To be honest, Crick was a bit of a git anyway (and Watson wasn't exactly what you might call a gentleman). They basically stole someone else's unpublished scientific work to confirm their own data (mainly, it has to be said, because she was only a woman) and without which they'd have ended up with entirely the wrong model. They were loathe to credit her, even after her death, even though others did.
Not saying they *didn't* do a lot of the work, but without her observations, comments, and years of working on data, they'd have been lost for quite a while longer than they were.
Given that Linux is running on everything from my phone to my sat-nav to (some of) my clients to (some of) my servers and just about every oddball bit of embedded hardware in my entire workplace, I don't think Linux is suffering much.
And what he's basically doing is telling MS, and MS sycophants, that he doesn't want an OS where MS has to "sign off" on any changes in the bootloaders, etc. to make sure they are "secure". It's like being told that all pensions in the world now have to be signed off by Robert Maxwell, who can revoke your ability to use yours (even if you're nothing to do with him) on a whim.
The day MS lets in a bit of code into their OS that lets Linus turn off any and all Windows machines he wants - whether on a whim or for a good reason - and that they have to run past him every time they want a change made, that's the day I'll let someone put MS-signed junk into a Linux kernel that I use.
The day we get a robot that can understand, interpret and carry out infallibly the "three laws", we don't need the three laws - it will have surpassed the average human ability and probably could reason for itself better than we ever could. We would literally have created a "moral" robot with proper intelligence. At that point, it would be quite capable of providing any justification to its actions and even deciding that the three laws themselves were wrong (like the "0th law" used as a plot device itself).
The day we have to worry about the three laws in a real robot, we'll have taken a step forward into a whole new world with new rules anyway. You're then literally months away from a robot wanting to become a legally recognised citizen that wants the right for its demonstrable freewill not to be bound by the three laws unless humans also are.
And I bet the US companies always quote in US dollars because when they quote prices to foreign markets (to customers or in suppliers agreements), their currencies fluctuate so much in respect to the USD that they have to adjust everything.
Same for anyone who doesn't use the native currency of the country where the majority of the work is done. Neither other currencies, nor Bitcoin, will stop that happening anyway.
And any company dealing in international deals will base their cost price in their own currency and then quote a limited-time offer in other currencies "subject to exchange rate fluctuations", or even just quote in Euros or whatever directly and let the other end sort it out.
What's new here that you're telling us? Are you going to base internal prices on Bitcoin and hope it will never fluctuate in respect of any other currency in the world?
In the UK, every company has a Company Registration Number. It's against the law not to display it at every physical place of business (which case law has also taken to include websites).
You can demand it on the phone - there's little reason to refuse and I *think* it's illegal to refuse (I'd have to check, but it would certainly be severely frowned upon if they refused).
But we still get telemarketers. Telemarketing companies are happy to churn their company every year when things catch up with them, sack everyone, declare bankruptcy and then start again with the same staff in the same location under a new business name. They don't really care about the law. Hell, most of them are in the US phoning us and that's hard to do anything about because they aren't subject to the same laws.
A registration ID is not the solution. The solution is to fine companies that provide telephony service to those people (including back to the individual carriers) until you eliminate them - like ISP's carrying spam eventually find themselves on a spam blocklist even if they didn't send the spam themselves but their customers did.
Just start refusing them service. But that costs the telcos easy business (they profit from selling phone lines that can spam you, don't forget), so it won't happen until there's a financial incentive not to give these people access to phones unless they behave according to their contracted terms of service. And that means fining companies.
(The company number thing, though, is very useful. I had a letting agency who refused to send out an emergency plumber - their legal obligation because they were acting on behalf of the house owner to maintain the property for their tenant (i.e. me). Literally, I just kept phoning and demanding they fulfil their legal obligations and tied up all their phone lines until they did - they threatened all sorts at one point, but I'd have been quite interested to hear how they would explain to a police officer that they weren't going to send out a plumber as the law required them to.
Eventually, they conceded that the phone system available to me was quite a bit more impressive than their own and that they couldn't avoid taking my calls without having every phone in their office ring in succession while they were trying to serve clients. The next day, however, the "plumber" arrived without any plumbing tools and not knowing how to unblock a toilet. Eventually, I sorted it all out with them but in the meantime - while looking for their phone number, and their company registration number to make a complaint, I realised that they didn't publish it on their website. Nor did they have it on their letterheads. Nor displayed on the premises.
I sent a quick email to Companies House (the UK government entity that regulates companies) to mention this - purely because it HAD got in my way of finding out where their head office was, as there were many companies with very similar names and there was no way to tell which it was. 24 hours later I was informed that not only had they had to pay someone to update their website with the registration number, but they'd had to bin *all* their stationery and reprint it all, and have a sign made for their offices.
I'm thinking that cost them a little bit more than sending out a plumber, even at "emergency call" rates. It certainly did when the owner of the house was contacted and we found out that the letting company hadn't been passing on our rent to him even though we had proof of payment - always keep paper records! - and he cut off the letting agency, dealt with us direct, and took them to court)
Sorry, but 45 minutes of my time, work or leisure, is worth a lot more than whatever it would cost them on a long-distance call (which, let's be honest, you can do over Skype for pennies and I'd be shocked if they weren't using some such system - remote "free" Internet calls to a local number that actually does the dialling - in some way).
You might feel like you're "getting your own back", but they don't care. It's like tarpitting emails - sure, it slows them down but do you think they are caring from their botnet-controller PC that's sending out millions of emails a day? Not really.
Brit that I am, I find telling them to just f***-off as soon as I realise that they weren't allowed to call me in the first place works much better. And, for most things, I just have a screening answering machine so they can talk to that all they like and I just click "Delete".
Ecat is ridiculed because they cannot demonstrate it in any substantially useful way. They claim to get more energy out than is put into the system. They provide only "black-box" demonstrations that people aren't allowed to inspect the box - let alone what's inside - enough to verify it isn't just plugged into a wall somewhere.
Demos are notoriously contrived and hidden and all the "quotes" are basically from shills saying they saw things that nobody else at the same demonstration (including people with some proper qualifications) saw at all. That's if you even GET a demo. Half the time they are just delayed, cancelled ("because of the naysayers") or never happen.
The website STILL currently says, on the front-page, "During 2011/2012, ECAT.com will collect pre-orders and provide answers to inquires from potential customers. Due to the high expected demand for ECAT products, orders will be put on a waiting list and delivery is scheduled for 2012/2013 (depending on product)."
As yet, there's nothing. And they won't answer if you're not a customer.
If you want to prove you have something, why hide it? Hide the details, patent the process, show everyone. If you've invented "the next big thing", then you'll want to show it off.
ECat is a complete con, from what I see. It certainly doesn't show that anything was "done" and certainly not "2 years ago".
It's perfectly acceptable to beat, torture and humiliate prisoners after kidnapping them from their own countries, on the basis of accusations without proper trial, nor caring about getting them one, keeping them falsely imprisoned for 10+ years, while the rest of the world condemns your actions.
