Why? Because its smaller and runs faster - nuff said, I'm a speed freak. I don't need bells and wistles on my Sun's desktop, I'll save em for machines that aren't expected to compile large programs on demand and as fast as possible.
Thats odd, I was able to write a full-blown chat server in python, multithreaded non-blocking, with various commands and such, in less then half a KB of source (191 lines of code, to be exact)... Languages such as python and perl are designed for this sort of thing - they have amazing libraries that let you concentrate on your app and its problems. Rebol is not open sourced, yes? Alternatives that are amazingly powerful exist, yes? And these alternatives are open source... and have huge communities behind them... I'm all for Yet-Another-New-Language attempts, but please, make it open! Otherwise its just as bad as C#...
Maybe if Ximian hadn't pulled the rude trickery they did on google that Gordon mentioned, he wouldn't have the _admited_ bad taste in his mouth. Yes, what they did was technically legal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't rude.
I've read several interviews with the Ximian folks, and they act like they have polls up thier arses - no offense, but they have an attitude, just like many l33t linux users I unfortunatly know. I find it funny that people have no problem with thier attitudes, and yet complain when Gordon, who has been attacked and hurt by them in the past, expresses his dis-taste for them...
maybe if people in the 'community' acted co-operatively and didn't 'dis' each other all the time and pull stupid stunts like Ximian did and the gnome people and KDE people do against each other, we'd actually have some usable systems.
I manage a software development team. I used to be a 'prima-dona' programmer. It seems in the community egos rule and prima-donas are tolerated... but then people complain about how we have competing projects with horrible duplications of effort and GUIs that don't seem to work as well or are anywhere near as easy to use as the commercial competitors. Only comercial entities such as Sun/IBM perform usability tests and seem to care that the apps and ditros SUCK for average users.
This has turned into a little bit of a rant, but: when you are paid to code, the end user IS your boss. This is the lesson many prima-donas never seem to learn. I think parts of the community would benefit from a mass-pressing of 'the pragmatic programmer'
If I had two people, let alone two groups, of developers working for me who let thier egos get in the way like the KDE and Gnome people do, I w ould fire BOTH teams when they refused to co-operate.
Unfortunatly, it seems I'm a minority in the community, since I care about the end-result of the work, not just the beliefs behind the work...
Maybe because it came too late...
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Why not Ruby?
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· Score: 1
There are are limited number of developers out there, and once most of them have found thier fav languages - whether it is Perl, C/C++, Python, java or (gasp) Tcl - they dont always feel the need to pick up another language when thier current tools do the same things... Ruby is suffering because of the existence of decent competition, not because its bad. Heck, a lot of people write decent little languages that never take off.
everyone _has_ an accent. You just don't recognize yours because you are an american surounded by americans who all 'sound normal' - that is, they have american accents...
Do something like, oh, steal the source code for windows2k, solaris, IIS, oracle and anything else they can get thier hands on, along with the SMDI hacks and the DCS source code, load it in one of these along with enough tranmitting power to keep the source broadcasted at like 28kb/sec continuously for a few years;) It'd be SOO expensive to get rid of, no one could do anything before the information was out...
I know, troll material, but it'd be funny...
I've even gotten to the point where I refuse to state my age when dealing with my employeer and/or recruiters.
(luckily for me I started to bald early, making me look older then I am)
The best thing I've found is that if your current employeer refuses to take your advice, document it for future reference. If they are passing you up for promotion and/or pay increases, leave. Federal law only covers age discrimination for employees over 45 years old...
Leave, and write up a very good resume describing all of the great accomplishments you've done at your current Job, and make sure you leave on a good note so that your Boss(es) will be friendly when recruiters and potential employeers call for recomendations. When they call, they may ask 'Did he do the following things under your employement:', and your boss (unless they lie through thier teeth) will have to say 'yes' to all of the things you did.
Keep in mind, however, that in many states your emplyeer needs no good reason to fire you, and calls for references could start the ball rolling. On the other hand, calls for references can also start the ball rolling on a nice raise...
An impressive resume and a mature attitude when dealing with potential employeers and recruiters will get you a lot farther then grey hair - I know this from experience. I once, after accepting a job through a recruiter, ended up informing them of my age - it was too late to stop anything, and its not like its illegal for me to work - they were quite surprised, and impressed. Experience and ability are your allies - use them to impress. If your age is known before your abilities, people's eyes (and brains) tend to glaze over...
Re:School Children saw it.
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The Challenger
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· Score: 1
Not all children were as lucky as you, is all I can say. Not being in a private school were religion classes existed made the experience very diffrent from what you describe. We did not talk about the accident after the fact - it became taboo. If you became upset or wanted to talk about it, you were sent to the couselor's office to talk about it. In a large public school system this was a Bad Thing - the other kids noticed and would treat you diffrently because of it. Going to the counselor was seen as a bizare combo of mild punishment, being a snitch, being a wuss, and just being 'odd' - it usually caused more damage via the treatment you would get from other students then it was worth. Thus, without the benefit of discussion after the fact, without guiding hands saying 'these things happen, it is sad buch such is life, nothing is without risk' - we were left to rot in confusion. Many of us, myself included, didn't go home to our parents. Our parents worked and went to school and we were left with baby sitters who didn't want to discus it because it bothered them, or they didn't want to get in trouble with thier parents, etc... Maybe myself and my class just weren't as mature as your 5th grade class - but from what you describe it was a growing experience for you - for us it Was disturbing.
