Because most of the tools we use for web development work and are actively maintained on Apache. mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ruby, etc. Sure you can use these via CGI with any web server, but the in process execution makes them more convenient to use.
Apache has turned into a de-facto standard. People can expect security updates for it, and the large user base insures its longevity. With any major piece of software, there are always better alternatives. But still, people use sendmail, even though we have postfix and qmail. People use bind...
Apache works, is solid, scalable and is supported by many languages and many people. That's why most people use it.
While we're at it, why not ditch the LCD entirely and just integrate projector into the laptop. Those new in-focus projects are getting pretty small. Just think about how annoying you could be on an airplane! It'd be worse than one of those laser pointers!
I heard this on NPR this morning on the way to work. The reason why the White House office even knows about it is because their own staff reads The Onion because at least they have a sense of humor.
On another note, isn't this protected under parody? If not, could they take the logo and add a triangle around it and then say it's protected under parody?
I like the fact that the war is won even before either format is officially in use. Honestly, we're not going to truly know the winner until the PS3/XBox/HD-DVD/Blu-ray players hit the shelves. Unless 90% of all distributors declare going on way or the other (and who's to say they won't change with the tide if they can do so without too steep a manufacturing loss), we really aren't going to know the winning standard until they're in full use. It's the good ole Betamax/VHS battle. Personally, I hope Blu-ray wins...and I hope we get Bur-Ray writable drives. That would be so bad ass!
When I first got my current job, everyone had the same password! It's awful because even when someone leaves the company, they can still access everyone else accounts. The system admins response when I asked him about it, "Well if you let them choose their own passwords they keep forgetting them and keeping bugging me about it."
This is the same system admin who mapped drives on the Samba3 domain to regular users using as the Domin Admin, shared up the entire C drive of a server read-only (on top of the existing administration share), uses eMule at work and who reformats his windows box every 3 months because of excess spyware.
The problem comes from system administrators who are lazy and stupid. All this admin had to do was write some scripts to check when teachers updated their passwords, and if they didn't after x amount of time, lock their accounts. Either that or send out unique passwords.
Stupid people shouldn't be in charge or important things that involves the physical and informational security of many people. However we keep putting them in those positions and keep them there cause it's easier and we "trust" them even though they are incompetent. We else would American reelect Bush?
For a single threaded application, if you have either two 1Ghz processors (or one dual core 1Ghz), your single application will run at the same speed as it does on a uniprocessor 1Ghz. Now if you run two or more applications, the operating system can place them on different processors, but your top speed for either process will be that 1Ghz.
Some applications (Nero and Quake 3 for example..I think Doom3 too but I'm not too sure) are designed to take advantage of multi-processors and distribute their load between them. You'll get an advantage there.
Also, the dual core processors may also have different low level designs (cache, data-paths, pipelines, control logic, etc.) that would make them faster.
Mhz/Ghz speed is a poor rating of performance. There is so much more including the size of the pipeline, number of stages, CPI, # of instructions, branch prediction, etc. etc.
I've used SMP processors for a while, starting back with dual 300Mhz and now with Dual AthlonMP 1900+. They help a lot with development. As far as games and regular applications go, I couldn't honestly say for sure, but if you placed them side by side I bet you would see a significant difference with the dual core machine.
So yesterday I was at home trying to post a comment and I got the following:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down. If you think this is unfair, please email moderation@slashdot.org with your MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "fbc83eaaddf909965a32494c3cf14021" and " 0681b6883c7b099b59889c08cb34313a" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP number "68.xxx.xxx.xxx http://68.xxx.xxx.xxx/>" and your username "SumDog".
So I emailed them telling them the problem. I was a subscriber, with decent Karma and I don't troll (although I bet this will be modded as a troll sadly). The response I got was:
> On 10/17/05, Robert Rozeboom wrote: >> >> It looks like you share this subnet with a troll, sorry.
