Ah, spoken by someone who's never had to deal with an addict before. Next time you see that guy shaking, screaming, sweating, and vomiting blood on your shoes -- remember that he's just weak.
Yes, some people make phenomonally bad choices, especially with all the warnings we've been given. Often times the answer is not quite as simple as cold turkey. Hell, even with addictions that aren't physiological, it's a HARD thing to do (hard as in NP-complete to you CS/Math majors). (To those of you who HAVE quit something, anything, cold turkey --congratulations, you're fortunate souls.)
And addictions aren't just things like breathing, or food, or conversation. Addictions hurt -- they hurt you and those around you. They make your life miserable, and you can't do anything to stop it, much like breathing. Ever try to hold your breath until you pass out? It's pretty difficult to do (for good reason).
I don't think the key is so much the reward system, but the existence of an endgame situation -- a point where you can step back and go "Yeah! I won!". Maybe it's leaving the dungeon with the Amulet of Yendor, or killing Morgoth or Diablo, or something else, but one exists. Most offline RPGs have this. Having multiple paths to the endgame makes it attractive to start over and find a different way to win (and makes the game worth the $50), but there's a stopping point.
The evil ones are the ones with no endgame. This is pretty much every one of your MMORPGs. I mean, how does one WIN UO? There's a few others too, like the Gran Turismo games. Is it possible to finish those damn endurance races? I know people who have sat in front of the TV and finished one of those things in one sitting. Yech. I couldn't do it. Although your skill at finding the perfect racing line through the course should be well-honed by the end of the race.:-)
That's just my take on it though. Either way you look at it, the path of avoidance is the same: don't do the deeds, or walk the walks, or hang with people who do. (That's why one of the keys to a successful rehab is moving, or at least finding new hangouts and new friends.)
I don't have the time handy to dig up the link right now, but there was one senator who voted against the bill because he knew it was bad, but he didn't know why -- he never had a chance to read the bill, or even a synopsis of it, before voting on it. It wasn't for lack of trying, either. To read the story, it sounded as if the committee drafting it was stonewalling everyone who wanted to see the bill before the vote.
Not to mention the unofficial peer and constituent pressure to vore for the bill -- it was the PATRIOT Act, what kind of un-American bastard wouldn't vote for something called the PATRIOT Act?
There wasn't much chance of it being good before, but now that people are starting to examine it and read it closely, we're realizing that it's much worse than originally thought.
The "bugginess" is mostly Windows' fault. All the program does (simply put) is grab a window handle and make a handful of API calls.
Yeah, console windows don't work right. They don't really play nice with the rest of the desktop. I'm not totally sure why (other than "console windows are some sort of bad OS hack"). Ever notice that a console window doesn't get the new style border and icons like every other window in WinXP? (If you don't have XP, then trust me on that one.)
With Media Player, it's probably something to do with the fact that they're probably using an overlay surface. Besides, could you imagine trying to real-time alpha blend a movie? Ouch.
DirectX and OpenGL probably expect to have full control of the video subsystem, at least in their little playground. Hijack that and I can't imagine that they'd want to be real nice about it.
By the by, why would you want to play a game on a translucent window anyway? It seems kinda silly to me. Not as much for UO than Q3, but still... While it's useful at some level (HUDs and the like), I wouldn't want my action screen to be translucent. ("Why won't this creature die?!" 'Dude, that's an icon.')
While the usefulness of the program is still limited, it not as bad as you think.
While I haven't looked at this program yet, I know that they're certainly not the first to do this in Win2k or XP. In fact, alpha blending was one of the first GUI hack to come out with Win2k.
Hell, if you program in Delphi 6 you can set the transparancy level in the Form Designer!
Personally, I use PowerMenu to handle my window transparency. It does a few other exceptionally useful things too, and it's only ~50k to download.
True enough - I had forgotten about that sort of thing actually. (Considering I spent a year working at 155% Office Depot, that's amazing!) It's only $10 though, so it's not THAT big of a deal. Now, if I had paid the $80 that was being asked at Funcoland (and probably other retailers too), I'd have been a bit more up in arms about it.
Don't forget -- This thing does have a serial port on it. Admittedly, not a standard one, but we'd probably have more luck getting that hooked up than getting 2 BBAs into it.:-)
Just dump logs to the serial port and we're good to go.
But if the software is a virus (or trojan, or some other malware), wouldn't that make it a tool of terrorism?
Does that mean we can have a military tribunal for the MIB?:-)
This is sickening.
Please, please, PLEASE, somebody tell me that someone will write a program to watch for this "Magic Lantern" and disable it, or at least warn the user that it's installed.
