I'll listen to this guy's advice on web optimization as soon as his sites begin adhering to W3C standards. Until then, he's a monkey in a tree throwing poo at the other monkeys trying to get them to stop throwing their poo at him.
I wrote a biff-like mail checker for Windows named Ham. If you really wanted to, you could claim it was a recursive acronym for "Ham is an Automatic Mailchecker", but I really just wanted to be able to say, "Oh look, Ham says I have new mail."
Shareaza broke nothing. Have you used Shareaza? It has an excellent implementation of both Gnutella 0.6 (which every other client uses) and its own Gnutella2 protocol. You can use them both at the same time, meaning that you're a part of both networks. Nothing is being broken. Other Gnutella users get the benefit of your file collection (and vice versa), and other Shareaza users get the same benefit but without the scaling issues (and vice versa).
Of course it was a daft move for Mike to call it Gnutella2, but so what? The guy had written a damn good protocol based on Gnutella, and a rose, by any other name, is still a goddamn rose.
Legend has it (i.e., I wasn't there, but this is what I've been told) that some friends of mine (who shall remain nameless, for obvious reasons) once took a bowling ball up to the top of a local residential road that travels down a long, steep hill for about a mile or two. At the very bottom, it intersects with a major four lane road.
The aforementioned friends aimed the ball very carefully right down the center line of the road, then gave it a gentle nudge down the hill, hopped in their car and sped off like maniacs. Since nobody stuck around to see what happened, and since there was nothing in the local news the next morning, we can't be certain, but if that ball stayed on course, it very well could have reached speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour by the time it reached the busy intersection at the bottom of the hill. If a car had been in the way, it would have been hit by the equivalent of a lightweight cannonball. But of course, since the news didn't mention anything, we have to assume nobody got hurt...
He claimed he wrote packages that defeat the aforementioned security methods, when in actuality what he wrote was a medical records package that used OCR libraries to do something not at all related to the security methods he previously claimed he had written software to defeat. Thus: bullshit.
I see. So when you said "I've written packages that defeat..." what you really meant was "I've used packages that could theoretically do something similar to defeating..."
Do you see how much confusion could have been cleared up right from the beginning if you had stated what you actually did rather than implying that you did something wholly more remarkable?
I say "bullshit" not because I think it's technically impossible, but because I don't believe that you personally have written any of these "packages", as you claimed.
Um. I'm sorry. I love TOS, but Starship Exeter was absolute crap. It looks like they had fun doing it, but it's still crap. It's badly acted, badly directed, badly edited, and the production values are far worse than I'd expect even for a no-budget fan project. In short, Starship Exeter could have been good, but it sucked.
I can't for the life of me understand what anyone liked about it. Even "Spock's Brain" was magnitudes better plotwise.
That's news to me. I've used five different ISPs over the last few years, through both work and home, both DSL and dialup, and none of them have prohibited the use of connection sharing at a single address. Each one did prohibit reselling bandwidth or providing secondary dialup service through my own account, however.
Prohibiting an action that could take business away from the ISP is entirely logical, but prohibiting an action that has no effect on the ISP whatsoever is not. If I'm paying for a 768Kbps DSL line and I'm not reselling that bandwidth, the ISP should keep its nose out of my business. I'm paying for that bandwidth and what I use it for is up to me until it begins harming the ISP.
I also have a real problem with ISPs that crack down on users who do lots of filesharing. Since I pay my ISP for 24 hour 768Kbps access, I expect to be able to utilize all the bandwidth I'm paying for (minus TCP overhead, of course) all the time. An ISP telling me I can't use all 768Kbps all the time because they haven't got the capacity is like the cable company telling me I can only watch HBO fifteen days out of the month. It's their job to have the capacity, since I'm paying them for it.
Sharing the connection is probably against the DSL provider's terms of service. Your friend might want to look into that before sharing the connection.
I can't see how it would be. It's no different than sharing the connection between an upstairs computer and a downstairs computer. Most ISPs' policies have clauses prohibiting reselling their services, but they'd have a real hard time prohibiting freely sharing the bandwidth that the subscriber has paid for.
When I email someone and get a message asking me to verify that I'm a real person, I feel insulted. The only time I tend to email people who don't know me is when I'm complimenting a software author on something they wrote, or responding to a user who has emailed me about something I wrote.
When I spend a good thirty minutes of my valuable time crafting a detailed answer to a user's question about some aspect of an application I've written that, if they'd read the docs, they could have figured out themselves, only to find that this user's email server considers me a spammer until I prove otherwise, I usually just say "fuck it" and go do something more productive.
Guilty until proven innocent is not an effective way to stop spam. It merely shifts the inconvenience from you to someone who may be legitimately trying to contact you, and if they're like me, they may decide you're not worth contacting after all.
I personally receive hundreds of spam emails a day (in fact, over 75% of all the email I receive is spam). Yet, I very rarely see any spam in my inbox, thanks to Bogofilter. Bogofilter has about a 95% success rate at discerning spam from non-spam, and it gets smarter with each message I receive.
