The length of an identifier should be roughly proportional to the log of the size of its scope. A file scope "i" is an abomination. A loop scope "commentParserDatabaseCursor" is an idiocy.
Why is that, exactly? You're a particularly slow typist or reader? Or you expect the code to never be read again?
The longer I work in the industry, the more I become aware of the Zeroeth Law of coding. Understand who your audience is.
You are not your audience. It's necessary that understand the code as you're writing it, but not sufficient. Your peers are not your audience. Your reviewer is not your audience. The compiler is not your audience (or we'd use variables like "_" and "__").
Your audience is the poor shmuck fresh out of college who gets your code dumped on her in five, ten, or twenty years, long after you and anybody else who worked on it has left for pastures new. Anything - anything - that you can do to help that person out should be done. To do less, to make any assumption about their ability or experience, to make statements that this is stupid, and that is an abomination, is egotistic arrogance of the worst sort.
Feel free to demonstrate that I'm correct by taking that personally and responding angrily. Ego has no place in coding.
You're coming across as a bitter old school AICN poster who feels robbed because he went to see a movie that Harry recommended and couldn't get into it
Mmm, I did give that impression, but it's not at all true. I don't spend that much time on AICN, I've just been dipping into it for years, and reading the reviews casually. I only see movies based on personal recommendations from friends, never based on professional reviews. My point is that Harry's stories (I won't call them reviews) have gone from enthusiastic but informative to pure solipsism, where the entire point seems to be to get across exactly how inside Harry is. See the bizarre story of Blade 2 for a perfect example.
Sure, Harry is perfectly honest about his subjective ramblings, and he's never less than entertaining, but just because you like his style doesn't mean that you have to give credit to his substance.
It's like a politician announcing a tax rise; you'll probably get an anecdote about how badly the money is needed, and how much the polician regrets doing it, and so on. All of this is perfectly true, but perfectly irrelevant; the only salient point is taxes are going up. Similary, Harry can write five hundred words about how hyped he was, or who invited him, or what he had to eat that day, or how hot the chick in front of him was and how much she wanted to ride his 400lbs carcasse like a bucking bronco, but that's just spin. The beef is: what was the movie like. And I'm finding that increasingly Harry just doesn't say, although he's becoming better and better at covering that up.
Time until feature complete. Hmmm, this sounds dubious. It may be quicker to sit down and code the feature, but then end up being very hard to maintain
Here's an honest question: why did you even bother to respond to a post that you didn't read? I explained what I meant by "Time to feature complete", because it's not a common phrase. I won't repeat myself. Go back and brush up on your comprehension skills, and I only hope to god that you don't code the way you Slashpost, or if you do, that you don't work on anything mission critical.
it is amazing how much code people can write and not comment it
Point taken, but I rather prefer writing self commenting code. What's better?
int32 data[7];// Number of ISDN terminals per trunk. But then I should really comment every use of this monstrosity as well
int32 ISDN_Terminals_Per_Trunk[NUMBER_OF_TRUNKS];// Why would you need to comment this?
And anyone who complains that it takes too long to type "ISDN_Terminals_Per_Trunk" compared to "data" really needs to take a cluecheck about the relative amounts of time spend reading and writing code compared to comprehending and fixing it.;-)
Phew, what a long winded way to say: KLOC in any form is a useless metric.
I was rather hoping for positive suggestions regarding better alternative, and especially some shiny references to back them up for when I take them to my boss.
The best metric I've found is simply "Time until feature complete". Just that. Elapsed time between a feature being requested and it going live in the field with no bug reports coming back. Anything else is largely bunk. Trouble with that is that it's very hard for twitchy bosses to deal with the interim stages. "Time to code complete" is easier for them to monitor and deal with, but as anyone who has actually supported a product will know, that's only the beginning of a piece of software's life. Push the time to code complete back by a week, and you can save yourself month of grief later.;-)
Mmm, all true, but the big issue that I have with Harry is that everybody else in the entire business has to buy for their access by writing positive reviews. Harry wants us to believe that he's different, because he started out different.
But the special access he gets now, teamed with the apparent inconsistencies of his tastes, the increasing number of rave reviews of big films (I know he likes movies, but even so...) and if nothing else the plain old fact that his site is sponsored directly by the owners of the films that he is reviewing (and AOL-Time Warner, I notice) mean that the only reliable information that you can get from Harry's reviews is an insight into Harry.
I really is a damn shame. AICN used to be a great site when Harry did things the hard way. But as soon as it started attracting enough eyeballs for Harry to start receiving legitimate invites, it effectively removed the point of its own existence. In fact, I mostly just read it now for the trolls, who tend to be a lot more amusing and vitriolic than the goober subspecies on Slashdot.;-)
You really shouldn't drink and post. 802.11b and Bluetooth use overlapping frequencies, but completely different protocols. Oh, and I forgot to mention cordless telephones, which also use 2.4Ghz.
