks. I can only imagine what kind of messed up legal system we would have if the laws were fscked up like that.
Actually, in some circumstances, there are really fscked up laws. For example, a guy broke into a school in the middle of the night. While in there ILLEGALLY, he fell down and broke his arm. He sued the school and won, and the school had to pay him damages for an activity that took place while he was illegally on the premises. In my opinion, if somebody is in the process of an illegal activity, the victim of the crime (in this case, the school that was broken into) receives automatic immunity from any liability to the criminal, including shooting them. That would cause criminals to think ten times before breaking into something, crime levels would be lower, prisons would be less populated, taxpayer money would be saved, and a whole host of other problems would be solved. Not to mention that the VICTIMS of an ILLEGAL CRIME would not have to pay damages to the CRIMINAL who performed the ILLEGAL act.
Of course carbon can emit light... If you can turn lead into gold, you can make anything do anything. (What's that, you say? You can't turn lead into gold? Well, why not? You can turn a tree into a diamond! Don't believe me? What's a tree made of? Carbon. What's a diamond made of? Carbon. So they're both made of the same thing but look different... If the tree is turned into ashes which are then compressed with a shitload of pressure and heat, you'll get a diamond. That's expensive to do and diamonds aren't really that valuable when you consider that two families control the release of diamonds from their vast reserves. But turning lead into gold is relatively cheap and generates a huge return on investment. I regularly turn lead into gold but I won't tell you how it's done. You have to follow that path on your own and stumble along the way like I have. Once you know how, it's very easy. I'll tell you that much.) So, basically, what you're telling me is that if I apply enough electricity to something made out of carbon, it will emit light. That might explain some strange things.
Incoming telephone, cable and electric lines should be protected from the moment they enter your building. All lines should enter into a protected equipment room in the basement, which should be a concrete room with a strong, locked steel door. From there, all lines that run to your networking areas should be enclosed in protected ducts that are difficult to saw into. Each networking area should have walls of concrete with thick chicken wire on each side, over which the drywall and plaster is installed. All doors entering into these areas should be of the metal variety. No windows should allow looking into these areas. Inside the networking area should be a concrete room containing the high end servers and other expensive equipment that provides frequent services but is accessed infrequently. These should be locked behind strong doors. Guards should be posted by each door, including the one to the basement and to each networking area. Each member of personnel should have an ID badge that is difficult to counterfeit as well as a five digit entry code. The ID badge should be verified by the guard as the security code is entered into the system. This allows the door to unlock. Guards carry keys that unlock only a deadbolt on each door. The security code opens the other lock. Thus it is necessary for both the guard and the other person to participate in unlocking the door. Guards carry weapons to fight anybody who attempts to enter by force. Inside the networking areas, all computers are secured by digital means outside the scope of this post. This security setup can then be touted as 100% secure and unbreakable. Management is stupid enough to believe a claim like that.
The point is this: There are big organizations like Microsoft, the RIAA and MPAA around, whose management thinks their company has a God given right to eternal perpetually increasing profits. When they don't make "enough" billions of dollars, they make up for it through court litigation and by getting all kinds of Big Brother legislation passed, like the DMCA.
Free Software is one of the keys to placing control back in the hands of those who should have it: The consumer. The more installations there are of Linux, BSD and anything else that is free and open, the better off the consumer will be, if only because the overall community has more power to avoid getting locked in to Microsoft solutions that are all designed to keep you stuck to their products.
Lindows is definitely a good thing in this respect. There are issues (technical, political, intellectual or otherwise) that you might not like to use Lindows. Perhaps you don't want to run as root all the time. But consider this: IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST THAT AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE USE LINDOWS, root or not. Juan Q. Público is never going to care about the "nuances" of computer science.
As recently as last year, I tried to help out a medical doctor who is a relatively technology literate businessman. I explained that I should do this and that to set up a reasonable security policy, which will require that he change somewhat the way his staff uses their computers at his clinic. Fully knowing the problems of computers, he told me in so many words, "I don't care about security." That's right. All of this stuff (software, computers, security, passwords, etc.) doesn't mean jack to him. He wants his business to be successful and gain value. If he has to spend a few thousands each year to correct problems, that's acceptable as long as the risk is relatively low in comparison to that of incurring overhead due to security requirements. The best security is frequent backups anyway. Everything else is just there to prevent more sophisticated attacks, which won't so badly affect home users. They already have gigabytes of shit on their computers... all kinds of sounds and videos, viruses, porn advertisements, "enlarge your penis" SPAM containing viruses that they click on anyway... it couldn't get much worse than that, root or not.
So, yes, security will remain a huge problems in computing for a long time to come, mostly because most people don't know or care enough to do something about it. When they lose their data and come crying to me, I'll continue to say what I've repeatedly said for ten years: "Did you make a backup of your data? No? Well, the only way I can fix this is to blow everything off your hard drive and reinstall everything. Sorry." C'est la vie.
They want virus protection? Give 'em virus protection! No viruses in Linux?! Oh, well... just put in a framework that runs fsck in the background once in a while to make the disk spin. A false sense of security might be the root of all evil but at least it will make them feel better about using Linux instead of Windows.