Hmm...
Oh, and by the by... To anyone who wants to make that "if you're not doing anything wrong..." argument, please send me pictures of your wife naked. Just put my address on the back of a 3x5 print, along with your credit and checking account numbers.
Oh, that's private?
Then f**k off and don't let me hear you say it again until you're willing to put your money where your mouth is.
Quite rightly, I don't think that it's anyone's business to see the data on my computer, unless they have a real warrant and show up at my house with it. On the same token, I think that keyloggers should fall under wiretapping regulations. (Does anyone know if they do or not? Last I heard the FBI was trying to say that it didn't.)
It's going to take a LONG time to fix the damage our government is doing. If we're lucky, some of us will live to see something akin to real freedom again. If we're not, well, we'll just have to make sure that the stories get passed down to our children.
Maybe soneday I'll take the time to cohesively form my thoughts on this, but at any rate, I think y'all get the idea.
The key weakness in your argument is "a large enough development group."
While a legal feasability study is certainly a Good Thing that any major Open Source project should do, remember that many projects start out as a few people hacking away. There is no large group that can put up the cash for these sorts of legal costs. It just doesn't exist. A lot of these projects start out as hobbies. I don't know about you, but I most certainly don't want to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to figure out what I can do in my spare time.
In some cases, it is obviously rather daft to go anywhere with a project without paying a lawyer lots of money first (e.g., Ogg Vorbis), and probably later too (Good luck to the Vorbis team!).
In the case of PNG, it would have been a good idea, because we were doing this to get away from exactly this sort of thing in the first place!
I don't know why this got modded funny. I can't get a Windows installation back to full usability for at least three days, and that's assuming that I've done the Great Internet Driver Hunt beforehand.
Sure Windows and drivers only take a few hours, but then you have to tweak it up so it's not walking with 4 toes on each foot and make sure you don't take off a leg in the process.
Yes, one could argue that doing your own Linux "from scratch" would take longer (especially if you want to compile XFree), but if you have good file management, you don't have to rebuild linux every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
If you're burned out in your mid to late 20s, I think you people need to find new jobs.
It doesn't matter whether it's with a different comany doing something similar, or whether you're doing something different altogether.
While, yes, work sucks sometimes -- it shouldn't suck all the time. It's just not healthy, especially at such a young age. How do you think you'll feel when you're 40? Then you'll hate your job, think you've wasted your life, that you're immobilized because you have to care for the wife/husband and kids, and resent THEM for YOUR lack of sac. I've seen it -- and it's not pretty.
We certainly weren't given these lives and bodies to make our souls miserable!
Right now I'm in my last semester (more like last class, since I'm only taking one) of undergrad. My grades certainly aren't what they used to be, but I have a halfways decent job. (luckily)
Here's what I've been finding out over the past few years: I'm sick of school. My job is pretty good though, while I'm not doing anything ground-breaking (except for maybe finding bugs in a 5 year old file-handler for a 15 year old database system.:-), it's nice to do something that has some sort of impact.
The best advice I can give you is to get the degree. I know it sucks, but bear it out -- you'll need one. If you're REALLY burned out on CS, get a degree in something else. It may not get your foot in many doors, but it certainly keeps your resume out of the circular file for a few more seconds.
This may be somewhat roundabout, but sometimes you just have to change directions to find the love again, you know? Start doing something completely unrelated.
I'd wager that most of the readers (and responders) are full-time geeks. Not everyone's cut out to do it though -- you might be one of those people. Not that either one is necessarily a bad thing, but it sounds like you need a break more than anything else.
Save up for spring break, go down to Florida, get drunk, sleep with some hot babes and/or hunks, and relax.
I'm rambling here, but I hope you get my drift. Maybe you need a break, or a different focus, or to start/join a project to get some perspective. Maybe you aren't cut out to be a professional geek, but you might be able to be one at home while you advance through some other career.
The most important thing is to find something (or some balance of somethings, not many people have the single-minded devotion to be hardcore in their baliwick of choice 24/7) that makes you happy.
Why do this? Why bother coming out with a castrated, nearly unusable product that only supports an obsoleted version of the product that they're trying to kill? Especially when it's going to be competing for developer mindshare with the language that they really want to push to kill Java (C#, if you've been under a rock for the past year or so)?
I mean, maybe MS is hoping that people will try to use it so that they get pissed off at Java and go with C#? Do they really think that developers, even Windows ones (-: j/k, I'm a Delphi guy myself), are too stupid to look up non-MS Java information? What do they think will happen when those developers realize that they're getting the shaft to try to push them away from Java?
