1) create an IE plugin. In side of this plugin put a full, decompressed, working firefox install 2) when your site detects IE, try sending your page as data for the plugin you just had the user install. 3) the plugin passes the rendering of the HTML to firefox which renders inside of the IE window. Your IE window appears to have all of the benefits of firefox while your users still think they're using IE.
You laugh, but I've done it before and it works. The only problem is the big install and making sure that your site uses the plugin if its available.
The guy that runs this is a friend of mine. They've done work on a number of moview and television shows. Their main claim to fame is around making the mac do things that would normally require an avid machine. If nothing else, then can offer you some advice and suggestions about how to get a lot of work done professionally but inexpensively.
I have a powerbook and I love the OS on it. Everything works just like its supposed to and it's really smoothly intgegrated.
And I just gave it up to get another linux box.
Apple computers are just too damn slow to use for development. If I could get apple on X86 and blast up the speed, I would buy in a heart beat. I wouldn't even mind if I had to buy some kind of hardware dongle to make sure I wasn't copying it. But until Apple is on x86 I wont be switching to them again.
I like the quote: "estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail" coming from people who want you to by their unsolicited e-mail services. Does anyone really trust this number, or does it seem totally made up?
And if you believe that number I have a new marketing technique for you called 'Silent Marketing'. Just pay me a few thousand dollars and your product will be available to millions of potential buyers! Billions of dollars were spent over the web this year, so obviously my marketing idea will generate billions of dollars for you! Never mind what the idea is, other people are making money so if you give me money, you'll be making money too!
I installed my own dish, on a wooden swingset and it was fine. Once you find the satellite, a little wiggle / wind / rain isn't going to hurt anything. Cable people complaining about lost picture is pure and utter BS.
Plus: DirecTV + 2 channel Tivo is gods gift to TV. Record one thing while watching another is fantastic. Cable Companies are lying pigs that will eventually go the way of the Dodo.
Unless ThinkGeek owns the other store too. If you're in the retail business you want to own both the highest and the lowest cost outlet. Advertise the highest so that if someone feels that it's worth it you get all the cash, but own the lowest cost generice and you'll get the volume without directly advertising. It is precisely for this reason that Cambles puts the same soup in many different brands of soup can. Branding is an important business tactic.
I'm sorry, but you don't seem to have any idea what is going on here.
Your very first comment was quite correct. Google ads are a perfect example of good advertising done well.
You're second point is wrong. Clearly they do make some money advertising high caffeine tables, or they wouldn't do it. Probably they don't make enough on that alone, but it is the sum of all adds that run a business, not just the revenue of one particular ad on one particular day. As for the "News for Nerds" slogan, your comment is offensive. I take pride in my 'nerd' status, with all the goods and the bads that go with it. Am I as socially adept as I'd like to be? No. Do I occasonally suffer for that lack of aptitude? Yes. However, I have traded learning social skills for learning technical skills and it's a life choice I am comfortable with.
You comment that slashdot editors are communiation challenged is silly. It is precisely because they are interested in more than just the anal retention of any possible spelling errors that make them interesting. By analogy: most rock stars are terrible singers that actively damage their voices with every performance. Any voice teach will cringe to hear them. However the work they produce is about raw feeling and power, not dedication to carefully considered principles. There is a time and place for careful techniques and there is a time and place for just saying what is on your mind. On Slashdot, grammer is nice, but not required. It is the openness of the communication that makes the site interesting.
As for running slashdot into the ground, you seem to believe that slashdot feel from the sky after which Hemos picked it up off from ground and has been poking it with a stick ever since. D00d! These guys created slashdot, and they are experimenting with how to operate it. When that experimentation stops slashdot will die. In the mean time, if you don't like a course correction, you should say so, but it is definitely not an indication of emminent destruction.
As for your last point, the banner doesn't say "win $300 to spend on drugs and prostitutes!" its simply says "Win $300". You can put it into your IT budget and be happy. Your boss can take the team to a party. Whatever. You're assumption that it is going to be embezzled just shows that you were reaching to somehow find a point and have too low a faith in your colleagues and fellow people.