Yeah, that totally ruined it for me. After I read that bit, I threw the book at the wall and grabbed the phone to warn my friends not to read it. I bought "cryptonomiconsucks.com" and called in sick to work the next day so I could spend the day putting together a website warning the rest of the world not to read the book as well.
That weekend, I went to the local Barnes and Noble and picketed in front of the "S" section. I posted several scathing reviews on Amazon.com under various pseudonyms and spent most of Sunday digging up Neal Stephenson's home phone number, after which I prank-called him for a good six hours straight.
I wrote a letter to my congressman as well, and I strongly urge you to do the same! If we don't fight the rising tide of inaccurate astronomical navigation references in modern science fiction, then who will?
If you like Roger Zelazny, you'll love Steven Brust! Brust is best known for his Vlad Taltos series (Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla, Taltos, Phoenix, Athyra, Orca, Dragon, Issola), about an assassin in Dragaera (Dragaera is to Brust as Amber is to Zelazny or Xanth is to Piers Anthony, if you'll pardon the rather general analogy). All of the Vlad novels are absolutely excellent. In addition, Brust has written (and is writing) several other novels that take place in Dragaera (which, I must say, is one of the most detailed fantasy worlds any author has ever created). The Phoenix Guards and its sequel, Five Hundred Year After are excellent adventure yarns that take place some 1,000 years and 500 years (respectively) prior to Vlad's timeline.
Brust has also written quite a few "standalone" novels. Prime among them are To Reign in Hell, an intriguing "what if"-style account of the war in Heaven that's referred to in the opening paragraphs of the Bible. Roger Zelazny particularly liked To Reign in Hell, coincidentally. Also very much worth reading are Agyar; The Sun, the Moon and the Stars; and (if you want something a little more pulpy and silly) Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille.
In my opinion (and that of many other people) Steven Brust is one of the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors alive.
I love how the scientific method has mutated into "we're hoping to find such and such, so we're going to look very hard until we do". With that methodology, you'll always find something that supports your theory.
"RubyCocoa is a Mac OS X framework that allows Cocoa programming in the Object-Oriented Scripting Language Ruby. RubyCocoa allows writing a Cocoa application in Ruby. It allows creating and using a Cocoa object in a Ruby script."
So, let me get this straight. You're saying I can (gasp!) write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Which is to say that I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Let me put this another way: I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? So in other words, I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Wow, Cocoa apps written in Ruby, who would've thought. Did I mention that you can write Cocoa apps in Ruby?
My earliest memory is from when I was about two. I remember playing with a little blue car on the kitchen floor, and I remember that the car had rubber wheels that I could pull off, and which I ended up losing. This memory probably stuck with me because none of my other toy cars had rubber wheels, making this one unique. I have a few other memories from around the same time: walking quietly down the hall after my mom had put my baby sister to sleep, lusting after (and finally getting) a toy helicopter (which I subsequently broke), building a snowman with my dad (he built it really, I mostly fell down).
Mom has a great story about when she and her brothers were kids and were eating dinner. Someone brought up the topic of earliest memories, and my uncle (who was three or four at the time) described his circumcision in great detail, much to the horror of everyone at the table. He's now a doctor, fittingly enough. The reason I mention this is that my uncle has a tremendously high IQ, and it's possible that could have something to do with his excellent memory.
If MandrakeSoft is in such dire straights, then what's all this about? Just last week revenue was up 31%, operating costs down 42%, and they were giving themselves a big pat on the back. And now they're asking for handouts again? What?
On a somewhat related note, if you're the guy who keeps calling my cell phone at 4am and asking, in a slurred voice, if you can speak to Jared, please stop. I mean it. I'm not Jared and I don't know Jared, and even if I was Jared I would kill you for waking me up at 4am.
Whatever you do, don't come to Portland. I barely managed to grab a job as it is; I don't need any qualified techies snapping things out from under me. That said, I love it here. But stay away. I'm warning you.
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I'll listen to this guy's advice on web optimization as soon as his sites begin adhering to W3C standards. Until then, he's a monkey in a tree throwing poo at the other monkeys trying to get them to stop throwing their poo at him.
I wrote a biff-like mail checker for Windows named Ham. If you really wanted to, you could claim it was a recursive acronym for "Ham is an Automatic Mailchecker", but I really just wanted to be able to say, "Oh look, Ham says I have new mail."
Of course it was a daft move for Mike to call it Gnutella2, but so what? The guy had written a damn good protocol based on Gnutella, and a rose, by any other name, is still a goddamn rose.
I'm no electritian, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that it ain't the voltage that kills you; it's the amperage.
I think you mean uce@ftc.gov.