As others have said, Grub understand filesystems.
By default I know that it can handle ext2 and reiserfs, and someone is maintaining patches for JFS and XFS. I'll have to double check on FATx and NTFS when I get home tonight.
What's really nice is that I didn't have to pull any fancy tricks to get it to triple boot Win98, Win2000, and Linux (I'm not super familiar with Linux yet, so I can't wipe Win2k yet, and Win2k only plays EA games when logged in as Administrator, so Win98 stays for gaming. Don't even mention XP to me). Run it's setup, make a config if you want, have fun. Just install it last so the various MS bootloaders don't blow it away. Hell, even if they do, use your handy dandy boot disk (you DID make one of those, didn't you?) and reinstall it.
It also does partition hiding. I don't want my Windows 2000 partition to see my Win98 partition (mostly because I'm neurotic, but someone might have a more legitimate reason), so my grub config hides my win98 partition from Win2k before booting it. Whee! Now I believe that LILO may also be able to do this, can anyone confirm?
Hell, the grub command shell can even do tab-filename completion, and some basic partition management!
I think that you're trying to link together things that don't really go together in the real world.
A computer should deal with a scratched CD by going "Uh, garbage data. Don't like that. Shut down system gracefully, don't try to find out the sound of heads on platters."
If the transmission is screwed up in your car, you don't expect it to crack the drivetrain.
EVERY piece of software should be checking for sufficient disk space during a WRITE operation. Only fools and dieties do otherwise. You shouldn't blindly try to overwrite the old file with the new and hope it works unless you've got a damn good reason.
When your car runs out of fuel, you certainly don't expect it to ruin the engine. Give it fuel (or disk space, as it were), and it's happy again.
There's a difference between dying heroically and taking everyone with you. I don't mind if a program barfs on occasion because of slight variance in the pases of the moon. The software industry is still young and needs to learn more lessons from the engineering industry. I mind when it barfs and takes my data along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, spoken by someone who's never had to deal with an addict before. Next time you see that guy shaking, screaming, sweating, and vomiting blood on your shoes -- remember that he's just weak.
Yes, some people make phenomonally bad choices, especially with all the warnings we've been given. Often times the answer is not quite as simple as cold turkey. Hell, even with addictions that aren't physiological, it's a HARD thing to do (hard as in NP-complete to you CS/Math majors). (To those of you who HAVE quit something, anything, cold turkey --congratulations, you're fortunate souls.)
And addictions aren't just things like breathing, or food, or conversation. Addictions hurt -- they hurt you and those around you. They make your life miserable, and you can't do anything to stop it, much like breathing. Ever try to hold your breath until you pass out? It's pretty difficult to do (for good reason).
Someone's listened to a little too much Denis Leary -- however accurate. :-)
I don't think the key is so much the reward system, but the existence of an endgame situation -- a point where you can step back and go "Yeah! I won!". Maybe it's leaving the dungeon with the Amulet of Yendor, or killing Morgoth or Diablo, or something else, but one exists. Most offline RPGs have this. Having multiple paths to the endgame makes it attractive to start over and find a different way to win (and makes the game worth the $50), but there's a stopping point.
:-)
The evil ones are the ones with no endgame. This is pretty much every one of your MMORPGs. I mean, how does one WIN UO? There's a few others too, like the Gran Turismo games. Is it possible to finish those damn endurance races? I know people who have sat in front of the TV and finished one of those things in one sitting. Yech. I couldn't do it. Although your skill at finding the perfect racing line through the course should be well-honed by the end of the race.
That's just my take on it though. Either way you look at it, the path of avoidance is the same: don't do the deeds, or walk the walks, or hang with people who do. (That's why one of the keys to a successful rehab is moving, or at least finding new hangouts and new friends.)
I don't have the time handy to dig up the link right now, but there was one senator who voted against the bill because he knew it was bad, but he didn't know why -- he never had a chance to read the bill, or even a synopsis of it, before voting on it. It wasn't for lack of trying, either. To read the story, it sounded as if the committee drafting it was stonewalling everyone who wanted to see the bill before the vote.
Not to mention the unofficial peer and constituent pressure to vore for the bill -- it was the PATRIOT Act, what kind of un-American bastard wouldn't vote for something called the PATRIOT Act?
There wasn't much chance of it being good before, but now that people are starting to examine it and read it closely, we're realizing that it's much worse than originally thought.
Of course it is.
:-)
The difference is, the judge's opinion matters, until someone who matters more decides differently.
The "bugginess" is mostly Windows' fault. All the program does (simply put) is grab a window handle and make a handful of API calls.