The next day, I am still unable to post from home. I have to ssh into work and use lynx to post a comment. I e-mailed him again and got this response:
I;m sorry but I can't unblock your subnet.
Again from Robert Rozeboom. I actually support slashdot, bought a subscription (yea I know it's only $10) and I can't post from home because someone who uses a Comcast cable modem is a troll?! What the fuck?!
They don't bother to check the individual user, but instead ban an entire sub net. There were several comments I wanted to post yesterday but couldn't, because I didn't want to sit with a damn ssh terminal in lynx retyping my user name and password for each comment (I had cookies turned on in Lynx, but it didn't remember my authentication).
If I had done something wrong, I could understand. If there was some way I could fix the problem I would. But even if I unplug my cable modem and get a new IP, it will still likely be on the same subnet. I can't change providers, I don't have DSL or any other broadband in my area (not to mention the reconnection and setup fees are insane unless they're running a special offer)
Before slashdot worries about polishing up the look and feel of their site, they should go back and fix underlying problems with the code, maybe even add spell-check and require users to type in words from images (a.k.a reverse turing test) to prevent abuse from bots.
We really don't need this material you know. The pentagon on 9/11/01 was hit by a comercial jetliner and the windows all around the impact point were still intact. The Pentagon said they were blast resistant. If they can withstand the impact of a plane, it will be simply amazing how strong this material is. See for yourself:
You know I currently do not have cable. I have broadband, and torrent sides from which I download everything from the Simpsons, to Battlestar Galatica to Rome to Weeds. With so many people encoding with AC3 audio and HDTV rips, it's really the way to go. Of course the rips won't be as good as an actual HDTV broadcast, but the quality is still damn good.
If these shows were available for immediate download for $1 ~ $2 each, I'd be all for it. It would be a whole lot more worthwhile than cable, and maybe the satellite companies would finally get it too and offer channel packs, plans where you could say, pick and choose 30 channels out of 100 for a lower price, leaving out all the shit you'd never watch.
Wow, that's one LONG function. I don't do a lot of OOP in PHP, although I should probably start doing some in PHP5...but yea this does bother me. There is way too much being done in this one function and it starts but creating several objects.
There should be a RCube class for starters, and a constructers that calls each of the individual sections. Hey, at least it's well commented!
um...we've known about the tabbed browsing in IE7 for several months. If I remember correctly, there was a slashdot article pointing to a review of IE7.
On top of that, there are always insane amount of Windows betas floating around before a final release. My cousin subscribes to MSDN and has a box of CD/DVD spindles in his garage of Windows 2000 betas back when that was coming out. This really is now surprise.
Now if the leaked beta came with viruses straight on the iso, that would be newsworthy.
I've been using Gaim proudly for years! I also had a roommate that hated Gaim and would use Trillian if they had a Linux version.
Gaim is very good at what it does. If you want to IM text messages, it has you covered. It has spell check, buddy pounce, tabbed IM windows, HTML logs, speech synthesis (via Festival plug-in), etc. For a text chat client, it does very very well, much better than MSN, Yahoo and AIM.
No as far as some of the nicer features. File transfers? They do work...sometimes...yea...could you e-mail that to me instead?
Audio chat would be nice and so would video, but those seem like they'll be a while.
And to be honest, why do you need your IM program to do video/audio? A lot of voice/video integration in IM clients sucks anyway. The video is choppy, occasionally you'll get voice echos, etc.
For people who want to voice chat, there are solutions. GnomeMeeting is an excellent program and works very well with Netmeeting. I use to use it all the time, before the novelty of video chat wore off.
IMs are nice because you can carry on a conversation with many people at the same time, or while watching a movie. And for that Gaim does very well for what it is, and dare I say even better than any commercially available chat program including Trillian.
What I really find interesting about Tivo is their advertising model. I don't think I've even seen an actual TiVo ad, but rather product placement in every TV show imaginable. I head it mentioned in Law and Order, The Daily Show and there was an entire segment dedicated to it in Family Guy complete with TiVo sound effects.
