Getting acquainted with the syntax of ANY language is the hardest part. I couldn't tell you the number of times I forgot closing tags in html, semicolons in javascript, or any number of things in c++. And commenting is (IMHO) the single most important part of writing code. I've left perl scripts for months and been able to come back to them, because every single function is thoroughly commented, with descriptions on what it's supposed to do and how it does it. As for fast admin stuff, I agree with you (bash), but for more powerful needs (with web and such) nothing can touch perl. (once again, just my humble opinion...)
Cogeco@Home doesn't support much other than Win98. They have the most useless phone monkeys around. And Sympatico HSE isn't much better. When I first got my DSL it took them THREE WEEKS to get it working, because nobody (up until I got tier 3 tech support) understood the error codes that their software was spitting back at me, and nobody would give me the gateway/dns settings so that I could get it running on my redhat box.
I hate to join The Army of the Damned(tm), but is this really so news-worthy? Last time I looked, there were 'members only' sites all over the internet. NY Times has free registration. Since IE is a free download, isn't this just more of the same? I tried to help my girlfriend with her cable modem, and when I went to their tech support website, it wouldn't let me in because I didn't have a Rogers @Home browser. Are they evil too? The fact is, you can get your news from any other 'free' news site. If you really need your MSN, which is a free service, then they have every right to ask you to do something for them. We register for free at NY Times to use the service. We get ad banners from damn near every site on the web. So if MS says 'do this for us and we'll give you free content', either download the free browser, or go elsewhere. It's not anti-competitive behaviour. They're not telling you that you have to use IE for ALL websites, just theirs.
The same thing that makes me think that using a phone should be private: the constitution. Last I checked, Americans had a right to privacy. How about we put a tap on your phone, broadcast the conversations, and call it art? Those are, after all, not private land lines you're using. Nor, do I imagine, do you own a private satellite, so why don't we capture your cell calls too. Whether you call it art or not, it's still eavesdropping. If this thing hadn't been GPL'd, people here would be all over it, whining about their privacy. Let's see MS release this and watch the pigs squeal. And no, I'm not trolling...
but when I install Debian today it doesn't install a 2 month old version, but downloads the latest release straight from the debian servers.
exactly. you download the new version. just like XP users download new patches.
in contrast, the windows XP version in the shops right now is 2 months out of date
and the debian cd's from compUSA have all the updates as of this second? think before you speak. I get three or four emails per week telling me about all the patches for redhat. how many kernel updates have we seen in the last few weeks? I prefer my linux system too, but we need a better way to update things. MS may drop the ball a lot, but what could be easier than download, double click, reboot? it sure beats the hell out of download, unzip, untar,./configure, make, make configure, make install, make clean.
I don't know that I'd call it 'reprehensible', but I'd have to say it's definitely dishonest. If I buy a video card because benchmarks say it pumps out $SomeNumber fps when they tested it with Q3A, and I try to play some other game with similar hardware requirements (or what-have-you) as quake and end up with half the frame rate, I'd be miffed. I'd have no problem with them doing this if they made it perfectly clear that they did so ("Now optimized for Q3 Arena!!"). Then again, I'm sure they'll use the argument of "Hey, WE never said you'd get x performance out of it...that's somebody else's benchmark numbers." It's not like ATI is going around claiming you'll get the same performance from their card no matter what game you play. Just seems kind of underhanded...
Indeed. I live in Canada, work in the U.S., and I've seen the difference on this one. I get DSL from Bell Canada and pay ~$25 USD for 1Mb down and about 640K upstream. People I work with pay something like $40 for cable that only pulls 640K downstream.
I develop in Visual Studio too. I run linux for fun. I use a Mac for work. I understand computers a fair bit better than 'Average Joe', as I'm sure you and the rest of the readers here do. But Microsoft doesn't sell their products to *us*, they sell them to 'Average Joe'. They don't target *us* with their marketing and their spin, they target 'Average Joe'. So we can pick this article apart all we want, but it will do nothing to the perception of 'Average Joe'. He sees hackers as bad people. Security issues aren't Microsoft's fault, they're the fault of the bad people who invented them, because your average consumer doesn't understand buffer overflows, and how to code around them. He doesn't grasp that all an exploit does is showcase a weakness in the software - he thinks it's some sort of magic. So MS can spin out whatever they want on this, and consumers will eat it all up.
