The case was tried in Rochester, NY. A JURY decided the case. Now here's the kicker: who's the largest employer in Rochester? According to the article:
"Rochester's largest employer [Kodak] claimed during a three-week trial. ..".
Yes, the citizens of Rochester, NY know not to bite the hand that feeds them. Especially when said hand is withering from a dying business and poor strategic decisions.
How on earth did they allow this case to continue there? Why not move the Wal-Mart sex-descrimination suits to the corporate headquareters in Bentonville, Arkansas? I'm sure they'd get a fair jury trial there . ..
Good grief, you'd think this legislation was drafted by someone who wanted to cripple the U.S. Economy for good. On the one hand, we have problems with outsourced jobs, economy still struggling to recover, terrorist threats, middle-east unrest . . . and some senators feel that now's a good time to give lawyers even more things to sue companies for??????
You know, I've thought about going into law school - it seems the jobs are leaving the IT industry and heading that way . ..
But seriously - at what point can we just say to the entertainment industry "live with it"? How long has the software industry lived with software piracy for better and worse?
I'll say this - all those countries that have been worried about the corrupting influence of American culture, don't worry. Senator Hatch is working very hard to make sure that there's no possible way for any of that culture to escape the country.
You have to expect a large amount of corporate (well, American corporate) and even gov't FUD over this. Corporations want a sure thing - secure investments and market control. Patents in every form are a lock (to some degree) on money and a preventative measure on competition.
I personally wouldn't mind software patents if they were truly fundamental breakthroughs or such (RSA cryptography comes to mind), but with Microsoft patenting "To Do Lists" the EU should be really concerned over what kind of silliness is going to be submitted as a software patent.
For that matter, if the EU was to adopt software patents, what % of those patents would be American?
Should the EU choose not to adopt the software patent idea, we'll see the EU become the hotbed of software creativity for the next 20 years. That's something that'll rankle America, but will it bother the U.S. enough to suffer the pain of changing the patent law?
This guy just reams into the idiosyncrasies of computer gaming. He really really "gets it".
Yeah, the humor is dry and witty - the author is British. American humor tends to be cruder and much less subtle. So, really your critique of the "not funny" is more of a personal preference (probably because you're American - I'm guessing).
If you look at the.ini files, they're littered with comments about this setting being for XBOX, this is for PC. And all the PC settings are commented out. Dumb dumb dumb... I hope someone in their QA team is feeling like an idiot.
If you make all of the above changes in your ini file(s), the game is amazingly better. I went from unplayable on 640x480 to smooth and beautiful on 1024x780. And I'm running with a AMD 2500XP, 712 MB GeForce 3 card. You should be able to smoke that...
Having done some work with image matching algorithms, I'll say this - if they can get an ability to search for pictures based on backgrounds or faces it will be extremely impressive.
Generic image matching algorithms are at best 60% reliable - specifically tailored algorithms (like for facial pattern matching) can do better, but trying to match a background would be very very hard (look for all backgrounds with moutains in them, much harder to do based on digital data then you'd think).
I did a research project where a small team put together a new algorithm to look at matching picture data. Besides the horrible horrible statistical analysis and coding, it really can be a crapshoot as to your results. Some images / image types we had fantastic matches on. Others - we couldn't tell why on earth it was selected.
Was also the first time I'd written a program that chewed through my entire virtual address space and still wanted more. . .
Considering we're 1/10th the U.S.'s size, it's foolish to think this'll last for long. The Canadian variant of the RIAA has been making noises here as well. The law here on copying files is a little murky - the articles up here indicate that a similar "sue-em-all" campaign could be launched, just that it'd be harder. Some of our ISP's (Bell for example) have ownership by U.S. corporations/parent companys, and you could expect some leverage applied that way.
I guess it'll give more mileage to South Park's "Blame Canada!" song...
The advantage of consoles (and the reason why you'd want to optimize) is that you have a standard platform. More specifically, you know exactly what the memory, and video architecture is. You can take shortcuts with your code - you can write code that is very dangerous with a normal PC (because of all the possible configurations) but is safe and much, much faster on the console.
How long will you be able to play new releases for the PS2? How long will you be able to play new releases for your PC? Without any upgrades?
Can you believe it? For the last 20+ years we've only really had BORING and FRUSTRATING games! That's why! D'oh!
To quote: "One of the main obstacles was the complicated controls of many of today's games, as well as tough levels which left many players frustrated. "You want a game that is challenging but never frustrating," said Ms Fryer.
Didn't they make the "Deer Hunter" games for those people?