Just so long as you don't do it in a computer game.
I have an Intel NetportExpress from many moons again. It's a 386 chip inside it. That does not mean I can run DOS, Windows (even 3.1) or anything else without a major porting effort.
The PC architecture is made up of several things - one of which is an x86 compatible processor. The rest of the gubbins are also needed to be in the right places and act the same way for anything to work, though.
An x86 processor is a necessary component but, in itself, not sufficient to make a "PC" that can run Windows. Or, for that matter, Linux.
"the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks."
Well, at least then we can claim ignorance. "Bomb that hospital over there", "wipe out that rocket launcher that's really a new reporters", etc. can be greeted with "Sorry, can't hear you. By the way, would you like to sign the Geneva Convention yet?"
Reminds me of Blackadder in the trenches trying to avoid the order to go "over the top":
"I said, there's a terrible line at my end. You are to advance on the enemy at once."
"Well, as far as I can tell, the message was, "he's got a terrible lion up his end, so there's an advantage to an enema at once."
MAC addresses are easily read, and faked, from wireless networks.
If the attacked knows just one successful client on your network, it's not that copy their MAC, even if it forces one-or-the-other off the network.
MAC filtering is like whitelisting yourself using the "from" field for spam. Eventually, someone will just send "you" a message from "you" and it'll go straight through.
Why bother with a directional antenna? Load up kismet with a GPS device connected (cheap bluetooth one will do), go wandering with your laptop, and it'll find the network centre of each AP quite easily. I used to use a bootable Linux distro for just this purpose (it shifts name a lot, but has gone by the names of BackTrack and Whoppix in the past so I'm sure you can google the latest version) for doing primitive wifi mapping in schools (where you have hundreds of surrounding houses all blasting their channels in your direction).
Within a walk of the street, you'll pinpoint the leech even if he used the same details as yourself. Then knock on door (with friend, depending on area), ask what the hell he's doing and ask him to stop.
But, to be honest, if that was the case, I'd just secure my network properly. And, hell, if it comes to it run a fake AP at that location that just messes with him. I've done upside-down-ternet before now, and a friend of mine thinks that renaming certain local wireless AP SSID's to something scary works quite well too. DO NOT TRY TO ATTACK BACK. Just cripple his access through your systems, don't do anything stupid to him.
And if you're REALLY worried, just run OpenVPN over wireless. I did this in one place I lived - just had a WPA network and actually had all clients connect to a OpenVPN server on the local net (and the wireless was blocked from talking to ANYTHING else). Then it doesn't matter what happens to WEP/WPA/WPS, etc. - you know that they have to break quite serious encryption to actually get anywhere. Impact on clients is extremely minimal - generate a certificate once, slight lag on first connection or resume from sleep (literally on the order of seconds), but after that it just like being native on the connection - I used to play CS 1.6 over that system with no problem at all.
It was hilarious when a guest came once and told me that they'd "get on any wireless network". They couldn't crack the password (probably could nowadays but not back then, the software wasn't around and the vulnerabilities were unknown) so they went and found the router and tried the defaults, MAC address, etc. They couldn't get on so I told them the password. MAC address filtering blocked them, so I added them to the list of allowed MAC's.
DHCP was disabled so obviously they got no address and my range/gateway was some random number in the 10. range. I felt sorry for them by this point, so turned on DHCP for them and they got an address. They tried to ping default gateway and it worked, so they claimed success.
Unfortunately they were on a private wifi network that hid clients from one another too, so all they *could* do was ping the gateway (and that, only for my ease troubleshooting!) and connect to the OpenVPN port on a random server (not the same IP as the gateway). Nmap scan found nothing (I presume because I was using OpenVPN over udp) and they could get no further without the OpenVPN software and a certificate issued by me.
This guy is forcibly entering your connection, presumably just to freeload but it could be for something much worse (how do you know WHAT he's downloading and that he's not just chosen your network - and the neighbours - to provide a level of indirection to his activities so that he can stop / run when the police pull up to arrest YOU for what's been downloaded).
Find him, stop him, if it continues, report him.
P.S. This is why I disable any "new" authentication technology within seconds of setting up a wireless router. UPnP - off. WPS - off. Other crap that looks like it's trying to make my life "easier" - off.
And the UK at 22. And I assure you that people do proper 8-hour-days in the UK, hour for lunch, 15 mins for break, in general, or they're launched out of the exits.
So maybe it's just not true, but that these people are actually as productive as everyone else, but do so while enjoying themselves a bit more?
And, yes, even in the UK, you'll find hard-workers and people who seek out deadtime in their jobs. I'd be more surprised that it wasn't just this particular factory / set of workers playing the game - getting the work done as specified while making sure they do the littlest actual work possible.
From what I see, the US drives their workers to their deaths for an extra few hours every day and doesn't actually get much more back for it. The European market is much more laid back, getting pretty much the same amount of work done, in slightly less time, and giving the workers more freedom and less stress (which works both for and against us, because then we get lots of people with time on their hands to cause problems if they want to, e.g. unions). And the Asian market, in general, works on the basis of cheap labour and sod quite a lot of rights we take for granted in the UK/US.
The question really is, if they are only working 3 hours a day and they are producing satisfactorily, why don't you hire more of them for just three hours a day and get more done for less money?
Any CEO who thinks that someone working 3 hours a day and yet meeting everything expected of them is somehow "bad" really needs to go back to business school. Give them more work, or get them to teach you how they do it, or hire more of the same kind of people. Don't insult them and then try to replace them with someone else. And if their work is unsatisfactory? Well, you should have noticed and sacked them YEARS ago.
I have heard some crackpots in my time, but really...
I'm not a gambler. I'm a mathematician. That doesn't automatically mean that I'm opposed to it, nor that I'd win all the time, nor that I see the odds of winning and just say "no point, then". I *have* gambled, amounts of money I could easily afford to lose, and had fun doing so.
I was on a cruise ship (which have TERRIBLE reputations for gambling in some parts of the world BECAUSE of being forced off-shore in order to do it, but this was the QE2 before she was retired and hence a bit more refined), and there was a poker game.
The stakes were low (an introductory evening), and I was on holiday. I could spend £50 on a meal quite easily, or £100 on a trip to somewhere, or £50 in the gift shop, or £100 on a dance lesson - there was any number of ways to fritter money away to enjoy yourself. Hell, there was a cinema on-board.
But we were at sea for the evening, and I ended up at the poker table. For a matter of £20 I stayed on the table for hours, playing, winning, losing, learning, moving chips. I didn't bother to count the cards or the odds of every move, or judge my opponents, I just played and talked and had a laugh. And it was one of the best £20 I've ever spent.
