Some people do their best thinking other times than 9 to 5. I think much better later in the day. My boss is a morning person, and he'll wake up at 5 am and come in and work, we get there at 9, and he takes a nap for a couple hours. For this current stage of our project we've all gotta be there 9-4 at least because of having to interact with other businesses.
When we were doing just plain old research and development and we didn't have to deal with businesses on fixed schedules, we were all on flex time and it worked out nicely. I was a night person, so for a while i worked noon-8pm. We all got to be there for the part of the day where we did our best thinking...
I can just picture a bunch of jack-booted-thugs with little microsoft logos on their jackets slithering down black nylon ropes from building rooftops and popping in the windows of offices around the country to run the filedrawers and poke around on everybody's drives to look for pirate copies of office or whatever.
If they show up at my house/office/wherever, I'll beat them to death with an old UNIX manual in a laundry bag (sort of a geek's blackjack...).
Yeah, think about it! This is just a "hey, you wanna see the guts of this..." for a "ain't it cool" sort of thing and for geeks to ooh and aah. Most likely nobody will use the assembly, but will probably use C++ or whatever... Read the article you fuck-nut.
People have done this before, but always fucked it up by either: Giving up control of the platform and letting it get un-standardized such that the write-once/run-anywhere thing fell apart. It happened to the UCSD p-system, and it happened to Java. I hope Amiga manages to hold this together. I think they are doing good by making the development environment themselves. I really hope this works, because
A) i like their philosophy
B) i really liked my old amiga, and it looks like a lot of the things i liked have carried over.
C) I really want to write multi-platform network adventure games, and Java suxx...
From what i understand from previous articles and the interviews i've read, is that the Amiga Binary is compiled to native code when you run it, and then it runs native. This sort of thing hasn't worked too well in the past (for instance the NT for the Alpha was supposed to have something to do this for intel assembly...) but I'm confident that this will work well and fast because instead of being used to deal with some really hairy legacy processor (like most of these rigs are supposed to do...) it's compiling from a source that was designed from the ground up to be translatable.
I'm psyched. Next paycheck, i want to buy the SDK =:-)
The reason DARE and other campaigns like it (i was the last year of my school to get teh Reagan anti-drug campaign before DARE was instated... Lots of old yellowed filmstrips of burnout kids, etc...)
Now, i think the problem with campaigns like that is they often come off as propiganda. I for one was interrested to go and do drugs because i wanted to see what all the stink was about. At first I was afraid, which was the desired effect, but after a while i just became curious (like many youth tend to be).
When I was in high school, my friends and i did a whole wide range of drugs just for the hell of it, and it was a shitload of fun, but eventually we grew out of it, and learned to use more moderation, and ended up all having enough responsibilities in the real world that there wasn't enough time to goof off like that any more, but we sure had fun doing it. I think we all viewed the anti-drug campaigns as something irrelivant to plow through, just like the simplified versions of history they teach kids to keep them from being emotionally disturbed, and all that other sort of stuff.
I think the DARE campaign works well for the kids who would use drugs due to peer pressure, which is a good thing, because these people would be doing it for the wrong reason, and without knowing what they are getting into.
The people who did their research first, then did it for fun or experementation will do it no matter what you do to stop them, and they are probably the least likely to be harmed by it, so i guess after all it works okay, because it keeps the people more likely to be hurt out of it, and everybody else can do drugs if they want....
There are a bunch of granola hippies around my home town (Ithaca, NY) who are going around posting these obnoxious flyers that come just short of advocating violence against those who use cell phones for creating a demand for technology that produces "massive amounts of harmful radiation" bla bla bla. I fucking hate them, they can go eat a bag of dicks. It makes me think of the scientist guy in Repo Man who was going off about all those Damned Lies you hear about radiation (as he was dying of radiation exposure...)
