Utility was never the point of manned space flight
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
To argue that the utility of manned space flight is limited is easy. Utility was never the point. You might just as well argue the utility of a Van Gogh painting. It's not supposed to have utility, it's art.
In the same way, human astronauts capture the imagination of people in a way that robots never can and never will. If not for John Kennedy's great vision of putting a man on the moon, we might not have the mighty space program we do today.
Take the humans out of it and the regular people will pay less attention to it, and be more likely to cut the funding altogether. You may not like this fact, but it's how people work.
Mods, haven't you noticed that most of these posts are completely about microsoft? Geez, you need to quit slacking and do your duties. What's the world coming to when people can just post their pro-Microsoft propaganda without fear of the righteous retribution of the almighty mod?
Next thing you know, we'll have emacs users getting modded up. It's chaos I tell you! Anarchy!
As for your instructions on how to make a shape, I can do that, sure, but it is not intuitive. In fact, I would never have figured that out, but I can draw a box in photoshop easily enough.
I agree with you. This box method probably works fine, but how in blazes do you draw a slanted line? Is it even possible?
Would it be so hard to add some shape/line drawing tools? I end up opening microsoft paint when I want to draw a freaking line. That's pretty damn lame.
Oh, and what if I don't know my pixel to inches ratio on my monitor? I don't want to worry about that crap, I just wanna draw some stuff.
</rant> I do like the Gimp, but it could be easier to use.
Piracy prevention methods only punish legitimate users. I'm referring specifically here to cd "in the drive" copy protection. Pirates make short work of that sort of copy protection, but legit users often go through the hassle of putting the disk in the drive, either because they don't know about the crack, or don't want to run it for fear of viruses and the like.
I doubt this style of copy protection has ever caused a single sale. It's just annoying to those of us who actually buy the game (like me).
I've done a fair bit of moderating on Slashdot, and I think moderation is necessary in order to filter out the crap, but now I see that it is being used to limit freedom of speech when someone presents ideas with which you Yanks are uncomfortable. I'm not going to continue to moderate, because I believe that it is being abused. I had a sense that my post would be modded down, so I thought, "let's try it".
With all due respect sir, your reply was a classic troll. Strong opinions, yes, but short diatribes without any sort of qualitative analysis, full of invective, are practically the definition of a troll. Use your strong opinions to create something worthwhile to read which is not merely a rage against the machine, and you won't get modded as a troll.
Even if what you said was true, you could have expressed yourself better. If I caught this in meta-moderation, I'd judge it as fair, even though I completely agree with your sentiment.
Rather than making an ad on the web accountable in ways that no other media is required, why not just assume it's getting you market-awareness and presence?
I totally agree. Answer: because they can. The information is just so juicy, and it's just right there, it's too tempting to ignore.
As long as they don't ignore it, however, we will have scammers like this one.
I still find your post a little suspicious, seeing as you're the only person who actually seems to have gotten a computer from this guy, he doesn't have a business license, he sells stuff that doesn't exist, he doesn't seem to have an office, he makes up complete lies about who his customers are, he claims to have talked to reviewers who never talked to him, he seems clueless with tech specs, he gives the runaround to the Tom's people when they ask him for a review machine, etc.
Can't you see why it's hard to believe that he actually shipped you a machine?
I've looked at your posting history and you seem as though you're a reasonable person, but then, so does this guy in the online interview he had with the Tom's reporter.
To top it off, you make a big deal about a seven year warranty, as though that's some kind of selling point. Seven years ago a P1 was a top of the line machine.
It's really hard to believe you, especially considering how many other people say they just plain got ripped off and he never shipped them anything. If you're legit, I apologize for calling you a liar, but surely you must see how I would come to that conclusion?
About a year and half ago I found myself needing/wanting a monster.....I disapprove of the direction his marketing has taken (who wouldn't). Because of it, I've taken to sending folks here and elsewhere who want a PC built for them.
A quick look at the wayback machine shows that he was already making these claims (the navy buys our machines, etc) when you say you bought a computer from him. See here
You're a liar and probably in cahoots with Michael, or you're michael himself.
A space ship captain/thief with a heart of gold in trouble with the big bad crime boss? Can you say "Han Solo"? I knew you could.
Was Han a thief? No! In your face! Hahahahahah!
