So what? Why do you love this corporation so much that you feel compelled to defend them from a bunch of anonymous people. DO you love other corporations just as much? Do you go around yelling at people if they say they don't like fords or maytag washers? If not why not? Why did you choose to make yourself a sycophant for this corporation but not others? Honestly I want to know how MS got you to pledge your allegience to them.
Nothing. They don't have my allegiance. I also defend France and Muslims against misinformed detractors, the Macintosh platform from those who claim it has no software, and the hipster bikini from those who think that thongs are always inherently hotter (sorry guys, but some girls have very flat backsides, and the thong shamefully accentuates this fact).
In short: I feel that if you are going to make a claim against a person, company, religion, model of car, piece of art, etc, you'd better have a valid reason for doing so. Repeating a lie makes people think it's the truth. Or do you think we should just go ahead and believe all statements made against any of these institutions just because we don't have a vested interest in them, and therefore they're ripe for slander?
I am getting pretty tired of morons blaming users for not upgrading.
Maybe you should get used to it. Software is an amazingly complex entity and there will always be holes waiting just outside the knowledge of the security community. Which means patches aren't going to stop -- ever. Unless you want to get a virus, you will HAVE to upgrade as soon as possible. I don't wait more than fifteen minutes to patch vulnerabilities in OpenSSH. The risk is too great.
It's a common myth that downtime causes a loss of funds...I say myth, because a reboot should take less than ten minutes, do it on client machines before lunch, at the end of the day, or before a meeting. As for server machines, well, that might take 15 minutes but maintenance like that should already be occurring after hours by people who are paid to do so. No additional work time plus no additional funds equals ZERO CHANGE. But that number doesn't look as nice in articles for SecurityFocus magazine. Besides, even if it's a hassle, getting hacked is a much bigger one. Duh!
What would be a great boon to the community is if MS would release the patches free to everyone, in serveral different forms. I mean, they only offer dowloads to registered customers.
What? No they don't. I don't have an account with Microsoft, and I patch my machines fine. BITS downloads them automatically and AutoUpdate displays them for my perusal. You have NO IDEA what you are talking about. As a Linux user, you could visit this link and get the latest patch for RDS on MDAC 2.1; a component release WHO KNOWS how long ago.
No, it isn't anything like the truth with Microsoft. GM recalls parts that are faulty. Microsoft issues patches. If your GM part fails, and it you never had it fixed for the recall, THAT IS YOUR FAULT.
As for the military...dude, equipment fails ALL THE TIME in the military, and quite often nothing is ever done about it because the military contract is liability free and the government has to pay either way. Receive a gun that jams 50% of the time on full auto? Tough tittie, private, fire in short bursts. You've never heard of GIs trading their guns for those of dead enemies, or stuffing flak vests into foolishly underarmored points? I'll take Microsoft's patching over that shit any day of the week.
Oh, and to the "asshole" appelation, feel free to add "shitty debater." You've earned that one.
As opposed to Slashdot? In every case where there has been a problem with Windows security, it's been AFTER they released a patch for the vulnerability. Every one! And yet, Slashdotters love to make patently untrue jabs like "Ho ho, they can't patch their OS fast enough, guffaw!" How does this kind of thing make it past the editors, anyway? Do they not know? Or do they not care?
Listen assholes, Microsoft is patching things fine. You're just not RUNNING the patches! It's like getting shot with an arrow and blaming your blacksmith, when you were the one who didn't raise your shield up to avoid the barrage!
I think if Microsoft releases their AV software for FREE, it'd be a great boon to the community. It could be a good way to help those hold outs who still wait a couple of weeks (or months) before INSTALLING the latest patch "just in case" and who are then surprised when they get fucked by a virus. And then proceed to wail about in on Slashdot. But it they try charging for it, they do institute a big conflict of interest, and to be honest I'd be unlikely to buy it.
I'm sorry, but every little bit helps. If working on an OSS project brings in $100 a month in donations, you're far more likely to continue it when your wife starts getting cross with you, your kids are bugging to to go play, your grades start slipping, your fishing rod starts to get brittle from lack of use or your boss starts giving you the eye for coming in late every morning after staying up all night hacking a hardware abstraction layer.
Well, when it comes down to brass tacks, we _DID_ still owe them close to $800 for the obscene bandwidth used by Something Positive. So I figured, fair's fair.
