Step 1. Create new MyDoom variant with some "specific" things that will "target" Google Step 2. Release virus Step 3. Watch as Google searches fall off into the bit-bucket for many users Step 4. Watch IPO tank Step 5. Release your own search engine that doesn't suck but is certainly no Google Step 6. Exclaim proudly: "See, we TOLD you Linux was no good! Not even Google, probably the biggest Linux success story ever, could keep it running!" Step 7. Garned even MORE hate from all of humanity
(As a nice side-effect: "Watch as Slasdot slows to a crawl for a couple of hours as every geek on the planet tries to find out what happened to their beloved Google")
That's very interesting... I guess it would come down to convincing a judge that the situation which implies a contract is judged by a majority of people to be a contractual situation. Your example seems like a good one, but I wonder just how far you could push things? As long as you could convince a judge of it, it seems like you could say anything is an implied contract, and we have only the integrity and intelligence of judges to keep it from happening. That SHOULD be enough, but I wonder...
"The promise or promises may be express (either written or oral) or may be implied from circumstances."
What the heck does that mean?!?
If I work for a company, in the absence of any written or oral agreement, can they claim that because I never released a piece of software based on work I did with them while I was there that therefore I am circumstantially bound to not do so when I leave? Can such a contract be IMPLIED simply on the basis of the terms being observed as a concidence during my tenure with the company?
I agree completely. It's the supid-ass comments posted with the headlines that reveals Slashdot for what it is: Anti-MS Zealots Central.
I don't care if comments like that are posted, but they should be kept off the front page in my opinion. If your trying to be a semi-serious news site, then do it, which means keeping crap like that out of the headlines. If you just want to be a community of Microsft haters, that's fine, but get rid of your grandiose tagline because it doesn't apply.
About the news itself... Geez people, hate Microsoft all you want, there's plenty of good reason. But even they deserve SOME level of fairness applied, and as the parent here posted, they are damned if they do, damned it they don't, in the eyes of this community anyway. That's unfair, and even THEY deserve some degree of fairness.
"...the US Supreme Court Monday upheld a Nevada law that makes it a criminal offense for anyone suspected of wrongdoing to refuse to identify himself to police."
Assuming this is a correct interpretation of the decision, the way I see it is that if a cop stops me on the street and asks for my name, the first words out of my mouth should be "Am I suspected of some wrongdoing?". If the answer is no, or any variation thereof, I am NOT compelled to furnish my name. It's only if he says I'm suspected of something that I risk running afoul of this ruling.
And you know what? As long as I knew I didn't do anything, I *might* even be willing to go to court on those grounds.
The article says that Microsoft believes only 10% of PS2 owners were interested in older PS1 games. I don't doubt that. There is a big difference though: When you compare PS2 games to PS1 games, the PS2 games are usually a pretty big step up. XBox to XBox2 is not likely to be as big a leap, so there will still I think be plenty of interest in XBox games.
This is going to wind up being a terrible move for them, I absolutely believe that. Unless XBox2 has something revolutionary that makes people forget XBox 1, this is just going to alienate people, as the opinion at the end of the article says.
Leave it to Microsoft to actually have a good product and then royally shoot themselves in the foot.
I'm not here to claim Windows is better than Unix as far as administration goes, but I think in fairness it should be pointed out that ever since Win2K (and really even NT with the admin pack addded), Windows has actually been very powerful in terms of what you can automate.
They actually have taken a page from Unix' book and added a lot of command-line tools that can do just about anything you'd need to. You can tie it all together with VBScript run with Windows Scripting Host.
Sure, we could get into a debate about security issues with regard to WSH, but just in terms of what you can accomplish, I'd honestly say that Windows *NOW* is really fairly close to Unix. In either case it takes a knowledgable and capable admin to make it sing, but while it wasn't possible before, or at least not very easy, it is now.
I'm not so sure about this... I agree with what your saying from a theoretical standpoint, but doesn't it ignore the fact that what's happening in the disk subsystem is to a large extent independant of what happens within the OS?
I mean, if the OS dispatches out to the hard drive to store a file, presumably it also must store some journaling information at the same time with a journaled file system... Now if the hard drive goes and keeps both pieces of information in it's own internal cache, as far as the OS knows that info was stored. But if power goes out before it's physically committed to the platters, then that data is lost anyway.
Maybe it's the case that modern OSs with really robust file systems actually query the hard drive to report when the data has physically been writen? That at least means the OS wouldn't be "assuming" the data was written when it really wasn't, but then it's just a different point of failure: main memory vs. drive cache.
However, maybe all of this is really moot... maybe the cache is only a read cache and writes are basically done real-time. In fact, without knowing for sure I would really believe this to be the case. Does anyone know for sure?
About three years ago I wrote a very simplistic database server in Prolog on an Atari 800XL. This was of course AFTER I wrote a very simplistic Prolog compiler:) The database server accepted VERY basic SQL queries and could query against data on a floppy OR a cassette drive (yes, it supported cassettes!) and would display the results on the screen, nothing more (well, you could print it too, but I didn't have a printer, so I'm not 100% sure that would have worked).