And your claim that we wanted to be shielded or think its right to be shielded is false. Had you sat in my shoes you would of had a very diffrent experience, and all who experienced it they way I did were bothered by it - not even the school clowns would dare make jokes the like of which are being posted on slashdot as we speak.
Since the shuttle was carring the first teacher into space, many schools across america had been preparing for the launch and mission for weeks. We had made posters, I had perfected the art of drawing the shuttle for the other kids, and were all eagerly awaiting the launch. I was lucky, I didn't see it live, but it was still bad.
My (4th grade) class had lunch durring the time the launch was to happen, so we were buying food when it happened. The class next to us had decided to take a late lunch in order to watch it - they suddenly showed up and were rather upset - saying the shuttle had exploded. Lunch ended early. Classes crowded into rooms with TVs and watched news reports on what had happened. at least 20 times from various angles we saw the explosion. We were all elft speechless, some kids cried. The teachers were too stunned to realize they needed to turn the TV off and get us doing something else. No work got done all day - we went to the busses straight from watching the news coverage.
The media, not knowing that schoolchildren were watching, didn't pull any punches, and repeatedly stated that the astronaughts and crew were most likely dead. It was a bad day, and it hurt the space program as well as disturbing a generation. I'm getting my vodka now. I don't want to think about this.
I once toured their headquaters...
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FASA Dies
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· Score: 2
I was big into shadowrun and battletech as a teenager (early 90s), and so one spring break a friend of mine wanted to go visit Chicago - under the guise of seeing some colleges he didn't really want to attend. Three of us ended up going - and since I had called ahead and somehow gotten Lou Prosperi on the phone (creator of earthdawn, great guy) - we were invited to come in and tour the building.
It was in a not-so-hot area of town, on the third floor of a large warehouse building, but once you were inside you forgot all of that. Original artwork from all of their diffrent books decorated the walls - one end of the hallway had a Shadorwun banner/logo that had to be 8 feet wide if it was an inch...
Lou took us into the lounge/game-room where they spent a couple of hours everyday testing their own products and the competitions'... One wall was a series of shelves filled with more game books then you can count - it was amazing.
Lou told us about their daily routine, and then showed us promotional materials (including a proof he brought straight from the art department for an upcomming ad in Dragon magazine) for the upcomming game Earthdawn, and we immediatly fell in love.
Anyway, FASA for me meant good, detailed worlds with enough behind-the-scenes action going on, or at least hinted at, that you never got bored, and had plenty of material to use when GMing. In their later years the quality slacked off a bit in the artwork (or at least the on-staff artists changed and weren't in my style anymore) and the quality of the books - for me this death knell came much earlier, in '95 or '96 (I can't remember which) when it was anounced that Tom Dowd - one of the creators of Shadowrun and the maintainer of the game world/senior editor for all Shadorun products, left to work at FASA interactive. The new guy on staff had good ideas, but they didn't mesh with the way the game world had originally been presented - Tom had the Touch, this guy didn't...
As I got further and further away from gaming in general and more focused on my career, I would look back on my gaming time as educational - I expanded my creativety, my social skills, and my problem solving ability. I'm slowly selling my game books collection on ebay, and now this... brings back memories I tell ya. It is a semi-sad day in the gaming world.
The Fredonian Air and Space Association is no more (yes, thats what fasa stood for, a reference to a old marx brothers movie)! At least battletech and Shadowrun will live on.
Last march I began work for a fairly Large ISP's web-app development department. I was brought on as a senior developer, due to my experience with web apps and development in general, and was also considered the 'problem solver' of the group.
Within days of being Hired I was asked to work on a project I will call 'NOX3' (changed to protect the parties involved from litigation - Seriously!) - this project had been ongoing for almost 2 years by the time I was brought on. All of the original developers had left the company - and just two months before my arrival a 'needed' type of join had facilitated the change from utilizing mysql to Oracle as the backend DB.
As most of you may or may-not know, Oracle can perform very well - when the DB is archetected correctly with its relationships and indexes. As it turns out, we had seen a 260% DECREASE in performance switching to Oracle: this was because the developers involved (by the time the switchover took place, an outside development company was also involved) did not want to rewrite the hundreds of queires used by the system and so copied the table structure over to oracle with no schema changes, no added indexes, or anything. Due to the 'flat' nature of the schema, table-scans were common-place, leading to horrible performance with the full 800k+ rows in the main table. Linux's max-file size (2GB at the time, thank god for 2.4!!) actualy held us back by forcing indexes and tables to be spread over multiple files, which also affected performance...
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. As I said, within days of being hired I was put on the team of developers working on the project and told to 'see what could be done, a silver bullet would be nice'. Well, the deeper I dug, the more I realized a silver bullet didn't exist - the app was horribly archetected, badly (= none) documented, uncommented (180k lines of code, only 1k lines of comments!!!!!), hampered by the DB schema and even by the choice of technologies used to implement the system. To add insult to injury, the team of developers (now 'mine') inside the ISP were just running support/bugfixing, because the customer was doing field tests of the 'beta' (not my choice of term) copy of the app live, and the external development company brought in to consult was working on adding features (to the live beta app, mind you).
I told my managers that the project was a write-off at best, and that if they ever expected to get near the performance the client wanted ( we were two orders of magantude two slow), and support the number of simultaneous users they wanted (5000 active users, with peaks of 15k+), we needed to start a re-design imediatly before things were even further behind schedule. (the app was 13 months late... I'm not kidding)...
