You think that pure ore wouldn't be needed even if we started recycling? The damage will be done anyway. In a way, better to get it over with.
The normal process is "almost exhaust supply", "require alternatives", "find way to recycle old supply in meantime", "exhaust supply while transitioning".
Good luck trawling through a motherboard (even a pristine, fully-working, but obsolete motherboard handed to you for nothing) and finding the rare-earths and extracting them back to a form, purity and volume that suppliers would take them from you to put back into products.
You're literally assuming that it's like gold, or iron - just melt it down, scrape off the top and sell what's left. What if those rare-earths are modified to be part of a compound, fine nanostructure, device, etc.? It would literally take more energy to pull them out and back into a useable format than the entire thing cost to dig from a dwindling ore supply and make in the first place.
You know what happens to more household waste put into a recycling bin in the UK (as exposed by various TV investigations)? It's shipped abroad and buried in landfill, if it even makes it that far. That's literally things like plastics and glass which are quite "easy" (relatively speaking) to separate, purify, reform, etc.
Just how do you expect to reclaim the yttrium, say, from LED's in TV sets? Do you realise just what a percentage they make up and how spread out they are in even the largest of TV's?
And if you know the model PERFECTLY and get every ounce of them back out, you're likely to end up requiring MILLIONS of devices to get it back to a saleable amount (not to mention it's poisonous to lungs, which adds whole new costs to its extraction and handling). But it's also the 28th most abundant element in the Earth's crust (so "rare earths" isn't what you might think). It's even difficult to separate from its own raw form, let alone reclaiming it - and there's probably more in your spleen now than in a TV sent to recycling.
Recycling a material only makes sense when you can do so repeatedly (otherwise you end up making more and more concentrated rubbish), consistently and more cheaply than getting the original source. And all the things we routinely recycle we can do because of VOLUME. We dispose of millions of tons of paper or glass or plastic every year, and though it's not perfect or saleable in that form we dispose it, it takes little to make it so (in fact, collection is probably the greatest expense because of the volume it's available in).
Rare earth recycling is pretty much pointless until it becomes, quite literally, like gold-dust. It has to be worth enough that someone just grabbing a couple of motherboards or old TV's off a scrapheap would be paid enough for their efforts through a resale price that makes it worthwhile. You can literally make a living scouring gold and platinum and even iron from junk and selling it on in volume. Doing so with rare earths is CENTURIES away, for even the rarest.
I looked at the cinema listings near me the other week.
Every movie had a sequel number/name in it, and most were around the 4th or more in the franchise. I could not find one that was NOT a sequel in some fashion, and all were sequels to things that had no precedent (i.e. it wasn't like they were the movie of the second book in the series, but were just completely fabricated sequels to only the popular first-runs in order to cash in on the name - I'm honestly waiting for Avatar 2 to appear before I shoot myself).
And then people wonder why I haven't been to see a movie in, literally, YEARS.
I'm a mad Tolkien fan. I couldn't stand more than half-way through the first movie, and splitting The Hobbit into three movies? I read it yesterday evening in one sitting.
My girlfriend is Italian and LOVES UK cinema - but not the stuff we ever show in the UK, which is only ever the US "blockbuster" movies. Literally, she can name English directors for the most obscure movies that have some of our best actors and we have NEVER seen them playing at any cinema anywhere. There are niche cinemas, in central London, that show the sort of things she's referring to but NOBODY goes to watch them, and nobody even knows where to find them.
If it's not fourth-in-the-franchise, big-name film with trailers, special effects, 3D and famous-actor-who-can't-act in it, it's not shown, not on DVD and nobody ever sees it.
I'm not a huge "niche" movie fan, but I've watched and enjoyed more on the obscure channels and late-night "arty" movies than anything I've seen even listed at a cinema in over a decade.
Sure, we all love a bit of Aliens or some mindless comedy pap every now and then, but honestly the cinemas now are babysitters for infants. "Cars 2", "Toy Story 3", "Shrek 4" - and, because not all infants are children - "The Expendables 2", "Iron Man 3", "Men in Black 3", etc.
I have not been to the cinema (except out of sheer boredom or to accompany friends, but not to actually SEE something that I wanted to see or enjoyed seeing) since, what, 2005-ish because my girlfriend-at-the-time wanted to go out somewhere (and IIRC we both walked out before the opening credits had even finished, after paying for the movie, popcorn, drinks, etc.)?
The problem is that in my country, Hollywood own the cinemas, and the rest is given a bad rep "It doesn't have a famous actor as the main star?", "There's no 'feel-good' ending?", "It has subtitles?", "It's an indie production so it has to be like The Blair Witch Project (shiver)".
Best films I've watched in the last few weeks? Perfect Sense - Ewan McGregor in a love-story where people around the world start to lose their senses (smell, taste, hearing, then vision - a bit like a mini-Day of The Triffids). It wasn't the best thing I've ever watched but certainly better than all the Christmas-shite and big-name re-runs for Christmas on TV and in the cinema.
I also showed my girlfriend "Mrs Brown" (Judi Dench and Billy Connolly playing Queen Victoria and Mr Brown - one of the best bits of serious acting I've seen from a comedian, but his latest attempt at replicating that success with the newly-released Quartet? - I'm not convinced it will be any good).
What do both have in common? No special effects. No HD. No 3D. No modernised-to-the-point-of-stretching-credulity plots (seems to be the thing now to insert modern-era jokes into historical movies to make them "funny" at points). Just some skilled people, in front of a camera, trying their best to make you believe they are someone else and the things they do are really happening to them.
There's a difference between "entertaining" and "enthralling / enrapturing". One is what you do to babies, with magic tricks and twinkly things, to keep them occupied and their minds off the things you don't want them doing (like remembering how much that fecking cinema ticket and popcorn cost!), the other is to make someone live another person's life through a perfect setting, convincing acti
A MacBook you sit literally inches away from during normal use.
A TV you sit literally feet from during normal use.
Thus the TV never has to have more than approximately 1/12th of the resolution of a laptop display for you to not even spot the difference.
4K is just a step up on the HD-scam, which you won't be able to detect without a HUGE TV or by watching it from a completely unnatural position.
Hell, SVGA monitors were doing HD resolution back in the 90's, and I used to watch TV on a card in my PC because it was a FABULOUS image on them compared to a TV (and that was from a standard SD signal and some nice deinterlacing). It's taken 20 years to catch up and get to the point where a 32" screen can do the same.
The fact is, though, is that I was literally able to see individual pixels (running Windows 3.1, you could actually see every pixel on a window edge, for example) from the distance I sat at when I was doing fine work that needed the resolution (e.g. DTP, etc.) and usually had to sit back in order to actually appreciate the display in its entirety, where I lost that view of individual pixels (and, when watching TV on it, I usually did it from the other side of the room).
If you get close enough to and squint at anything, you can see fine detail. From the other side of the room, not so much. Or else houses with wallpaper would form a kind of OCD in people and they'd need it to be perfectly printed, aligned and defined.
Fact is, a 4K image printed at 600dpi (like the cheapest lasers have been doing for - what - 20 years also?) is 6 and 2/3rds inches long. Personally, I've never been able to distinguish between 300dpi and 600dpi without a magnifier of some kind (and have used 2400dpi printers and scanners - in fact, my usual setup is to set everything to 300dpi toner-save, with 100dpi for scanners and faxes, and NOBODY complains even for presentation work). At 300 dpi? That's barely a 14" image. What you're claiming is that if you look at an A3 piece of paper printed full-colour at 300 dpi, you'll see the whole image AND nearly every dot at the same time, and that if it was printed at 290dpi you'd notice it looking worse. Rubbish.
Now, even adding some extra width to the pixels for movement, colour, etc., you're still in the bounds of a TV-size from paper-reading distances. And you don't watch TV from paper-reading distances.
Please stop buying crap. The world might be running to retina displays (but, to be honest, I work in IT and have never seen one and know nobody who has one) but if they are it's because of ignorance. 20 years ago, people were buying "2400dpi scanners" which were really just 300dpi scanners that interpolated. And nobody noticed, because they just assumed it was true, and were happy to pay for the number. While the rest of us locked them into 100dpi modes and everyone said how wonderfully they scanned and that they didn't have trouble emailing 1Mb scans around like their "other" scanner which generated 500Mb scans or larger.
Now make me one that compiles thirty+ files in subdirectories, links into something like GTK libraries, support multiple targets (one static and non-debug, say, and the other dynamic and debug), checks dependencies, compiles only unchanged objects, can be updated simply when a new file is added, etc.
Sure, it can be done. But it's learning another language, not a simple, intuitive tool. I would posit that the C preprocessor is easy to learn than an everyday Makefile, and that's just the wrong way round. Just what precisely is in the way of just dropping a bunch of files in a folder, running make and having it compile them all to object, link those objects and run off to find dependencies properly? Because it doesn't happen, and it could. And if GNU Make was so good, CMake and SCons wouldn't exist. Both are, it has to be said, equally bad too.
GNU Make is exactly the tool I'm referring to as horrendous and atrocious. Honestly, tab-stops that break files in the 21st century...
I started with a Hotmail account pre-2000, probably pre-1995 (don't know exactly, but long before I was in uni). Since then it has been an MSN account (where I started using Messenger), a Live account, a Microsoft account, and now it's taking over my Skype. Hell, even Windows 8 wanted me to log in using it and I refused - I haven't actually USED that account in YEARS.
The problem I'm more worried about (rather than the bi-annual "upgrade your account to new account X" problem) is what about third-party clients? I have Pidgin plugged in with my messenger details, and presume that will stop. Honestly, that just means I'll stop using messenger and won't even notice - I still have plenty of alternatives and slowly ditched things in the past as they stopped letting me use them from third-party clients (I still have ICQ, AOL, MSN, YIM, Jabber, and even Facebook messengers plugged into my Pidgin).
Fact is, I don't really care about running "your" software, just your backend service - and it's just not vital enough that I'd care. MS, in particular, has had a bad history with me and their client software - it's been pretty atrocious at points over the years and taking several backward steps (I can't remember the last time I successfully did a messenger file transfer, the various takeovers meant it got more and more plastered with adverts, etc. and video-over-MSN was always a joke in comparison).
Steam also wants me to message my friends that way - er, no - because it's just a sub-standard chat client that I have a bucket of and numerous alternatives with more features that don't need me and my friends to be running Steam all the time to use them. Like Skype, I won't have it running "just in case" someone wants to talk to me, and hence they won't use it as much either (if Skype offered a proper API that other programs could use, Pidgin etc. would jump on it).
Skype is probably MS's biggest online asset at the moment. It's really quite a powerful tool and I was half expecting it to go the other way (e.g. Skype functionality appearing only in Messenger and Windows, etc.). I now honestly give it a handful of months before I abandon it except to keep the account live. And that really means that Skype will surge as everyone does this "upgrade" and then die when people learn how atrocious the client is again.