Why you ask? Well, I'm frankly not sure I would have ever thought of this "accomplishment" again had I not read many of the responses to the PHP thing...
A friend of mine and I were having a little debate about how people sometimes do utterly pointless things with computers. We came to the conclusion that hackers in the generic "computer geek that likes to push the boundaries" sense of the word just like to see how far they can push things. They like to see what they can make these machines do that their designers never could have imagined them doing. This PHP thing is a good example of that, but applied to a language rather than hardware.
Not every project has to have a real purpose behind it. Sometimes just seeing if you can pull something off, no matter how stupid it might seem, is well worth it.
Oh yeah... my friend's "pointless" project? He wrote a web server on a Timex Sinclair 1000! He wired up an old C64 300 baud modem to the expansion port (so he couldn't use the 16k memory module at the same time), then dialed into his PC and used that as the network layer. IP requests to the web server were forwarded through the phone line, through the modem, and on to the Timex, which served up the pages. Everything was pre-loaded into memory from cassette when the server was started. To this day I don't know how he wrote the code to interface with the modem... I do know that he is an electrical engineering god and that he did have some external components added to the modem, but he told me, and I believe him, that the Timex was in fact controlling the modem. And you thought being limited to 1.5K per page with this PHP thing was crazy! Remember, the Timex had a GRAND TOTAL of 2K built-in! This to me is about as sick (and pointless!) as anything can get.
Needless to say, his project was far and away more pointless than mine:) Both were fun as hell to do though, made us think in very unconventional ways, and forced us at the end to say "well, that's cool, but what the hell is the point?!?"
The answer of course is "because we could, but we weren't so sure at the start". And that is many times the only answer you need.
Developing for PocketPC is an absolutely free experience, and has been for some years now. You could for a long time download the eMbedded toolkits (C++ and VB) and develop, even without a device since it comes with an emulator, and deploy for nothing. The only cost, and I don't think it's fair to count this, is the cost of the OS and software on the DESKTOP, since the free PPC tools don't run on anything other than Windows.
I've been a professional coder for over 10 years, and and programmer in general for more than 20. I've also been a parent for 4 years, one 4-year old (obviously!) and a 1-year old. The answer to your question is probably the answer that goes for most any job: depends on the environment you are in.
Some companies do actually care about your home life, and some companies don't. Some panies understand that employees with the ability to spend time with their family is important, others do not.
I am fortunate that, while my company isn't the greatest in many respects (i.e., advancement possibilities, technologies in use, creativity always appreciated, etc.), one thing they are utterly fantastic in is that if I need to take time off because my kid is sick, no problem. If I want to come in late some that I can go to a class picnic, fine. If I want to work at home so I can play old ColecoVision games with my son, that's fine. All of this is regardless of how much vacation or personal days I have left. My boss understands, his boss understands, and as long as I do good work and do what is asked of me, it's all fine.
Fortunately I tend to do much more than asked and am very highly-regarded by most everyone in the company, but I see the same attitude towards those that don't have my record of success or my proven abilities. Everyone enjoys the same atmosphere.
Now, there are times when I have to stay late, and there are times where I have to put in a little extra effort and time, but frankly everyone tries their best to avoid these things, and these situations are few and far between, and when you are generally treated well all the others times, it doesn't bother you as much to work one Saturday every few months, or work a 45-hour week every so often (when people go out of their way to make sure 40 is the norm).
So, find the right environment, and it works fine. It's tough to do, and you sometimes have to give up some other things like working with all the latest and greatest, but I think you'll overall be a much happuer person. I am. I've been with this company for almost nine years, and I've passed up at least five opportunities just about every year, even with a bad economy the past few, jobs that would have paid me more and probably been more exciting from a purely geeky point of view.
But when you have a family involved, things look a little different, and this company has treated me right in the areas that count, so I've stuck around. I suggest looking for something like that, and I think you'll be glad you did.
The software companies think the hardware will be commoditized and you'll pay for software (Microsoft and Sun among them, Sun obviously thinking their salvation is in moving away from the hardware arena)...
The hardware companies think you'll continue to pay for hardware but the software will be free (IBM and Intel among them, IBM being a big Linux & OSS booster)...
I say...
THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT! Free machines AND software for all the children!
I had an old Compaq 1255 laptop sitting on the shelf with a bad hard drive for quite some time. Recently a friend of mine gave me an old 2.4G HD to put in it. Now, that's smaller than the original HD, so I couldn't use the factory reinstall disc, which was Win98 anyway, so all the the better I figured! I could have maybe put some other version of Windows on it, but it's an older machine, so I figured maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to do my first native Linux installation (i.e., the first time it's the primary OS and not running in VMWare, or a dual-boot with Windows as the primary OS). I figured it would run OK, and I'd have a useful machine out of it.