I wasn't listened to - the manager nodded his head and passed on the message, but nothing happened. So I started giving him reports with all of the horrible things I was finding, things he could show his managers - they didn't listen to the reports. So for two months I fought just to get permission to spend actual company time running benchmarks/tests of the system to prove my point... I ran the tests and boom - the system Crashed (not slowed down, actual crash) at 48 simultaneous users - crashed so bad it took down the machine the app was on (but not the DB machines). Finally I had my boss's attention, my findings were vindicated...
We never got to do a rewrite, instead the project degenerated into legal wrangling complicated enough to confuse OJ's lawyers. The consulting company claimed it wasn't thier responsability to comment on the quality/capability of the app - just to add features - meanwhile my company claimed that they should of performed 'due dilligence' in making sure the app could perform as required, and they should of opened thier moths way before I blew the whistle, meanwhile the customer went after both my company and the cunsulting company, and my company brought in a second consulting company to verify/audit my findings and gather evidence (this took 4 months, meanwhile we sat almost idle).
My team was dismantled - all of the developers on the team (except for myself) were hired with specific skill sets to work with the technologies the app required, and thus weren't needed any more (this was 2 months after the 4 month audit was completed). The original manager who started the project was fired for 'other reasons', and my manager, who came on board just 4 months before myself, was also let go. All of this firing and such took place 8 months after my hiring. A week after my hiring I had determined (and was already telling my manager) that the system needed a complete redesign, and it would take 6 months with the right design and current team, to do it right (no contact with the customer would of been allowed, along with no testing, we needed six-months of heads-down coding time). Instead of listinging to the person they had hired as thier 'problem solver' and senior developer they drug thier feet and then dismantled the project, but paid everyone for 8 months work along the way.
So which makes more sense, 8 months of paying everyone involved just to end up cancling the project and then get into costly legal manuvers, or six months of paying them to deliver a working app to the customer, late (which, surprisingly, the customer was fine with, as it turns out - time wasn't the issue, functionality was)?
I don't claim to understand it, and I still don't know why they did what they did - my point is, asking for a re-write can be like wishing to win the lottery - the powers that be can work against you.
Device for Forcing Computer Upgrade(TM), and associated buisness model.
Device and technique for rendering computing hardware unuseable and therefore bug-free via the application of a large steel weight approximatly 15 lbs in mass against the primary circuits, hardrives and other vital components at a high rate of speed. Application results in the target computer system being instantly non-functional, thus requiring the user to seek the purchase of a new computer imediatly. The device, from now on reffered to as the 'sledge hammer' is fashioned from a handle wood fit for being gripped by a human hand, with a large metal weight attached at one end.
Also, A patent is being sought on the buisness model based upon the judicious use of this device, especially when thier computer is made by a competitor, and always within 24 months of purchase.
the thoery for this was printed in a analog sci-fi magazine back in 93 or 94... i'll dig it up and publish the issue date...
ok, from this old message post comes the info on the publish date, it was actually in 92!!
Heres a quote:
"There's a cover-story article I've just read that I think a lot of you
will be interested in: ``The Magnetic Sail,'' by Robert M. Zubrin
(based on work by Dana G. Andrews (Boeing) and himself (Martin-Marietta).
I regret it appeared in an only *quasi*-reliable source: the "science fact"
section of this month's (May 1992) _Analog_.
"
Systems development is less visible to the general public of computer users, but it Does go on, and is Not irrelevant. Psion, the PalmOS, Amos, Qnx, and BeOS are just examples of alternative systems being developed - many exist in the private embeded market and aren't even known outside ther respective niches, such as OS-9. Microsoft's products are feature rich, but I do not think anyone would classify them, as a whole (there are always exceptions!), as being technologically superior. Yes Windows has a good gui, but so does Mac, so does (did?) Amiga, BeOS, and many others. Under the hood, windows 9x is LESS sophisticated in many ways then linux. WinNT/2k is more complex and is built upon a different model then win9x or *nix, but that model itself is not very sophisticated or 'technologically superior' compared to many systems available... just different, and feature rich.
If we were to equate piled on features with sophistication, then a swiss army knife is sophisticated...
If we were to equate piled on features with technological superiority, then the warner brothers special edition mini-van is technologically superior to a turbo charged italian sports car <insert favorite brand here>...
Dont be fooled! yes, you need to put 'APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf, but then you ALSO need to run lilo on the command line in order for that setting to become active. Klilo will run lilo for you if you add the setting there and do a 'install' - but Klilo freaks on many distributions that put a listing for a floppy device boot option into lilo.conf... if you dont have a floppy mounted at the time you hit 'install' in Klilo, you'll get an error, and the new boot loader settings wont be used. for best results, edit/etc/lilo.conf with your favorite text editor (save a backup first) - and put 'APPEND="mem=256m"' on a new line in the listing for your default kernel, then save your changes, and just type 'lilo' on the command line. if lilo chokes, on a listing for a floppy boot kernel for example, try mounting a floppy, then running lilo... if it still chokes, you might have to remove the listing for the floppy boot option. (you can still overide this at the boot prompt if needbe to boot from whatever device you want) I had many an issue with this when I first started playing with linux - and everyplace I looked skipped over the fact that you need to run lilo after configuring lilo.conf Doh!