Since this is in the star wars heading it must be on topic:
Is there anyone even vaguely excited to see this movie? I'll see it out of duty and all, but I'm looking forward to SpiderMan more than I'm looking forward to Ep2, and I camped over night to see the first one.
Why would you replace a completely working system?
If it works and you don't need to significantly modify it, then you don't worry about it. But then, that application doesn't effect a future development decision much either.
If the project does need major maintenance or you are trying to take advantage of the maintainers free time you have these situations:
A) The project is not changing enough to be re-written in which case you stick with the language you are in. (Thus not needing language neutrality)
B) The code is going to be rewritten in which case you can choose the language and don't care much about language neutrality.
C) Your developer has enough spare time to work on something else, but is unwilling to learn a new language in which case you have a lazy developer.
I do understand that migration is a slow process, but you don't need to keep your COBOL programmers forever if they refuse to learn new technologies. Obviously you don't switch languages in one big bang as you seem to suggest.
Also remember that I'm not talking from the view of a programmer. I'm talking from the point of view of a business manager who doesn't want to spend a huge salary on COBOL consultants when they could spend much less money on a java programmer if they re-write the software in a more commonly known language.
I know tonnes of people at large companies who spend 40 hours a week doing 5 worth of work because they're the only ones who know the obscure mainframe lanugage. As soon as the company migrates to a more up to date platform and language they suddenly get much more bang for their programmer buck. That is profitable. Paying someone for 35 hours a week of surfing time is not. Making new extensions to an old language (such as adding.Net to Cobol or the laughable 'Visual Fortran') is simply perpetuating a non-profitable situation.
Now look at the VM. The design goal of the JVM bytecode was obviously "design the easiest to implement VM that we can compile Java to."
What are you talking about?!?! The JVM is designed to be a minimal set of what is needed so you can get about your job without a huge pile of baggage loaded on top of you.
As for the libraries; they both suck.
Which shows that you don't know how to code in either of them. The Java API is much easier to use than the old MFC api I used to work with, JDBC is much more friendly than ODBC and the core java API's much much easier than the C++ api's for the MS, unix and AS/400 systems that I had to work with.
C# is Java Except that it isn't mature, is OS dependent, seems very open to security holes which are imposible under Java, has no community review process, has no officially sanctioned competing implementations, has no choice of developement environment, cannot be used for free, and requires you to be an all MS shop. If you don't mind any of those things then they're just about the same!
"Is C#/.NET better than Java" because everyone who isn't a MS hater or a one-language-programmer J2EE hack can see the answer. The real question is: "Is the superiority of C#/.NET enough to offset the costs of moving to it from J2EE." You being a troll.
...are the biggest boon for free lance developers.
You meet someone who is busy and needs to update their little side app. Because the person is doing it on the side they don't have time to do a proper design. You come in, bill them at a competitive, hourly rate to update/rewrite/extend the code and then train the maintainer on what you did. You get a nice little bonus for your spare time, and the maintainer gets to keep the clout of maintaining an important app plus gains access to a good example of using up to date technology in their application space. The only tricky part is finding the clients.
If you are a paying for programmers, do you really want them all speaking different languages? Obviously not. You want them all to be able to read each others code. This makes it so you can pull people from one project and put them on another project without having to teach them a whole new language.
The very first thing any company or project does is pick a language. Before that point, language neutrality doesn't matter becuase the company hasn't picked a language yet. Beyond that point language neutrality doesn't matter because everyone has learned the language of choice. In a legacy, language-hetrogenous environment language neutrality does not matter because everyone has to be trained in CRL.
.Net has no selling point because no business wants language neutrality and every feature it intends to offer can already be done in J2EE. (I'm seperating.Net from Passport because Passport is a particularly dangerous idea)
The fact that language neutrality is 'cool' doesn't matter. The.com days are over and if you aren't thinking about your company's profitability you are wasting your employers money.
1) We are currently discussing drawbacks and solutions to them. Pay attention.
