Man, I just got back from Philadelphia for business and I cannot tell you how much businessspeak and cliche's I heard. [...] I can't tell you how sick I get from hearing folks spout off tripe like "world class" etc...
so maybe you find this book more interesting: american psycho by bret easton ellis. it also has tons of businessspeak, but it's a lot more entertaining. it's about how you can be a successful businessman during the day, and an imaginative women murderer during the night.
Re:Ugh! Another $129 x 2 Machines!
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
So instead you bought a $129 single pack and installed it on three machines, instead screwing Apple out of SEVENTY bucks.
well, as i see it they screwed themselves. they claimed the family pack should be available in shops, but it isn't. so i had to make a choice between supporting somebody i hate, or partially supporting somebody i like.
considering that during the last 2 years i gave apple about 4500 euro, i really didn't feel bad about the latter.
Re:Ugh! Another $129 x 2 Machines!
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
If the Apple store was up right now, I'd point you to the "Family License" version that costs $199, and is good for up to 5 computers.
actually, i tried to buy a family license back then when jaguar came out. however, i couldn't find a shop that sold it. all of them had the single license version, but claimed that there is no point in having the family license in stock because "nobody every asks for it".
eventually i bought a single license and installed it on 3 machines. why do they have to make it so hard to be honest?
(i can't order it online. i don't have a credit card because i don't see any reason why a bunch of greedy people that waste a lot of money on advertising should get 3% or more of everything i buy. i'd rather give these percents to those people who provide something valuable to me.)
But to go up to save astronauts from certain death? Yeah, that's worth an orbiter.
objection. from a strict nasa point of view, it probably isn't. in general, you can compute how much "worth" something is by calculating how easy it would be to reproduce it.
it's relatively easy to reproduce a bunch of astronauts. basically you need some nice people with good education and certain type of character. plenty of them exist already, no investment needed. then, give them some exercise and training so they can do their job in space. yes, this needs a lot of infrastructure, but this is already there in order to produce n astronauts a year/decade/whatever. increasing it to n+4 won't increase the infrastructure costs a lot.
it's pretty impossible to reproduce another orbiter because you hardly can find the parts and the know-how to do it. nasa already has a hard time maintaining them. you would have to develop a new one, which nasa unsuccessfully tried for decades.
of course, this is not politically correct to say. but i'm pretty sure the astronauts knew that everybody will do his best to try to avoid such a decision, but if necessary, this kind of thinking is going to be applied.
Software using an old version of a library must continue to work on future versions. This also meant that developers had to think out thier library API beforehand (because you would have to maintain that API). Libraries could be extended though with extra functions.
i think it's also worth mentioning that the API was specified in an external *.fd file ("function definitions" AFAIR), which tools like fd2pragma could convert into C-headers, oberon modules, pascal units, assembler includes, whatever.
while AmigaOS-libraries are definitely a smart concept, i believe there is another reason they worked so well: for a long time, libraries were incredibly difficult to code (assembler stubs, reentrant-code, no real "globals"). only really experienced developers managed to do that. only later (90ties) tools and compilers started to simplify that, and good examples and tutorials showed up.
OTOH under windows every taxi-driver can click through a wizard and can come up with a library.
i don't mean to say there's a problem about taxi drivers writing dll's. on the contrary, i'm a big fan of making things easy to use. but this must include save-guards against major screw-ups. neither AmigaOS, windows or unix does that.
Hans talks about how 99% of people, as it stands, don't see the names of the folks responsible for the software they turned out. I'd counter that 99% of the people certainly could care less, that 99% of people leave movies before the credits are even halfway through and habitually tune them out to begin with.
and yet, they usually read the about 10 names showing up at the beginning of the movie, typically including the director, producer, main actors and camera.
this also seems to be hans' point: he doesn't ask for credits of every little patch-submitter, he wants a list of "rock-stars".
i wonder how long it will take before we have the developer-equivalent of boy-groups and britney....
how do we prevent terrorist from using this kind of stuff ? [...] cheers from Portugal
just continue living in a country that doesn't step on everyone toes because of megalomaniac reasons, and terrorists will happily send their missiles somewhere else.
in the worst case, eventually the terrorists or a megalomaniac country will take over yours, but as the result will be pretty much the same, there's no point in worrying about it too much.