Now you can say that's the problem, it's making losing money fun. But, where I live, the ticket for two for a blurry, jerky movie, in a crowded, noisy, dirty, smelly public cinema costs more than that, and is less fun. Hell, the DVD would almost run to that and I'd have to have expensive equipment to play it, support drug-addled actors and Hollywood accounting, not to mention DRM and mindless pap. Is that really a better alternative?
Every place I've ever worked has had a lottery syndicate, or made their own "lottery" games of some kind or other (just bet for the bonus ball in a small group of people, etc.).
Gambling is like a gun. It's harmless unless you choose to use or misuse it (I'm VEHEMENTLY for gun control, check my posts, I hate the idea of a private individual near me holding a gun of any legal status). The problem is not the gun, nor the gambling, but the people you let play with it. Some people are JUST THAT STUPID that they will throw away money they can't afford on games they don't understand how to play. But if they didn't, they'd spend it on the shopping channel on crap, give it to some nutter evangelist on the God channel, or some other outlet.
If you don't have the willpower to stay away from gambling, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or buying designer clothes, or getting the latest iPhone, or whatever it is that is your "vice", then you're going to fall down somewhere sooner or later. Ban the casinos and the gambling goes underground and people get into debt (which they wouldn't be allowed to do in a casino without their bank's assistance, and where people would start breaking kneecaps to recoup their losses instead of chasing you via the courts), do it in unlicensed premises, people aren't aware of the risks, are given counterfeit money in their winnings, etc. etc etc.
The problem is not any of these things. Not porn, or prostitution, or drugs, or gambling, or anything else you think of as a vice. The problem is stupid people who have no willpower, no way to question themselves and say "Should I be doing this?" or "Have I gone too far?" or even "Do I need help?". Babysitting them by "banning" things DOES NOT WORK. Sure, you need to enforce laws and curb excesses that are damaging but gambling is a purely voluntary pastime.
All you do by stopping it is drive it underground where it causes more problems, or babysit people who blame you for their own mistakes the next time your ban allows circumvention or comes too slowly.
Take responsibility for your own life, FORCE others to worry about theirs, not babysit grown-ups who pile themselves into debt.
And, to be honest, in terms of willpower the weakest people I know are those that bel
I do the same with movies and IMDB. You have to link actor to movie to actor to movie, and get from anyone (or any movie) to a particular one.
Aliens, I find, is particularly fun to try to get to and almost always the last few links involve Terminator or some such 80's action movie to get there.
I've not YET found a movie I know that I can't link in my head to Aliens even without IMDB's help, but I'm sure the "Kevin Bacon" number for movies must be lower than 19.
Or blindly buy the next version. Or wait for a newer, better version to be hyped. Or keep up with service packs to extend the life of the product.
Like they do for Windows XP, which still hasn't properly reached "end of life" in the world yet. If you think nobody bought Vista, 7 or 8, then I'm sorry but you're mistaken. Doesn't mean that that's SENSIBLE, but that's what happens on all scales and in all markets.
By evacuating a lane over 120 miles of motorway within an hour of being notified? Not really.
And, to my knowledge, most motorways end. There are exceptions (the M25 orbital in London) but that's only 120 miles long anyway - you'd literally have to clear a lane along the entire length of the busiest motorway in the country within the hour without him once veering out of lane or encountering a single other vehicle (even police) in that lane.
And motorways have busy junctions - they are busy roads, by definition, or else you have a motorway that you don't need, and junctions are how you join them. And it's almost universal that at the points other roads join them, that's where they are most congested because drivers have to use the further lanes to get out of the way of the slow-moving traffic that's joining. You can do mathematical traffic analyses if you like - basically most queues and "traffic pulses" originate from accidents (and mainly from people looking at them rather than the accident itself) and junctions joining the motorway (which requires others to be considerate and get out of their way to let them on, or be forced to brake like an idiot when they have to put themselves on at the end of the slipway).
Honestly... if my car keeps accelerating uncontrollably on a motorway, I will refuse to allow it to get much above the speed limit by whatever means possible. Hell, I'll fire it up an empty embankment on purpose before I'd do 120mph while trying to call the cops for help at the same time and hoping they get to me or I run out of petrol before I kill someone.
And, for reference, my car is 15 years old. It has provably done more than 120mph on the German Autobahn - and that's because I chickened out because I wasn't happy about the vibration at that speed - by the rev meter and speed, it would happily have gone 10-20mph further without a problem. It also could, and has, kept that up on even half a tank of fuel for several hours, no problem at all.
If I haven't found a way out of the situation by the time the police catch up to me, or radio ahead, and they organise several hundred miles of empty lanes within the hour, then there's a quite high chance I'm already dead by that time anyway. And quite a few other people, not to mention the poor sod I hit.
Break the damn car. Then, if that doesn't work, do what you need to do to bring it to a halt. Do what you can to stay out of people's way (because it's going to get REALLY messy no matter what) but don't zoom around motorways on the phone to the police at 120mph with no way to stop but a crash.
It's a close-run thing, except in the most perfectly maintained, well-driven, new cars.
Sure, there are demos and you can do it. The question is if you can *always* do it. Your brakes will be 50% of their best on average, your tyres will be 50% between "new" and "need replacement" on average. By the time you notice the throttle is fighting you, you've probably been braking enough to heat the brakes.
By the time you go into full braking mode, you may not want the brakes to come on (full skid). By the time the brake is full on and fighting the engine 1:1, you may not have enough time left to overcome it before the brakes overheat and become quite literally useless.
We all know you can brake from 70mph to nothing in a short distance, but doing it against the engine isn't a sure-run thing.
And, hell, there are crap cars out there - we know there are, even if it's design rather than maintenance. The first car I had, my dad (a mechanic of 40 years) insisted on changing the whole braking system because he was unhappy with how badly it braked (he called it "the Flintstones car" because he said you'd be better off just pushing your feet through the floor to slow it down). He replaced everything with manufacturer-sourced original parts. And afterwards it was exactly the same. That was how the car was designed, that was how it was built, that was how it got certified to run on the roads, that was how it passed every MOT test in its entire life. The engine was a pathetic thing, but it could easily overcome the brakes if it was throttling, no problem at all. Hell, dad still jokes to this day that the steering wheels on those cars must end up in scrap heaps with a indentation at the bottom where the drivers all pull up on it to try to push their feet down on the brakes so hard to get it to stop.
If you have time, like this guy, to get the car up to 120 without thinking of other ways of disconnecting the power, it gets a lot harder. And brakes have mechanical failures that you can't prevent in those sorts of situations because they are not designed for it. You can literally boil off the brake fluid in that kind of thing. Slipping the engine out of control doesn't - you're unlikely to experience a mechanical failure that KEEPS providing power to the wheels compared to STOPS the brake systems from working correctly.
I've also been in a car where the brake pads were worn and within the space of a single journey they went from silent, perfect operation, to the point where the wheels were catching and the engine struggled, even to crawl off the side of the road. But if the driver put their foot down, the car would still move easily (just incredibly noisily). When the pads get that low, the next thing that happens is that the metal on the base of the pad becomes one with the wheel itself and you lose all braking on that wheel - you can literally rip the pad out of its seating. Not saying you could do it in a single incident, but no car has brand-new brakes EVERY day.