Seriously though, i think a lot of people are way to quick to believe that any new technology is evil, and then others are too quick to believe that any new technology is perfect. The jury is still out, but for the moment i'll keep using my phone 'cause it's actually cheaper than a land line for how often i move, and what New York Telephone, i mean NYNEX, i mean Bell Atlantic i mean Verizon charges to move or hook up a bloody telephone!
I was about to post a comment along the lines of "so what! If they delay longer, and release something harder to crack (even for the sake of argument, impossible to crack), the market can just refuse to use it, and keep using MP3s and other such unencumbered technoligies...
But then I thought about it. I believe that the music industry has enough power over the users that they'll take what they can get. I don't think the market _could_ realisticly fight the will of these companies. They have little competition, because all the "competing" companies have all globbed together in the form of RIAA.
I don't see a peaceful end to this, because there is a lot of money at stake, and whenever there is money, there is also a rabid foaming-at-the-mouth mob of greedy bastards willing to trample anybody in their way to get at it.
So maybe we should not worry so much about this standard being cracked, because if it was, it'd work just like the DeCSS fiasco, but maybe they'd learn from the mistakes of the MPAA's lawyers. What we need to start worrying about is a way to break loose from this feudalism where the consumer no longer has the power to change things in their favor (partly because most of the consumers are not informed enough to fight back, and there is a lot of money going to PR to keep it that way). Consumers are now Serfs, and large media companies are now lords. I imagine eventually there will be something like a revolution, moving us along the line towards democracy in the information world, but it'll take a while =:-(
That may be so, their x.0 releases are still buggy as fuck-all, but that is almost inevitable. They are doing something difficult, and they can't possibly test every part of the distribution (including the hundreds of software packages that come with it) on every possible hardware and software configuration. If some things don't work, they'll be patched in later minor releases, or even better, incrementally in the updates directories.
The same people who are bitching that x.0 never runs without hiccup out of the box are also the same people who'd piss and moan to no end about how long it took for the next release if they took longer to do more extensive testing.
So, in short, buggy x.0 software has been around as long as software has existed, and people can lump it and deal, it is a fact of life, just like hangovers, conservation of energy, and gravity.
Does anybody else remember the old apple game (I think it was a Beagle Brothers product) called "I/O Silver". Aside from being a bad pun, it was also a very good pengo play-alike. You were a frantic programmer running around a lab, killing bugs instead of ice-creatures =:-)
One of the local providers to Ithaca, NY, Lightlink Internet does that already. They offer high speed radio, DSL, etc... and you pay a reasonably small per month fee, and you can pull the maximum bandwidth that your connection physically allows, but you pay $10/Gigabyte over 1 gigabyte per month, so that way you can get quick downloads by using lots of bandwidth in short bursts, but if you don't pull down too much, you don't pay much. If oyu want to download a shitload of stuff, you pay more. It works well, the company I work for uses the service, and it's worked out quite well.
OOps, that was an irrelivant subject. My bad. I was originally going to ask about the fact that postal mail is not interceptable, but then decided that i would be straying too far form the subject at hand. Damn, maybe i should go and get some more coffee %-) dardardar...
In the end a system like carnivore will only work for a while, and only against fairly unintelligent users because end-to-end strong encryption is no longer compuationally infeasable. Joe Schmoe with the middle of the road prebuilt gateway could easily handle the processor load of encrypting all his e-mail with 2048 bit RSA (which is now freely available, and even exportable). Not only that, but even with existing (and reasonably near-term) quantum computers, we are not even near enough qbits to start tackling these cyphers, since they can't be broken down when being fed to a quantum computer.
So in short, is this whole thing just a moot point? Who would Carnivore really catch?
So what we have here is somebody who has taken the idea of portscanning, promisc detection, tcp fingerprinting, etc... and then injected it with many many drugs...
Wonder if this is any relation to _THE_ Gibson? Would be fitting wouldn't it...
Hmm. This does seem rather silly. I mean yeah, the thing has a decent amount of balls for a router, and yeah you could run it as a Linux box, but you could just as well build a $500 Linux Box that would outperform your $1500 router as a general purpose computer. Now if you are using the Cisco still as a router just using the Linux kernel, then you are probably not going to get the same level of finely tuned performance you'd get out of a low profile, specific purpose routing kernel like the one that is usually running on a Cisco.
