I believe the government should pay for everything. From now on, nobody will ever work. You'll just hang out and stuff, and the government will send you a hefty check each day. Little by little, people will spend the money, and it will eventually get back to the government. And then, someone will start a rival government, and people will get to choose which government they subscribe to. Eventually, there will be like 10,000 governments to choose from, and you'll get deals, like 10,000 free bucks when you sign up for a year or something like that. The next thing you know, someone will start a government to govern all the governments. And then, there will be competition in that area, so that governments get all kinds of free toasters or ice boxes or whatever when they sign up for some government-government. And then, there will be so much competition, that someone will start a government to govern all the government-governments. A hundred years down the road, every person will be the sole owner and operator of about 10 different governments of various levels and whatnot. Money will go left and right, up and down, and nobody will be able to figure out who is governing who.
I believe I have the ultimate design for a moon base: Terraform the moon and turn it into a planet orbiting our own. Sure, you might think the moon can't hold oxygen and other gasses due to its low weight (and therefore, low gravity), but that's not such a big problem. Have you ever read Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation? The world described in that book, I believe it was called Trantor, was almost entirely covered with domes. It began when shopping centers enclosed themselves in domes. Then, cities covered themselves. The next thing you knew, the whole damn planet became covered. Something of this nature should take place on the moon, except that instead of a bunch of domes, they'd build a huge hollow sphere that encloses the whole damn moon. This sphere would be made of millions of square sheets of ultra-pure glass about 10 feet thick. Then, trillions upon trillions of tons of oxygen and whatever gasses would be put inside this sphere, along with soil, seeds, fertilizer, and whatever else is necessary for getting things going. (Where would the gasses come from? Well, you could jack them from Venus, which has them in excess, or from any of the gas planets. Got the wrong gasses? That's not a problem with nuclear fission/fusion. Just figure out how to take radioactivity out of the equation. That shouldn't take more than half an hour of a freshman science major's time.) Lots of water would be added. The next thing you know, it will turn into a cycle--rain, snow, whatever. I think lights could be hanged from the enormous frame of the sphere, providing light to areas that are not lit by the sun. Vast cities would be built on the moon, but the whole system would be engineered from the start to create no wastes, and to use the cyclic patterns of the new "planet" to their fullest advantage. Oh yeah, and to protect from meteors and stuff, big huge lasers will be mounted all over the top of the spherical structure, and they'll blast anything that comes close (except ships and whatnot).
Once this is done, terraform Mars and do exactly the same thing, except that Mars doesn't need to be enclosed. But its moons do. And then, it'd be cool to terraform Venus. There's lots of potential there. Perhaps if trillions upon trillions of plants are placed there, the atmosphere will automatically change and become more Earth-like. Once that's done, do the same to Mercury. At that point, you've done all the solid bodies from Mercury to Mars. Then, you can do all the moons of the gas planets. And then, you can do Pluto, which is cold and stuff, but that doesn't really matter, considering you'd dome it in and put heat lamps all over the ceiling. And don't forget its moon, whatever it's called. Once that's done, find more planets and do the same. By then, the human population of the solar system will be like 4 trillion or so, so someone will figure out warp drive, and we'll start taking over all the planets in the galaxy. And then, when the human population is like 945 quadrillion to the third power, someone will figure out travel between the galaxies, and we'll do all those planets. And then, when the human population approaches a hundred thousand million billion trillion quadrillion times the previous amount, someone will figure out travel between universes. And by then, the Internet will be so damn big, Google will have to buy one of the universes and fill it from end to end with an enormous cluster of Linux quantum-mainframes, just to hold the indexes and stuff.
Now if NASA wasn't spending 100 times as much on Mars as on the Moon we might get somewhere...
You aren't thinking fourth-dimensionally! NASA is spending 100 times as much on Mars for a reason. Perhaps there have been breakthrough discoveries so important (with scary and/or highly political consequences) that NASA is keeping them secret, but continuing to study them. I'm not saying there's little green men on that little red planet, but I am saying that somthing must be going on.
As for a moon base... I think that's a good idea, but they should be freakin' careful. Have you seen that "Time Machine" movie that recently came out? The one that allegedly tells H. G. Wells' story, but is actually totally different? They showed the moon falling apart when humans tried to blast things into place. It shattered, fell on the Earth, and killed all the people until a million billion years into the future. So yeah... build a moon base, but don't do no nucular blasts up there!
Argentina was going to launch a rescue effort but it has been caught in a dispute over the cost
Yeah... Why waste something as valuable as money to save something as worthless as 107 human lives? Humans are easily replaced anyway, but money... now that is difficult to earn, especially when you're a government.
Alright, dude... So you got a Civic. That, in and of itself, is not a crime.
But for the love of God, man, please don't lower it, put an exhaust tip the size of a coffee can on it, or a spoiler that makes it look like a shopping cart, or a bunch of Japanese lettering on the front fender and part of the hood, or racing stripes, or aircowls all over the body that don't actually lead anywhere, or a bunch of ground effects, or tail lights that look like head lights mounted on the wrong end of the car, or a triple subwoofer with a 3000 watt amp so we can hear your car vibrating itself apart all the way down the street, or any of the other 10,000 stupid things that rice boys spend $30,000 on to make their cars look fast and sound really stupid and annoying.
We've already got too many of those ugly pieces of trash on the roads. If you wanna go fast, spend $2000 on an old car, like a Nova, Chevelle, Camaro (Chevy's), GTO (Pontiac), GS (Buick), Mustang (Ford) or Barracuda (Mopar) from the late 60's to early 70's, and spend $5,000 to make it haul ass. Girls actually wave at guys driving cars like this. (I swear to God!)
You're definitely making the right choice. Store-bought PCs aren't all they're cracked up to be. When you build your own box, you get to research all the components and find out, for yourself, what the advantages and disadvantages of each component is. If you're going to run FreeBSD or Linux or whatever, you can select hardware that is supported by your software, so that you don't pay a bunch of money for something prebuilt where half the stuff in the box is unsupported, and is therefore shit produced by shitheads.
(Because only really stupid people make hardware that isn't supported by Linux or FreeBSD.)
Commands in vi don't change.
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 2
Damn it. Once a program is published, the user's interaction with it shouldn't change unless it's for a very good reason.
