I like the idea, but it would be way funnier if it displayed the slashdot fortune/QOTD from the bottom of the site... that's more screwed up than any search query on google... Right now it says "I'm a GENIUS! I want to dispute sentence structure with SUSAN SONTAG!!" How the hell could that be less weird than a search term? Really???
How many people out there do you think there are that would want to learn assembly? I learned it when I was young and tinkering with a C64... but now a days, you ask any young programmers, 95% of them don't want to bother learning assembly...
Don't get me wrong, I do embedded development, and use of ASM is frequent, but modern consoles don't need such low level programming, the API's handle almost everything... I doubt that this is so much about learning to program consoles, as it is learning to develop for embedded systems... modern consoles don't qualify in my books...
I have a question for slashdot... can I use your polls for scientific research? Will my request result in slashdot removing their polls section? What kind of a crazy assed reaction is this? Why not just put a disclaimer up on the page that says, not scientific.
Stopping file sharing will make the US fall behind? By definition file sharing would be pointless if the US wasn't so anal about copyrights and IP. You have mass file sharing because of the US. The US will crumble without file sharing???... how the heck did this guy make that connection? Someone please enlighten me... I'm not following the logic.
All activation, anti-piracy, cd checking, and most authentication systems are broken... why? because they use self modifying code to verify the license, and that they aren't being fooled... the problem? SP2 enforces the NX flag (no execute flag, as in thou shalt not execute data!)... and the morons that wrote the crappy code (not MS in this case) were stupid enough to not add code to ensure that their data wasn't marked with the NX flag... and now everyone blames MS for these idiotic lazy ass developers creating convulted stupid ass self modifying authenticating anti-piracy crap code and not bothering to at least write it properly (not to mention the code gets defeated everytime by crackers, it just pisses off regular paying customers...) but back to my rant... the NX flag is now being used.. thus everything that does self modifying code, and 'forgot' to deal with the NX flag properly is now busted...
At my old job, the two way pagers err umm... I mean blackberries... were a crap shoot... half the department had no kids, the other half had twins and triplets.... I kid you not...
I want a decent video card (say an ATI 9800 XT or equiv.) and a decent speed processor (say a Prescott 3.2 Ghz or equiv.)... From what I've read, I can kiss the noiseless part of the system good bye if that's what I want... The heatpipes need to be cooled, and at close to 200 watts of heat dissipation for just the CPU and GPU, I'm not so sure their solution will work fanless...
You have to ask the question, "should adults be able to engage in behavior that might place their life or health at risk?" If the answer is "no," then for starters we should ban motorcycles and bicycles and lower the speed limit to ten MPH. I think you'd find these measures would save on the order of 40,000 lives per year in the United States.
Not to mention saving a lot of fuel, since a 1/2 HP engine would be plenty for the largest car.
Why ban bikes and leave cars? That's just stupid... How about we ban cars... they are way more dangerous than a bicycle. Hell, the only time I've ever been injured on my bike is when a car hasn't followed the highway traffic act and nailed me while I was biking. If people were to get rid of cars, and have everyone on bikes, there wouldn't be the mess of accidents that there are today... Get rid of the cars, and you don't need speed limits... if someone can go fast on a bike, so be it... but it's a physical limit, not some imposed limit that everyone ignores. And I don't know of anytime that you are on a bike going any reasonably fast speed (say 40kph+) and are not damned alert... you are physically active, you can't be snoozing... in a car, you can sleep at speeds over 100kph... and you're in a huge 3 ton chunk of metal... bloody safe that is...
Wow... so that's what happend to my internet experience... and all this time I thought that XP SP2's IE with pop-up blocking was what was ruining my experience...
503? screw that... why not have a new error number designated specifically for MS infected systems... error 999: The operating system you are using is insecure and has been exploited... you are partially responsible for bringing this server to its knees... Now go in the corner and think about what you've done.
Yes, I have used the office clipboard helper... a neat hack for the problem I agree, and for most people it's a useable solution. I rate it as useful as the paperclip helper was in office. It's useful for some, irritating as hell for others. I should have used the paperclip as an example instead of the clipboard, but I didn't want to overcomplicate my point... in a lot of slashdot users views, clippy was a disaster... but a lot of novices loved the damned thing... another example of UI not being everything for everyone... and imagine having written something like Word, and then having your users want a helper app, so you set out to write all sorts of API hooks into your code so that a 'clippy' can now autogenerate stuff for the end user... only to have your userbase curse you for adding such an annoying interface, which they ultimately make you disable... resulting in a rather large waste of your time, as the programmer, implementing something that your users wanted, but then rejected.
I'm a software developer, I work on commerical software. What you propose is great, lets fix the usability problems, and then worry about the technical 'behind the scenes' problems.