Now, on the other hand, if you're just a bored geek killing off idle cycles making interresting software hacks for the hell of it, hey you're doing good =:-)
Actually a couple years ago, I was reading about somebody who wanted to coat the blades of various tools with some sort of vaccuum deposited diamond film (possibly this... I don't know too much about this process, the think i was reading also involved vaccuum chambers and heavy hydrogen and bombarding stuff with microwaves... didn't sound like too practical a process on an industrial scale).. That was in 93 or so, so it was probably something different... This sounds cool though =:-)
I'm sorry to break it to you, but the Ithaca in Upstate New York is actually spelled "Ithaca". Ithica is a Greek isle.
Secondly, I am able to write a paragraph if I need to, but in the case of a slashdot post, it is not important. Slashdot is an imformal setting where it doesn't matter. The only people who seem to care are snobs like yourself.
Another factor in my decision (as mentioned above, if you actually _read_ what I had to say), was my uncertainty as to _what_ I wanted to study.
Well, I'm glad they taught you "how" to program. I took some Computer Science, and it was neat. I expose myself to a lot of different things, including art and literature. In a way I almost dread going to college for fear I'll end up with an obnoxious and condescending world view similar to the one you are so eloquently expressing.
As for knowing "how" to program, there are several ways to do that. Your method is certainly a valid and proven method, and I'm sure it has served you well. It is not, however, the only viable way to learn. By a combination of self-teaching from textbooks obtained at the local public library, tutoring, users groups, formal instruction, and on-the-job training I have learned quite a few languages, but more important than that is the underlying logical basis of programming that transcends languages, platforms, and paradigms.
Right now (if I were not on lunch break) my employer is paying me to learn as much as I can about Neural Nets, and has supplied me with as many books as I can go through to do so.
My points are in order of importance:
Try to be a little more accepting of other styles learning.
Your reply is dripping with contempt. All it does is go to show your own insecurity.
Don't be superficial. This is in informal forum. The fact that you were so eager to pick on my form distracted you from actually listening to the content.
In the united states at least there is a decent segment of the population (mostly working class families) that are above the level where they can get financial aid, and way below the level where they could afford to pay for school on their own without taking on unmanagable amounts of debt.
This comes in part from reigional differences in wages and cost of living. Where I grew up (and still live (working as a programmer)) in Ithaca, NY there are a sufficient number of college students that have come for the ivy league experience at Cornell that they raise the cost of living quite a bit, and then there are also grad students that are starving enough to build a nuke, program the next greatest software suite, run your network, etc... for $8/hour. A small (less than 15' x 15' ) studio apartment in a lousy neighborhood (across the street from a crackhouse actually) is $350/month. I got lucky and snagged a tech job by knowing the right people and being in the right place, and after 4 years i've worked my way up to 36k/year as a consultant...
In any case, i decided to put off college indefinitely because i couldn't afford it, neither could my parents, and i wasn't ready enough to pick a field to go into, since i'd pretty much be locked in after i finished until i could pay off a massive (probably $50-100k loan)... with the constantly shifting future of the tech industry it is hard to pick a feild to go into that is both interresting, having new developments, and is going to be able to provide you with a job 4-6 years later and ofr long enough to pay off a loan.
My reasoning for not going to college right after high school was more born of a pragmatic evaltuation of my options, with many options and not very many known variables, i took the one which gave me the least chance of making a catastrophic mistike. For me this was to settle into a 9-5er until i could either afford to go to college (and had a good idea of what i wanted to go for...), or until i found a neat enough and stable enough job not to care.
As it is now, after passing the 4 year experience mark i've had a lot more offers for work (and good stuff too) than i can take, so i'm okay for the moment.