It is STILL in our best interest, though, that more people use Linux. It will create a market for us developers to make a profit. It will create interesting challenges in figuring out security policies that benefit the user without making computer use any more difficult. It might require that we rethink security altogether and come up with methods different from those we use now, which would perhaps be more flexible and powerful. Who knows. But the important point is that in order for this wonderful thing to continue, fucked up legislation like the DMCA needs to stop happening, and for that to happen, Linux needs to gain in power, whether by smart computer scientists or stupid shmoes like Joe Sixpack.
I wanted to say Doom II because I used to spend most of my time playing it and modifying it, both with level editors and DeHackEd. It got me thinking about game programming for a long time and I had some interesting ideas for a first person shooter that I wanted to make. So I bought many books on the subjects and thought it out a lot... that was before id released the sources. Doom II definitely scared the shit out of me several times. On one occasion I was in The Factory when I heard one of the aractrotrons or whatever they're called, walking, stopping, walking again... and it scared me so bad that I just froze up in some corner and waited for it to come up so I could shoot it. It never got there. After what must have been 20 minutes (I shit you not), I decided to go looking for it and finally discovered that it was stuck in a corner, on top of a raised floor from which it couldn't descend. So all that time I was scared of a spider that couldn't even get me.
But Quake II scared the living daylights out of me in a way that Doom II never did. I played it all night on one of my older computers at the time. I think it was a Pentium 133 or maybe a 200; in any case it was a pretty slow box. The graphics were low resolution and I couldn't really see the wonderful detail that id put into that game. I arrived at some part where I think I was in some sewer pipe or something and this creature shows up behind me and is just about to shoot. I shoot first and to my utter horror, this force field shield thing appears in front of the monster, kind of like the Borg have in Star Trek. I think I just started running at that point. The next night, I was on a different computer just listening to Joe Satriani through headphones and minding my own business. I don't think I was playing anything. On the contrary, I must have been trolling/. or something. It was after midnight and dark in my room except for the glow of my monitor. Suddenly and all at once, I jumped, screamed and turned around, to see that it was my sister, as opposed to some alien from Quake II, that put her hand on my shoulder. I became pretty nervous for a while and didn't play Quake II again for years.
This post if ON TOPIC but requires two or three paragraphs of introductory text, kind of like a book that requires 150 pages of character development before the plot gets good. Except you're lucky because I conveniently summarized 150 pages into this short post:
There used to be a show on television called Vengeance Unlimited. When they cancelled that show and replaced it with "America's Funniest Pets," I stopped watching television, having realized just how profoundly low the content providers had stooped.
In one episode, the main character (the vengeance for hire guy) manages to jack ill gained (down payment) money that a bogus real estate agent had scammed out of people. In its place in the safe deposit box, the vengeance guy left a note that read:
NANNY NANNY BOO BOO.
That is the message, I hope, that SCO has received by the zillions of angry/. readers and other geeks around the world who are outraged at SCO's stupid, obvious attempt to make money by legal (court litigation) means instead of by marketing and "honest" business means.
That's right, SCO... Read my sig and whimper. (Its explanation is in another post of mine somewhere.)
This is just like Johnny Mneumonic. Every day, with the bullshit being pulled by the RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft and other predatory multinational multibillion dollar organizations seeking nothing more than eternal perpetually increasing profits, the world gets closer to the reality portrayed in that movie. That was the subject of Johnny Mneumonic; in that case, it was a pharmaceuticals company that let people stay sick even though they had a cure because it meant more profits for them.
But that's NOT why I associate this with Johnny Mneumonic. I associate it because in the beginning of the movie, they're going to store 80 gigs of information (about as much as I have in/usr/home/) in Just Johnny's head. They use three random images from the television to associate with and encrypt the information. These images are then faxed to the recipient. Obviously the bits aren't being used because they would change in faxing. A more associative method is used, kind of like a human memory. I think that with time, more technologies like this will be used as our computational needs advance; That is, unless these multibillion dollar corporations have their way and our computers become merely vessels for receiving garbage information (valuable intellectual property) like the stupid movies and music being made nowadays, while "real" computers will be labeled as "professional equipment" and will cost five hundred times as much as they should so that only the corporations can afford them to keep us under control.
In the world of the future, it will be corporations, not governments, that will oppress the people. The governments will only serve as a tool to those corporations. Capitalism is fine; I just think that one change needs to be made: The individuals should have a much louder "voice" in government issues than corporations. In fact, the "voice" of any party should be inversely proportional to its size and power. The RIAA should not have enough voice to mail a letter to a senator, let alone do the evils that they are doing.
The RIAA wants to mess with my computers, eh? That is precisely why my networks are protected behind a giant Wall of stone and mortar, beyond a moat of black water filled with flesh eating monsters. Guards stand atop the Wall, some with swords, some with bows are arrows, some with tubs of boiling oil, some with boulders of granite, and some with sawed off 12 gauges. Atop a tower behind the great Wall stands a big ogre wielding a BFG9000. And inside the fortress, behind the giant gates of wrought iron and forged steel stands an entire army of very big, very drunk, very pissed off demons ready to beat the living crap out of anything that steps through the gate. This is what I call a security system. You might better know it as... OpenBSD.
