"Mobile notifications" both never work for me and deliver exactly the same information. Furthermore, my smartphone is a far frailer device that I do not feel comfortable taking half way around the world with me, where's a Nokia 3310 is a very durable and reliable phone (I speak from experience on this matter). Trendy for Google to cripple their services I suppose...
That doesn't really preserve the originals, you're just making copies of them. There are hundreds of thousands of Mona Lisa's in the world, but they are all worth nothing compared to the original. I really don't mean to discourage these efforts, it's a good idea, but it's not "preserving artifacts destroyed by ISIS", it's "distributing copies of things destroyed by ISIS". Copies are not going to pacify my loathing for this terrible organization - these people deserved to be burned alive just like the people they've killed, and I'm very rarely one to talk about extremes.
I don't know of any country on earth where heroin, methamphetamine etc. can be bought and sold freely among consenting adults. So you probably should say something is wrong with human society.
Why not use cameras instead? I'm not talking about motion detecting ones, which are not going to very reliable, but what about color detection? Most drones stand out distinctly from the sky they're flying in, and you can see glints of light and such from them. You could also simply have human surveillance watch out for them - they tend to be pretty good at telling birds from drones. Machines aren't replacements for humans at everything, you know...
Powerpoint is supposed to shorten information and condense it down. You might as well rail against taking notes by hand, because that loses original information as well.
Now, idiotic uses of Powerpoint in which the presenter just drones on and on and omits vital information - THAT is a crime, I hate people who do that. There simply is no fathoming the depths of my loathing for them. But that's people misusing the tool - we don't ban hammers because some moron tries to push the nail in with the wooden end. Powerpoint can actually be a pretty decent tool when employed correctly.
And Access is amazing, very underrated product. You can do some crazily incredible things with this thing.
Shouldn't someone from the anti-open-source bunch be on here stating that this "proves" that open source isn't viable?
Oops, shouldn't give them ideas.
I more lament the demise of Crunchbang, actually. It was a pretty original concept. But distros come and go. There are market forces in open source, too. Commercial software also comes and goes, but when it goes, users are generally left with... not much.
You might be interested in Crunchbang++. They are basically a continuation of the original, with the same goals and values. I've been mainly a FreeBSD user since early 2005 or so, and that's my main OS for my workstation. However, when it came to my laptop, nothing could beat Crunchbang on that thing - hope the successor can be as awesome as the original.
Maybe Greeks are different but in Germany, if you borrow money, you are fully expected to pay it back. As soon as possible. Greece can make as much racket as it likes, but the Germans still want their money back. And frankly, I agree. If Greece is not willing to pay back what they take, that's theft, and they can go without aid for all I care. Especially when the borrowed money doesn't actually go to fixing its major economic issues.
How does this deal with loud interrupting noises? Classrooms or offices tend to have bursts of loud noises (dropped items, phones ringing, etc.), is there any way it can figure out lost information?
Back in the days of the Pentium 3 or 4. Again, I ask what speed concern would you have with one of those processors? I mean, sure, if you were dealing with an 8086 or something like that speed is an issue. But most tasks run just fine on a Pentium grade processor so long as you don't have a GUI filled with bloat.
One, they explicitly wanted the ability to use a GUI along with the ability to do things like watch movies and browse the internet. Linux is not going to cut it here.
Two, it's a pet hobby. Next time you make a model airplane, I'll be sure to point out that it's a waste of time because it will never actually fly.
It fits on a floppy disk? We are in 2015, right? What is a 'floppy disk'?
They started writing this back in like 2000, when people still used them. Besides, it's just a hobby project: if they want to write it as a challenge, who cares? Personally, I think it's quite impressive and I commend them for their work.
I'd highly recommend leaving them in their original format, or if anything, converting them all to.pdf. Conversion is always fraught with danger, and you will be spending an awful lot of time getting to the know the intricacies of Microsoft Word if you go this route. Pdfs display equally nicely on every operating system, they archive very well, and almost every tool out there can read them - but while converting documents to this format usually works better than others, I'd still be very careful to watch for mistakes in conversions.
Dude, you have no anonymity. With less than five minutes of my spare time, I know your entire name: Alexander Peter Kawalski, hence your nickname of APK. You are a Verizon customer, and you currently live in Syracuse, New York. You can be found at 903 East Division Street, Apartment #1, bottom floor. The house is a bit of a dingy gray/blue color, you have a few wooden chairs out back in your poor excuse for a yard, and there's a wooden power pole directly by your house.