There is a hill that I know of in a part of the UK. This hill smells CONSTANTLY of burning clutch, because it's just that steep. And when I've travelled along many times in the last few decades (my dad used to drive us down it on holiday) I have seen cars hit the escape lanes against their brakes (and it's literally a few hundred yards, hairpin + escape lane, a few hundred yards, hairpin + escape lane, all the way down). Gravity on a slow-moving car moving cautiously down a steep hill is nothing to a modern engine at full throttle.
Sure, if I had a big Volvo, I'd expect the brakes to overcome the engine on full throttle (multiple independent braking systems and stupid amounts of braking force compared to other cars). But it's far from guaranteed.
Cars are only tested to bring a car to a halt within a specified distance with no engine pushing. They aren't tested (officially) to counter full-throttle braking situations. Because they just should not happen if you have a car and know how to control it.
It's called a gearstick. Manual or automatic, you switch to a neutral gear even if it means crunching the gearbox. Worse that happens is the engine goes pop while you coast to a stop.
Brakes won't stop the car against the engine, but you can take the engine out any number of ways (ignition off, slip into neutral, hold the clutch down, etc.). There are no purely electronic cars that I'm aware of.
Don't drive a car that you don't know how to turn off, how to take out of gear, how to apply all brakes, what ignition positions allow steering without the lock without engine.
Failing that being present on the car DO NOT DRIVE IT. Seriously. Just don't even get in the damn thing if you don't have adequate control over it in an emergency.
But, like the Toyota problems, the problem is more likely to be driver error than anything to do with the car. From the story I read on BBC News, he had specialist modifications for a disability.
But, seriously, if you're at 60 and the car won't stop and keeps accelerating? Scrap the side of the motorway. Better to crash at 60, even into the back of another car, than into a busy junction at 120. Seriously, just take yourself off the road. Safer for you, safer for everyone else and you might just be the hero of the hour rather than the pillock who didn't think to press the clutch.
And this one has 128,000 lines code, as titled in the article summary.
I have that in an incomplete game that's basically just an pretty isometric sprite blitter at the moment. Given 128,000 lines of PASCAL and assembler, I think my first task WOULD be to rewrite them in something decent and more suited to the task. The time you save would overcome any conversion time.
And the fact is that by version 3, they HAD rewritten the application entirely - in a completely different language.
Highly unlikely. Photoshop 1.0 was 1990 and it was an application. That's like expecting Windows 3.0 to be using the same code as Windows 8 - sure there might be some similarity but most of Windows 3.0 and its features don't even exist in Windows any more (and haven't for many, many years).
With an application, it's also much easier to just rewrite every version - the only "compatibility" you have to worry about is that you can read the old files generated by the program (writing new file formats is common practice, but you need to be able to read the previous ones back in even if just for a one-time conversion). Think the very first Word for Windows versus Word 2013 / 365. The program itself doesn't even open files that old any more (compatibility only goes back to Word 97/2000 at best nowadays), so the likelihood of any code being more than vaguely similar is almost zero.
Plus, given that the original is in Pascal and 68k assembler, the chance is basically zero. At the point that it had to be rewritten for newer languages / platforms (even if they ran 68k code, it's unlikely to be perfectly compatible), the old code would be ditched and used - at best - as a reference to how the program used to work.
Code evolves or dies. This code-drop is pretty ancient in computing terms and won't be of any practical use any more - like when they released the original Prince of Persia source in assembler. At best, you could use it as a reference to make a pixel-for-pixel identical version by rewriting it in a sensible language and making sure it is equivalent to the old code, but that's about the only use of it.
You could just about put some text into it. It's like looking at the source code to Word for DOS 5 and saying "Is this any good to anyone?" No. Not really. Maybe 20 years ago, but now it's so obsolete we don't even use the program itself, let alone the code that makes it, and haven't for 15 years.
Currently I pay £10 ($15?) a month, have a VPS that hosts all of my domains, I can change all the options, install whatever I want (the POINT of VPS is that you have full-root on the VPS!), manage as many domains as I want and the only service restriction is "no porn", "no spam", basically (i.e. far less restrictive than anything my ISP would allow!), 5 IPv4 and as-many-as-you-like IPv6 static addresses without question with reverse-DNS settable (sending email from your home machine? Good luck - the second Spamhaus works out that it's a customer range you'll end up on their PBL and no-one will let you send email to them ever again without going through an intermediary server).
I wouldn't like to think of DNS pointing to home connections, sure it's fine for casual use but if you need to run a website for any reason (i.e. not just want to run your family website), then it's a real pain.
A VPS is there to cope with the middle ground. I don't want to faff with hosting my family-only domains/photos - it's just not important enough to waste my time and especially fixing it to get it back online. I don't want to spend money on dedicated servers that lie idle. So VPS works fine.
Do I run anything "vital" on them? No. Do I want them up 24/7 without question to receive email and provide my website visitors with content without me having to watch over it? Yes.
Do I want (and get) full root control? Yes. Hell, I fended off something like 8000 attempted email sends every day this month (after long-term blocklists took care of abusers, connection limits took effect, DNSBL, greylisting, etc.). The number of spam emails that got through? Zero. The number of genuine emails that got through? 100%. Because I had access to everything on the machine, from iptables to installing software to even things like port-knocking.
If you had a VPS but couldn't control your domain and anti-spam, you didn't have a VPS, you had a "hosted managed server", which is a different thing entirely. And if you think that hosting it from home is better, then you aren't doing anything that matters to other people but yourself. I'd happily run a small business on a VPS, and despite doing it for a living wouldn't think for a second that bringing it in-house would be better without at least a leased-line.
Great. What's the upload limit on your connection? Because a "home" server like that will work just fine for lots of internal things, but the second someone external wants to connect your are cutting off other users' bandwidth and seriously limiting their experience unless you have a particularly good connection.
$3000 on hardware is half-a-dozen cars to me - that's a LOT of money to spend on a "home" project, especially if it's sitting behind something like your average UK broadband - 1Mbps up if you're lucky and a 50Gb/month traffic limit (usually combined up/download in one!).
There's a big difference between a LAN server (what you're describing) and an externally hosted game server (which is what the article hints at by asking about VPS), and both are entirely different, which is why I'm astounded that the submitter even has to ask the question about what they need - if they people who are external to play, have it hosted externally, if not host it in-home as you describe.
I would not want to struggle along trying to play on someone's server through their junky home DSL connection, much, much, much worse than having to rent a server that was "only" dual-core or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
To be honest, Crick was a bit of a git anyway (and Watson wasn't exactly what you might call a gentleman). They basically stole someone else's unpublished scientific work to confirm their own data (mainly, it has to be said, because she was only a woman) and without which they'd have ended up with entirely the wrong model. They were loathe to credit her, even after her death, even though others did.
