If we go along this line...why don't you ever say, fuck car mechanics..don't people solve problems by learning anymore?
Like I said in my other posting, not all people want or need to learn Linux to do what they have to do. Does a doctor need to learn Linux? No, he just wants to be able to power up his PC and start typing a report...
I totally agree with you there. To me, a self taught background is better than an well-funded high price bad education. It is so much easier to teach someone something new that they are interested in rather than unlearn all the bad stuff that some "third-tier" colleges teach. The fact of the matter is that a good percentage of the people in IT education are in it for the fast money. Which is going to be the downfall of the industry. Now, if I were a company, one of my top priority is to hire well educated recruiters that know and can pick out between the excellent and the decent. This is KEY!
The thing about why people say that MS technical support is the best in the industry is because of their name and where they place themselves. People know that when they have a problem with a MS product, they call Microsoft. If you have a problem with your Dell Laptop, you call Dell. The same for IBM servers.
Now, if I [I as in not me, but a "typical" user] has a problem with their Linux installation... who do I call? Do I call RedHat? Do I call VA Linux? To be completely honest, a typical user does not want to spend hours reading dejanews or HOWTOs to find out why they can't run spell check in emacs.
The thing is, we being inside the industry are not able to look at the full picture. We, being inquisitive and want to know anything and everything, are willing to put in the extra time to learn. But a person majoring in Business or Art Humanities wants to be able to click on a button and run spellcheck. They don't want to spend the time to learn how a computer works. I mean, how many of us are willing to buy an "open source" automobile? How many of us want to spend the time to figure out how an internal combustion engine works or how a catalyic converter works?
Just because we do certain things doesn't mean that we can expect consumers to be just like us.
Lastly, Linux is a great operating system. I run it for a lot of my CS projects. However, when it comes down to writing a paper, I will not think twice before using Win2k/MSOffice. Linux has a lot of potential but before it can actually succeed it has to be more "consumer friend" (different from User Friend). A while back, there was an article here on/. about how a lot of linux users are too advanced to teach beginners. Consumers don't care about Open Source, Consumers don't care about customizability. They want something that they feel secure with. [That makes them feel all cuddly inside.] They want to be able to click on My Computer and have it go to the hard drives. They want to be able to go out to a store and buy software with the MS Windows Compatible sticker. And I think Linux has the potential to do all this and be even better. But it is going to take some major time and also we have to look into how we market linux to consumers.
This is by far the most sensational article I've read. I mean, there has been no evidence to support this other than a testimony of a guy.
Secondly, I don't think this is any better at proving that Open Source is better than how Microsoft is doing it. Let give a generous estimate that 5 people infiltrated MS. With the system of code checking that they have at MS, it is almost impossible for these 5 people to implement something that will go unnoticed by thousands. The same thing could as likely to have happend in open source software.
Record companies are not breaking the fair use rights. By providing you with the ability to record music using analog, that is fair use. There is nothing there that says that they have to allow you to get EXACT digital duplicates. It's the same with copying pages from books. You are allowed to copy a number of pages from books for personal use, however, you can't go to a book publisher and say that you want 5 copies of a book for the price of 1 because that is fair use...
This is starting to look more and more like what happend during the 1920s with Prohibition. As soon as the government made liquor illegal, it increased the criminal trafficking of it. Same way here, more and more people are going to turn towards illegal copies of the cds just so they can play it on their CD players or computers.
This is actually quite true. Has anyone confirmed that the Logo is still on there? There are certain legal rules and regulations in certifications like these...
You can still do this. This isn't what the companies are trying to stop. But the problem with this is that it is no longer a digital copy. Anytime you go through analog, you pick up sound artifacts and degradation. Maybe to the casual listeners, it's no big deal and if that's the case, that is protected by the Fair Use Law, feel free to do that. In fact, it is legal to even tape songs off the radio.
What they ARE trying to stop is the Digital copying of CDs. In fact, digital copies can reproduce EXACTLY what the original was without the degradation.