Bully for you. In the early days of my hosting service, I had a machine crash on me at a very crummy co-loc house. They said they'd send the broken, possibly unrecoverable hard drive to me, but only if I paid $250 for them to pull it out and put it in a cardboard box (plus shipping). This was after they told me that they never set up the incremental CD backups I'd been paying them $10 a month to perform.
Since I was making less than $20 profit at that point, I was looking at paying $230 out of pocket to MAYBE get a backup that I said I didn't provide for a handful of users (only two of whom hadn't properly backed up when it died). Since I also had to spend money to get a new server up as soon as possible as well as install it temporarily in a very expensive local co-loc, I didn't do it.
It would have been nice to have performed this courtesy. But we couldn't -- not without taking out a big loan for no payback. In the end, it didn't hurt us -- the guys whose data we couldn't save are still with the service and we're bigger than ever in a nice, cheap, honest local co-loc.
So stop offering to them for free. I don't advertise at all and still have more than 28 people using my $5 per month email hosting deal. I've also discovered that people who pay a fair price for things are less likely to make fantastic demands than people who don't pay anything. Funny how that is.
Incidentally, there are plenty of things I do offer for free (my photos are in the public domain, for example, and I donate bandwidth to several projects). But since maintenance of my webserver depends on bandwidth being paid for, I don't screw around with free-hosting-for-everybody. All you're going to attract is dumb leeches who only know, only CARE, that they aren't going to pay a lot for that muffler.
MP3 is a subset of a Motion Picture industry standard, thus it had industry backing.
WMA and Real have support of two companies, which are again part of the computer/internet Industry.
Ogg is neither backed by a sizable company nor is it part of a mutually agreed upon standard for any industry. Therefore, it is completely unadvertised and has few commercial tools available for it. Think, man: if your company spend $100,000 and two years helping to develop a standard for low bandwidth audio, are you going to junk what you've done just because some amateurs come up with a really good way of doing it?
Three years from now, the Just In Time compiler becomes so efficent that code is executed before it is written. A rift will open up in time, and the first Java compiler will land on the desktop of an unsuspecting Sun intern.
Since you should be bounds checking every array ANYWAY, I don't see where that hit matters. It's certainly not visible in any of the performance Java work I've done.
Yeah, Java can let you be lazy with object creation and destruction. So can C++. At its best, though, Java is a happy medium that can adjust to just about any available amount of memory.
Speaking of which, if you don't want Java to become a memory hog, cut it off! Use a smaller maximum heap, 64 meg is enough for pretty much everything (and for most utilities, 4 meg is a dream). Since Java won't run GC until a certain percentage (70-80%) of its maximum allocation is filled up, it's almost always going to be resting at near maximum allocation. I wouldn't worry about it too much, with modern swapped memory, most of those old references are sitting quietly on your hard drive, hoping that you'll need them.
And generics are coming, as is a greatly improved UI speed. Incidentally, one of the reasons Java UI is so slow is that most developers, lazy things that we are, let Java object perform their own updates and paintings. If you want a snappy GUI, you HAVE to do all redraws yourself. This is the only way to prevent the whole window from flickering every time a control's state changes, which besides being annoying means you just created and destroyed a bunch of objects for no real reason other than you can't be bothered to track the mouse.
Actually, fansubbing existed LONG before the internet in the form of traded tapes. It's just gotten a lot easier these days, without needing to sit in front of a character generated and SEG to 22 minutes an episode, then make copies of the tapes for $5 a pop in real time...
People always misquote that. Information wants to be free: as-in-Mandela. That doesn't mean you aren't going to have to pay to get it out. In fact, since information wants so desperately to be free, offering its freedom in a tidy package for a modest sum is good business. Just as InfoUSA.
Manga has always been popular among females because a) girls like cute things and b) manga exists outside, you know, video games and computers, areas in which girls are not known to flock.
My only problem is that girls who like manga generally annoy the shit out of me. In fact, they are surpassed on my anime shitlist only by guys who say "Kawaii," "Kiree" or "Oro."
Anime is generally a field full of annoyances and it's something everybody will eventually grow out of for that reason. I'm selling my dozens of anime DVDs on half.com...$10 a pop if you're interested...