This is a huge topic, and I've only ever looked into part of it in depth, but:
Remember that for most motherboards, their RAID implementations are going to be software based, and not hardware. This makes for a cheaper chipset in general, and since the CPU speed is fairly high now the performance hit you experience is pretty nominal compared to the performance of a hardware based controller. The only REAL exception to this is for RAID 5 controllers - RAID 5 uses an XOR system which is really punishing on a CPU - hardware (i.e. add-in cards) makes a huge difference here.
All things considered, bear in mind that one of the reasons for RAID is data integrity (depending on mode, obviously) - do you want to risk your data by saving $50 on a cheap board? Where I live, the hardware place I frequent has a fairly large (10+ on staff at any one time) team of techs assembling custom orders and doing installs of purchases if their customers want them. These guys are usually the ones fixing/replacing problem MB's, and they'd be the best to talk to on quality - most reviews of MB's nowadays tend to focus on features and performance - long term reliability is something you've got to find out from others or on your own...
Can you image the effects of having an entire nerd populace sitting on its backside for 9 straight hours of LOTR?
- Viruses go rampant as sysadmins fail to respond to urgent system messages
- Patches, code deadlines missed
- Executives everywhere are paralyzed as their IT depts leave for a whole day and they can't figure out what to do when that Blue Screen with the white letters appears (in case you're reading this: reboot)
- More importantly, the obesity % of the American populace has a massive spike
You realize, Mr. Atkinson, that by backing off now you're encouraging us to continue this kind of behavior on other spammers . ..
In a truely please-don't-blink moment, the man who claimed to send out 100 million messages a day on such wonderful things as penis-enlarging pills complains about receiving 5 obscene phone calls . . . they were probably just disappointed customers.;)
There's a (I think) better alternative, though a little tricker to run.
In WinXP (works for Home or Pro), run "Dcomcnfg", double click on component services, d-click on computer, r-click on My computer and select properties. Select the Default Properties Tab and uncheck "Enabled Distributed COM on this computer".
This'll shut down that subsystem which is vulnerable to the attack in the first place, and give you time to update patches etc. Works even if the virus is currently in place (you'll still need to remove it later).
A friend of mine got nailed with this last night, she's a mother of 3 knows jack about computers (mind you, I know jack about raising a family so we're even). No firewall, and didn't even know there was a "Windows Update" option to upgrade her OS. As much as I don't like a "Big Brother" type interferance from Microsoft (especially them), its situations like this which make me think that having them forcing updates remotely to PC's may not be a bad thing - some people just don't know, and don't want to have to worry about stuff like that.
See, I'd figure IBM as a more likely candidate to buy out SUN. Big Blue has already made a significant investment into UNIX/AIX and Linux and especially Java, so from the software side there's incentive that way. Plus, servers and high-end workstations are still a mainstay of IBM's business.
While I've seen some adds for Apple servers, I don't know if that's a market Apple can or will thrive in - SUN just doesn't seem to add much to Apple unless they're looking at expanding their business directions.
Even though I prefer Perl, one of the fanatastic things I loved about Python was the interactive shell (not sure of the proper name for it) that allowed you to execute individual lines of code and immeadiately see the effects. It made learning the language much easier, and also was handy when writing a script and you wanted to try something out on the side first.
I think that interactive shells like this are a fantastic way to teach programming especially for early beginners (i.e. junior/senior high school). C & C++ have a lot of low-level aspects to them (my understanding of C increased after studying architecture and low-level drivers in University), and they don't make for a great initial learning experience. Java is in a similar difficulty range as C++, and learning OO really early doesn't (IMHO) convey too many advantages - functional programming is a better way to start.
Like some previous posters, a scripting language might be a better way to start, especially if an interactive shell is available to help speed up learning.
I've nothing against IBM, but seeing the SEC going after the big companies for "irregular accounting" is a good thing. Sometimes you can think these companies are immune to prosecution due to their massive size/legal teams - now, let's hope SEC makes it worthwhile.
In related news, isn't Martha Stewart getting charged soon? To quote Robin Williams, she's going to become someone's b*tch.
I think one of the best parts of this interview was his detailed explanation of how to get experience and "break in" to this industry - I'm tempted to get started (there's a relevant course I may take in the last year of my degree concerning sysadmin & network programming, and this'd be a great primer).
I'm impressed that this guy gave us that much of his time, and his thoughts. That's certainly the longest interview I've read here.
I'll second this as an almost grad of this program.