Programs should be designed extremely well before any coding takes place. What's the program's purpose? How will the user interact with this program? Those are probably the first two questions that should be asked in the design process. Anything that doesn't fulfill one of those two functions doesn't belong in the program, period.
Once the program is published and folks begin using it, the user interface should remain consistent through every revision, and should only change for a very good reason. For example, if a feature so important that 99% of the users will jump on it upon release, that's a valid excuse for making a small change to the user interface. However, unless such a high percentage of the users need the change as bad as I need a bottle of Negra Modelo, the user interface (including placement of items in menus, images on icons, accelerator keys and whatnot) should not change, because it only annoys the user and creates trouble.
For example, I visited a Lenscrafters store yesterday to have some new glasses made. I remember their old text-based computer system. It wasn't pretty, but damn it, those folks could enter your information in minutes and you'd be out of there. Instead, now they have a system based on Windows 2000. There are all kinds of fancy graphics, but because the interface is so different, nobody knew how to operate the damn thing. A huge crowd built up, waiting for receipts or for credit card purchases to go through or something. I was there from 12:00 to 2:00, just because there were so many people ahead of me, and all the employees were trying to figure out this stupid new system. In other words, before, a new employee would learn which buttons to push and it just worked. Now, it's all supposedly self explanatory and looks pretty, but they have to click through a zillion menus to put a simple item on your receipt. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Another example... My company used to ship a lot of stuff through Delta Dash. I remember how it used to take them a minute or two to serve each customer at their little reception area. Their computers had boring text-based interfaces. The lines moved quickly, people got their cargo shipped, and everybody was happy. Then, one day, the employees showed up to work, and lo and behold, there was a new computer system, based on some form of Windows. Suddenly, there were a bunch of pretty icons to click on, everything was moved around, and nobody received any instruction (probably because someone convinced management that Windows is so good, nobody needs instruction). So I had to wait at least an hour for them to serve about 5 people ahead of me. The guy started getting the hang of it when he served me. Since I do pay attention to things, though, I noticed that he continuously has to move his hands between the keyboard and the mouse, whereas before, there were keys on the keyboard for each operation, and it went smoothly. In the past, a new employee would learn which buttons did what, and it worked. Now, they have to click through a zillion pretty dialog boxes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Honestly, if you get a new antenna for your television set, you don't expect your volume dial to relocate, or to turn into buttons or something. Why shouldn't this be true of software? My way of looking at it is this: If you have to move crap around with each new revision, you didn't design the damn thing properly in the first place, and you probably shouldn't be making interactive programs.
I believe that if twice the content of a CD-ROM can be stored on something the size of a coin, the technology should be extended to discs the size of CD-ROMS.
What I'm really looking forward to is discs the size of CD-ROMS with storage capacities in the multi-exabyte range, which can be completely "burnt" in a few minutes... that would be really huge. I can imagine companies with tons and tons of data running automated systems that transfer nearly all of their rarely-changing data to these discs, and union-mounting them for the ability to modify data. Better yet, if the discs could be read and written like a hard drive, you'd really have a solution.
Oh yeah... what drives me mad about burning CDs is that you can't do anything else with the computer at the same time, or it screws up the CD. I can't understand why CD-RW drives can't be built with 700 MB of RAM inside the drive. When you insert a CD, it would immediately begin copying the entire CD into the RAM for really fast access. If you try and access something that isn't in RAM yet, it'll read it directly off the disc, placing it in RAM at the same time. Once all the RAM is full, all accesses to the CD-ROM are nearly instantaneous. And when you want to record a CD, all the data will be transferred in a matter of perhaps a minute, and then you can do whatever you want with your computer while the recording process happens in the CD-RW hardware, with no computer intervention. Aren't our main processors doing enough already?
Seriously, the main processor should do computations and things that are critical to the efficient operation of the computer. For all other purposes, including user interface and whatever, there should be other processors. Imagine how fast crap will run if your desktop, including X, your wm and everything else ran inside a separate processor. It wouldn't even need to be such a fast processor, and better yet, if the user interface crashes, it won't bring down the rest of the program. But I digress. Oooooooooooh well.
Hi Craig. Google is my favorite search engine, mostly because it's so simple, fast, and has a very professional feel.
I wonder, when you're in charge of something as huge as Google, are you on call 24/7 in case something goes wrong? Have you ever been called during, say, a nice dinner, or worse, in the middle of the night? Thanks.
I think if Wal Mart wants to save money and offer low prices, they should ship x86 PCs with a bootlegged copy of the operating system from Sputnik. There won't be a bootloader, because that would increase the cost, so users would have to separately purchase a book describing how to manually boot the operating system. Of course, it'll be guarenteed to run any application made for DOS, Windows, Amiga, any UNIX, Linux, BeOS, old Atari games, Nintendo cartridges, and it'll play VHS too.
I have a better idea. The UN should pass a law requiring that all network traffic in the world, whether on a home LAN or through the Internet, must pass through one central checkpoint machine that will log all the traffic. This will provide a worldwide data retention center where authorities and large corporations can perform queries to figure out exactly what someone was doing. (Obviously, defendants won't be allowed to perform similar queries, because that wouldn't be fair.)
Oh yeah... And the central machine that would fulfill this function would be a 386 SX with a tape drive serving as RAM, running Windows XP Professional, and it would be connected to the Internet through a 1200 baud modem. This will make true worldwide broadband a reality and keep the economy strong.
Mr. Anonomous Coward,
It has come to our attention that you are infringing on the patent, copyright and trademark of our client, rice_burners_suck. (Or, more accurately, you are infringing on rice_burners_suck's federally mandated right to eternal profit from valuable intellectual property, a charge that, if pressed, will land you in a dungeon torture chamber where such offenses are punished under the latest revision to the DMCA.) You have two options in this matter: Either you secure a license to use the valuable intellectual property of rice_burners_suck (obviously, for an outrageous fee that will destroy even the most remote possibility of breaking even, let alone making any profit) or cease and desist immediately, promptly destroying all infringing copies of said property (especially those copies that you can no longer destroy, such as the comment you posted on Slashcrack). You have 24 hours to respond, in writing, to our offer for a license (and it must be postmarked two weeks from now and sent with the slowest delivery options). If we do not hear from you during this time, we will believe that you have chosen to cease and desist. If you continue to infringe on rice_burners_suck's right to eternal profit, we will sue you into the grave.