So, first I tried Redhat, 8.0 I believe (I'm not sure the exact version, but it was the latest as of about a month ago). Installation took about four hours (seriously!), and the majority of that time was the automated portion (i.e, after I selected packages and it was doing the actual install). I opted for a non-graphical bootup (because I've had problems with XFree in the past, I always prefer booting to a console and starting KDE from there). Ok, so the install finally completes, and I try to boot, no good. A few seconds after the LILO message appears, the screen fills with a bunch of random gibberish (and I'm not talking about the normal Linux bootup here, I'm talking real random character gibberish all over the place), and locks solid. I let it sit for about an hour, just in case it was long bootup, not that I would have used it even if it was at that point, but still no good. It didn't work.
Ok, maybe it's just Redhat I figured, and I personally prefer Mandrake anyway, so I gave that a shot. Again, it was the latest version at the time (9.2 I believe it was, 9.x something in any case for sure). Installation took about two hours, still not good, but when I restarted the laptop the exact same problem ocurred.
Ok, so maybe it's Redhat AND Mandrake. Wait, maybe I did something wrong during installation (even though I pretty much just took default options). Ok, let me try Mandrake again and this time don't do ANYTHING beyond defaults (i.e., I'll let it to the disc partitioning and I won't select packages individually). Long story short, same result.
Ok, maybe Suse? Nope, same problem. Gee, could the newer kernel be the problem? Nope, Redhat 6 did the same thing.
Ok, at this point I'm ready to just do my own Win98 installation, to hell with the Linux mess.
(And here's where the relevancy to this topic comes in)...
I notice that I have a copy of Lindows 4.0 via a friend of mine (yeah, yeah, shouldn't have it, I know, but I did, so let's move past that point), so what the hell, why not try it? Guess what? IT WORKED!
The installation took about an hour, and although I wasn't thrilled with having almost no options during install (just the one question about partitioning, and I told it to just use the entire hard drive since it was going to be the only OS, why not??)... But in the end, it worked. Network worked right away, video worked right away. No sound at all, so that's a problem, and I haven't tried the modem at all, but I don't really expect it to work as it's a Winmodem piece of crap, and it doesn't really matter anyway.
Now, it is SLOW AS A DOG, a lot slower than I expected. But, it has been my observation that KDE isn't particularly snappy even on my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1G RAM at work (certainly useable, but to my eyes it lags WinXP a little bit, not a ton, but noticeably). But on the plus side, it mostly works as expected, and isn't that bad of a transition for a Windows guy. Tons of configuration options to be sure, which is nice. I did have a number of programs crash already (and I really don't need some Willie Coyote on crack-looking kid with a bomb in his hand pop up when that happens), but generally it's been fine.
I was surprised to see Lindows work at all, given the failure of the other distros. And before anyone says it, sure, I could have t
How are all the Linux boosters out there going to feel when you wind up trading one dictator for another?
People want to get rid of Microsoft, or at least greatly decrease their power, so much so (and to a large extent for good reason) that you can't see that IBM will take their place in a heartbeat if they can.
Many of you may be too young to remember the days when "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" because IBM ruled the computing world, flat out. Hell, *I* don't even remember those days personally, but I've heard the stories from people that were there, and IBM was in most ways just as bad as Microsoft. They used pressure sales tactics, made deals with companies that weren't in anyones' best interests but their own, and generally didn't play fair in many instances. They'll pull the same tactics out of their hate and monopolize the world just as surely as Microsoft has, first chance they get.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. IBM is setting themselves up to again prove that cliche true, and so many people don't have a problem with it because Microsoft is the defeated other party.
Be careful what you ask for folks... you just might get it.
"Whining about open source software is like complaining about the quality of a Wikipedia article."
That statement WOULD be valid EXCEPT that the OSS community as a generality likes to proclaim as loudly as possible on whatever soapbox they can get that Linux is the Way and the Light and that FOSS will usher in a new era of bliss for everyone smart enough to use it, and if your too dumb to realize the benefit than you shouldn't be allowed by law to use a computer anyway.
A little too harsh? I don't think so. That's the impression that too many people have of Linux and the OSS community as a whole, which is really unfortunate because there's a bunch of really good folks involved, but they tend to get drowned out by the much more vocal minority that gives off all the bad vibes.
If your going to take on the dominant proprietary companies and say that your offering can take the place of what the corrupt big boys are offering, than these types of comparisons become 100% valid to make, and if you don't like the negative feedback, too bad, you invited it on yourself by telling us how great your contributions to society are.
Yes, before we started hearing all this chatter about Linux taking over the world, your statement would have rang true, but not any more. You want to play with the big boys, there is a whole new set of standards you have to meet. Deal with it.
Why is it that when Microsoft does it it's called illegal bundling, but when Apple does it it's called "...a good suite of software preloaded".
And don't give me that "because Microsoft is a monopoly" crap either. You may be technically correct from a legal standpoint, but they've been doing it since day one and they weren't always the monopoly.
Man, I didn't come anywhere NEAR close to stating my point properly... I completely understand the comments about it, so let me try and explain myself better...