Although some of these references may have just been for the hell of it, like on talk shows, when the name comes up in sitcoms and dramas, it's pretty safe to assume the plug was paid for.
Living in the southern US, everyone down here likes to refer to generic products by their brand name. Every soda in the word becomes a "Coke" even if its a Pepsi, every portable mp3 player becomes an "iPod" even if it's an "iPlay" and now ever PVR device is being referred to as a "TiVo" when it's really a Comcast PVR (which is probably made by Motorola or some other company).
TiVo might go away, but the name will stick in every household.
I've heard of security experts stopping some worms which received their updates from geocity sites but placing an update on the geocity site that removed the worm and locking the original creator for accessing the site. The worm in effect, downloaded updates that cleaned itself.
Although this seems like a good idea, I can't imagine pushing out worms that are beneficial. Why? Because you're still leaving the security exploit in place! Unless the beneficial worm closes the exploit, and in that case why not just release a patch in a safe an controlled manor?
Are we starting to confuse patching, a process every good security administrator should be familiar with, with "good worms"
I noticed Gmail just started supporting timed auto-saves and you can cut and past formatted text and it turns them into some type of pseudo object...in javascript..yea
So yet, it's totally insane what you can do with Javascript and when I heard speculation about Google and an Office Suite, I suspected they would write their own similar to gmail. However it doesn't like that's the case (although it is hard to discern from the article).
OpenOffice is a huge install, something that will be quite obvious if it starts downloading with the toolbar. Are they going to make a web interface to OpenOffice, or is this simply the program installed on Windows with the Google brand and easy toolbar access...maybe some "Save to Google Account..." type features thrown in.
Somehow I doubt the figures quoted. I've been running a journal at http://sumdog.com/ since 2001 (before everyone called them blogs) and have been running google ads since January and have made $29 so far.
Ads aren't worth a whole lot. If you choose to do your own advertising and not use services like google ad words, you can probably do much better, but they're still not worth much. I suspect many of these people are selling merchandise, promoting certain businesses and have several forms of revenue.
Looking at cartoon sites, the Brothers Chap who run homestarrunner.com current make enough money off all their merchandise to fully support themselves. Hell I even own a StrongBad poster.
You can support yourself off a blog, but it's rare. It requires the type of site status as homestarrunner, the onion or maddox...or possibly Wifey's World or Heather's I Deep Throat.
These are nothing new. My company buys a lot of Dell 2400 machines that come with FreeDOS. In fact, Dell has been offering FreeDOS with machines for a while, at least to businesses, probably because many of them either want to use Linux or have a volume license for WinXP. We use Linux on our machines here.
I've been a long time user of JFS and XFS. I've found JFS more stable in the past, and it is nice that JFS's fsck tool actually does something as opposed to XFS's fsck which exists with 0 and whos manpage tells you to use xfs_recover.
However both of them seem to have grown to be fairly stable, however there are still many instances where I've suffered dataloss, sometimes entire directories which I though was what a journaling filesystem was supposed to prevent...journaling directory meta data before writing it.
There was one instance where I had a hard drive continually being corrupted because of a bad hard drive controller, in which case no file system could have prevented data loss. Still in the pass I hate to think about how much media and data I've lost because of a power outage and a corrupt filesystem. Good think in Gentoo you can always to an "emerge world --emptytree" to get all your binary executables back, so long as didn't loose your compiler in the crash.
You beat me to it. I was going to mention how OpenVMS uses versioning allowing you to keep several version of the same file. The syntax is a big odd, myfile.txt;1 and myfile.txt;2 are two different versions. Good luck trying to use OpenVMS though. If you do, I highly suggest installing the GNU file-utils. Thinks like ls and cd are wonderful commands compared to down and dir.