Patents are stupid!!! Copyright sucks!!! Trademarks are crap!!! Ban intellectual property!!! Screw the establishment!!!
<fine print>
Patent pending. Copyright (c) 2002, rice_burners_suck. All rights reserved. "Patents are stupid!!! Copyright sucks!!! Trademarks are crap!!! Ban intellectual property!!! Screw the establishment!!!" is a registered trademark of rice_burners_suck. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This flamebait is protected by U.S. copyright law and international treaty. Do not make illegal copies of this flamebait. All violations are punishable by death per subparagraph 3,939,112 of DMCA XP 2004.
Need I point out my earlier comment? I'll save you the trouble of looking it up:
I have to say, the Apache web server is quite a high quality piece of work. The fact that an obscure security issue has been found is a good sign that developers and users are on top of things in the constant struggle against remote exploiters.
I am confident that a fix will be available very shortly. Serious sysadmins will have their servers patched sooner than any serious damage takes place. I don't have the same confidence when it comes to Microsoft's products.
I believe it was Dark Helmet who once said, "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." But in the case of software, it's pretty clear that free will always triumph because commercial is dumb. Honestly, software developed out of a desire to:
Learn,
Do good,
Have fun in the process...
is simply going to be better software than something that's developed out of the runaway greed rampant in the inferior competition.
Honestly, who cares?!?! Now that FreeBSD has Java, who needs Windows anymore? In my opinion, the operating systems of the future are the free UNIX ones. Linux is supported by a great many companies. The BSDs form a good group of friendly competition. There are a whole bunch of fringe operating systems out there. Sooner or later, already the laughing stock of the industry, Microsoft is just going to lose the market, regardless of whether the government does anything to screw them over. Microsoft has abused its customers time and again, promising change and delivering crap each time. Think a memo about reliability is going to change anything? It'll take Microsoft years to solve the problems in their software, because it contains so much code, and even more so because it's a moving target: Microsoft can't afford to simply stop development and concentrate on reliability. They have to implement new features and stay on top of the constantly changing market.
Although Microsoft does have a shitload of money, I believe they made a fundamental mistake, and their high rate of success is only going to make them fall much harder when the time comes. That mistake was simply trying to accomplish too much. Regardless of their size and resources, they simply can't manufacture the rigorous quality that's becoming ever more important in our world. Their software is defective to the core, and it shows.
What Microsoft tried to do was become the empire. Like Rome or something. Rome took over about a quarter of the world, probably in hopes of gaining complete control over everything. Furthermore, the rich people donated a lot of money to the empire for various things. Everyone who donated wanted their name to go down in history, so they donated money to build extravagant things like colosseums and whatnot. Nobody wanted to support the maintainence of roads or other boring stuff. As a result of this negligence and many "management" mistakes, the empire declined until it fell apart completely. Microsoft tried the same thing: They either bought out or put out of business just about every profitable software company out there, in hopes of gaining complete control over the software industry. Furthermore, instead of concentrating on reliability, they concentrated on extravagant things like features nobody uses and talking paperclips. This practice has resulted in millions upon millions of lines of code, and probably 3000% duplication of effort, of which probably a good one fourth is defective, and this is hidden by hasty workarounds and kludges in order to meet shipping schedules.
I believe Microsoft would have been much better off if they didn't produce any software at all! Instead, they would be a software publisher, a packaging and marketing company of sorts. Microsoft would form alliances with companies in the markets they wished to enter. To begin with, they would offer a shitload of money to these companies, up-front, as an investment. The companies would produce the software, which must meet Microsoft's would-be rigorous software testing and auditing requirements. No known bugs would be released, and Microsoft would throw whatever was required into ironing out all but the most obscure and unknown bugs. For the release, Microsoft would print fancy documentation, put the software in fancy boxes, and spend a shitload on marketing. (The software would be sold as, for example, Microsoft C++, Presented by Borland International, or something like that, in much the same way as some science fiction books are sold as Isaac Asimov Presents whatever by whomever.) Then, Microsoft and the software producer would equally split the profits and share a few truckloads of Negra Modelo while they're at it. Everyone wins.
As time passed, and the Microsoft name was found on more and more products, companies would run to Microsoft, desperately trying to get Microsoft's name on their products. Instead of Microsoft blackmailing companies to give in, "Sell out to us or we'll crush you," everyone would run to Microsoft, in an effort to make Microsoft ditch one product for another. (Of course, the vast superiority of a product would have to be demonstrated in order for Microsoft to make such a move.) To make a long story short, there would be no anti-trust trial and software would be extremely reliable.
But then reality sets in, and all the free software out there has a giant advantage over Microsoft. That advantage is simply time. Linux, for example, had about 7 or 8 good years to simply develop without market pressure or competition. That allowed a good, solid foundation to be built and a lot of experience to be gained. Regardless of their resources, Microsoft did not have that kind of time to research and develop Windows, because the reality of the market forced them to continually make releases and add features. So I go back to what I said at the beginning of this unnecessarily long post, and that is that free software is going to replace commercial software, at least in the operating systems market.
I have a better idea. IBM, Sun, SGI and HP should all release all of their source code, no matter what it's for, under the GPL. Then, these companies should put all of their money, engineers and programmers together into an enormous team that would put the best bits of all their source code into Linux and all components and programs that run under Linux, debug these until there are no bugs at all, and optimize them for maximum possible performance (writing the most time consuming portions in the most tightly optimized assembly language possible for every platform supported by Linux).
Linux is cool now. But if this takes place, it will be more cool.
Perhaps Disney is following Industrial Light and Magic's lead in using Linux. I believe there was an article here a few days (or weeks?) ago.
With such serious companies as ILM, PTC and Disney using Linux and/or making software for it, and with companies worldwide developing it in all sorts of directions, it's no wonder that Microsoft's execs are shitting their pants. I wouldn't be surprised if five years from now, Microsoft will end up chucking Windows and joining the party. (Or putting things into Linux that previously only Windows could do. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...)
Even though Disney and their buddies are "the bad guys," I hope they succeed with Linux, because as more huge companies advertise their success with it, the more software and support Linux will have. SGI supports it. IBM supports it. Wouldn't it be a surprise if Linus' toy turns into the de facto operating system, replacing the various incompatible versions of UNIX and other OSes out there?
Knuth is your friend.
on
General IT Books?