Just kidding. I liked it for all the little science touches that they didn't bother to explain. Something in space explodes and there is no sound. They didn't feel the need to have a dumb character say "Hey, how come no boom?". They just did it. The space saving toilet that folded into the wall.... the shepherd buys his way onto the ship with fresh fruit... the captain pushes the villian off course so he couldn't reach his ship... the companion added respectability to the outlaw ship... I could go on and on.
Any of that original? Probably not. For tv, however, it was pretty damn good. Plus you had Joss Whedon's writing which was as witty and funny as ever he was. It was a beautiful, wonderful show.
People have said that developers need to write their game code with cross compatiblity in mind. They have it exactly backwards.
To have a really successful linux gaming platform, the linux developers need to work on a kick ass set of tools to make porting games easy as clicking a few buttons. Yes, I'm a software developer myself, and yes, I know this is MUCH more difficult than it sounds, and yes, I know that they can't go rewriting DirectX on Linux (or can they?).
No, what you need is for the linux developers to swallow their pride and create a large suite of tools that work well with both Linux and Windows, and make it compelling enough that Windows development houses will use it *instead* of DirectX. Take the standard away from Microsoft, and control the tools, make it so that writing cross-platform games means you only have to write the code once and don't have to do much (if any) extra work.
Is it ambitious? Of course! Will anything less fit the bill? No, in my humble opinion.
The very top reason I run Windows on my desktop at home is for games. I would absolutely love it if that changed.
I would gladly donate my time to such a project. Anyone else?
While I really liked Firefly, you can't pretend that it was significantly sci-fi. Space was just the setting. It was far more of a "Western Wagons through the Stars".
It's unfortunate that Joss gave wind to all you naysayers sails by calling it a "western in space". I would have to respectfully disagree with your comment. Sure, it had the western swashbuckling aspect to it, but it also had a lot better science than most shows. There were many examples, but I only have time to offer you a couple right now.
Remember the spacewalk when they are repairing the ship? If you remember, they moved VERY slowly, and when Jayne hands the captain a tool, he does it VERY deliberately. You have to be careful when you're in space.
Remember how he dispatches the villian in the series finale? He doesn't shoot him. He just pushes him off course, so that he won't be able to reach his ship.
There were a lot of little touches like that put into the show for geeks like me. It may not have been great sf by literary standard, but I still say it was a cut above what I've seen on tv.
You might not have noticed all the little touches, because they never bothered to explain them. This is another aspect I loved about the show.
Well.... Good thing I have karma to burn because here it goes...
*Some of it may be good, but for every Star Trek or Babylon 5 there are 2 Milleniums or Space:Above and Beyonds
Can you really hold up Star Trek and Babylon 5 as examples of good science fiction? I admit that I enjoyed some Star Trek every now and then, but it was totally space opera, they so rarely had interesting, original science fiction concepts that when they did it was a cause for celebration. Maybe I never gave B5 a chance, but the few times I tried to watch it I had to change the channel because it was so formulaic.
Do you read science fiction?
For my money, Firefly was the best science fiction show ever. They tried to be fairly scientific at the same time as telling a story, and the characters and places were so much more real to me. The captain was a real man, who made hard decisions and sometimes may even have been a little unfair, manipulative, and vicious. The ship was not some federation of goodie goodies, but a crew of outcasts and criminals just trying to get by. There was a huge story arc that was slowly being revealed (two by two, the men in blue).
Sure, much of it was stuff that science fiction literature has seen before, but as far as tv goes, it was amazingly original, and they even had some nice little touches that I've never read (the "crazy Ivan" maneuver with the ship, the "reavers").
They never insulted my intelligence with loud explosions in space, or impossible physics (ships making crazy zig-zags as though through an atmosphere).
Thank goodness they're making a movie (although since the show got cancelled, I don't quite understand how this got funded).
I'm not even going to start on your grammar. How can you expect for people to take your opinions on an intellectual topic seriously unless you learn to spell, or at the very least learn to use a spell checker?
I'm in favor of laws limiting spyware and adware, but I think it's important to get it right the first time. If the FTC doesn't even have a definition for spyware, it's back to the drawing board.
The first time I ran into adware, I got pretty ticked off about it. I was running a pop-up killer, yet I was still getting pop ups, at Google and my bank even.
Google put a link on their page "Why Google doesn't use pop-ups", I clicked it, and I read all about [ad/spy]ware. I quickly discovered Ad-Aware, and removed gator from my system. I'm embarrassed that I had it and didn't know it, but, to continue my story....