The trouble with what you want is that it is horrible inefficient and slow, and a Journaling file system is no less secure than a regular file system. The data still gets written, however before a critical part of the table is updated, the write is stored in a journal first. That way if the computer dies during a write to the allocation table, you don't loose all your file and directory information.
If you want to a specific file permanently, there are utilities that do that for you and remove all traces of the data from the hard drive, but doing this for each and every request would require a lot of overhead.
This type of technology has been available from IBM for years. I remember those old AS/400 machines during my undergrad that had removable boards that you could hot swap which contained extra processors. One of my professors told me about when he took operating systems, he made his OS on an IBM machine and was able to use one of the six processors available in his own little virtual space without interfering with anyone else's simulations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like IBM has placed into hardware what systems like Xen currently does in software, allocating virtual space for different operating systems to share resources and execute simultaneously.
I worked in a Carmike during high school. You know that bag of small popcorn for $2.95? You know how much it cost to make it? 1/7 of a cent. It takes less than a penny to make a bag of popcorn. Because of the high profit ratio, they make more money off popcorn than they do candy and soda...
"That's awful," you say, but what about this: theaters typically make about 5 cents per movie ticket. On an independent film they might make 10 cents. Oh and by the way, they're exempt from overtime laws so their workers never get paid over $5.15 (much of the entertainment industry is exempt from overtime)
I think what it boils down to is people are turning from the theater experience. At home I have a 1024x768 Viewsonic projector, Onkyo 5.1 surround system and a Linux box where I keep tons of downloaded Xvid files. The fact is my home theater experience, even with a decent quality cam, is still better than the actual theater with the screaming kids and people throwing popcorn and $7 rape you in the ass entry fee; that is for an average film.
With electronics getting cheaper, it seems like my friends only make it a point to go see movies in the theater for films that really stand out. We make it a point and an ocasion to watch the midnight premier. But I agree with the arcile, there really haven't been a lot of good movies worth that effort lately, and with better home theater systems emerging, I think the movie industry will need to work harder to produce films worth the entertainment value of the theater.
There is a HUGE difference when designing software. When you talk about massive monolithic pieces of software, close or open, it becomes very difficult to search for every possible error. People are going, for the most part, make software that works to keep their customer base, or in the case of Microsoft and Oracle, spend lots of money on advertising to get people locked into software that doesn't work.
The argument with the children's book is also a stupid argument. If I write something down and someone follows it, there is a trust relationship there. You have to trust the book, the author and that the book didn't get modified along the way. If someone slips in a new page before it gets delivered to you and you follow instructions that lead to your death...yea that's not gonna happen with a book, but it can and DOES happen with computer programs. That's why computer scientists use hashes, certificates and a wide variety of other tools.
There is a trust relationship between you and the software vendor. If you don't want to trust the software unless they take full responsibility, look for another piece of software (and be warned, it will cost you...a lot!)
Free software is worth well more than what you pay for it, but you do get what you pay for, and establishing a trust relationship with free software does have risks, as does trust relationships with comerical software. The fact is due to the sheer size and magnitude of the code base to most software products, it can be a daunting task to keep they free of bugs and security issues. If you want to hold free software programmers responsible for flaws, just ask for your money back, all $0 of it.
I've noticed many other games have engines based on lua. I believe the first two Warcraft series use lua extensively for level development and is what people wrote custom mods with if they didn't want to use the built in map editors.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of lua or anything. I've only done minor programming in it. My question is why did you choose the language that you did (python + xml files), what are the advantages to this approach, what are the disadvantages and finally, how much development time would you say is needed using your SDK would take vs attempting to design a mod for some of the other popular games (Quake3, Half-Life2, etc.)
Oh and I guess one more thing. How far have we come in modding games since Doom I.wad files?
Slashdot Mirror
Because most of the tools we use for web development work and are actively maintained on Apache. mod_php, mod_perl, mod_ruby, etc. Sure you can use these via CGI with any web server, but the in process execution makes them more convenient to use.
