This is somewhat obvious, but: iTunes is definitely better than copying files manually. This is especially true if you stay in iTunes-land: You rip your CDs with iTunes or buy songs from the ITMS and it automatically adds all the correct ID3 name tags. iTunes doesn't deal well with missing ID3 tags - it will just plop everything in the "unknown artist" category.
Why is iTunes better? iTunes provides a database of music and keeps the files organized on the disk in the background for you. I would naturally assume that any geek would understand how a database is better than a file system, but here are some examples: Searching is easier, re-organizing is easier, you have meta-data (like rating: 1 to 5 stars). You can create smart playlists, like "all 5 star songs in my library". And so on.
And you can conveniently move albums from iTunes to your portable mp3 player. If songs are already there, it will do nothing, not annoy you with an "are you sure you want to overwrite?" dialog. You can also set it to auto-sync all music if you have a big enough player.
A real-life example: I have a Bob Marley album on both the computer and the portable device. Now i just bought another Bop Marley album. On iTunes, i click "import" and it will go to the CDDB and get track names, import all files and put them in the correct place on the HDD, naming the files like the song titles, and putting it in a/artist/album/ folder structure. One click. I then take the new songs and drag them onto the device where they are similarly organized. One drag.
If i am HDD based, i need to first tell my importing program where to put them on the HDD, "Save As: Bob Marley/Album..". Then, i open Explorer on the HDD, navigate to the the album (many clicks), hit "copy" on the album folder, navigate to the portable player to the correct album (many clicks) and hit paste. No gain, but a whole lot more work.
As far as crappy MP3 software is concerned, i know what you mean. Back when i had a Creative Nomad with MusicMatch JB (PC), i just could not use it. Like, at all. It was total crap. I had to resort to using the Nomad only on the mac, with the iTunes plugin (there was no iTunes for windows at the time).
[working at IBM at that time, i suddenly had a huge RS/6000 on my desk. a very powerful machine running AIX. i managed to get Xwindows running, which seemed to be written by people out to prove that the command line is better than a GUI]
anyway, one important thing has changed since then: Macs used to be based on OS 9 - very nice GUI with almost no technical merit. Now they run OS X, which, while still sporting a nice GUI, is technically the most advanced OS shipping. large parts of it are written in a dynamically binding OO language, for chrissake! it's heaven for techies.
two quick points: 1) the PS2 is surely worse because it has two different processors which makes it extremely difficult to program. cell will be an improvement here, if only for the fact that you have to deal with only one kind of processor.
2) you can make parallelization easy by making it simple for tasks that are suited for it. think AltiVec vector instructions - very easy to use. graphics-intensive apps are almost always easy to parallelize. you are going to run the logic in one thread, and spread graphic over as many as you need (primitive thought: divide up the screen real estate).
I develop in a range of languages, but mostly Java for its cross-platform-ness and GUIs, and Python for its clear syntax.
If i had a combination of the two - python's pureness and cleanliness and Java's x-platform libraries - i would be pretty happy. However, i would still be stuck with Swing for GUI work.
I would like to see a language that is built for creating rich GUIs, and have it be as clean and simple as Python, and as well thought out as InterfaceBuilder (OS X).
Java/Swing (and TCL/TK is surely worse) still requires one to write lots of boring code that should be handled by the framework. In addition, Swing has a huge problem with allowing needlessly many options in implementing common things (and, again, doesn't implement them to begin with) so if you read somebody else's code, chances are they did everything completely differently. There are no design guidelines, and even Sun's code is not consistent in any way.
O'Caml may be better at some things and in some way than Java or Python, but unless a fantastic GUI framework is included, it's not that interesting.
You need to take a step back and ask yourself: What is the complexity of the problem? And: What is the complexity of the solution. The best possible solution will be as complex as the problem - a bad solution will be much more complex than the problem.
And i think the latter is what makes these systems so insanely complicated. The larger the system, the more little design weaknesses affect the whole, until you end up with an unmanageable mess.
This can happen even in small apps. The people involved will not see the complexity of the original problem anymore because they are so involved with "solving the problem at hand" which is the complexity of the solution.
But it's an order of magnitude worse in large apps, and another order of magnitude worse in assemblies of (lots of) apps.