2) Most people here believe that the idea is needed, but the law is ineffective. Very different from believeing that the idea is not needed. Again pay attention.
3) Most people here love their cell phones. Kind of skews the audience. A technology discussion forum obviously will love technology. Pay attention to your circumstances.
4) Many people here have felt RSI. No on here I know of has felt pain from RF. Thus people are posting based on attention to their own experiences. I bet you've had sore wrists, but not cell phone cancer. With attention to your own experience what does that tell you?
5) Robots and machines are a understood problem. Most engineers feel that given sufficent time and resources most things are possible. Pay attention to the subject matter and you'll see why.
6) Pay attention to the source of the claims and you'll see why/. thinks their bunk.
7) Pay attention to your own grammer when you are condemning someone elses.
8) Most people here don't even write C. Pay attention to who is posting when you make a generalization.
9) You criticism was baseless and broad. It deserves to be modded down.
10)My cricism of your criticism is based on fact and deserved to be modded up.:]
11)No. The simpsons are no longer funny.
12)No. Making fun of slashdot IS funny. That's why so many people do it. (And bother replying to people who do it)
13)If you had paid any attention to StarOffice you'd realize it can do far more than two page letters.
14)Technology doesn't have a downside. However people's use of technology is a different matter. Pay attention to the difference.
15)The fact that you believe anyone believes this, shows that you are not paying attention to the post.
16)No one here believes that either. Pay attention to what people say, not what you think they would say if you let them get a word in.
The operating system IS a commodity. Everyone needs one. Most people don't really give a crap about it.
Take water. You absolutely must have a clean supply of it, but who gets it to you and how they do it you only give the vaguest care about. MAYBE if you're a health nut, you put a water filter in line, but most people don't bother. Once you have the water you'll buy lemonaid mix, washing machines, sprinklers, etc. You really care about those applications, not just the water itself.
Same (is || will be) true for the OS. It has to make it possible for my software to talk to the hardware. Beyond that all I really care about are applications. (Note that I'm considering the shell an application, not an intrisic part of the OS)
If the illegality is in breaking the encryption, could some secure 3rd party break the encryption and send me the results. Posetion of cracked data is not an offence, is it? Maybe some Ukranian crack-boy could make a living cracking the encryption on popular items and then selling the results back into the US. What is anybody going to do if I release some code for something, based on publicly available specs. (Even if those specs are the result of some work done elsewhere that couldn't be done here.) Isn't that how PC cloning got started with Clean Room reverse engineering?
I'm not an EQ player, but it seems like the answer to hording is simple. The banks tax you on the items/money stored. If I put in 100Kpp and let it sit for a month. I should come back to only 95Kpp in the bank. That way I'm motivated to sell it, spend it or carry some and risk losing it.
Wether you think MS is satan or god this arguement should make some sense. What do you think: (btw this was my letter. Flame on if you must)
Under the Tunney Act, I wish to comment on the proposed Microsoft settlement.
This settlement is widely perceived as a non-punishment for Microsoft. By
allowing this settlement to go forward, the government sends the message that it
is ok to break corporate law because you will not truely be punished for it.
Many computer enthusiasts and business people are watching the outcome of
this trial and will base future behaviour around the outcome. If Microsoft is
given a non-punishing settlement, people wil reason that it is ok to commit a
crime so long as you have the the clout to avoid punishment. The courts must
enforce a real punishment on what has been proven to be a real crime.
If the courts do not enforce a truely behaviour changing penalty on Microsoft
the rule of law over corporate america will be drastically weakened. A
capitolist system depends on the rule of law to ensure a level playing field and
promote competition. The people of the United States have charged the justice
system with ensuring that level playing field. Please do not let us down.
False. Capitolism is an economic philosophy that REQUIRES protection of the courts in order to function. It is preciesly because the citizens of communist countries could not easily sue the scammers, grifters and cheats that communism failed.
The need for resources if a fundamental aspect of all people. Communism tries to hide from our human nature while capitolism embraces the reality of who we are.