Hey, excellent plan! Exactly what we did when they passed the DMCA, and now when they're trying to pass the SSSCA - 'Nobody's actually been *charged* for any crimes here, so who cares?!?!'
And what then when it DOES happen? What if IBM goes lawsuit happy? You need to address the problem at the source, not wait for it to maybe possibly someday cause some damage.
If you'd actually read the article before commenting, you'd have noticed that it's not about piracy - it's about *pay* services for mp3s and making the RIAA play fair. The only thing worse that people who whine about how the man is taking their "right" to theive music is ignorant people who whine just for the sake of it.
The RIAA is already known to put destructive code on cds to protect copyright (and degrade music quality as well...and remove our ability to play the music on computers, and new car stereos...) so why should we think it's beneath them to write a little code to search and destroy mp3s on your windows box, add an autorun.inf, and distribute cds like that? I mean, they're not liable, or so they claim, and if you ripped the mp3s yourself, you can just rip them again...a little inconvenient for you, but they have to protect their copyrights.
I guess the best we can do is hope that anyone who comes up with The Next Big Thing(tm) won't be swayed by big money, and see it through to production rather than sell it off to the highest bidder. Or maybe we can invent it, and release it under the GPL;)
Haven't read anything on that, but I should. But it's a different idea. If you don't want to pay a tarrif, don't export to that country. There wouldn't be an option for Microsoft to not pay the fine - they'd have no choice. But I'd love to see about that lumber case - sounds like the U.S. is fudging on NAFTA with that one.
Nice...I'm sure they'd never even THINK of checking barcodes for the pass, although they might find the barcode scanner to be an odd peripheral for the average home user...
well hell, if you're going to that trouble, why simply mock them with "haha MOFO's!!!!" when you could have some real fun:
Journl Entry - Oct.12, 2000
Met with 'Dubbya' today. Promised to have all fake ballots filled out and filed within the next couple weeks. Also, sold him an 8-ball.
huh...odd. Looks like the more you pay for a channel, the less right you have to the content. I would suppose it's to prevent people from recording and re-distributing pay-per-view events and just-released movies, but it still seems to me that I should be able to pause my ppv, run to the fridge for a beer, come back, and resume. But it's a really strange-seeming clause there...
But just because the Discordian religion probably appeared first in a fictional novel doesn't mean that the beliefs are not valid
That seems to me how many religions start. Scientology is based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard. Many would argue that the bible is nothing but a work of fiction (and many more would argue that the old testament is fictional). There are numerous variations on wicca, druidism, et al that are based on old texts. I know it's been said over and over, but a religion is merely a set of beliefs. If you truly believe that all life comes from the force, it flows through all, and so on, then you could consider yourself a follower of the Jedi faith (although I'd call it 'Force-ology', or some such). You don't necessarily have to believe that someday we'll all fly starfighters and wield light sabres, just as all Christians don't necessarily believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and was wiped clean by a great flood.
In other news, AMD releases a 16 Ghz chip (although they call it the "AMD 16,000" for marketing reasons). It vastly outperforms the Intel 20 Ghz chip and costs a third of the price, but the liquid-nitrogen cooled case is just too damn tricky to build a window kit into, so nobody buys them.
If they got paid enough, they wouldn't really need licensing money (I'd rather have a million dollars now than a few thousand a year for the next 30 or 40 years...). And as for owning KaZaA, how much do you suppose they're making off of those free downloads?
Anyways, that was just my conspiracy rant, so...whatev...
Judging from fasttrack's seeming willingness to cooperate with the RIAA, it seems quite possible that fasttrack got paid off to change the network login and give the RIAA an in to shut down kazaa/morpheus. It's not like fasttrack would care if they got paid enough to do it. But that's just my $0.02 worth of conspiracy theories.
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Getting acquainted with the syntax of ANY language is the hardest part. I couldn't tell you the number of times I forgot closing tags in html, semicolons in javascript, or any number of things in c++. And commenting is (IMHO) the single most important part of writing code. I've left perl scripts for months and been able to come back to them, because every single function is thoroughly commented, with descriptions on what it's supposed to do and how it does it. As for fast admin stuff, I agree with you (bash), but for more powerful needs (with web and such) nothing can touch perl. (once again, just my humble opinion...)