Finding a way out - and this is my belief - requires ingenuity and guts. You need to design a better architecture for all of this, which is a major task on its own, but you also need to find a transition strategy that has guaranteed no downtime which is just this: Damn difficult. Methodologies and SE buzzwords are not going to save you - you will have to think hard.
This is more than true. In China, India, and SE Asia, Windows costs just as much as Linux: Software is priced per CD, and one CD costs about $1 - 3, depending on the country.
So why do people use Windows if the cost the same? Because all Software, from Adobe to the latest games, is also priced per CD, and readily available for Windows. I pay $2 per CD for any Windows app here, no matter what it is. Mac is possible to get, but difficult and older. Linux apps, i have never seen. I think the only reason they sell Linux (RedHat etc) at all is for servers.
Obviously, people who sell you hardware can't just include a pirated copy of Windows, so they will pre-install either some DOS version or, increasingly, Linux - but just so people can install their own Windows. All big laptop manufacturers sell their low-cost models here with Linux or DOS pre-installed.
Microsoft doesn't do anything against that as in reality it's the only thing that keeps them on the market. If everybody here had to pay western prices for Software and OS, then no-one would be able to afford it and it would disappear from the market in a day. Everybody would use Linux, and asian software companies would be cranking out Linux clones of Win-software.
Piracy is the only thing that keeps M$ in the game.
Even better: MS switches to the PPC platform. They use G5s in the XBOX 2 and they own Virtual PC for backwards compatibility - they could (easily) pull a move like Apple did when switching from 68k to PPC...
M$ could be deliberately hedging its bets here - better have a big stick in the closet in case Intel acts up (too much).
I wanted to have this for a while: If I am a system admin, and start my browser, could it not be set up so that i am actually starting a browser-launcher, which then starts the browser but with the rights of "webuser", who can't do anything but modify the downloads directory?
even Microsoft could do that, and even their buggy-as-s*** web browser would now be safe because it's the OS that is taking care of security.
on linux or mac, it would be even easier because AFAIK all the OS support for a scheme like this would already be there.
you get a 100% safe web browser, guaranteed by unix security. the web browser, with all it's messy bits and pieces, is running in a safe sandbox.
As a software engineer, i would ask one question first: What is it that makes our job difficult, what needs to improve?
I start from the ideal situation: If i know what to do - the requirements - i want to just make it happen. An ideal software tool would allow me to go straight from specs to a prototype.
I would estimate about 50% of the current total project time is spent developing specifications - the process of figuring out what exactly the customer wants. Even though that's probably the first thing taught in SE 101, i rarely see it done in practice. Software people don't listen, and the customers don't know any better. Note: Before you can implement a business solution, you must develop a full and deep understanding of the business process. Before starting the implementation.
All we can hope for in a realistic software tool is to save the other 50%.
Eclipse was a major step in terms of productivity, and i think it mostly works because even though it does a lot of stuff for you, you can always go in and text-edit something. Good tools are both transparent and powerful.
As for Rational tools: Power without transparencyt. I won't touch them with a 10 foot pole. They are great if you want to get away with failure (as you can point to them and claim that you used the best tools available), but if you are interested in developing great products - no way. It is the wrong solution for the problem.
What i want as a developer is very simple: I want the shortest path from conception to implementation, from idea to program. I don't want the tool to help me with the idea because it just won't work. Also, spending a lot of time talking to the customer and listening and tormenting them with questions is surprisingly easy.
When i implement things i try to automate everything that can be automated, but in Eclipse/Java, at least, i still end up with 80% of my time wasted on silly things. These i want a tool to take care of for me, preserving transparency at the same time.