You're right C isn't taught. You're expected to be able to figure it out due to exposure to C++ and assembler in 2nd year. You must know it though - you'll get nailed otherwise. I've taken the following courses where we used primarily or only C:
- 2nd year: Architecture (assembler for PDP-11 via simulation, Intel x86, and integrating x86 assembler with C routines.
- 3rd year: Another architecture course which involved writing device drivers for assignments. All C coding.
- O/S course, projects consisting of at least one modification to the OpenBSD O/S and three other O/S related ones in Solaris (my 4 were implementing an md5 hash as a system call in OpenBSD, writing a process scheduler for Solaris, writing a parser that would translate a set of extensions into the appropriate POSIX calls, and writing a virtual memory simulation with sorting routines.) All code was in C
- There's a number of 4th year courses that have a heavy C focus as well due to lower level work. Compared to some other CPSC programs, the U of C has a strong low-level focus. Your statements would be more true of other universities.
The instructor is Dr. John Aycock, and he's definitely one of the better instructors we have in CPSC. His focus is in compilers and OS's, and taught the 3rd-year OS class for I think the first time last Winter.
He definitely has a strong security focus in his courses, and has one of the highest standards I've encountered in a prof regarding testing ( after turning in our implementation of an md5 hash as a system call in OpenBSD, he asked the class if anyone had tried testing with 1 Gb input strings. Just an example).
There's another course with a similar bent - a 4th year SysAdmin course that's year-long and involves substantial network programming. I'm told that the instructors will take down the network during your examination, forcing you to fix things while still completing your test online. Past grads also like to hammer the servers the students setup.
Personally, I'm glad to see these courses - most of these problems are things I've no clue about or would even think about how to prevent. Exposure is a start.
Recently Microsoft has been claiming that the Judge was biased during the trial, because afterwards he said a few choice words about the company. Their Lawyers are trying to use this to wriggle out of the judgement, however the simple fact is that once the judgement has been reached by due process in a court of law then the judge is allowed to be predjudiced - he has to sentence them, after all.
This is not quite correct. The problem is that the Judge gave some interviews before the trial and placed a one-year publication ban on those interviews. Now they're released and they indicate his opinions before the trial was even conducted. Microsoft is saying that the case was basically pre-decided.
Personally, I think the judge is an idiot to go on the record with those comments (before a trial), in the first place. If he'd kept those thoughts to himself, no big deal - I think the trial in court gave numerous instances where Microsoft clearly was trying to mislead or falsify evidence, and it be hard not to rule against them.
Slashdot Mirror
The case was tried in Rochester, NY. A JURY decided the case. Now here's the kicker: who's the largest employer in Rochester? According to the article:
.".
.
"Rochester's largest employer [Kodak] claimed during a three-week trial. .
Yes, the citizens of Rochester, NY know not to bite the hand that feeds them. Especially when said hand is withering from a dying business and poor strategic decisions.
How on earth did they allow this case to continue there? Why not move the Wal-Mart sex-descrimination suits to the corporate headquareters in Bentonville, Arkansas? I'm sure they'd get a fair jury trial there . .
I'll take you up on that - I'm laying odds that the "unnamed licensee" is none other then Raven. What id engine HAVEN'T they licensed? =)
Good grief, you'd think this legislation was drafted by someone who wanted to cripple the U.S. Economy for good. On the one hand, we have problems with outsourced jobs, economy still struggling to recover, terrorist threats, middle-east unrest . . . and some senators feel that now's a good time to give lawyers even more things to sue companies for??????
.
You know, I've thought about going into law school - it seems the jobs are leaving the IT industry and heading that way . .
But seriously - at what point can we just say to the entertainment industry "live with it"? How long has the software industry lived with software piracy for better and worse?
I'll say this - all those countries that have been worried about the corrupting influence of American culture, don't worry. Senator Hatch is working very hard to make sure that there's no possible way for any of that culture to escape the country.
You have to expect a large amount of corporate (well, American corporate) and even gov't FUD over this. Corporations want a sure thing - secure investments and market control. Patents in every form are a lock (to some degree) on money and a preventative measure on competition.
I personally wouldn't mind software patents if they were truly fundamental breakthroughs or such (RSA cryptography comes to mind), but with Microsoft patenting "To Do Lists" the EU should be really concerned over what kind of silliness is going to be submitted as a software patent.
For that matter, if the EU was to adopt software patents, what % of those patents would be American?
Should the EU choose not to adopt the software patent idea, we'll see the EU become the hotbed of software creativity for the next 20 years. That's something that'll rankle America, but will it bother the U.S. enough to suffer the pain of changing the patent law?