IBM's PowerPC processors for thier rs6000 and as/400s are COMPLETELY diffrent from the g4 design - they are compatable on a binary level, but then again, so are the 386 and the pentium II... IBM uses very specialized processors in thier high-end systems - three integer pipelines, 2 fpus, 1000+ pins on thier interface (HIGH bandwith bus!!), tons of cache... each integer pipeline is Long, like 12+ stages, allowing for high scalablity in the Mhz of the processor... The g4 has too few stages in its pipeline, leading to it being Very hard to scale to high Mhz... copper/soi g4s _might_ get to 600Mhz - but the yeilds would be just as low as the current 500Mhz ones. Remember, the g4 is Tiny it was designed to be used in embeded apps as well as desktops - and thus was designed with as few transistors as possible. AMD and motorola have been working on a 'new' g4 that is basicly a redesign with a few more stages in the pipelines, allowing for much higher speeds.
it was a book too - in the book it was high-school or middle-school age students (I dont really remember - I read it in 6th grade) Anyways, the book focuses on a teacher who, in order to get his class involved in teaching of history, especially dealing with WWII - starts 'the Wave' - a nazi-youth-copylike organization in his classes where non participation lead to outcasting... students wore arm-bands with 3 wavy lines on them...
Its REALLY sad that not only would this sort of thing happen today, but they would be stupid enough to use the name of a late 70s/early 80s book/movie that was about how easily things like this can go wrong!!!
No one, including mattel, is questioning the validity of the GPL - but reguardless of a product or piece of software`s liscense, if it violates copyrights, trademarks and/or patents then That particular product/piece of software can be 'outlawed' and all users CAN be forced to stop using the product.
For example, If I were to, oh, copy the source code of windows from a server at microsoft, then released it under the 'GPL' - and the courts decided to outlaw my software (as they would have every right to do) - then it wouldn't be the GPL being questioned, it would be the Original intelectual property rights of myself that came in question. Since I did not have the right to distribute the software, its illegal for me to do so, under any liscense.
Mind you, what these guys did via reverse engineering is Not what I would consider to be wrong and/or a punishable offense... but the courts have put up an injunction, and that injunction is against the original creators - it nulifies thier rights to distribute the software. Since they have lost the right to do so, then the GPL they granted to the software is itself invalid IN THIS CASE ONLY due to the authors not holding the intelectual rights (according to the courts) in the first place...
Also give me the ability to feed said monkeys for an extreemly long period of time. This way, you only need a few computers to siphon through the monekey`s input (via dumping full keyboard buffers) to sift for any random examples of brilliance... or hamlet.
What about keeping the source for the game itself open source, but create a module in the source that handles encrypting and decrypting data sent back and forth between the server using an internally stored and signed key.
The admin of Quake server foo would compile thier server And Client using thier own pair of key pairs (one pair for upstream, one for down), and distribute said binaries on thier website.
Thus, to play quake on the foo server, you would need to foo quake binary, whose source is open, but whose key is not. Then the whole issue becomes one of convience (who wants to download 50 binaries for 50 diffrent servers?) and the strength of the encryption used. Of course, signed server binaries and clients wouldnt be limited to use on one server machine, quake world, for example, could with a reasonably sized encryption key, use the same binary for all of thier quake servers, and thus to play on any quake world server you would only need to make one download of the quake world client... of course, quake world could publish the source of thier client and server if they modified it, but they just wouldnt include thier key pairs in the source...
Thus, we mix the power of open source for the development process, and the power of public key encryption with internal signed keys, by using distributed binaries for actual play. of course, it could always be a compile option to use the encryption (it would slow things down) - but if you dont have the proper keys in your binary, you cant play on anyone`s server(s).
Of course, this also stops aim-bots, but it leaves several things that are hard to deal with:
- Server admins would need to either be able to make thier own binaries on all platforms they wanted to support (how many people actually have a linux box, a bsd, a win9x, a winNT, and a mac, all with compile tools just laying around?), or purchase/obtain pre-compiled binaries from a trusted source.
- Anyone who did have the tools, or only wanted to support one or two platforms, could compile cheats into thier own clients at the same time that they created the clients to be distributed to the public... or sell 'upgrades' to the standard clients that included the proper keys for thier server And cheats...
- Players would need to download several sets of binaries if they are active deathmatch players - wasting time and bandwith...
Anyone else have an idea that is a open source solution...???
This is not true streaming, this is packet based, hence the 'cipherblock' as they are called. They require a minimum amount of data to work on at one time. See my post on bits vs packets
The fact is, single-bit encryption Cannot be done securly. If you are Not sure, for example, in a streaming situation, that All previous bits have been recieved, then you cannot base current bit values on all previous ones without making your system so weak as to be useless. Even if you increase the minimum data size to a 8-bit byte, you still run into problems - did the previous byte come through? what about the one before that?
The only way to have secure and usable streaming encryption would be to use a large packet size, and encrypt each packet... now by large, i dont mean several kb or anything - we could be talking about 256 bits per packet, for example. Each packet gets its own encryption applied, and is not only secure, but does not rely upon future or past data for the encryption.
Redundancy could be built into the schema also - spreading data through several packets to ensure it gets through even if one is lost. Mind you, this does Not produce a true stream, but a series of packets that can be decrypted and reassembled into a stream... Sounds like virtual circuits and tcp/ip, doesnt it?
If you can get around the problem of being sure all data previously sent Was sent, then a XOR based algorythm could be used on a per-bit or per-byte basis as the data flowed through, with the encryptor keeping track of where in the key it is pointing, and systamaticly applying the encryption to individual pieces of data as they flow through...
the problem is, however, that XORs are not that hard to break...
Slashdot Mirror
"I just got a bill for 4000$ because my my cat jammed in the F5 key, refreshing slashdot.org continuously for a couple of hours..."