The problem is, that there are many cases where a seemingly minor UI change to the program would downright destroy the backend. For example (and it's a crappy one, I know, trying not to overcomplicate it...) Take a look at how the clipboard works. You can copy one item of infromation on it at once, and take one item off at once. As an end user, I don't understand why I can't copy text from notepad on it, then copy an image from paint, and then paste the text I had into Word, and paste the image I have back into paint. Obviously all the changes needed would be to know what I want to paste. Problem comes when as a programmer I now have to figure out what to paste where. Text into notepad, that's easy... but what about Word... now what, image or text? Okay, lets ask the user... oh wait, I can't, because I'm not able to do any UI in another program (hypothetically here...)
Yes it can be solved, but from a user point of view, it's minor, and from a programmers point of view it is damned complex and not worth the trouble. Let the user do two copy operations, instead of me having to write and debug thousands of lines of code that is trying to assume what the user wants (and the user will bitch about if I get it wrong anyways). Add to that most OSS developers are doing this for free, and are not going to want to rewrite their backend just for a seemingly minor UI change, which isn't going to make everyone happy, just a few people who complained.
What some people find intuitive is complex for others... there is no happy median... there will always be UI's that are not liked by some... there is no perfect UI design out there... and very few people willing to try and find it, especially for free.
Oh don't worry, with Longhorn everything will be less cluttered, and more useless, as everything is now being treated as 3D... you think it's a pain to find the window with the info you need now? Wait till you have to navigate through a bunch of stacked windows viewed on a 45 degree angle from the z-plane... And I thought the fischer price interface of XP was bad...
Slashdot? Why is it going down, there is no article... where do I RTFA???? Maybe it was microsoft's fault... we'll just call up russia and get a beowulf cluster of something to make some profit, and then slashdot can stay up? Or do I need to forward some of my spam to slashdot, they keep telling me that they can keep me up for hours at a time...
First of all, I was told the same thing for kilometres... except to divide by 10 not 5... but Mach 10 is not 4 kilometres per second... I demand you retract your faulty explanation at once as I have demonstrated a clear proof that you sir are outright wrong!
Why is it that applying security at a higher layer is a bad thing? The data is what needs to be secured, not the headers of the packets... I don't care if people know I'm sending data to my credit card company, I do care if they know what my login and password is though... Am I missing something? Why is it so important to apply security to the lowest layer?
I ride with an iPod in traffic, and believe it or not, no matter how friggin loud I have my music cranked (hell sometimes I wonder if it's sweat or my ears are bleeding...), I have never, ever been approached from behind by a car without hearing it... no ear-bud headphones can block out the ambient noise well enough... so it's a non-issue...
no, you got it backwards... you can run secure linux apps in an insecure environment...
We'll just let that go as an accidental slip of the tongue... it happens to the best of us... assuming Windows is secure... pffft... there's my laugh for the day...
He lost the battle, but he didn't really lose the war.
Sure Edison didn't profit from this directly, but the fact that we have a relative few AC power generation centers (compared to how many we'd have if we went DC) has caused huge problems. First, if everyone needed a DC power station in their neighbourhood, don't you think alternate sources of energy would have taken over by now... the "it's not in my backyard" syndrome, and the ability to just plug in and get power without any clue of where it comes from is a bad thing, especially when that power comes from polluting sources.
But more on topic, now that everything is coming in as AC, have you noticed how many damned DC convertors we have? Every device/appliance has one, short of the original light bulbs and some heaters. Computers, TV's, stereos, microwaves, etc.. I could list at least 80% of the things in your house as needing a DC convertor. He might have been after making loads of money off having tons of DC power plants in every neighbourhood... hell, I'm willing to bet that was the case... but think about the difference it could have made had he gotten his way. I'm sure we would have cleaner methods of producing required power, and I'm positive we wouldn't be wasting all this material in all of our device converting relatively high voltage AC to low voltage DC. Isn't it cheaper to make convertors from DC to AC for the few devices that need them? All I can think of is anything with a motor.
I don't think this Afghani is really such a good person compared to Edison... had Edison gotten his way, we all might be better off, and no one would remember that he was all for money, not the betterment of humanity. High morals be damned, I just want things to work out well in the end.
And to think I used to read all the cute girls emails at school when I was a temp sysadmin... it was all legal! w00t... I wonder if the extortion I did using the information I gleaned from their emails was equally as legal... oh well, I guess I'll never know... besides, how else is a geek supposed to get action in highschool?:P
Slashdot Mirror
I like the idea, but it would be way funnier if it displayed the slashdot fortune/QOTD from the bottom of the site... that's more screwed up than any search query on google... Right now it says "I'm a GENIUS! I want to dispute sentence structure with SUSAN SONTAG!!" How the hell could that be less weird than a search term? Really???