What are you smoking? They're hilarious!
This guy just reams into the idiosyncrasies of computer gaming. He really really "gets it".
Yeah, the humor is dry and witty - the author is British. American humor tends to be cruder and much less subtle. So, really your critique of the "not funny" is more of a personal preference (probably because you're American - I'm guessing).
It's the NHL playoffs - why on EARTH would I turn off my TV?
:)
Maybe when baseball season's in full swing . . .
'Cause at least my land is free . . .
So . . . should we setup an express line for Slashdot readers at the local immigration booth?
Hey, maybe this counts as prior art!
I'll point you to a previous thread on this - the other poster here has made a few good comments, but there's a LOT of tweaks you need to make.
2 2/ 1715233&mode=thread&tid=127&tid=186&tid=204&tid=20 6
.ini files, they're littered with comments about this setting being for XBOX, this is for PC. And all the PC settings are commented out. Dumb dumb dumb... I hope someone in their QA team is feeling like an idiot.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/
If you look at the
If you make all of the above changes in your ini file(s), the game is amazingly better. I went from unplayable on 640x480 to smooth and beautiful on 1024x780. And I'm running with a AMD 2500XP, 712 MB GeForce 3 card. You should be able to smoke that...
Having done some work with image matching algorithms, I'll say this - if they can get an ability to search for pictures based on backgrounds or faces it will be extremely impressive.
Generic image matching algorithms are at best 60% reliable - specifically tailored algorithms (like for facial pattern matching) can do better, but trying to match a background would be very very hard (look for all backgrounds with moutains in them, much harder to do based on digital data then you'd think).
I did a research project where a small team put together a new algorithm to look at matching picture data. Besides the horrible horrible statistical analysis and coding, it really can be a crapshoot as to your results. Some images / image types we had fantastic matches on. Others - we couldn't tell why on earth it was selected.
Was also the first time I'd written a program that chewed through my entire virtual address space and still wanted more. . .
Considering we're 1/10th the U.S.'s size, it's foolish to think this'll last for long. The Canadian variant of the RIAA has been making noises here as well. The law here on copying files is a little murky - the articles up here indicate that a similar "sue-em-all" campaign could be launched, just that it'd be harder. Some of our ISP's (Bell for example) have ownership by U.S. corporations/parent companys, and you could expect some leverage applied that way.
I guess it'll give more mileage to South Park's "Blame Canada!" song...
While this is obvious flaimbait...
The advantage of consoles (and the reason why you'd want to optimize) is that you have a standard platform. More specifically, you know exactly what the memory, and video architecture is. You can take shortcuts with your code - you can write code that is very dangerous with a normal PC (because of all the possible configurations) but is safe and much, much faster on the console.
How long will you be able to play new releases for the PS2? How long will you be able to play new releases for your PC? Without any upgrades?
Can you believe it? For the last 20+ years we've only really had BORING and FRUSTRATING games! That's why! D'oh!
To quote: "One of the main obstacles was the complicated controls of many of today's games, as well as tough levels which left many players frustrated. "You want a game that is challenging but never frustrating," said Ms Fryer.
Didn't they make the "Deer Hunter" games for those people?
This is a huge topic, and I've only ever looked into part of it in depth, but:
Remember that for most motherboards, their RAID implementations are going to be software based, and not hardware. This makes for a cheaper chipset in general, and since the CPU speed is fairly high now the performance hit you experience is pretty nominal compared to the performance of a hardware based controller. The only REAL exception to this is for RAID 5 controllers - RAID 5 uses an XOR system which is really punishing on a CPU - hardware (i.e. add-in cards) makes a huge difference here.
All things considered, bear in mind that one of the reasons for RAID is data integrity (depending on mode, obviously) - do you want to risk your data by saving $50 on a cheap board? Where I live, the hardware place I frequent has a fairly large (10+ on staff at any one time) team of techs assembling custom orders and doing installs of purchases if their customers want them. These guys are usually the ones fixing/replacing problem MB's, and they'd be the best to talk to on quality - most reviews of MB's nowadays tend to focus on features and performance - long term reliability is something you've got to find out from others or on your own...
Considering how often the average nerd actually gets to have sex, would you think their chances of having sex during a movie are better or worse?
Especially LOTR...
Can you image the effects of having an entire nerd populace sitting on its backside for 9 straight hours of LOTR?