Each channel has the full 802.11b bandwidth
Oh please take a cluecheck. Bandwidth has been appropriated from radio lingo and used to refer to data rate on a dedicated connection. But we're talking about a radio frequency issue. Sound it out. Band. Width. I'm talking about the limited number of discrete channels you can squeeze around a nominal wavelength, not the data rate per channel. The fact that you can send 11Mb/s on a given channel isn't the point; it's that if (as I suggested) we all go and buy Bluetooth keyboards, mice, PDA's and cellphone headsets, and stick them in the same area as a bunch of 802.11b devices, then your notionally "dedicated" channel is going to receive a lot of cries of "Hey! Listen to me! Listen to me! I'm a 2.4ghz device trying to negotiate a connection! Hey!" from devices futily but repeatedly trying your channel in the hope of getting a connection.
Sad to tell, anyone who's followed Harry's fortunes over the years has seen him metamorphosise from a rebel outsider into a minor celebrity, feted by both individual directors and (gasp) Big Bad Studios just like any other influential mainstream reviewer. Even now, Harry still (very occasionally) gripes about mainstream reviewers, while at the same time accepting the exact same special access to sets and screenings. The only difference is that Harry explains exactly how the whole sordid business works, with reviewers buying themselves celebrity status by giving good review-bites that guarantee that their name will go up on a poster or trailer, thereby elevating them into more expensive and high class whores. And yet despite receiving the rewards, Harry would like us to believe that he is still untainted by the influence and can be trusted. This idea seems to flow from the fact that Harry explains the context behind each viewing (whether you want to hear it or not) and writes informally. It's superfically convincing, but the style of presentation is irrelevant other than for entertainment value, it's the substance that matters for a reviewer.
I am simply unwilling to believe the spy-games circumstances that Harry claims. If he has seen this film, it is with the full sanction of Lucasarts, on the implicit or explicit understanding that he would give it a rave review, and that he would imply that it was a rogue showing. And note carefully, he leaves us to infer that by describing his feelings (which nobody can prove or disprove), but never actually makes a factual statement to support it. You have a think about that.
Don't get me wrong. Perhaps it is a good movie and an honest review. But Harry can simply no longer be trusted. There are just too many examples of him raving about movies to which he has received special access for him to be a credible independent reviewer any more. I won't claim he has sold out, because he never claimed to want to be outside the system. In fact, he has made every effort to insinuate himself into the whole sorry cycle of review-reward, and I think this may very well be his crowning glory.
Sorry Harry, you used to be someone I could trust. Now you're just a shallow parody of Comic Book Guy. The circle is complete; now you are the studios' bitch. Ain't it ironic?
I find it very hard to credit AC posts saying "I work for so and so" when they're actually just repeating the company line, i.e. don't mod the chip. Why on earth would you need to post as AC to say that?
If you're going to post as AC, at least justify that by disclosing why older XP's had the bridge closed in the first place, and why the Duron still does. That seems very strange. What exactly is different about the XP and the MP that the XP will cook and the MP won't? Where does the Duron fit into this?
C'mon, guy, post as yourself so we can check your rap sheet and decide if you're doing us a favour or just getting your jollies watching your AC post get a 5 rating.
you may not use the Product to permit any Device to [...] display [...] the [...] Product's user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product
Meaningless rabid lawyerese. Taken literally (and how else would you take a literal license?) and given that WinXP is licensed according to what's inside the box, it follows that you can't use a monitor to display WinXP unless the monitor has a separe license.
If you want to argue that a monitor is not a "Device" whereas (e.g.) a remote laptop is, then consider one of those funky Phillips 802.11b touchscreen monitors with a whack of built in functionality, regardless of whether it's connected to a box or not. Then you draw the line between what's a Device and what isn't. Remember to future proof your definition to include stuff that hasn't been invented yet.
Microsoft really needs to run this stuff through a cluechecker before leaving themselves open to this kind of ridicule. It's folly to write a license that's impossible to fully comply with, then get all prissy when people choose to ignore it as a whole.
[As a paying SuSE customer] What exactly are the benefits to me of Mandrake staying afloat?
New features and fixes from Mandrake make it over into Suse, perhaps?
Fair point, but my original point was that the money that's currently going to Mandrake would probably end up going to another Linux distributor anyway. That's not to imply that money going to Mandrake is wasted; unlike binary-only outfits, even if a given Linux distro goes under, the work isn't lost. But either way, I'll see the benefit of money going into SuSE directly long before an indirect spinoff from another distro.
More competitors are around to keep Suse on its toes rather than let it sit back and coast?
Ahem, Microsoft and their spinoff R&D department at Apple? And I prefer to think that cooperation is better for the Linux world than competition: I personally think that the competition between GNOME and KDE is hurting X/GNU/Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows.
More exposure for Linux? Take your pick, or add one of the myriad other benefits I didn't mention
I think you need to mention them, because I'm not seeing them. I'm sorry to be harsh, but for purely pragmatic reasons, as an application developer (as opposed to an X/GNU/Linux OS developer), I'd prefer to see two or at most three commercial Linux distro's. The horrible part is that it means that a lot of distros are going to have to go to make way for that. I'd hate to see any particular distro disappear, but I'd get over it quite quickly.