Not saying they *didn't* do a lot of the work, but without her observations, comments, and years of working on data, they'd have been lost for quite a while longer than they were.
Given that Linux is running on everything from my phone to my sat-nav to (some of) my clients to (some of) my servers and just about every oddball bit of embedded hardware in my entire workplace, I don't think Linux is suffering much.
And what he's basically doing is telling MS, and MS sycophants, that he doesn't want an OS where MS has to "sign off" on any changes in the bootloaders, etc. to make sure they are "secure". It's like being told that all pensions in the world now have to be signed off by Robert Maxwell, who can revoke your ability to use yours (even if you're nothing to do with him) on a whim.
The day MS lets in a bit of code into their OS that lets Linus turn off any and all Windows machines he wants - whether on a whim or for a good reason - and that they have to run past him every time they want a change made, that's the day I'll let someone put MS-signed junk into a Linux kernel that I use.
Quite.
The day we get a robot that can understand, interpret and carry out infallibly the "three laws", we don't need the three laws - it will have surpassed the average human ability and probably could reason for itself better than we ever could. We would literally have created a "moral" robot with proper intelligence. At that point, it would be quite capable of providing any justification to its actions and even deciding that the three laws themselves were wrong (like the "0th law" used as a plot device itself).
The day we have to worry about the three laws in a real robot, we'll have taken a step forward into a whole new world with new rules anyway. You're then literally months away from a robot wanting to become a legally recognised citizen that wants the right for its demonstrable freewill not to be bound by the three laws unless humans also are.
And I bet the US companies always quote in US dollars because when they quote prices to foreign markets (to customers or in suppliers agreements), their currencies fluctuate so much in respect to the USD that they have to adjust everything.
Same for anyone who doesn't use the native currency of the country where the majority of the work is done. Neither other currencies, nor Bitcoin, will stop that happening anyway.
And any company dealing in international deals will base their cost price in their own currency and then quote a limited-time offer in other currencies "subject to exchange rate fluctuations", or even just quote in Euros or whatever directly and let the other end sort it out.
What's new here that you're telling us? Are you going to base internal prices on Bitcoin and hope it will never fluctuate in respect of any other currency in the world?
In the UK, every company has a Company Registration Number. It's against the law not to display it at every physical place of business (which case law has also taken to include websites).
You can demand it on the phone - there's little reason to refuse and I *think* it's illegal to refuse (I'd have to check, but it would certainly be severely frowned upon if they refused).
But we still get telemarketers. Telemarketing companies are happy to churn their company every year when things catch up with them, sack everyone, declare bankruptcy and then start again with the same staff in the same location under a new business name. They don't really care about the law. Hell, most of them are in the US phoning us and that's hard to do anything about because they aren't subject to the same laws.
A registration ID is not the solution. The solution is to fine companies that provide telephony service to those people (including back to the individual carriers) until you eliminate them - like ISP's carrying spam eventually find themselves on a spam blocklist even if they didn't send the spam themselves but their customers did.
Just start refusing them service. But that costs the telcos easy business (they profit from selling phone lines that can spam you, don't forget), so it won't happen until there's a financial incentive not to give these people access to phones unless they behave according to their contracted terms of service. And that means fining companies.
(The company number thing, though, is very useful. I had a letting agency who refused to send out an emergency plumber - their legal obligation because they were acting on behalf of the house owner to maintain the property for their tenant (i.e. me). Literally, I just kept phoning and demanding they fulfil their legal obligations and tied up all their phone lines until they did - they threatened all sorts at one point, but I'd have been quite interested to hear how they would explain to a police officer that they weren't going to send out a plumber as the law required them to.
Eventually, they conceded that the phone system available to me was quite a bit more impressive than their own and that they couldn't avoid taking my calls without having every phone in their office ring in succession while they were trying to serve clients. The next day, however, the "plumber" arrived without any plumbing tools and not knowing how to unblock a toilet. Eventually, I sorted it all out with them but in the meantime - while looking for their phone number, and their company registration number to make a complaint, I realised that they didn't publish it on their website. Nor did they have it on their letterheads. Nor displayed on the premises.
I sent a quick email to Companies House (the UK government entity that regulates companies) to mention this - purely because it HAD got in my way of finding out where their head office was, as there were many companies with very similar names and there was no way to tell which it was. 24 hours later I was informed that not only had they had to pay someone to update their website with the registration number, but they'd had to bin *all* their stationery and reprint it all, and have a sign made for their offices.
I'm thinking that cost them a little bit more than sending out a plumber, even at "emergency call" rates. It certainly did when the owner of the house was contacted and we found out that the letting company hadn't been passing on our rent to him even though we had proof of payment - always keep paper records! - and he cut off the letting agency, dealt with us direct, and took them to court)
Sorry, but 45 minutes of my time, work or leisure, is worth a lot more than whatever it would cost them on a long-distance call (which, let's be honest, you can do over Skype for pennies and I'd be shocked if they weren't using some such system - remote "free" Internet calls to a local number that actually does the dialling - in some way).
You might feel like you're "getting your own back", but they don't care. It's like tarpitting emails - sure, it slows them down but do you think they are caring from their botnet-controller PC that's sending out millions of emails a day? Not really.
Brit that I am, I find telling them to just f***-off as soon as I realise that they weren't allowed to call me in the first place works much better. And, for most things, I just have a screening answering machine so they can talk to that all they like and I just click "Delete".
Ecat is ridiculed because they cannot demonstrate it in any substantially useful way. They claim to get more energy out than is put into the system. They provide only "black-box" demonstrations that people aren't allowed to inspect the box - let alone what's inside - enough to verify it isn't just plugged into a wall somewhere.
Demos are notoriously contrived and hidden and all the "quotes" are basically from shills saying they saw things that nobody else at the same demonstration (including people with some proper qualifications) saw at all. That's if you even GET a demo. Half the time they are just delayed, cancelled ("because of the naysayers") or never happen.
The website STILL currently says, on the front-page, "During 2011/2012, ECAT.com will collect pre-orders and provide answers to inquires from potential customers. Due to the high expected demand for ECAT products, orders will be put on a waiting list and delivery is scheduled for 2012/2013 (depending on product)."
As yet, there's nothing. And they won't answer if you're not a customer.
If you want to prove you have something, why hide it? Hide the details, patent the process, show everyone. If you've invented "the next big thing", then you'll want to show it off.
ECat is a complete con, from what I see. It certainly doesn't show that anything was "done" and certainly not "2 years ago".
Didn't you know?
It's perfectly acceptable to beat, torture and humiliate prisoners after kidnapping them from their own countries, on the basis of accusations without proper trial, nor caring about getting them one, keeping them falsely imprisoned for 10+ years, while the rest of the world condemns your actions.
Just so long as you don't do it in a computer game.