Post AC all you want, but it's not going to stop anyone from finding out who you are.
While I don't actively hate it pixel art, I agree it's overused. If you're not specifically going for a retro vibe, I don't really see it as attractive. I think decrying the decline of this 'art form' is definitely premature at this point.
But the alternative in the 2D universe is all too often Flash or Flash-style animation, which IMO is a harbinger of cheesiness and not very attractive looking at all. It's very garish and cartoony--given the choice between the two I think I'd rather have pixel art, since (for me) it's a bit easier on the eyes, draws less attention to itself once you've been playing it for a bit.
What I really miss is that one art form that has been absolutely massacred by the trio of pixel art, flash graphics and (the ever easier to implement) 3D graphics--high quality sprite artwork. Think late 90s / early 2000s RTSes and CRPGs like Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Fallout 1/2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc. If you have any of these games a high resolution makeover (the sad part is, in many cases higher resolution versions of many of the sprites probably existed on the artists' hard drives at the time) and they would look rather good. Improve the animations a bit (either by using 2.5D or by generating 2D sprites from 3D models) and I really think it could rival many of today's 3D games, for at least somewhat less money. (I'm not sure how much quality 2D artists cost vs. high end 3D graphics, so I couldn't say for sure how much less.) Scaling to different resolutions would be an issue, but not an impossible one and on the plus side you wouldn't have to worry about graphics card performance at all...
But alas, the AAA developers simply aren't going to sully themselves with such oldschool nonsense, and the indie developers are inevitably going to gravitate towards pixel art or cartoony Flash art due to the cost savings.
THIS. Seriously people, go play a Metal Slug game sometime - some of the sprite work of the late 90's is absolutely amazing, and the detail and crispness is unrivaled by even modern day graphics. I really wish high quality sprite work came back, honestly, because it looks gorgeous. People often pay attention to the other two extreme ends of the spectrum (pixel art and then 3D high res graphics), but the middle ground has completely disappeared...
The important thing to remember here is that Swift is absolutely destroying Rust.
Rust has been nothing but hype so far. Many Ruby on Rails hipsters have rallied around it, but they haven't actually managed to produce anything useful with it.
Anything that can be done using Rust can be done better by using C++.
C, C++ and Go are the dominant languages on Linux. Rust has made no inroads here.
C++ and C# are the dominant languages on Windows. Rust has made no inroads here.
Now that Swift is seeing tremendous uptake within the iOS and OS X sphere of influence, Rust has even less of a chance than it had before.
I think that Swift will be seen as the final nail in Rust's coffin. Swift has provided developers with productivity, while Rust has provided them with false hopes.
We're seeing a convergence on exactly three languages: C++, C#, and Swift. Every other language is becoming a minor player compared to these Three Giants.
According to the TIOBE Index, Java has more usage than all three of them put together. I'd hardly call it a "minor player".
Since when is embedded programming associated with "immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications"? I don't think Swift is going to replace C anytime soon in that department.
I would almost certainly prefer the FSB to see what I am doing rather than the NSA. The FSB aren't able to knock down my door and throw me in jail for thought crimes like the NSA can.
The NSA can gather all your information and store it on a server for a set amount of time. The FSB can do this indefinitely, can imprison you without any justification, subject you to whatever torture they deem necessary, and can even outright kill you if they so wish. They are literally what came out of the ashes of the KGB. I'm not condoning the NSA's actions, but they are a far cry from the FSB by any definition.
It seems like the only way you can truly make yourself unoffshoreable is to acquire your own local customers by running your own business.
I agree. If you aren't your own boss, then you are vulnerable to offshoring. It doesn't matter how indispensible you actually are, your boss only needs to believe that you are dispensible to make you vulnerable.
A good example nowadays is teachers. Many universities are getting rid of their teaching faculty, and replacing them with cheap postdocs. This is a stupid move, becuase it severely impacts the quality of university education. But the effects won't be felt immediately, and when they are felt, it is unclear whether the university administration will realize that they're to blame.
And if you are your own boss, you risk being fired by your customers when your products/services cost more because you use local workers. Offshoring destroys jobs now matter how you work.
Except it's not really a good lesson to the marketplace if all is forgiven.... "Try DRM, if it works, great. If not, your former customers will forgive you and all's good."
They should not be congratulated for recognizing how stupid they are. Let's congratulate and support the coffee maker companies who DIDN'T try this.