If we all rush out and buy all the 802.11b and Bluetooth gadgets that marketdroids are shrieking about, aren't we going to run out of bandwidth really fast, especially given that 802.11b and Bluetooth share a frequency and don't play nicely together? Sure, we've got used to contending for network resources, but hands up who would swap a wired in IO peripheral for a wireless one that has any sort of lag or stutter, even (or especially) intermittent jerkiness. You're going to spend $$$ on a bunch of super-hardware and then tolerate a worse user experience? Excuse me if I don't put down a deposit right now.
Huh, I shouldn't speak. I develop voice over IP, and we're still stuck with IPv4 (with no QoS). Our marketdroids actually tell customers that the choppy voice quality is all in their imagination. Funnily enough, they're not buying that, in any sense of the word, and I wouldn't buy this product either unless I could test it thoroughly in a realistic office environment first.
The US military is an organization, and any software is published to the organization
Hrrm, but army, navy and air force have separate budgets and chains of command, plus they subcontract work. It's an interesting issue; as I (personally) read the GPL, the onus is on me (personally) to comply. That means that the distributable I produce must be accompanied by the written offer to supply source. It's irrelevant whether I intend to supply it to my mother, my workmate, another department in my company, or Osama bin Laden for that matter. If I use GPL code, I have to ensure that I'm in a position to comply with the terms. Saying "I voz only obeying orders" isn't good enough.
you have to pay them the basic asking price on the free (i.e non-classified) market, and they don't get to say "no, you can't use it". For GPL/BSD/Open Source licenses, the asking price is Free, so well, they've been "compensated" as they've normally would.
There is a cost associated with using open source code, usually acknowledgement, sometimes releasing your changes, occasionally open sourcing your project. It is not generally "free as in beer", it's just that the cost is in behaviour, not $$$.
I take your point that the military can do whatever it damn well likes, but it'd be interesting to see what a court would consider a "just and reasonable" paying of the cost of using open source code. I'm a little tired of groups thinking that they can behave any way they like, then substitute money afterwards when they are forced to. It's not OK for Microsoft to do it, and I don't think it's OK for the Dubyament either.
That said, if the binaries never leave the military, the source doesn't have to, even under GPL. But that doesn't mean that you can get away with paying the costs as they apply in the circumstances, i.e. adding GPL licenses to all linked source.
Nowa days every one has a cd burnner and CDRs are dirt cheap. Besides when was the last time you could find a blank floppy in less then 10 minutes
Great! I'll just chuck my firewall and fileserver boxen on a landfill and buy some newer hardware then!
Thanks for the info, but some of us like to keep hardware in service until the magic smoke gets out (for environmental as well as cost reasons), and a decent boot floppy is an integral part of that. "Buy new hardware!" is a Microsoft strategy, and that's one of the reasons why I've given up on their upgrade-or-become-unsupported OS's.
Enforce password conventions the way NASA does... "Epasswd differs from the vendor's password programs in that it enforces strict password construction requirements which include a minimum number of numeric, special, lower, and upper case characters as well as the min and max password length. [...] Passwords that have been changed using epasswd have withstood processing by the Crack 5.0 release which is a publicly available password cracking application"
Unless you've got physical access to the machine, in which case you can just find it on the PostIt note stuck to the monitor.
Honest to god, who actually runs dictionary attacks on passwords for hostile purposes in the real world? Really, who? Examples?
My own experience with my company is that requiring a mixed alphanumeric, timing it out, and disallowing the previous 9 passwords just leads to me using "[usualpassword]0-9". Combine that with Window's lovely trick of expiring your network passwords on the server because you haven't logged your machine out for two weeks (no, really), and you get a royal pain in the ass for both users and tech support, and zero extra security, because it's an intranet password, and anybody who's in a position to enter it could just pick up my machine instead.
And yet I agree with you: CVS is even easier than Clearcase, and does everything you'd need to do on a typical project!
No it doesn't! If you'd said "almost" I'd agree with you, but see some of the discussion on this earlier slashdot thread
OK, we don't have the same definition of "typical".;-) Isn't that thread more of a praising of arch than a damning of CVS though? But either way, it's a great illustration that even if someone says "System XYZ is the best ever!" it's always worth taking with a pinch of salt, and doing your own research.
To put this in perspective - while at Oracle with 1000s of engineers working on the same tree, we used ClearCase and it was awesome. The difference here is that there was much steeper a learning curve, and no normal engineers could actually do complex tasks - i.e. create branches etc. We had a complete groud dedicated to ClearCase.
To put this in perspective, I currently handle the Clearcase side of a transatlantic development effort, with maybe 200 developers. The other side uses Continuus (office politics, don't ask). They have a complete config/build group. They even have a tools group that does nothing but evaluate, purchase and support tools for the config/build group. Until very recently, I handled the Clearcase side on my own. Part time (I'm a developer). It got to the stage where I would actually take the source from Continuus, import it to Clearcase, produce reports, perform a build and test it before the Continuus team could do it, and my builds got used in preference to theirs.