Before I even do that, let me just say that I had an aunt that died in a car crash some years ago as the direct result of a drunk driver on the road with her, so I am quite sympathetic to anyone that has experinced any sort of auto-related tragedy.
What I should have said originally is that I don't want to live in a world where freedom is traded for safety. For instance, if you could tell me that you have a device that when embedded in a car would make it absolutely impossible for anyone to ever die on the road, and to do so all I have to do is allow the government to track my every move, I would absolutely be against that. I would not want the possibility of being killed on the road (or of my children being killed on the road, to bring the point home more) to be removed IF the price was my (or their) freedom.
In retrospect, this may have not been the best case to make this point with because we're really not talking about something like that. As another poster pointed out, we're talking about something that can determine what happened AFTER the fact with a high degree of accuracy, higher than would be possible without it certainly. I don't have a problem with that at all. Those that do wrong and harm others should be punished in a very stringent manner, I completely agree with that.
But, I do think things like this quickly and easily become the proverbial slippery slope leading to tracking our every move in the name of public safety. This is the inevitability (I believe that's what it is) that I want to avoid, NOT being able to punish those that do wrong, that I am all for 100%.
When I said I should be allowed to kill someone, I didn't mean literally that society any government should have no problem with me killing someone. What I meant was that I want the freedom to make mistakes, even those that lead to the death of myself or, God forbid, others. I ABSOLUTELY want there to be punishment for such things, and very harsh punishments in some cases. The only way to remove the possibility of such mistakes is to curtail personal freedoms to the point that such mistakes are impossible to make, and that's giving up too much in my opinion.
This argument comes up a great deal with regard to terrorism as well. Some people are quite willing to trade civil liberties if they believe the government can then protect them from harm. I am not willing to make such a trade. Believe me, I don't want to die, and I most certainly do not want my children to die. But if the price of freedom is the threat of death, whether from terrorists or idiot drivers on the road, I take the threat over the loss of freedom without hesitation.
"Give me liberty or give me death". I didn't make it up, but I can't think of truer words.
That's the point I was trying to make originally. I did a poor job, but I hope this clears up my position a bit.
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Part of me is perfectly happy to cage someone that drives like that much of an asshole, and kills someone to boot.
Then part of me is scared to death of such an invasion of privacy and curtailing of personal liberties.
I mean, I SHOULD be able to drive like that and I SHOULD be able to kill someone and I shouldn't have to worry about Big Brother knowing about it.
But that doesn't exactly take into consideration the poor soul that was run down by this idiot, does it?
I don't really have a point except to answer the comments that will inevitably be made here about freedoms and government encroachment of our civil liberties... There is always a balance between complete freedom and the public good, and it's never an easy line to draw. I'm generally for letting people do whatever the hell they want until their actions hurt someone. In this instance, they clearly have, so it becomes a difficult topic.
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
That's all this is. Real has been slowly pissing off whatever customers it ever had by it's borderline spyware coding practices, and then not even giving better performance than the competition (not consistently and not by any appreciable amounts anyway).
QuickTime is far superior. Hell, even WindowsMedia is superior. Real knows their only real hope (pun intended!) is to hitch their wagon to a winning team and ride those coattails until the cows come home.
I personally hope Apple bitch-slaps them back to their hole in the wall, and I hope Microsoft just outright buys them to shut them up (in this singular case I'd be all for that tactic from MS!).
Real just annoys me to no end, and their demise, bu whatever means, can't come soon enough for me.
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
... that every alien spaceship/moonbase/post-WWIII Earth is devoid of the technology to do LIGHTS?!?
I am impressed by anyone that can get a 3D engine into that small a piece of code. You can make the argument that because it's linked to DX that it's actually hundreds of megs large. I don't agree... I could then make the claim that EVERY piece of software that makes use of an OS's API calls is really hundreds of megs big. That's clearly a bogus argument, and I don't think linking to a given library nullifies this achievement.
But still... Can we get some LIGHTING in that thing?!? Doesn't even have to be dynamic, I'd be perfectly happy if you increased the overall gamma a bit. I mean, the graphics, what I can see of them, look excellent, Why not bring them out in the light more?!?
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
You would think something with so many buttons would be a geek's dream, but this just falls flat. The first one was ugly, but at least it was black (black makes any piece of tech look cooler!), but this time, ugh, ugh, and ugh again.
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Now, if they could just find a way through some sort of bizarre gene therapy maybe to make male ejaculation fluids based on this stuff, my bed sheets would thank the scientific community!
(Stop looking so disgusted, you were thinking it too!)
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist! Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Slashdot Mirror
Step 1. Create new MyDoom variant with some "specific" things that will "target" Google
Step 2. Release virus
Step 3. Watch as Google searches fall off into the bit-bucket for many users
Step 4. Watch IPO tank
Step 5. Release your own search engine that doesn't suck but is certainly no Google
Step 6. Exclaim proudly: "See, we TOLD you Linux was no good! Not even Google, probably the biggest Linux success story ever, could keep it running!"