The aforementioned friends aimed the ball very carefully right down the center line of the road, then gave it a gentle nudge down the hill, hopped in their car and sped off like maniacs. Since nobody stuck around to see what happened, and since there was nothing in the local news the next morning, we can't be certain, but if that ball stayed on course, it very well could have reached speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour by the time it reached the busy intersection at the bottom of the hill. If a car had been in the way, it would have been hit by the equivalent of a lightweight cannonball. But of course, since the news didn't mention anything, we have to assume nobody got hurt...
My friends aren't the smartest people.
And I'm the thick one?
Do you see how much confusion could have been cleared up right from the beginning if you had stated what you actually did rather than implying that you did something wholly more remarkable?
I say "bullshit" not because I think it's technically impossible, but because I don't believe that you personally have written any of these "packages", as you claimed.
Ahem. Bullshit.
I can't for the life of me understand what anyone liked about it. Even "Spock's Brain" was magnitudes better plotwise.
Prohibiting an action that could take business away from the ISP is entirely logical, but prohibiting an action that has no effect on the ISP whatsoever is not. If I'm paying for a 768Kbps DSL line and I'm not reselling that bandwidth, the ISP should keep its nose out of my business. I'm paying for that bandwidth and what I use it for is up to me until it begins harming the ISP.
I also have a real problem with ISPs that crack down on users who do lots of filesharing. Since I pay my ISP for 24 hour 768Kbps access, I expect to be able to utilize all the bandwidth I'm paying for (minus TCP overhead, of course) all the time. An ISP telling me I can't use all 768Kbps all the time because they haven't got the capacity is like the cable company telling me I can only watch HBO fifteen days out of the month. It's their job to have the capacity, since I'm paying them for it.
I can't see how it would be. It's no different than sharing the connection between an upstairs computer and a downstairs computer. Most ISPs' policies have clauses prohibiting reselling their services, but they'd have a real hard time prohibiting freely sharing the bandwidth that the subscriber has paid for.
When I spend a good thirty minutes of my valuable time crafting a detailed answer to a user's question about some aspect of an application I've written that, if they'd read the docs, they could have figured out themselves, only to find that this user's email server considers me a spammer until I prove otherwise, I usually just say "fuck it" and go do something more productive.
Guilty until proven innocent is not an effective way to stop spam. It merely shifts the inconvenience from you to someone who may be legitimately trying to contact you, and if they're like me, they may decide you're not worth contacting after all.
I personally receive hundreds of spam emails a day (in fact, over 75% of all the email I receive is spam). Yet, I very rarely see any spam in my inbox, thanks to Bogofilter. Bogofilter has about a 95% success rate at discerning spam from non-spam, and it gets smarter with each message I receive.
Never fear...in a mere two weeks, you'll be able to buy The Book of Athyra, which contains both Athyra and Orca.
That weekend, I went to the local Barnes and Noble and picketed in front of the "S" section. I posted several scathing reviews on Amazon.com under various pseudonyms and spent most of Sunday digging up Neal Stephenson's home phone number, after which I prank-called him for a good six hours straight.
I wrote a letter to my congressman as well, and I strongly urge you to do the same! If we don't fight the rising tide of inaccurate astronomical navigation references in modern science fiction, then who will?
Brust has also written quite a few "standalone" novels. Prime among them are To Reign in Hell, an intriguing "what if"-style account of the war in Heaven that's referred to in the opening paragraphs of the Bible. Roger Zelazny particularly liked To Reign in Hell, coincidentally. Also very much worth reading are Agyar; The Sun, the Moon and the Stars; and (if you want something a little more pulpy and silly) Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille.
In my opinion (and that of many other people) Steven Brust is one of the best Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors alive.
I love how the scientific method has mutated into "we're hoping to find such and such, so we're going to look very hard until we do". With that methodology, you'll always find something that supports your theory.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying I can (gasp!) write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Which is to say that I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Let me put this another way: I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? So in other words, I can write a Cocoa application in Ruby? Wow, Cocoa apps written in Ruby, who would've thought. Did I mention that you can write Cocoa apps in Ruby?
Mom has a great story about when she and her brothers were kids and were eating dinner. Someone brought up the topic of earliest memories, and my uncle (who was three or four at the time) described his circumcision in great detail, much to the horror of everyone at the table. He's now a doctor, fittingly enough. The reason I mention this is that my uncle has a tremendously high IQ, and it's possible that could have something to do with his excellent memory.
If MandrakeSoft is in such dire straights, then what's all this about? Just last week revenue was up 31%, operating costs down 42%, and they were giving themselves a big pat on the back. And now they're asking for handouts again? What?
On a somewhat related note, if you're the guy who keeps calling my cell phone at 4am and asking, in a slurred voice, if you can speak to Jared, please stop. I mean it. I'm not Jared and I don't know Jared, and even if I was Jared I would kill you for waking me up at 4am.
Whatever you do, don't come to Portland. I barely managed to grab a job as it is; I don't need any qualified techies snapping things out from under me. That said, I love it here. But stay away. I'm warning you.
I got a $2,000 raise. Ho ho ho!