Right. And this exactly the difference between the Open Source and hacker communities AND the Manga community: as soon as licensing is picked up for a Manga, the community STOPS spreading it. Seriously, it becomes a ghost town and site ops proudly tell you to go to Borders and buy it.
The Anime/Manga community has a deep tradition of underground trading but they understand that the continued development of new Anime and Manga relies on people buying the shit. This mix of consumerism and grassroots effort is nothing like the OSS community, which, like it or not, shuns efforts to commercialize things and even resents them. I have never heard anybody say "It's a shame tha Viz is picking up Dragonball. I would far rather have my fan sub jpegs than any softback corporate shill manga," or "I'm sure that the Anime Industry Association of America will shut it down, here's a link from India."
Uh...DivX, 3ivX, XViD, QT MPEG-4...they're all basically different approaches to the same thing, which is the VAST and complicated MPEG-4 video standard. You can play all of these using the codec from any of the others, so long as the codec understands the method of encoding used (there are TONS of them which can be used interchangably for different results, hence the different approaches). I use FFMPEG (technically, VideoLan Client, which call ffmpeg) and it will read pretty much all of the formats because it ignores the container they're in entirely and tries to stream them through itself...if I understand it correctly.
But...but they have the same mime type, no? Application/Ogg?
I sure as shit don't want to open audio files in my video player, or vica versa. Which is why I'm glad some folks are releasing Theora videos with an OGM extension, just to make it obvious I don't want to download them.
Not a bad post, but try to tone up the sarcasm a little. You were a little too realistic for my comfort...the girlfriend poke was a nice touch, but realize that if Keith was any kind of geek, he would have asked her to marry him the same week he met her so they could "do" it.
I am reminded of a demotivational slogan. "It is true that winners never quit, and that quitters never win. But he who never quit and never wins is an idiot."
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Why do you love this corporation so much that you feel compelled to defend them from a bunch of anonymous people. DO you love other corporations just as much? Do you go around yelling at people if they say they don't like fords or maytag washers? If not why not? Why did you choose to make yourself a sycophant for this corporation but not others? Honestly I want to know how MS got you to pledge your allegience to them.
Nothing. They don't have my allegiance. I also defend France and Muslims against misinformed detractors, the Macintosh platform from those who claim it has no software, and the hipster bikini from those who think that thongs are always inherently hotter (sorry guys, but some girls have very flat backsides, and the thong shamefully accentuates this fact).
In short: I feel that if you are going to make a claim against a person, company, religion, model of car, piece of art, etc, you'd better have a valid reason for doing so. Repeating a lie makes people think it's the truth. Or do you think we should just go ahead and believe all statements made against any of these institutions just because we don't have a vested interest in them, and therefore they're ripe for slander?
I am getting pretty tired of morons blaming users for not upgrading.
Maybe you should get used to it. Software is an amazingly complex entity and there will always be holes waiting just outside the knowledge of the security community. Which means patches aren't going to stop -- ever. Unless you want to get a virus, you will HAVE to upgrade as soon as possible. I don't wait more than fifteen minutes to patch vulnerabilities in OpenSSH. The risk is too great.
It's a common myth that downtime causes a loss of funds...I say myth, because a reboot should take less than ten minutes, do it on client machines before lunch, at the end of the day, or before a meeting. As for server machines, well, that might take 15 minutes but maintenance like that should already be occurring after hours by people who are paid to do so. No additional work time plus no additional funds equals ZERO CHANGE. But that number doesn't look as nice in articles for SecurityFocus magazine. Besides, even if it's a hassle, getting hacked is a much bigger one. Duh!
What would be a great boon to the community is if MS would release the patches free to everyone, in serveral different forms. I mean, they only offer dowloads to registered customers.
What? No they don't. I don't have an account with Microsoft, and I patch my machines fine. BITS downloads them automatically and AutoUpdate displays them for my perusal. You have NO IDEA what you are talking about. As a Linux user, you could visit this link and get the latest patch for RDS on MDAC 2.1; a component release WHO KNOWS how long ago.
No, it isn't anything like the truth with Microsoft. GM recalls parts that are faulty. Microsoft issues patches. If your GM part fails, and it you never had it fixed for the recall, THAT IS YOUR FAULT.