We need to engender fear in the heart of every executive who would even CONSIDER this insanity. So I say fuck them-- let their company suffer from their idiocy and let others learn from their failure.
If this news makes you want to reconsider a keurig machine, re-reconsider. There are plenty of other great alternatives. And that goes for printer makers and anyone else who's thinking about going in this direction.
In other words, you're advocating to never forgive them for their mistakes. If you can lead a huge multinational business and never make a single mistake, ever, then congratulations to you, but the rest of us are only human. The idea may have been stupid, yes, but everyone screws up at some points in their life. If they continue to make these choices, then yes, I'm sure people will switch, but one failed marketing line shouldn't prevent you from ever using their coffee makers again. Seems a shame to lose a very convenient and otherwise decent coffee maker over a petty grudge - although, since I don't own one, I am admittedly only assuming it's convenient.
Of all the destructive things one could do, it rewrites the MBR? That's it? That's fairly easy to fix, and your data is still easily intact by copying it with a second machine.
To be honest, a much more dangerous one would be one that sits dormant for, oh, say six months or so. In doing that, it gets itself into all of your backups (if you have any), and now you're going to have trouble separating your data from the virus. If it then activates a random amount of days (1-14) after being restored, it's not obvious which backups are infected and which ones aren't.
Of course, this is all purely theoretical, and I highly discourage anyone from actually implementing this - it's just an idea...
While not utilizing any of c++'s features, it is still valid c++. I think he might call it this because he may usually program in c++, but maybe just for this one project he did it in c, and since it's still legal c++ he finds it easier to just label it as c++. I actually quite like it - could use a bit more commenting, but overall very clean and readable. Should compile with a decent c or c++compiler...
Slashdot Mirror
"Mobile notifications" both never work for me and deliver exactly the same information. Furthermore, my smartphone is a far frailer device that I do not feel comfortable taking half way around the world with me, where's a Nokia 3310 is a very durable and reliable phone (I speak from experience on this matter). Trendy for Google to cripple their services I suppose...
That doesn't really preserve the originals, you're just making copies of them. There are hundreds of thousands of Mona Lisa's in the world, but they are all worth nothing compared to the original. I really don't mean to discourage these efforts, it's a good idea, but it's not "preserving artifacts destroyed by ISIS", it's "distributing copies of things destroyed by ISIS". Copies are not going to pacify my loathing for this terrible organization - these people deserved to be burned alive just like the people they've killed, and I'm very rarely one to talk about extremes.
I don't know of any country on earth where heroin, methamphetamine etc. can be bought and sold freely among consenting adults. So you probably should say something is wrong with human society.
I do. Portugal.
Why not use cameras instead? I'm not talking about motion detecting ones, which are not going to very reliable, but what about color detection? Most drones stand out distinctly from the sky they're flying in, and you can see glints of light and such from them. You could also simply have human surveillance watch out for them - they tend to be pretty good at telling birds from drones. Machines aren't replacements for humans at everything, you know...
Powerpoint is supposed to shorten information and condense it down. You might as well rail against taking notes by hand, because that loses original information as well.
Now, idiotic uses of Powerpoint in which the presenter just drones on and on and omits vital information - THAT is a crime, I hate people who do that. There simply is no fathoming the depths of my loathing for them. But that's people misusing the tool - we don't ban hammers because some moron tries to push the nail in with the wooden end. Powerpoint can actually be a pretty decent tool when employed correctly.
And Access is amazing, very underrated product. You can do some crazily incredible things with this thing.
Shouldn't someone from the anti-open-source bunch be on here stating that this "proves" that open source isn't viable?
Oops, shouldn't give them ideas.
I more lament the demise of Crunchbang, actually. It was a pretty original concept. But distros come and go. There are market forces in open source, too. Commercial software also comes and goes, but when it goes, users are generally left with ... not much.
You might be interested in Crunchbang++. They are basically a continuation of the original, with the same goals and values. I've been mainly a FreeBSD user since early 2005 or so, and that's my main OS for my workstation. However, when it came to my laptop, nothing could beat Crunchbang on that thing - hope the successor can be as awesome as the original.
Maybe Greeks are different but in Germany, if you borrow money, you are fully expected to pay it back. As soon as possible. Greece can make as much racket as it likes, but the Germans still want their money back. And frankly, I agree. If Greece is not willing to pay back what they take, that's theft, and they can go without aid for all I care. Especially when the borrowed money doesn't actually go to fixing its major economic issues.
Teaching is still seen as a woman's profession. Your point?
And marketing won the day.