Capitolism even makes philanthropy more possible. Who is truely better off: a disabled citizen of a capitolist economy or a disabled citizen of a communist economy? (And note that I'm talking Capitolism vs. Communism. Semi-socialist states have free health care are very sane and reasonable example of middle ground)
If you are a user and you have hardware that is over seven years old, the staute of limitations says that nobody, not even linux has to support it.
Think where things were 7 years ago. Do you really think that any non-geek cares about that hardware? If grandpa has a computer for 7 years, and wants a new OS, he'll have to buy a new system and presto, his hardware is sane again.
Dogmatic support of antique hardware is fun, but not profitable.
Microscopic device that you eat. It swims around in you like a submarine, communicates by tiny radio waves, can even take grainy, tech looking pictures to show doctors whats going on in side you.
Tiny little bot with one of those chem detectors. Attach it to a tiny bit of iron. It floats around in a solution and when it finds a molecule of the type you're looking for it grabs ahold. Now you can seperate two things that were presumably not seperable before.
Tiny machine that traces around circuits that have gone defective and actually repairs them through some magic. The little devices follow the paths until they come to a problem they can repair.
My personal goal device actually has nothing to do with chains, but is a microscopic audio recorder that becomes permanently attached to your ear. It records everything you hear giving you perfect memory! Powered by body heat so you don't switch batteries, no bulky tapes, saves the data to disk at the end of the day. Suddenly my bad memory is no longer a handicap!
I have a degree in Math and have done many years of semi-professional acting (i.e. I get paid, but not so much that I don't need my CS job to live)
Copenhagen was a better written play, but I pity and respect the man who tries to perform it. Long difficult monologues where the audience will often want to stand up and say, "Could you repeat that, I only half got it." But when you're reading it and can appreciate the nuance. Copenhagen was by far a superior piece of writing in the history, the math, and especially in the interpersonal relationship between the two men. First as teacher-student, then nearly to father-son, then suddenly to bitter enemies. It is practically shakespere-ian in how dynamic their relationship was and those aspects were very strongly and humanely played out.
To talk about Proof, it would be easy to produce, easy to get an audience, and easy to make people feel smart because they were watching a play that had math in it. The actors have plenty of opportunity to showboat and draw an audience in, but fundamentally, the play is about smart men who are too pig-headed to trust a girl. (*gasp!* it's a GIRL! Not a big shocker any more) As soon as the play uses up its 90 minutes, the boyfriend pulls the stick from his bum and then everything is fine. He shouldn't have mistrusted her in the first place, but then the play would be about 15 minutes long.
To sum up: Proof is fun to watch chickies who do math and physicist who drink heavily. Copenhagen is an excellent play to expand your scope and see a truly powerful piece of writing.
I completely agree that it CAN be used for a great benefit, but in my experience it rarely is.
I see a similar but less epidemic problem in the mis-use of XML. At least three projects I've come into with XML being used to store 100% flat properties. With no hierarchy, and only one project searching only one database, there is no point in using LDAP except that people seem to think they're supposed to.
Certainly a protocol is not responsible for people mis-using it, but LDAP seems to lend itself to this mis-use through a lack of real clarity for beginners about what it is for and a lack of simplicity in its interface for building good examples.
I understand that LDAP is supposed to be used for
all kinds of great contact / location / description information, but how is it used in reality? It is used as a really difficult to use properties file. Judging the way most people use LDAP that I've seen, they would have been better off with a sql database. At least with SQL the queries are readable. (o=, c=, wtf= is a pain).
The way I feel about it is that the LDAP 'problem' does exist and is solvable, but the right protocol/implementation does not yet exist. Until something much more friendly and useful comes along, I am firmly off the LDAP bandwagon.
So if you're looking for a good tool to solve your LDAP problems, I suggest Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL.:]
Slashdot Mirror
1) create an IE plugin. In side of this plugin put a full, decompressed, working firefox install
2) when your site detects IE, try sending your page as data for the plugin you just had the user install.