As for the military...dude, equipment fails ALL THE TIME in the military, and quite often nothing is ever done about it because the military contract is liability free and the government has to pay either way. Receive a gun that jams 50% of the time on full auto? Tough tittie, private, fire in short bursts. You've never heard of GIs trading their guns for those of dead enemies, or stuffing flak vests into foolishly underarmored points? I'll take Microsoft's patching over that shit any day of the week.
Oh, and to the "asshole" appelation, feel free to add "shitty debater." You've earned that one.
Funny. When I installed said patch on all of our systems the day it came out, I had no problems.
It might be that I'm an amazing systems admin. It might be that the patch you ran was a beta that somehow got up there accidentally.
Or you might be lying.
As opposed to Slashdot? In every case where there has been a problem with Windows security, it's been AFTER they released a patch for the vulnerability. Every one! And yet, Slashdotters love to make patently untrue jabs like "Ho ho, they can't patch their OS fast enough, guffaw!" How does this kind of thing make it past the editors, anyway? Do they not know? Or do they not care?
Listen assholes, Microsoft is patching things fine. You're just not RUNNING the patches! It's like getting shot with an arrow and blaming your blacksmith, when you were the one who didn't raise your shield up to avoid the barrage!
I think if Microsoft releases their AV software for FREE, it'd be a great boon to the community. It could be a good way to help those hold outs who still wait a couple of weeks (or months) before INSTALLING the latest patch "just in case" and who are then surprised when they get fucked by a virus. And then proceed to wail about in on Slashdot. But it they try charging for it, they do institute a big conflict of interest, and to be honest I'd be unlikely to buy it.
I'm sorry, but every little bit helps. If working on an OSS project brings in $100 a month in donations, you're far more likely to continue it when your wife starts getting cross with you, your kids are bugging to to go play, your grades start slipping, your fishing rod starts to get brittle from lack of use or your boss starts giving you the eye for coming in late every morning after staying up all night hacking a hardware abstraction layer.
Well, when it comes down to brass tacks, we _DID_ still owe them close to $800 for the obscene bandwidth used by Something Positive. So I figured, fair's fair.
And the guy from this webcomic dared his readers to help him quit his shitty job. They raised over $22,000 in less than a month.
But this won't work for everyone. If you want to offer people a service, you should sell access to it or expect to pay it for ever.
Bully for you. In the early days of my hosting service, I had a machine crash on me at a very crummy co-loc house. They said they'd send the broken, possibly unrecoverable hard drive to me, but only if I paid $250 for them to pull it out and put it in a cardboard box (plus shipping). This was after they told me that they never set up the incremental CD backups I'd been paying them $10 a month to perform.
Since I was making less than $20 profit at that point, I was looking at paying $230 out of pocket to MAYBE get a backup that I said I didn't provide for a handful of users (only two of whom hadn't properly backed up when it died). Since I also had to spend money to get a new server up as soon as possible as well as install it temporarily in a very expensive local co-loc, I didn't do it.
It would have been nice to have performed this courtesy. But we couldn't -- not without taking out a big loan for no payback. In the end, it didn't hurt us -- the guys whose data we couldn't save are still with the service and we're bigger than ever in a nice, cheap, honest local co-loc.
So stop offering to them for free. I don't advertise at all and still have more than 28 people using my $5 per month email hosting deal. I've also discovered that people who pay a fair price for things are less likely to make fantastic demands than people who don't pay anything. Funny how that is.
Incidentally, there are plenty of things I do offer for free (my photos are in the public domain, for example, and I donate bandwidth to several projects). But since maintenance of my webserver depends on bandwidth being paid for, I don't screw around with free-hosting-for-everybody. All you're going to attract is dumb leeches who only know, only CARE, that they aren't going to pay a lot for that muffler.
MP3 is a subset of a Motion Picture industry standard, thus it had industry backing.
WMA and Real have support of two companies, which are again part of the computer/internet Industry.
Ogg is neither backed by a sizable company nor is it part of a mutually agreed upon standard for any industry. Therefore, it is completely unadvertised and has few commercial tools available for it. Think, man: if your company spend $100,000 and two years helping to develop a standard for low bandwidth audio, are you going to junk what you've done just because some amateurs come up with a really good way of doing it?
Funny, I shudder when I think about PHP applications too...
No, that was written in Java too.