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· Score: 3, Informative
You missed what I consider the most important book. Actually, it's a set of three books. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I understand there's a fourth book in the works too, but I'm not sure. This piece of work is more important to IT (or whatever marketbabble it's called today) than any book on C or C++ or UML or whatever. Those are all a bunch of pesky details. Knuth's work is one of very few authoritative sources on anything related to the processing of information. I'd call it the Computer Programming Canon, and I think it should be required reading, even if you don't plan on doing any programming yourself. If you're in IT, you should understand the concepts.
And I must add one small detail: Did you know that under Fair Use (which is being systematically eroded by megacorporations), you are legally allowed to reverse engineer any product? You have to do it a certain way, in order for it to be legal, but it's allowed.
Suppose a program requires a dongle to operate. And suppose that dongle prevents something else from working (like a printer that plugs into the same port, or an RS-232 cable or something). The software maker refuses to remove the dongle requirement from your copy of the software. So you're allowed to reverse engineer and crack the software (or hire someone to do it) for the purpose of circumventing the problem you're having.
There are plenty of other reasons that you'd crack a program. What if the software maker isn't around anymore? Or they don't support the program anymore? Or you've found a bug they refuse to fix? There are thousands of possibilities. When it comes down to it, copy protection simply causes inconvenience to customers, and gives pirates a nice challenge. All the more reason for them to pirate the stuff!
I've got a better idea. How 'bout the stupid American people WAKE UP, realize their rights (and to make the rest of you happy, all LAWS in favor of the individual) are being eroded away for the convenience and eternal profit of huge corporation?!? Eh? Isn't that an innovative solution? I'm not talking about CDs or music or MP3s or stupid shit like that. I'm talking about wait 30 years and you'll see how you have to prove your innocence every time you draw breath.
Perhaps pay a monthly fee of $19.99 and download at an endless unlimited amount.
Oh man, I just LOVE statements like that. It'll be just like "pay 40 dollars a month for UNLIMITED broadband internet access!" And then, when people actually start using the bandwidth they're PAYING FOR under the agreement, the provider freaks out (because of course, the provider is run by a bunch of boring gray-haired old geezers) and starts figuring out ways to weasel out of the agreement. Like charging extra after exceeding a certain amount of bandwidth. So if you download like 3 bytes, the 3rd and every subsequent bytes will cost you an arm and a leg. Of course, since this will be in fine print so small that you'd need to put six telescopes and a scanning electron microscope in series to read it, a lot of people will be fooled.
So where was I? Oh yeah, "Perhaps pay a monthly fee of $19.99 and download at an endless unlimited amount." That'll last about 6 months. And then, they'll say, "Ok, 19.99 for unlimited use, except if you download more than, say, ten songs (a 6 dollar value under your pricing scheme), we'll charge you extra. And then, the IDIOT consumers, who think they have no choice, will fall for it. And the price will quietly rise from 60 cents to something like 6 dollars per song, and once again, piracy will become a problem.
The way I see it, you can be as morally correct as you want... Say that the RIAA will price crap at whatever the market will bear. Well, obviously, the market ISN'T bearing their outrageous prices, because if it did, piracy would be a fringe thing, and nobody would think twice about it, because it'd be a waste of time and money to muck around trying to fight it.
Oh well. Nobody understands. I'll just have another Negra Modelo or ten and go back to sleep.
I strongly believe this is an unacceptable settlement. An acceptable settlement is one where a business arrangement is reached whereby both parties benefit from the agreement. For example, a deal whereby some small fee is paid to the RIAA for each copy of a song downloaded or sold, in exchange for RIAA marketing muscle supporting the scheme. This would most likely bring more benefits to both parties than the current scheme, which will screw over AudioGalaxy and give no extra profit to the RIAA.
Conclusion? The boring, gray-haired old men in charge of the RIAA have absolutely no imagination whatsoever. Only a lot of greed. And greed is their downfall. Case in point: If music (and indeed, other "content" such as movies) was sold for much cheaper, I believe the RIAA would increase volumes tremendously and make more profit than under the current scheme, where laws are passed left and right to protect the alleged right of the RIAA to eternal profit. Suppose an album you wanted cost $8.00 to $10.00 (USD), rather than the outrageous $18.00 that many albums cost nowadays. I believe that most people would find it so much more convenient to buy an album than to download 300 copies of a song in search of a good quality rip. Further, I think that music should be sold online, for extremely low prices. An album that sells for $8.00 in the store might go for $2.00 if downloaded, as the buyer doesn't get a nice shiny CD, case, booklet, and all kinds of other stuff. The copy available at the store would include all sorts of cool stuff (including coupons to direct customers to other music they might like), giving people a good reason to actually buy the music.
Finally, I think everyone should fight for their fair use rights. If you buy a CD, you should be allowed to make as many copies as you want for your own use. For example, I never take my original CDs into my car, as they could get jacked or lost or melted in the heat or something. It would be even more convenient if my stereo played MP3 CDs, so I could put all my albums on a few discs and not have to endanger myself and others while driving to change CDs around.
But like I said, those idiot gray-haired old geezers in control of the RIAA have no style or imagination. They're a bunch of boring old men with no goal in life other than to make themselves appear elevated by crushing others.
I know this may seem just a tad off topic, but I've read a ton of articles at Tom's Hardware, and I think I must mention something about the format of his web site. I don't particularly like that articles are split into a number of pages, and you have to wait for each one to load. Why can't the whole article be on the same page. Download it once, and read the whole thing from beginning to end. I believe that is the better way to do it, as it reduces the number of requests to the web server, and allows you to save an entire article for later reading, when you're possibly disconnected from the network.
As far as this particular article is concerned, I think it's quite detailed, and I like that. It's all about reading about the old technologies that made the computing industry what it is today. Makes me want to have a Negra Modelo.
There are so many different copy protection schemes out there. Some are really simple, like throwing some file in an obscure directory on the user's hard disk. Others are really complicated, involving the detection of various debuggers that might be present and working around them in such ways that the software can't be broken.