Xenix used the same marketing as Windows did. In fact, Microsoft owned it.
Now OS/2 I'll grant you, IBM fumbled hard on that one...
But a more convoluted, heavy weight Scheme? If we adopted Lisp 20 years ago the world would be a better place.
#1. Java is nothing like Scheme, it's a fundamentally different language.
#2. Scheme is a Lisp, so if Java were a heavy weight one, we would have a widely adopted Lisp.
#3. Why would having Lisp being a widely adopted "make the world a better place"? Does it donate to charity?
And frankly, I personally consider the Lisps to be heavily overrated to begin with.
How does this deal with loud interrupting noises? Classrooms or offices tend to have bursts of loud noises (dropped items, phones ringing, etc.), is there any way it can figure out lost information?
It actually does not. You can even get faster performance with garbage collection.
Yes, you can.... everywhere except in the real world. Garbage collection is one of the reasons iOS is much faster than Android on the same hardware .
Since when does Android run on iOS devices? It doesn't?
. . . . .
Then it's not the same hardware.
Back in the days of the Pentium 3 or 4. Again, I ask what speed concern would you have with one of those processors? I mean, sure, if you were dealing with an 8086 or something like that speed is an issue. But most tasks run just fine on a Pentium grade processor so long as you don't have a GUI filled with bloat.
One, they explicitly wanted the ability to use a GUI along with the ability to do things like watch movies and browse the internet. Linux is not going to cut it here.
Two, it's a pet hobby. Next time you make a model airplane, I'll be sure to point out that it's a waste of time because it will never actually fly.
And yet Slashdot loads faster even with all its shit coding.
Slashdot is not running off someone's spare Pentium box clocking in at 200 MHz.
Not anymore.
It fits on a floppy disk? We are in 2015, right? What is a 'floppy disk'?
They started writing this back in like 2000, when people still used them. Besides, it's just a hobby project: if they want to write it as a challenge, who cares? Personally, I think it's quite impressive and I commend them for their work.
I'd highly recommend leaving them in their original format, or if anything, converting them all to .pdf. Conversion is always fraught with danger, and you will be spending an awful lot of time getting to the know the intricacies of Microsoft Word if you go this route. Pdfs display equally nicely on every operating system, they archive very well, and almost every tool out there can read them - but while converting documents to this format usually works better than others, I'd still be very careful to watch for mistakes in conversions.
Dude, you have no anonymity. With less than five minutes of my spare time, I know your entire name: Alexander Peter Kawalski, hence your nickname of APK. You are a Verizon customer, and you currently live in Syracuse, New York. You can be found at 903 East Division Street, Apartment #1, bottom floor. The house is a bit of a dingy gray/blue color, you have a few wooden chairs out back in your poor excuse for a yard, and there's a wooden power pole directly by your house.
Post AC all you want, but it's not going to stop anyone from finding out who you are.
While I don't actively hate it pixel art, I agree it's overused. If you're not specifically going for a retro vibe, I don't really see it as attractive. I think decrying the decline of this 'art form' is definitely premature at this point. But the alternative in the 2D universe is all too often Flash or Flash-style animation, which IMO is a harbinger of cheesiness and not very attractive looking at all. It's very garish and cartoony--given the choice between the two I think I'd rather have pixel art, since (for me) it's a bit easier on the eyes, draws less attention to itself once you've been playing it for a bit. What I really miss is that one art form that has been absolutely massacred by the trio of pixel art, flash graphics and (the ever easier to implement) 3D graphics--high quality sprite artwork. Think late 90s / early 2000s RTSes and CRPGs like Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Fallout 1/2, Planescape Torment, Baldur's Gate, etc. If you have any of these games a high resolution makeover (the sad part is, in many cases higher resolution versions of many of the sprites probably existed on the artists' hard drives at the time) and they would look rather good. Improve the animations a bit (either by using 2.5D or by generating 2D sprites from 3D models) and I really think it could rival many of today's 3D games, for at least somewhat less money. (I'm not sure how much quality 2D artists cost vs. high end 3D graphics, so I couldn't say for sure how much less.) Scaling to different resolutions would be an issue, but not an impossible one and on the plus side you wouldn't have to worry about graphics card performance at all... But alas, the AAA developers simply aren't going to sully themselves with such oldschool nonsense, and the indie developers are inevitably going to gravitate towards pixel art or cartoony Flash art due to the cost savings.