Dynamic strings and arrays can help, since you can make the buffer as big as your data, but you can still overflow a dynamic array if you never check the data size.
i suppose you are referring to the case where some input explicitely specifies an invalid array-index. you are right, this has to be dealt with and turned into a proper error message. in case this check is missing or flawed, the language also needs array index checking to prevent this kind of buffer overflow. (this might result in the program to be terminated, unless the language allows to recover from such a condition.)
The only thing you need to prevent buffer overflows is to check the size of all data from untrusted sources before you put it in your buffer.
yes, but you can not guarantee that all this is done - and without making mistakes. that's why i don't consider this an approach to prevent buffer overflows. it just attempts to avoid them.
different to dynamic strings/arrays and automatic index checking, which are a no-brainer to use. (well, there is a possibility for compiler/library bugs, but its rather small.)
Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency.
i think strings mainly exist because of usability considerations - from the developers point of view. they provide a compact notation for "list of characters". furthermore, most languages come with string routines/classes/operators that are a lot more powerful and flexible than their list-equivalent.
efficiency definitely is a consideration, but not the main one.
If Konsole and Konqueror were linked, such that when I typed, "cd ~/Stuff" in Konsole, Konqueror would act like I'd clicked on "~/Stuff," then I would get the power of a terminal but the easy visualization of the graphical file browser.
in the terminal of mac os x, you can type
open ~/Stuff
and the finder will open the specified folder. my personal favourite is "open.", which saves a lot of time for many common tasks.
btw, you can do the same in windows' console, for example "start." and "start c:\stuff".
Maternity leave: A total of twelve weeks off paid at 75% of your salary, plus $50 a day to spend on Waiters On Wheels for the first two weeks that you are home with your new baby.
Paternity leave: Our new dads receive two weeks off paid at 100% to be home with their new baby. They also receive up to $50 a day to spend on Waiters On Wheels for the first two weeks that they are home with their new baby.
SO your sitting at a stop light and notice the trck approaching you from the rear is not slowing down. As a intelligent being, you move into the intersection and get out of the way.
Now the automated system is sending you a ticket.
so the camera records you driving into the intersections, followed by a truck out of control. guess how difficult it will be to prove you didn't break the law on purpose?
An automated system would ticket me over and over and over.
i'd expect such a system to give an visual or audible indication that you are speeding.
don't know about the u.s., but some european countries have boxes beside the street taking photographs of speeding drivers. if you are too fast, you will notice the flashlight of the camera...
you have to see the bigger picture: TaxCut for $0 will soon be gone because of intellectual property, "freeware is communism" propaganda, software patents and so on.
For tech, we see a lot of farming out to India, especially since they're are lot of competent English speakers there. [...] then the next place is space.
obviously. as numerous tv series told us, all aliens speak english.
People review the code, make comments and the developer(s) go off and make whatever changes.
then you are not doing it properly. every serious review process has a step where the editor (or someone who is not the author) checks if the issues discovered were addressed by the changes.
granted, there's are lots of oppurtunities to let something slip, but it's not intended to be "whatever changes".
of course you are right when you point out that not all checked-in code is reviewed. at least not immediately. but you can review critical modules again after, say, half a year. this makes you review all related code checked-in during this period.
Something like Deus Ex is infinitely harder to design, because not only do you have to write a compelling story, but you also have to implement it.
i really enjoyed playing deus ex, but it was only because of the options you had completing a level and solving puzzles. usually you could find a secret passage, bribe some dude, deactivate evil stuff by some trick, or just blast your way through.
but the overall-story between the levels just sucked.
think about it: the cluelessly dumped every conspiracy theory they could find into it (secret agents, area 51, genetic experiments, the templer-dudes, some evil drug,...). then they added the usual "exotic places" from bond-movies (hong kong, france, sea laboratory,,...). and of course, your friendy neighborhood terrorists who turn out to be the good guys, combined with the evil russian friend and the evil german friend who turn out to be the bad guys.