I agree with you that they should not be afraid of the technology and that this is a bad idea, especially for people that have bought multi-thousand dollar stereo equipment which won't play these. However, a good majority of the people are sheeps and are just rolling over while the RIAA is slowly taking away many of our privileges.
The RIAA is an old organization trying to immpose what they know and their power on a new generation of consumers and technology.
This lecture note for my Computability class simplifies the problem to terms that people can understand. This is a definitely good read if you're interested in P vs NP
Hey..I remember back in fifth grade playing Mega Man 4 until 5 in the morning and I saw the pattern in the save code. Mega Man used dots and grids to denote level and lives and stat about your player. If you move a certain dot to another location, you get more lives and stuff. A month later, I found the same hack in Nintendo Power. So, no, I did not sleep with the geeks..
So far this group of a half-dozen programmers has cranked out more than 23,000 codes that cover nearly every game on the market. As many as 2 million visitors a month log in to grab the latest codes from the company's Web site, www.gameshark.com.
2 Million visitors a month to their website. If you take a look at their website, it is jam packed with advertisements. Granted some of them are for themselves, but each of those ads are revenue streams. They also sell accessories and other stuff. It seems like they have a 1-900 number. All these bring in money. Maybe not multi-billion dollars, but this is a niche market
So in-effect, players are not paying for the cheat code but the cheat code attract people to their products and services.
There's two different answers to this one:
1) Companies insert cheat codes because like you said, they use it to test the games. The Second reason is that it is always a thrill by the player to find out about these cheat codes, either through a purposely well placed 'leak' by the company or by themselves. Thirdly, companies do make money on cheats. Some companies sell "player guides" that are filled with help and cheats on games. If there weren't any cheats, there would be no market for these player guides.
2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.
Here's why that would work: Let's say that the program says:
Sorry, your assumption is wrong. P vs NP is not a discussion on O(n^p). P vs NP is used to check if a problem is calculatable and correct in polynomial time. The problem with a lot of problems is that it takes an infinite amount of resources and time to verify if the solution is correct. P vs NP checks if a solution is correct and that it is the best solution.
I just need to correct this before some sap who hasn't gone to class reads this and fails his finals..
Wow, this is such great timing. I've been studying for my computability final for next tuesday and this was the topic that I didn't really get...
Anyways..just as a note, NP doesn't not mean O(NP) as many of you are talking about. O(n) is a term for speed of an algorithm. P vs NP problems deal with whether something is calculatable
If anyone has some free time and wants to win a million dollars read this: The P versus NP Problem (oh..did I forget to mention that you must be a genius in computablity) Here is the press release about the $1 million prize money.
But I think the point of it is that since it is coming from a variety of sources, it doesn't matter if one packet gets dropped when it could be attained from another. This was the way that iMesh worked. I'm not sure if they are still around.
Secondly, by using UDP and a variety of sources, you speed up the transfer by removing the ACK (acknowledgment) used in TCP. Granted UDP requires a more intense system processing afterwards then TCP but with our systems today, it can surely handle it.
This is by far the worst article ever read on slashdot. Where is your proof? where is the evidence? Has MS specifically said they will NOT fix this bug? Is this even a bug?
Makes you wonder...
A lot of people on here have stated that the government should just step back and let people pirate and the whole "it's not hurting anyone" mentality. What is not often quite obvious is organized crimes syndicates have taken to selling pirated software and pawning pirated software as legal copies to fund their illegal activities. (It's talked about in this article) These are the people that the government is going after, not joe blow who copied his friends version of Photoshop.