Granted, I'm a freeloader - I've never paid Skype a penny or any of the MSN/Live/Microsoft etc. services. But the fact is that I haven't run an "official" client in nearly a decade now, and the bit that messenger does can be done on any number of third-party clients. Messing with that just means I move on to something else - hell, I even have my own domain's Jabber setup ready to roll if it comes to it. It's even loaded into my Pidgin and anyone can use it for free.
I don't see what they seek to achieve, to be honest. I won't suddenly start using MS services that I haven't used in a decade (the IM client kept the account open nicely, though). I won't suddenly start using MS features through Skype. And I won't tolerate Skype being broken by MS upgrades without just moving on or sacrificing its functionality entirely. And they won't "save" anything by merging accounts because they still can't shut down in China, they still have to track all those accounts, they still have to pay for separate authentication mechanisms in the various software for years to come, etc.
Kill messenger. Not much will happen, but - as pointed out - people will be a bit more wary about what they sign up for in the future. Like the Google accounts lately that have had features taken from them, etc. - we'll just move on as soon as something affects us personally.
It would be sad to see my ancient Hotmail/MSN account go, if for no other reason that I'm impressed it's still running (I never check it and only get spam and the last "proper" email in it was from 2005, I think, before I moved them all out when they started to cut out Outlook Express integration with it - which was the only free way
To answer both above questions, I'm using C as an example. Almost all modern languages (including anything in.NET, even the more modern Visual Basics, Java, etc.) suffer from the same problems.
Python would also be included on my list. Hell, the programs I see written in python often bundle their own runtime copy of the entire Python interpreter when distributed because there's no way to guarantee what the end-user has and your program just might not work unless they have the right version. It's not as easy to setup a nice Python development environment as you make out.
Google Python, end up on download page with about 30 downloads on it (all of which are python and the "official, latest, stable" one of which is half-way down the page), if you pick the "nice" MSI it installs into the root of C:\ (come on, this is looking like MinGW installation already! If I move it, do I get a ton of path issues like MinGW too?). That gives me IDLE (apparently the "Python GUI" according to the icon it creates, in preference to the "CLI" icon it also creates), which leaves me at a >>> prompt in the Python Shell and where even typing "help" has been programmed to be unhelpful (it ONLY tells you to type help() - nice waste of a few lines of code there!). How do I save the program, distribute it, etc.? Sure, you can work it out or follow a tutorial if you NEED to learn but if you just WANT to learn, there's no hint, nothing. Your shining example, Python, leaves me at a shell prompt. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That was acceptable in the 80's when every byte counted and the instruction manuals were printed with every copy, but not any more.
Imagine you want to load in a Python program you've been given, how do you go about it, what do you do, will it run (I guarantee you that it's not a definite yes, because I've had python programs in the past that crashed when another python interpreter of a different breed / version was present and stealing file associations - I've seen Python messes that rival Cygwin multi-installations for issues). And that's before we even get into things like, say, installing a third-party Python library to integrate with.
And Java suffers similar problems. Hell, just the whole JDK/JRE and classpath installation issues are enough to blow a lot of beginner's minds.
Some people really don't know what it's like to try to be a self-taught programmer these days. You will spend more time learning the tools than the language, and that's NOT how it used to be. I can't ever remember having to look up something back in the BASIC days that was due to how I'd installed the environment. Again, I don't use BASIC as a shining beacon of perfection, just a particular example to highlight things.
Just because people want to be programmers doesn't mean we should forgo user-friendliness in their tools. And simple things, like decent GUI's that don't just run CLI tools with horrendously strict syntaxes and obscure errors, should be present.
What the article is hinting at is that programming should be like office applications. Open the program, open a project or create a new one, get left at the point where you can just type in a program, then "save" or "compile" it and give the end result to either another programmer (if you saved) or a random end-user (if you compiled) and have things work. This isn't about dumbing down programming itself (which is dangerous) but making the programming IDE's as nice to use as Word or Excel. I don't claim to know a thing about advanced Excel functionality, but I can damn well open a spreadsheet someone else has made and not run into non-programming problems with it no matter how complex it is.
I have to agree. I've always said that 50% of modern programming is having the right tools, and the right tools configured correctly.
Introduce someone to C. Now explain that even though C is standardised, there's no "standard" way to compile a C program, to port a Makefile, to have a program compile the same everywhere without manual work ensuring so, or even to start debugging. And then show then a Visual C++ project file and tell them they have to manage it and make sure it works even if their primary platform isn't Visual C++.
It can get horrendous. Sure, most Linux installs come with gcc set up and you can compile a basic C file and get a basic executable (called a.out with NO OUTPUT to tell you that, for stupid historical reasons, which still blows my mind), but anything beyond that and you're learning the tools more than the language.
I personally have a deep-set hatred of Makefiles. I honestly can't stand them as a programmer and avoid them like the plague. I get the C preprocessor inside-out and can fancy macro tricks that amaze even me, but I can't be bothered with Makefiles and their separate, unrelated, horrendous syntax. But as a user, they are great when I just want to make a simple change and then recompile without fussing about where my compiler path is, etc. All their alternatives? I have the same problem, but at least plain Makefiles work the same everywhere if they are well-written.
Even IDE's only mask those same details and thus cause more problems. Standard debugging of a problem for a beginner is to google the error messages from the compiler / linker because it really is that atrocious to try to understand what they actually mean.
I have a large C project on the go at the moment. It's several dozen code and header files and the same again in associated resources, etc. It took me an hour to work out how to stop it uploading the resource files to the SVN repository and even now I can break it when I add a new resource file without meaning to. It's a nightmare that only compiles because the IDE generates a hidden makefile, runs it through MinGW's make tools and then runs MinGW's gcc to get it to compile / link. I gave up about the five-object-file mark of trying to compile it myself but in other projects with other people's code, I've literally deleted the Makefile and wrote a bash script to do the job instead, they were that horrendous to understand.
Debugging is also a major bugbear. I know how to load a file into gdb, set a breakpoint, execute it and inspect variable values. Manually. And that's it. I don't even know what half the commands on the menus are supposed to be used for or the correct syntax to make them work and it's not like I haven't tried. Debugging is best done through an IDE that does it for you (still using gdb) and even then the tool doesn't get everything right (I often get out-of-sync line numbers when single-stepping through a program in Eclipse).
I have taught beginners programming since I was a teenager, and it's only got harder. If I was to write a book on, say, C now, I would feel obliged to supply a disk and include a chapter on how to find the compiler setup program, how to install it, etc. so that I could be consistent throughout the book knowing they were using the same tools and the same versions so I could show them how to debug, etc. Just saying "compile this hello world" can be a book in itself, depending on their background, experience, and computer setup.
I frequent a C programming board and most of the problems I see are people using obsolete tools (e.g. Turbo C presumably because it's "free" and their instructors were trained on it), or no tools at all (i.e. no capability to debug, manually typing in compile-lines, etc.).
The next most common set of problems is not understanding how to use those tools or interpret their errors ("_main is undefined", etc.). The next set is not understanding how to write something that doesn't give a compile warning/error (usually because they've star
Personally, I never have been a "gamer" from that sort of perspective, and yet since the days of DOS I was playing top titles within a year or so of their release. Hell, I played Quake on a min-spec Pentium with a Voodoo card within days of release and that was the first ever game to actually MAKE people into "gamers" to buy an upgrade card that serves no further purpose than to play games faster (back then, it was necessary, though unless you wanted flickbook framerates).
The problem with PC gaming is not the hardware, but the mentality. "I have to have 120fps on everything, in HD, with all the options turned on and all the latest kit to show off" - there isn't a console in the world that actually does the equivalent, and if there was it would cost a fortune or slow to a crawl and gamers would hardly notice the difference otherwise.
I have a laptop now - technically nowhere close to a gamer's laptop but it has nVidia Optimus graphics. It cost not much more than just about any of the current consoles has ever cost on release day. I can't find a game on my Steam list that it doesn't play. And from the current AAA-titles? Well, in a year's time when they are sensible prices I will buy them and try them and most of them will work just fine (if 9 years of Steam gaming is anything to go by, and years more of Counterstrike play before that) but I might have to turn down an option or two.
PC gaming isn't about upgrading every two seconds. Being a "gamer" is. I can name every upgrade I've ever done to every PC I've ever personally owned, and most of the time that was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated upgrade that doubled the performance for much much less than the price of an equivalent replacement (if you upgrade a machine, it's likely that it's to hit some bottleneck which costs more than the machine is worth to upgrade further). I have never upgraded a motherboard, or a CPU, in my own machines in all the time I've owned a PC precisely because the upgrades, and their associated prerequisite upgrades, were never worth it.
And I've probably personally owned about 3 desktops and 4-5 laptops in all my time playing, so I certainly get some use out of them (and, to be honest, the laptops die by physical breakage on the hinges more than obsolescence and I still have an IBM Thinkpad with a 90MHz processor that's going strong). And I do think of myself as a gamer, in terms of the amount of time I spend playing and the amount of money I spend each year on games, but not a "gamer" in terms of spending money on constant upgrades for my computers.
I actually have, upstairs, an MSI gaming laptop that was bought as my last work laptop three years ago (my employer buys whatever I specify, and I specified nVidia graphics for various reasons and ended up with a gaming laptop that was vastly overpowered and half-the-cost of an equivalent business model). The screen hinge is shattered and it's being used as separate LCD / keyboard parts (blue-takked to the wall and the worktop appropriately). And it *still* laughs at 99% of the games on my Steam account after all that time. And that's a laptop, which can't really be upgraded at all (about the only thing I could do to it is increase the RAM but it's on a 32-bit OS and already at 4Gb, or change the HDD, but that's really not a bottleneck in anything I do on it).
Gone are the days where you have to have the latest bus that nobody else has got, with a massively overpowered card that churns through power, whirrs like mad, and sets the motherboard on fire, and some huge CPU and memory that's unheard of in anything else but video-editing, and some stupidly over-powered PSU to run it all, just to play a 3D game. Hell, a half-decent laptop laughs at anything for at least 3-4 years so long as you're not hoping for 120fps in stereo 3D at the highest resolution supported on the HDMI out, on full detail while encoding Blu-Ray's in the background.
And, to be honest, in all my time, I've never had a laptop that didn't break BEFORE it became obsolete (usu
There are countries in the world where the side of the road that was driven on was changed overnight. Literally. I'm sure the US can manage to use those measurements that ALL their children understand (ask a teenager how many chains in a furlong?) in duality with the measurements that hardly anyone understands the origin of any more, and keep the duality until there's nobody really left to object.
And when you're the only country left in the world, and all the auto manufacturers ADD costs to your cars to show imperial speeds, etc. because it costs them to add such functionality for just one country (and in firmware, now, not just a piece of paper - sure, it's pence but do you think they'll only add pence when the US is the ONLY customer that requires it?) and where you can't even do things like compare racing records with others sensibly (I doubt that even today they measure speed records in mph primarily, but maybe only convert from the instrument's native measure for those who want to know).