This is MY PROPERTY! I am NOT a CRIMINAL. And I will NOT have some stupid RIAA telling me otherwise. Oh, and need I mention that due to their tactics, I do NOT buy music recordings any longer? (Except for self published recordings that have nothing to do with the RIAA.) It's not due to piracy either... because I don't download MP3s. I bought a GUITAR and I make my own damn music!
d00d. The fine folks at my company know all about interference problems. (I'm the guy who works at the company that never put a computer out of commission.) Some of our electronic products are installed into electromechanical systems. In one particular setup, we lost a lot of money and important deals because the systems were going crazy at some random time during operation. We were going crazy, thinking it was interference from outside; we tried it with the shield, without the shield, with the ground, without the ground, with the transformer wired this way and that way... until this 80 year old guy that we know told us it was interference, not from all this weird stuff but from other components in the same system. We did a lot of research and corrected the problem by using a few slower processors in place of the faster ones that we used before... We could never find the spikes but they were very quick. The slower processor is unaffected by them. Because of all the problems with this particular setup, we never sold anymore of them but use them inhouse.
This all goes to show just how FRAGILE everything is in electronics. In programming, it's one thing to overrun a buffer by a few bytes and wonder why some totally different part of the system takes a dump, but in electronics, you can't even debug the damn thing. Airplanes have this problem times a million because of all the noise that goes circulating around in their systems. And I truly understand their concerns. I don't want to go falling down from 50,000 feet because some jackass in row 39D's WiFi driver in Windows starts sending out all kinds of strange signals. And because Windows Sucks.
The Federal Trade Commission (NASDAQ: MSFT) today announced plans to increase the amount of SPAM mail, the digital blueprints for highly desired Internet content, sent annually to over 40 million addresses on the Internet. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions. The move is said to foster the development of new information technologies.
"We are excited at the news to increase the amounts of this highly desirable content that we email every day," said Xing Dung Ho Chung, president of some organization in China that sends over 5 billion SPAM emails daily. "Our customers will be very pleased when download times increase proportionally with the desirable noise to undesirable signal ratio as we flood the Internet with our information, preventing undesirable signal from getting through."
Hong Dong Chong Shlong commented, "Our goal is to reduce the Internet into a medium for advertising with no possibility of gaining any other use from it. Our long term plans include government lobbying to illegalize the information that people want while simultaneously forcing people to spend a minimum quota of time reading every word of SPAM and clicking on every full screen advertisement that comes up. Strategic partnerships with computer companies and additional legislation will force the consumer to purchase a new computer each day because the hard drive of yesterday's computer will break down with the wear and tear of yesterday's immeasurable amount of SPAM."
SPAM companies also indicated plans to lobby for laws requiring the consumer to purchase every product and service advertised to them. The long term plan is to give huge multinational corporations an easy method to eternal, perpetually increasing profits with no benefit to the consumer. Humanity, except the shareholders of several enormous conglomerates, will be enslaved forever.
One of these movies... has a future, and one of them does not. Now, I'm going to be as... forthcoming, with you as I can be, Mr. Anderson. You're here because, we need your help. We know that you've acquired the highest karma rating on a certain website, one that calls itself Slashdot. Whatever you think you know about this site is irrelevant, it is considered by many corporate executives to be the most dangerous site on the web. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start, and all that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing known Microsoft bashers to justice.
Listen. The authors wrote the software. They did so with the knowledge that it would be distributed freely (as in libremente) and as such they would probably not make any money off it. Despite this, they have put a lot of effort, blood, sweat and tears into making something that is reasonably functional, efficient and safe to use. I know exactly how difficult it is to produce good software.
The way I see it, the authors deserve to have credits all over the free software that they made. And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, when folks began downloading massive quantities of music from various Internet channels, corporations realized that this posed a threat to their current methods, as did the CD to tapes, tapes to LPs, LPs to live performances, etc. However, the top management and boards of directors of these large companies have no imagination, no style, no tact, no nothing. They know only one thing... It is commonly known as "the bottom line." What it means is, "We have the inalienable right to eternal perpetually increasing profits."
To continue our example of the music industry, we will note that instead of seeking ways to make the changes work for the company, the aforementioned managers and directors (hereinafter idiots) want to maintain stability in a business that is inherently unstable. This stability is artificial and is achieved through litigation, just as the artificial monopoly provided for "intellectual" property is achieved through law.
The idiots abuse the legal system in order to maintain their bottom line and will continue to do so as long as the courts allow it. The RIAA does this. The MPAA does this. Now SCO is jumping on the "e-Litigation" bandwagon. Who cares anyway... SCO is yesteryear's news. The future is Linux. And if there is some code in there that belongs to SCO, which I doubt, then it is already done because once released in Linux, it will remain in use forever. There will always be some server out there, some desktop out there, some strange hack that will contain this code for lack of being updated to the next version, which is "cleaned" of the offending code. What are you going to do? Make Linux illegal throughout the galaxy because of this? Hang Linus for it? Or, figure that the code wasn't making you any money anyway and spend the would-be litigation funds on marketing efforts, on product line expansion, on research and development, on performing services for valuable customers... and on the million other things that SCO might do, in order to secure a good bottom line through honest, ethical, and otherwise positive and constructive means?