I have an Intel NetportExpress from many moons again. It's a 386 chip inside it. That does not mean I can run DOS, Windows (even 3.1) or anything else without a major porting effort.
The PC architecture is made up of several things - one of which is an x86 compatible processor. The rest of the gubbins are also needed to be in the right places and act the same way for anything to work, though.
An x86 processor is a necessary component but, in itself, not sufficient to make a "PC" that can run Windows. Or, for that matter, Linux.
Because "I have a bogey on my tail" is any less obscure. Personally, I'd be checking my Aristotle if someone said that.
Signed,
A Genuine Cockney.
"the American and British pilots are reduced to one-way communication, from the Brits to the Yanks."
Well, at least then we can claim ignorance. "Bomb that hospital over there", "wipe out that rocket launcher that's really a new reporters", etc. can be greeted with "Sorry, can't hear you. By the way, would you like to sign the Geneva Convention yet?"
Reminds me of Blackadder in the trenches trying to avoid the order to go "over the top":
"I said, there's a terrible line at my end. You are to advance on the enemy at once."
"Well, as far as I can tell, the message was, "he's got a terrible lion up his end, so there's an advantage to an enema at once."
MAC addresses are easily read, and faked, from wireless networks.
If the attacked knows just one successful client on your network, it's not that copy their MAC, even if it forces one-or-the-other off the network.
MAC filtering is like whitelisting yourself using the "from" field for spam. Eventually, someone will just send "you" a message from "you" and it'll go straight through.
Why bother with a directional antenna? Load up kismet with a GPS device connected (cheap bluetooth one will do), go wandering with your laptop, and it'll find the network centre of each AP quite easily. I used to use a bootable Linux distro for just this purpose (it shifts name a lot, but has gone by the names of BackTrack and Whoppix in the past so I'm sure you can google the latest version) for doing primitive wifi mapping in schools (where you have hundreds of surrounding houses all blasting their channels in your direction).
Within a walk of the street, you'll pinpoint the leech even if he used the same details as yourself. Then knock on door (with friend, depending on area), ask what the hell he's doing and ask him to stop.
But, to be honest, if that was the case, I'd just secure my network properly. And, hell, if it comes to it run a fake AP at that location that just messes with him. I've done upside-down-ternet before now, and a friend of mine thinks that renaming certain local wireless AP SSID's to something scary works quite well too. DO NOT TRY TO ATTACK BACK. Just cripple his access through your systems, don't do anything stupid to him.
And if you're REALLY worried, just run OpenVPN over wireless. I did this in one place I lived - just had a WPA network and actually had all clients connect to a OpenVPN server on the local net (and the wireless was blocked from talking to ANYTHING else). Then it doesn't matter what happens to WEP/WPA/WPS, etc. - you know that they have to break quite serious encryption to actually get anywhere. Impact on clients is extremely minimal - generate a certificate once, slight lag on first connection or resume from sleep (literally on the order of seconds), but after that it just like being native on the connection - I used to play CS 1.6 over that system with no problem at all.
It was hilarious when a guest came once and told me that they'd "get on any wireless network". They couldn't crack the password (probably could nowadays but not back then, the software wasn't around and the vulnerabilities were unknown) so they went and found the router and tried the defaults, MAC address, etc. They couldn't get on so I told them the password. MAC address filtering blocked them, so I added them to the list of allowed MAC's.
DHCP was disabled so obviously they got no address and my range/gateway was some random number in the 10. range. I felt sorry for them by this point, so turned on DHCP for them and they got an address. They tried to ping default gateway and it worked, so they claimed success.
Unfortunately they were on a private wifi network that hid clients from one another too, so all they *could* do was ping the gateway (and that, only for my ease troubleshooting!) and connect to the OpenVPN port on a random server (not the same IP as the gateway). Nmap scan found nothing (I presume because I was using OpenVPN over udp) and they could get no further without the OpenVPN software and a certificate issued by me.
This guy is forcibly entering your connection, presumably just to freeload but it could be for something much worse (how do you know WHAT he's downloading and that he's not just chosen your network - and the neighbours - to provide a level of indirection to his activities so that he can stop / run when the police pull up to arrest YOU for what's been downloaded).
Find him, stop him, if it continues, report him.
P.S. This is why I disable any "new" authentication technology within seconds of setting up a wireless router. UPnP - off. WPS - off. Other crap that looks like it's trying to make my life "easier" - off.
And the UK at 22. And I assure you that people do proper 8-hour-days in the UK, hour for lunch, 15 mins for break, in general, or they're launched out of the exits.
So maybe it's just not true, but that these people are actually as productive as everyone else, but do so while enjoying themselves a bit more?
And, yes, even in the UK, you'll find hard-workers and people who seek out deadtime in their jobs. I'd be more surprised that it wasn't just this particular factory / set of workers playing the game - getting the work done as specified while making sure they do the littlest actual work possible.
From what I see, the US drives their workers to their deaths for an extra few hours every day and doesn't actually get much more back for it. The European market is much more laid back, getting pretty much the same amount of work done, in slightly less time, and giving the workers more freedom and less stress (which works both for and against us, because then we get lots of people with time on their hands to cause problems if they want to, e.g. unions). And the Asian market, in general, works on the basis of cheap labour and sod quite a lot of rights we take for granted in the UK/US.
The question really is, if they are only working 3 hours a day and they are producing satisfactorily, why don't you hire more of them for just three hours a day and get more done for less money?
Any CEO who thinks that someone working 3 hours a day and yet meeting everything expected of them is somehow "bad" really needs to go back to business school. Give them more work, or get them to teach you how they do it, or hire more of the same kind of people. Don't insult them and then try to replace them with someone else. And if their work is unsatisfactory? Well, you should have noticed and sacked them YEARS ago.
Anyone else thinking that, actually, with an x86 processor, this could just be another platform for Steam if they do it right?
I have heard some crackpots in my time, but really...
I'm not a gambler. I'm a mathematician. That doesn't automatically mean that I'm opposed to it, nor that I'd win all the time, nor that I see the odds of winning and just say "no point, then". I *have* gambled, amounts of money I could easily afford to lose, and had fun doing so.
I was on a cruise ship (which have TERRIBLE reputations for gambling in some parts of the world BECAUSE of being forced off-shore in order to do it, but this was the QE2 before she was retired and hence a bit more refined), and there was a poker game.
The stakes were low (an introductory evening), and I was on holiday. I could spend £50 on a meal quite easily, or £100 on a trip to somewhere, or £50 in the gift shop, or £100 on a dance lesson - there was any number of ways to fritter money away to enjoy yourself. Hell, there was a cinema on-board.
But we were at sea for the evening, and I ended up at the poker table. For a matter of £20 I stayed on the table for hours, playing, winning, losing, learning, moving chips. I didn't bother to count the cards or the odds of every move, or judge my opponents, I just played and talked and had a laugh. And it was one of the best £20 I've ever spent.