Just goes to show, there's always a worse system, or other alternatives to explore. The developers who're used to using Continuus are all in love with Clearcase, and rebellion is brewing. One guy said that he'd learned to do in Clearcase in two weeks what it had taken him two years to learn in Continuus. And yet I agree with you: CVS is even easier than Clearcase, and does everything you'd need to do on a typical project!
I was working in a corner of a cafe late at night when I guy came in, sat beside me, stuck a knife to my side and said "put the laptop in the bag".
I'll top that. Friend of mine came out of the University about 1am, and locked up behind him. Three guys grabbed him, showed him the knife and said "Play nice". They hailed a cab, put him in it, and said "Take us to your apartment," which he did. They then took him up, sat him on the floor, and carefully cleaned the place out, including his laptop (and the keys to the University), and made it utterly clear to him what would happen if he reported any of this. He said that it was a surreal experience, and the scariest thing was how utterly casual and bored they were, like they could not give a fuck how many people saw them, whether he shouted for help, or whether they knifed him or not. On the bright side, they did pay for the cab.
I ended up with a newer machine, and a spare drive, and the thief ended up with a password protected laptop. Just goes to show, crime doesn't pay
Well, crime probably paid about $50, the price of a "good cosmetic condition, fails to boot" laptop on eBay, or at the local fence. And that's rather the point about laptop security: it doesn't matter how bad you make the proposition look, if someone decides to take your laptop (or cell phone, or anything else) they're going to do it. You will have to make the decision whether it's worth carrying something so valuable that you're prepared to risk your life protecting it. I think that you (and my friend) made the right decision. "Hero" tends to be a posthumous epithet, barring superior firepower and the opportunity and will to use it.
The flipside of all this is: never, ever buy goods in a "too good to be true" deal from someone who's not keen to answer questions on where they came from, because more often that not, there's a victim in there somewhere. Are we all quite clear on that?
Having an old/crap/50lbs laptop will only stop it from being stolen if there's an obviously better one sitting right next to it.
When the alarm goes off, what's the first thing the thief is going to do? Better hope that your laptop can survive being hurled violently to the ground.
If the thief doesn't throw your laptop away, are you going to chase them? If you think possession of your laptop is more important than your health, perhaps you need to evaluate why you feel that you need to carry something so valuable that it might get you killed.
(A little aside about human nature) According to my friends in IS, most corporate owned laptops are stolen by employees. (Pop quiz: How many corporations want to collect metrics that say how crooked their employees are? It's simply recorded as unspecified theft, or even depreciation) My current employer actually has a tacit policy that laptops pass down the food chain until they reach a dark, quiet corner, then they slip out the back door. It's actually less hassle and cost to the company than trying to protect them, or for that matter trying to sell them on. Also, having confidential files on a stolen laptop is a lot less embarassing for the IS guys than having them found on a "wiped for resale" laptop. Very cynically enterprising of them.
If you don't want your laptop stolen, don't ever let it get into a situation where it can be stolen, because (people being what they are) it will be. And if you think you absolutely can't live without your laptop, do yourself a favour and evaluate what you actually mean by that. Chances are you'll find it's simply not true.
Why, exactly? Do you honestly believe the current over-the-top level of airport security is useful or necessary?
Works fairly well in Europe. 1/3 of British Airways staff work in security, and they're not all minimum wagers.
Besides, the issue here is that he refused a quite reasonable request, but still insisted on flying. Any way you look at it, the security guys' solution was much quicker and neater than his "All you have to do is to phone X, Y and Z and check my story" stance. It seems clear that both sides were unnecessarily stubborn.
what reason could they have for detaining him without allowing him to speak with his doctor or colleuges
None, so it's lucky that they didn't do that:
"[He] spent the next two days arranging conversations between his university colleagues and the airline."
You (and the moderators) fail the cluecheck. Looks to me like Captain Cyborg here is equally as guilty in the stubberness stakes, and is now happily milking this for publicity. It's an interesting story, but don't read things into it that aren't there.
If the nanotech is any good, it can absorb energy from a landing (by cascading stiffness up the armor, and allowing the armor to take the pressure without crushing the guy inside)
Oh please. Energy isn't the issue, it's acceleration. If you stiffen the armour, you just get smushed against the hard armour instead of the hard ground. In fact, stiffening is the last thing you want to do; you want as much articulation as possible to minimise the impulse. This "leap tall buildings in a single bound" claim is pure fantasy.
Regarding the burrowing - sorry, borrowing - of IP, the first editions of D&D (basic D&D, not that new fangled Advanced nonsense, or new-improved-non-advanced from WotC) had "hobbits" in it. Gary was rightly bitchslapped by the estate of JRRT, and from then on all furry footed burrowers were henceforth known as halflings. Which I personally view as also infringing in context, but the rights holders didn't, probably because they thought all this "roleplaying" silliness wouldn't come to anything.;-)
In my community, the hacker community, a goal is to IMPROVE security by revealing it's flaws. But these guys broke security to make billions off of someone else's huge investment. That's very different [and they should be jailed for 20 years to life]
Whoa there just a second. Before we all start cheering "You go, geek!", let's analyse what you've just said.