Oh, wait... Their bottom line demands that they abuse the court system, as if they're betting on a semi-fixed basketball game.
Like Oreo cookies? Well, the leftist extremists want to make them illegal wherever kids can buy them, supposedly because of transfatty acids. Now I don't exactly eat mountains of Oreo cookies, but if someone wants to eat them, this is supposed to be a free country! Ban those and the liberals, er, leftist extremists will have opened the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from places where kids can buy them, which opens the door to ban all "unhealthy" foods from this country for everyone. Now under the excuse of "health," the government will be able to dictate what we eat. This is Big Brother. It doesn't matter if right wing extremists or left wing extremists do it... the legal system is supposed to be the bare minimum, with a good education system teaching people how to think and use common sense, and to suggest how they should eat healthy stuff, be polite to others, not smoke, not drink, not do drugs, etc. But the minute the government can dictate which FACIAL EXPRESSIONS you may employ when talking to someone, or which FOODS you may eat, or where your money, that YOU EARNED is going to go, that is extremism and it is wrong.
I'm very sorry... The liberals/leftist extremists have gained control over the media and the schools. They have screwed up the education system because some people are less intelligent than others, so in order to be fair and to avoid hurting someone's feelings, they have reduced the quality of education in order to level the playing field. And this results in a lot of people being idiots... USEFUL IDIOTS, as Lenin said (see link for references).
This is exactly what I need! While I don't watch television and therefore couldn't use a TiVo, I will definitely want one of these, especially since I am at work during my favorite talk radio crap and want to listen to it at different times.
I am certain that a lot of things affect moods. Audio is one of them. But I also believe that visual characteristics have a lot to do with mood. What's that Chinese art of interior decorating that is supposed to bring harmony? I forgot the name.
Mexico City (for those of you who don't know what D.F. stands for) is a heavily populated place. I've heard different accounts that it is the biggest city (or the third biggest) in the world, and I don't know if this means by population or by physical size. In any case, there is a LOT of traffic here. I have found that I am quite affected by "road rage," or let's just call it frustration behind the wheel, when I'm driving around town: Traffic moves along slowly. Going ten miles can take between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on the circumstances. It's just such a pain, and it is frustrating. Now, in my case, my frustration behind the wheel is caused by a number of factors:
Now all of this might sound totally psycho to you but I'm serious... people can't explain why they are the nicest people but turn into total bastards when they get in a car. It's not just sound waves that can piss you off... it's everything that your brain has to assign resources to, like motion and shape. I think this is why we associate certain feelings with certain faces, colors, shapes, body language, etc.
P.d., the worst road rage I've ever had was yelling profanities at the top of my lungs, and that only happened once when I was three hours late to work because I slept too long at my girlfriend's house and couldn't get to work fast enough. But that's how life is in the big city... I just go home in the evening and have some tequila. Because Denial is a river in Egypt.
I kind of wish that you had asked a different question: Are there jobs for old programmers who have been in the industry for 30 years. The answer is, "Fuck yeah!" Old programmers were around when computers were big, clunky and SLOW. They know that computers are intended for computing, a rather unobvious fact that you would never infer from the name. They know that problems are solved with algorithms, which are closely tied to mathematics and principles of electronics, and which must operate efficiently, as opposed to the contemporary method of programming, in which problems are solved with a million billion if..then..else statements that could be replaced by two lines of assembly.
aside() { These facts, in my opinion, illustrate the reason that old computers like the Apple II are still being hacked and used: There is something remarkable, something aesthetic, something that is simply challenging and yet so utterly simple about the design of old computers. The software that runs on them has a small set of rules to follow, as opposed to the entire universes of information involved in modern computers with three million billion logic gates in the space of a speck of dust. I am a younger member of the programming community and yet I can totally relate to the old timers who really understood their shit, as opposed to the geeks of today who need a calculator to convert between hex and binary. That's why I order a lot of these cheap 8- and 16-bit processors from Digi-Key and program all sorts of fun stuff with them. My dream is to build my own computer architecture, where the central processing unit is an entire board, rather than a single chip... kind of like in the old timers' days. It'll be slow as molasses going uphill, but NetBSD will run on it anyway.} /* aside */
So back to the question you asked in the beginning... is there any place in the workforce for old timers just getting started? If they have a lot of experience in electronic engineering and mathematics, and if they have a genuine ability to get their way with computers through this knowledge, then, yes, there is probably a place for them. Most likely, it will involve more work in the fields with which they are already experienced, with some programming involved, which they might have done before anyway. However, if they are janitors who ask questions like, "I just bought a computer. It has 256 gigahertz and 800 megabytes. Is that good? I got a Dell. Is that better than Fujitsu?", who are trying to jump on the high tech bandwagon, then, uh, no.
Violates the DMCA, does it? Or, as I called it in my company's new EULA, the Holy Bible?