Why? Because its smaller and runs faster - nuff said, I'm a speed freak. I don't need bells and wistles on my Sun's desktop, I'll save em for machines that aren't expected to compile large programs on demand and as fast as possible.
Thats odd, I was able to write a full-blown chat server in python, multithreaded non-blocking, with various commands and such, in less then half a KB of source (191 lines of code, to be exact)...
Languages such as python and perl are designed for this sort of thing - they have amazing libraries that let you concentrate on your app and its problems.
Rebol is not open sourced, yes?
Alternatives that are amazingly powerful exist, yes? And these alternatives are open source... and have huge communities behind them...
I'm all for Yet-Another-New-Language attempts, but please, make it open! Otherwise its just as bad as C#...
Maybe if Ximian hadn't pulled the rude trickery they did on google that Gordon mentioned, he wouldn't have the _admited_ bad taste in his mouth. Yes, what they did was technically legal, but that doesn't mean it wasn't rude.
I've read several interviews with the Ximian folks, and they act like they have polls up thier arses - no offense, but they have an attitude, just like many l33t linux users I unfortunatly know. I find it funny that people have no problem with thier attitudes, and yet complain when Gordon, who has been attacked and hurt by them in the past, expresses his dis-taste for them...
maybe if people in the 'community' acted co-operatively and didn't 'dis' each other all the time and pull stupid stunts like Ximian did and the gnome people and KDE people do against each other, we'd actually have some usable systems.
I manage a software development team. I used to be a 'prima-dona' programmer. It seems in the community egos rule and prima-donas are tolerated... but then people complain about how we have competing projects with horrible duplications of effort and GUIs that don't seem to work as well or are anywhere near as easy to use as the commercial competitors. Only comercial entities such as Sun/IBM perform usability tests and seem to care that the apps and ditros SUCK for average users.
This has turned into a little bit of a rant, but: when you are paid to code, the end user IS your boss. This is the lesson many prima-donas never seem to learn. I think parts of the community would benefit from a mass-pressing of 'the pragmatic programmer'
If I had two people, let alone two groups, of developers working for me who let thier egos get in the way like the KDE and Gnome people do, I w ould fire BOTH teams when they refused to co-operate.
Unfortunatly, it seems I'm a minority in the community, since I care about the end-result of the work, not just the beliefs behind the work...
There are are limited number of developers out there, and once most of them have found thier fav languages - whether it is Perl, C/C++, Python, java or (gasp) Tcl - they dont always feel the need to pick up another language when thier current tools do the same things... Ruby is suffering because of the existence of decent competition, not because its bad. Heck, a lot of people write decent little languages that never take off.
everyone _has_ an accent. You just don't recognize yours because you are an american surounded by americans who all 'sound normal' - that is, they have american accents...
duh.
Do something like, oh, steal the source code for windows2k, solaris, IIS, oracle and anything else they can get thier hands on, along with the SMDI hacks and the DCS source code, load it in one of these along with enough tranmitting power to keep the source broadcasted at like 28kb/sec continuously for a few years ;) It'd be SOO expensive to get rid of, no one could do anything before the information was out...
I know, troll material, but it'd be funny...
I've even gotten to the point where I refuse to state my age when dealing with my employeer and/or recruiters.
(luckily for me I started to bald early, making me look older then I am)
The best thing I've found is that if your current employeer refuses to take your advice, document it for future reference. If they are passing you up for promotion and/or pay increases, leave. Federal law only covers age discrimination for employees over 45 years old...
Leave, and write up a very good resume describing all of the great accomplishments you've done at your current Job, and make sure you leave on a good note so that your Boss(es) will be friendly when recruiters and potential employeers call for recomendations. When they call, they may ask 'Did he do the following things under your employement:', and your boss (unless they lie through thier teeth) will have to say 'yes' to all of the things you did.
Keep in mind, however, that in many states your emplyeer needs no good reason to fire you, and calls for references could start the ball rolling. On the other hand, calls for references can also start the ball rolling on a nice raise...
An impressive resume and a mature attitude when dealing with potential employeers and recruiters will get you a lot farther then grey hair - I know this from experience. I once, after accepting a job through a recruiter, ended up informing them of my age - it was too late to stop anything, and its not like its illegal for me to work - they were quite surprised, and impressed. Experience and ability are your allies - use them to impress. If your age is known before your abilities, people's eyes (and brains) tend to glaze over...
Not all children were as lucky as you, is all I can say. Not being in a private school were religion classes existed made the experience very diffrent from what you describe. We did not talk about the accident after the fact - it became taboo. If you became upset or wanted to talk about it, you were sent to the couselor's office to talk about it. In a large public school system this was a Bad Thing - the other kids noticed and would treat you diffrently because of it. Going to the counselor was seen as a bizare combo of mild punishment, being a snitch, being a wuss, and just being 'odd' - it usually caused more damage via the treatment you would get from other students then it was worth. Thus, without the benefit of discussion after the fact, without guiding hands saying 'these things happen, it is sad buch such is life, nothing is without risk' - we were left to rot in confusion. Many of us, myself included, didn't go home to our parents. Our parents worked and went to school and we were left with baby sitters who didn't want to discus it because it bothered them, or they didn't want to get in trouble with thier parents, etc... Maybe myself and my class just weren't as mature as your 5th grade class - but from what you describe it was a growing experience for you - for us it Was disturbing.