Apache has turned into a de-facto standard. People can expect security updates for it, and the large user base insures its longevity. With any major piece of software, there are always better alternatives. But still, people use sendmail, even though we have postfix and qmail. People use bind...
Apache works, is solid, scalable and is supported by many languages and many people. That's why most people use it.
While we're at it, why not ditch the LCD entirely and just integrate projector into the laptop. Those new in-focus projects are getting pretty small. Just think about how annoying you could be on an airplane! It'd be worse than one of those laser pointers!
I heard this on NPR this morning on the way to work. The reason why the White House office even knows about it is because their own staff reads The Onion because at least they have a sense of humor.
On another note, isn't this protected under parody? If not, could they take the logo and add a triangle around it and then say it's protected under parody?
I like the fact that the war is won even before either format is officially in use. Honestly, we're not going to truly know the winner until the PS3/XBox/HD-DVD/Blu-ray players hit the shelves. Unless 90% of all distributors declare going on way or the other (and who's to say they won't change with the tide if they can do so without too steep a manufacturing loss), we really aren't going to know the winning standard until they're in full use. It's the good ole Betamax/VHS battle. Personally, I hope Blu-ray wins...and I hope we get Bur-Ray writable drives. That would be so bad ass!
When I first got my current job, everyone had the same password! It's awful because even when someone leaves the company, they can still access everyone else accounts. The system admins response when I asked him about it, "Well if you let them choose their own passwords they keep forgetting them and keeping bugging me about it."
This is the same system admin who mapped drives on the Samba3 domain to regular users using as the Domin Admin, shared up the entire C drive of a server read-only (on top of the existing administration share), uses eMule at work and who reformats his windows box every 3 months because of excess spyware.
The problem comes from system administrators who are lazy and stupid. All this admin had to do was write some scripts to check when teachers updated their passwords, and if they didn't after x amount of time, lock their accounts. Either that or send out unique passwords.
Stupid people shouldn't be in charge or important things that involves the physical and informational security of many people. However we keep putting them in those positions and keep them there cause it's easier and we "trust" them even though they are incompetent. We else would American reelect Bush?
For a single threaded application, if you have either two 1Ghz processors (or one dual core 1Ghz), your single application will run at the same speed as it does on a uniprocessor 1Ghz. Now if you run two or more applications, the operating system can place them on different processors, but your top speed for either process will be that 1Ghz.
Some applications (Nero and Quake 3 for example..I think Doom3 too but I'm not too sure) are designed to take advantage of multi-processors and distribute their load between them. You'll get an advantage there.
Also, the dual core processors may also have different low level designs (cache, data-paths, pipelines, control logic, etc.) that would make them faster.
Mhz/Ghz speed is a poor rating of performance. There is so much more including the size of the pipeline, number of stages, CPI, # of instructions, branch prediction, etc. etc.
I've used SMP processors for a while, starting back with dual 300Mhz and now with Dual AthlonMP 1900+. They help a lot with development. As far as games and regular applications go, I couldn't honestly say for sure, but if you placed them side by side I bet you would see a significant difference with the dual core machine.
So yesterday I was at home trying to post a comment and I got the following:
Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, comment posting has
temporarily been disabled. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the
timeout corner . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down.
If you think this is unfair, please email moderation@slashdot.org with your
MD5'd IPID and SubnetID, which are "fbc83eaaddf909965a32494c3cf14021" and "
0681b6883c7b099b59889c08cb34313a" and (optionally, but preferably) your IP
number "68.xxx.xxx.xxx http://68.xxx.xxx.xxx/>" and your username "SumDog".
So I emailed them telling them the problem. I was a subscriber, with decent Karma and I don't troll (although I bet this will be modded as a troll sadly). The response I got was:
> On 10/17/05, Robert Rozeboom wrote:
>>
>> It looks like you share this subnet with a troll, sorry.