3) the plugin passes the rendering of the HTML to firefox which renders inside of the IE window. Your IE window appears to have all of the benefits of firefox while your users still think they're using IE.
You laugh, but I've done it before and it works. The only problem is the big install and making sure that your site uses the plugin if its available.
http://www.digitalfilmtree.com/
The guy that runs this is a friend of mine. They've done work on a number of moview and television shows. Their main claim to fame is around making the mac do things that would normally require an avid machine. If nothing else, then can offer you some advice and suggestions about how to get a lot of work done professionally but inexpensively.
I have a powerbook and I love the OS on it. Everything works just like its supposed to and it's really smoothly intgegrated.
And I just gave it up to get another linux box.
Apple computers are just too damn slow to use for development. If I could get apple on X86 and blast up the speed, I would buy in a heart beat. I wouldn't even mind if I had to buy some kind of hardware dongle to make sure I wasn't copying it. But until Apple is on x86 I wont be switching to them again.
I like the quote: "estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail" coming from people who want you to by their unsolicited e-mail services. Does anyone really trust this number, or does it seem totally made up?
And if you believe that number I have a new marketing technique for you called 'Silent Marketing'. Just pay me a few thousand dollars and your product will be available to millions of potential buyers! Billions of dollars were spent over the web this year, so obviously my marketing idea will generate billions of dollars for you! Never mind what the idea is, other people are making money so if you give me money, you'll be making money too!
I installed my own dish, on a wooden swingset and it was fine. Once you find the satellite, a little wiggle / wind / rain isn't going to hurt anything. Cable people complaining about lost picture is pure and utter BS.
Plus: DirecTV + 2 channel Tivo is gods gift to TV. Record one thing while watching another is fantastic. Cable Companies are lying pigs that will eventually go the way of the Dodo.
And no, I do not work for any TV related company.
You made me laugh out loud. If I hadn't already posted, I'd mod you up. Excellent research and response. Bravo!
Unless ThinkGeek owns the other store too. If you're in the retail business you want to own both the highest and the lowest cost outlet. Advertise the highest so that if someone feels that it's worth it you get all the cash, but own the lowest cost generice and you'll get the volume without directly advertising. It is precisely for this reason that Cambles puts the same soup in many different brands of soup can. Branding is an important business tactic.
I'm sorry, but you don't seem to have any idea what is going on here.
Your very first comment was quite correct. Google ads are a perfect example of good advertising done well.
You're second point is wrong. Clearly they do make some money advertising high caffeine tables, or they wouldn't do it. Probably they don't make enough on that alone, but it is the sum of all adds that run a business, not just the revenue of one particular ad on one particular day. As for the "News for Nerds" slogan, your comment is offensive. I take pride in my 'nerd' status, with all the goods and the bads that go with it. Am I as socially adept as I'd like to be? No. Do I occasonally suffer for that lack of aptitude? Yes. However, I have traded learning social skills for learning technical skills and it's a life choice I am comfortable with.
You comment that slashdot editors are communiation challenged is silly. It is precisely because they are interested in more than just the anal retention of any possible spelling errors that make them interesting. By analogy: most rock stars are terrible singers that actively damage their voices with every performance. Any voice teach will cringe to hear them. However the work they produce is about raw feeling and power, not dedication to carefully considered principles. There is a time and place for careful techniques and there is a time and place for just saying what is on your mind. On Slashdot, grammer is nice, but not required. It is the openness of the communication that makes the site interesting.
As for running slashdot into the ground, you seem to believe that slashdot feel from the sky after which Hemos picked it up off from ground and has been poking it with a stick ever since. D00d! These guys created slashdot, and they are experimenting with how to operate it. When that experimentation stops slashdot will die. In the mean time, if you don't like a course correction, you should say so, but it is definitely not an indication of emminent destruction.
As for your last point, the banner doesn't say "win $300 to spend on drugs and prostitutes!" its simply says "Win $300". You can put it into your IT budget and be happy. Your boss can take the team to a party. Whatever. You're assumption that it is going to be embezzled just shows that you were reaching to somehow find a point and have too low a faith in your colleagues and fellow people.