It's OK for you to crack encryption and to disclose it - responsibly, I'm sure you'll claim, but you'll have to pick your own definition for what that actually means - because your intention is to help the creators improve it.
It's 20 years to life for an NDS employee to perform substantially similar actions, simply because their intention is different.
You probably reckon that if you ever screw up a disclosure (information wants to be free, right?), and information gets into the wild that helps commercial pirates to sell cracked cards, then it's a no-foul simply because you're one of the good guys. In that case the damages to rights owners is just an unfortunate accident, it wasn't your fault, it was that 1337_h4x0r guy you'd known for three whole weeks on IRC, who promised he was a white hat and that you could trust him with the disclosure, and so on.
I can understand your stance, but I'd suggest that in practical terms that any disclosures you make will be judged (prosecuted, rather) on the consequences, and that you'll have to rely on your good intentions purely as a last ditch defence, and not as a cloak of invulnerability. I'd be very careful about wishing for long sentences for black hats, because I suspect that a jury might be rather less inclined to believe a plea of "I never meant to hurt anyone" from someone that the prosecution has just described as an evil computer hacker with a track record of hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms ("standards") to cover up his nefarious acts.
In other words: don't be too sure that something as fragile as the truth will protect you. Lawyers get paid a lot of money to lie very convincingly on behalf of their clients. How convincing could you be if you ever have to prove your innocence?
Slashdot Mirror
Why is that, exactly? You're a particularly slow typist or reader? Or you expect the code to never be read again?
The longer I work in the industry, the more I become aware of the Zeroeth Law of coding. Understand who your audience is.
You are not your audience. It's necessary that understand the code as you're writing it, but not sufficient. Your peers are not your audience. Your reviewer is not your audience. The compiler is not your audience (or we'd use variables like "_" and "__").
Your audience is the poor shmuck fresh out of college who gets your code dumped on her in five, ten, or twenty years, long after you and anybody else who worked on it has left for pastures new. Anything - anything - that you can do to help that person out should be done. To do less, to make any assumption about their ability or experience, to make statements that this is stupid, and that is an abomination, is egotistic arrogance of the worst sort.
Feel free to demonstrate that I'm correct by taking that personally and responding angrily. Ego has no place in coding.
Mmm, I did give that impression, but it's not at all true. I don't spend that much time on AICN, I've just been dipping into it for years, and reading the reviews casually. I only see movies based on personal recommendations from friends, never based on professional reviews. My point is that Harry's stories (I won't call them reviews) have gone from enthusiastic but informative to pure solipsism, where the entire point seems to be to get across exactly how inside Harry is. See the bizarre story of Blade 2 for a perfect example.
Sure, Harry is perfectly honest about his subjective ramblings, and he's never less than entertaining, but just because you like his style doesn't mean that you have to give credit to his substance.
It's like a politician announcing a tax rise; you'll probably get an anecdote about how badly the money is needed, and how much the polician regrets doing it, and so on. All of this is perfectly true, but perfectly irrelevant; the only salient point is taxes are going up. Similary, Harry can write five hundred words about how hyped he was, or who invited him, or what he had to eat that day, or how hot the chick in front of him was and how much she wanted to ride his 400lbs carcasse like a bucking bronco, but that's just spin. The beef is: what was the movie like. And I'm finding that increasingly Harry just doesn't say, although he's becoming better and better at covering that up.
Here's an honest question: why did you even bother to respond to a post that you didn't read? I explained what I meant by "Time to feature complete", because it's not a common phrase. I won't repeat myself. Go back and brush up on your comprehension skills, and I only hope to god that you don't code the way you Slashpost, or if you do, that you don't work on anything mission critical.
Point taken, but I rather prefer writing self commenting code. What's better?
And anyone who complains that it takes too long to type "ISDN_Terminals_Per_Trunk" compared to "data" really needs to take a cluecheck about the relative amounts of time spend reading and writing code compared to comprehending and fixing it. ;-)
Phew, what a long winded way to say: KLOC in any form is a useless metric.
I was rather hoping for positive suggestions regarding better alternative, and especially some shiny references to back them up for when I take them to my boss.
The best metric I've found is simply "Time until feature complete". Just that. Elapsed time between a feature being requested and it going live in the field with no bug reports coming back. Anything else is largely bunk. Trouble with that is that it's very hard for twitchy bosses to deal with the interim stages. "Time to code complete" is easier for them to monitor and deal with, but as anyone who has actually supported a product will know, that's only the beginning of a piece of software's life. Push the time to code complete back by a week, and you can save yourself month of grief later. ;-)
Mmm, all true, but the big issue that I have with Harry is that everybody else in the entire business has to buy for their access by writing positive reviews. Harry wants us to believe that he's different, because he started out different.