Step 7. Garned even MORE hate from all of humanity
(As a nice side-effect: "Watch as Slasdot slows to a crawl for a couple of hours as every geek on the planet tries to find out what happened to their beloved Google")
That's very interesting... I guess it would come down to convincing a judge that the situation which implies a contract is judged by a majority of people to be a contractual situation. Your example seems like a good one, but I wonder just how far you could push things? As long as you could convince a judge of it, it seems like you could say anything is an implied contract, and we have only the integrity and intelligence of judges to keep it from happening. That SHOULD be enough, but I wonder...
IANAL, so, can anyone explain the bold part:
"The promise or promises may be express (either written or oral) or may be implied from circumstances."
What the heck does that mean?!?
If I work for a company, in the absence of any written or oral agreement, can they claim that because I never released a piece of software based on work I did with them while I was there that therefore I am circumstantially bound to not do so when I leave? Can such a contract be IMPLIED simply on the basis of the terms being observed as a concidence during my tenure with the company?
Yeah, good point :)
I'm not surprised, just sad. I mean, I KNOW the Lemmings are going to walk off the cliff, but it's still sad.
I agree completely. It's the supid-ass comments posted with the headlines that reveals Slashdot for what it is: Anti-MS Zealots Central.
I don't care if comments like that are posted, but they should be kept off the front page in my opinion. If your trying to be a semi-serious news site, then do it, which means keeping crap like that out of the headlines. If you just want to be a community of Microsft haters, that's fine, but get rid of your grandiose tagline because it doesn't apply.
About the news itself... Geez people, hate Microsoft all you want, there's plenty of good reason. But even they deserve SOME level of fairness applied, and as the parent here posted, they are damned if they do, damned it they don't, in the eyes of this community anyway. That's unfair, and even THEY deserve some degree of fairness.
Standard disclaimer: IANAL... but...
Quote from the article:
"...the US Supreme Court Monday upheld a Nevada law that makes it a criminal offense for anyone suspected of wrongdoing to refuse to identify himself to police."
Assuming this is a correct interpretation of the decision, the way I see it is that if a cop stops me on the street and asks for my name, the first words out of my mouth should be "Am I suspected of some wrongdoing?". If the answer is no, or any variation thereof, I am NOT compelled to furnish my name. It's only if he says I'm suspected of something that I risk running afoul of this ruling.
And you know what? As long as I knew I didn't do anything, I *might* even be willing to go to court on those grounds.
Maybe.
Probably not. I'm a wuss.
But maybe.
The article says that Microsoft believes only 10% of PS2 owners were interested in older PS1 games. I don't doubt that. There is a big difference though: When you compare PS2 games to PS1 games, the PS2 games are usually a pretty big step up. XBox to XBox2 is not likely to be as big a leap, so there will still I think be plenty of interest in XBox games.
This is going to wind up being a terrible move for them, I absolutely believe that. Unless XBox2 has something revolutionary that makes people forget XBox 1, this is just going to alienate people, as the opinion at the end of the article says.
Leave it to Microsoft to actually have a good product and then royally shoot themselves in the foot.
I'm not here to claim Windows is better than Unix as far as administration goes, but I think in fairness it should be pointed out that ever since Win2K (and really even NT with the admin pack addded), Windows has actually been very powerful in terms of what you can automate.
They actually have taken a page from Unix' book and added a lot of command-line tools that can do just about anything you'd need to. You can tie it all together with VBScript run with Windows Scripting Host.
Sure, we could get into a debate about security issues with regard to WSH, but just in terms of what you can accomplish, I'd honestly say that Windows *NOW* is really fairly close to Unix. In either case it takes a knowledgable and capable admin to make it sing, but while it wasn't possible before, or at least not very easy, it is now.
I'm not so sure about this... I agree with what your saying from a theoretical standpoint, but doesn't it ignore the fact that what's happening in the disk subsystem is to a large extent independant of what happens within the OS?
I mean, if the OS dispatches out to the hard drive to store a file, presumably it also must store some journaling information at the same time with a journaled file system... Now if the hard drive goes and keeps both pieces of information in it's own internal cache, as far as the OS knows that info was stored. But if power goes out before it's physically committed to the platters, then that data is lost anyway.
Maybe it's the case that modern OSs with really robust file systems actually query the hard drive to report when the data has physically been writen? That at least means the OS wouldn't be "assuming" the data was written when it really wasn't, but then it's just a different point of failure: main memory vs. drive cache.
However, maybe all of this is really moot... maybe the cache is only a read cache and writes are basically done real-time. In fact, without knowing for sure I would really believe this to be the case. Does anyone know for sure?
About three years ago I wrote a very simplistic database server in Prolog on an Atari 800XL. This was of course AFTER I wrote a very simplistic Prolog compiler :) The database server accepted VERY basic SQL queries and could query against data on a floppy OR a cassette drive (yes, it supported cassettes!) and would display the results on the screen, nothing more (well, you could print it too, but I didn't have a printer, so I'm not 100% sure that would have worked).
:) Both were fun as hell to do though, made us think in very unconventional ways, and forced us at the end to say "well, that's cool, but what the hell is the point?!?"