Yeah, console windows don't work right. They don't really play nice with the rest of the desktop. I'm not totally sure why (other than "console windows are some sort of bad OS hack"). Ever notice that a console window doesn't get the new style border and icons like every other window in WinXP? (If you don't have XP, then trust me on that one.)
With Media Player, it's probably something to do with the fact that they're probably using an overlay surface. Besides, could you imagine trying to real-time alpha blend a movie? Ouch.
DirectX and OpenGL probably expect to have full control of the video subsystem, at least in their little playground. Hijack that and I can't imagine that they'd want to be real nice about it.
By the by, why would you want to play a game on a translucent window anyway? It seems kinda silly to me. Not as much for UO than Q3, but still... While it's useful at some level (HUDs and the like), I wouldn't want my action screen to be translucent. ("Why won't this creature die?!" 'Dude, that's an icon.')
While the usefulness of the program is still limited, it not as bad as you think.
While I haven't looked at this program yet, I know that they're certainly not the first to do this in Win2k or XP. In fact, alpha blending was one of the first GUI hack to come out with Win2k.
Hell, if you program in Delphi 6 you can set the transparancy level in the Form Designer!
Personally, I use PowerMenu to handle my window transparency. It does a few other exceptionally useful things too, and it's only ~50k to download.
True enough - I had forgotten about that sort of thing actually. (Considering I spent a year working at 155% Office Depot, that's amazing!) It's only $10 though, so it's not THAT big of a deal. Now, if I had paid the $80 that was being asked at Funcoland (and probably other retailers too), I'd have been a bit more up in arms about it.
Don't forget -- This thing does have a serial port on it. Admittedly, not a standard one, but we'd probably have more luck getting that hooked up than getting 2 BBAs into it. :-)
Just dump logs to the serial port and we're good to go.
And I just paid $59.99 for mine on Sunday!!!!
You guys coming?
:-)
But if the software is a virus (or trojan, or some other malware), wouldn't that make it a tool of terrorism?
Does that mean we can have a military tribunal for the MIB?
This is sickening.
Please, please, PLEASE, somebody tell me that someone will write a program to watch for this "Magic Lantern" and disable it, or at least warn the user that it's installed.
Hmm...
Oh, and by the by... To anyone who wants to make that "if you're not doing anything wrong..." argument, please send me pictures of your wife naked. Just put my address on the back of a 3x5 print, along with your credit and checking account numbers.
Oh, that's private?
Then f**k off and don't let me hear you say it again until you're willing to put your money where your mouth is.
Quite rightly, I don't think that it's anyone's business to see the data on my computer, unless they have a real warrant and show up at my house with it. On the same token, I think that keyloggers should fall under wiretapping regulations. (Does anyone know if they do or not? Last I heard the FBI was trying to say that it didn't.)
It's going to take a LONG time to fix the damage our government is doing. If we're lucky, some of us will live to see something akin to real freedom again. If we're not, well, we'll just have to make sure that the stories get passed down to our children.
Maybe soneday I'll take the time to cohesively form my thoughts on this, but at any rate, I think y'all get the idea.
The key weakness in your argument is "a large enough development group."
While a legal feasability study is certainly a Good Thing that any major Open Source project should do, remember that many projects start out as a few people hacking away. There is no large group that can put up the cash for these sorts of legal costs. It just doesn't exist. A lot of these projects start out as hobbies. I don't know about you, but I most certainly don't want to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to figure out what I can do in my spare time.
In some cases, it is obviously rather daft to go anywhere with a project without paying a lawyer lots of money first (e.g., Ogg Vorbis), and probably later too (Good luck to the Vorbis team!).
In the case of PNG, it would have been a good idea, because we were doing this to get away from exactly this sort of thing in the first place!
You mean kinda like gift?
I don't know why this got modded funny. I can't get a Windows installation back to full usability for at least three days, and that's assuming that I've done the Great Internet Driver Hunt beforehand.
Sure Windows and drivers only take a few hours, but then you have to tweak it up so it's not walking with 4 toes on each foot and make sure you don't take off a leg in the process.
Then you start installing applications:
void install_program(void) {
run_installer();
reboot();
while (! last_update()) && (reboot_count 0x10) {
install_update();
reboot();
}
}
void main(void) {
while (! last_program()) && (reboot_count 1e10) {
install_program();
reboot();
}
}
That's why it takes forever.
Yes, one could argue that doing your own Linux "from scratch" would take longer (especially if you want to compile XFree), but if you have good file management, you don't have to rebuild linux every 3 months to keep it running smoothly.