I did a hell of a lot of research about ad-ware and spy-ware, and I wrote a very detailed letter to the FTC about it, what it was and why it was wrong. I waited with bated breath for their response. Here's what I got:
Thank you for writing to us about unsolicited commercial email (UCE). UCE is a very big problem in the US, and we're working on a solution.....
Thanks guys.
Re:I want a filter dammit. Server side doesn't cut
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DSPAM v2.10 Released
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· Score: 1
neverwinter runs on linux also...
That was the point.... Quake3 and nwn are just about it for linux gaming.
as for mozilla, you must teach it more... the more spam you show it, the more eficient it will be... this take time...
I actually saved over 5000 spam messages and over 2000 good messages before I ever switched to Mozilla and I used those to train it when I made the switch.
but learn something: there isnt a perfect filters, there will be spam that will reach the inbox, there will be valid email in the spam folder
Yeah, I don't need them to be perfect at catching spam, I was just saying that the effectiveness I've measured is far below what some others have reported. I do need them to be perfect at letting my real mail through.
Re:I want a filter dammit. Server side doesn't cut
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DSPAM v2.10 Released
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· Score: 1
Popfile. It's fantastic. It has a great UI (it's web based, you just open http://localhost:8080 in a broswer), it works with all E-Mail clients that use POP (it might work with others too).
I've looked into popfile. Isn't it pretty much just bayesian filtering (with more than the basic two spam and non-spam corpuses)? Is it better than mozilla mail? Mozilla mail is a hell of a lot better than nothing at all, but my experience has been a lot less perfect than some others have reported. I suspect popfile would be the same. Unless I'm missing something?
I want a filter dammit. Server side doesn't cut it
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DSPAM v2.10 Released
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Okay, I'll admit it. I run windows. I like to play games other than quake3 and neverwinter nights (though I like those games too). If it weren't for games, I wouldn't bother with Windows. As it is, I actually paid for it, and run it as my primary.
I see all my fellow slashdotters saying (over and over again) that spam filters should be server side, because otherwise you are still paying for the wasted bandwidth. This is a very powerful argument, and I tend to agree.
However, there are two things that make me nervous about this approach. First of all, if I miss even one email, no matter how innocuous, because my ISP installed filters, I am going to be pissed!
"Man, you missed it, the party was a blast!"
"What party?"
"Didn't you get the email?"
With a client side filter, at least I can look through the 'spam' and find the gold nuggets. If my ISP filters for me, and I miss a legit email, I'm just SOL.
Secondly, all of the best filters are for linux. Ask me if I run Mozilla (for windows). I will tell you, "HELL yes I do". Is it anywhere close to 90% effective for filtering spam? Not for me! Is it 100% effective in letting my legit mail come through? Not for me! The browser has stopped 99.9% of the popups tho.
Anyway, long ramble short, give me something that's good on windows. Do I have to write it myself? I've been thinking of altering Mozilla to incoporate the latest anti-spam technology, but, man, I just never have the time these days.
Anyway, good work on the part of D-Spam, nonetheless. Kudos to your bad selves.
the software that comes with it doesn't look all that great... of course this may not be a problem because there has already been significant effort in getting linux to run on it
I found myself laughing heartily at this. It doesn't really function well as a DVR, which is what you bought it for, but LINUX runs on it! That makes it worth the expense!
I took Latin in college, which was a mistake, but that's not what this post is about.
It's about the fact that every single year, Wheelock comes out with a new and improved Latin textbook, making the old ones obsolete, so that I couldn't sell mine back to the school store and recoup a small portion of my investment.
Now, when was the last time Latin grammar changed? About 1900 years ago? They could use Latin grammar texts from 50 years ago, and they'd be as good today as they were then. It seems to me that professors are complicit in this little scam.
The same goes for calculus. My calculus text was obsolete by the time I finished the course. Did calculus change? Did they put in some brand new groundbreaking stuff about measuring curves? No, they just wanted to make sure I couldn't sell back my book for others to buy more cheaply than the "new" one.
At the University of Texas, the cost of my books made up at least 30% of my total tuition costs. How insane is that? It's a racket, plain and simple.
