Just watch this.
"Space Shuttle Columbia $5 Commemoritive Coin", sold for US $13,101.00.
Honestly, I don't undestand. If you have that amount of money to spend, why not do something useful with it? Maybe donate it to the families of the astronauts, or use it for lobbying to get more funds for NASA. But a $5 coin? Sheesh.
Re:Here's some REALLY immortal code
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
This reminds me of a funny program I wrote once. It made shutting down Win9x really impossible. This is because Win9x has no tools to do the equivalent of kill -9 instantly. It first asks the program nicely, and if it doesn't react lets you kill it.
So what my program does is starting several copies of itself, and re-executing itself and terminating when it gets a nice request to terminate. Unless you're *very* fast, or have a tool for it you're not going to get rid of it.
WinNT/2K/XP has the task manager, so it's not effective there.
Why, because I don't think Linux should be more windows-like? I think you didn't understand me.
I like Linux because of the way it works, which is the same reason why I don't like Windows. I don't think it needs to be more user friendly, I like the command line.
If you want to have an OSS Windows-like system, that's fine by me. If you don't like that Linux is hard to use, don't whine. Do something! Join usability projects, email developers with your suggestions, build frontends. There are many things you can do even if you can't program.
Well, a P133 is not a wonderful computer, but it's certainly useful. My brother is still using a P166 MMX, and I've got a P166 as a firewall, booting Bering from a floppy. IMO the greatest thing about it is that it can run with no fan, just a heatsink! Just use a silent power supply and you'll get a nice firewall that nobody notices.
There are many things it still can do. It can be a firewall, DNS, DHCP or even a web server if you use static pages. That it can't run XP doesn't mean it's completely useless.
I didn't say it doesn't offer ANY support. It does offer some, but it's really minimal. AFAIK all you get is a framebuffer to write pixels to, and it can use it as a console. If you want to paint TrueType fonts on it you've got to use a library or do it yourself.
I misunderstood the parent message while writing my post, but the point is mostly the same. First, the Linux kernel has absolutely nothing to do with True Type fonts, so the idea just makes no sense at all. Second, it's just a plain stupid idea.
I started with SuSE. Kind of liked it. Then moved to Mandrake, and got several people to try it too. But I got annoyed with RPM and some other issues. And then finally moved to Debian, and this is what I've been using so far, with the only exception of LEAF (LRP based) on the firewall.
All the 4 people I convinced to get Debian really liked apt-get and the general stability. And maybe that's the problem. It's that the experts don't want to use the distribution that's "for newbies" and that's not as nice to administrate as Debian. And their friends and other people then follow, because they learned enough, want to try something new, or because they depend on the expert who'll have an easier time helping people who use the same distribution.
That last point could be pretty important, IMO. I'm pretty sure that if I switched to say, Gentoo, and didn't have Debian anymore those friends would switch to it later as well.
IMO. Just think of how much time you need to know before beginning to understand how to properly secure a system. People could use Linux for months to do all they need, and still not have a good idea of permissions, daemons and other security elements.
I've never used VMS, but I'm completely sure it's a system with its own quirks, security features and comon configuration errors that result in security problems.
My own opinion is that when possible I'll never get into this situation. I can and do admit I don't know everything, and if possible would try to get out of a situation when I'm pretty sure I won't be helpful. If you can't do that I think you should try to find a guru who'll give you some basic knowledge. But I still think that in 4 days you can't learn much about security.
In physics we were taught to assume the earth is an infinitely small point with the mass of the earth, and that to calculate how strongly it attacts something you just calculate radius_of_earth + objects_distance_from_surface.
However, this must be an approximation because it'd mean the center of the earth is a black hole.
Ah, but I understood this as a monitor with an USB plug. Since AFAIK monitors have no RAM inside them they just have to get all the 75 frames per second from the card.
Besides, a game or video would require pretty much the full bandwidth
Yeah, only that you'll need a card that will compress it. And then it'll pretty much lose the point. I doubt even modern computers can compress 1024x768 video at 60 fps in real time. Decompression is usually much faster than compression, BTW.
Let's see... 1600 x 1200 x 4 (32bit color) x 75 Hz = 549 MB/s 1024 x 768 x 4 x 75 = 225 MB/s 640 x 480 x 2 (16 bit color) x 75 = 43 MB/s
USB2 badwidth: 480Mbps = 60 MB/s
Pretty useless I'd say. Besides in USB2 the computer needs to control the data transmission, so the 480Mbps hasn't been reached in practice. Add to that the overhead of the protocol and maybe a device or two on the bus... and then the 133 MB/s limit of the PCI bus which might be saturated with hard disks or a sound card.
Maybe an Athlon could do it, but then you'd need a new motherboard anyway.