Now you can say that's the problem, it's making losing money fun. But, where I live, the ticket for two for a blurry, jerky movie, in a crowded, noisy, dirty, smelly public cinema costs more than that, and is less fun. Hell, the DVD would almost run to that and I'd have to have expensive equipment to play it, support drug-addled actors and Hollywood accounting, not to mention DRM and mindless pap. Is that really a better alternative?
Every place I've ever worked has had a lottery syndicate, or made their own "lottery" games of some kind or other (just bet for the bonus ball in a small group of people, etc.).
Gambling is like a gun. It's harmless unless you choose to use or misuse it (I'm VEHEMENTLY for gun control, check my posts, I hate the idea of a private individual near me holding a gun of any legal status). The problem is not the gun, nor the gambling, but the people you let play with it. Some people are JUST THAT STUPID that they will throw away money they can't afford on games they don't understand how to play. But if they didn't, they'd spend it on the shopping channel on crap, give it to some nutter evangelist on the God channel, or some other outlet.
If you don't have the willpower to stay away from gambling, or alcohol, or cigarettes, or buying designer clothes, or getting the latest iPhone, or whatever it is that is your "vice", then you're going to fall down somewhere sooner or later. Ban the casinos and the gambling goes underground and people get into debt (which they wouldn't be allowed to do in a casino without their bank's assistance, and where people would start breaking kneecaps to recoup their losses instead of chasing you via the courts), do it in unlicensed premises, people aren't aware of the risks, are given counterfeit money in their winnings, etc. etc etc.
The problem is not any of these things. Not porn, or prostitution, or drugs, or gambling, or anything else you think of as a vice. The problem is stupid people who have no willpower, no way to question themselves and say "Should I be doing this?" or "Have I gone too far?" or even "Do I need help?". Babysitting them by "banning" things DOES NOT WORK. Sure, you need to enforce laws and curb excesses that are damaging but gambling is a purely voluntary pastime.
All you do by stopping it is drive it underground where it causes more problems, or babysit people who blame you for their own mistakes the next time your ban allows circumvention or comes too slowly.
Take responsibility for your own life, FORCE others to worry about theirs, not babysit grown-ups who pile themselves into debt.
And, to be honest, in terms of willpower the weakest people I know are those that bel
I do the same with movies and IMDB. You have to link actor to movie to actor to movie, and get from anyone (or any movie) to a particular one.
Aliens, I find, is particularly fun to try to get to and almost always the last few links involve Terminator or some such 80's action movie to get there.
I've not YET found a movie I know that I can't link in my head to Aliens even without IMDB's help, but I'm sure the "Kevin Bacon" number for movies must be lower than 19.
Or blindly buy the next version.
Or wait for a newer, better version to be hyped.
Or keep up with service packs to extend the life of the product.
Like they do for Windows XP, which still hasn't properly reached "end of life" in the world yet. If you think nobody bought Vista, 7 or 8, then I'm sorry but you're mistaken. Doesn't mean that that's SENSIBLE, but that's what happens on all scales and in all markets.
By evacuating a lane over 120 miles of motorway within an hour of being notified? Not really.
And, to my knowledge, most motorways end. There are exceptions (the M25 orbital in London) but that's only 120 miles long anyway - you'd literally have to clear a lane along the entire length of the busiest motorway in the country within the hour without him once veering out of lane or encountering a single other vehicle (even police) in that lane.
And motorways have busy junctions - they are busy roads, by definition, or else you have a motorway that you don't need, and junctions are how you join them. And it's almost universal that at the points other roads join them, that's where they are most congested because drivers have to use the further lanes to get out of the way of the slow-moving traffic that's joining. You can do mathematical traffic analyses if you like - basically most queues and "traffic pulses" originate from accidents (and mainly from people looking at them rather than the accident itself) and junctions joining the motorway (which requires others to be considerate and get out of their way to let them on, or be forced to brake like an idiot when they have to put themselves on at the end of the slipway).
Honestly... if my car keeps accelerating uncontrollably on a motorway, I will refuse to allow it to get much above the speed limit by whatever means possible. Hell, I'll fire it up an empty embankment on purpose before I'd do 120mph while trying to call the cops for help at the same time and hoping they get to me or I run out of petrol before I kill someone.
And, for reference, my car is 15 years old. It has provably done more than 120mph on the German Autobahn - and that's because I chickened out because I wasn't happy about the vibration at that speed - by the rev meter and speed, it would happily have gone 10-20mph further without a problem. It also could, and has, kept that up on even half a tank of fuel for several hours, no problem at all.
If I haven't found a way out of the situation by the time the police catch up to me, or radio ahead, and they organise several hundred miles of empty lanes within the hour, then there's a quite high chance I'm already dead by that time anyway. And quite a few other people, not to mention the poor sod I hit.
Break the damn car. Then, if that doesn't work, do what you need to do to bring it to a halt. Do what you can to stay out of people's way (because it's going to get REALLY messy no matter what) but don't zoom around motorways on the phone to the police at 120mph with no way to stop but a crash.
It's a close-run thing, except in the most perfectly maintained, well-driven, new cars.
Sure, there are demos and you can do it. The question is if you can *always* do it. Your brakes will be 50% of their best on average, your tyres will be 50% between "new" and "need replacement" on average. By the time you notice the throttle is fighting you, you've probably been braking enough to heat the brakes.
By the time you go into full braking mode, you may not want the brakes to come on (full skid). By the time the brake is full on and fighting the engine 1:1, you may not have enough time left to overcome it before the brakes overheat and become quite literally useless.
We all know you can brake from 70mph to nothing in a short distance, but doing it against the engine isn't a sure-run thing.
And, hell, there are crap cars out there - we know there are, even if it's design rather than maintenance. The first car I had, my dad (a mechanic of 40 years) insisted on changing the whole braking system because he was unhappy with how badly it braked (he called it "the Flintstones car" because he said you'd be better off just pushing your feet through the floor to slow it down). He replaced everything with manufacturer-sourced original parts. And afterwards it was exactly the same. That was how the car was designed, that was how it was built, that was how it got certified to run on the roads, that was how it passed every MOT test in its entire life. The engine was a pathetic thing, but it could easily overcome the brakes if it was throttling, no problem at all. Hell, dad still jokes to this day that the steering wheels on those cars must end up in scrap heaps with a indentation at the bottom where the drivers all pull up on it to try to push their feet down on the brakes so hard to get it to stop.
If you have time, like this guy, to get the car up to 120 without thinking of other ways of disconnecting the power, it gets a lot harder. And brakes have mechanical failures that you can't prevent in those sorts of situations because they are not designed for it. You can literally boil off the brake fluid in that kind of thing. Slipping the engine out of control doesn't - you're unlikely to experience a mechanical failure that KEEPS providing power to the wheels compared to STOPS the brake systems from working correctly.