To the Emacs/Java hard-core people: Get over it and use Eclipse. You can set it to Emacs keyboard shortcuts, You can bind in external programs with ANT, incorporate python for code generation, and last not least use all the great time-saving and quality-improving tools that are built in. And all of it completely transparent and free of charge.
i am using print statements in Eclipse (and all other IDEs before that, actually). on several occasions, i have spent significant time with the debugger in order to determine if the debugger would be more efficient. every time, the answer is no. the debugger has too much information - and you have to spend lots of time clicking and digging into it to get the few interesting bits out. print-statements are a lot simpler. 3 or 4 quick iterations are enough to pin down 99% of bugs.
the really great recent enhancement to debugging is automated test cases (JUnit, a snap to set up in Eclipse). these do require an initial time investment, but they pay off almost immediately. also, its pretty satisfying to know that you save maybe 3-5 minutes every time you run the test case [as opposed to manually starting the app and testing some part].
i also find that refactoring makes a huge difference, not so much in fixing bugs but in improving the architecture. changing an Interface, for example, is not a dangerous and labor-intensive thing to do anymore. in this sense Eclipse (et al.) further good design. if something is even slightly wrong, you can just painlessly change it.
the studios are filthy pigs and try to milk their customers for all it's worth, while, at the same time, try to restrict the right to fair use.
but that doesn't make it right to pirate.
the industry furthers piracy by driving people away from the legit choices, which is something they will eventually realize - though, judging from past behavior, it might take a good number of years or even decades. the reason it takes so long is that there really is no free market competition in this business. it's large conglomerates acting in sync - with a "the emperor doesn't make mistakes" kind of attitude. if there was an alternative movie industry, somehow creating blockbuster movies with well known actors, we would have easy-to-use DVDs already.
what's surprising to me is that DVD player manufacturers don't just ignore the "no skip" sections on DVDs. for example, 99% of the time when i insert a DVD, i want to just watch the damn movie. i don't want to watch special-effects transitions, copyright notes, the little title music with splash screen animation, or any of this BS. yeah, some are nice, some are bad, but i don't want to see any of it. i want to watch the movie. the DVD player should ignore any skip prevention and just do what i want it to do. after all, this is MY DVD player and MY DVD...
hoax is unlikely as all the people in the pix are real and members of fraternities/sororities. no fratboy would do an art project like this, or have a friend who did an art / media project like this.
[or in my experience any "art" project that didn't involve somebody getting too drunk to get up]
1) SPAM all you can - get way up there right with the top 2) turn yourself in, maybe via a trusted 3rd party 3) get 6 months on probation whilst earning the $3M placed on your head 4) profit!
=> unless the spammers get 20 years for their crimes, this scheme is going to be very successful in 1) making spammers rich 2) creating more spammers.
better still the spammers themselves should pay 2x the bounty.
the other side of the coin is this: one crazy uberhacker sociopath genius can do the work of 100 of your neat, dependable, works-well-with-team kind of guys. on the other hand, that guy won't be in any kind of olympics, either. hard to find.
here's why MS won't hire him: if MS hired the guy and gave him $200k/year to fix windows security (which is impossible), they would send a message to all bored, too-much-time-on-their-hands teenage geeks out there: "Hey, come take down as many of our machines as you possibly can, damage our customers and reputation, and if you do it enough, we will reward you with an office right next to billg." You don't go wave a red flag in front of the bull, and especially not if there are millions of them, many in developing countries...
I recently read The Da Vinci Code. The book is entertaining, but it also gave me one great big A-HA! experience: Namely, that school's main purpose was to destroy me. I might have thought so back when i was 13, but i was one of those teenagers who thought themselves so much better than the system as to be immune. Which was not entirely correct.
But when i think about school - and i didn't have any particular problems which as i know now is a BAD THING - i can only come to one logical conclusion about its purpose: This is, to make curious, creative, lively little children into the mindless worker drones that they will become. By mindless i mean accepting and never questioning society and its order, and as a side, they also deeply ingrain cultural beliefs and a belief system in you that is insanely difficult to get rid of. Mainly, i learned in school how to arrange myself with the system. How to cut a deal with "the Man". Get a house/job/ aspire to make 100k per year, then 200k, have a good insurance, be a good corporate citizen. Have a family because, honestly, its the only thing that can keep you sane, and besides, the financial responsibility will make you more cautious and therefore more malleable.
School is about making sure you are neither wild nor free.
The last Soviets left Austria in 1955 - a fact that is celebrated every year in Austria, on the National celebration day. Arnold was 8 years old at the time. These are irrefutable facts - Google for them yourself. It's been debated in Austria as to whether he could have seen tanks because there were no tanks in his home province of Styria. He said he was driving in his uncle's VW bug to vienna and saw them there. You may believe that last one or not, but what's for sure is that during his childhood - and the childhood of my parents, as well - fear of the Soviet union was wide-spread. Austria narrowly avoided becoming part of the east block...