Well, in fact, one of my computers has no power button at all. You can only yank the power cord to power it off.
Somehow I had a case with no power button, so I took it from another uglier case I had around. And when I needed that last case of course there was no button. So I just connected the wires on the power supply.
That machine does a fine job as a firewall with LEAF, and probably I'm not going to need to turn it off any time soon.
IIRC, the key I'm talking about was somewhere near the insert key, and of course I managed to press it 4 times the same day. And the system decided to just shut down with no confirmation.
No, because I look at the screen (while typing this, for example), and not at the keyboard. The only thing I need is to have my hands in the right position. Once that's done it doesn't matter what's written on it.
Doesn't really matter I think. Most people who spend a lot of time can touch type, so as long as you can find the keyboard it doesn't really matter if you can see the letters.
I rearranged mine for Dvorak, but then forgot about learning it and left it like that. I still type qwerty just fine on it, although nobody else in my family can use it.
I'd really like to see a keyboard with a few programmable LEDs, or even better, a LCD screen. It'd be cool to have the memory/CPU use or something like that there.
But all I see instead is keyboards with annoying power buttons I tend to press in the least inconvenient moment. I just don't get it, what's the point of having it there? As if I needed to turn the computer on and off every 5 minutes.
Bah, why spam Bob when there are much better targets? I register stuff to bill.gates@microsoft.com and president@whitehouse.gov sounds like a nice target too. Wonder if the white house hunts spammers.
Maybe you live in some strange world where the products in use are almost the latest ones, but at my school we still use *Windows 95*! I'm pretty sure VB6 won't be going anywhere for a few years at least..NET is too new IMO. Too few people know it, the one who do probably don't have enough experience, and I'm pretty sure important components are missing. I'm almost sure.NET is "the future" and that it's worth trying and learning it, but its existence isn't going to make all the VB6 apps magically disappear. And since the syntax is so different VB6 apps aren't just going to get converted in a few hours.
Oh, we use the installer. The problem is different.
At work: Win2K Pro, SP3, VB6 SP5. I open my project, with a reference to my own DLL (source in same CVS repository). It works. Now, save, commit to CVS
At home: Same configuration, checkout project. Suddenly the reference to the DLL disappears. If it's a.OCX file then it's worse. VB can't load the project properly as if the OCX was missing, when it's actually there! Okay, I open the references dialog and add it. But now the darn reference disappears at work!
Well, not really. First, Perl is a much more stable and debugged language. VB wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have some horrible bugs that tend to appear in the most inconvenient moment. Also Perl lets you access pretty much all the system stuff, at least in Unix, has lots of free modules for almost everything.
Now, VB. First of all, the access to most system stuff is hidden. So if you say, wanted to write a task manager app like the one in NT and Win2K, your program would end full of WinAPI calls. At that point probably it wouldn't cost much to just write it in C, since the VB code would be almost inexistent...
Classes. While in Perl OO isn't wonderful, at least it has inheritance. Oh, I almost forgot about the way of getting "inheritance" in VB6 by writing a class full of one line functions that call the original one.
Binary files associated to forms. Doesn't work well with source control tools.
ActiveX. Major pain in the arse. For some reason references to ActiveX objects that work just fine on one computer might disappear if you move the source to another.
Syntax. A few examples: foo = function(1,2) do_something 1,2 Line (0,0) - (10,10), 1, BF 'You can't write a function with this syntax if IsNull(Variable) then if Variable Is Nothing Then if Variable Is Null Then 'The IDE makes 'Is Null' capitalized as if this worked, but it actually doesn't.
And that's not even half of the stuff you'll have to deal with...
Ah, but here's the problem. People fail to understand the purpose of VB far too often.
VB is great for writing small apps. If say, you want to write a program that takes photos at an interval and automatically saves them in/images/yyyy/mm/dd/hh_mm_ss.jpg then it's a wonderful thing. Add a webcam component, then another for jpg (VB can only save BMP), and in a few minutes it will be done.
Now, the problem begins when this little program grows. If you try to write big apps with VB you'll fairly soon start hitting its limitations, writing workarounds, having to put up with completely idiotic bugs like project files that break by themselves... and you end with a complete piece of crap.
Also, pretty much anything that can be done with VB can be done in Linux with Perl and PerlQt, perhaps with some help from other apps. Pretty much the only thing I couldn't find a replacement for is such a great debugger.
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Just watch this. "Space Shuttle Columbia $5 Commemoritive Coin", sold for US $13,101.00. Honestly, I don't undestand. If you have that amount of money to spend, why not do something useful with it? Maybe donate it to the families of the astronauts, or use it for lobbying to get more funds for NASA. But a $5 coin? Sheesh.