If you're burned out in your mid to late 20s, I think you people need to find new jobs.
It doesn't matter whether it's with a different comany doing something similar, or whether you're doing something different altogether.
While, yes, work sucks sometimes -- it shouldn't suck all the time. It's just not healthy, especially at such a young age. How do you think you'll feel when you're 40? Then you'll hate your job, think you've wasted your life, that you're immobilized because you have to care for the wife/husband and kids, and resent THEM for YOUR lack of sac. I've seen it -- and it's not pretty.
We certainly weren't given these lives and bodies to make our souls miserable!
Right now I'm in my last semester (more like last class, since I'm only taking one) of undergrad. My grades certainly aren't what they used to be, but I have a halfways decent job. (luckily)
:-), it's nice to do something that has some sort of impact.
:-)
Here's what I've been finding out over the past few years: I'm sick of school. My job is pretty good though, while I'm not doing anything ground-breaking (except for maybe finding bugs in a 5 year old file-handler for a 15 year old database system.
The best advice I can give you is to get the degree. I know it sucks, but bear it out -- you'll need one. If you're REALLY burned out on CS, get a degree in something else. It may not get your foot in many doors, but it certainly keeps your resume out of the circular file for a few more seconds.
This may be somewhat roundabout, but sometimes you just have to change directions to find the love again, you know? Start doing something completely unrelated.
I'd wager that most of the readers (and responders) are full-time geeks. Not everyone's cut out to do it though -- you might be one of those people. Not that either one is necessarily a bad thing, but it sounds like you need a break more than anything else.
Save up for spring break, go down to Florida, get drunk, sleep with some hot babes and/or hunks, and relax.
I'm rambling here, but I hope you get my drift. Maybe you need a break, or a different focus, or to start/join a project to get some perspective. Maybe you aren't cut out to be a professional geek, but you might be able to be one at home while you advance through some other career.
The most important thing is to find something (or some balance of somethings, not many people have the single-minded devotion to be hardcore in their baliwick of choice 24/7) that makes you happy.
Am I making any sense?
Why do this? Why bother coming out with a castrated, nearly unusable product that only supports an obsoleted version of the product that they're trying to kill? Especially when it's going to be competing for developer mindshare with the language that they really want to push to kill Java (C#, if you've been under a rock for the past year or so)?
I mean, maybe MS is hoping that people will try to use it so that they get pissed off at Java and go with C#? Do they really think that developers, even Windows ones (-: j/k, I'm a Delphi guy myself), are too stupid to look up non-MS Java information? What do they think will happen when those developers realize that they're getting the shaft to try to push them away from Java?
Anywho... Makes me wonder...
As others have said, Grub understand filesystems.
By default I know that it can handle ext2 and reiserfs, and someone is maintaining patches for JFS and XFS. I'll have to double check on FATx and NTFS when I get home tonight.
What's really nice is that I didn't have to pull any fancy tricks to get it to triple boot Win98, Win2000, and Linux (I'm not super familiar with Linux yet, so I can't wipe Win2k yet, and Win2k only plays EA games when logged in as Administrator, so Win98 stays for gaming. Don't even mention XP to me). Run it's setup, make a config if you want, have fun. Just install it last so the various MS bootloaders don't blow it away. Hell, even if they do, use your handy dandy boot disk (you DID make one of those, didn't you?) and reinstall it.
It also does partition hiding. I don't want my Windows 2000 partition to see my Win98 partition (mostly because I'm neurotic, but someone might have a more legitimate reason), so my grub config hides my win98 partition from Win2k before booting it. Whee! Now I believe that LILO may also be able to do this, can anyone confirm?
Hell, the grub command shell can even do tab-filename completion, and some basic partition management!
I think that you're trying to link together things that don't really go together in the real world.
A computer should deal with a scratched CD by going "Uh, garbage data. Don't like that. Shut down system gracefully, don't try to find out the sound of heads on platters."
If the transmission is screwed up in your car, you don't expect it to crack the drivetrain.
EVERY piece of software should be checking for sufficient disk space during a WRITE operation. Only fools and dieties do otherwise. You shouldn't blindly try to overwrite the old file with the new and hope it works unless you've got a damn good reason.
When your car runs out of fuel, you certainly don't expect it to ruin the engine. Give it fuel (or disk space, as it were), and it's happy again.
There's a difference between dying heroically and taking everyone with you. I don't mind if a program barfs on occasion because of slight variance in the pases of the moon. The software industry is still young and needs to learn more lessons from the engineering industry. I mind when it barfs and takes my data along with it.