Boohoofuckingwah. His point was that the going rate for a webmonkey is lower than that of a similarly skilled programmer. Any programmer could easily get into how difficult it is to do all the things you mentioned, but they don't get their undies in a twist anytime someone talks shit about their profession. I suggest laying off the caffeine and taking a vacation. You sound like you need one.;)
Everyone needs a vacation. And which programmers do you mean? Every one I've ever met (and I've met many) will defend their language, or their philosophy, or this or that, especially in the face of such ignorance and superstition.. We must come frome two different worlds, you and I.
Being able to do anything beyond operating Front Page is a higher level of skill than is expected from the average web monkey.
I guess it depends on your definition. My point was just that a lot of web developers are true-blue engineers, and there's a stigma associated with working in the industry, as though if you've ever touched a website, you're not a "real programmer". This isn't at all fair, as several of the people I've worked with have been outstanding engineers, and a great deal more talented and knowledgeable than some I've known who do "real programming", like c++, but unable to find a job doing anything else, because a casual glance at their resume gets them branded a "web monkey".
I have a feeling you're just trolling here, but you've got my hackles raised now, so I feel forced to respond.
DB administration - installing MySQL on a Redhat box from RPM and editing the configuration file. A challenging job for a 12 year old.
You think that's all there is to DB administration, and you are putting me down? Please. Real database administration involves watching the database to see how it's queried, studying execution plans and reworking tables and queries to make it more efficient. I'm not about to get into everything a DB admin does on a regular basis, but it's a lot more than just clicking next on a wizard.
DB design - Yes, it's very difficult to break things down into tables and to choose an appropriate data type. I'm impressed by your mad skillz.
Sure, anybody can design tables. Does that mean just anybody can do it well? Do you agree that there are good ways and bad ways to design a database structure?
DB implementation - writing a SELECT query is so hard only a trained secretary could do it.
Mmm hmmm. Writing quality queries is hard. Once again, sure, anyone could do it, but once again, wouldn't you agree that there are often several ways to get information into and out of a database, and that some are better than others? Or do you even know what you are talking about?
server administration - it sure as hell takes knowledge and experience to hit RESET when the redhat box crashes and to use webmin when it works.
Of course that's all there is to it, isn't it?
site design - only a seasoned professional can write HTML, aside from a chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees can oil paint too. Would you buy one of their paintings? It sure is easy to knock other people down, but it's a lot harder to create something good. HTML design is an art form. Some people are better at it than others. Does that scare you?
PERL coding - OH NO NOT PERL CODING!!! That's so impossibly hard that it actually involves reading one of those "learn ____ in 24 hours" books.
The point was that I had to do all of the above, in addition to my ostensible main duties, i.e. perl coding, and that my experience is common amongst my peers, not that PERL is in itself extremely difficult.
You could get into that, or you could realize that a real programmer does things that are 10 to 100 times more complex as part of their everyday job. Writing a search routine for a small website seems hard until you try writing something as simple as a Tetris clone.
Funny you should mention that. I have in fact written multiple tetris clones. It doesn't come close to being as difficult or complex as my web programming jobs were.
Furthermore, my current job involves writing multithreaded client-server code in c++. It's certainly difficult to do well. However, I don't see it as inherently harder or easier than my duties as a web programmer.
I'm sure you'll say that I probably do it poorly, due to the fact that I once designed websites. That says more about you than me.
$50k for 3 years for a webmonkey: $150k (actually that's WAY TOO MUCH for a webmonkey. You could hire a real programmer for that much.)
You know, I'm currently a "real programmer", but in your words, I used to be a "webmonkey".
I take offense at this notion that web programmers are somehow inferior to "real" programmers. My job web programming was a hell of a lot more difficult than my current "real" job. I had to wear a lot more hats. Among my duties were: DB administration, network administration, DB design, DB implementation, server administration, site design, and PERL coding. The way of thinking of management types is that you hire a "web monkey", and he just "does" your site. A lot of people have no idea what goes into a large scale interactive website. It may not be rocket science, but it often is much more than just writing some HTML (though even that is very hard to do well).
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
Slashdot Mirror
In the same way, human astronauts capture the imagination of people in a way that robots never can and never will. If not for John Kennedy's great vision of putting a man on the moon, we might not have the mighty space program we do today.
Take the humans out of it and the regular people will pay less attention to it, and be more likely to cut the funding altogether. You may not like this fact, but it's how people work.
Next thing you know, we'll have emacs users getting modded up. It's chaos I tell you! Anarchy!
I agree with you. This box method probably works fine, but how in blazes do you draw a slanted line? Is it even possible?