The next day, I am still unable to post from home. I have to ssh into work and use lynx to post a comment. I e-mailed him again and got this response:
I;m sorry but I can't unblock your subnet.
Again from Robert Rozeboom. I actually support slashdot, bought a subscription (yea I know it's only $10) and I can't post from home because someone who uses a Comcast cable modem is a troll?! What the fuck?!
They don't bother to check the individual user, but instead ban an entire sub net. There were several comments I wanted to post yesterday but couldn't, because I didn't want to sit with a damn ssh terminal in lynx retyping my user name and password for each comment (I had cookies turned on in Lynx, but it didn't remember my authentication).
If I had done something wrong, I could understand. If there was some way I could fix the problem I would. But even if I unplug my cable modem and get a new IP, it will still likely be on the same subnet. I can't change providers, I don't have DSL or any other broadband in my area (not to mention the reconnection and setup fees are insane unless they're running a special offer)
Before slashdot worries about polishing up the look and feel of their site, they should go back and fix underlying problems with the code, maybe even add spell-check and require users to type in words from images (a.k.a reverse turing test) to prevent abuse from bots.
We really don't need this material you know. The pentagon on 9/11/01 was hit by a comercial jetliner and the windows all around the impact point were still intact. The Pentagon said they were blast resistant. If they can withstand the impact of a plane, it will be simply amazing how strong this material is. See for yourself:
p
http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2005/04/770706.ph
You know I currently do not have cable. I have broadband, and torrent sides from which I download everything from the Simpsons, to Battlestar Galatica to Rome to Weeds. With so many people encoding with AC3 audio and HDTV rips, it's really the way to go. Of course the rips won't be as good as an actual HDTV broadcast, but the quality is still damn good.
If these shows were available for immediate download for $1 ~ $2 each, I'd be all for it. It would be a whole lot more worthwhile than cable, and maybe the satellite companies would finally get it too and offer channel packs, plans where you could say, pick and choose 30 channels out of 100 for a lower price, leaving out all the shit you'd never watch.
"Lifetime, TV for idiots" (Family Guy)
Wow, that's one LONG function. I don't do a lot of OOP in PHP, although I should probably start doing some in PHP5...but yea this does bother me. There is way too much being done in this one function and it starts but creating several objects.
There should be a RCube class for starters, and a constructers that calls each of the individual sections. Hey, at least it's well commented!
um...we've known about the tabbed browsing in IE7 for several months. If I remember correctly, there was a slashdot article pointing to a review of IE7.
On top of that, there are always insane amount of Windows betas floating around before a final release. My cousin subscribes to MSDN and has a box of CD/DVD spindles in his garage of Windows 2000 betas back when that was coming out. This really is now surprise.
Now if the leaked beta came with viruses straight on the iso, that would be newsworthy.
I've been using Gaim proudly for years! I also had a roommate that hated Gaim and would use Trillian if they had a Linux version.
Gaim is very good at what it does. If you want to IM text messages, it has you covered. It has spell check, buddy pounce, tabbed IM windows, HTML logs, speech synthesis (via Festival plug-in), etc. For a text chat client, it does very very well, much better than MSN, Yahoo and AIM.
No as far as some of the nicer features. File transfers? They do work...sometimes...yea...could you e-mail that to me instead?
Audio chat would be nice and so would video, but those seem like they'll be a while.
And to be honest, why do you need your IM program to do video/audio? A lot of voice/video integration in IM clients sucks anyway. The video is choppy, occasionally you'll get voice echos, etc.
For people who want to voice chat, there are solutions. GnomeMeeting is an excellent program and works very well with Netmeeting. I use to use it all the time, before the novelty of video chat wore off.
IMs are nice because you can carry on a conversation with many people at the same time, or while watching a movie. And for that Gaim does very well for what it is, and dare I say even better than any commercially available chat program including Trillian.