Since this is in the star wars heading it must be on topic:
Is there anyone even vaguely excited to see this movie? I'll see it out of duty and all, but I'm looking forward to SpiderMan more than I'm looking forward to Ep2, and I camped over night to see the first one.
Why would you replace a completely working system?
.Net to Cobol or the laughable 'Visual Fortran') is simply perpetuating a non-profitable situation.
If it works and you don't need to significantly modify it, then you don't worry about it. But then, that application doesn't effect a future development decision much either.
If the project does need major maintenance or you are trying to take advantage of the maintainers free time you have these situations:
A) The project is not changing enough to be re-written in which case you stick with the language you are in. (Thus not needing language neutrality)
B) The code is going to be rewritten in which case you can choose the language and don't care much about language neutrality.
C) Your developer has enough spare time to work on something else, but is unwilling to learn a new language in which case you have a lazy developer.
I do understand that migration is a slow process, but you don't need to keep your COBOL programmers forever if they refuse to learn new technologies. Obviously you don't switch languages in one big bang as you seem to suggest.
Also remember that I'm not talking from the view of a programmer. I'm talking from the point of view of a business manager who doesn't want to spend a huge salary on COBOL consultants when they could spend much less money on a java programmer if they re-write the software in a more commonly known language.
I know tonnes of people at large companies who spend 40 hours a week doing 5 worth of work because they're the only ones who know the obscure mainframe lanugage. As soon as the company migrates to a more up to date platform and language they suddenly get much more bang for their programmer buck. That is profitable. Paying someone for 35 hours a week of surfing time is not. Making new extensions to an old language (such as adding
Now look at the VM. The design goal of the JVM bytecode was obviously "design the easiest to implement VM that we can compile Java to."
What are you talking about?!?! The JVM is designed to be a minimal set of what is needed so you can get about your job without a huge pile of baggage loaded on top of you.
As for the libraries; they both suck.
Which shows that you don't know how to code in either of them. The Java API is much easier to use than the old MFC api I used to work with, JDBC is much more friendly than ODBC and the core java API's much much easier than the C++ api's for the MS, unix and AS/400 systems that I had to work with.
C# is Java
Except that it isn't mature, is OS dependent, seems very open to security holes which are imposible under Java, has no community review process, has no officially sanctioned competing implementations, has no choice of developement environment, cannot be used for free, and requires you to be an all MS shop. If you don't mind any of those things then they're just about the same!
"Is C#/.NET better than Java" because everyone who isn't a MS hater or a one-language-programmer J2EE hack can see the answer. The real question is: "Is the superiority of C#/.NET enough to offset the costs of moving to it from J2EE."
You being a troll.
...are the biggest boon for free lance developers.
You meet someone who is busy and needs to update their little side app. Because the person is doing it on the side they don't have time to do a proper design. You come in, bill them at a competitive, hourly rate to update/rewrite/extend the code and then train the maintainer on what you did. You get a nice little bonus for your spare time, and the maintainer gets to keep the clout of maintaining an important app plus gains access to a good example of using up to date technology in their application space. The only tricky part is finding the clients.
Think from the business point of view:
.Net from Passport because Passport is a particularly dangerous idea)
.com days are over and if you aren't thinking about your company's profitability you are wasting your employers money.
If you are a paying for programmers, do you really want them all speaking different languages? Obviously not. You want them all to be able to read each others code. This makes it so you can pull people from one project and put them on another project without having to teach them a whole new language.
The very first thing any company or project does is pick a language. Before that point, language neutrality doesn't matter becuase the company hasn't picked a language yet. Beyond that point language neutrality doesn't matter because everyone has learned the language of choice. In a legacy, language-hetrogenous environment language neutrality does not matter because everyone has to be trained in CRL.
.Net has no selling point because no business wants language neutrality and every feature it intends to offer can already be done in J2EE. (I'm seperating
The fact that language neutrality is 'cool' doesn't matter. The
1) We are currently discussing drawbacks and solutions to them. Pay attention. /. thinks their bunk.