If you had started the chilling process 3 minutes, earlier we wouldn't be in this predicament now!
Does this mean that we'll soon be getting more durable Post-it Notes?
No, it means we are getting invisible Post-it Notes...
How many people out there do you think there are that would want to learn assembly? I learned it when I was young and tinkering with a C64... but now a days, you ask any young programmers, 95% of them don't want to bother learning assembly...
Don't get me wrong, I do embedded development, and use of ASM is frequent, but modern consoles don't need such low level programming, the API's handle almost everything... I doubt that this is so much about learning to program consoles, as it is learning to develop for embedded systems... modern consoles don't qualify in my books...
I have a question for slashdot... can I use your polls for scientific research? Will my request result in slashdot removing their polls section? What kind of a crazy assed reaction is this? Why not just put a disclaimer up on the page that says, not scientific.
Stopping file sharing will make the US fall behind? By definition file sharing would be pointless if the US wasn't so anal about copyrights and IP. You have mass file sharing because of the US. The US will crumble without file sharing???... how the heck did this guy make that connection? Someone please enlighten me... I'm not following the logic.
All activation, anti-piracy, cd checking, and most authentication systems are broken... why? because they use self modifying code to verify the license, and that they aren't being fooled... the problem? SP2 enforces the NX flag (no execute flag, as in thou shalt not execute data!)... and the morons that wrote the crappy code (not MS in this case) were stupid enough to not add code to ensure that their data wasn't marked with the NX flag... and now everyone blames MS for these idiotic lazy ass developers creating convulted stupid ass self modifying authenticating anti-piracy crap code and not bothering to at least write it properly (not to mention the code gets defeated everytime by crackers, it just pisses off regular paying customers...) but back to my rant... the NX flag is now being used.. thus everything that does self modifying code, and 'forgot' to deal with the NX flag properly is now busted...
At my old job, the two way pagers err umm... I mean blackberries... were a crap shoot... half the department had no kids, the other half had twins and triplets.... I kid you not...
I want a decent video card (say an ATI 9800 XT or equiv.) and a decent speed processor (say a Prescott 3.2 Ghz or equiv.)... From what I've read, I can kiss the noiseless part of the system good bye if that's what I want... The heatpipes need to be cooled, and at close to 200 watts of heat dissipation for just the CPU and GPU, I'm not so sure their solution will work fanless...
You have to ask the question, "should adults be able to engage in behavior that might place their life or health at risk?" If the answer is "no," then for starters we should ban motorcycles and bicycles and lower the speed limit to ten MPH. I think you'd find these measures would save on the order of 40,000 lives per year in the United States.
Not to mention saving a lot of fuel, since a 1/2 HP engine would be plenty for the largest car.
Why ban bikes and leave cars? That's just stupid... How about we ban cars... they are way more dangerous than a bicycle. Hell, the only time I've ever been injured on my bike is when a car hasn't followed the highway traffic act and nailed me while I was biking. If people were to get rid of cars, and have everyone on bikes, there wouldn't be the mess of accidents that there are today... Get rid of the cars, and you don't need speed limits... if someone can go fast on a bike, so be it... but it's a physical limit, not some imposed limit that everyone ignores. And I don't know of anytime that you are on a bike going any reasonably fast speed (say 40kph+) and are not damned alert... you are physically active, you can't be snoozing... in a car, you can sleep at speeds over 100kph... and you're in a huge 3 ton chunk of metal... bloody safe that is...
Can they use a battery? As in charge the battery using human power and then run the motor off the battery power???
Wow... so that's what happend to my internet experience... and all this time I thought that XP SP2's IE with pop-up blocking was what was ruining my experience...
503? screw that... why not have a new error number designated specifically for MS infected systems... error 999: The operating system you are using is insecure and has been exploited... you are partially responsible for bringing this server to its knees... Now go in the corner and think about what you've done.
If you have a sister that is over 18... I'm game for trading my 9800XT...
Yes, I have used the office clipboard helper... a neat hack for the problem I agree, and for most people it's a useable solution. I rate it as useful as the paperclip helper was in office. It's useful for some, irritating as hell for others. I should have used the paperclip as an example instead of the clipboard, but I didn't want to overcomplicate my point... in a lot of slashdot users views, clippy was a disaster... but a lot of novices loved the damned thing... another example of UI not being everything for everyone... and imagine having written something like Word, and then having your users want a helper app, so you set out to write all sorts of API hooks into your code so that a 'clippy' can now autogenerate stuff for the end user... only to have your userbase curse you for adding such an annoying interface, which they ultimately make you disable... resulting in a rather large waste of your time, as the programmer, implementing something that your users wanted, but then rejected.