Would it be so hard to add some shape/line drawing tools? I end up opening microsoft paint when I want to draw a freaking line. That's pretty damn lame.
Oh, and what if I don't know my pixel to inches ratio on my monitor? I don't want to worry about that crap, I just wanna draw some stuff.
</rant> I do like the Gimp, but it could be easier to use.
I doubt this style of copy protection has ever caused a single sale. It's just annoying to those of us who actually buy the game (like me).
With all due respect sir, your reply was a classic troll. Strong opinions, yes, but short diatribes without any sort of qualitative analysis, full of invective, are practically the definition of a troll. Use your strong opinions to create something worthwhile to read which is not merely a rage against the machine, and you won't get modded as a troll.
Even if what you said was true, you could have expressed yourself better. If I caught this in meta-moderation, I'd judge it as fair, even though I completely agree with your sentiment.
I totally agree. Answer: because they can. The information is just so juicy, and it's just right there, it's too tempting to ignore.
As long as they don't ignore it, however, we will have scammers like this one.
Can't you see why it's hard to believe that he actually shipped you a machine?
I've looked at your posting history and you seem as though you're a reasonable person, but then, so does this guy in the online interview he had with the Tom's reporter.
To top it off, you make a big deal about a seven year warranty, as though that's some kind of selling point. Seven years ago a P1 was a top of the line machine.
It's really hard to believe you, especially considering how many other people say they just plain got ripped off and he never shipped them anything. If you're legit, I apologize for calling you a liar, but surely you must see how I would come to that conclusion?
A quick look at the wayback machine shows that he was already making these claims (the navy buys our machines, etc) when you say you bought a computer from him. See here You're a liar and probably in cahoots with Michael, or you're michael himself.
Was Han a thief? No! In your face! Hahahahahah!
Just kidding. I liked it for all the little science touches that they didn't bother to explain. Something in space explodes and there is no sound. They didn't feel the need to have a dumb character say "Hey, how come no boom?". They just did it. The space saving toilet that folded into the wall.... the shepherd buys his way onto the ship with fresh fruit... the captain pushes the villian off course so he couldn't reach his ship... the companion added respectability to the outlaw ship... I could go on and on.
Any of that original? Probably not. For tv, however, it was pretty damn good. Plus you had Joss Whedon's writing which was as witty and funny as ever he was. It was a beautiful, wonderful show.
To have a really successful linux gaming platform, the linux developers need to work on a kick ass set of tools to make porting games easy as clicking a few buttons. Yes, I'm a software developer myself, and yes, I know this is MUCH more difficult than it sounds, and yes, I know that they can't go rewriting DirectX on Linux (or can they?).
No, what you need is for the linux developers to swallow their pride and create a large suite of tools that work well with both Linux and Windows, and make it compelling enough that Windows development houses will use it *instead* of DirectX. Take the standard away from Microsoft, and control the tools, make it so that writing cross-platform games means you only have to write the code once and don't have to do much (if any) extra work.
Is it ambitious? Of course! Will anything less fit the bill? No, in my humble opinion.
The very top reason I run Windows on my desktop at home is for games. I would absolutely love it if that changed.
I would gladly donate my time to such a project. Anyone else?
It's unfortunate that Joss gave wind to all you naysayers sails by calling it a "western in space". I would have to respectfully disagree with your comment. Sure, it had the western swashbuckling aspect to it, but it also had a lot better science than most shows. There were many examples, but I only have time to offer you a couple right now.
Remember the spacewalk when they are repairing the ship? If you remember, they moved VERY slowly, and when Jayne hands the captain a tool, he does it VERY deliberately. You have to be careful when you're in space.
Remember how he dispatches the villian in the series finale? He doesn't shoot him. He just pushes him off course, so that he won't be able to reach his ship.
There were a lot of little touches like that put into the show for geeks like me. It may not have been great sf by literary standard, but I still say it was a cut above what I've seen on tv.
You might not have noticed all the little touches, because they never bothered to explain them. This is another aspect I loved about the show.
*Some of it may be good, but for every Star Trek or Babylon 5 there are 2 Milleniums or Space:Above and Beyonds
Can you really hold up Star Trek and Babylon 5 as examples of good science fiction? I admit that I enjoyed some Star Trek every now and then, but it was totally space opera, they so rarely had interesting, original science fiction concepts that when they did it was a cause for celebration. Maybe I never gave B5 a chance, but the few times I tried to watch it I had to change the channel because it was so formulaic.