When it comes down to it, copy protection is just like system security. In system security, as we all know, the programmers have to find security holes before the 1337z h4x0rz do, and close those holes. (Remembering to enjoy a Negra Modelo after each security hole is closed.) Similarly, copy protection is a war between the implementer and the hacker. The only difference between copy protection and security is that the roles are reversed: In security, the implementer is the good guy and the h4x0r is the bad guy. In copy protection, the implementer is the evil force and the h4x0r who breaks it is the good guy. That's a fact, and breaking of copy protection should be rewarded with large sums of money by the implementer. Call it a sort of fine on copy protection that doesn't work. In other words, anybody who implements copy protection will eventually go bankrupt because it will get broken eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the government should pay for everything. From now on, nobody will ever work. You'll just hang out and stuff, and the government will send you a hefty check each day. Little by little, people will spend the money, and it will eventually get back to the government. And then, someone will start a rival government, and people will get to choose which government they subscribe to. Eventually, there will be like 10,000 governments to choose from, and you'll get deals, like 10,000 free bucks when you sign up for a year or something like that. The next thing you know, someone will start a government to govern all the governments. And then, there will be competition in that area, so that governments get all kinds of free toasters or ice boxes or whatever when they sign up for some government-government. And then, there will be so much competition, that someone will start a government to govern all the government-governments. A hundred years down the road, every person will be the sole owner and operator of about 10 different governments of various levels and whatnot. Money will go left and right, up and down, and nobody will be able to figure out who is governing who.
I believe I have the ultimate design for a moon base: Terraform the moon and turn it into a planet orbiting our own. Sure, you might think the moon can't hold oxygen and other gasses due to its low weight (and therefore, low gravity), but that's not such a big problem. Have you ever read Isaac Asimov's Prelude to Foundation? The world described in that book, I believe it was called Trantor, was almost entirely covered with domes. It began when shopping centers enclosed themselves in domes. Then, cities covered themselves. The next thing you knew, the whole damn planet became covered. Something of this nature should take place on the moon, except that instead of a bunch of domes, they'd build a huge hollow sphere that encloses the whole damn moon. This sphere would be made of millions of square sheets of ultra-pure glass about 10 feet thick. Then, trillions upon trillions of tons of oxygen and whatever gasses would be put inside this sphere, along with soil, seeds, fertilizer, and whatever else is necessary for getting things going. (Where would the gasses come from? Well, you could jack them from Venus, which has them in excess, or from any of the gas planets. Got the wrong gasses? That's not a problem with nuclear fission/fusion. Just figure out how to take radioactivity out of the equation. That shouldn't take more than half an hour of a freshman science major's time.) Lots of water would be added. The next thing you know, it will turn into a cycle--rain, snow, whatever. I think lights could be hanged from the enormous frame of the sphere, providing light to areas that are not lit by the sun. Vast cities would be built on the moon, but the whole system would be engineered from the start to create no wastes, and to use the cyclic patterns of the new "planet" to their fullest advantage. Oh yeah, and to protect from meteors and stuff, big huge lasers will be mounted all over the top of the spherical structure, and they'll blast anything that comes close (except ships and whatnot).
Once this is done, terraform Mars and do exactly the same thing, except that Mars doesn't need to be enclosed. But its moons do. And then, it'd be cool to terraform Venus. There's lots of potential there. Perhaps if trillions upon trillions of plants are placed there, the atmosphere will automatically change and become more Earth-like. Once that's done, do the same to Mercury. At that point, you've done all the solid bodies from Mercury to Mars. Then, you can do all the moons of the gas planets. And then, you can do Pluto, which is cold and stuff, but that doesn't really matter, considering you'd dome it in and put heat lamps all over the ceiling. And don't forget its moon, whatever it's called. Once that's done, find more planets and do the same. By then, the human population of the solar system will be like 4 trillion or so, so someone will figure out warp drive, and we'll start taking over all the planets in the galaxy. And then, when the human population is like 945 quadrillion to the third power, someone will figure out travel between the galaxies, and we'll do all those planets. And then, when the human population approaches a hundred thousand million billion trillion quadrillion times the previous amount, someone will figure out travel between universes. And by then, the Internet will be so damn big, Google will have to buy one of the universes and fill it from end to end with an enormous cluster of Linux quantum-mainframes, just to hold the indexes and stuff.
You aren't thinking fourth-dimensionally! NASA is spending 100 times as much on Mars for a reason. Perhaps there have been breakthrough discoveries so important (with scary and/or highly political consequences) that NASA is keeping them secret, but continuing to study them. I'm not saying there's little green men on that little red planet, but I am saying that somthing must be going on.
As for a moon base... I think that's a good idea, but they should be freakin' careful. Have you seen that "Time Machine" movie that recently came out? The one that allegedly tells H. G. Wells' story, but is actually totally different? They showed the moon falling apart when humans tried to blast things into place. It shattered, fell on the Earth, and killed all the people until a million billion years into the future. So yeah... build a moon base, but don't do no nucular blasts up there!
Oooooooooooooh well.
Yeah... Why waste something as valuable as money to save something as worthless as 107 human lives? Humans are easily replaced anyway, but money... now that is difficult to earn, especially when you're a government.
This is the biggest disaster since the conception of Windows.
Alright, dude... So you got a Civic. That, in and of itself, is not a crime.
But for the love of God, man, please don't lower it, put an exhaust tip the size of a coffee can on it, or a spoiler that makes it look like a shopping cart, or a bunch of Japanese lettering on the front fender and part of the hood, or racing stripes, or aircowls all over the body that don't actually lead anywhere, or a bunch of ground effects, or tail lights that look like head lights mounted on the wrong end of the car, or a triple subwoofer with a 3000 watt amp so we can hear your car vibrating itself apart all the way down the street, or any of the other 10,000 stupid things that rice boys spend $30,000 on to make their cars look fast and sound really stupid and annoying.
We've already got too many of those ugly pieces of trash on the roads. If you wanna go fast, spend $2000 on an old car, like a Nova, Chevelle, Camaro (Chevy's), GTO (Pontiac), GS (Buick), Mustang (Ford) or Barracuda (Mopar) from the late 60's to early 70's, and spend $5,000 to make it haul ass. Girls actually wave at guys driving cars like this. (I swear to God!)
You're definitely making the right choice. Store-bought PCs aren't all they're cracked up to be. When you build your own box, you get to research all the components and find out, for yourself, what the advantages and disadvantages of each component is. If you're going to run FreeBSD or Linux or whatever, you can select hardware that is supported by your software, so that you don't pay a bunch of money for something prebuilt where half the stuff in the box is unsupported, and is therefore shit produced by shitheads.
(Because only really stupid people make hardware that isn't supported by Linux or FreeBSD.)