I'm a software developer, I work on commerical software. What you propose is great, lets fix the usability problems, and then worry about the technical 'behind the scenes' problems.
The problem is, that there are many cases where a seemingly minor UI change to the program would downright destroy the backend. For example (and it's a crappy one, I know, trying not to overcomplicate it...) Take a look at how the clipboard works. You can copy one item of infromation on it at once, and take one item off at once. As an end user, I don't understand why I can't copy text from notepad on it, then copy an image from paint, and then paste the text I had into Word, and paste the image I have back into paint. Obviously all the changes needed would be to know what I want to paste. Problem comes when as a programmer I now have to figure out what to paste where. Text into notepad, that's easy... but what about Word... now what, image or text? Okay, lets ask the user... oh wait, I can't, because I'm not able to do any UI in another program (hypothetically here...)
Yes it can be solved, but from a user point of view, it's minor, and from a programmers point of view it is damned complex and not worth the trouble. Let the user do two copy operations, instead of me having to write and debug thousands of lines of code that is trying to assume what the user wants (and the user will bitch about if I get it wrong anyways). Add to that most OSS developers are doing this for free, and are not going to want to rewrite their backend just for a seemingly minor UI change, which isn't going to make everyone happy, just a few people who complained.
What some people find intuitive is complex for others... there is no happy median... there will always be UI's that are not liked by some... there is no perfect UI design out there... and very few people willing to try and find it, especially for free.
Oh don't worry, with Longhorn everything will be less cluttered, and more useless, as everything is now being treated as 3D... you think it's a pain to find the window with the info you need now? Wait till you have to navigate through a bunch of stacked windows viewed on a 45 degree angle from the z-plane... And I thought the fischer price interface of XP was bad...
But why is the getLaid(void *) call just a wrapper to the kissAss(), suckUp(), and payBribe(LARGE INT) calls???
Slashdot? Why is it going down, there is no article... where do I RTFA???? Maybe it was microsoft's fault... we'll just call up russia and get a beowulf cluster of something to make some profit, and then slashdot can stay up? Or do I need to forward some of my spam to slashdot, they keep telling me that they can keep me up for hours at a time...
First of all, I was told the same thing for kilometres... except to divide by 10 not 5... but Mach 10 is not 4 kilometres per second... I demand you retract your faulty explanation at once as I have demonstrated a clear proof that you sir are outright wrong!
;)
Laugh, it's a joke... and a bad one at that...
Why is it that applying security at a higher layer is a bad thing? The data is what needs to be secured, not the headers of the packets... I don't care if people know I'm sending data to my credit card company, I do care if they know what my login and password is though... Am I missing something? Why is it so important to apply security to the lowest layer?
I ride with an iPod in traffic, and believe it or not, no matter how friggin loud I have my music cranked (hell sometimes I wonder if it's sweat or my ears are bleeding...), I have never, ever been approached from behind by a car without hearing it... no ear-bud headphones can block out the ambient noise well enough... so it's a non-issue...
no, you got it backwards... you can run secure linux apps in an insecure environment...
We'll just let that go as an accidental slip of the tongue... it happens to the best of us... assuming Windows is secure... pffft... there's my laugh for the day...
He lost the battle, but he didn't really lose the war.
Sure Edison didn't profit from this directly, but the fact that we have a relative few AC power generation centers (compared to how many we'd have if we went DC) has caused huge problems. First, if everyone needed a DC power station in their neighbourhood, don't you think alternate sources of energy would have taken over by now... the "it's not in my backyard" syndrome, and the ability to just plug in and get power without any clue of where it comes from is a bad thing, especially when that power comes from polluting sources.
But more on topic, now that everything is coming in as AC, have you noticed how many damned DC convertors we have? Every device/appliance has one, short of the original light bulbs and some heaters. Computers, TV's, stereos, microwaves, etc.. I could list at least 80% of the things in your house as needing a DC convertor. He might have been after making loads of money off having tons of DC power plants in every neighbourhood... hell, I'm willing to bet that was the case... but think about the difference it could have made had he gotten his way. I'm sure we would have cleaner methods of producing required power, and I'm positive we wouldn't be wasting all this material in all of our device converting relatively high voltage AC to low voltage DC. Isn't it cheaper to make convertors from DC to AC for the few devices that need them? All I can think of is anything with a motor.
I don't think this Afghani is really such a good person compared to Edison... had Edison gotten his way, we all might be better off, and no one would remember that he was all for money, not the betterment of humanity. High morals be damned, I just want things to work out well in the end.
And to think I used to read all the cute girls emails at school when I was a temp sysadmin... it was all legal! w00t... I wonder if the extortion I did using the information I gleaned from their emails was equally as legal... oh well, I guess I'll never know... besides, how else is a geek supposed to get action in highschool? :P