Why you ask? Well, I'm frankly not sure I would have ever thought of this "accomplishment" again had I not read many of the responses to the PHP thing...
A friend of mine and I were having a little debate about how people sometimes do utterly pointless things with computers. We came to the conclusion that hackers in the generic "computer geek that likes to push the boundaries" sense of the word just like to see how far they can push things. They like to see what they can make these machines do that their designers never could have imagined them doing. This PHP thing is a good example of that, but applied to a language rather than hardware.
Not every project has to have a real purpose behind it. Sometimes just seeing if you can pull something off, no matter how stupid it might seem, is well worth it.
Oh yeah... my friend's "pointless" project? He wrote a web server on a Timex Sinclair 1000! He wired up an old C64 300 baud modem to the expansion port (so he couldn't use the 16k memory module at the same time), then dialed into his PC and used that as the network layer. IP requests to the web server were forwarded through the phone line, through the modem, and on to the Timex, which served up the pages. Everything was pre-loaded into memory from cassette when the server was started. To this day I don't know how he wrote the code to interface with the modem... I do know that he is an electrical engineering god and that he did have some external components added to the modem, but he told me, and I believe him, that the Timex was in fact controlling the modem. And you thought being limited to 1.5K per page with this PHP thing was crazy! Remember, the Timex had a GRAND TOTAL of 2K built-in! This to me is about as sick (and pointless!) as anything can get.
Needless to say, his project was far and away more pointless than mine
The answer of course is "because we could, but we weren't so sure at the start". And that is many times the only answer you need.
Developing for PocketPC is an absolutely free experience, and has been for some years now. You could for a long time download the eMbedded toolkits (C++ and VB) and develop, even without a device since it comes with an emulator, and deploy for nothing. The only cost, and I don't think it's fair to count this, is the cost of the OS and software on the DESKTOP, since the free PPC tools don't run on anything other than Windows.
Much like putting a spoiler warning when discussing an upcoming movie, please in the future wrap your text in tags, just so we're sure ;)
I've been a professional coder for over 10 years, and and programmer in general for more than 20. I've also been a parent for 4 years, one 4-year old (obviously!) and a 1-year old. The answer to your question is probably the answer that goes for most any job: depends on the environment you are in.
Some companies do actually care about your home life, and some companies don't. Some panies understand that employees with the ability to spend time with their family is important, others do not.
I am fortunate that, while my company isn't the greatest in many respects (i.e., advancement possibilities, technologies in use, creativity always appreciated, etc.), one thing they are utterly fantastic in is that if I need to take time off because my kid is sick, no problem. If I want to come in late some that I can go to a class picnic, fine. If I want to work at home so I can play old ColecoVision games with my son, that's fine. All of this is regardless of how much vacation or personal days I have left. My boss understands, his boss understands, and as long as I do good work and do what is asked of me, it's all fine.
Fortunately I tend to do much more than asked and am very highly-regarded by most everyone in the company, but I see the same attitude towards those that don't have my record of success or my proven abilities. Everyone enjoys the same atmosphere.
Now, there are times when I have to stay late, and there are times where I have to put in a little extra effort and time, but frankly everyone tries their best to avoid these things, and these situations are few and far between, and when you are generally treated well all the others times, it doesn't bother you as much to work one Saturday every few months, or work a 45-hour week every so often (when people go out of their way to make sure 40 is the norm).
So, find the right environment, and it works fine. It's tough to do, and you sometimes have to give up some other things like working with all the latest and greatest, but I think you'll overall be a much happuer person. I am. I've been with this company for almost nine years, and I've passed up at least five opportunities just about every year, even with a bad economy the past few, jobs that would have paid me more and probably been more exciting from a purely geeky point of view.
But when you have a family involved, things look a little different, and this company has treated me right in the areas that count, so I've stuck around. I suggest looking for something like that, and I think you'll be glad you did.
The software companies think the hardware will be commoditized and you'll pay for software (Microsoft and Sun among them, Sun obviously thinking their salvation is in moving away from the hardware arena)...
The hardware companies think you'll continue to pay for hardware but the software will be free (IBM and Intel among them, IBM being a big Linux & OSS booster)...
I say...
THEY'RE BOTH RIGHT! Free machines AND software for all the children!
I had an old Compaq 1255 laptop sitting on the shelf with a bad hard drive for quite some time. Recently a friend of mine gave me an old 2.4G HD to put in it. Now, that's smaller than the original HD, so I couldn't use the factory reinstall disc, which was Win98 anyway, so all the the better I figured! I could have maybe put some other version of Windows on it, but it's an older machine, so I figured maybe this would be the perfect opportunity to do my first native Linux installation (i.e., the first time it's the primary OS and not running in VMWare, or a dual-boot with Windows as the primary OS). I figured it would run OK, and I'd have a useful machine out of it.