Damn it. Once a program is published, the user's interaction with it shouldn't change unless it's for a very good reason.
Programs should be designed extremely well before any coding takes place. What's the program's purpose? How will the user interact with this program? Those are probably the first two questions that should be asked in the design process. Anything that doesn't fulfill one of those two functions doesn't belong in the program, period.
Once the program is published and folks begin using it, the user interface should remain consistent through every revision, and should only change for a very good reason. For example, if a feature so important that 99% of the users will jump on it upon release, that's a valid excuse for making a small change to the user interface. However, unless such a high percentage of the users need the change as bad as I need a bottle of Negra Modelo, the user interface (including placement of items in menus, images on icons, accelerator keys and whatnot) should not change, because it only annoys the user and creates trouble.
For example, I visited a Lenscrafters store yesterday to have some new glasses made. I remember their old text-based computer system. It wasn't pretty, but damn it, those folks could enter your information in minutes and you'd be out of there. Instead, now they have a system based on Windows 2000. There are all kinds of fancy graphics, but because the interface is so different, nobody knew how to operate the damn thing. A huge crowd built up, waiting for receipts or for credit card purchases to go through or something. I was there from 12:00 to 2:00, just because there were so many people ahead of me, and all the employees were trying to figure out this stupid new system. In other words, before, a new employee would learn which buttons to push and it just worked. Now, it's all supposedly self explanatory and looks pretty, but they have to click through a zillion menus to put a simple item on your receipt. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Another example... My company used to ship a lot of stuff through Delta Dash. I remember how it used to take them a minute or two to serve each customer at their little reception area. Their computers had boring text-based interfaces. The lines moved quickly, people got their cargo shipped, and everybody was happy. Then, one day, the employees showed up to work, and lo and behold, there was a new computer system, based on some form of Windows. Suddenly, there were a bunch of pretty icons to click on, everything was moved around, and nobody received any instruction (probably because someone convinced management that Windows is so good, nobody needs instruction). So I had to wait at least an hour for them to serve about 5 people ahead of me. The guy started getting the hang of it when he served me. Since I do pay attention to things, though, I noticed that he continuously has to move his hands between the keyboard and the mouse, whereas before, there were keys on the keyboard for each operation, and it went smoothly. In the past, a new employee would learn which buttons did what, and it worked. Now, they have to click through a zillion pretty dialog boxes. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Honestly, if you get a new antenna for your television set, you don't expect your volume dial to relocate, or to turn into buttons or something. Why shouldn't this be true of software? My way of looking at it is this: If you have to move crap around with each new revision, you didn't design the damn thing properly in the first place, and you probably shouldn't be making interactive programs.
Oooooooooh well.
I believe that if twice the content of a CD-ROM can be stored on something the size of a coin, the technology should be extended to discs the size of CD-ROMS.
What I'm really looking forward to is discs the size of CD-ROMS with storage capacities in the multi-exabyte range, which can be completely "burnt" in a few minutes... that would be really huge. I can imagine companies with tons and tons of data running automated systems that transfer nearly all of their rarely-changing data to these discs, and union-mounting them for the ability to modify data. Better yet, if the discs could be read and written like a hard drive, you'd really have a solution.
Oh yeah... what drives me mad about burning CDs is that you can't do anything else with the computer at the same time, or it screws up the CD. I can't understand why CD-RW drives can't be built with 700 MB of RAM inside the drive. When you insert a CD, it would immediately begin copying the entire CD into the RAM for really fast access. If you try and access something that isn't in RAM yet, it'll read it directly off the disc, placing it in RAM at the same time. Once all the RAM is full, all accesses to the CD-ROM are nearly instantaneous. And when you want to record a CD, all the data will be transferred in a matter of perhaps a minute, and then you can do whatever you want with your computer while the recording process happens in the CD-RW hardware, with no computer intervention. Aren't our main processors doing enough already?
Seriously, the main processor should do computations and things that are critical to the efficient operation of the computer. For all other purposes, including user interface and whatever, there should be other processors. Imagine how fast crap will run if your desktop, including X, your wm and everything else ran inside a separate processor. It wouldn't even need to be such a fast processor, and better yet, if the user interface crashes, it won't bring down the rest of the program. But I digress. Oooooooooooh well.
Hi Craig. Google is my favorite search engine, mostly because it's so simple, fast, and has a very professional feel.
I wonder, when you're in charge of something as huge as Google, are you on call 24/7 in case something goes wrong? Have you ever been called during, say, a nice dinner, or worse, in the middle of the night? Thanks.
I think if Wal Mart wants to save money and offer low prices, they should ship x86 PCs with a bootlegged copy of the operating system from Sputnik. There won't be a bootloader, because that would increase the cost, so users would have to separately purchase a book describing how to manually boot the operating system. Of course, it'll be guarenteed to run any application made for DOS, Windows, Amiga, any UNIX, Linux, BeOS, old Atari games, Nintendo cartridges, and it'll play VHS too.
I have a better idea. The UN should pass a law requiring that all network traffic in the world, whether on a home LAN or through the Internet, must pass through one central checkpoint machine that will log all the traffic. This will provide a worldwide data retention center where authorities and large corporations can perform queries to figure out exactly what someone was doing. (Obviously, defendants won't be allowed to perform similar queries, because that wouldn't be fair.)
Oh yeah... And the central machine that would fulfill this function would be a 386 SX with a tape drive serving as RAM, running Windows XP Professional, and it would be connected to the Internet through a 1200 baud modem. This will make true worldwide broadband a reality and keep the economy strong.
Mr. Anonomous Coward, It has come to our attention that you are infringing on the patent, copyright and trademark of our client, rice_burners_suck. (Or, more accurately, you are infringing on rice_burners_suck's federally mandated right to eternal profit from valuable intellectual property, a charge that, if pressed, will land you in a dungeon torture chamber where such offenses are punished under the latest revision to the DMCA.) You have two options in this matter: Either you secure a license to use the valuable intellectual property of rice_burners_suck (obviously, for an outrageous fee that will destroy even the most remote possibility of breaking even, let alone making any profit) or cease and desist immediately, promptly destroying all infringing copies of said property (especially those copies that you can no longer destroy, such as the comment you posted on Slashcrack). You have 24 hours to respond, in writing, to our offer for a license (and it must be postmarked two weeks from now and sent with the slowest delivery options). If we do not hear from you during this time, we will believe that you have chosen to cease and desist. If you continue to infringe on rice_burners_suck's right to eternal profit, we will sue you into the grave.