:]
2) Most people here believe that the idea is needed, but the law is ineffective. Very different from believeing that the idea is not needed. Again pay attention.
3) Most people here love their cell phones. Kind of skews the audience. A technology discussion forum obviously will love technology. Pay attention to your circumstances.
4) Many people here have felt RSI. No on here I know of has felt pain from RF. Thus people are posting based on attention to their own experiences. I bet you've had sore wrists, but not cell phone cancer. With attention to your own experience what does that tell you?
5) Robots and machines are a understood problem. Most engineers feel that given sufficent time and resources most things are possible. Pay attention to the subject matter and you'll see why.
6) Pay attention to the source of the claims and you'll see why
7) Pay attention to your own grammer when you are condemning someone elses.
8) Most people here don't even write C. Pay attention to who is posting when you make a generalization.
9) You criticism was baseless and broad. It deserves to be modded down.
10)My cricism of your criticism is based on fact and deserved to be modded up.
11)No. The simpsons are no longer funny.
12)No. Making fun of slashdot IS funny. That's why so many people do it. (And bother replying to people who do it)
13)If you had paid any attention to StarOffice you'd realize it can do far more than two page letters.
14)Technology doesn't have a downside. However people's use of technology is a different matter. Pay attention to the difference.
15)The fact that you believe anyone believes this, shows that you are not paying attention to the post.
16)No one here believes that either. Pay attention to what people say, not what you think they would say if you let them get a word in.
The operating system IS a commodity. Everyone needs one. Most people don't really give a crap about it.
Take water. You absolutely must have a clean supply of it, but who gets it to you and how they do it you only give the vaguest care about. MAYBE if you're a health nut, you put a water filter in line, but most people don't bother. Once you have the water you'll buy lemonaid mix, washing machines, sprinklers, etc. You really care about those applications, not just the water itself.
Same (is || will be) true for the OS. It has to make it possible for my software to talk to the hardware. Beyond that all I really care about are applications. (Note that I'm considering the shell an application, not an intrisic part of the OS)
If the illegality is in breaking the encryption, could some secure 3rd party break the encryption and send me the results. Posetion of cracked data is not an offence, is it? Maybe some Ukranian crack-boy could make a living cracking the encryption on popular items and then selling the results back into the US. What is anybody going to do if I release some code for something, based on publicly available specs. (Even if those specs are the result of some work done elsewhere that couldn't be done here.) Isn't that how PC cloning got started with Clean Room reverse engineering?
I'm not an EQ player, but it seems like the answer to hording is simple. The banks tax you on the items/money stored. If I put in 100Kpp and let it sit for a month. I should come back to only 95Kpp in the bank. That way I'm motivated to sell it, spend it or carry some and risk losing it.
Wether you think MS is satan or god this arguement should make some sense. What do you think: (btw this was my letter. Flame on if you must)
Under the Tunney Act, I wish to comment on the proposed Microsoft settlement.
This settlement is widely perceived as a non-punishment for Microsoft. By
allowing this settlement to go forward, the government sends the message that it
is ok to break corporate law because you will not truely be punished for it.
Many computer enthusiasts and business people are watching the outcome of
this trial and will base future behaviour around the outcome. If Microsoft is
given a non-punishing settlement, people wil reason that it is ok to commit a
crime so long as you have the the clout to avoid punishment. The courts must
enforce a real punishment on what has been proven to be a real crime.
If the courts do not enforce a truely behaviour changing penalty on Microsoft
the rule of law over corporate america will be drastically weakened. A
capitolist system depends on the rule of law to ensure a level playing field and
promote competition. The people of the United States have charged the justice
system with ensuring that level playing field. Please do not let us down.
False. Capitolism is an economic philosophy that REQUIRES protection of the courts in order to function. It is preciesly because the citizens of communist countries could not easily sue the scammers, grifters and cheats that communism failed.
The need for resources if a fundamental aspect of all people. Communism tries to hide from our human nature while capitolism embraces the reality of who we are.