I guess i just wanted to be a voice for people who didn't go to school, because i've seen a lot of people putting that decision down as irresponsible, impatient, or just poorly though out. I'm seeing a lot of people writing off the non-degreed people as a bunch of idiots, which i think is a particularly narrow view. A good portion of the programmers i know have taken a similar path, and most of them have been successful. Several have found their calling and gone to school, several have saved up and bought or build houses and settled down in the community, and several of the younger ones (me included) are still feeling things out.
This is one hell of a braindead pricing policy. Maybe that is the only way Amazon can be profitable is to establish themselves as the cheapest until people stop shopping around and then randomly overcharge people by random small amounts... It seems pretty ridiculous to me...
NOw, i have used both KDE and GNOME, and really, to me it makes very little difference. They are both by now fairly stable, and the only real difference that i bump into is that their menus are in a different order, which i could configure if i gave a rat's ass and a half, but i don't. As for development, i like Kdevelop alright, but really, most of what i do is either console mode only, or SDL based, so i have little need for most of the features of these development environments.
So as far as i can tell, either one is fine, they are both doing good work, and whatever rivalrly, one-upmanship, etc... will just benefit the users, so hey, don't bitch =:-)
I wonder how many spooks, cops, and hired goons (if there is any real difference...) are willing to end up with their brains on the walls to keep a few geeks from watching movies under Linux..
(which all in all is a moot point since there are no funcitonal MPEG players that even begin to run under Linux...)
I bet they will delay as much as possible on giving out any specs, so that everybody will use WinCE (talk about an aptly named product =:-) instead of running QNX, Linux, or whatever else people like to put on little embedded systems.
I wonder what makes MS think they can pull off a switch like this and make it worth it... I'll be curiously watching to see what sort of evil plan they have, because they must have some sort of plan to embark on such a odd project...
Slashdot Mirror
Some people do their best thinking other times than 9 to 5. I think much better later in the day. My boss is a morning person, and he'll wake up at 5 am and come in and work, we get there at 9, and he takes a nap for a couple hours. For this current stage of our project we've all gotta be there 9-4 at least because of having to interact with other businesses.
When we were doing just plain old research and development and we didn't have to deal with businesses on fixed schedules, we were all on flex time and it worked out nicely. I was a night person, so for a while i worked noon-8pm. We all got to be there for the part of the day where we did our best thinking...
I can just picture a bunch of jack-booted-thugs with little microsoft logos on their jackets slithering down black nylon ropes from building rooftops and popping in the windows of offices around the country to run the filedrawers and poke around on everybody's drives to look for pirate copies of office or whatever.
If they show up at my house/office/wherever, I'll beat them to death with an old UNIX manual in a laundry bag (sort of a geek's blackjack...).
Yeah, think about it! This is just a "hey, you wanna see the guts of this..." for a "ain't it cool" sort of thing and for geeks to ooh and aah. Most likely nobody will use the assembly, but will probably use C++ or whatever... Read the article you fuck-nut.
People have done this before, but always fucked it up by either: Giving up control of the platform and letting it get un-standardized such that the write-once/run-anywhere thing fell apart. It happened to the UCSD p-system, and it happened to Java. I hope Amiga manages to hold this together. I think they are doing good by making the development environment themselves. I really hope this works, because
A) i like their philosophy
B) i really liked my old amiga, and it looks like a lot of the things i liked have carried over.
C) I really want to write multi-platform network adventure games, and Java suxx...
From what i understand from previous articles and the interviews i've read, is that the Amiga Binary is compiled to native code when you run it, and then it runs native. This sort of thing hasn't worked too well in the past (for instance the NT for the Alpha was supposed to have something to do this for intel assembly...) but I'm confident that this will work well and fast because instead of being used to deal with some really hairy legacy processor (like most of these rigs are supposed to do...) it's compiling from a source that was designed from the ground up to be translatable.
I'm psyched. Next paycheck, i want to buy the SDK =:-)
The reason DARE and other campaigns like it (i was the last year of my school to get teh Reagan anti-drug campaign before DARE was instated... Lots of old yellowed filmstrips of burnout kids, etc...)