Let me tell you something: If I buy an Xbox, it BELONGS to me. It is mine. It becomes my property. It is no longer the property of Microsoft, or the store that sold it to me, or the video game makers who make programs for it, or the RIAA, or the MPAA, or some marijuana dealer who sells stolen stereos out of the back of his stolen pickup truck. The Xbox becomes MINE because I have PAID for the damn thing. If it is my property, I can do whatever the fsck I damn please with it, including:
- Smashing the thing to bits with a sledge hammer, videotaping the process, and put the video all over the Internet.
- Drilling a hole into the central processing unit and/or memory, again, videotaping the process.
- Remove the chips from it and build an experimental garage opener out of the damn thing.
- Solder blue LEDs to it.
- Put a modchip that allows me to run PalmOS on the thing so I can use it as a really big PDA at the office.
- Put it on eBay and try to charge $500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00 USD for it, even though nobody would bid.
- Or, anything else that I might desire.
I don't know what liberal democrats came up with this retarded DMCA but it has to get off the books faster than shit going through a tin horn, or the next set of anti freedom legislation is going to bring us yet another step closer to BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.Ok. Let me get this straight. There are people in some African country that send out emails with schemes like, "We need to transfer 500 million dollars into a bank account but we need your help! Give us all of your private information, including your name, SSN, bank account numbers, etc., and we will open an account in your name to perform this transfer. To compensate you, we will give you 20% of the money." And people answer emails like that and give out their personal information. Or, someone sticks a sign on a bank drop box that reads, "Out of order. Leave deposits with guard." And obviously dresses like a guard and stands next to the drop box with a cart, collecting deposits. (As if a BOX can be out of order!!!!!) There are thousands of schemes like this... these two come from Frank Abagnale's book The Art of the Steal. He jacked millions of dollars himself, so he should know: People are unconscious! They don't think about security. Heck, America can't figure out how to secure its borders when thousands of years ago, China came up with a solution that can be seen from space. If people can't figure out how to secure a border, which is a physical thing that is well documented and understood by everyone (just look at a map), how the heck do you expect to secure computer networks when people don't understand (or want to understand) the complex computer internals that need to be understood in order to combat this problem?
Let me ask you a question... When was the last time you were rooted? On your desktop? Running Windows? I honestly doubt that anybody here has ever been compromised, even if running Windows 24x7 with an Internet connection and no firewall of any kind. You know why? Because most folks here understand what security means, at least conceptually, and wouldn't be stupid enough to enter their password (not that it secures anything under Windows) into some bogus window. Do you honestly think that putting your dog's name (or any other information, for that matter) into a window is going to solve any security problems for Joe Shmoe? NO WAY!
The way I see things is simple: Market security to corporations. Sell them computer security services in which their entire network is secured against attack, and more importantly, their data is backed up. But the home Joe Shmoe users... let them screw up their computers with the biggest security threats: All these stupid screensavers, cursors, sounds, graphics, clutter, junk, crap, downloads, viruses, MS Outlook, and all the crap they download and execute without thinking... When their computer crashes and they come crying to me, I'll continue saying what I've been saying for the past ten years, "Where are your backups? Oh, you didn't make any?! Well, the only way I can fix this computer is by blowing everything off and reinstalling. Oh, well... Maybe you should take it to [insert name of a computer repair shop that charges outrageous prices to reinstall Windows for you] and have them fix it. They understand these things better than I do."
If Microsoft really wanted to combat security problems, and I am 100% serious about what I am saying here, then they would forget all this B.S. and convince users to keep the clutter and the CRAP off their computers. Secondly, they would convince people to back up their data. Windows might suck, but I'm always more concerned about the mechan
Mikreausauft Corporation
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT (EULA)
1. By us having written this license agreement, you have agreed to be bound by its terms. Such bondage shall commence at the instant this document is written and shall persist for all of eternity or until the universe self destructs, whichever happens last, and applies even if you are unaware of such application.
2. You agree that you wish to be bound by the terms of this agreement and that if any statement or clause in this agreement is found unenforceable by a court of law, such a clause will still remain in effect. The previous statement includes itself. You agree to challenge the judge in said court of law to a duel.
3. PRICE. You agree that all of your physical and/or intellectual property now belongs to Mikreausauft Corporation, including but not limited to all of your money, your house(s), your car(s), your personal belongings and those of your family, friends, coworkers and enemies, and any other property that used to belong to you or any of the aforementioned people, and any other property. You agree that under the terms of this license agreement, we are doing you a huge favor by allowing you to pretend that what used to be your property still is, but that may change at any moment without prior notice. You agree that at any time, with or without notice of any kind, we, including our agents and representatives, may enter into the property that used to be yours in order to search and/or access any property therein, as it belongs to us and it is our right to access it. You agree that such search and seizure shall commence with or without a search warrant, with or without your permission, and with or without any other such legal procedure. You agree that you forfeit the right to due process and may be arrested by us or any of our agents and representatives for any reason and without the right to a fair trial, if one is given at all. You agree that you are our slave forever and ever and that you have no rights under this agreement. You agree that you have signed your soul over to us, that we own you, and that you are our material property to do with as we please. You agree that because Mikreausauft Corporation is a huge multibillion dollar multinational corporation, Mikreausauft Corporation is entitled under the laws of the universe and by divine privelege to eternal perpetually increasing profits.