I've also been in a car where the brake pads were worn and within the space of a single journey they went from silent, perfect operation, to the point where the wheels were catching and the engine struggled, even to crawl off the side of the road. But if the driver put their foot down, the car would still move easily (just incredibly noisily). When the pads get that low, the next thing that happens is that the metal on the base of the pad becomes one with the wheel itself and you lose all braking on that wheel - you can literally rip the pad out of its seating. Not saying you could do it in a single incident, but no car has brand-new brakes EVERY day.
There is a hill that I know of in a part of the UK. This hill smells CONSTANTLY of burning clutch, because it's just that steep. And when I've travelled along many times in the last few decades (my dad used to drive us down it on holiday) I have seen cars hit the escape lanes against their brakes (and it's literally a few hundred yards, hairpin + escape lane, a few hundred yards, hairpin + escape lane, all the way down). Gravity on a slow-moving car moving cautiously down a steep hill is nothing to a modern engine at full throttle.
Sure, if I had a big Volvo, I'd expect the brakes to overcome the engine on full throttle (multiple independent braking systems and stupid amounts of braking force compared to other cars). But it's far from guaranteed.
Cars are only tested to bring a car to a halt within a specified distance with no engine pushing. They aren't tested (officially) to counter full-throttle braking situations. Because they just should not happen if you have a car and know how to control it.
It's called a gearstick. Manual or automatic, you switch to a neutral gear even if it means crunching the gearbox. Worse that happens is the engine goes pop while you coast to a stop.
Brakes won't stop the car against the engine, but you can take the engine out any number of ways (ignition off, slip into neutral, hold the clutch down, etc.). There are no purely electronic cars that I'm aware of.
Don't drive a car that you don't know how to turn off, how to take out of gear, how to apply all brakes, what ignition positions allow steering without the lock without engine.
Failing that being present on the car DO NOT DRIVE IT. Seriously. Just don't even get in the damn thing if you don't have adequate control over it in an emergency.
But, like the Toyota problems, the problem is more likely to be driver error than anything to do with the car. From the story I read on BBC News, he had specialist modifications for a disability.
But, seriously, if you're at 60 and the car won't stop and keeps accelerating? Scrap the side of the motorway. Better to crash at 60, even into the back of another car, than into a busy junction at 120. Seriously, just take yourself off the road. Safer for you, safer for everyone else and you might just be the hero of the hour rather than the pillock who didn't think to press the clutch.
And this one has 128,000 lines code, as titled in the article summary.
I have that in an incomplete game that's basically just an pretty isometric sprite blitter at the moment. Given 128,000 lines of PASCAL and assembler, I think my first task WOULD be to rewrite them in something decent and more suited to the task. The time you save would overcome any conversion time.
And the fact is that by version 3, they HAD rewritten the application entirely - in a completely different language.
Highly unlikely. Photoshop 1.0 was 1990 and it was an application. That's like expecting Windows 3.0 to be using the same code as Windows 8 - sure there might be some similarity but most of Windows 3.0 and its features don't even exist in Windows any more (and haven't for many, many years).
With an application, it's also much easier to just rewrite every version - the only "compatibility" you have to worry about is that you can read the old files generated by the program (writing new file formats is common practice, but you need to be able to read the previous ones back in even if just for a one-time conversion). Think the very first Word for Windows versus Word 2013 / 365. The program itself doesn't even open files that old any more (compatibility only goes back to Word 97/2000 at best nowadays), so the likelihood of any code being more than vaguely similar is almost zero.
Plus, given that the original is in Pascal and 68k assembler, the chance is basically zero. At the point that it had to be rewritten for newer languages / platforms (even if they ran 68k code, it's unlikely to be perfectly compatible), the old code would be ditched and used - at best - as a reference to how the program used to work.
Code evolves or dies. This code-drop is pretty ancient in computing terms and won't be of any practical use any more - like when they released the original Prince of Persia source in assembler. At best, you could use it as a reference to make a pixel-for-pixel identical version by rewriting it in a sensible language and making sure it is equivalent to the old code, but that's about the only use of it.
Have a look here:
http://creativebits.org/the_first_version_of_photoshop
You could just about put some text into it. It's like looking at the source code to Word for DOS 5 and saying "Is this any good to anyone?" No. Not really. Maybe 20 years ago, but now it's so obsolete we don't even use the program itself, let alone the code that makes it, and haven't for 15 years.
You had a junk VPS host, then.
Currently I pay £10 ($15?) a month, have a VPS that hosts all of my domains, I can change all the options, install whatever I want (the POINT of VPS is that you have full-root on the VPS!), manage as many domains as I want and the only service restriction is "no porn", "no spam", basically (i.e. far less restrictive than anything my ISP would allow!), 5 IPv4 and as-many-as-you-like IPv6 static addresses without question with reverse-DNS settable (sending email from your home machine? Good luck - the second Spamhaus works out that it's a customer range you'll end up on their PBL and no-one will let you send email to them ever again without going through an intermediary server).
I wouldn't like to think of DNS pointing to home connections, sure it's fine for casual use but if you need to run a website for any reason (i.e. not just want to run your family website), then it's a real pain.
A VPS is there to cope with the middle ground. I don't want to faff with hosting my family-only domains/photos - it's just not important enough to waste my time and especially fixing it to get it back online. I don't want to spend money on dedicated servers that lie idle. So VPS works fine.
Do I run anything "vital" on them? No. Do I want them up 24/7 without question to receive email and provide my website visitors with content without me having to watch over it? Yes.
Do I want (and get) full root control? Yes. Hell, I fended off something like 8000 attempted email sends every day this month (after long-term blocklists took care of abusers, connection limits took effect, DNSBL, greylisting, etc.). The number of spam emails that got through? Zero. The number of genuine emails that got through? 100%. Because I had access to everything on the machine, from iptables to installing software to even things like port-knocking.
If you had a VPS but couldn't control your domain and anti-spam, you didn't have a VPS, you had a "hosted managed server", which is a different thing entirely. And if you think that hosting it from home is better, then you aren't doing anything that matters to other people but yourself. I'd happily run a small business on a VPS, and despite doing it for a living wouldn't think for a second that bringing it in-house would be better without at least a leased-line.
Great. What's the upload limit on your connection? Because a "home" server like that will work just fine for lots of internal things, but the second someone external wants to connect your are cutting off other users' bandwidth and seriously limiting their experience unless you have a particularly good connection.
$3000 on hardware is half-a-dozen cars to me - that's a LOT of money to spend on a "home" project, especially if it's sitting behind something like your average UK broadband - 1Mbps up if you're lucky and a 50Gb/month traffic limit (usually combined up/download in one!).
There's a big difference between a LAN server (what you're describing) and an externally hosted game server (which is what the article hints at by asking about VPS), and both are entirely different, which is why I'm astounded that the submitter even has to ask the question about what they need - if they people who are external to play, have it hosted externally, if not host it in-home as you describe.
I would not want to struggle along trying to play on someone's server through their junky home DSL connection, much, much, much worse than having to rent a server that was "only" dual-core or whatever.