But the special access he gets now, teamed with the apparent inconsistencies of his tastes, the increasing number of rave reviews of big films (I know he likes movies, but even so...) and if nothing else the plain old fact that his site is sponsored directly by the owners of the films that he is reviewing (and AOL-Time Warner, I notice) mean that the only reliable information that you can get from Harry's reviews is an insight into Harry.
I really is a damn shame. AICN used to be a great site when Harry did things the hard way. But as soon as it started attracting enough eyeballs for Harry to start receiving legitimate invites, it effectively removed the point of its own existence. In fact, I mostly just read it now for the trolls, who tend to be a lot more amusing and vitriolic than the goober subspecies on Slashdot. ;-)
You really shouldn't drink and post. 802.11b and Bluetooth use overlapping frequencies, but completely different protocols. Oh, and I forgot to mention cordless telephones, which also use 2.4Ghz.
Oh please take a cluecheck. Bandwidth has been appropriated from radio lingo and used to refer to data rate on a dedicated connection. But we're talking about a radio frequency issue. Sound it out. Band. Width. I'm talking about the limited number of discrete channels you can squeeze around a nominal wavelength, not the data rate per channel. The fact that you can send 11Mb/s on a given channel isn't the point; it's that if (as I suggested) we all go and buy Bluetooth keyboards, mice, PDA's and cellphone headsets, and stick them in the same area as a bunch of 802.11b devices, then your notionally "dedicated" channel is going to receive a lot of cries of "Hey! Listen to me! Listen to me! I'm a 2.4ghz device trying to negotiate a connection! Hey!" from devices futily but repeatedly trying your channel in the hope of getting a connection.
Sad to tell, anyone who's followed Harry's fortunes over the years has seen him metamorphosise from a rebel outsider into a minor celebrity, feted by both individual directors and (gasp) Big Bad Studios just like any other influential mainstream reviewer. Even now, Harry still (very occasionally) gripes about mainstream reviewers, while at the same time accepting the exact same special access to sets and screenings. The only difference is that Harry explains exactly how the whole sordid business works, with reviewers buying themselves celebrity status by giving good review-bites that guarantee that their name will go up on a poster or trailer, thereby elevating them into more expensive and high class whores. And yet despite receiving the rewards, Harry would like us to believe that he is still untainted by the influence and can be trusted. This idea seems to flow from the fact that Harry explains the context behind each viewing (whether you want to hear it or not) and writes informally. It's superfically convincing, but the style of presentation is irrelevant other than for entertainment value, it's the substance that matters for a reviewer.
I am simply unwilling to believe the spy-games circumstances that Harry claims. If he has seen this film, it is with the full sanction of Lucasarts, on the implicit or explicit understanding that he would give it a rave review, and that he would imply that it was a rogue showing. And note carefully, he leaves us to infer that by describing his feelings (which nobody can prove or disprove), but never actually makes a factual statement to support it. You have a think about that.
Don't get me wrong. Perhaps it is a good movie and an honest review. But Harry can simply no longer be trusted. There are just too many examples of him raving about movies to which he has received special access for him to be a credible independent reviewer any more. I won't claim he has sold out, because he never claimed to want to be outside the system. In fact, he has made every effort to insinuate himself into the whole sorry cycle of review-reward, and I think this may very well be his crowning glory.
Sorry Harry, you used to be someone I could trust. Now you're just a shallow parody of Comic Book Guy. The circle is complete; now you are the studios' bitch. Ain't it ironic?
I find it very hard to credit AC posts saying "I work for so and so" when they're actually just repeating the company line, i.e. don't mod the chip. Why on earth would you need to post as AC to say that?
If you're going to post as AC, at least justify that by disclosing why older XP's had the bridge closed in the first place, and why the Duron still does. That seems very strange. What exactly is different about the XP and the MP that the XP will cook and the MP won't? Where does the Duron fit into this?
C'mon, guy, post as yourself so we can check your rap sheet and decide if you're doing us a favour or just getting your jollies watching your AC post get a 5 rating.
Meaningless rabid lawyerese. Taken literally (and how else would you take a literal license?) and given that WinXP is licensed according to what's inside the box, it follows that you can't use a monitor to display WinXP unless the monitor has a separe license.
If you want to argue that a monitor is not a "Device" whereas (e.g.) a remote laptop is, then consider one of those funky Phillips 802.11b touchscreen monitors with a whack of built in functionality, regardless of whether it's connected to a box or not. Then you draw the line between what's a Device and what isn't. Remember to future proof your definition to include stuff that hasn't been invented yet.
Microsoft really needs to run this stuff through a cluechecker before leaving themselves open to this kind of ridicule. It's folly to write a license that's impossible to fully comply with, then get all prissy when people choose to ignore it as a whole.
- [As a paying SuSE customer] What exactly are the benefits to me of Mandrake staying afloat?