And your claim that we wanted to be shielded or think its right to be shielded is false. Had you sat in my shoes you would of had a very diffrent experience, and all who experienced it they way I did were bothered by it - not even the school clowns would dare make jokes the like of which are being posted on slashdot as we speak.
Since the shuttle was carring the first teacher into space, many schools across america had been preparing for the launch and mission for weeks. We had made posters, I had perfected the art of drawing the shuttle for the other kids, and were all eagerly awaiting the launch. I was lucky, I didn't see it live, but it was still bad.
My (4th grade) class had lunch durring the time the launch was to happen, so we were buying food when it happened. The class next to us had decided to take a late lunch in order to watch it - they suddenly showed up and were rather upset - saying the shuttle had exploded. Lunch ended early. Classes crowded into rooms with TVs and watched news reports on what had happened. at least 20 times from various angles we saw the explosion. We were all elft speechless, some kids cried. The teachers were too stunned to realize they needed to turn the TV off and get us doing something else. No work got done all day - we went to the busses straight from watching the news coverage.
The media, not knowing that schoolchildren were watching, didn't pull any punches, and repeatedly stated that the astronaughts and crew were most likely dead. It was a bad day, and it hurt the space program as well as disturbing a generation. I'm getting my vodka now. I don't want to think about this.
I was big into shadowrun and battletech as a teenager (early 90s), and so one spring break a friend of mine wanted to go visit Chicago - under the guise of seeing some colleges he didn't really want to attend. Three of us ended up going - and since I had called ahead and somehow gotten Lou Prosperi on the phone (creator of earthdawn, great guy) - we were invited to come in and tour the building.
It was in a not-so-hot area of town, on the third floor of a large warehouse building, but once you were inside you forgot all of that. Original artwork from all of their diffrent books decorated the walls - one end of the hallway had a Shadorwun banner/logo that had to be 8 feet wide if it was an inch... Lou took us into the lounge/game-room where they spent a couple of hours everyday testing their own products and the competitions'... One wall was a series of shelves filled with more game books then you can count - it was amazing.
Lou told us about their daily routine, and then showed us promotional materials (including a proof he brought straight from the art department for an upcomming ad in Dragon magazine) for the upcomming game Earthdawn, and we immediatly fell in love.
Anyway, FASA for me meant good, detailed worlds with enough behind-the-scenes action going on, or at least hinted at, that you never got bored, and had plenty of material to use when GMing. In their later years the quality slacked off a bit in the artwork (or at least the on-staff artists changed and weren't in my style anymore) and the quality of the books - for me this death knell came much earlier, in '95 or '96 (I can't remember which) when it was anounced that Tom Dowd - one of the creators of Shadowrun and the maintainer of the game world/senior editor for all Shadorun products, left to work at FASA interactive. The new guy on staff had good ideas, but they didn't mesh with the way the game world had originally been presented - Tom had the Touch, this guy didn't...
As I got further and further away from gaming in general and more focused on my career, I would look back on my gaming time as educational - I expanded my creativety, my social skills, and my problem solving ability. I'm slowly selling my game books collection on ebay, and now this... brings back memories I tell ya. It is a semi-sad day in the gaming world.
The Fredonian Air and Space Association is no more (yes, thats what fasa stood for, a reference to a old marx brothers movie)! At least battletech and Shadowrun will live on.
Last march I began work for a fairly Large ISP's web-app development department. I was brought on as a senior developer, due to my experience with web apps and development in general, and was also considered the 'problem solver' of the group.
Within days of being Hired I was asked to work on a project I will call 'NOX3' (changed to protect the parties involved from litigation - Seriously!) - this project had been ongoing for almost 2 years by the time I was brought on. All of the original developers had left the company - and just two months before my arrival a 'needed' type of join had facilitated the change from utilizing mysql to Oracle as the backend DB.
As most of you may or may-not know, Oracle can perform very well - when the DB is archetected correctly with its relationships and indexes. As it turns out, we had seen a 260% DECREASE in performance switching to Oracle: this was because the developers involved (by the time the switchover took place, an outside development company was also involved) did not want to rewrite the hundreds of queires used by the system and so copied the table structure over to oracle with no schema changes, no added indexes, or anything. Due to the 'flat' nature of the schema, table-scans were common-place, leading to horrible performance with the full 800k+ rows in the main table. Linux's max-file size (2GB at the time, thank god for 2.4!!) actualy held us back by forcing indexes and tables to be spread over multiple files, which also affected performance...
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. As I said, within days of being hired I was put on the team of developers working on the project and told to 'see what could be done, a silver bullet would be nice'. Well, the deeper I dug, the more I realized a silver bullet didn't exist - the app was horribly archetected, badly (= none) documented, uncommented (180k lines of code, only 1k lines of comments!!!!!), hampered by the DB schema and even by the choice of technologies used to implement the system. To add insult to injury, the team of developers (now 'mine') inside the ISP were just running support/bugfixing, because the customer was doing field tests of the 'beta' (not my choice of term) copy of the app live, and the external development company brought in to consult was working on adding features (to the live beta app, mind you).
I told my managers that the project was a write-off at best, and that if they ever expected to get near the performance the client wanted ( we were two orders of magantude two slow), and support the number of simultaneous users they wanted (5000 active users, with peaks of 15k+), we needed to start a re-design imediatly before things were even further behind schedule. (the app was 13 months late... I'm not kidding)...