There's nothing particularly special about the US - the UK uses imperial measures too (and just to make it more fun, ours differ quite a bit in some areas and use the same "names" for the units...) and has mph on its signposts.
But you could easily put km/h measures underneath in tiny writing for this generation, and the uproar would be minimal (the UK is already considering this because we're really the only ones in Europe to use mph and you *can* go from mainland Europe to the UK without getting out of your car in under 30 minutes, have to change sides of the road and remember that the signs are now in a different unit, and thus there's a big "this will stop accidental speeding"-style incentive to mark km/h on UK signs too).
Then the next generation, you get them to have cars that have km/h as the larger measurement on the instrumentation dial (like most cars in the world have) even if they still mark mph or have an option on digital dials to show it. Then you get to the point where it makes more sense to make the km/h the big figure on signposts. Then mph can disappear without a whimper from people after only a few years.
And not doing it overnight is simply a matter of not wanting to cause uproar. You could do it in two generations without anyone noticing beyond "Oh, yeah, I remember when....". You could do it in a generation easily, without too much fuss. You could do it in a decade if you told people it would make their cars cheaper and reduce expenditure on fancy new equipment (like automated speed cameras, driverless car tech, etc.). You could do it in a term of office if you REALLY wanted to.
All you really need is a person close to the higher echelons of government who would stand to make money by replacing all the road signs. And, let's be honest, that's going to be someone eventually.
If you were right, it would be as big a change as imperial to metric anyway, and as different from imperial as metric is. Why?
Feet in a yard (3), division of an inch (usually 16ths or 32nds), square yards in an acre (403 and a third), ounces in a gallon (160), pounds in a ton (186 and a third).
Imperial is a MESS of units that have little or no common factors whatsoever, and some of them aren't even used anymore but only exist to make OTHER things nice numbers (1 acre = 1 furlong x 1 chain, etc.). There are 8's, 12's, 16's and, yes, 10's in there if you go to esoteric enough imperial measurements (10 chains in a furlong, for example).
The thing about metric? Everything is a power of 10 in some fashion except where there is no sensible fraction you can use (e.g. units based on universal constants).
Like everything, nobody is really arguing that 12 is more easily factorable. What we saying is that 12 has NOTHING special to do with imperial measurements at all. And that's the problem. Propose a metric alternative based on 12 and there would be some people who would back it. But nobody has seriously suggested that as an option, well, ever.
I find that anyone that mixes NAT and IPv6 problems usually doesn't administer their own networks.
NAT saves a lot of administration for a small business or home network. You have ONE outside address, and all your Internet traffic goes through ONE machine. That ONE address is unmistakably external, can have several thousand services running over it, and can be your external address for everything all at once. As an admin, you only need to know that one address (or corresponding DNS alias), and you can be fairly sure when setting up your firewalls etc. that you know what's coming in / out, from / to where.
And then all your internal client machines? Well, their numbering is by definition none of anybody else's business, not even your ISP. It absolutely, 100% does not matter. I could be running them over token-ring and IPX for all anyone outside cares, so it honestly does not make any difference whatsoever to anyone else. And 99.99999% of networks will never, ever, ever exhaust the reserved internal ranges of IPv4, so it's easier to keep it simple internally, not have to make ANY internal changes, and have one single machine visible to the outside world handling all the "complex" stuff and horrendous addresses that are a pain to memorise, type, tell others, trace through logs with grep, etc. And if (when) the time comes that IPv4 is unsupported on a machine? You assign the gateway an internal IPv6 address, add a DHCPv6 range, and viola - it all works 100% again.
The trick to most small business network administration is to simplify changes down to their smallest possible set so as to have the least impact. You use your brain to do less work without compromising elsewhere. And using IPv4 internal and NAT'ing that to "whatever" is external is the easiest way to do that without having to risk leaving holes in your configuration for a while to come.
I don't WANT direct-accessibility to internal network ranges, that's why NAT has always been a viable option because it prevents that and that's what I WANT to do anyway. Yes, a firewall is capable of intercepting anything anyway, if I really want to, but having things go through a single machine that sanitises traffic and discards any attempt to communicate directly to machines that may not have the protection they should (e.g. random public devices on an internal Wifi connection offered as a convenience to guests). Instead of administering hundreds of individual machines and their software firewalls, plus an expensive IPv6-capable router at the border with thousands of rules in order to secure the machines, you can just NAT the whole network and secure that one external router/gateway machine to block things that were unsolicited or shouldn't be getting through to any machine.
And, given that most people would have to deploy a non-trivial configuration where they DON'T just pass external traffic direct to internal machines (whether by NAT'ing or by a complicated firewall configuration), people who complain about NAT are complaining about something that will NEVER affect them - a total side-issue that concerns almost no-one.
My networks are IPv6 compatible already. 100%. You can put an IPv6-capable host into it, get an address, and talk to all internal services and externally. You can also access remotely by IPv6, and even access IPv6 websites from an internal IPv4 client that has no support for it. It's literally a handful of lines in your existing configurations. And we have external servers with IPv6 addresses. Nobody uses them but they are there, and work.
The fact is that the entire NAT thing is a diversion to make us think we have to do entire network overhauls and upgrades to make this new-fangled thing work. It's just not true. I will no more allow internal clients to send out on SMTP ports or allow external hosts to access, well anyway internal, over IPv6 than I would over IPv4. It's just a diversion.
And a nice diversion from those sites, like Slashdot, that posts an IPv6 article about once a month
And your prof was right - the user can still be stupid and you, as a programmer in this instance, should have worked to ensure that the user COULDN'T do anything bad by being (deliberately or not) stupid.
Take, for instance, things like this were a result from an experiment erroneously kicks out -0.000001 K and you allow it into your program to wreak havoc with your assumption (e.g. if you were storing it in unsigned at any point, or dividing by it assuming it was always >0 K).
Or the user hits the minus key by accident. Or the user entered in Celsius rather than Kelvin. Or any one of a million and one ways that it could have gone wrong for you.
Or you could have added a single "if", a single line of code, not lost marks and NOT have allowed that scenario to ever have happened without needed to audit the entire program to see if a negative value would have affected anything.
A recruiter who Googles you expecting to find, well, you is a recruiter you don't want to work for.
A recruiter who FINDS you, specifically and undeniably you, will still find you and the things you've advertised to the world online anyway. And that's just about work-life separation.
But the person who thinks that people are Googling them and that's affecting their job prospects (without, I imagine, a shred of evidence because it's likely illegal under employment law anyway without due notice to the application and verification that it's actually them - no worse than hearsay from a stranger), and PAYS to improve the results on her name (and the other 10,000 people with that name)? I wouldn't touch her with a bargepole. What do you have to hide?
There are already motherboards in the wild with "UEFI" that refuse to boot any entry on a boot menu that's not labelled "MS Windows" or "Red Hat Linux", for instance. There was a Slashdot article just a few weeks ago about exactly that.
BIOS-writers are the laziest, most terrible of programmers when it comes to user-functionality and if they can shortcut things to work only for Windows and save themselves some effort, they always have and always will do so. Maybe not all of them, maybe not forever, but enough that it becomes a problem.
I had a BIOS in a brand-new model of laptop only the other week that checks a sector on the disk for zero - one that's only zero if you use Windows partitions, NTFS and a clean format. If you encrypt the disk, or install Linux or just happen to have odd partitions the machine REFUSES TO BOOT. It took the threat of removal of several huge accounts from a major supplier, that supplier chasing it up to not lose custom on other products and TWO MONTHS before we got a BIOS fix given to us with "WARNING: Internal code only - do not use in production" splattered all over it. Admittedly it fixed the problem, but that's hardly reassuring.
And though these particular machines were from a no-name motherboard manufacturer, they have AMI BIOS, and HP/Dell BIOS's are the other major casualty of this particular bug that's UNFIXABLE without a co-operative motherboard BIOS writer.
If I have to rely on a BIOS manufacturer to give me functionality on my computer back, I *cannot* rely on it working without testing every single unit that passes through IT as I open the boxes. And I guarantee you that trying to find a new model that allows arbitrary UEFI boot will see me reject 5-10% of models before I even start.
To quote a very old British Telecom advert: "People will always need plates".
To suggest that automation is the end of the line for human input is ridiculous. If anything, there are MORE jobs per person now than there ever have been. In fact, the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls - which tells you a lot about manual labour, and why the US likes to lock people up more than just about any country in the world.
The jobs will change, of course, but when the horse-drawn taxicabs of London were replaced with the internal combustion engine, there were less stable-boys but a lot more drivers, cleaners, repairers, tool-makers etc. to go with that.
And, because of the way tax and the human mind works, the government will create a job for you or secure your job against automation for a LONG time yet. They don't want you out-of-work, or bored because robots are doing everything for you leaving you to "play" all day long.
If I was to call out the names of all the people - actual people - involved in the production, billing, delivery, installation and maintenance of even a simple office, I'd still be here tomorrow. That *wasn't* true a hundred years ago or longer.
The more we create things, the more people are needed to design them, litigate them, design the machines that produce them, assemble and operate and maintain and supervise the machines that use them, provide quality control, testing, fill out the paperwork, manage the orders, ship out the product, deliver it, assemble it, install it, train people on it, handle complaints from it, etc.
If anything, we'll hit a point where we *have* to automate because there are too many humans in the loop and that means we can't do things fast enough, and we'll be hindered - not by the unions and the unemployed - but by the number of employed. Hell, it's already nearly impossible to deliver a parcel during the day any more - the stay-at-home mother is no longer prevalant in society, and now schools even have to provide day-care and evening-care for families who have to go to work (which means more people work in those schools, too!).
An unemployed person is likely to get rarer long before it becomes the norm. It's hovering at around 4% in the UK at the moment, which is a fairly ordinary, stable country. That's nowhere *near* the highest and not far from the lowest it's ever been.
And no matter what gadget comes along, until we have complete independence on earning money because of the facilities available to all (when unemployment will no longer matter, anyway), there will always be someone needed to design it, build it, ship it, clean it, or even just test it. And most jobs in the world are actually "menial" jobs that require no skill (hell, that's one of the prime reasons that people come off benefits in my country - they say the jobs they are FORCED to go into after X amount of time on state benefits are too menial given their qualifications).
For every computer putting a man out of a job, that computer generates 5-10 jobs elsewhere, even if it's only the guy who cleans it and the guy who sells him the special cleaner to do that job with.
Like anything - if someone does the hard work, and it's supported enough, and it doesn't break OTHER architectures, there's no reason why not.
It just seems that m68k (and other projects along the same lines) have people willing to do all that work, whereas the 386 architecture doesn't (yet?).
This is the thing I actually quite like about Linux. MCA support? Few used it, fewer wanted it enough to do the so, so bye-bye. But other buses? They are still around. Applies to buses, architectures, drivers, features, even "helper code" of one type or another.