... adding a TV tuner would mean you would be required by law to register it as TV device and henceforth pay a monthly fee for public broadcasting - whether you want/use the TV tuner or not.
i will give you the shortest possible summary of the difference between code reviews and test cases: code reviews are done by humans, test cases by computers.
who's smarter?
test cases are a great way to ensure that your code continues to do what it's intended to do. code reviews can catch design errors [though the ego factor is problematic here], can lead to new ideas, can dramatically simplify algorithms, etc.
ITS GOOD WHEN THE PROGRAMMERS TALK ABOUT THE CODE EVERY ONE IN A WHILE!
a free side benefit of reviews is that you have two people who know the code. invaluable in case one of your programmers gets hit by a bus.
Addendum: this is also the guy who claimed that "iBooks are girly". Dvorak's strategy for fame is simple: Make outrageous and unsubstantiated claims, and watch everybody else write about it. He's a professional troll, and the less/. and others write about him, the better.
Word is indeed crap, but Dvorak isn't the person to write about it.
let's assume you have an atomic FS where all the data you write doesn't matter as long as the nodes are not updated, or, more abstractly, as long as confirmation of this transaction has not been written.
the advantage is then that writing the confirmation is much faster and the likelihood of the writing of the confirmation being interrupted by a power outage much lower.
assuming that, the worst case would be that power goes out _during_ the writing of the confirmation.
so a truly atomic FS needs to be able to deal with partial confirmations.
this is pretty tricky to get right as you have to prove that for every possible confirmation this system will work, e.g. no checksum collisions etc.. you have to prove that for all possible confirmations C containing N bits, you can handle the case that 0, 1, 2,... N-1 bits have found their way to the disk. for example, the system could feature a final confirmation confirmation which consists of just one bit. before the transaction takes place, that bit is set to 0, and after the transaction is finished, it is set to 1. data loss due to power outage can still occur in such a system, but file system corruption can't.
if reiser4 truly can do this, it's pretty damn cool and i will be pretty impressed. it's a sign of maturing software where critical operations don't rely on the old "crossing my fingers and hoping for the best" way of doing things.
According to the article, i am to take my little suede CD storage folder everywhere i go with my laptop. Yeah, right. "Oh, wait, i might want to play X today, i better take CD X with me...".
That's completely retarded, sorry. And i feel that there must be a better way to protect games and NOT inconvenience users to the point of not wanting to buy a game.
In fact, i know (and own) a perfect example: Quake3. The CD keys to my knowledge have never been cracked, and i never had a problem with mind. In addition: - the game always worked flawlessly, didn't crash the system, didn't install weirdo drivers [exactly what i need on my already-unstable windows system - loads of proprietary drivers installed], didn't even install any registry entries. - i migrated the game from system to system without ever having any problems. - i even - and i don't expect that from all game developers but that one really blew my mind - migrated my copy from the Mac to the PC, with no problems - best of all, all this time, on all these systems, the game was copy protected by my CD key (which i had long stored on the HD so there was never any reason to get the CD out again.) the protection has never been broken.
THAT is perfection. All other companies protecting their games should take note.
Reading the article on the singularity, i have one question: What is intelligence?
This question needs to be answered before other questions can be answered, like: If entity A is intelligent, can entity A create or design an entity B that is at least as intelligent as entity A? So far, it seems like "No" is the answer. I call this the intelligence barrier.
The border cases seem to support this: A being with intelligence zero cannot design another being of intelligence zero. And God can't create God.
Even if humans could design robots that are just as intelligent as them, it doesn't mean they could design robots that are more intelligent. Which also means these robots couldn't design other robots which would be more intelligent.
This is the basic fallacy in the singularity concept.
P.S.: I am also missing a debate about enlightenment: To be enlightened means to truly understand oneself, and in that, to truly understand life. Yet, most people are not enlightened. And how can you talk about understanding another intelligence if you can't even understand yourself?
Slashdot Mirror
This is somewhat obvious, but: iTunes is definitely better than copying files manually.
/artist/album/ folder structure. One click. I then take the new songs and drag them onto the device where they are similarly organized. One drag.