New features and fixes from Mandrake make it over into Suse, perhaps?Fair point, but my original point was that the money that's currently going to Mandrake would probably end up going to another Linux distributor anyway. That's not to imply that money going to Mandrake is wasted; unlike binary-only outfits, even if a given Linux distro goes under, the work isn't lost. But either way, I'll see the benefit of money going into SuSE directly long before an indirect spinoff from another distro.
Ahem, Microsoft and their spinoff R&D department at Apple? And I prefer to think that cooperation is better for the Linux world than competition: I personally think that the competition between GNOME and KDE is hurting X/GNU/Linux as a desktop replacement for Windows.
I think you need to mention them, because I'm not seeing them. I'm sorry to be harsh, but for purely pragmatic reasons, as an application developer (as opposed to an X/GNU/Linux OS developer), I'd prefer to see two or at most three commercial Linux distro's. The horrible part is that it means that a lot of distros are going to have to go to make way for that. I'd hate to see any particular distro disappear, but I'd get over it quite quickly.
If we all rush out and buy all the 802.11b and Bluetooth gadgets that marketdroids are shrieking about, aren't we going to run out of bandwidth really fast, especially given that 802.11b and Bluetooth share a frequency and don't play nicely together? Sure, we've got used to contending for network resources, but hands up who would swap a wired in IO peripheral for a wireless one that has any sort of lag or stutter, even (or especially) intermittent jerkiness. You're going to spend $$$ on a bunch of super-hardware and then tolerate a worse user experience? Excuse me if I don't put down a deposit right now.
Huh, I shouldn't speak. I develop voice over IP, and we're still stuck with IPv4 (with no QoS). Our marketdroids actually tell customers that the choppy voice quality is all in their imagination. Funnily enough, they're not buying that, in any sense of the word, and I wouldn't buy this product either unless I could test it thoroughly in a realistic office environment first.
Hrrm, but army, navy and air force have separate budgets and chains of command, plus they subcontract work. It's an interesting issue; as I (personally) read the GPL, the onus is on me (personally) to comply. That means that the distributable I produce must be accompanied by the written offer to supply source. It's irrelevant whether I intend to supply it to my mother, my workmate, another department in my company, or Osama bin Laden for that matter. If I use GPL code, I have to ensure that I'm in a position to comply with the terms. Saying "I voz only obeying orders" isn't good enough.
This is absolutely untrue for the majority of open source licenses. I suggest you go and look at a piece of open source code. See the first line? The little © symbol? If you don't want to read any further, then just stop right there and assume that the code is neither free as in speech or in beer.
There is a cost associated with using open source code, usually acknowledgement, sometimes releasing your changes, occasionally open sourcing your project. It is not generally "free as in beer", it's just that the cost is in behaviour, not $$$.
I take your point that the military can do whatever it damn well likes, but it'd be interesting to see what a court would consider a "just and reasonable" paying of the cost of using open source code. I'm a little tired of groups thinking that they can behave any way they like, then substitute money afterwards when they are forced to. It's not OK for Microsoft to do it, and I don't think it's OK for the Dubyament either.
That said, if the binaries never leave the military, the source doesn't have to, even under GPL. But that doesn't mean that you can get away with paying the costs as they apply in the circumstances, i.e. adding GPL licenses to all linked source.
Great! I'll just chuck my firewall and fileserver boxen on a landfill and buy some newer hardware then!
Thanks for the info, but some of us like to keep hardware in service until the magic smoke gets out (for environmental as well as cost reasons), and a decent boot floppy is an integral part of that. "Buy new hardware!" is a Microsoft strategy, and that's one of the reasons why I've given up on their upgrade-or-become-unsupported OS's.
Unless you've got physical access to the machine, in which case you can just find it on the PostIt note stuck to the monitor.
Honest to god, who actually runs dictionary attacks on passwords for hostile purposes in the real world? Really, who? Examples?
My own experience with my company is that requiring a mixed alphanumeric, timing it out, and disallowing the previous 9 passwords just leads to me using "[usualpassword]0-9". Combine that with Window's lovely trick of expiring your network passwords on the server because you haven't logged your machine out for two weeks (no, really), and you get a royal pain in the ass for both users and tech support, and zero extra security, because it's an intranet password, and anybody who's in a position to enter it could just pick up my machine instead.
- And yet I agree with you: CVS is even easier than Clearcase, and does everything you'd need to do on a typical project!
No it doesn't! If you'd said "almost" I'd agree with you, but see some of the discussion on this earlier slashdot threadOK, we don't have the same definition of "typical". ;-) Isn't that thread more of a praising of arch than a damning of CVS though? But either way, it's a great illustration that even if someone says "System XYZ is the best ever!" it's always worth taking with a pinch of salt, and doing your own research.
To put this in perspective, I currently handle the Clearcase side of a transatlantic development effort, with maybe 200 developers. The other side uses Continuus (office politics, don't ask). They have a complete config/build group. They even have a tools group that does nothing but evaluate, purchase and support tools for the config/build group. Until very recently, I handled the Clearcase side on my own. Part time (I'm a developer). It got to the stage where I would actually take the source from Continuus, import it to Clearcase, produce reports, perform a build and test it before the Continuus team could do it, and my builds got used in preference to theirs.