Three years from now, the Just In Time compiler becomes so efficent that code is executed before it is written. A rift will open up in time, and the first Java compiler will land on the desktop of an unsuspecting Sun intern.
I'd put it in a brand new case and install the JDS on it.
Since you should be bounds checking every array ANYWAY, I don't see where that hit matters. It's certainly not visible in any of the performance Java work I've done.
Yeah, Java can let you be lazy with object creation and destruction. So can C++. At its best, though, Java is a happy medium that can adjust to just about any available amount of memory.
Speaking of which, if you don't want Java to become a memory hog, cut it off! Use a smaller maximum heap, 64 meg is enough for pretty much everything (and for most utilities, 4 meg is a dream). Since Java won't run GC until a certain percentage (70-80%) of its maximum allocation is filled up, it's almost always going to be resting at near maximum allocation. I wouldn't worry about it too much, with modern swapped memory, most of those old references are sitting quietly on your hard drive, hoping that you'll need them.
And generics are coming, as is a greatly improved UI speed. Incidentally, one of the reasons Java UI is so slow is that most developers, lazy things that we are, let Java object perform their own updates and paintings. If you want a snappy GUI, you HAVE to do all redraws yourself. This is the only way to prevent the whole window from flickering every time a control's state changes, which besides being annoying means you just created and destroyed a bunch of objects for no real reason other than you can't be bothered to track the mouse.
Actually, fansubbing existed LONG before the internet in the form of traded tapes. It's just gotten a lot easier these days, without needing to sit in front of a character generated and SEG to 22 minutes an episode, then make copies of the tapes for $5 a pop in real time...
People always misquote that. Information wants to be free: as-in-Mandela. That doesn't mean you aren't going to have to pay to get it out. In fact, since information wants so desperately to be free, offering its freedom in a tidy package for a modest sum is good business. Just as InfoUSA.
Manga has always been popular among females because a) girls like cute things and b) manga exists outside, you know, video games and computers, areas in which girls are not known to flock.
My only problem is that girls who like manga generally annoy the shit out of me. In fact, they are surpassed on my anime shitlist only by guys who say "Kawaii," "Kiree" or "Oro."
Anime is generally a field full of annoyances and it's something everybody will eventually grow out of for that reason. I'm selling my dozens of anime DVDs on half.com...$10 a pop if you're interested...
Right. And this exactly the difference between the Open Source and hacker communities AND the Manga community: as soon as licensing is picked up for a Manga, the community STOPS spreading it. Seriously, it becomes a ghost town and site ops proudly tell you to go to Borders and buy it.
The Anime/Manga community has a deep tradition of underground trading but they understand that the continued development of new Anime and Manga relies on people buying the shit. This mix of consumerism and grassroots effort is nothing like the OSS community, which, like it or not, shuns efforts to commercialize things and even resents them. I have never heard anybody say "It's a shame tha Viz is picking up Dragonball. I would far rather have my fan sub jpegs than any softback corporate shill manga," or "I'm sure that the Anime Industry Association of America will shut it down, here's a link from India."
Yeah, but it's open source, so it's mostly fat bearded guys jerking off while reading the GPL.
Uh...DivX, 3ivX, XViD, QT MPEG-4...they're all basically different approaches to the same thing, which is the VAST and complicated MPEG-4 video standard. You can play all of these using the codec from any of the others, so long as the codec understands the method of encoding used (there are TONS of them which can be used interchangably for different results, hence the different approaches). I use FFMPEG (technically, VideoLan Client, which call ffmpeg) and it will read pretty much all of the formats because it ignores the container they're in entirely and tries to stream them through itself...if I understand it correctly.
But...but they have the same mime type, no? Application/Ogg?
I sure as shit don't want to open audio files in my video player, or vica versa. Which is why I'm glad some folks are releasing Theora videos with an OGM extension, just to make it obvious I don't want to download them.
You're right. Some people do prefer to have PCs designed with all open software.
The rest of us like to, you know, get some work done.
And I'm ouuuuuuut...
Not a bad post, but try to tone up the sarcasm a little. You were a little too realistic for my comfort...the girlfriend poke was a nice touch, but realize that if Keith was any kind of geek, he would have asked her to marry him the same week he met her so they could "do" it.
I am reminded of a demotivational slogan. "It is true that winners never quit, and that quitters never win. But he who never quit and never wins is an idiot."