This is especially true if you stay in iTunes-land: You rip your CDs with iTunes or buy songs from the ITMS and it automatically adds all the correct ID3 name tags. iTunes doesn't deal well with missing ID3 tags - it will just plop everything in the "unknown artist" category.
Why is iTunes better? iTunes provides a database of music and keeps the files organized on the disk in the background for you. I would naturally assume that any geek would understand how a database is better than a file system, but here are some examples: Searching is easier, re-organizing is easier, you have meta-data (like rating: 1 to 5 stars). You can create smart playlists, like "all 5 star songs in my library". And so on.
And you can conveniently move albums from iTunes to your portable mp3 player. If songs are already there, it will do nothing, not annoy you with an "are you sure you want to overwrite?" dialog. You can also set it to auto-sync all music if you have a big enough player.
A real-life example: I have a Bob Marley album on both the computer and the portable device. Now i just bought another Bop Marley album. On iTunes, i click "import" and it will go to the CDDB and get track names, import all files and put them in the correct place on the HDD, naming the files like the song titles, and putting it in a
If i am HDD based, i need to first tell my importing program where to put them on the HDD, "Save As: Bob Marley/Album..". Then, i open Explorer on the HDD, navigate to the the album (many clicks), hit "copy" on the album folder, navigate to the portable player to the correct album (many clicks) and hit paste. No gain, but a whole lot more work.
As far as crappy MP3 software is concerned, i know what you mean. Back when i had a Creative Nomad with MusicMatch JB (PC), i just could not use it. Like, at all. It was total crap. I had to resort to using the Nomad only on the mac, with the iTunes plugin (there was no iTunes for windows at the time).
[working at IBM at that time, i suddenly had a huge RS/6000 on my desk. a very powerful machine running AIX. i managed to get Xwindows running, which seemed to be written by people out to prove that the command line is better than a GUI]
anyway, one important thing has changed since then: Macs used to be based on OS 9 - very nice GUI with almost no technical merit. Now they run OS X, which, while still sporting a nice GUI, is technically the most advanced OS shipping. large parts of it are written in a dynamically binding OO language, for chrissake! it's heaven for techies.
two quick points:
1) the PS2 is surely worse because it has two different processors which makes it extremely difficult to program. cell will be an improvement here, if only for the fact that you have to deal with only one kind of processor.
2) you can make parallelization easy by making it simple for tasks that are suited for it. think AltiVec vector instructions - very easy to use. graphics-intensive apps are almost always easy to parallelize. you are going to run the logic in one thread, and spread graphic over as many as you need (primitive thought: divide up the screen real estate).
I develop in a range of languages, but mostly Java for its cross-platform-ness and GUIs, and Python for its clear syntax.
If i had a combination of the two - python's pureness and cleanliness and Java's x-platform libraries - i would be pretty happy. However, i would still be stuck with Swing for GUI work.
I would like to see a language that is built for creating rich GUIs, and have it be as clean and simple as Python, and as well thought out as InterfaceBuilder (OS X).
Java/Swing (and TCL/TK is surely worse) still requires one to write lots of boring code that should be handled by the framework. In addition, Swing has a huge problem with allowing needlessly many options in implementing common things (and, again, doesn't implement them to begin with) so if you read somebody else's code, chances are they did everything completely differently. There are no design guidelines, and even Sun's code is not consistent in any way.
O'Caml may be better at some things and in some way than Java or Python, but unless a fantastic GUI framework is included, it's not that interesting.
You need to take a step back and ask yourself: What is the complexity of the problem? And: What is the complexity of the solution. The best possible solution will be as complex as the problem - a bad solution will be much more complex than the problem.
And i think the latter is what makes these systems so insanely complicated. The larger the system, the more little design weaknesses affect the whole, until you end up with an unmanageable mess.
This can happen even in small apps. The people involved will not see the complexity of the original problem anymore because they are so involved with "solving the problem at hand" which is the complexity of the solution.
But it's an order of magnitude worse in large apps, and another order of magnitude worse in assemblies of (lots of) apps.
Finding a way out - and this is my belief - requires ingenuity and guts. You need to design a better architecture for all of this, which is a major task on its own, but you also need to find a transition strategy that has guaranteed no downtime which is just this: Damn difficult. Methodologies and SE buzzwords are not going to save you - you will have to think hard.