Now, i think the problem with campaigns like that is they often come off as propiganda. I for one was interrested to go and do drugs because i wanted to see what all the stink was about. At first I was afraid, which was the desired effect, but after a while i just became curious (like many youth tend to be).
When I was in high school, my friends and i did a whole wide range of drugs just for the hell of it, and it was a shitload of fun, but eventually we grew out of it, and learned to use more moderation, and ended up all having enough responsibilities in the real world that there wasn't enough time to goof off like that any more, but we sure had fun doing it. I think we all viewed the anti-drug campaigns as something irrelivant to plow through, just like the simplified versions of history they teach kids to keep them from being emotionally disturbed, and all that other sort of stuff.
I think the DARE campaign works well for the kids who would use drugs due to peer pressure, which is a good thing, because these people would be doing it for the wrong reason, and without knowing what they are getting into.
The people who did their research first, then did it for fun or experementation will do it no matter what you do to stop them, and they are probably the least likely to be harmed by it, so i guess after all it works okay, because it keeps the people more likely to be hurt out of it, and everybody else can do drugs if they want....
There are a bunch of granola hippies around my home town (Ithaca, NY) who are going around posting these obnoxious flyers that come just short of advocating violence against those who use cell phones for creating a demand for technology that produces "massive amounts of harmful radiation" bla bla bla. I fucking hate them, they can go eat a bag of dicks. It makes me think of the scientist guy in Repo Man who was going off about all those Damned Lies you hear about radiation (as he was dying of radiation exposure...)
Seriously though, i think a lot of people are way to quick to believe that any new technology is evil, and then others are too quick to believe that any new technology is perfect. The jury is still out, but for the moment i'll keep using my phone 'cause it's actually cheaper than a land line for how often i move, and what New York Telephone, i mean NYNEX, i mean Bell Atlantic i mean Verizon charges to move or hook up a bloody telephone!
I was about to post a comment along the lines of "so what! If they delay longer, and release something harder to crack (even for the sake of argument, impossible to crack), the market can just refuse to use it, and keep using MP3s and other such unencumbered technoligies...
But then I thought about it. I believe that the music industry has enough power over the users that they'll take what they can get. I don't think the market _could_ realisticly fight the will of these companies. They have little competition, because all the "competing" companies have all globbed together in the form of RIAA.
I don't see a peaceful end to this, because there is a lot of money at stake, and whenever there is money, there is also a rabid foaming-at-the-mouth mob of greedy bastards willing to trample anybody in their way to get at it.
So maybe we should not worry so much about this standard being cracked, because if it was, it'd work just like the DeCSS fiasco, but maybe they'd learn from the mistakes of the MPAA's lawyers. What we need to start worrying about is a way to break loose from this feudalism where the consumer no longer has the power to change things in their favor (partly because most of the consumers are not informed enough to fight back, and there is a lot of money going to PR to keep it that way). Consumers are now Serfs, and large media companies are now lords. I imagine eventually there will be something like a revolution, moving us along the line towards democracy in the information world, but it'll take a while =:-(
That may be so, their x.0 releases are still buggy as fuck-all, but that is almost inevitable. They are doing something difficult, and they can't possibly test every part of the distribution (including the hundreds of software packages that come with it) on every possible hardware and software configuration. If some things don't work, they'll be patched in later minor releases, or even better, incrementally in the updates directories. The same people who are bitching that x.0 never runs without hiccup out of the box are also the same people who'd piss and moan to no end about how long it took for the next release if they took longer to do more extensive testing. So, in short, buggy x.0 software has been around as long as software has existed, and people can lump it and deal, it is a fact of life, just like hangovers, conservation of energy, and gravity.