So, first I tried Redhat, 8.0 I believe (I'm not sure the exact version, but it was the latest as of about a month ago). Installation took about four hours (seriously!), and the majority of that time was the automated portion (i.e, after I selected packages and it was doing the actual install). I opted for a non-graphical bootup (because I've had problems with XFree in the past, I always prefer booting to a console and starting KDE from there). Ok, so the install finally completes, and I try to boot, no good. A few seconds after the LILO message appears, the screen fills with a bunch of random gibberish (and I'm not talking about the normal Linux bootup here, I'm talking real random character gibberish all over the place), and locks solid. I let it sit for about an hour, just in case it was long bootup, not that I would have used it even if it was at that point, but still no good. It didn't work.
Ok, maybe it's just Redhat I figured, and I personally prefer Mandrake anyway, so I gave that a shot. Again, it was the latest version at the time (9.2 I believe it was, 9.x something in any case for sure). Installation took about two hours, still not good, but when I restarted the laptop the exact same problem ocurred.
Ok, so maybe it's Redhat AND Mandrake. Wait, maybe I did something wrong during installation (even though I pretty much just took default options). Ok, let me try Mandrake again and this time don't do ANYTHING beyond defaults (i.e., I'll let it to the disc partitioning and I won't select packages individually). Long story short, same result.
Ok, maybe Suse? Nope, same problem. Gee, could the newer kernel be the problem? Nope, Redhat 6 did the same thing.
Ok, at this point I'm ready to just do my own Win98 installation, to hell with the Linux mess.
(And here's where the relevancy to this topic comes in)...
I notice that I have a copy of Lindows 4.0 via a friend of mine (yeah, yeah, shouldn't have it, I know, but I did, so let's move past that point), so what the hell, why not try it? Guess what? IT WORKED!
The installation took about an hour, and although I wasn't thrilled with having almost no options during install (just the one question about partitioning, and I told it to just use the entire hard drive since it was going to be the only OS, why not??)... But in the end, it worked. Network worked right away, video worked right away. No sound at all, so that's a problem, and I haven't tried the modem at all, but I don't really expect it to work as it's a Winmodem piece of crap, and it doesn't really matter anyway.
Now, it is SLOW AS A DOG, a lot slower than I expected. But, it has been my observation that KDE isn't particularly snappy even on my 2.4GHz Pentium 4 with 1G RAM at work (certainly useable, but to my eyes it lags WinXP a little bit, not a ton, but noticeably). But on the plus side, it mostly works as expected, and isn't that bad of a transition for a Windows guy. Tons of configuration options to be sure, which is nice. I did have a number of programs crash already (and I really don't need some Willie Coyote on crack-looking kid with a bomb in his hand pop up when that happens), but generally it's been fine.
I was surprised to see Lindows work at all, given the failure of the other distros. And before anyone says it, sure, I could have t
How are all the Linux boosters out there going to feel when you wind up trading one dictator for another?
People want to get rid of Microsoft, or at least greatly decrease their power, so much so (and to a large extent for good reason) that you can't see that IBM will take their place in a heartbeat if they can.
Many of you may be too young to remember the days when "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" because IBM ruled the computing world, flat out. Hell, *I* don't even remember those days personally, but I've heard the stories from people that were there, and IBM was in most ways just as bad as Microsoft. They used pressure sales tactics, made deals with companies that weren't in anyones' best interests but their own, and generally didn't play fair in many instances. They'll pull the same tactics out of their hate and monopolize the world just as surely as Microsoft has, first chance they get.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. IBM is setting themselves up to again prove that cliche true, and so many people don't have a problem with it because Microsoft is the defeated other party.
Be careful what you ask for folks... you just might get it.
"Whining about open source software is like complaining about the quality of a Wikipedia article."
That statement WOULD be valid EXCEPT that the OSS community as a generality likes to proclaim as loudly as possible on whatever soapbox they can get that Linux is the Way and the Light and that FOSS will usher in a new era of bliss for everyone smart enough to use it, and if your too dumb to realize the benefit than you shouldn't be allowed by law to use a computer anyway.
A little too harsh? I don't think so. That's the impression that too many people have of Linux and the OSS community as a whole, which is really unfortunate because there's a bunch of really good folks involved, but they tend to get drowned out by the much more vocal minority that gives off all the bad vibes.
If your going to take on the dominant proprietary companies and say that your offering can take the place of what the corrupt big boys are offering, than these types of comparisons become 100% valid to make, and if you don't like the negative feedback, too bad, you invited it on yourself by telling us how great your contributions to society are.
Yes, before we started hearing all this chatter about Linux taking over the world, your statement would have rang true, but not any more. You want to play with the big boys, there is a whole new set of standards you have to meet. Deal with it.
Why is it that when Microsoft does it it's called illegal bundling, but when Apple does it it's called "...a good suite of software preloaded".
And don't give me that "because Microsoft is a monopoly" crap either. You may be technically correct from a legal standpoint, but they've been doing it since day one and they weren't always the monopoly.
Man, I didn't come anywhere NEAR close to stating my point properly... I completely understand the comments about it, so let me try and explain myself better...