Very good people is what you need.
This is more than true. In China, India, and SE Asia, Windows costs just as much as Linux: Software is priced per CD, and one CD costs about $1 - 3, depending on the country.
So why do people use Windows if the cost the same? Because all Software, from Adobe to the latest games, is also priced per CD, and readily available for Windows. I pay $2 per CD for any Windows app here, no matter what it is. Mac is possible to get, but difficult and older. Linux apps, i have never seen. I think the only reason they sell Linux (RedHat etc) at all is for servers.
Obviously, people who sell you hardware can't just include a pirated copy of Windows, so they will pre-install either some DOS version or, increasingly, Linux - but just so people can install their own Windows. All big laptop manufacturers sell their low-cost models here with Linux or DOS pre-installed.
Microsoft doesn't do anything against that as in reality it's the only thing that keeps them on the market. If everybody here had to pay western prices for Software and OS, then no-one would be able to afford it and it would disappear from the market in a day. Everybody would use Linux, and asian software companies would be cranking out Linux clones of Win-software.
Piracy is the only thing that keeps M$ in the game.
Even better: MS switches to the PPC platform. They use G5s in the XBOX 2 and they own Virtual PC for backwards compatibility - they could (easily) pull a move like Apple did when switching from 68k to PPC...
M$ could be deliberately hedging its bets here - better have a big stick in the closet in case Intel acts up (too much).
ad: webuser
I wanted to have this for a while: If I am a system admin, and start my browser, could it not be set up so that i am actually starting a browser-launcher, which then starts the browser but with the rights of "webuser", who can't do anything but modify the downloads directory?
even Microsoft could do that, and even their buggy-as-s*** web browser would now be safe because it's the OS that is taking care of security.
on linux or mac, it would be even easier because AFAIK all the OS support for a scheme like this would already be there.
you get a 100% safe web browser, guaranteed by unix security. the web browser, with all it's messy bits and pieces, is running in a safe sandbox.
As a software engineer, i would ask one question first: What is it that makes our job difficult, what needs to improve?
I start from the ideal situation: If i know what to do - the requirements - i want to just make it happen. An ideal software tool would allow me to go straight from specs to a prototype.
I would estimate about 50% of the current total project time is spent developing specifications - the process of figuring out what exactly the customer wants. Even though that's probably the first thing taught in SE 101, i rarely see it done in practice. Software people don't listen, and the customers don't know any better. Note: Before you can implement a business solution, you must develop a full and deep understanding of the business process. Before starting the implementation.
All we can hope for in a realistic software tool is to save the other 50%.
Eclipse was a major step in terms of productivity, and i think it mostly works because even though it does a lot of stuff for you, you can always go in and text-edit something. Good tools are both transparent and powerful.
As for Rational tools: Power without transparencyt. I won't touch them with a 10 foot pole. They are great if you want to get away with failure (as you can point to them and claim that you used the best tools available), but if you are interested in developing great products - no way. It is the wrong solution for the problem.
What i want as a developer is very simple: I want the shortest path from conception to implementation, from idea to program. I don't want the tool to help me with the idea because it just won't work. Also, spending a lot of time talking to the customer and listening and tormenting them with questions is surprisingly easy.
When i implement things i try to automate everything that can be automated, but in Eclipse/Java, at least, i still end up with 80% of my time wasted on silly things. These i want a tool to take care of for me, preserving transparency at the same time.
To the Emacs/Java hard-core people: Get over it and use Eclipse. You can set it to Emacs keyboard shortcuts, You can bind in external programs with ANT, incorporate python for code generation, and last not least use all the great time-saving and quality-improving tools that are built in. And all of it completely transparent and free of charge.
i am using print statements in Eclipse (and all other IDEs before that, actually). on several occasions, i have spent significant time with the debugger in order to determine if the debugger would be more efficient. every time, the answer is no. the debugger has too much information - and you have to spend lots of time clicking and digging into it to get the few interesting bits out.
print-statements are a lot simpler. 3 or 4 quick iterations are enough to pin down 99% of bugs.