What I really find interesting about Tivo is their advertising model. I don't think I've even seen an actual TiVo ad, but rather product placement in every TV show imaginable. I head it mentioned in Law and Order, The Daily Show and there was an entire segment dedicated to it in Family Guy complete with TiVo sound effects.
Although some of these references may have just been for the hell of it, like on talk shows, when the name comes up in sitcoms and dramas, it's pretty safe to assume the plug was paid for.
Living in the southern US, everyone down here likes to refer to generic products by their brand name. Every soda in the word becomes a "Coke" even if its a Pepsi, every portable mp3 player becomes an "iPod" even if it's an "iPlay" and now ever PVR device is being referred to as a "TiVo" when it's really a Comcast PVR (which is probably made by Motorola or some other company).
TiVo might go away, but the name will stick in every household.
I've heard of security experts stopping some worms which received their updates from geocity sites but placing an update on the geocity site that removed the worm and locking the original creator for accessing the site. The worm in effect, downloaded updates that cleaned itself.
Although this seems like a good idea, I can't imagine pushing out worms that are beneficial. Why? Because you're still leaving the security exploit in place! Unless the beneficial worm closes the exploit, and in that case why not just release a patch in a safe an controlled manor?
Are we starting to confuse patching, a process every good security administrator should be familiar with, with "good worms"
Opening Open Office from the tool bar eh?
I noticed Gmail just started supporting timed auto-saves and you can cut and past formatted text and it turns them into some type of pseudo object...in javascript..yea
So yet, it's totally insane what you can do with Javascript and when I heard speculation about Google and an Office Suite, I suspected they would write their own similar to gmail. However it doesn't like that's the case (although it is hard to discern from the article).
OpenOffice is a huge install, something that will be quite obvious if it starts downloading with the toolbar. Are they going to make a web interface to OpenOffice, or is this simply the program installed on Windows with the Google brand and easy toolbar access...maybe some "Save to Google Account..." type features thrown in.
Somehow I doubt the figures quoted. I've been running a journal at http://sumdog.com/ since 2001 (before everyone called them blogs) and have been running google ads since January and have made $29 so far.
Ads aren't worth a whole lot. If you choose to do your own advertising and not use services like google ad words, you can probably do much better, but they're still not worth much. I suspect many of these people are selling merchandise, promoting certain businesses and have several forms of revenue.
Looking at cartoon sites, the Brothers Chap who run homestarrunner.com current make enough money off all their merchandise to fully support themselves. Hell I even own a StrongBad poster.
You can support yourself off a blog, but it's rare. It requires the type of site status as homestarrunner, the onion or maddox...or possibly Wifey's World or Heather's I Deep Throat.
These are nothing new. My company buys a lot of Dell 2400 machines that come with FreeDOS. In fact, Dell has been offering FreeDOS with machines for a while, at least to businesses, probably because many of them either want to use Linux or have a volume license for WinXP. We use Linux on our machines here.
I've been a long time user of JFS and XFS. I've found JFS more stable in the past, and it is nice that JFS's fsck tool actually does something as opposed to XFS's fsck which exists with 0 and whos manpage tells you to use xfs_recover.
However both of them seem to have grown to be fairly stable, however there are still many instances where I've suffered dataloss, sometimes entire directories which I though was what a journaling filesystem was supposed to prevent...journaling directory meta data before writing it.
There was one instance where I had a hard drive continually being corrupted because of a bad hard drive controller, in which case no file system could have prevented data loss. Still in the pass I hate to think about how much media and data I've lost because of a power outage and a corrupt filesystem. Good think in Gentoo you can always to an "emerge world --emptytree" to get all your binary executables back, so long as didn't loose your compiler in the crash.
You beat me to it. I was going to mention how OpenVMS uses versioning allowing you to keep several version of the same file. The syntax is a big odd, myfile.txt;1 and myfile.txt;2 are two different versions. Good luck trying to use OpenVMS though. If you do, I highly suggest installing the GNU file-utils. Thinks like ls and cd are wonderful commands compared to down and dir.