3. GRANT OF LICENSE. This EULA grants you the following rights: Not applicable.
4. LIMITATIONS. You may NOT use the software product that you have paid for. You may NOT return the product for a full or partial refund. You may NOT install the product on any number of computers, including but not limited to zero, one, two, any negative number, any positive number, any rational or irrational number, any real number, any complex number, any imaginary number, any infinite number, any number on any number system or mathematical theory now known, later developed or previously forgotten, any number in any base system, including but not limited to binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal or any other base system, any number expressed in any numeral system including but not limited to the Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, or any other numeral system, any number recorded by any method or by any means, including but not limited to numbers stored in the digital memory banks of any storage and retrieval system, numbers written on paper, refrigerator magnets, cavemen scribblings or engravings on granite boulders or any other type of rock material, or any other number. The software product may NOT be used by any number of processors on the allowed number of computers. The software product may NOT be used on any day of the week, including but not limited to Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, any day with a name in any language, or any other day. You may NOT reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, twist, spin, poke, prod, mutilate, cut o
The way I see it, the federal government should ban all software from this country that isn't manufactured by Microsoft. Only Microsoft makes reliable software. The rest of the software industry produces bugs and problems that cost businesses some $60,000,000,000.00 a year. Oh, well. (By the way, drink normal Guinness, the stuff that tastes good. The extra stout stuff is crap. I used to think that was the only Guinness there was and as a result I hated Guinness. Not anymore. I started drinking the good stuff and let me tell you... it is GOOD!!! Negra Modelo is still my favorite bottled beer. Guinness is to be enjoyed from the tap... none of this bottle or can bullshit.)
Ding! You are correct. I am a "Mission: Impossible" fanatic. Remember the story a day or two back about "which video game has affected you most?" Well, if the question was "which television series has affected you most," my answer would certainly be "Mission: Impossible." My career in technology is based significantly on what I saw in those episodes.
Even if I was a large business with many millions of dollars, I still wouldn't buy this report. How do I know that this report, for which I would pay $95.00, even contains what I need? And, no, I don't care if this is published by Gartner or anyone else for that matter. There simply CANNOT be so much work or valuable information in a six page report that it calls for such an outrageous price. If it was $95.00 for a subscription to 6 months of valuable business information, that would be reasonable. But a six page report? That I can't even examine before buying? I don't know about you, but this sounds like a pretty stupid business decision to make. There are longer reviews of Linux on the cheapest websites that probably contain information of similar quality, even without the research that Gartner put into it. But then, if you're an exec who is so STUPID that you don't know that there will STILL be costs incurred in the maintainance of any computer system, plus a cost to modify your system and procedures, then you're stupid enough to pay $95.00 for a six page report that tells you that.
Windows 3.1 had code embedded in it that detected if it was running on DR-DOS, and if so, caused Windows to crash and otherwise behave unreliably. (The evidence was presented in court and Microsoft had to pay fines many years later. These amounted to a slap on the wrist for them.) Is there a point to what I'm saying? Yes! A company that puts deliberate bugs into their software in order to crush a competitor might also put special code to detect that an application is Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Word, or whatever, and show your username next to it as opposed to Admin, just to make people like you feel good. I have no evidence to prove or disprove anything said in my post or in the parent posts. But I'm trying to make a point... Remember the old adage about not believing everything you read? That applies to computer software, too, and probably more so than anywhere else, as people have this way of believing what computers tell them.
Hey, there might be 100 million lines of code in Windows... It might only take 20 or so to put your username next to something that has admin privs.
Being the laggard that I am, I still do not own a DVD player. I have decided that when ALL of the Mission Impossible episodes from every generation of this series are released in a boxed set of DVDs, I will buy a DVD player. Until then, I don't need a DVD player.
Oh, and by the way... those so called "Mission Impossible" movies with Tom Cruise in them? They suck.
If you think otherwise, then nobody would or could set up a website where people can post stuff, because the owners of such a website could be sued for the contents posted by other people. It would literally be impossible to run such a site without terrible legal risks. I can only imagine what kind of messed up legal system we would have if the laws were fscked up like that.
Actually, in some circumstances, there are really fscked up laws. For example, a guy broke into a school in the middle of the night. While in there ILLEGALLY, he fell down and broke his arm. He sued the school and won, and the school had to pay him damages for an activity that took place while he was illegally on the premises. In my opinion, if somebody is in the process of an illegal activity, the victim of the crime (in this case, the school that was broken into) receives automatic immunity from any liability to the criminal, including shooting them. That would cause criminals to think ten times before breaking into something, crime levels would be lower, prisons would be less populated, taxpayer money would be saved, and a whole host of other problems would be solved. Not to mention that the VICTIMS of an ILLEGAL CRIME would not have to pay damages to the CRIMINAL who performed the ILLEGAL act.