the really great recent enhancement to debugging is automated test cases (JUnit, a snap to set up in Eclipse). these do require an initial time investment, but they pay off almost immediately. also, its pretty satisfying to know that you save maybe 3-5 minutes every time you run the test case [as opposed to manually starting the app and testing some part].
i also find that refactoring makes a huge difference, not so much in fixing bugs but in improving the architecture. changing an Interface, for example, is not a dangerous and labor-intensive thing to do anymore. in this sense Eclipse (et al.) further good design. if something is even slightly wrong, you can just painlessly change it.
the studios are filthy pigs and try to milk their customers for all it's worth, while, at the same time, try to restrict the right to fair use.
but that doesn't make it right to pirate.
the industry furthers piracy by driving people away from the legit choices, which is something they will eventually realize - though, judging from past behavior, it might take a good number of years or even decades.
the reason it takes so long is that there really is no free market competition in this business. it's large conglomerates acting in sync - with a "the emperor doesn't make mistakes" kind of attitude. if there was an alternative movie industry, somehow creating blockbuster movies with well known actors, we would have easy-to-use DVDs already.
what's surprising to me is that DVD player manufacturers don't just ignore the "no skip" sections on DVDs. for example, 99% of the time when i insert a DVD, i want to just watch the damn movie. i don't want to watch special-effects transitions, copyright notes, the little title music with splash screen animation, or any of this BS. yeah, some are nice, some are bad, but i don't want to see any of it. i want to watch the movie. the DVD player should ignore any skip prevention and just do what i want it to do. after all, this is MY DVD player and MY DVD...
hoax is unlikely as all the people in the pix are real and members of fraternities/sororities.
no fratboy would do an art project like this, or have a friend who did an art / media project like this.
[or in my experience any "art" project that didn't involve somebody getting too drunk to get up]
obligator^H^H^H
1) SPAM all you can - get way up there right with the top
2) turn yourself in, maybe via a trusted 3rd party
3) get 6 months on probation whilst earning the $3M placed on your head
4) profit!
=> unless the spammers get 20 years for their crimes, this scheme is going to be very successful in 1) making spammers rich 2) creating more spammers.
better still the spammers themselves should pay 2x the bounty.
the other side of the coin is this: one crazy uberhacker sociopath genius can do the work of 100 of your neat, dependable, works-well-with-team kind of guys.
on the other hand, that guy won't be in any kind of olympics, either. hard to find.
here's why MS won't hire him: if MS hired the guy and gave him $200k/year to fix windows security (which is impossible), they would send a message to all bored, too-much-time-on-their-hands teenage geeks out there: "Hey, come take down as many of our machines as you possibly can, damage our customers and reputation, and if you do it enough, we will reward you with an office right next to billg."
You don't go wave a red flag in front of the bull, and especially not if there are millions of them, many in developing countries...
I recently read The Da Vinci Code. The book is entertaining, but it also gave me one great big A-HA! experience: Namely, that school's main purpose was to destroy me. I might have thought so back when i was 13, but i was one of those teenagers who thought themselves so much better than the system as to be immune. Which was not entirely correct.
But when i think about school - and i didn't have any particular problems which as i know now is a BAD THING - i can only come to one logical conclusion about its purpose: This is, to make curious, creative, lively little children into the mindless worker drones that they will become. By mindless i mean accepting and never questioning society and its order, and as a side, they also deeply ingrain cultural beliefs and a belief system in you that is insanely difficult to get rid of. Mainly, i learned in school how to arrange myself with the system. How to cut a deal with "the Man". Get a house/job/ aspire to make 100k per year, then 200k, have a good insurance, be a good corporate citizen.
Have a family because, honestly, its the only thing that can keep you sane, and besides, the financial responsibility will make you more cautious and therefore more malleable.
School is about making sure you are neither wild nor free.
i agree with the other comments you made, but Schwarzenegger's claim is pretty believable.
Two facts: Schwarzenegger was born in 1947.
The last Soviets left Austria in 1955 - a fact that is celebrated every year in Austria, on the National celebration day. Arnold was 8 years old at the time.
These are irrefutable facts - Google for them yourself.
It's been debated in Austria as to whether he could have seen tanks because there were no tanks in his home province of Styria. He said he was driving in his uncle's VW bug to vienna and saw them there.