If someone's willing to put in the back-breaking to get it up to standard, there's no reason to NOT let it in. Unfortunately, that standard has to be high for a number of reasons (e.g. legal obligations like licensing, coding quality, support, ongoing maintenance etc.). And for some, it's so high it doesn't justify the work.
Linux is a meritocracy, like more open-source code. If there's a reason to do so, and it's done well, it happens. If not, it doesn't. If only parts of law and government were like that.
"Guess what? Grandma's computer is sending out spam in the background as fast as her system and connection limits will allow."
Then your connection limits are inadequate, you should secure the SMTP servers that you provide on whitelisted ranges (i.e. grandma's connection should NEVER be able to send direct SMTP to random servers without a minimum of a secure connection, which almost all UK ISP's enforce, for instance, and require you to use THEIR authenticated, secured outbound mail servers if you want to send ANYTHING).
Once secured, you know exactly who, when and how many emails they are sending (which you should know anyway). Seriously, anything over a couple of emails a minute is almost certainly spam, but at the ISP you can tune that as necessary (and even delay the sending of them until the user has manually verified - by some tool - that they were intending to send them). If you're failing to monitor and block that YOURSELF, as an ISP, then that's exactly why you're being blacklisted by an external entity (who aren't going to do it for a single email, for instance).
And things like Google Mail can "blacklist" you for a little while for just a handful of bad attempts on their SMTP servers, for instance (just ran into it the other day forwarding emails between domains during some mailserver downtime).
The alternative to that? Buy a server on a public IP range. It costs peanuts, because you only need the most basic of VPS's from the cheapest of hosts with a rack in a local datacenter. And, guess what, if you spam from them too - accidentally or not - you'll get your account shutdown pretty damn quick. Because *THEY* also monitor what you're doing and act on reports because they don't want their IP ranges blacklisted either. They KNOW how many emails you sent to how many domains and exactly what customer sent them, I guarantee you.
This isn't a question of someone oppressing you. This is a question of poor system administration. Hell, some ISP's will block you for attempting to send packets over port 139 - because it's a clear sign of an insecure network or poor configuration. And any half-decent ISP has measures to control that. My previous ISP would intercept your web traffic for a few minutes afterwards unless you signed a form saying you KNEW that's what you were doing - worded so that you would be responsible for that incredibly stupid decision of yours enough to scare everyone off, and with a list of instructions that stopped it happening for any of their customers (The NAT device they supplied had a default to NOT let port 139 traffic out, etc.).
If you're allowing your IP ranges to be abused, expect them to crop up on lists of IP ranges that can / are being abused. Then don't be surprised when other, more responsible, system administrators decide to use those lists to block obvious spam.
And, yes, as an ISP, letting a residential customer send out lots of email direct to SMTP server could be considered abuse after just a few emails or a handful of complaints/reports to their postmaster. For a business, it's slightly more usual for things like that to happen but you'll still be held accountable and businesses tend to be more secure than your average granny.
Fact is, if you provide a facility that allows abuse, you'll find yourself on lists of facilities that allow abuse. And all of the consequences that come from that fact.
Connected fine from Italy and the UK over the past few days, and haven't lost an connection on Steam... well, ever. Connected at this moment, in fact.
Either this is a localised problem or - as usual - some sheer capacity issue for the half-hour that everyone in the US logs on and then not again.
Steam has a HUGE amount of players online (5m at my last check a few minutes ago) on hundreds of servers worldwide, and I'd think we'd notice 5m people just dropping offline, or all the servers not working, and people complaining about THAT in the forums. Fact is, it's a blip, if anything. And probably a local blip at that.
I'd guess, living in a non-gun-owning country, that actually the opposite is true. A readily-available, anonymously acquired, deadly weapon is a valuable asset.
Wait for the householder to leave (it's EASY to know if a house is empty of not if you actually bother to watch it for a day or so - and in the worst case, the balls to knock on the front door first to see if anyone answers), then break in, knowing there is definitely a weapon (that probably won't be linked to the burglar) on the premises that - almost certainly - is available to anyone who has a pair of bolt-cutters and a couple of minutes to look for it (I'd go for within reach of the bed, personally).
Said weapon will have less link to a burglar than anything they can buy, carries less risk than buying illegal weapons from unknowns (turning up with a bunch of cash to buy an unregistered gun sounds like the ideal way to leave without your cash OR your life), and almost certainly has enough value (along with the belongings in the house) to justify the initial break-in.
It's like having a map of everyone who has a particularly valuable asset registered to their house, except that normally you would never know if there was a weapon there or not without this sort of mapping. And you can't revoke a weapon, or put out an APB on it, or stop it being used for its purpose before its disposed of quite hastily (unlike with other valuable assets that might be public knowledge to your neighbours, etc.)
Also: Any arms-race is a never-ending game of oneupmanship. You can say "nobody will break in because I have a gun", but all it really means is "anyone who breaks in won't risk coming without at least an automatic weapon or an armed accomplice". And in some neighbourhoods, such things are already true because the arms-race has escalated to the point that EVERYONE has a gun already.
You can't win an arms-race. You can merely not fall behind for too long.
Because, from what I've seen, in certain field, publishing on arXiv is like handing a note "from your mother" written in your own scrawly handwriting and signed "Mom" to your teacher.
It tends to get a bad rap and it's almost impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff precisely BECAUSE it's an open-access site. And absolute tripe can get there and get positive feedback without any rigorous verification at all.
From what I see, if you want to stay reputable and not just "pass", you have to publish properly or not at all. And even that's not a guarantee.
Think of the publishing industry. A self-published ebook is highly unlikely to sell millions of copies and be on the bookshelves for Christmas. It can happen. It has happened. But if you go to a literary agent and tell them you're self-published, or have previously published your book under an open-source license, they'll laugh you out of the room and not want to touch you. In some cases, people who have self-published 20 copies of their own "book" without any editing and failing every submission they've ever done and being rejected by every agent in the land will tell you they are a "published author" while everyone else snickers behind their back. Academic reputation is dealt in pretty much the same way.
Science is open. Research is open. Publishing is open. But your reputation (and thus talks, jobs, further research, etc.) is predicated on being in properly peer-reviewed journals.
Granted, to catch bad fakes and casual deception, this probably works
But what's stopping someone now knowing this, and supplanting their own "hum" back into the right place from any recording make anywhere during the time they want to "pretend" to be recording in?
What's actually stopping them ripping out the hum entirely and replacing it with the hum of any arbitrary period of time? If it's in every recording, and you can spot it in, say, CCTV recordings (that use quite primitive recording equipment and compression methods), then it's also incredibly easy to detect and "fake" yourself.
Also, I don't believe it's as reliable as they make out. We'll find out as more cases use it and it will have to be challenged at some point but even speed-cameras that weren't entirely accurate got a lot of people in trouble and then had to be rescinded years later.
And, totally off-topic, it reminds me of my German teacher in school (I'm English, and we were taught German as an optional foreign language). He basically begged me to take his class instead of Double Science, many moons ago, and even called me a "rat" at a parent's evening in front of my dad when I said I wasn't going to study German any more. Turns out he was kinda hoping I'd take German so he could up the average result a bit.
Two years later, he was sacked because the audio recordings of oral work that he sent off for the final exam had "clicks" on the tape (yes, tape!) in between every question where he'd obviously paused it and briefed the children on the right answer.
Wonder how they submit oral coursework now, with MP3's and things? It would be the work of a second to get a perfectly smooth recording of the same thing happening nowadays.
Commercial "3D printing" has existed forever, or at least the equivalent ("here's the money, here's the model, make me X number of them"). What technology is used to do it is really quite inconsequential - current 3D printing really doesn't add any value to the process beyond more conventional techniques.
The attractive feature of actual 3D printing is that people can do it themselves. Buy a bag of nylon, load it into the machine, press out all the little play-figures you want from designs pulled from the Internet. Do it properly and, within a few years and instead loading 4 packs of nylon, you could even have them pre-coloured.
You could then literally destroy the toy-making (Lego!), Christmas-ornament-making, sculpture, board-games and other industries overnight if you wanted. That's the *interesting* bit about 3D printing. For years I've been able to supply a company a 3D model and have them make it in whatever materials and even paint it for me. That's never been a problem. Cost has, and the available skill and equipment (like this article - the equipment is specialist and unlikely to be able to be operated by an ordinary person with no training), but not the actual making a model of anything you can design on a computer.
Home 3D printing will drastically reduce the cost of such things, though, drastically reduce the cost of plastic items of all kinds (e.g. board games, role-playing games, Christmas cracker trinkets, even casing for embedded boards, etc.).
And like with 2D printing and 2D scanning, we could all end up with a device in the back-bedroom and just "knock up" a quick copy of, say, a key, or a toy for the kids, or a cup.
The interesting part isn't massive machines in commercial use, it's tiny machines in home use. 50 years ago nobody had a computer, now we all have them (probably several). 50 years ago, nobody could get their books printed without going to a printer, now we can all run off something on a device cheaper than a book costs to buy (if you buy the cheap rubbish). 100 years ago, businesses had to PAY people to wander around London with an accurate watch, calibrated to the Greenwich clock, and would subscribe to a service where that person would come back each week and tell them the time.
Advances in basic, cheap 3D scanning and printing, I'm interested in. Large companies being able to produce McDonald's toys (which have been around for decades), I'm not.
Give a hardware hacker a year and they could knock up a 3D scanner that formed a 3D model on the computer, with coloured textures for the outside "skin". Give them a year and they could knock up a 3D printer that might be able to come close to reproducing that model in plastic, with colourations on the outside approximating those in the model.
Make those devices cheap, reliable, as easy to use as a printer (i.e. not millimetre-vital calibration and building) and of half-decent quality, that you can just place an original model inside and pour nylon powder into and get a copy model out the other end and you'll make a fortune. That's what I class as the modern phrase of "3D printing", not something we could do for the last 30 years on commercial scales.
Have you not heard of fax modems? (and if you have, welcome to the 90's!). I've routinely faxed Windows Printer Test Pages because it's the most convenient thing to send to test the fax, with modern network->fax system, I wouldn't mess around with bits of paper and fax machines (what are those?! Welcome back to the 80's!)
All you'd do would be to tie up their phone lines a bit until they blacklisted the numbers on their internal switchboard (which might even happen automatically with any half-decent telephony hardware and things like 9999 retries). And, if successful anyway, all you would do is add a couple of megs of "black" PDF's to their spool folders.
Childish protest won't help, if that's what you're after. Just state your rights and objection. If enough people do that, in whatever manner, it will work. Anything above and beyond that is more likely to get YOU into trouble, though.
Like spam, if you just repeat the same message endlessly with a blatant agenda to harass people into buying through sheer volume you will get ignored.
Write a single, sensible, reasoned, properly-delivered letter and your opinion instantly counts for more.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that pure ore wouldn't be needed even if we started recycling? The damage will be done anyway. In a way, better to get it over with.