I wasn't listened to - the manager nodded his head and passed on the message, but nothing happened. So I started giving him reports with all of the horrible things I was finding, things he could show his managers - they didn't listen to the reports. So for two months I fought just to get permission to spend actual company time running benchmarks/tests of the system to prove my point... I ran the tests and boom - the system Crashed (not slowed down, actual crash) at 48 simultaneous users - crashed so bad it took down the machine the app was on (but not the DB machines). Finally I had my boss's attention, my findings were vindicated...
We never got to do a rewrite, instead the project degenerated into legal wrangling complicated enough to confuse OJ's lawyers. The consulting company claimed it wasn't thier responsability to comment on the quality/capability of the app - just to add features - meanwhile my company claimed that they should of performed 'due dilligence' in making sure the app could perform as required, and they should of opened thier moths way before I blew the whistle, meanwhile the customer went after both my company and the cunsulting company, and my company brought in a second consulting company to verify/audit my findings and gather evidence (this took 4 months, meanwhile we sat almost idle).
My team was dismantled - all of the developers on the team (except for myself) were hired with specific skill sets to work with the technologies the app required, and thus weren't needed any more (this was 2 months after the 4 month audit was completed). The original manager who started the project was fired for 'other reasons', and my manager, who came on board just 4 months before myself, was also let go. All of this firing and such took place 8 months after my hiring. A week after my hiring I had determined (and was already telling my manager) that the system needed a complete redesign, and it would take 6 months with the right design and current team, to do it right (no contact with the customer would of been allowed, along with no testing, we needed six-months of heads-down coding time). Instead of listinging to the person they had hired as thier 'problem solver' and senior developer they drug thier feet and then dismantled the project, but paid everyone for 8 months work along the way.
So which makes more sense, 8 months of paying everyone involved just to end up cancling the project and then get into costly legal manuvers, or six months of paying them to deliver a working app to the customer, late (which, surprisingly, the customer was fine with, as it turns out - time wasn't the issue, functionality was)? I don't claim to understand it, and I still don't know why they did what they did - my point is, asking for a re-write can be like wishing to win the lottery - the powers that be can work against you.
Device for Forcing Computer Upgrade(TM), and associated buisness model.
Device and technique for rendering computing hardware unuseable and therefore bug-free via the application of a large steel weight approximatly 15 lbs in mass against the primary circuits, hardrives and other vital components at a high rate of speed. Application results in the target computer system being instantly non-functional, thus requiring the user to seek the purchase of a new computer imediatly. The device, from now on reffered to as the 'sledge hammer' is fashioned from a handle wood fit for being gripped by a human hand, with a large metal weight attached at one end.
Also, A patent is being sought on the buisness model based upon the judicious use of this device, especially when thier computer is made by a competitor, and always within 24 months of purchase.
the thoery for this was printed in a analog sci-fi magazine back in 93 or 94... i'll dig it up and publish the issue date...
ok, from this old message post comes the info on the publish date, it was actually in 92!!
Heres a quote:
"There's a cover-story article I've just read that I think a lot of you
will be interested in: ``The Magnetic Sail,'' by Robert M. Zubrin
(based on work by Dana G. Andrews (Boeing) and himself (Martin-Marietta).
I regret it appeared in an only *quasi*-reliable source: the "science fact"
section of this month's (May 1992) _Analog_.
"
Systems development is less visible to the general public of computer users, but it Does go on, and is Not irrelevant. Psion, the PalmOS, Amos, Qnx, and BeOS are just examples of alternative systems being developed - many exist in the private embeded market and aren't even known outside ther respective niches, such as OS-9. Microsoft's products are feature rich, but I do not think anyone would classify them, as a whole (there are always exceptions!), as being technologically superior. Yes Windows has a good gui, but so does Mac, so does (did?) Amiga, BeOS, and many others. Under the hood, windows 9x is LESS sophisticated in many ways then linux. WinNT/2k is more complex and is built upon a different model then win9x or *nix, but that model itself is not very sophisticated or 'technologically superior' compared to many systems available... just different, and feature rich.
If we were to equate piled on features with sophistication, then a swiss army knife is sophisticated...
If we were to equate piled on features with technological superiority, then the warner brothers special edition mini-van is technologically superior to a turbo charged italian sports car <insert favorite brand here>...
just some thoughts from someone in the trenches.
Dont be fooled! yes, you need to put 'APPEND="mem=256m" in lilo.conf, but then you ALSO need to run lilo on the command line in order for that setting to become active. Klilo will run lilo for you if you add the setting there and do a 'install' - but Klilo freaks on many distributions that put a listing for a floppy device boot option into lilo.conf... if you dont have a floppy mounted at the time you hit 'install' in Klilo, you'll get an error, and the new boot loader settings wont be used. /etc/lilo.conf with your favorite text editor (save a backup first) - and put 'APPEND="mem=256m"' on a new line in the listing for your default kernel, then save your changes, and just type 'lilo' on the command line.
for best results, edit
if lilo chokes, on a listing for a floppy boot kernel for example, try mounting a floppy, then running lilo... if it still chokes, you might have to remove the listing for the floppy boot option. (you can still overide this at the boot prompt if needbe to boot from whatever device you want)
I had many an issue with this when I first started playing with linux - and everyplace I looked skipped over the fact that you need to run lilo after configuring lilo.conf
Doh!
IBM's PowerPC processors for thier rs6000 and as/400s are COMPLETELY diffrent from the g4 design - they are compatable on a binary level, but then again, so are the 386 and the pentium II... IBM uses very specialized processors in thier high-end systems - three integer pipelines, 2 fpus, 1000+ pins on thier interface (HIGH bandwith bus!!), tons of cache... each integer pipeline is Long, like 12+ stages, allowing for high scalablity in the Mhz of the processor...