any branching points during the game? nope. of course, some dudes got killed or not depending on your actions. but it didn't make any difference on the story. alive, they showed up later and dropped some lines. dead, somebody else showed up and announced "some dude is dead. how bad."
the lamest point probably is the city-level, where you first can save your brother from the mib's and then try to escape. no matter what you do, you die and wake up in the laboratory. did you make it to the end of the level? then you have to fight gunther/hermann/whatever-german-name, but you can't win because he is invincible, and you die anyway and wake up in the lab. of course, many levels later in the castle, you can kill him.
different endings? oh yes! you dicide which one in the last 3 minutes of the last level.
in summary, i'd say deus ex as perfect example for a great game based on interesting level design and nice graphics, and a really sucky story that fortunately can't spoil the overall experience.
Because Apple was willing to almost completely drop backwards compatibility.
yeah, right. in particular, apple didn't include something like a classic environment. and even if they would, i'm sure i couldn't run my old 68k applications in it. worst of all, they never provided an upgrade path for developers, so everybody was forced to jump to cocoa from one day to the other! oh, wait...
[atomic checkins are] super-handy, and brings it up to par with Perforce
while perforce is not open source, they still grant a free license for 2 clients. this is enough for toying with my g4 and ibook. additionally, all the manuals are online, and so are ports for many different systems. there are plugins for many ides, and a web-gui based on html-forms. what i like the most is the relative ease of use of all parts involved.
until someone comes up with a stable and usable open-source tool, perforce might serve any home-user's needs.
The only thing I'd like to have seen is that it be.kids, rather than.kids.us, but I guess the limitation to.us is for political reasons - surprisingly, for Bush, in an effort not to appear to be acting as the President of the World.
according to a recent (german) article in telepolis, they initially tried to get.kids and put it under american rule. no surprise here.
Slashdot Mirror
so maybe you find this book more interesting: american psycho by bret easton ellis. it also has tons of businessspeak, but it's a lot more entertaining. it's about how you can be a successful businessman during the day, and an imaginative women murderer during the night.
well, as i see it they screwed themselves. they claimed the family pack should be available in shops, but it isn't. so i had to make a choice between supporting somebody i hate, or partially supporting somebody i like.
considering that during the last 2 years i gave apple about 4500 euro, i really didn't feel bad about the latter.
actually, i tried to buy a family license back then when jaguar came out. however, i couldn't find a shop that sold it. all of them had the single license version, but claimed that there is no point in having the family license in stock because "nobody every asks for it".
eventually i bought a single license and installed it on 3 machines. why do they have to make it so hard to be honest?
(i can't order it online. i don't have a credit card because i don't see any reason why a bunch of greedy people that waste a lot of money on advertising should get 3% or more of everything i buy. i'd rather give these percents to those people who provide something valuable to me.)
objection. from a strict nasa point of view, it probably isn't. in general, you can compute how much "worth" something is by calculating how easy it would be to reproduce it.
of course, this is not politically correct to say. but i'm pretty sure the astronauts knew that everybody will do his best to try to avoid such a decision, but if necessary, this kind of thinking is going to be applied.
i think it's also worth mentioning that the API was specified in an external *.fd file ("function definitions" AFAIR), which tools like fd2pragma could convert into C-headers, oberon modules, pascal units, assembler includes, whatever.
while AmigaOS-libraries are definitely a smart concept, i believe there is another reason they worked so well: for a long time, libraries were incredibly difficult to code (assembler stubs, reentrant-code, no real "globals"). only really experienced developers managed to do that. only later (90ties) tools and compilers started to simplify that, and good examples and tutorials showed up.