The normal process is "almost exhaust supply", "require alternatives", "find way to recycle old supply in meantime", "exhaust supply while transitioning".
Good luck trawling through a motherboard (even a pristine, fully-working, but obsolete motherboard handed to you for nothing) and finding the rare-earths and extracting them back to a form, purity and volume that suppliers would take them from you to put back into products.
You're literally assuming that it's like gold, or iron - just melt it down, scrape off the top and sell what's left. What if those rare-earths are modified to be part of a compound, fine nanostructure, device, etc.? It would literally take more energy to pull them out and back into a useable format than the entire thing cost to dig from a dwindling ore supply and make in the first place.
You know what happens to more household waste put into a recycling bin in the UK (as exposed by various TV investigations)? It's shipped abroad and buried in landfill, if it even makes it that far. That's literally things like plastics and glass which are quite "easy" (relatively speaking) to separate, purify, reform, etc.
Just how do you expect to reclaim the yttrium, say, from LED's in TV sets? Do you realise just what a percentage they make up and how spread out they are in even the largest of TV's?
And if you know the model PERFECTLY and get every ounce of them back out, you're likely to end up requiring MILLIONS of devices to get it back to a saleable amount (not to mention it's poisonous to lungs, which adds whole new costs to its extraction and handling). But it's also the 28th most abundant element in the Earth's crust (so "rare earths" isn't what you might think). It's even difficult to separate from its own raw form, let alone reclaiming it - and there's probably more in your spleen now than in a TV sent to recycling.
Recycling a material only makes sense when you can do so repeatedly (otherwise you end up making more and more concentrated rubbish), consistently and more cheaply than getting the original source. And all the things we routinely recycle we can do because of VOLUME. We dispose of millions of tons of paper or glass or plastic every year, and though it's not perfect or saleable in that form we dispose it, it takes little to make it so (in fact, collection is probably the greatest expense because of the volume it's available in).
Rare earth recycling is pretty much pointless until it becomes, quite literally, like gold-dust. It has to be worth enough that someone just grabbing a couple of motherboards or old TV's off a scrapheap would be paid enough for their efforts through a resale price that makes it worthwhile. You can literally make a living scouring gold and platinum and even iron from junk and selling it on in volume. Doing so with rare earths is CENTURIES away, for even the rarest.
I looked at the cinema listings near me the other week.
Every movie had a sequel number/name in it, and most were around the 4th or more in the franchise. I could not find one that was NOT a sequel in some fashion, and all were sequels to things that had no precedent (i.e. it wasn't like they were the movie of the second book in the series, but were just completely fabricated sequels to only the popular first-runs in order to cash in on the name - I'm honestly waiting for Avatar 2 to appear before I shoot myself).
And then people wonder why I haven't been to see a movie in, literally, YEARS.
I'm a mad Tolkien fan. I couldn't stand more than half-way through the first movie, and splitting The Hobbit into three movies? I read it yesterday evening in one sitting.
My girlfriend is Italian and LOVES UK cinema - but not the stuff we ever show in the UK, which is only ever the US "blockbuster" movies. Literally, she can name English directors for the most obscure movies that have some of our best actors and we have NEVER seen them playing at any cinema anywhere. There are niche cinemas, in central London, that show the sort of things she's referring to but NOBODY goes to watch them, and nobody even knows where to find them.
If it's not fourth-in-the-franchise, big-name film with trailers, special effects, 3D and famous-actor-who-can't-act in it, it's not shown, not on DVD and nobody ever sees it.
I'm not a huge "niche" movie fan, but I've watched and enjoyed more on the obscure channels and late-night "arty" movies than anything I've seen even listed at a cinema in over a decade.
Sure, we all love a bit of Aliens or some mindless comedy pap every now and then, but honestly the cinemas now are babysitters for infants. "Cars 2", "Toy Story 3", "Shrek 4" - and, because not all infants are children - "The Expendables 2", "Iron Man 3", "Men in Black 3", etc.
I have not been to the cinema (except out of sheer boredom or to accompany friends, but not to actually SEE something that I wanted to see or enjoyed seeing) since, what, 2005-ish because my girlfriend-at-the-time wanted to go out somewhere (and IIRC we both walked out before the opening credits had even finished, after paying for the movie, popcorn, drinks, etc.)?
The problem is that in my country, Hollywood own the cinemas, and the rest is given a bad rep "It doesn't have a famous actor as the main star?", "There's no 'feel-good' ending?", "It has subtitles?", "It's an indie production so it has to be like The Blair Witch Project (shiver)".
Best films I've watched in the last few weeks? Perfect Sense - Ewan McGregor in a love-story where people around the world start to lose their senses (smell, taste, hearing, then vision - a bit like a mini-Day of The Triffids). It wasn't the best thing I've ever watched but certainly better than all the Christmas-shite and big-name re-runs for Christmas on TV and in the cinema.
I also showed my girlfriend "Mrs Brown" (Judi Dench and Billy Connolly playing Queen Victoria and Mr Brown - one of the best bits of serious acting I've seen from a comedian, but his latest attempt at replicating that success with the newly-released Quartet? - I'm not convinced it will be any good).
What do both have in common? No special effects. No HD. No 3D. No modernised-to-the-point-of-stretching-credulity plots (seems to be the thing now to insert modern-era jokes into historical movies to make them "funny" at points). Just some skilled people, in front of a camera, trying their best to make you believe they are someone else and the things they do are really happening to them.
There's a difference between "entertaining" and "enthralling / enrapturing". One is what you do to babies, with magic tricks and twinkly things, to keep them occupied and their minds off the things you don't want them doing (like remembering how much that fecking cinema ticket and popcorn cost!), the other is to make someone live another person's life through a perfect setting, convincing acti
A MacBook you sit literally inches away from during normal use.
A TV you sit literally feet from during normal use.
Thus the TV never has to have more than approximately 1/12th of the resolution of a laptop display for you to not even spot the difference.
4K is just a step up on the HD-scam, which you won't be able to detect without a HUGE TV or by watching it from a completely unnatural position.
Hell, SVGA monitors were doing HD resolution back in the 90's, and I used to watch TV on a card in my PC because it was a FABULOUS image on them compared to a TV (and that was from a standard SD signal and some nice deinterlacing). It's taken 20 years to catch up and get to the point where a 32" screen can do the same.
The fact is, though, is that I was literally able to see individual pixels (running Windows 3.1, you could actually see every pixel on a window edge, for example) from the distance I sat at when I was doing fine work that needed the resolution (e.g. DTP, etc.) and usually had to sit back in order to actually appreciate the display in its entirety, where I lost that view of individual pixels (and, when watching TV on it, I usually did it from the other side of the room).
If you get close enough to and squint at anything, you can see fine detail. From the other side of the room, not so much. Or else houses with wallpaper would form a kind of OCD in people and they'd need it to be perfectly printed, aligned and defined.
Fact is, a 4K image printed at 600dpi (like the cheapest lasers have been doing for - what - 20 years also?) is 6 and 2/3rds inches long. Personally, I've never been able to distinguish between 300dpi and 600dpi without a magnifier of some kind (and have used 2400dpi printers and scanners - in fact, my usual setup is to set everything to 300dpi toner-save, with 100dpi for scanners and faxes, and NOBODY complains even for presentation work). At 300 dpi? That's barely a 14" image. What you're claiming is that if you look at an A3 piece of paper printed full-colour at 300 dpi, you'll see the whole image AND nearly every dot at the same time, and that if it was printed at 290dpi you'd notice it looking worse. Rubbish.
Now, even adding some extra width to the pixels for movement, colour, etc., you're still in the bounds of a TV-size from paper-reading distances. And you don't watch TV from paper-reading distances.
Please stop buying crap. The world might be running to retina displays (but, to be honest, I work in IT and have never seen one and know nobody who has one) but if they are it's because of ignorance. 20 years ago, people were buying "2400dpi scanners" which were really just 300dpi scanners that interpolated. And nobody noticed, because they just assumed it was true, and were happy to pay for the number. While the rest of us locked them into 100dpi modes and everyone said how wonderfully they scanned and that they didn't have trouble emailing 1Mb scans around like their "other" scanner which generated 500Mb scans or larger.
"single C file".
Yeah. Real-world example.
Now make me one that compiles thirty+ files in subdirectories, links into something like GTK libraries, support multiple targets (one static and non-debug, say, and the other dynamic and debug), checks dependencies, compiles only unchanged objects, can be updated simply when a new file is added, etc.
Sure, it can be done. But it's learning another language, not a simple, intuitive tool. I would posit that the C preprocessor is easy to learn than an everyday Makefile, and that's just the wrong way round. Just what precisely is in the way of just dropping a bunch of files in a folder, running make and having it compile them all to object, link those objects and run off to find dependencies properly? Because it doesn't happen, and it could. And if GNU Make was so good, CMake and SCons wouldn't exist. Both are, it has to be said, equally bad too.
GNU Make is exactly the tool I'm referring to as horrendous and atrocious. Honestly, tab-stops that break files in the 21st century...
I started with a Hotmail account pre-2000, probably pre-1995 (don't know exactly, but long before I was in uni). Since then it has been an MSN account (where I started using Messenger), a Live account, a Microsoft account, and now it's taking over my Skype. Hell, even Windows 8 wanted me to log in using it and I refused - I haven't actually USED that account in YEARS.
The problem I'm more worried about (rather than the bi-annual "upgrade your account to new account X" problem) is what about third-party clients? I have Pidgin plugged in with my messenger details, and presume that will stop. Honestly, that just means I'll stop using messenger and won't even notice - I still have plenty of alternatives and slowly ditched things in the past as they stopped letting me use them from third-party clients (I still have ICQ, AOL, MSN, YIM, Jabber, and even Facebook messengers plugged into my Pidgin).
Fact is, I don't really care about running "your" software, just your backend service - and it's just not vital enough that I'd care. MS, in particular, has had a bad history with me and their client software - it's been pretty atrocious at points over the years and taking several backward steps (I can't remember the last time I successfully did a messenger file transfer, the various takeovers meant it got more and more plastered with adverts, etc. and video-over-MSN was always a joke in comparison).
Steam also wants me to message my friends that way - er, no - because it's just a sub-standard chat client that I have a bucket of and numerous alternatives with more features that don't need me and my friends to be running Steam all the time to use them. Like Skype, I won't have it running "just in case" someone wants to talk to me, and hence they won't use it as much either (if Skype offered a proper API that other programs could use, Pidgin etc. would jump on it).
Skype is probably MS's biggest online asset at the moment. It's really quite a powerful tool and I was half expecting it to go the other way (e.g. Skype functionality appearing only in Messenger and Windows, etc.). I now honestly give it a handful of months before I abandon it except to keep the account live. And that really means that Skype will surge as everyone does this "upgrade" and then die when people learn how atrocious the client is again.