Cogeco@Home doesn't support much other than Win98. They have the most useless phone monkeys around. And Sympatico HSE isn't much better. When I first got my DSL it took them THREE WEEKS to get it working, because nobody (up until I got tier 3 tech support) understood the error codes that their software was spitting back at me, and nobody would give me the gateway/dns settings so that I could get it running on my redhat box.
Imagin getting a game on a self-booting CD/DVD, that boots you into the a fast, BSOD-free environment
I have that system. It's called a PlayStation2.
I hate to join The Army of the Damned(tm), but is this really so news-worthy? Last time I looked, there were 'members only' sites all over the internet. NY Times has free registration. Since IE is a free download, isn't this just more of the same? I tried to help my girlfriend with her cable modem, and when I went to their tech support website, it wouldn't let me in because I didn't have a Rogers @Home browser. Are they evil too? The fact is, you can get your news from any other 'free' news site. If you really need your MSN, which is a free service, then they have every right to ask you to do something for them. We register for free at NY Times to use the service. We get ad banners from damn near every site on the web. So if MS says 'do this for us and we'll give you free content', either download the free browser, or go elsewhere. It's not anti-competitive behaviour. They're not telling you that you have to use IE for ALL websites, just theirs.
The same thing that makes me think that using a phone should be private: the constitution. Last I checked, Americans had a right to privacy. How about we put a tap on your phone, broadcast the conversations, and call it art? Those are, after all, not private land lines you're using. Nor, do I imagine, do you own a private satellite, so why don't we capture your cell calls too. Whether you call it art or not, it's still eavesdropping. If this thing hadn't been GPL'd, people here would be all over it, whining about their privacy. Let's see MS release this and watch the pigs squeal. And no, I'm not trolling...
but when I install Debian today it doesn't install a 2 month old version, but downloads the latest release straight from the debian servers.
./configure, make, make configure, make install, make clean.
exactly. you download the new version. just like XP users download new patches.
in contrast, the windows XP version in the shops right now is 2 months out of date
and the debian cd's from compUSA have all the updates as of this second? think before you speak. I get three or four emails per week telling me about all the patches for redhat. how many kernel updates have we seen in the last few weeks? I prefer my linux system too, but we need a better way to update things. MS may drop the ball a lot, but what could be easier than download, double click, reboot? it sure beats the hell out of download, unzip, untar,
I don't know that I'd call it 'reprehensible', but I'd have to say it's definitely dishonest. If I buy a video card because benchmarks say it pumps out $SomeNumber fps when they tested it with Q3A, and I try to play some other game with similar hardware requirements (or what-have-you) as quake and end up with half the frame rate, I'd be miffed. I'd have no problem with them doing this if they made it perfectly clear that they did so ("Now optimized for Q3 Arena!!"). Then again, I'm sure they'll use the argument of "Hey, WE never said you'd get x performance out of it...that's somebody else's benchmark numbers." It's not like ATI is going around claiming you'll get the same performance from their card no matter what game you play. Just seems kind of underhanded...
Indeed. I live in Canada, work in the U.S., and I've seen the difference on this one. I get DSL from Bell Canada and pay ~$25 USD for 1Mb down and about 640K upstream. People I work with pay something like $40 for cable that only pulls 640K downstream.
And here goes my take on this.
I develop in Visual Studio too. I run linux for fun. I use a Mac for work. I understand computers a fair bit better than 'Average Joe', as I'm sure you and the rest of the readers here do. But Microsoft doesn't sell their products to *us*, they sell them to 'Average Joe'. They don't target *us* with their marketing and their spin, they target 'Average Joe'. So we can pick this article apart all we want, but it will do nothing to the perception of 'Average Joe'. He sees hackers as bad people. Security issues aren't Microsoft's fault, they're the fault of the bad people who invented them, because your average consumer doesn't understand buffer overflows, and how to code around them. He doesn't grasp that all an exploit does is showcase a weakness in the software - he thinks it's some sort of magic. So MS can spin out whatever they want on this, and consumers will eat it all up.