Do you read science fiction?
For my money, Firefly was the best science fiction show ever. They tried to be fairly scientific at the same time as telling a story, and the characters and places were so much more real to me. The captain was a real man, who made hard decisions and sometimes may even have been a little unfair, manipulative, and vicious. The ship was not some federation of goodie goodies, but a crew of outcasts and criminals just trying to get by. There was a huge story arc that was slowly being revealed (two by two, the men in blue).
Sure, much of it was stuff that science fiction literature has seen before, but as far as tv goes, it was amazingly original, and they even had some nice little touches that I've never read (the "crazy Ivan" maneuver with the ship, the "reavers").
They never insulted my intelligence with loud explosions in space, or impossible physics (ships making crazy zig-zags as though through an atmosphere).
Thank goodness they're making a movie (although since the show got cancelled, I don't quite understand how this got funded).
My $0.02.
dosen't, cancling, irregulare, repeates, cancle, patern, cancled, cancled, obigitory, clames, slame, repeate, happends, slames, dose, lissen, becouse, appart, clames, vage, conservitive, hoasts
I'm not even going to start on your grammar. How can you expect for people to take your opinions on an intellectual topic seriously unless you learn to spell, or at the very least learn to use a spell checker?
The first time I ran into adware, I got pretty ticked off about it. I was running a pop-up killer, yet I was still getting pop ups, at Google and my bank even.
Google put a link on their page "Why Google doesn't use pop-ups", I clicked it, and I read all about [ad/spy]ware. I quickly discovered Ad-Aware, and removed gator from my system. I'm embarrassed that I had it and didn't know it, but, to continue my story....
I did a hell of a lot of research about ad-ware and spy-ware, and I wrote a very detailed letter to the FTC about it, what it was and why it was wrong. I waited with bated breath for their response. Here's what I got:
Thank you for writing to us about unsolicited commercial email (UCE). UCE is a very big problem in the US, and we're working on a solution.....
Thanks guys.
That was the point.... Quake3 and nwn are just about it for linux gaming.
as for mozilla, you must teach it more... the more spam you show it, the more eficient it will be... this take time...
I actually saved over 5000 spam messages and over 2000 good messages before I ever switched to Mozilla and I used those to train it when I made the switch.
but learn something: there isnt a perfect filters, there will be spam that will reach the inbox, there will be valid email in the spam folder
Yeah, I don't need them to be perfect at catching spam, I was just saying that the effectiveness I've measured is far below what some others have reported. I do need them to be perfect at letting my real mail through.
I've looked into popfile. Isn't it pretty much just bayesian filtering (with more than the basic two spam and non-spam corpuses)? Is it better than mozilla mail? Mozilla mail is a hell of a lot better than nothing at all, but my experience has been a lot less perfect than some others have reported. I suspect popfile would be the same. Unless I'm missing something?
I see all my fellow slashdotters saying (over and over again) that spam filters should be server side, because otherwise you are still paying for the wasted bandwidth. This is a very powerful argument, and I tend to agree.
However, there are two things that make me nervous about this approach. First of all, if I miss even one email, no matter how innocuous, because my ISP installed filters, I am going to be pissed!
"Man, you missed it, the party was a blast!"
"What party?"
"Didn't you get the email?"
With a client side filter, at least I can look through the 'spam' and find the gold nuggets. If my ISP filters for me, and I miss a legit email, I'm just SOL.
Secondly, all of the best filters are for linux. Ask me if I run Mozilla (for windows). I will tell you, "HELL yes I do". Is it anywhere close to 90% effective for filtering spam? Not for me! Is it 100% effective in letting my legit mail come through? Not for me! The browser has stopped 99.9% of the popups tho.
Anyway, long ramble short, give me something that's good on windows. Do I have to write it myself? I've been thinking of altering Mozilla to incoporate the latest anti-spam technology, but, man, I just never have the time these days.
Anyway, good work on the part of D-Spam, nonetheless. Kudos to your bad selves.
I found myself laughing heartily at this. It doesn't really function well as a DVR, which is what you bought it for, but LINUX runs on it! That makes it worth the expense!
Only on /.
Either that or "Henry Fonzarelli Shark Jumper 2005".
It's about the fact that every single year, Wheelock comes out with a new and improved Latin textbook, making the old ones obsolete, so that I couldn't sell mine back to the school store and recoup a small portion of my investment.