The trouble with what you want is that it is horrible inefficient and slow, and a Journaling file system is no less secure than a regular file system. The data still gets written, however before a critical part of the table is updated, the write is stored in a journal first. That way if the computer dies during a write to the allocation table, you don't loose all your file and directory information.
If you want to a specific file permanently, there are utilities that do that for you and remove all traces of the data from the hard drive, but doing this for each and every request would require a lot of overhead.
This type of technology has been available from IBM for years. I remember those old AS/400 machines during my undergrad that had removable boards that you could hot swap which contained extra processors. One of my professors told me about when he took operating systems, he made his OS on an IBM machine and was able to use one of the six processors available in his own little virtual space without interfering with anyone else's simulations.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like IBM has placed into hardware what systems like Xen currently does in software, allocating virtual space for different operating systems to share resources and execute simultaneously.
I worked in a Carmike during high school. You know that bag of small popcorn for $2.95? You know how much it cost to make it? 1/7 of a cent. It takes less than a penny to make a bag of popcorn. Because of the high profit ratio, they make more money off popcorn than they do candy and soda...
"That's awful," you say, but what about this: theaters typically make about 5 cents per movie ticket. On an independent film they might make 10 cents. Oh and by the way, they're exempt from overtime laws so their workers never get paid over $5.15 (much of the entertainment industry is exempt from overtime)
I think what it boils down to is people are turning from the theater experience. At home I have a 1024x768 Viewsonic projector, Onkyo 5.1 surround system and a Linux box where I keep tons of downloaded Xvid files. The fact is my home theater experience, even with a decent quality cam, is still better than the actual theater with the screaming kids and people throwing popcorn and $7 rape you in the ass entry fee; that is for an average film.
With electronics getting cheaper, it seems like my friends only make it a point to go see movies in the theater for films that really stand out. We make it a point and an ocasion to watch the midnight premier. But I agree with the arcile, there really haven't been a lot of good movies worth that effort lately, and with better home theater systems emerging, I think the movie industry will need to work harder to produce films worth the entertainment value of the theater.
Kudos to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference
There is a HUGE difference when designing software. When you talk about massive monolithic pieces of software, close or open, it becomes very difficult to search for every possible error. People are going, for the most part, make software that works to keep their customer base, or in the case of Microsoft and Oracle, spend lots of money on advertising to get people locked into software that doesn't work.
The argument with the children's book is also a stupid argument. If I write something down and someone follows it, there is a trust relationship there. You have to trust the book, the author and that the book didn't get modified along the way. If someone slips in a new page before it gets delivered to you and you follow instructions that lead to your death...yea that's not gonna happen with a book, but it can and DOES happen with computer programs. That's why computer scientists use hashes, certificates and a wide variety of other tools.
There is a trust relationship between you and the software vendor. If you don't want to trust the software unless they take full responsibility, look for another piece of software (and be warned, it will cost you...a lot!)
Free software is worth well more than what you pay for it, but you do get what you pay for, and establishing a trust relationship with free software does have risks, as does trust relationships with comerical software. The fact is due to the sheer size and magnitude of the code base to most software products, it can be a daunting task to keep they free of bugs and security issues. If you want to hold free software programmers responsible for flaws, just ask for your money back, all $0 of it.
I've noticed many other games have engines based on lua. I believe the first two Warcraft series use lua extensively for level development and is what people wrote custom mods with if they didn't want to use the built in map editors.
.wad files?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of lua or anything. I've only done minor programming in it. My question is why did you choose the language that you did (python + xml files), what are the advantages to this approach, what are the disadvantages and finally, how much development time would you say is needed using your SDK would take vs attempting to design a mod for some of the other popular games (Quake3, Half-Life2, etc.)
Oh and I guess one more thing. How far have we come in modding games since Doom I
Sumit