Granted, I'm a freeloader - I've never paid Skype a penny or any of the MSN/Live/Microsoft etc. services. But the fact is that I haven't run an "official" client in nearly a decade now, and the bit that messenger does can be done on any number of third-party clients. Messing with that just means I move on to something else - hell, I even have my own domain's Jabber setup ready to roll if it comes to it. It's even loaded into my Pidgin and anyone can use it for free.
I don't see what they seek to achieve, to be honest. I won't suddenly start using MS services that I haven't used in a decade (the IM client kept the account open nicely, though). I won't suddenly start using MS features through Skype. And I won't tolerate Skype being broken by MS upgrades without just moving on or sacrificing its functionality entirely. And they won't "save" anything by merging accounts because they still can't shut down in China, they still have to track all those accounts, they still have to pay for separate authentication mechanisms in the various software for years to come, etc.
Kill messenger. Not much will happen, but - as pointed out - people will be a bit more wary about what they sign up for in the future. Like the Google accounts lately that have had features taken from them, etc. - we'll just move on as soon as something affects us personally.
It would be sad to see my ancient Hotmail/MSN account go, if for no other reason that I'm impressed it's still running (I never check it and only get spam and the last "proper" email in it was from 2005, I think, before I moved them all out when they started to cut out Outlook Express integration with it - which was the only free way
To answer both above questions, I'm using C as an example. Almost all modern languages (including anything in .NET, even the more modern Visual Basics, Java, etc.) suffer from the same problems.
Python would also be included on my list. Hell, the programs I see written in python often bundle their own runtime copy of the entire Python interpreter when distributed because there's no way to guarantee what the end-user has and your program just might not work unless they have the right version. It's not as easy to setup a nice Python development environment as you make out.
Google Python, end up on download page with about 30 downloads on it (all of which are python and the "official, latest, stable" one of which is half-way down the page), if you pick the "nice" MSI it installs into the root of C:\ (come on, this is looking like MinGW installation already! If I move it, do I get a ton of path issues like MinGW too?). That gives me IDLE (apparently the "Python GUI" according to the icon it creates, in preference to the "CLI" icon it also creates), which leaves me at a >>> prompt in the Python Shell and where even typing "help" has been programmed to be unhelpful (it ONLY tells you to type help() - nice waste of a few lines of code there!). How do I save the program, distribute it, etc.? Sure, you can work it out or follow a tutorial if you NEED to learn but if you just WANT to learn, there's no hint, nothing. Your shining example, Python, leaves me at a shell prompt. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. That was acceptable in the 80's when every byte counted and the instruction manuals were printed with every copy, but not any more.
Imagine you want to load in a Python program you've been given, how do you go about it, what do you do, will it run (I guarantee you that it's not a definite yes, because I've had python programs in the past that crashed when another python interpreter of a different breed / version was present and stealing file associations - I've seen Python messes that rival Cygwin multi-installations for issues). And that's before we even get into things like, say, installing a third-party Python library to integrate with.
And Java suffers similar problems. Hell, just the whole JDK/JRE and classpath installation issues are enough to blow a lot of beginner's minds.
Some people really don't know what it's like to try to be a self-taught programmer these days. You will spend more time learning the tools than the language, and that's NOT how it used to be. I can't ever remember having to look up something back in the BASIC days that was due to how I'd installed the environment. Again, I don't use BASIC as a shining beacon of perfection, just a particular example to highlight things.
Just because people want to be programmers doesn't mean we should forgo user-friendliness in their tools. And simple things, like decent GUI's that don't just run CLI tools with horrendously strict syntaxes and obscure errors, should be present.
What the article is hinting at is that programming should be like office applications. Open the program, open a project or create a new one, get left at the point where you can just type in a program, then "save" or "compile" it and give the end result to either another programmer (if you saved) or a random end-user (if you compiled) and have things work. This isn't about dumbing down programming itself (which is dangerous) but making the programming IDE's as nice to use as Word or Excel. I don't claim to know a thing about advanced Excel functionality, but I can damn well open a spreadsheet someone else has made and not run into non-programming problems with it no matter how complex it is.
I have to agree. I've always said that 50% of modern programming is having the right tools, and the right tools configured correctly.
Introduce someone to C. Now explain that even though C is standardised, there's no "standard" way to compile a C program, to port a Makefile, to have a program compile the same everywhere without manual work ensuring so, or even to start debugging. And then show then a Visual C++ project file and tell them they have to manage it and make sure it works even if their primary platform isn't Visual C++.
It can get horrendous. Sure, most Linux installs come with gcc set up and you can compile a basic C file and get a basic executable (called a.out with NO OUTPUT to tell you that, for stupid historical reasons, which still blows my mind), but anything beyond that and you're learning the tools more than the language.
I personally have a deep-set hatred of Makefiles. I honestly can't stand them as a programmer and avoid them like the plague. I get the C preprocessor inside-out and can fancy macro tricks that amaze even me, but I can't be bothered with Makefiles and their separate, unrelated, horrendous syntax. But as a user, they are great when I just want to make a simple change and then recompile without fussing about where my compiler path is, etc. All their alternatives? I have the same problem, but at least plain Makefiles work the same everywhere if they are well-written.
Even IDE's only mask those same details and thus cause more problems. Standard debugging of a problem for a beginner is to google the error messages from the compiler / linker because it really is that atrocious to try to understand what they actually mean.
I have a large C project on the go at the moment. It's several dozen code and header files and the same again in associated resources, etc. It took me an hour to work out how to stop it uploading the resource files to the SVN repository and even now I can break it when I add a new resource file without meaning to. It's a nightmare that only compiles because the IDE generates a hidden makefile, runs it through MinGW's make tools and then runs MinGW's gcc to get it to compile / link. I gave up about the five-object-file mark of trying to compile it myself but in other projects with other people's code, I've literally deleted the Makefile and wrote a bash script to do the job instead, they were that horrendous to understand.
Debugging is also a major bugbear. I know how to load a file into gdb, set a breakpoint, execute it and inspect variable values. Manually. And that's it. I don't even know what half the commands on the menus are supposed to be used for or the correct syntax to make them work and it's not like I haven't tried. Debugging is best done through an IDE that does it for you (still using gdb) and even then the tool doesn't get everything right (I often get out-of-sync line numbers when single-stepping through a program in Eclipse).
I have taught beginners programming since I was a teenager, and it's only got harder. If I was to write a book on, say, C now, I would feel obliged to supply a disk and include a chapter on how to find the compiler setup program, how to install it, etc. so that I could be consistent throughout the book knowing they were using the same tools and the same versions so I could show them how to debug, etc. Just saying "compile this hello world" can be a book in itself, depending on their background, experience, and computer setup.
I frequent a C programming board and most of the problems I see are people using obsolete tools (e.g. Turbo C presumably because it's "free" and their instructors were trained on it), or no tools at all (i.e. no capability to debug, manually typing in compile-lines, etc.).
The next most common set of problems is not understanding how to use those tools or interpret their errors ("_main is undefined", etc.). The next set is not understanding how to write something that doesn't give a compile warning/error (usually because they've star
Personally, I never have been a "gamer" from that sort of perspective, and yet since the days of DOS I was playing top titles within a year or so of their release. Hell, I played Quake on a min-spec Pentium with a Voodoo card within days of release and that was the first ever game to actually MAKE people into "gamers" to buy an upgrade card that serves no further purpose than to play games faster (back then, it was necessary, though unless you wanted flickbook framerates).
The problem with PC gaming is not the hardware, but the mentality. "I have to have 120fps on everything, in HD, with all the options turned on and all the latest kit to show off" - there isn't a console in the world that actually does the equivalent, and if there was it would cost a fortune or slow to a crawl and gamers would hardly notice the difference otherwise.
I have a laptop now - technically nowhere close to a gamer's laptop but it has nVidia Optimus graphics. It cost not much more than just about any of the current consoles has ever cost on release day. I can't find a game on my Steam list that it doesn't play. And from the current AAA-titles? Well, in a year's time when they are sensible prices I will buy them and try them and most of them will work just fine (if 9 years of Steam gaming is anything to go by, and years more of Counterstrike play before that) but I might have to turn down an option or two.
PC gaming isn't about upgrading every two seconds. Being a "gamer" is. I can name every upgrade I've ever done to every PC I've ever personally owned, and most of the time that was a one-time, never-to-be-repeated upgrade that doubled the performance for much much less than the price of an equivalent replacement (if you upgrade a machine, it's likely that it's to hit some bottleneck which costs more than the machine is worth to upgrade further). I have never upgraded a motherboard, or a CPU, in my own machines in all the time I've owned a PC precisely because the upgrades, and their associated prerequisite upgrades, were never worth it.
And I've probably personally owned about 3 desktops and 4-5 laptops in all my time playing, so I certainly get some use out of them (and, to be honest, the laptops die by physical breakage on the hinges more than obsolescence and I still have an IBM Thinkpad with a 90MHz processor that's going strong). And I do think of myself as a gamer, in terms of the amount of time I spend playing and the amount of money I spend each year on games, but not a "gamer" in terms of spending money on constant upgrades for my computers.
I actually have, upstairs, an MSI gaming laptop that was bought as my last work laptop three years ago (my employer buys whatever I specify, and I specified nVidia graphics for various reasons and ended up with a gaming laptop that was vastly overpowered and half-the-cost of an equivalent business model). The screen hinge is shattered and it's being used as separate LCD / keyboard parts (blue-takked to the wall and the worktop appropriately). And it *still* laughs at 99% of the games on my Steam account after all that time. And that's a laptop, which can't really be upgraded at all (about the only thing I could do to it is increase the RAM but it's on a 32-bit OS and already at 4Gb, or change the HDD, but that's really not a bottleneck in anything I do on it).
Gone are the days where you have to have the latest bus that nobody else has got, with a massively overpowered card that churns through power, whirrs like mad, and sets the motherboard on fire, and some huge CPU and memory that's unheard of in anything else but video-editing, and some stupidly over-powered PSU to run it all, just to play a 3D game. Hell, a half-decent laptop laughs at anything for at least 3-4 years so long as you're not hoping for 120fps in stereo 3D at the highest resolution supported on the HDMI out, on full detail while encoding Blu-Ray's in the background.
And, to be honest, in all my time, I've never had a laptop that didn't break BEFORE it became obsolete (usu
There are countries in the world where the side of the road that was driven on was changed overnight. Literally. I'm sure the US can manage to use those measurements that ALL their children understand (ask a teenager how many chains in a furlong?) in duality with the measurements that hardly anyone understands the origin of any more, and keep the duality until there's nobody really left to object.
And when you're the only country left in the world, and all the auto manufacturers ADD costs to your cars to show imperial speeds, etc. because it costs them to add such functionality for just one country (and in firmware, now, not just a piece of paper - sure, it's pence but do you think they'll only add pence when the US is the ONLY customer that requires it?) and where you can't even do things like compare racing records with others sensibly (I doubt that even today they measure speed records in mph primarily, but maybe only convert from the instrument's native measure for those who want to know).