Of course carbon can emit light... If you can turn lead into gold, you can make anything do anything. (What's that, you say? You can't turn lead into gold? Well, why not? You can turn a tree into a diamond! Don't believe me? What's a tree made of? Carbon. What's a diamond made of? Carbon. So they're both made of the same thing but look different... If the tree is turned into ashes which are then compressed with a shitload of pressure and heat, you'll get a diamond. That's expensive to do and diamonds aren't really that valuable when you consider that two families control the release of diamonds from their vast reserves. But turning lead into gold is relatively cheap and generates a huge return on investment. I regularly turn lead into gold but I won't tell you how it's done. You have to follow that path on your own and stumble along the way like I have. Once you know how, it's very easy. I'll tell you that much.) So, basically, what you're telling me is that if I apply enough electricity to something made out of carbon, it will emit light. That might explain some strange things.
Incoming telephone, cable and electric lines should be protected from the moment they enter your building. All lines should enter into a protected equipment room in the basement, which should be a concrete room with a strong, locked steel door. From there, all lines that run to your networking areas should be enclosed in protected ducts that are difficult to saw into. Each networking area should have walls of concrete with thick chicken wire on each side, over which the drywall and plaster is installed. All doors entering into these areas should be of the metal variety. No windows should allow looking into these areas. Inside the networking area should be a concrete room containing the high end servers and other expensive equipment that provides frequent services but is accessed infrequently. These should be locked behind strong doors. Guards should be posted by each door, including the one to the basement and to each networking area. Each member of personnel should have an ID badge that is difficult to counterfeit as well as a five digit entry code. The ID badge should be verified by the guard as the security code is entered into the system. This allows the door to unlock. Guards carry keys that unlock only a deadbolt on each door. The security code opens the other lock. Thus it is necessary for both the guard and the other person to participate in unlocking the door. Guards carry weapons to fight anybody who attempts to enter by force. Inside the networking areas, all computers are secured by digital means outside the scope of this post. This security setup can then be touted as 100% secure and unbreakable. Management is stupid enough to believe a claim like that.
Free Software is one of the keys to placing control back in the hands of those who should have it: The consumer. The more installations there are of Linux, BSD and anything else that is free and open, the better off the consumer will be, if only because the overall community has more power to avoid getting locked in to Microsoft solutions that are all designed to keep you stuck to their products.
Lindows is definitely a good thing in this respect. There are issues (technical, political, intellectual or otherwise) that you might not like to use Lindows. Perhaps you don't want to run as root all the time. But consider this: IT IS IN YOUR BEST INTEREST THAT AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE USE LINDOWS, root or not. Juan Q. Público is never going to care about the "nuances" of computer science.
As recently as last year, I tried to help out a medical doctor who is a relatively technology literate businessman. I explained that I should do this and that to set up a reasonable security policy, which will require that he change somewhat the way his staff uses their computers at his clinic. Fully knowing the problems of computers, he told me in so many words, "I don't care about security." That's right. All of this stuff (software, computers, security, passwords, etc.) doesn't mean jack to him. He wants his business to be successful and gain value. If he has to spend a few thousands each year to correct problems, that's acceptable as long as the risk is relatively low in comparison to that of incurring overhead due to security requirements. The best security is frequent backups anyway. Everything else is just there to prevent more sophisticated attacks, which won't so badly affect home users. They already have gigabytes of shit on their computers... all kinds of sounds and videos, viruses, porn advertisements, "enlarge your penis" SPAM containing viruses that they click on anyway... it couldn't get much worse than that, root or not.
So, yes, security will remain a huge problems in computing for a long time to come, mostly because most people don't know or care enough to do something about it. When they lose their data and come crying to me, I'll continue to say what I've repeatedly said for ten years: "Did you make a backup of your data? No? Well, the only way I can fix this is to blow everything off your hard drive and reinstall everything. Sorry." C'est la vie.
They want virus protection? Give 'em virus protection! No viruses in Linux?! Oh, well... just put in a framework that runs fsck in the background once in a while to make the disk spin. A false sense of security might be the root of all evil but at least it will make them feel better about using Linux instead of Windows.
It is STILL in our best interest, though, that more people use Linux. It will create a market for us developers to make a profit. It will create interesting challenges in figuring out security policies that benefit the user without making computer use any more difficult. It might require that we rethink security altogether and come up with methods different from those we use now, which would perhaps be more flexible and powerful. Who knows. But the important point is that in order for this wonderful thing to continue, fucked up legislation like the DMCA needs to stop happening, and for that to happen, Linux needs to gain in power, whether by smart computer scientists or stupid shmoes like Joe Sixpack.
I wanted to say Doom II because I used to spend most of my time playing it and modifying it, both with level editors and DeHackEd. It got me thinking about game programming for a long time and I had some interesting ideas for a first person shooter that I wanted to make. So I bought many books on the subjects and thought it out a lot... that was before id released the sources. Doom II definitely scared the shit out of me several times. On one occasion I was in The Factory when I heard one of the aractrotrons or whatever they're called, walking, stopping, walking again... and it scared me so bad that I just froze up in some corner and waited for it to come up so I could shoot it. It never got there. After what must have been 20 minutes (I shit you not), I decided to go looking for it and finally discovered that it was stuck in a corner, on top of a raised floor from which it couldn't descend. So all that time I was scared of a spider that couldn't even get me.