Secondly, (I don't intend on starting an OS war) but it is kind of hypocritical to say that all software should be free. Everything in the world cost money. Software is not cheap to produce. Wait, I take that back.. GOOD software is not cheap to produce. Companies invest heavily to research, develop, hire programmers, rent offices, marketing, etc to sell their software. Just because the final product is pressed onto a 10 cent CD doesn't mean that it does cost ten cents. People have argued, Companies should price it so high if they don't want people to pirate. Well, there is a thing called supply and demand. It is only because there is enough demand for it that companies can price it so high. Secondly, they price it high because it is a good product that they have invested time and money into. [Even with Windows, nobody is forcing anyone to purchase windows...and yes, you CAN get a PC without paying MS tax].
Well..that's my rambling..
Instead of the government spending billions and billions of dollars trying to patch up this hole we call security, the government should use some of that money to fund research project. The Internet was never designed from the beginning for what we currently use it for. In the beginning the only users/devices on the ARPAnet were trusted devices. TCP/IP was built for usability, not security. I believe TCP/IP v6 was designed with security as part of the protocol, however, not many administrators 1) know about this 2) actually implement it.
TCP/IP was originally written among a cohesive community that had significant internal trust. By default, IP applications assume they should trust people
so they can stop abusing the government funded ones that cost us taxpayers billions of dollars to put up
I don't understand what you are getting at with this. First of all, both of the "tourist" that have been in the news recently have paid their own way. I don't know of any that have been on a space trip on a free ride. Now, take the example of the previous tourist. He paid the Russian space agency $20 Million. This $20 million not only paid for his ride but also to fund other projects that the space agency could do.
Secondly, if all these individual companies decided to form their own space agency NASA would probably have to shut down. A good percentage of the money that NASA gets is to launch private satellites for companies or even go up there to fix a satellite. If another company was offering to do it for cheaper, greater competition. Hey, NASA has a monopoly on this and the only way they'll survive is to maintain a monopoly.
Lastly, (I think someone else already responded to this) but Bill Gates (or MS..don't remember) has invested in a network of communications satellite that will span the continental US. I haven't heard any more news on this though...
I just saw it in action on Good Morning America and I am.. totally WOWED! This definitely is revolutionary...
I'm just wondering when/. geeks are going to hack this thing and:
1) Install Linux
2) Remove the ugly looking vertical bar
- hey..use Bluetooth for the rotational control and have it sit in your pocket.
3) Add Voice Control
Slashdot Mirror
If we go along this line...why don't you ever say, fuck car mechanics..don't people solve problems by learning anymore?
Like I said in my other posting, not all people want or need to learn Linux to do what they have to do. Does a doctor need to learn Linux? No, he just wants to be able to power up his PC and start typing a report...
I totally agree with you there. To me, a self taught background is better than an well-funded high price bad education. It is so much easier to teach someone something new that they are interested in rather than unlearn all the bad stuff that some "third-tier" colleges teach. The fact of the matter is that a good percentage of the people in IT education are in it for the fast money. Which is going to be the downfall of the industry. Now, if I were a company, one of my top priority is to hire well educated recruiters that know and can pick out between the excellent and the decent. This is KEY!
The thing about why people say that MS technical support is the best in the industry is because of their name and where they place themselves. People know that when they have a problem with a MS product, they call Microsoft. If you have a problem with your Dell Laptop, you call Dell. The same for IBM servers.
/. about how a lot of linux users are too advanced to teach beginners. Consumers don't care about Open Source, Consumers don't care about customizability. They want something that they feel secure with. [That makes them feel all cuddly inside.] They want to be able to click on My Computer and have it go to the hard drives. They want to be able to go out to a store and buy software with the MS Windows Compatible sticker. And I think Linux has the potential to do all this and be even better. But it is going to take some major time and also we have to look into how we market linux to consumers.
Now, if I [I as in not me, but a "typical" user] has a problem with their Linux installation... who do I call? Do I call RedHat? Do I call VA Linux? To be completely honest, a typical user does not want to spend hours reading dejanews or HOWTOs to find out why they can't run spell check in emacs.