There's nothing particularly special about the US - the UK uses imperial measures too (and just to make it more fun, ours differ quite a bit in some areas and use the same "names" for the units...) and has mph on its signposts.
But you could easily put km/h measures underneath in tiny writing for this generation, and the uproar would be minimal (the UK is already considering this because we're really the only ones in Europe to use mph and you *can* go from mainland Europe to the UK without getting out of your car in under 30 minutes, have to change sides of the road and remember that the signs are now in a different unit, and thus there's a big "this will stop accidental speeding"-style incentive to mark km/h on UK signs too).
Then the next generation, you get them to have cars that have km/h as the larger measurement on the instrumentation dial (like most cars in the world have) even if they still mark mph or have an option on digital dials to show it. Then you get to the point where it makes more sense to make the km/h the big figure on signposts. Then mph can disappear without a whimper from people after only a few years.
And not doing it overnight is simply a matter of not wanting to cause uproar. You could do it in two generations without anyone noticing beyond "Oh, yeah, I remember when....". You could do it in a generation easily, without too much fuss. You could do it in a decade if you told people it would make their cars cheaper and reduce expenditure on fancy new equipment (like automated speed cameras, driverless car tech, etc.). You could do it in a term of office if you REALLY wanted to.
All you really need is a person close to the higher echelons of government who would stand to make money by replacing all the road signs. And, let's be honest, that's going to be someone eventually.
If you were right, it would be as big a change as imperial to metric anyway, and as different from imperial as metric is. Why?
Feet in a yard (3), division of an inch (usually 16ths or 32nds), square yards in an acre (403 and a third), ounces in a gallon (160), pounds in a ton (186 and a third).
Imperial is a MESS of units that have little or no common factors whatsoever, and some of them aren't even used anymore but only exist to make OTHER things nice numbers (1 acre = 1 furlong x 1 chain, etc.). There are 8's, 12's, 16's and, yes, 10's in there if you go to esoteric enough imperial measurements (10 chains in a furlong, for example).
The thing about metric? Everything is a power of 10 in some fashion except where there is no sensible fraction you can use (e.g. units based on universal constants).
Like everything, nobody is really arguing that 12 is more easily factorable. What we saying is that 12 has NOTHING special to do with imperial measurements at all. And that's the problem. Propose a metric alternative based on 12 and there would be some people who would back it. But nobody has seriously suggested that as an option, well, ever.
I find that anyone that mixes NAT and IPv6 problems usually doesn't administer their own networks.
NAT saves a lot of administration for a small business or home network. You have ONE outside address, and all your Internet traffic goes through ONE machine. That ONE address is unmistakably external, can have several thousand services running over it, and can be your external address for everything all at once. As an admin, you only need to know that one address (or corresponding DNS alias), and you can be fairly sure when setting up your firewalls etc. that you know what's coming in / out, from / to where.
And then all your internal client machines? Well, their numbering is by definition none of anybody else's business, not even your ISP. It absolutely, 100% does not matter. I could be running them over token-ring and IPX for all anyone outside cares, so it honestly does not make any difference whatsoever to anyone else. And 99.99999% of networks will never, ever, ever exhaust the reserved internal ranges of IPv4, so it's easier to keep it simple internally, not have to make ANY internal changes, and have one single machine visible to the outside world handling all the "complex" stuff and horrendous addresses that are a pain to memorise, type, tell others, trace through logs with grep, etc. And if (when) the time comes that IPv4 is unsupported on a machine? You assign the gateway an internal IPv6 address, add a DHCPv6 range, and viola - it all works 100% again.
The trick to most small business network administration is to simplify changes down to their smallest possible set so as to have the least impact. You use your brain to do less work without compromising elsewhere. And using IPv4 internal and NAT'ing that to "whatever" is external is the easiest way to do that without having to risk leaving holes in your configuration for a while to come.
I don't WANT direct-accessibility to internal network ranges, that's why NAT has always been a viable option because it prevents that and that's what I WANT to do anyway. Yes, a firewall is capable of intercepting anything anyway, if I really want to, but having things go through a single machine that sanitises traffic and discards any attempt to communicate directly to machines that may not have the protection they should (e.g. random public devices on an internal Wifi connection offered as a convenience to guests). Instead of administering hundreds of individual machines and their software firewalls, plus an expensive IPv6-capable router at the border with thousands of rules in order to secure the machines, you can just NAT the whole network and secure that one external router/gateway machine to block things that were unsolicited or shouldn't be getting through to any machine.
And, given that most people would have to deploy a non-trivial configuration where they DON'T just pass external traffic direct to internal machines (whether by NAT'ing or by a complicated firewall configuration), people who complain about NAT are complaining about something that will NEVER affect them - a total side-issue that concerns almost no-one.
My networks are IPv6 compatible already. 100%. You can put an IPv6-capable host into it, get an address, and talk to all internal services and externally. You can also access remotely by IPv6, and even access IPv6 websites from an internal IPv4 client that has no support for it. It's literally a handful of lines in your existing configurations. And we have external servers with IPv6 addresses. Nobody uses them but they are there, and work.
The fact is that the entire NAT thing is a diversion to make us think we have to do entire network overhauls and upgrades to make this new-fangled thing work. It's just not true. I will no more allow internal clients to send out on SMTP ports or allow external hosts to access, well anyway internal, over IPv6 than I would over IPv4. It's just a diversion.
And a nice diversion from those sites, like Slashdot, that posts an IPv6 article about once a month
And your prof was right - the user can still be stupid and you, as a programmer in this instance, should have worked to ensure that the user COULDN'T do anything bad by being (deliberately or not) stupid.
Take, for instance, things like this were a result from an experiment erroneously kicks out -0.000001 K and you allow it into your program to wreak havoc with your assumption (e.g. if you were storing it in unsigned at any point, or dividing by it assuming it was always >0 K).
Or the user hits the minus key by accident. Or the user entered in Celsius rather than Kelvin. Or any one of a million and one ways that it could have gone wrong for you.
Or you could have added a single "if", a single line of code, not lost marks and NOT have allowed that scenario to ever have happened without needed to audit the entire program to see if a negative value would have affected anything.
There are six billion people in this world.
A recruiter who Googles you expecting to find, well, you is a recruiter you don't want to work for.
A recruiter who FINDS you, specifically and undeniably you, will still find you and the things you've advertised to the world online anyway. And that's just about work-life separation.
But the person who thinks that people are Googling them and that's affecting their job prospects (without, I imagine, a shred of evidence because it's likely illegal under employment law anyway without due notice to the application and verification that it's actually them - no worse than hearsay from a stranger), and PAYS to improve the results on her name (and the other 10,000 people with that name)? I wouldn't touch her with a bargepole. What do you have to hide?
I think you don't keep up.
There are already motherboards in the wild with "UEFI" that refuse to boot any entry on a boot menu that's not labelled "MS Windows" or "Red Hat Linux", for instance. There was a Slashdot article just a few weeks ago about exactly that.
BIOS-writers are the laziest, most terrible of programmers when it comes to user-functionality and if they can shortcut things to work only for Windows and save themselves some effort, they always have and always will do so. Maybe not all of them, maybe not forever, but enough that it becomes a problem.
I had a BIOS in a brand-new model of laptop only the other week that checks a sector on the disk for zero - one that's only zero if you use Windows partitions, NTFS and a clean format. If you encrypt the disk, or install Linux or just happen to have odd partitions the machine REFUSES TO BOOT. It took the threat of removal of several huge accounts from a major supplier, that supplier chasing it up to not lose custom on other products and TWO MONTHS before we got a BIOS fix given to us with "WARNING: Internal code only - do not use in production" splattered all over it. Admittedly it fixed the problem, but that's hardly reassuring.
And though these particular machines were from a no-name motherboard manufacturer, they have AMI BIOS, and HP/Dell BIOS's are the other major casualty of this particular bug that's UNFIXABLE without a co-operative motherboard BIOS writer.
If I have to rely on a BIOS manufacturer to give me functionality on my computer back, I *cannot* rely on it working without testing every single unit that passes through IT as I open the boxes. And I guarantee you that trying to find a new model that allows arbitrary UEFI boot will see me reject 5-10% of models before I even start.
To quote a very old British Telecom advert: "People will always need plates".
To suggest that automation is the end of the line for human input is ridiculous. If anything, there are MORE jobs per person now than there ever have been. In fact, the US makes a substantial proportion of its GDP from products made from within prison walls - which tells you a lot about manual labour, and why the US likes to lock people up more than just about any country in the world.
The jobs will change, of course, but when the horse-drawn taxicabs of London were replaced with the internal combustion engine, there were less stable-boys but a lot more drivers, cleaners, repairers, tool-makers etc. to go with that.
And, because of the way tax and the human mind works, the government will create a job for you or secure your job against automation for a LONG time yet. They don't want you out-of-work, or bored because robots are doing everything for you leaving you to "play" all day long.
If I was to call out the names of all the people - actual people - involved in the production, billing, delivery, installation and maintenance of even a simple office, I'd still be here tomorrow. That *wasn't* true a hundred years ago or longer.
The more we create things, the more people are needed to design them, litigate them, design the machines that produce them, assemble and operate and maintain and supervise the machines that use them, provide quality control, testing, fill out the paperwork, manage the orders, ship out the product, deliver it, assemble it, install it, train people on it, handle complaints from it, etc.
If anything, we'll hit a point where we *have* to automate because there are too many humans in the loop and that means we can't do things fast enough, and we'll be hindered - not by the unions and the unemployed - but by the number of employed. Hell, it's already nearly impossible to deliver a parcel during the day any more - the stay-at-home mother is no longer prevalant in society, and now schools even have to provide day-care and evening-care for families who have to go to work (which means more people work in those schools, too!).
An unemployed person is likely to get rarer long before it becomes the norm. It's hovering at around 4% in the UK at the moment, which is a fairly ordinary, stable country. That's nowhere *near* the highest and not far from the lowest it's ever been.
And no matter what gadget comes along, until we have complete independence on earning money because of the facilities available to all (when unemployment will no longer matter, anyway), there will always be someone needed to design it, build it, ship it, clean it, or even just test it. And most jobs in the world are actually "menial" jobs that require no skill (hell, that's one of the prime reasons that people come off benefits in my country - they say the jobs they are FORCED to go into after X amount of time on state benefits are too menial given their qualifications).
For every computer putting a man out of a job, that computer generates 5-10 jobs elsewhere, even if it's only the guy who cleans it and the guy who sells him the special cleaner to do that job with.
Like anything - if someone does the hard work, and it's supported enough, and it doesn't break OTHER architectures, there's no reason why not.
It just seems that m68k (and other projects along the same lines) have people willing to do all that work, whereas the 386 architecture doesn't (yet?).
This is the thing I actually quite like about Linux. MCA support? Few used it, fewer wanted it enough to do the so, so bye-bye. But other buses? They are still around. Applies to buses, architectures, drivers, features, even "helper code" of one type or another.