Does anybody else remember the old apple game (I think it was a Beagle Brothers product) called "I/O Silver". Aside from being a bad pun, it was also a very good pengo play-alike. You were a frantic programmer running around a lab, killing bugs instead of ice-creatures =:-)
Thanks =:-) My brain was definetely not all there =:-)
One of the local providers to Ithaca, NY, Lightlink Internet does that already. They offer high speed radio, DSL, etc... and you pay a reasonably small per month fee, and you can pull the maximum bandwidth that your connection physically allows, but you pay $10/Gigabyte over 1 gigabyte per month, so that way you can get quick downloads by using lots of bandwidth in short bursts, but if you don't pull down too much, you don't pay much. If oyu want to download a shitload of stuff, you pay more. It works well, the company I work for uses the service, and it's worked out quite well.
OOps, that was an irrelivant subject. My bad. I was originally going to ask about the fact that postal mail is not interceptable, but then decided that i would be straying too far form the subject at hand. Damn, maybe i should go and get some more coffee %-) dardardar...
In the end a system like carnivore will only work for a while, and only against fairly unintelligent users because end-to-end strong encryption is no longer compuationally infeasable. Joe Schmoe with the middle of the road prebuilt gateway could easily handle the processor load of encrypting all his e-mail with 2048 bit RSA (which is now freely available, and even exportable). Not only that, but even with existing (and reasonably near-term) quantum computers, we are not even near enough qbits to start tackling these cyphers, since they can't be broken down when being fed to a quantum computer.
So in short, is this whole thing just a moot point? Who would Carnivore really catch?
So what we have here is somebody who has taken the idea of portscanning, promisc detection, tcp fingerprinting, etc... and then injected it with many many drugs...
Wonder if this is any relation to _THE_ Gibson? Would be fitting wouldn't it...
http://www.jumptec.de/product/data/dimmpc/index
It's a 486sx-66, 16M ram 16M flash.
Or you could also go for the ucSimm which is a dragonball processor, 8 M ram i think.
Both those systems have solid state secondary storage (boy is that a mouthfull!), and are happy running Linux.
Hmm. This does seem rather silly. I mean yeah, the thing has a decent amount of balls for a router, and yeah you could run it as a Linux box, but you could just as well build a $500 Linux Box that would outperform your $1500 router as a general purpose computer. Now if you are using the Cisco still as a router just using the Linux kernel, then you are probably not going to get the same level of finely tuned performance you'd get out of a low profile, specific purpose routing kernel like the one that is usually running on a Cisco.
Now, on the other hand, if you're just a bored geek killing off idle cycles making interresting software hacks for the hell of it, hey you're doing good =:-)
Actually a couple years ago, I was reading about somebody who wanted to coat the blades of various tools with some sort of vaccuum deposited diamond film (possibly this... I don't know too much about this process, the think i was reading also involved vaccuum chambers and heavy hydrogen and bombarding stuff with microwaves... didn't sound like too practical a process on an industrial scale).. That was in 93 or so, so it was probably something different... This sounds cool though =:-)
I'm sorry to break it to you, but the Ithaca in Upstate New York is actually spelled "Ithaca". Ithica is a Greek isle.
Secondly, I am able to write a paragraph if I need to, but in the case of a slashdot post, it is not important. Slashdot is an imformal setting where it doesn't matter. The only people who seem to care are snobs like yourself.
Another factor in my decision (as mentioned above, if you actually _read_ what I had to say), was my uncertainty as to _what_ I wanted to study.
Well, I'm glad they taught you "how" to program. I took some Computer Science, and it was neat. I expose myself to a lot of different things, including art and literature. In a way I almost dread going to college for fear I'll end up with an obnoxious and condescending world view similar to the one you are so eloquently expressing.
As for knowing "how" to program, there are several ways to do that. Your method is certainly a valid and proven method, and I'm sure it has served you well. It is not, however, the only viable way to learn. By a combination of self-teaching from textbooks obtained at the local public library, tutoring, users groups, formal instruction, and on-the-job training I have learned quite a few languages, but more important than that is the underlying logical basis of programming that transcends languages, platforms, and paradigms.
Right now (if I were not on lunch break) my employer is paying me to learn as much as I can about Neural Nets, and has supplied me with as many books as I can go through to do so.