The thing is, we being inside the industry are not able to look at the full picture. We, being inquisitive and want to know anything and everything, are willing to put in the extra time to learn. But a person majoring in Business or Art Humanities wants to be able to click on a button and run spellcheck. They don't want to spend the time to learn how a computer works. I mean, how many of us are willing to buy an "open source" automobile? How many of us want to spend the time to figure out how an internal combustion engine works or how a catalyic converter works?
Just because we do certain things doesn't mean that we can expect consumers to be just like us.
Lastly, Linux is a great operating system. I run it for a lot of my CS projects. However, when it comes down to writing a paper, I will not think twice before using Win2k/MSOffice. Linux has a lot of potential but before it can actually succeed it has to be more "consumer friend" (different from User Friend). A while back, there was an article here on
Well, that's my 4.5 cents...
This is by far the most sensational article I've read. I mean, there has been no evidence to support this other than a testimony of a guy.
Secondly, I don't think this is any better at proving that Open Source is better than how Microsoft is doing it. Let give a generous estimate that 5 people infiltrated MS. With the system of code checking that they have at MS, it is almost impossible for these 5 people to implement something that will go unnoticed by thousands. The same thing could as likely to have happend in open source software.
Record companies are not breaking the fair use rights. By providing you with the ability to record music using analog, that is fair use. There is nothing there that says that they have to allow you to get EXACT digital duplicates. It's the same with copying pages from books. You are allowed to copy a number of pages from books for personal use, however, you can't go to a book publisher and say that you want 5 copies of a book for the price of 1 because that is fair use...
This is starting to look more and more like what happend during the 1920s with Prohibition. As soon as the government made liquor illegal, it increased the criminal trafficking of it. Same way here, more and more people are going to turn towards illegal copies of the cds just so they can play it on their CD players or computers.
This is actually quite true. Has anyone confirmed that the Logo is still on there? There are certain legal rules and regulations in certifications like these...
You can still do this. This isn't what the companies are trying to stop. But the problem with this is that it is no longer a digital copy. Anytime you go through analog, you pick up sound artifacts and degradation. Maybe to the casual listeners, it's no big deal and if that's the case, that is protected by the Fair Use Law, feel free to do that. In fact, it is legal to even tape songs off the radio.
What they ARE trying to stop is the Digital copying of CDs. In fact, digital copies can reproduce EXACTLY what the original was without the degradation.
I agree with you that they should not be afraid of the technology and that this is a bad idea, especially for people that have bought multi-thousand dollar stereo equipment which won't play these. However, a good majority of the people are sheeps and are just rolling over while the RIAA is slowly taking away many of our privileges.
The RIAA is an old organization trying to immpose what they know and their power on a new generation of consumers and technology.
...Only this is illegal (remember DMCA) .. and LiveUpdate is not...
This lecture note for my Computability class simplifies the problem to terms that people can understand. This is a definitely good read if you're interested in P vs NP
One question that I might ask is...when these guys go home, do they play more video games?
Hey..I remember back in fifth grade playing Mega Man 4 until 5 in the morning and I saw the pattern in the save code. Mega Man used dots and grids to denote level and lives and stat about your player. If you move a certain dot to another location, you get more lives and stuff. A month later, I found the same hack in Nintendo Power. So, no, I did not sleep with the geeks..
So in-effect, players are not paying for the cheat code but the cheat code attract people to their products and services.
1) Companies insert cheat codes because like you said, they use it to test the games. The Second reason is that it is always a thrill by the player to find out about these cheat codes, either through a purposely well placed 'leak' by the company or by themselves. Thirdly, companies do make money on cheats. Some companies sell "player guides" that are filled with help and cheats on games. If there weren't any cheats, there would be no market for these player guides.
2) Game Shark (according to the article) does not use the cheats made by the companies, although, I suspect that if they are reverse engineering it, they could view the cheats. But what they do is write/edit the RAM (memory) at given moments to enhance a feature. Let's say that in memory location 255, the game Mortal Kombat stores the maximum health of player 1. What the GameShark does is, instead of letting the game store 100% there, it writes in 500% (let's say) which gives you more health. Or another way would be to store -1 or something that the program doesn't expect.