THIS. Seriously people, go play a Metal Slug game sometime - some of the sprite work of the late 90's is absolutely amazing, and the detail and crispness is unrivaled by even modern day graphics. I really wish high quality sprite work came back, honestly, because it looks gorgeous. People often pay attention to the other two extreme ends of the spectrum (pixel art and then 3D high res graphics), but the middle ground has completely disappeared...
The important thing to remember here is that Swift is absolutely destroying Rust.
Rust has been nothing but hype so far. Many Ruby on Rails hipsters have rallied around it, but they haven't actually managed to produce anything useful with it.
Anything that can be done using Rust can be done better by using C++.
C, C++ and Go are the dominant languages on Linux. Rust has made no inroads here.
C++ and C# are the dominant languages on Windows. Rust has made no inroads here.
Now that Swift is seeing tremendous uptake within the iOS and OS X sphere of influence, Rust has even less of a chance than it had before.
I think that Swift will be seen as the final nail in Rust's coffin. Swift has provided developers with productivity, while Rust has provided them with false hopes.
We're seeing a convergence on exactly three languages: C++, C#, and Swift. Every other language is becoming a minor player compared to these Three Giants.
According to the TIOBE Index, Java has more usage than all three of them put together. I'd hardly call it a "minor player".
Since when is embedded programming associated with "immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications"? I don't think Swift is going to replace C anytime soon in that department.
I would almost certainly prefer the FSB to see what I am doing rather than the NSA. The FSB aren't able to knock down my door and throw me in jail for thought crimes like the NSA can.
You, my friend, know nothing about the FSB.
The NSA can gather all your information and store it on a server for a set amount of time. The FSB can do this indefinitely, can imprison you without any justification, subject you to whatever torture they deem necessary, and can even outright kill you if they so wish. They are literally what came out of the ashes of the KGB. I'm not condoning the NSA's actions, but they are a far cry from the FSB by any definition.
It seems like the only way you can truly make yourself unoffshoreable is to acquire your own local customers by running your own business.
I agree. If you aren't your own boss, then you are vulnerable to offshoring. It doesn't matter how indispensible you actually are, your boss only needs to believe that you are dispensible to make you vulnerable.
A good example nowadays is teachers. Many universities are getting rid of their teaching faculty, and replacing them with cheap postdocs. This is a stupid move, becuase it severely impacts the quality of university education. But the effects won't be felt immediately, and when they are felt, it is unclear whether the university administration will realize that they're to blame.
And if you are your own boss, you risk being fired by your customers when your products/services cost more because you use local workers. Offshoring destroys jobs now matter how you work.
Except it's not really a good lesson to the marketplace if all is forgiven.... "Try DRM, if it works, great. If not, your former customers will forgive you and all's good."
They should not be congratulated for recognizing how stupid they are. Let's congratulate and support the coffee maker companies who DIDN'T try this.
We need to engender fear in the heart of every executive who would even CONSIDER this insanity. So I say fuck them-- let their company suffer from their idiocy and let others learn from their failure.
If this news makes you want to reconsider a keurig machine, re-reconsider. There are plenty of other great alternatives. And that goes for printer makers and anyone else who's thinking about going in this direction.
In other words, you're advocating to never forgive them for their mistakes. If you can lead a huge multinational business and never make a single mistake, ever, then congratulations to you, but the rest of us are only human. The idea may have been stupid, yes, but everyone screws up at some points in their life. If they continue to make these choices, then yes, I'm sure people will switch, but one failed marketing line shouldn't prevent you from ever using their coffee makers again. Seems a shame to lose a very convenient and otherwise decent coffee maker over a petty grudge - although, since I don't own one, I am admittedly only assuming it's convenient.
Of all the destructive things one could do, it rewrites the MBR? That's it? That's fairly easy to fix, and your data is still easily intact by copying it with a second machine.
To be honest, a much more dangerous one would be one that sits dormant for, oh, say six months or so. In doing that, it gets itself into all of your backups (if you have any), and now you're going to have trouble separating your data from the virus. If it then activates a random amount of days (1-14) after being restored, it's not obvious which backups are infected and which ones aren't.
Of course, this is all purely theoretical, and I highly discourage anyone from actually implementing this - it's just an idea...
While not utilizing any of c++'s features, it is still valid c++. I think he might call it this because he may usually program in c++, but maybe just for this one project he did it in c, and since it's still legal c++ he finds it easier to just label it as c++. I actually quite like it - could use a bit more commenting, but overall very clean and readable. Should compile with a decent c or c++compiler...