- Viruses go rampant as sysadmins fail to respond to urgent system messages
- Patches, code deadlines missed
- Executives everywhere are paralyzed as their IT depts leave for a whole day and they can't figure out what to do when that Blue Screen with the white letters appears (in case you're reading this: reboot)
- More importantly, the obesity % of the American populace has a massive spike
You realize, Mr. Atkinson, that by backing off now you're encouraging us to continue this kind of behavior on other spammers . . .
;)
In a truely please-don't-blink moment, the man who claimed to send out 100 million messages a day on such wonderful things as penis-enlarging pills complains about receiving 5 obscene phone calls . . . they were probably just disappointed customers.
In WinXP (works for Home or Pro), run "Dcomcnfg", double click on component services, d-click on computer, r-click on My computer and select properties. Select the Default Properties Tab and uncheck "Enabled Distributed COM on this computer".
This'll shut down that subsystem which is vulnerable to the attack in the first place, and give you time to update patches etc. Works even if the virus is currently in place (you'll still need to remove it later).
A friend of mine got nailed with this last night, she's a mother of 3 knows jack about computers (mind you, I know jack about raising a family so we're even). No firewall, and didn't even know there was a "Windows Update" option to upgrade her OS. As much as I don't like a "Big Brother" type interferance from Microsoft (especially them), its situations like this which make me think that having them forcing updates remotely to PC's may not be a bad thing - some people just don't know, and don't want to have to worry about stuff like that.
While I've seen some adds for Apple servers, I don't know if that's a market Apple can or will thrive in - SUN just doesn't seem to add much to Apple unless they're looking at expanding their business directions.
I think that interactive shells like this are a fantastic way to teach programming especially for early beginners (i.e. junior/senior high school). C & C++ have a lot of low-level aspects to them (my understanding of C increased after studying architecture and low-level drivers in University), and they don't make for a great initial learning experience. Java is in a similar difficulty range as C++, and learning OO really early doesn't (IMHO) convey too many advantages - functional programming is a better way to start.
Like some previous posters, a scripting language might be a better way to start, especially if an interactive shell is available to help speed up learning.
In related news, isn't Martha Stewart getting charged soon? To quote Robin Williams, she's going to become someone's b*tch.
I think one of the best parts of this interview was his detailed explanation of how to get experience and "break in" to this industry - I'm tempted to get started (there's a relevant course I may take in the last year of my degree concerning sysadmin & network programming, and this'd be a great primer).
I'm impressed that this guy gave us that much of his time, and his thoughts. That's certainly the longest interview I've read here.
You're right C isn't taught. You're expected to be able to figure it out due to exposure to C++ and assembler in 2nd year. You must know it though - you'll get nailed otherwise. I've taken the following courses where we used primarily or only C:
- 2nd year: Architecture (assembler for PDP-11 via simulation, Intel x86, and integrating x86 assembler with C routines.
- 3rd year: Another architecture course which involved writing device drivers for assignments. All C coding.
- O/S course, projects consisting of at least one modification to the OpenBSD O/S and three other O/S related ones in Solaris (my 4 were implementing an md5 hash as a system call in OpenBSD, writing a process scheduler for Solaris, writing a parser that would translate a set of extensions into the appropriate POSIX calls, and writing a virtual memory simulation with sorting routines.) All code was in C
- There's a number of 4th year courses that have a heavy C focus as well due to lower level work. Compared to some other CPSC programs, the U of C has a strong low-level focus. Your statements would be more true of other universities.
The instructor is Dr. John Aycock, and he's definitely one of the better instructors we have in CPSC. His focus is in compilers and OS's, and taught the 3rd-year OS class for I think the first time last Winter.
He definitely has a strong security focus in his courses, and has one of the highest standards I've encountered in a prof regarding testing ( after turning in our implementation of an md5 hash as a system call in OpenBSD, he asked the class if anyone had tried testing with 1 Gb input strings. Just an example).
There's another course with a similar bent - a 4th year SysAdmin course that's year-long and involves substantial network programming. I'm told that the instructors will take down the network during your examination, forcing you to fix things while still completing your test online. Past grads also like to hammer the servers the students setup.
Personally, I'm glad to see these courses - most of these problems are things I've no clue about or would even think about how to prevent. Exposure is a start.
This is not quite correct. The problem is that the Judge gave some interviews before the trial and placed a one-year publication ban on those interviews. Now they're released and they indicate his opinions before the trial was even conducted. Microsoft is saying that the case was basically pre-decided.
Personally, I think the judge is an idiot to go on the record with those comments (before a trial), in the first place. If he'd kept those thoughts to himself, no big deal - I think the trial in court gave numerous instances where Microsoft clearly was trying to mislead or falsify evidence, and it be hard not to rule against them.