Capitolism even makes philanthropy more possible. Who is truely better off: a disabled citizen of a capitolist economy or a disabled citizen of a communist economy? (And note that I'm talking Capitolism vs. Communism. Semi-socialist states have free health care are very sane and reasonable example of middle ground)
Here's a controversial thought:
If you are a user and you have hardware that is over seven years old, the staute of limitations says that nobody, not even linux has to support it.
Think where things were 7 years ago. Do you really think that any non-geek cares about that hardware? If grandpa has a computer for 7 years, and wants a new OS, he'll have to buy a new system and presto, his hardware is sane again.
Dogmatic support of antique hardware is fun, but not profitable.
Microscopic device that you eat. It swims around in you like a submarine, communicates by tiny radio waves, can even take grainy, tech looking pictures to show doctors whats going on in side you.
Tiny little bot with one of those chem detectors. Attach it to a tiny bit of iron. It floats around in a solution and when it finds a molecule of the type you're looking for it grabs ahold. Now you can seperate two things that were presumably not seperable before.
Tiny machine that traces around circuits that have gone defective and actually repairs them through some magic. The little devices follow the paths until they come to a problem they can repair.
My personal goal device actually has nothing to do with chains, but is a microscopic audio recorder that becomes permanently attached to your ear. It records everything you hear giving you perfect memory! Powered by body heat so you don't switch batteries, no bulky tapes, saves the data to disk at the end of the day. Suddenly my bad memory is no longer a handicap!
The problem is in Reading vs. Performance.
I have a degree in Math and have done many years of semi-professional acting (i.e. I get paid, but not so much that I don't need my CS job to live)
Copenhagen was a better written play, but I pity and respect the man who tries to perform it. Long difficult monologues where the audience will often want to stand up and say, "Could you repeat that, I only half got it." But when you're reading it and can appreciate the nuance. Copenhagen was by far a superior piece of writing in the history, the math, and especially in the interpersonal relationship between the two men. First as teacher-student, then nearly to father-son, then suddenly to bitter enemies. It is practically shakespere-ian in how dynamic their relationship was and those aspects were very strongly and humanely played out.
To talk about Proof, it would be easy to produce, easy to get an audience, and easy to make people feel smart because they were watching a play that had math in it. The actors have plenty of opportunity to showboat and draw an audience in, but fundamentally, the play is about smart men who are too pig-headed to trust a girl. (*gasp!* it's a GIRL! Not a big shocker any more) As soon as the play uses up its 90 minutes, the boyfriend pulls the stick from his bum and then everything is fine. He shouldn't have mistrusted her in the first place, but then the play would be about 15 minutes long.
To sum up: Proof is fun to watch chickies who do math and physicist who drink heavily. Copenhagen is an excellent play to expand your scope and see a truly powerful piece of writing.
I completely agree that it CAN be used for a great benefit, but in my experience it rarely is.
I see a similar but less epidemic problem in the mis-use of XML. At least three projects I've come into with XML being used to store 100% flat properties. With no hierarchy, and only one project searching only one database, there is no point in using LDAP except that people seem to think they're supposed to.
Certainly a protocol is not responsible for people mis-using it, but LDAP seems to lend itself to this mis-use through a lack of real clarity for beginners about what it is for and a lack of simplicity in its interface for building good examples.
I understand that LDAP is supposed to be used for
:]
all kinds of great contact / location / description information, but how is it used in reality? It is used as a really difficult to use properties file. Judging the way most people use LDAP that I've seen, they would have been better off with a sql database. At least with SQL the queries are readable. (o=, c=, wtf= is a pain).
The way I feel about it is that the LDAP 'problem' does exist and is solvable, but the right protocol/implementation does not yet exist. Until something much more friendly and useful comes along, I am firmly off the LDAP bandwagon.
So if you're looking for a good tool to solve your LDAP problems, I suggest Oracle, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
Completely
Masochistic
Version
Control
CMVC was unbelievably painful to use.
*shiver*
Ok, that's the end of my nightmare flashback.