OTOH under windows every taxi-driver can click through a wizard and can come up with a library.
i don't mean to say there's a problem about taxi drivers writing dll's. on the contrary, i'm a big fan of making things easy to use. but this must include save-guards against major screw-ups. neither AmigaOS, windows or unix does that.
and yet, they usually read the about 10 names showing up at the beginning of the movie, typically including the director, producer, main actors and camera.
this also seems to be hans' point: he doesn't ask for credits of every little patch-submitter, he wants a list of "rock-stars".
i wonder how long it will take before we have the developer-equivalent of boy-groups and britney....
just continue living in a country that doesn't step on everyone toes because of megalomaniac reasons, and terrorists will happily send their missiles somewhere else.
in the worst case, eventually the terrorists or a megalomaniac country will take over yours, but as the result will be pretty much the same, there's no point in worrying about it too much.
i suppose you are referring to the case where some input explicitely specifies an invalid array-index. you are right, this has to be dealt with and turned into a proper error message. in case this check is missing or flawed, the language also needs array index checking to prevent this kind of buffer overflow. (this might result in the program to be terminated, unless the language allows to recover from such a condition.)
yes, but you can not guarantee that all this is done - and without making mistakes. that's why i don't consider this an approach to prevent buffer overflows. it just attempts to avoid them.
different to dynamic strings/arrays and automatic index checking, which are a no-brainer to use. (well, there is a possibility for compiler/library bugs, but its rather small.)
AFAIK this does not prevent the buffer overflow. it just makes the program terminate instead. so you trade being rooted with denial-of-service.
to actually prevent the buffer overflow, you need to code in a language with dynamic strings and arrays.i think strings mainly exist because of usability considerations - from the developers point of view. they provide a compact notation for "list of characters". furthermore, most languages come with string routines/classes/operators that are a lot more powerful and flexible than their list-equivalent.
efficiency definitely is a consideration, but not the main one.
btw, you can do the same in windows' console, for example "start ." and "start c:\stuff".
75% * 12 = 100% * 2 ???
maybe they do this to get more chicks with big bazookies to come to their interviews?i'd expect such a system to give an visual or audible indication that you are speeding.
don't know about the u.s., but some european countries have boxes beside the street taking photographs of speeding drivers. if you are too fast, you will notice the flashlight of the camera...you have to see the bigger picture: TaxCut for $0 will soon be gone because of intellectual property, "freeware is communism" propaganda, software patents and so on.
then, drm actually works.
then you are not doing it properly. every serious review process has a step where the editor (or someone who is not the author) checks if the issues discovered were addressed by the changes.
granted, there's are lots of oppurtunities to let something slip, but it's not intended to be "whatever changes".
of course you are right when you point out that not all checked-in code is reviewed. at least not immediately. but you can review critical modules again after, say, half a year. this makes you review all related code checked-in during this period.
i really enjoyed playing deus ex, but it was only because of the options you had completing a level and solving puzzles. usually you could find a secret passage, bribe some dude, deactivate evil stuff by some trick, or just blast your way through.
but the overall-story between the levels just sucked.
think about it: the cluelessly dumped every conspiracy theory they could find into it (secret agents, area 51, genetic experiments, the templer-dudes, some evil drug, ...). then they added the usual "exotic places" from bond-movies (hong kong, france, sea laboratory,, ...). and of course, your friendy neighborhood terrorists who turn out to be the good guys, combined with the evil russian friend and the evil german friend who turn out to be the bad guys.
any branching points during the game? nope. of course, some dudes got killed or not depending on your actions. but it didn't make any difference on the story. alive, they showed up later and dropped some lines. dead, somebody else showed up and announced "some dude is dead. how bad."
the lamest point probably is the city-level, where you first can save your brother from the mib's and then try to escape. no matter what you do, you die and wake up in the laboratory. did you make it to the end of the level? then you have to fight gunther/hermann/whatever-german-name, but you can't win because he is invincible, and you die anyway and wake up in the lab. of course, many levels later in the castle, you can kill him.
different endings? oh yes! you dicide which one in the last 3 minutes of the last level.
in summary, i'd say deus ex as perfect example for a great game based on interesting level design and nice graphics, and a really sucky story that fortunately can't spoil the overall experience.
while perforce is not open source, they still grant a free license for 2 clients. this is enough for toying with my g4 and ibook. additionally, all the manuals are online, and so are ports for many different systems. there are plugins for many ides, and a web-gui based on html-forms. what i like the most is the relative ease of use of all parts involved.
until someone comes up with a stable and usable open-source tool, perforce might serve any home-user's needs.