Now, when was the last time Latin grammar changed? About 1900 years ago? They could use Latin grammar texts from 50 years ago, and they'd be as good today as they were then. It seems to me that professors are complicit in this little scam.
The same goes for calculus. My calculus text was obsolete by the time I finished the course. Did calculus change? Did they put in some brand new groundbreaking stuff about measuring curves? No, they just wanted to make sure I couldn't sell back my book for others to buy more cheaply than the "new" one.
At the University of Texas, the cost of my books made up at least 30% of my total tuition costs. How insane is that? It's a racket, plain and simple.
Everyone needs a vacation. And which programmers do you mean? Every one I've ever met (and I've met many) will defend their language, or their philosophy, or this or that, especially in the face of such ignorance and superstition.. We must come frome two different worlds, you and I.
I guess it depends on your definition. My point was just that a lot of web developers are true-blue engineers, and there's a stigma associated with working in the industry, as though if you've ever touched a website, you're not a "real programmer". This isn't at all fair, as several of the people I've worked with have been outstanding engineers, and a great deal more talented and knowledgeable than some I've known who do "real programming", like c++, but unable to find a job doing anything else, because a casual glance at their resume gets them branded a "web monkey".
DB administration - installing MySQL on a Redhat box from RPM and editing the configuration file. A challenging job for a 12 year old.
You think that's all there is to DB administration, and you are putting me down? Please. Real database administration involves watching the database to see how it's queried, studying execution plans and reworking tables and queries to make it more efficient. I'm not about to get into everything a DB admin does on a regular basis, but it's a lot more than just clicking next on a wizard.
DB design - Yes, it's very difficult to break things down into tables and to choose an appropriate data type. I'm impressed by your mad skillz.
Sure, anybody can design tables. Does that mean just anybody can do it well? Do you agree that there are good ways and bad ways to design a database structure?
DB implementation - writing a SELECT query is so hard only a trained secretary could do it.
Mmm hmmm. Writing quality queries is hard. Once again, sure, anyone could do it, but once again, wouldn't you agree that there are often several ways to get information into and out of a database, and that some are better than others? Or do you even know what you are talking about?
server administration - it sure as hell takes knowledge and experience to hit RESET when the redhat box crashes and to use webmin when it works.
Of course that's all there is to it, isn't it?
site design - only a seasoned professional can write HTML, aside from a chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees can oil paint too. Would you buy one of their paintings? It sure is easy to knock other people down, but it's a lot harder to create something good. HTML design is an art form. Some people are better at it than others. Does that scare you?
PERL coding - OH NO NOT PERL CODING!!! That's so impossibly hard that it actually involves reading one of those "learn ____ in 24 hours" books.
The point was that I had to do all of the above, in addition to my ostensible main duties, i.e. perl coding, and that my experience is common amongst my peers, not that PERL is in itself extremely difficult.
You could get into that, or you could realize that a real programmer does things that are 10 to 100 times more complex as part of their everyday job. Writing a search routine for a small website seems hard until you try writing something as simple as a Tetris clone.
Funny you should mention that. I have in fact written multiple tetris clones. It doesn't come close to being as difficult or complex as my web programming jobs were.
Furthermore, my current job involves writing multithreaded client-server code in c++. It's certainly difficult to do well. However, I don't see it as inherently harder or easier than my duties as a web programmer.
I'm sure you'll say that I probably do it poorly, due to the fact that I once designed websites. That says more about you than me.
You know, I'm currently a "real programmer", but in your words, I used to be a "webmonkey".
I take offense at this notion that web programmers are somehow inferior to "real" programmers. My job web programming was a hell of a lot more difficult than my current "real" job. I had to wear a lot more hats. Among my duties were: DB administration, network administration, DB design, DB implementation, server administration, site design, and PERL coding. The way of thinking of management types is that you hire a "web monkey", and he just "does" your site. A lot of people have no idea what goes into a large scale interactive website. It may not be rocket science, but it often is much more than just writing some HTML (though even that is very hard to do well).
I could get into how difficult it is to design an interface to be used by people who don't even know what interface means, to implement a good custom search facility, to smartly generate dynamic content and the like, but it would probably be lost on the likes of you.
Do too you're low user number I'm saprised you our asking that question.
The mods decide when too give points. Dont complain when you loose. </satire>