Just goes to show, there's always a worse system, or other alternatives to explore. The developers who're used to using Continuus are all in love with Clearcase, and rebellion is brewing. One guy said that he'd learned to do in Clearcase in two weeks what it had taken him two years to learn in Continuus. And yet I agree with you: CVS is even easier than Clearcase, and does everything you'd need to do on a typical project!
I'll top that. Friend of mine came out of the University about 1am, and locked up behind him. Three guys grabbed him, showed him the knife and said "Play nice". They hailed a cab, put him in it, and said "Take us to your apartment," which he did. They then took him up, sat him on the floor, and carefully cleaned the place out, including his laptop (and the keys to the University), and made it utterly clear to him what would happen if he reported any of this. He said that it was a surreal experience, and the scariest thing was how utterly casual and bored they were, like they could not give a fuck how many people saw them, whether he shouted for help, or whether they knifed him or not. On the bright side, they did pay for the cab.
Well, crime probably paid about $50, the price of a "good cosmetic condition, fails to boot" laptop on eBay, or at the local fence. And that's rather the point about laptop security: it doesn't matter how bad you make the proposition look, if someone decides to take your laptop (or cell phone, or anything else) they're going to do it. You will have to make the decision whether it's worth carrying something so valuable that you're prepared to risk your life protecting it. I think that you (and my friend) made the right decision. "Hero" tends to be a posthumous epithet, barring superior firepower and the opportunity and will to use it.
The flipside of all this is: never, ever buy goods in a "too good to be true" deal from someone who's not keen to answer questions on where they came from, because more often that not, there's a victim in there somewhere. Are we all quite clear on that?
If you don't want your laptop stolen, don't ever let it get into a situation where it can be stolen, because (people being what they are) it will be. And if you think you absolutely can't live without your laptop, do yourself a favour and evaluate what you actually mean by that. Chances are you'll find it's simply not true.
- But the guy had to be inspected.
Why, exactly? Do you honestly believe the current over-the-top level of airport security is useful or necessary?Works fairly well in Europe. 1/3 of British Airways staff work in security, and they're not all minimum wagers.
Besides, the issue here is that he refused a quite reasonable request, but still insisted on flying. Any way you look at it, the security guys' solution was much quicker and neater than his "All you have to do is to phone X, Y and Z and check my story" stance. It seems clear that both sides were unnecessarily stubborn.
None, so it's lucky that they didn't do that:
You (and the moderators) fail the cluecheck. Looks to me like Captain Cyborg here is equally as guilty in the stubberness stakes, and is now happily milking this for publicity. It's an interesting story, but don't read things into it that aren't there.
Oh please. Energy isn't the issue, it's acceleration. If you stiffen the armour, you just get smushed against the hard armour instead of the hard ground. In fact, stiffening is the last thing you want to do; you want as much articulation as possible to minimise the impulse. This "leap tall buildings in a single bound" claim is pure fantasy.
Regarding the burrowing - sorry, borrowing - of IP, the first editions of D&D (basic D&D, not that new fangled Advanced nonsense, or new-improved-non-advanced from WotC) had "hobbits" in it. Gary was rightly bitchslapped by the estate of JRRT, and from then on all furry footed burrowers were henceforth known as halflings. Which I personally view as also infringing in context, but the rights holders didn't, probably because they thought all this "roleplaying" silliness wouldn't come to anything. ;-)
Whoa there just a second. Before we all start cheering "You go, geek!", let's analyse what you've just said.
It's OK for you to crack encryption and to disclose it - responsibly, I'm sure you'll claim, but you'll have to pick your own definition for what that actually means - because your intention is to help the creators improve it.
It's 20 years to life for an NDS employee to perform substantially similar actions, simply because their intention is different.
You probably reckon that if you ever screw up a disclosure (information wants to be free, right?), and information gets into the wild that helps commercial pirates to sell cracked cards, then it's a no-foul simply because you're one of the good guys. In that case the damages to rights owners is just an unfortunate accident, it wasn't your fault, it was that 1337_h4x0r guy you'd known for three whole weeks on IRC, who promised he was a white hat and that you could trust him with the disclosure, and so on.
I can understand your stance, but I'd suggest that in practical terms that any disclosures you make will be judged (prosecuted, rather) on the consequences, and that you'll have to rely on your good intentions purely as a last ditch defence, and not as a cloak of invulnerability. I'd be very careful about wishing for long sentences for black hats, because I suspect that a jury might be rather less inclined to believe a plea of "I never meant to hurt anyone" from someone that the prosecution has just described as an evil computer hacker with a track record of hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms ("standards") to cover up his nefarious acts.
In other words: don't be too sure that something as fragile as the truth will protect you. Lawyers get paid a lot of money to lie very convincingly on behalf of their clients. How convincing could you be if you ever have to prove your innocence?