Patents are stupid!!! Copyright sucks!!! Trademarks are crap!!! Ban intellectual property!!! Screw the establishment!!!
Patent pending. Copyright (c) 2002, rice_burners_suck. All rights reserved. "Patents are stupid!!! Copyright sucks!!! Trademarks are crap!!! Ban intellectual property!!! Screw the establishment!!!" is a registered trademark of rice_burners_suck. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. This flamebait is protected by U.S. copyright law and international treaty. Do not make illegal copies of this flamebait. All violations are punishable by death per subparagraph 3,939,112 of DMCA XP 2004.Need I point out my earlier comment? I'll save you the trouble of looking it up:
I believe it was Dark Helmet who once said, "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." But in the case of software, it's pretty clear that free will always triumph because commercial is dumb. Honestly, software developed out of a desire to:
is simply going to be better software than something that's developed out of the runaway greed rampant in the inferior competition.
Honestly, who cares?!?! Now that FreeBSD has Java, who needs Windows anymore? In my opinion, the operating systems of the future are the free UNIX ones. Linux is supported by a great many companies. The BSDs form a good group of friendly competition. There are a whole bunch of fringe operating systems out there. Sooner or later, already the laughing stock of the industry, Microsoft is just going to lose the market, regardless of whether the government does anything to screw them over. Microsoft has abused its customers time and again, promising change and delivering crap each time. Think a memo about reliability is going to change anything? It'll take Microsoft years to solve the problems in their software, because it contains so much code, and even more so because it's a moving target: Microsoft can't afford to simply stop development and concentrate on reliability. They have to implement new features and stay on top of the constantly changing market.
Although Microsoft does have a shitload of money, I believe they made a fundamental mistake, and their high rate of success is only going to make them fall much harder when the time comes. That mistake was simply trying to accomplish too much. Regardless of their size and resources, they simply can't manufacture the rigorous quality that's becoming ever more important in our world. Their software is defective to the core, and it shows.
What Microsoft tried to do was become the empire. Like Rome or something. Rome took over about a quarter of the world, probably in hopes of gaining complete control over everything. Furthermore, the rich people donated a lot of money to the empire for various things. Everyone who donated wanted their name to go down in history, so they donated money to build extravagant things like colosseums and whatnot. Nobody wanted to support the maintainence of roads or other boring stuff. As a result of this negligence and many "management" mistakes, the empire declined until it fell apart completely. Microsoft tried the same thing: They either bought out or put out of business just about every profitable software company out there, in hopes of gaining complete control over the software industry. Furthermore, instead of concentrating on reliability, they concentrated on extravagant things like features nobody uses and talking paperclips. This practice has resulted in millions upon millions of lines of code, and probably 3000% duplication of effort, of which probably a good one fourth is defective, and this is hidden by hasty workarounds and kludges in order to meet shipping schedules.
I believe Microsoft would have been much better off if they didn't produce any software at all! Instead, they would be a software publisher, a packaging and marketing company of sorts. Microsoft would form alliances with companies in the markets they wished to enter. To begin with, they would offer a shitload of money to these companies, up-front, as an investment. The companies would produce the software, which must meet Microsoft's would-be rigorous software testing and auditing requirements. No known bugs would be released, and Microsoft would throw whatever was required into ironing out all but the most obscure and unknown bugs. For the release, Microsoft would print fancy documentation, put the software in fancy boxes, and spend a shitload on marketing. (The software would be sold as, for example, Microsoft C++, Presented by Borland International, or something like that, in much the same way as some science fiction books are sold as Isaac Asimov Presents whatever by whomever.) Then, Microsoft and the software producer would equally split the profits and share a few truckloads of Negra Modelo while they're at it. Everyone wins.
As time passed, and the Microsoft name was found on more and more products, companies would run to Microsoft, desperately trying to get Microsoft's name on their products. Instead of Microsoft blackmailing companies to give in, "Sell out to us or we'll crush you," everyone would run to Microsoft, in an effort to make Microsoft ditch one product for another. (Of course, the vast superiority of a product would have to be demonstrated in order for Microsoft to make such a move.) To make a long story short, there would be no anti-trust trial and software would be extremely reliable.
But then reality sets in, and all the free software out there has a giant advantage over Microsoft. That advantage is simply time. Linux, for example, had about 7 or 8 good years to simply develop without market pressure or competition. That allowed a good, solid foundation to be built and a lot of experience to be gained. Regardless of their resources, Microsoft did not have that kind of time to research and develop Windows, because the reality of the market forced them to continually make releases and add features. So I go back to what I said at the beginning of this unnecessarily long post, and that is that free software is going to replace commercial software, at least in the operating systems market.
I have a better idea. IBM, Sun, SGI and HP should all release all of their source code, no matter what it's for, under the GPL. Then, these companies should put all of their money, engineers and programmers together into an enormous team that would put the best bits of all their source code into Linux and all components and programs that run under Linux, debug these until there are no bugs at all, and optimize them for maximum possible performance (writing the most time consuming portions in the most tightly optimized assembly language possible for every platform supported by Linux).
Linux is cool now. But if this takes place, it will be more cool.
Perhaps Disney is following Industrial Light and Magic's lead in using Linux. I believe there was an article here a few days (or weeks?) ago.
With such serious companies as ILM, PTC and Disney using Linux and/or making software for it, and with companies worldwide developing it in all sorts of directions, it's no wonder that Microsoft's execs are shitting their pants. I wouldn't be surprised if five years from now, Microsoft will end up chucking Windows and joining the party. (Or putting things into Linux that previously only Windows could do. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing...)
Even though Disney and their buddies are "the bad guys," I hope they succeed with Linux, because as more huge companies advertise their success with it, the more software and support Linux will have. SGI supports it. IBM supports it. Wouldn't it be a surprise if Linus' toy turns into the de facto operating system, replacing the various incompatible versions of UNIX and other OSes out there?
You missed what I consider the most important book. Actually, it's a set of three books. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming. I understand there's a fourth book in the works too, but I'm not sure. This piece of work is more important to IT (or whatever marketbabble it's called today) than any book on C or C++ or UML or whatever. Those are all a bunch of pesky details. Knuth's work is one of very few authoritative sources on anything related to the processing of information. I'd call it the Computer Programming Canon, and I think it should be required reading, even if you don't plan on doing any programming yourself. If you're in IT, you should understand the concepts.