Before I even do that, let me just say that I had an aunt that died in a car crash some years ago as the direct result of a drunk driver on the road with her, so I am quite sympathetic to anyone that has experinced any sort of auto-related tragedy.
What I should have said originally is that I don't want to live in a world where freedom is traded for safety. For instance, if you could tell me that you have a device that when embedded in a car would make it absolutely impossible for anyone to ever die on the road, and to do so all I have to do is allow the government to track my every move, I would absolutely be against that. I would not want the possibility of being killed on the road (or of my children being killed on the road, to bring the point home more) to be removed IF the price was my (or their) freedom.
In retrospect, this may have not been the best case to make this point with because we're really not talking about something like that. As another poster pointed out, we're talking about something that can determine what happened AFTER the fact with a high degree of accuracy, higher than would be possible without it certainly. I don't have a problem with that at all. Those that do wrong and harm others should be punished in a very stringent manner, I completely agree with that.
But, I do think things like this quickly and easily become the proverbial slippery slope leading to tracking our every move in the name of public safety. This is the inevitability (I believe that's what it is) that I want to avoid, NOT being able to punish those that do wrong, that I am all for 100%.
When I said I should be allowed to kill someone, I didn't mean literally that society any government should have no problem with me killing someone. What I meant was that I want the freedom to make mistakes, even those that lead to the death of myself or, God forbid, others. I ABSOLUTELY want there to be punishment for such things, and very harsh punishments in some cases. The only way to remove the possibility of such mistakes is to curtail personal freedoms to the point that such mistakes are impossible to make, and that's giving up too much in my opinion.
This argument comes up a great deal with regard to terrorism as well. Some people are quite willing to trade civil liberties if they believe the government can then protect them from harm. I am not willing to make such a trade. Believe me, I don't want to die, and I most certainly do not want my children to die. But if the price of freedom is the threat of death, whether from terrorists or idiot drivers on the road, I take the threat over the loss of freedom without hesitation.
"Give me liberty or give me death". I didn't make it up, but I can't think of truer words.
That's the point I was trying to make originally. I did a poor job, but I hope this clears up my position a bit.
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Now no guys will try the old extend-the-arm-over-the-girl trick for fear of being seen by the projectionist as the girl slaps him for trying it.
:)
Man, if I had a quarter for every time that happened... Uh, that is, uh, that's what I've HEARD can happen sometimes.
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Part of me is perfectly happy to cage someone that drives like that much of an asshole, and kills someone to boot.
Then part of me is scared to death of such an invasion of privacy and curtailing of personal liberties.
I mean, I SHOULD be able to drive like that and I SHOULD be able to kill someone and I shouldn't have to worry about Big Brother knowing about it.
But that doesn't exactly take into consideration the poor soul that was run down by this idiot, does it?
I don't really have a point except to answer the comments that will inevitably be made here about freedoms and government encroachment of our civil liberties... There is always a balance between complete freedom and the public good, and it's never an easy line to draw. I'm generally for letting people do whatever the hell they want until their actions hurt someone. In this instance, they clearly have, so it becomes a difficult topic.
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
That's all this is. Real has been slowly pissing off whatever customers it ever had by it's borderline spyware coding practices, and then not even giving better performance than the competition (not consistently and not by any appreciable amounts anyway).
QuickTime is far superior. Hell, even WindowsMedia is superior. Real knows their only real hope (pun intended!) is to hitch their wagon to a winning team and ride those coattails until the cows come home.
I personally hope Apple bitch-slaps them back to their hole in the wall, and I hope Microsoft just outright buys them to shut them up (in this singular case I'd be all for that tactic from MS!).
Real just annoys me to no end, and their demise, bu whatever means, can't come soon enough for me.
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
... that every alien spaceship/moonbase/post-WWIII Earth is devoid of the technology to do LIGHTS?!?
I am impressed by anyone that can get a 3D engine into that small a piece of code. You can make the argument that because it's linked to DX that it's actually hundreds of megs large. I don't agree... I could then make the claim that EVERY piece of software that makes use of an OS's API calls is really hundreds of megs big. That's clearly a bogus argument, and I don't think linking to a given library nullifies this achievement.
But still... Can we get some LIGHTING in that thing?!? Doesn't even have to be dynamic, I'd be perfectly happy if you increased the overall gamma a bit. I mean, the graphics, what I can see of them, look excellent, Why not bring them out in the light more?!?
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
You would think something with so many buttons would be a geek's dream, but this just falls flat. The first one was ugly, but at least it was black (black makes any piece of tech look cooler!), but this time, ugh, ugh, and ugh again.
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC
Now, if they could just find a way through some sort of bizarre gene therapy maybe to make male ejaculation fluids based on this stuff, my bed sheets would thank the scientific community!
(Stop looking so disgusted, you were thinking it too!)
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Omnytex Technologies - Where dreams and software unite
K&G Arcade - 26 games in one, a unique blend of action, adventure and humor
Invasion: Trivia! - Trivia, with a very sick twist!
Electro - The premiere electronics tool for PocketPC