My points are in order of importance:
Try to be a little more accepting of other styles learning.
Your reply is dripping with contempt. All it does is go to show your own insecurity.
Don't be superficial. This is in informal forum. The fact that you were so eager to pick on my form distracted you from actually listening to the content.
That's all folks.
In the united states at least there is a decent segment of the population (mostly working class families) that are above the level where they can get financial aid, and way below the level where they could afford to pay for school on their own without taking on unmanagable amounts of debt.
This comes in part from reigional differences in wages and cost of living. Where I grew up (and still live (working as a programmer)) in Ithaca, NY there are a sufficient number of college students that have come for the ivy league experience at Cornell that they raise the cost of living quite a bit, and then there are also grad students that are starving enough to build a nuke, program the next greatest software suite, run your network, etc... for $8/hour. A small (less than 15' x 15' ) studio apartment in a lousy neighborhood (across the street from a crackhouse actually) is $350/month. I got lucky and snagged a tech job by knowing the right people and being in the right place, and after 4 years i've worked my way up to 36k/year as a consultant...
In any case, i decided to put off college indefinitely because i couldn't afford it, neither could my parents, and i wasn't ready enough to pick a field to go into, since i'd pretty much be locked in after i finished until i could pay off a massive (probably $50-100k loan)... with the constantly shifting future of the tech industry it is hard to pick a feild to go into that is both interresting, having new developments, and is going to be able to provide you with a job 4-6 years later and ofr long enough to pay off a loan.
My reasoning for not going to college right after high school was more born of a pragmatic evaltuation of my options, with many options and not very many known variables, i took the one which gave me the least chance of making a catastrophic mistike. For me this was to settle into a 9-5er until i could either afford to go to college (and had a good idea of what i wanted to go for...), or until i found a neat enough and stable enough job not to care.
As it is now, after passing the 4 year experience mark i've had a lot more offers for work (and good stuff too) than i can take, so i'm okay for the moment.
I guess i just wanted to be a voice for people who didn't go to school, because i've seen a lot of people putting that decision down as irresponsible, impatient, or just poorly though out. I'm seeing a lot of people writing off the non-degreed people as a bunch of idiots, which i think is a particularly narrow view. A good portion of the programmers i know have taken a similar path, and most of them have been successful. Several have found their calling and gone to school, several have saved up and bought or build houses and settled down in the community, and several of the younger ones (me included) are still feeling things out.
This is one hell of a braindead pricing policy. Maybe that is the only way Amazon can be profitable is to establish themselves as the cheapest until people stop shopping around and then randomly overcharge people by random small amounts... It seems pretty ridiculous to me...
NOw, i have used both KDE and GNOME, and really, to me it makes very little difference. They are both by now fairly stable, and the only real difference that i bump into is that their menus are in a different order, which i could configure if i gave a rat's ass and a half, but i don't. As for development, i like Kdevelop alright, but really, most of what i do is either console mode only, or SDL based, so i have little need for most of the features of these development environments.
So as far as i can tell, either one is fine, they are both doing good work, and whatever rivalrly, one-upmanship, etc... will just benefit the users, so hey, don't bitch =:-)
I mean more like splattering brains with a shotgun (Mossberg 590 would do just fine =:-)
Fucking nazis. They can go
Eat A Bag of Dicks!
I wonder how many spooks, cops, and hired goons (if there is any real difference...) are willing to end up with their brains on the walls to keep a few geeks from watching movies under Linux..
(which all in all is a moot point since there are no funcitonal MPEG players that even begin to run under Linux...)
I bet they will delay as much as possible on giving out any specs, so that everybody will use WinCE (talk about an aptly named product =:-) instead of running QNX, Linux, or whatever else people like to put on little embedded systems.
I wonder what makes MS think they can pull off a switch like this and make it worth it... I'll be curiously watching to see what sort of evil plan they have, because they must have some sort of plan to embark on such a odd project...