Hey, excellent plan! Exactly what we did when they passed the DMCA, and now when they're trying to pass the SSSCA - 'Nobody's actually been *charged* for any crimes here, so who cares?!?!'
And what then when it DOES happen? What if IBM goes lawsuit happy? You need to address the problem at the source, not wait for it to maybe possibly someday cause some damage.
emacs would have to be the most obvious choice here (Eats Memory And Constantly Swaps?)
I'm all for shooting down this stupid patent idea, but let's not use frontpage as our argument - we don't need to feed microsoft any ideas.
If you'd actually read the article before commenting, you'd have noticed that it's not about piracy - it's about *pay* services for mp3s and making the RIAA play fair. The only thing worse that people who whine about how the man is taking their "right" to theive music is ignorant people who whine just for the sake of it.
The RIAA is already known to put destructive code on cds to protect copyright (and degrade music quality as well...and remove our ability to play the music on computers, and new car stereos...) so why should we think it's beneath them to write a little code to search and destroy mp3s on your windows box, add an autorun.inf, and distribute cds like that? I mean, they're not liable, or so they claim, and if you ripped the mp3s yourself, you can just rip them again...a little inconvenient for you, but they have to protect their copyrights.
I guess the best we can do is hope that anyone who comes up with The Next Big Thing(tm) won't be swayed by big money, and see it through to production rather than sell it off to the highest bidder. Or maybe we can invent it, and release it under the GPL ;)
sweet! I have a couple cuecats lying around. Anybody have any software to turn a cuecat into a full on barcode scanner?
Haven't read anything on that, but I should. But it's a different idea. If you don't want to pay a tarrif, don't export to that country. There wouldn't be an option for Microsoft to not pay the fine - they'd have no choice. But I'd love to see about that lumber case - sounds like the U.S. is fudging on NAFTA with that one.
Nice...I'm sure they'd never even THINK of checking barcodes for the pass, although they might find the barcode scanner to be an odd peripheral for the average home user...
well hell, if you're going to that trouble, why simply mock them with "haha MOFO's!!!!" when you could have some real fun:
Journl Entry - Oct.12, 2000
Met with 'Dubbya' today. Promised to have all fake ballots filled out and filed within the next couple weeks. Also, sold him an 8-ball.
huh...odd. Looks like the more you pay for a channel, the less right you have to the content. I would suppose it's to prevent people from recording and re-distributing pay-per-view events and just-released movies, but it still seems to me that I should be able to pause my ppv, run to the fridge for a beer, come back, and resume. But it's a really strange-seeming clause there...
As much as I think this is a fantastic idea, I doubt that the U.S. gov't would force a company to fund their competitors. Too bad though...
That actually sounds really interesting. What game was it you worked on? Is it online still / yet?
But just because the Discordian religion probably appeared first in a fictional novel doesn't mean that the beliefs are not valid
That seems to me how many religions start. Scientology is based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard. Many would argue that the bible is nothing but a work of fiction (and many more would argue that the old testament is fictional). There are numerous variations on wicca, druidism, et al that are based on old texts. I know it's been said over and over, but a religion is merely a set of beliefs. If you truly believe that all life comes from the force, it flows through all, and so on, then you could consider yourself a follower of the Jedi faith (although I'd call it 'Force-ology', or some such). You don't necessarily have to believe that someday we'll all fly starfighters and wield light sabres, just as all Christians don't necessarily believe the earth is only 6,000 years old and was wiped clean by a great flood.
In other news, AMD releases a 16 Ghz chip (although they call it the "AMD 16,000" for marketing reasons). It vastly outperforms the Intel 20 Ghz chip and costs a third of the price, but the liquid-nitrogen cooled case is just too damn tricky to build a window kit into, so nobody buys them.
If they got paid enough, they wouldn't really need licensing money (I'd rather have a million dollars now than a few thousand a year for the next 30 or 40 years...). And as for owning KaZaA, how much do you suppose they're making off of those free downloads?
Anyways, that was just my conspiracy rant, so...whatev...
Judging from fasttrack's seeming willingness to cooperate with the RIAA, it seems quite possible that fasttrack got paid off to change the network login and give the RIAA an in to shut down kazaa/morpheus. It's not like fasttrack would care if they got paid enough to do it. But that's just my $0.02 worth of conspiracy theories.