This reminds me of a funny program I wrote once. It made shutting down Win9x really impossible. This is because Win9x has no tools to do the equivalent of kill -9 instantly. It first asks the program nicely, and if it doesn't react lets you kill it.
So what my program does is starting several copies of itself, and re-executing itself and terminating when it gets a nice request to terminate. Unless you're *very* fast, or have a tool for it you're not going to get rid of it.
WinNT/2K/XP has the task manager, so it's not effective there.
Why, because I don't think Linux should be more windows-like? I think you didn't understand me.
I like Linux because of the way it works, which is the same reason why I don't like Windows. I don't think it needs to be more user friendly, I like the command line.
If you want to have an OSS Windows-like system, that's fine by me. If you don't like that Linux is hard to use, don't whine. Do something! Join usability projects, email developers with your suggestions, build frontends. There are many things you can do even if you can't program.
When did I claim it was for everyone? In fact, I don't want it to be for everyone, I'm happy with how it is now.
Oh, sure, and when you use a car you expect that the car drives itself where you want to go?
If you don't want to RTFM, just use windows. I'll be happy to see one annoying person less in the Linux IRC channels.
Well, a P133 is not a wonderful computer, but it's certainly useful. My brother is still using a P166 MMX, and I've got a P166 as a firewall, booting Bering from a floppy. IMO the greatest thing about it is that it can run with no fan, just a heatsink! Just use a silent power supply and you'll get a nice firewall that nobody notices.
There are many things it still can do. It can be a firewall, DNS, DHCP or even a web server if you use static pages. That it can't run XP doesn't mean it's completely useless.
I didn't say it doesn't offer ANY support. It does offer some, but it's really minimal. AFAIK all you get is a framebuffer to write pixels to, and it can use it as a console. If you want to paint TrueType fonts on it you've got to use a library or do it yourself.
I misunderstood the parent message while writing my post, but the point is mostly the same. First, the Linux kernel has absolutely nothing to do with True Type fonts, so the idea just makes no sense at all. Second, it's just a plain stupid idea.
Probably you're trolling, but just in case: The Linux kernel has absolutely nothing to do with fonts. It doesn't even offer much graphics support.
I started with SuSE. Kind of liked it. Then moved to Mandrake, and got several people to try it too. But I got annoyed with RPM and some other issues. And then finally moved to Debian, and this is what I've been using so far, with the only exception of LEAF (LRP based) on the firewall.
All the 4 people I convinced to get Debian really liked apt-get and the general stability. And maybe that's the problem. It's that the experts don't want to use the distribution that's "for newbies" and that's not as nice to administrate as Debian. And their friends and other people then follow, because they learned enough, want to try something new, or because they depend on the expert who'll have an easier time helping people who use the same distribution.
That last point could be pretty important, IMO. I'm pretty sure that if I switched to say, Gentoo, and didn't have Debian anymore those friends would switch to it later as well.
IMO. Just think of how much time you need to know before beginning to understand how to properly secure a system. People could use Linux for months to do all they need, and still not have a good idea of permissions, daemons and other security elements.
I've never used VMS, but I'm completely sure it's a system with its own quirks, security features and comon configuration errors that result in security problems.
My own opinion is that when possible I'll never get into this situation. I can and do admit I don't know everything, and if possible would try to get out of a situation when I'm pretty sure I won't be helpful. If you can't do that I think you should try to find a guru who'll give you some basic knowledge. But I still think that in 4 days you can't learn much about security.
I always had a problem with that law.
In physics we were taught to assume the earth is an infinitely small point with the mass of the earth, and that to calculate how strongly it attacts something you just calculate radius_of_earth + objects_distance_from_surface.
However, this must be an approximation because it'd mean the center of the earth is a black hole.
Ah, but I understood this as a monitor with an USB plug. Since AFAIK monitors have no RAM inside them they just have to get all the 75 frames per second from the card.
Besides, a game or video would require pretty much the full bandwidth
Yeah, only that you'll need a card that will compress it. And then it'll pretty much lose the point. I doubt even modern computers can compress 1024x768 video at 60 fps in real time. Decompression is usually much faster than compression, BTW.
Heh, the idea of an USB monitor is really funny.
Let's see...
1600 x 1200 x 4 (32bit color) x 75 Hz = 549 MB/s
1024 x 768 x 4 x 75 = 225 MB/s
640 x 480 x 2 (16 bit color) x 75 = 43 MB/s
USB2 badwidth: 480Mbps = 60 MB/s
Pretty useless I'd say. Besides in USB2 the computer needs to control the data transmission, so the 480Mbps hasn't been reached in practice. Add to that the overhead of the protocol and maybe a device or two on the bus... and then the 133 MB/s limit of the PCI bus which might be saturated with hard disks or a sound card.