And I must add one small detail: Did you know that under Fair Use (which is being systematically eroded by megacorporations), you are legally allowed to reverse engineer any product? You have to do it a certain way, in order for it to be legal, but it's allowed.
Suppose a program requires a dongle to operate. And suppose that dongle prevents something else from working (like a printer that plugs into the same port, or an RS-232 cable or something). The software maker refuses to remove the dongle requirement from your copy of the software. So you're allowed to reverse engineer and crack the software (or hire someone to do it) for the purpose of circumventing the problem you're having.
There are plenty of other reasons that you'd crack a program. What if the software maker isn't around anymore? Or they don't support the program anymore? Or you've found a bug they refuse to fix? There are thousands of possibilities. When it comes down to it, copy protection simply causes inconvenience to customers, and gives pirates a nice challenge. All the more reason for them to pirate the stuff!
I've got a better idea. How 'bout the stupid American people WAKE UP, realize their rights (and to make the rest of you happy, all LAWS in favor of the individual) are being eroded away for the convenience and eternal profit of huge corporation?!? Eh? Isn't that an innovative solution? I'm not talking about CDs or music or MP3s or stupid shit like that. I'm talking about wait 30 years and you'll see how you have to prove your innocence every time you draw breath.
Oh man, I just LOVE statements like that. It'll be just like "pay 40 dollars a month for UNLIMITED broadband internet access!" And then, when people actually start using the bandwidth they're PAYING FOR under the agreement, the provider freaks out (because of course, the provider is run by a bunch of boring gray-haired old geezers) and starts figuring out ways to weasel out of the agreement. Like charging extra after exceeding a certain amount of bandwidth. So if you download like 3 bytes, the 3rd and every subsequent bytes will cost you an arm and a leg. Of course, since this will be in fine print so small that you'd need to put six telescopes and a scanning electron microscope in series to read it, a lot of people will be fooled.
So where was I? Oh yeah, "Perhaps pay a monthly fee of $19.99 and download at an endless unlimited amount." That'll last about 6 months. And then, they'll say, "Ok, 19.99 for unlimited use, except if you download more than, say, ten songs (a 6 dollar value under your pricing scheme), we'll charge you extra. And then, the IDIOT consumers, who think they have no choice, will fall for it. And the price will quietly rise from 60 cents to something like 6 dollars per song, and once again, piracy will become a problem.
The way I see it, you can be as morally correct as you want... Say that the RIAA will price crap at whatever the market will bear. Well, obviously, the market ISN'T bearing their outrageous prices, because if it did, piracy would be a fringe thing, and nobody would think twice about it, because it'd be a waste of time and money to muck around trying to fight it.
Oh well. Nobody understands. I'll just have another Negra Modelo or ten and go back to sleep.
I strongly believe this is an unacceptable settlement. An acceptable settlement is one where a business arrangement is reached whereby both parties benefit from the agreement. For example, a deal whereby some small fee is paid to the RIAA for each copy of a song downloaded or sold, in exchange for RIAA marketing muscle supporting the scheme. This would most likely bring more benefits to both parties than the current scheme, which will screw over AudioGalaxy and give no extra profit to the RIAA.
Conclusion? The boring, gray-haired old men in charge of the RIAA have absolutely no imagination whatsoever. Only a lot of greed. And greed is their downfall. Case in point: If music (and indeed, other "content" such as movies) was sold for much cheaper, I believe the RIAA would increase volumes tremendously and make more profit than under the current scheme, where laws are passed left and right to protect the alleged right of the RIAA to eternal profit. Suppose an album you wanted cost $8.00 to $10.00 (USD), rather than the outrageous $18.00 that many albums cost nowadays. I believe that most people would find it so much more convenient to buy an album than to download 300 copies of a song in search of a good quality rip. Further, I think that music should be sold online, for extremely low prices. An album that sells for $8.00 in the store might go for $2.00 if downloaded, as the buyer doesn't get a nice shiny CD, case, booklet, and all kinds of other stuff. The copy available at the store would include all sorts of cool stuff (including coupons to direct customers to other music they might like), giving people a good reason to actually buy the music.
Finally, I think everyone should fight for their fair use rights. If you buy a CD, you should be allowed to make as many copies as you want for your own use. For example, I never take my original CDs into my car, as they could get jacked or lost or melted in the heat or something. It would be even more convenient if my stereo played MP3 CDs, so I could put all my albums on a few discs and not have to endanger myself and others while driving to change CDs around.
But like I said, those idiot gray-haired old geezers in control of the RIAA have no style or imagination. They're a bunch of boring old men with no goal in life other than to make themselves appear elevated by crushing others.
I know this may seem just a tad off topic, but I've read a ton of articles at Tom's Hardware, and I think I must mention something about the format of his web site. I don't particularly like that articles are split into a number of pages, and you have to wait for each one to load. Why can't the whole article be on the same page. Download it once, and read the whole thing from beginning to end. I believe that is the better way to do it, as it reduces the number of requests to the web server, and allows you to save an entire article for later reading, when you're possibly disconnected from the network.
As far as this particular article is concerned, I think it's quite detailed, and I like that. It's all about reading about the old technologies that made the computing industry what it is today. Makes me want to have a Negra Modelo.
There are so many different copy protection schemes out there. Some are really simple, like throwing some file in an obscure directory on the user's hard disk. Others are really complicated, involving the detection of various debuggers that might be present and working around them in such ways that the software can't be broken.
When it comes down to it, copy protection is just like system security. In system security, as we all know, the programmers have to find security holes before the 1337z h4x0rz do, and close those holes. (Remembering to enjoy a Negra Modelo after each security hole is closed.) Similarly, copy protection is a war between the implementer and the hacker. The only difference between copy protection and security is that the roles are reversed: In security, the implementer is the good guy and the h4x0r is the bad guy. In copy protection, the implementer is the evil force and the h4x0r who breaks it is the good guy. That's a fact, and breaking of copy protection should be rewarded with large sums of money by the implementer. Call it a sort of fine on copy protection that doesn't work. In other words, anybody who implements copy protection will eventually go bankrupt because it will get broken eventually.