The g4 has too few stages in its pipeline, leading to it being Very hard to scale to high Mhz... copper/soi g4s _might_ get to 600Mhz - but the yeilds would be just as low as the current 500Mhz ones. Remember, the g4 is Tiny it was designed to be used in embeded apps as well as desktops - and thus was designed with as few transistors as possible. AMD and motorola have been working on a 'new' g4 that is basicly a redesign with a few more stages in the pipelines, allowing for much higher speeds.
it was a book too - in the book it was high-school or middle-school age students (I dont really remember - I read it in 6th grade)
Anyways, the book focuses on a teacher who, in order to get his class involved in teaching of history, especially dealing with WWII - starts 'the Wave' - a nazi-youth-copylike organization in his classes where non participation lead to outcasting... students wore arm-bands with 3 wavy lines on them...
Its REALLY sad that not only would this sort of thing happen today, but they would be stupid enough to use the name of a late 70s/early 80s book/movie that was about how easily things like this can go wrong!!!
No one, including mattel, is questioning the validity of the GPL - but reguardless of a product or piece of software`s liscense, if it violates copyrights, trademarks and/or patents then That particular product/piece of software can be 'outlawed' and all users CAN be forced to stop using the product.
For example, If I were to, oh, copy the source code of windows from a server at microsoft, then released it under the 'GPL' - and the courts decided to outlaw my software (as they would have every right to do) - then it wouldn't be the GPL being questioned, it would be the Original intelectual property rights of myself that came in question. Since I did not have the right to distribute the software, its illegal for me to do so, under any liscense.
Mind you, what these guys did via reverse engineering is Not what I would consider to be wrong and/or a punishable offense... but the courts have put up an injunction, and that injunction is against the original creators - it nulifies thier rights to distribute the software. Since they have lost the right to do so, then the GPL they granted to the software is itself invalid IN THIS CASE ONLY due to the authors not holding the intelectual rights (according to the courts) in the first place...
Also give me the ability to feed said monkeys for an extreemly long period of time.
This way, you only need a few computers to siphon through the monekey`s input (via dumping full keyboard buffers) to sift for any random examples of brilliance...
or hamlet.
Anyone have info on this? I thought the newtons died out awhiel back... this a gras-roots new newton model??
What about keeping the source for the game itself open source, but create a module in the source that handles encrypting and decrypting data sent back and forth between the server using an internally stored and signed key.
The admin of Quake server foo would compile thier server And Client using thier own pair of key pairs (one pair for upstream, one for down), and distribute said binaries on thier website.
Thus, to play quake on the foo server, you would need to foo quake binary, whose source is open, but whose key is not. Then the whole issue becomes one of convience (who wants to download 50 binaries for 50 diffrent servers?) and the strength of the encryption used. Of course, signed server binaries and clients wouldnt be limited to use on one server machine, quake world, for example, could with a reasonably sized encryption key, use the same binary for all of thier quake servers, and thus to play on any quake world server you would only need to make one download of the quake world client... of course, quake world could publish the source of thier client and server if they modified it, but they just wouldnt include thier key pairs in the source...
Thus, we mix the power of open source for the development process, and the power of public key encryption with internal signed keys, by using distributed binaries for actual play. of course, it could always be a compile option to use the encryption (it would slow things down) - but if you dont have the proper keys in your binary, you cant play on anyone`s server(s).
Of course, this also stops aim-bots, but it leaves several things that are hard to deal with:
- Server admins would need to either be able to make thier own binaries on all platforms they wanted to support (how many people actually have a linux box, a bsd, a win9x, a winNT, and a mac, all with compile tools just laying around?), or purchase/obtain pre-compiled binaries from a trusted source.
- Anyone who did have the tools, or only wanted to support one or two platforms, could compile cheats into thier own clients at the same time that they created the clients to be distributed to the public... or sell 'upgrades' to the standard clients that included the proper keys for thier server And cheats...
- Players would need to download several sets of binaries if they are active deathmatch players - wasting time and bandwith...
Anyone else have an idea that is a open source solution...???
Is there an email address or website where we can show our displeasure at these decisions?
This is not true streaming, this is packet based, hence the 'cipherblock' as they are called. They require a minimum amount of data to work on at one time. See my post on bits vs packets
The fact is, single-bit encryption Cannot be done securly. If you are Not sure, for example, in a streaming situation, that All previous bits have been recieved, then you cannot base current bit values on all previous ones without making your system so weak as to be useless. Even if you increase the minimum data size to a 8-bit byte, you still run into problems - did the previous byte come through? what about the one before that?
The only way to have secure and usable streaming encryption would be to use a large packet size, and encrypt each packet... now by large, i dont mean several kb or anything - we could be talking about 256 bits per packet, for example. Each packet gets its own encryption applied, and is not only secure, but does not rely upon future or past data for the encryption.
Redundancy could be built into the schema also - spreading data through several packets to ensure it gets through even if one is lost. Mind you, this does Not produce a true stream, but a series of packets that can be decrypted and reassembled into a stream... Sounds like virtual circuits and tcp/ip, doesnt it?
If you can get around the problem of being sure all data previously sent Was sent, then a XOR based algorythm could be used on a per-bit or per-byte basis as the data flowed through, with the encryptor keeping track of where in the key it is pointing, and systamaticly applying the encryption to individual pieces of data as they flow through...
the problem is, however, that XORs are not that hard to break...