You may believe that last one or not, but what's for sure is that during his childhood - and the childhood of my parents, as well - fear of the Soviet union was wide-spread. Austria narrowly avoided becoming part of the east block...
you mean "...saw pictures of the new iMac and hated them."
remember, a picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
... adding a TV tuner would mean you would be required by law to register it as TV device and henceforth pay a monthly fee for public broadcasting - whether you want/use the TV tuner or not.
i don't think that would be very popular here...
i will give you the shortest possible summary of the difference between code reviews and test cases: code reviews are done by humans, test cases by computers.
who's smarter?
test cases are a great way to ensure that your code continues to do what it's intended to do. code reviews can catch design errors [though the ego factor is problematic here], can lead to new ideas, can dramatically simplify algorithms, etc.
ITS GOOD WHEN THE PROGRAMMERS TALK ABOUT THE CODE EVERY ONE IN A WHILE!
a free side benefit of reviews is that you have two people who know the code. invaluable in case one of your programmers gets hit by a bus.
Addendum: this is also the guy who claimed that "iBooks are girly". /. and others write about him, the better.
Dvorak's strategy for fame is simple: Make outrageous and unsubstantiated claims, and watch everybody else write about it. He's a professional troll, and the less
Word is indeed crap, but Dvorak isn't the person to write about it.
let's assume you have an atomic FS where all the data you write doesn't matter as long as the nodes are not updated, or, more abstractly, as long as confirmation of this transaction has not been written.
... N-1 bits have found their way to the disk.
the advantage is then that writing the confirmation is much faster and the likelihood of the writing of the confirmation being interrupted by a power outage much lower.
assuming that, the worst case would be that power goes out _during_ the writing of the confirmation.
so a truly atomic FS needs to be able to deal with partial confirmations.
this is pretty tricky to get right as you have to prove that for every possible confirmation this system will work, e.g. no checksum collisions etc.. you have to prove that for all possible confirmations C containing N bits, you can handle the case that 0, 1, 2,
for example, the system could feature a final confirmation confirmation which consists of just one bit. before the transaction takes place, that bit is set to 0, and after the transaction is finished, it is set to 1. data loss due to power outage can still occur in such a system, but file system corruption can't.
if reiser4 truly can do this, it's pretty damn cool and i will be pretty impressed. it's a sign of maturing software where critical operations don't rely on the old "crossing my fingers and hoping for the best" way of doing things.
According to the article, i am to take my little suede CD storage folder everywhere i go with my laptop. Yeah, right. "Oh, wait, i might want to play X today, i better take CD X with me...".
That's completely retarded, sorry. And i feel that there must be a better way to protect games and NOT inconvenience users to the point of not wanting to buy a game.
In fact, i know (and own) a perfect example: Quake3. The CD keys to my knowledge have never been cracked, and i never had a problem with mind. In addition:
- the game always worked flawlessly, didn't crash the system, didn't install weirdo drivers [exactly what i need on my already-unstable windows system - loads of proprietary drivers installed], didn't even install any registry entries.
- i migrated the game from system to system without ever having any problems.
- i even - and i don't expect that from all game developers but that one really blew my mind - migrated my copy from the Mac to the PC, with no problems
- best of all, all this time, on all these systems, the game was copy protected by my CD key (which i had long stored on the HD so there was never any reason to get the CD out again.) the protection has never been broken.
THAT is perfection. All other companies protecting their games should take note.
Reading the article on the singularity, i have one question: What is intelligence?
This question needs to be answered before other questions can be answered, like:
If entity A is intelligent, can entity A create or design an entity B that is at least as intelligent as entity A?
So far, it seems like "No" is the answer. I call this the intelligence barrier.
The border cases seem to support this: A being with intelligence zero cannot design another being of intelligence zero. And God can't create God.
Even if humans could design robots that are just as intelligent as them, it doesn't mean they could design robots that are more intelligent. Which also means these robots couldn't design other robots which would be more intelligent.
This is the basic fallacy in the singularity concept.
P.S.: I am also missing a debate about enlightenment: To be enlightened means to truly understand oneself, and in that, to truly understand life. Yet, most people are not enlightened. And how can you talk about understanding another intelligence if you can't even understand yourself?