Here's why that would work: Let's say that the program says:
With this, the player would never die.
Or if you worked your ass off all three years of college and need an easy load senior year...
Sorry, your assumption is wrong. P vs NP is not a discussion on O(n^p). P vs NP is used to check if a problem is calculatable and correct in polynomial time. The problem with a lot of problems is that it takes an infinite amount of resources and time to verify if the solution is correct. P vs NP checks if a solution is correct and that it is the best solution.
I just need to correct this before some sap who hasn't gone to class reads this and fails his finals..
Wow, this is such great timing. I've been studying for my computability final for next tuesday and this was the topic that I didn't really get...
Anyways..just as a note, NP doesn't not mean O(NP) as many of you are talking about. O(n) is a term for speed of an algorithm. P vs NP problems deal with whether something is calculatable
If anyone has some free time and wants to win a million dollars read this: The P versus NP Problem (oh..did I forget to mention that you must be a genius in computablity) Here is the press release about the $1 million prize money.
But I think the point of it is that since it is coming from a variety of sources, it doesn't matter if one packet gets dropped when it could be attained from another. This was the way that iMesh worked. I'm not sure if they are still around.
Secondly, by using UDP and a variety of sources, you speed up the transfer by removing the ACK (acknowledgment) used in TCP. Granted UDP requires a more intense system processing afterwards then TCP but with our systems today, it can surely handle it.
This is by far the worst article ever read on slashdot. Where is your proof? where is the evidence? Has MS specifically said they will NOT fix this bug? Is this even a bug? Makes you wonder...
tried it on Win2k Professional/IE5.5 ... didn't work..
Back to the drawing board..
A lot of people on here have stated that the government should just step back and let people pirate and the whole "it's not hurting anyone" mentality. What is not often quite obvious is organized crimes syndicates have taken to selling pirated software and pawning pirated software as legal copies to fund their illegal activities. (It's talked about in this article) These are the people that the government is going after, not joe blow who copied his friends version of Photoshop.
Secondly, (I don't intend on starting an OS war) but it is kind of hypocritical to say that all software should be free. Everything in the world cost money. Software is not cheap to produce. Wait, I take that back.. GOOD software is not cheap to produce. Companies invest heavily to research, develop, hire programmers, rent offices, marketing, etc to sell their software. Just because the final product is pressed onto a 10 cent CD doesn't mean that it does cost ten cents. People have argued, Companies should price it so high if they don't want people to pirate. Well, there is a thing called supply and demand. It is only because there is enough demand for it that companies can price it so high. Secondly, they price it high because it is a good product that they have invested time and money into. [Even with Windows, nobody is forcing anyone to purchase windows...and yes, you CAN get a PC without paying MS tax]. Well..that's my rambling..
This ComputerWorld Article talks about.
Secondly, if all these individual companies decided to form their own space agency NASA would probably have to shut down. A good percentage of the money that NASA gets is to launch private satellites for companies or even go up there to fix a satellite. If another company was offering to do it for cheaper, greater competition. Hey, NASA has a monopoly on this and the only way they'll survive is to maintain a monopoly. Lastly, (I think someone else already responded to this) but Bill Gates (or MS..don't remember) has invested in a network of communications satellite that will span the continental US. I haven't heard any more news on this though...
I just saw it in action on Good Morning America and I am .. totally WOWED! This definitely is revolutionary...
/. geeks are going to hack this thing and:
I'm just wondering when
1) Install Linux
2) Remove the ugly looking vertical bar
- hey..use Bluetooth for the rotational control and have it sit in your pocket.
3) Add Voice Control
Oh baby..I can't wait!
This is slightly off-topic, but if the site has been taken down, it is most likely still viewable at The Internet Archive
Next time, post the URL so that we can view the page...