But Quake II scared the living daylights out of me in a way that Doom II never did. I played it all night on one of my older computers at the time. I think it was a Pentium 133 or maybe a 200; in any case it was a pretty slow box. The graphics were low resolution and I couldn't really see the wonderful detail that id put into that game. I arrived at some part where I think I was in some sewer pipe or something and this creature shows up behind me and is just about to shoot. I shoot first and to my utter horror, this force field shield thing appears in front of the monster, kind of like the Borg have in Star Trek. I think I just started running at that point. The next night, I was on a different computer just listening to Joe Satriani through headphones and minding my own business. I don't think I was playing anything. On the contrary, I must have been trolling /. or something. It was after midnight and dark in my room except for the glow of my monitor. Suddenly and all at once, I jumped, screamed and turned around, to see that it was my sister, as opposed to some alien from Quake II, that put her hand on my shoulder. I became pretty nervous for a while and didn't play Quake II again for years.
There used to be a show on television called Vengeance Unlimited. When they cancelled that show and replaced it with "America's Funniest Pets," I stopped watching television, having realized just how profoundly low the content providers had stooped.
In one episode, the main character (the vengeance for hire guy) manages to jack ill gained (down payment) money that a bogus real estate agent had scammed out of people. In its place in the safe deposit box, the vengeance guy left a note that read:
NANNY NANNY BOO BOO.
That is the message, I hope, that SCO has received by the zillions of angry /. readers and other geeks around the world who are outraged at SCO's stupid, obvious attempt to make money by legal (court litigation) means instead of by marketing and "honest" business means.
That's right, SCO... Read my sig and whimper. (Its explanation is in another post of mine somewhere.)
But that's NOT why I associate this with Johnny Mneumonic. I associate it because in the beginning of the movie, they're going to store 80 gigs of information (about as much as I have in /usr/home/) in Just Johnny's head. They use three random images from the television to associate with and encrypt the information. These images are then faxed to the recipient. Obviously the bits aren't being used because they would change in faxing. A more associative method is used, kind of like a human memory. I think that with time, more technologies like this will be used as our computational needs advance; That is, unless these multibillion dollar corporations have their way and our computers become merely vessels for receiving garbage information (valuable intellectual property) like the stupid movies and music being made nowadays, while "real" computers will be labeled as "professional equipment" and will cost five hundred times as much as they should so that only the corporations can afford them to keep us under control.
In the world of the future, it will be corporations, not governments, that will oppress the people. The governments will only serve as a tool to those corporations. Capitalism is fine; I just think that one change needs to be made: The individuals should have a much louder "voice" in government issues than corporations. In fact, the "voice" of any party should be inversely proportional to its size and power. The RIAA should not have enough voice to mail a letter to a senator, let alone do the evils that they are doing.
This is MY PROPERTY! I am NOT a CRIMINAL. And I will NOT have some stupid RIAA telling me otherwise. Oh, and need I mention that due to their tactics, I do NOT buy music recordings any longer? (Except for self published recordings that have nothing to do with the RIAA.) It's not due to piracy either... because I don't download MP3s. I bought a GUITAR and I make my own damn music!
This all goes to show just how FRAGILE everything is in electronics. In programming, it's one thing to overrun a buffer by a few bytes and wonder why some totally different part of the system takes a dump, but in electronics, you can't even debug the damn thing. Airplanes have this problem times a million because of all the noise that goes circulating around in their systems. And I truly understand their concerns. I don't want to go falling down from 50,000 feet because some jackass in row 39D's WiFi driver in Windows starts sending out all kinds of strange signals. And because Windows Sucks.
"We are excited at the news to increase the amounts of this highly desirable content that we email every day," said Xing Dung Ho Chung, president of some organization in China that sends over 5 billion SPAM emails daily. "Our customers will be very pleased when download times increase proportionally with the desirable noise to undesirable signal ratio as we flood the Internet with our information, preventing undesirable signal from getting through."
Hong Dong Chong Shlong commented, "Our goal is to reduce the Internet into a medium for advertising with no possibility of gaining any other use from it. Our long term plans include government lobbying to illegalize the information that people want while simultaneously forcing people to spend a minimum quota of time reading every word of SPAM and clicking on every full screen advertisement that comes up. Strategic partnerships with computer companies and additional legislation will force the consumer to purchase a new computer each day because the hard drive of yesterday's computer will break down with the wear and tear of yesterday's immeasurable amount of SPAM."
SPAM companies also indicated plans to lobby for laws requiring the consumer to purchase every product and service advertised to them. The long term plan is to give huge multinational corporations an easy method to eternal, perpetually increasing profits with no benefit to the consumer. Humanity, except the shareholders of several enormous conglomerates, will be enslaved forever.
One of these movies... has a future, and one of them does not. Now, I'm going to be as... forthcoming, with you as I can be, Mr. Anderson. You're here because, we need your help. We know that you've acquired the highest karma rating on a certain website, one that calls itself Slashdot. Whatever you think you know about this site is irrelevant, it is considered by many corporate executives to be the most dangerous site on the web. We're willing to wipe the slate clean, give you a fresh start, and all that we're asking in return is your cooperation in bringing known Microsoft bashers to justice.
The way I see it, the authors deserve to have credits all over the free software that they made. And when you run free software, don't tell yourself that it's your right to take someone else's work and use it "just because." You have the right to use it because THEY gave you that right.