If someone's willing to put in the back-breaking to get it up to standard, there's no reason to NOT let it in. Unfortunately, that standard has to be high for a number of reasons (e.g. legal obligations like licensing, coding quality, support, ongoing maintenance etc.). And for some, it's so high it doesn't justify the work.
Linux is a meritocracy, like more open-source code. If there's a reason to do so, and it's done well, it happens. If not, it doesn't. If only parts of law and government were like that.
"Guess what? Grandma's computer is sending out spam in the background as fast as her system and connection limits will allow."
Then your connection limits are inadequate, you should secure the SMTP servers that you provide on whitelisted ranges (i.e. grandma's connection should NEVER be able to send direct SMTP to random servers without a minimum of a secure connection, which almost all UK ISP's enforce, for instance, and require you to use THEIR authenticated, secured outbound mail servers if you want to send ANYTHING).
Once secured, you know exactly who, when and how many emails they are sending (which you should know anyway). Seriously, anything over a couple of emails a minute is almost certainly spam, but at the ISP you can tune that as necessary (and even delay the sending of them until the user has manually verified - by some tool - that they were intending to send them). If you're failing to monitor and block that YOURSELF, as an ISP, then that's exactly why you're being blacklisted by an external entity (who aren't going to do it for a single email, for instance).
And things like Google Mail can "blacklist" you for a little while for just a handful of bad attempts on their SMTP servers, for instance (just ran into it the other day forwarding emails between domains during some mailserver downtime).
The alternative to that? Buy a server on a public IP range. It costs peanuts, because you only need the most basic of VPS's from the cheapest of hosts with a rack in a local datacenter. And, guess what, if you spam from them too - accidentally or not - you'll get your account shutdown pretty damn quick. Because *THEY* also monitor what you're doing and act on reports because they don't want their IP ranges blacklisted either. They KNOW how many emails you sent to how many domains and exactly what customer sent them, I guarantee you.
This isn't a question of someone oppressing you. This is a question of poor system administration. Hell, some ISP's will block you for attempting to send packets over port 139 - because it's a clear sign of an insecure network or poor configuration. And any half-decent ISP has measures to control that. My previous ISP would intercept your web traffic for a few minutes afterwards unless you signed a form saying you KNEW that's what you were doing - worded so that you would be responsible for that incredibly stupid decision of yours enough to scare everyone off, and with a list of instructions that stopped it happening for any of their customers (The NAT device they supplied had a default to NOT let port 139 traffic out, etc.).
If you're allowing your IP ranges to be abused, expect them to crop up on lists of IP ranges that can / are being abused. Then don't be surprised when other, more responsible, system administrators decide to use those lists to block obvious spam.
And, yes, as an ISP, letting a residential customer send out lots of email direct to SMTP server could be considered abuse after just a few emails or a handful of complaints/reports to their postmaster. For a business, it's slightly more usual for things like that to happen but you'll still be held accountable and businesses tend to be more secure than your average granny.
Fact is, if you provide a facility that allows abuse, you'll find yourself on lists of facilities that allow abuse. And all of the consequences that come from that fact.
Connected fine from Italy and the UK over the past few days, and haven't lost an connection on Steam... well, ever. Connected at this moment, in fact.
Either this is a localised problem or - as usual - some sheer capacity issue for the half-hour that everyone in the US logs on and then not again.
Steam has a HUGE amount of players online (5m at my last check a few minutes ago) on hundreds of servers worldwide, and I'd think we'd notice 5m people just dropping offline, or all the servers not working, and people complaining about THAT in the forums. Fact is, it's a blip, if anything. And probably a local blip at that.
I'd guess, living in a non-gun-owning country, that actually the opposite is true. A readily-available, anonymously acquired, deadly weapon is a valuable asset.
Wait for the householder to leave (it's EASY to know if a house is empty of not if you actually bother to watch it for a day or so - and in the worst case, the balls to knock on the front door first to see if anyone answers), then break in, knowing there is definitely a weapon (that probably won't be linked to the burglar) on the premises that - almost certainly - is available to anyone who has a pair of bolt-cutters and a couple of minutes to look for it (I'd go for within reach of the bed, personally).
Said weapon will have less link to a burglar than anything they can buy, carries less risk than buying illegal weapons from unknowns (turning up with a bunch of cash to buy an unregistered gun sounds like the ideal way to leave without your cash OR your life), and almost certainly has enough value (along with the belongings in the house) to justify the initial break-in.
It's like having a map of everyone who has a particularly valuable asset registered to their house, except that normally you would never know if there was a weapon there or not without this sort of mapping. And you can't revoke a weapon, or put out an APB on it, or stop it being used for its purpose before its disposed of quite hastily (unlike with other valuable assets that might be public knowledge to your neighbours, etc.)
Also: Any arms-race is a never-ending game of oneupmanship. You can say "nobody will break in because I have a gun", but all it really means is "anyone who breaks in won't risk coming without at least an automatic weapon or an armed accomplice". And in some neighbourhoods, such things are already true because the arms-race has escalated to the point that EVERYONE has a gun already.
You can't win an arms-race. You can merely not fall behind for too long.
"git pull".
Learn it.
I'd say:
Because, from what I've seen, in certain field, publishing on arXiv is like handing a note "from your mother" written in your own scrawly handwriting and signed "Mom" to your teacher.
It tends to get a bad rap and it's almost impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff precisely BECAUSE it's an open-access site. And absolute tripe can get there and get positive feedback without any rigorous verification at all.
From what I see, if you want to stay reputable and not just "pass", you have to publish properly or not at all. And even that's not a guarantee.
Think of the publishing industry. A self-published ebook is highly unlikely to sell millions of copies and be on the bookshelves for Christmas. It can happen. It has happened. But if you go to a literary agent and tell them you're self-published, or have previously published your book under an open-source license, they'll laugh you out of the room and not want to touch you. In some cases, people who have self-published 20 copies of their own "book" without any editing and failing every submission they've ever done and being rejected by every agent in the land will tell you they are a "published author" while everyone else snickers behind their back. Academic reputation is dealt in pretty much the same way.
Science is open. Research is open. Publishing is open. But your reputation (and thus talks, jobs, further research, etc.) is predicated on being in properly peer-reviewed journals.
Granted, to catch bad fakes and casual deception, this probably works
But what's stopping someone now knowing this, and supplanting their own "hum" back into the right place from any recording make anywhere during the time they want to "pretend" to be recording in?
What's actually stopping them ripping out the hum entirely and replacing it with the hum of any arbitrary period of time? If it's in every recording, and you can spot it in, say, CCTV recordings (that use quite primitive recording equipment and compression methods), then it's also incredibly easy to detect and "fake" yourself.
Also, I don't believe it's as reliable as they make out. We'll find out as more cases use it and it will have to be challenged at some point but even speed-cameras that weren't entirely accurate got a lot of people in trouble and then had to be rescinded years later.
And, totally off-topic, it reminds me of my German teacher in school (I'm English, and we were taught German as an optional foreign language). He basically begged me to take his class instead of Double Science, many moons ago, and even called me a "rat" at a parent's evening in front of my dad when I said I wasn't going to study German any more. Turns out he was kinda hoping I'd take German so he could up the average result a bit.
Two years later, he was sacked because the audio recordings of oral work that he sent off for the final exam had "clicks" on the tape (yes, tape!) in between every question where he'd obviously paused it and briefed the children on the right answer.
Wonder how they submit oral coursework now, with MP3's and things? It would be the work of a second to get a perfectly smooth recording of the same thing happening nowadays.
Commercial "3D printing" has existed forever, or at least the equivalent ("here's the money, here's the model, make me X number of them"). What technology is used to do it is really quite inconsequential - current 3D printing really doesn't add any value to the process beyond more conventional techniques.
The attractive feature of actual 3D printing is that people can do it themselves. Buy a bag of nylon, load it into the machine, press out all the little play-figures you want from designs pulled from the Internet. Do it properly and, within a few years and instead loading 4 packs of nylon, you could even have them pre-coloured.
You could then literally destroy the toy-making (Lego!), Christmas-ornament-making, sculpture, board-games and other industries overnight if you wanted. That's the *interesting* bit about 3D printing. For years I've been able to supply a company a 3D model and have them make it in whatever materials and even paint it for me. That's never been a problem. Cost has, and the available skill and equipment (like this article - the equipment is specialist and unlikely to be able to be operated by an ordinary person with no training), but not the actual making a model of anything you can design on a computer.
Home 3D printing will drastically reduce the cost of such things, though, drastically reduce the cost of plastic items of all kinds (e.g. board games, role-playing games, Christmas cracker trinkets, even casing for embedded boards, etc.).
And like with 2D printing and 2D scanning, we could all end up with a device in the back-bedroom and just "knock up" a quick copy of, say, a key, or a toy for the kids, or a cup.
The interesting part isn't massive machines in commercial use, it's tiny machines in home use. 50 years ago nobody had a computer, now we all have them (probably several). 50 years ago, nobody could get their books printed without going to a printer, now we can all run off something on a device cheaper than a book costs to buy (if you buy the cheap rubbish). 100 years ago, businesses had to PAY people to wander around London with an accurate watch, calibrated to the Greenwich clock, and would subscribe to a service where that person would come back each week and tell them the time.
Advances in basic, cheap 3D scanning and printing, I'm interested in. Large companies being able to produce McDonald's toys (which have been around for decades), I'm not.
Give a hardware hacker a year and they could knock up a 3D scanner that formed a 3D model on the computer, with coloured textures for the outside "skin". Give them a year and they could knock up a 3D printer that might be able to come close to reproducing that model in plastic, with colourations on the outside approximating those in the model.
Make those devices cheap, reliable, as easy to use as a printer (i.e. not millimetre-vital calibration and building) and of half-decent quality, that you can just place an original model inside and pour nylon powder into and get a copy model out the other end and you'll make a fortune. That's what I class as the modern phrase of "3D printing", not something we could do for the last 30 years on commercial scales.
Welcome to the 80's.
Have you not heard of fax modems? (and if you have, welcome to the 90's!). I've routinely faxed Windows Printer Test Pages because it's the most convenient thing to send to test the fax, with modern network->fax system, I wouldn't mess around with bits of paper and fax machines (what are those?! Welcome back to the 80's!)
All you'd do would be to tie up their phone lines a bit until they blacklisted the numbers on their internal switchboard (which might even happen automatically with any half-decent telephony hardware and things like 9999 retries). And, if successful anyway, all you would do is add a couple of megs of "black" PDF's to their spool folders.
Childish protest won't help, if that's what you're after. Just state your rights and objection. If enough people do that, in whatever manner, it will work. Anything above and beyond that is more likely to get YOU into trouble, though.
Like spam, if you just repeat the same message endlessly with a blatant agenda to harass people into buying through sheer volume you will get ignored.
Write a single, sensible, reasoned, properly-delivered letter and your opinion instantly counts for more.