Maybe an Athlon could do it, but then you'd need a new motherboard anyway.
Well, in fact, one of my computers has no power button at all. You can only yank the power cord to power it off.
Somehow I had a case with no power button, so I took it from another uglier case I had around. And when I needed that last case of course there was no button. So I just connected the wires on the power supply.
That machine does a fine job as a firewall with LEAF, and probably I'm not going to need to turn it off any time soon.
Ah, that's good.
IIRC, the key I'm talking about was somewhere near the insert key, and of course I managed to press it 4 times the same day. And the system decided to just shut down with no confirmation.
No, because I look at the screen (while typing this, for example), and not at the keyboard. The only thing I need is to have my hands in the right position. Once that's done it doesn't matter what's written on it.
Doesn't really matter I think. Most people who spend a lot of time can touch type, so as long as you can find the keyboard it doesn't really matter if you can see the letters.
I rearranged mine for Dvorak, but then forgot about learning it and left it like that. I still type qwerty just fine on it, although nobody else in my family can use it.
I'd really like to see a keyboard with a few programmable LEDs, or even better, a LCD screen. It'd be cool to have the memory/CPU use or something like that there.
But all I see instead is keyboards with annoying power buttons I tend to press in the least inconvenient moment. I just don't get it, what's the point of having it there? As if I needed to turn the computer on and off every 5 minutes.
Bah, why spam Bob when there are much better targets? I register stuff to bill.gates@microsoft.com and president@whitehouse.gov sounds like a nice target too. Wonder if the white house hunts spammers.
Dead?
.NET is too new IMO. Too few people know it, the one who do probably don't have enough experience, and I'm pretty sure important components are missing. I'm almost sure .NET is "the future" and that it's worth trying and learning it, but its existence isn't going to make all the VB6 apps magically disappear. And since the syntax is so different VB6 apps aren't just going to get converted in a few hours.
Maybe you live in some strange world where the products in use are almost the latest ones, but at my school we still use *Windows 95*! I'm pretty sure VB6 won't be going anywhere for a few years at least.
Ack! Stop using that stupid term.
There's no such thing as "deep linking" and there never was. It's just something some people claim to exist to justify those braindead policies.
Oh, we use the installer. The problem is different.
.OCX file then it's worse. VB can't load the project properly as if the OCX was missing, when it's actually there! Okay, I open the references dialog and add it. But now the darn reference disappears at work!
At work:
Win2K Pro, SP3, VB6 SP5. I open my project, with a reference to my own DLL (source in same CVS repository). It works. Now, save, commit to CVS
At home:
Same configuration, checkout project. Suddenly the reference to the DLL disappears. If it's a
Well, not really. First, Perl is a much more stable and debugged language. VB wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have some horrible bugs that tend to appear in the most inconvenient moment. Also Perl lets you access pretty much all the system stuff, at least in Unix, has lots of free modules for almost everything.
Now, VB. First of all, the access to most system stuff is hidden. So if you say, wanted to write a task manager app like the one in NT and Win2K, your program would end full of WinAPI calls. At that point probably it wouldn't cost much to just write it in C, since the VB code would be almost inexistent...
Classes. While in Perl OO isn't wonderful, at least it has inheritance. Oh, I almost forgot about the way of getting "inheritance" in VB6 by writing a class full of one line functions that call the original one.
Binary files associated to forms. Doesn't work well with source control tools.
ActiveX. Major pain in the arse. For some reason references to ActiveX objects that work just fine on one computer might disappear if you move the source to another.
Syntax. A few examples:
foo = function(1,2)
do_something 1,2
Line (0,0) - (10,10), 1, BF 'You can't write a function with this syntax
if IsNull(Variable) then
if Variable Is Nothing Then
if Variable Is Null Then 'The IDE makes 'Is Null' capitalized as if this worked, but it actually doesn't.
And that's not even half of the stuff you'll have to deal with...
Ah, but here's the problem. People fail to understand the purpose of VB far too often.
/images/yyyy/mm/dd/hh_mm_ss.jpg then it's a wonderful thing. Add a webcam component, then another for jpg (VB can only save BMP), and in a few minutes it will be done.
VB is great for writing small apps. If say, you want to write a program that takes photos at an interval and automatically saves them in
Now, the problem begins when this little program grows. If you try to write big apps with VB you'll fairly soon start hitting its limitations, writing workarounds, having to put up with completely idiotic bugs like project files that break by themselves... and you end with a complete piece of crap.
Also, pretty much anything that can be done with VB can be done in Linux with Perl and PerlQt, perhaps with some help from other apps. Pretty much the only thing I couldn't find a replacement for is such a great debugger.