Something I don't see anyone keeping in mind is the infrastructure you need to maintain in order to keep copying. One of the reason so many manuscripts and such survived the dark ages was that there were alot of monks who just sat there and copied stuff all day. They were able to do that because it's not all that difficult to make parchment and ink (well, good ink is harder, but even crappy ink will last long enough for it to be copied again). CDs and other digital media, on the other hand, take a signifigant infrastructure to create - making a blank CD involves an enormous pipeline of goods and processing, to say nothing of the hardware and software you need to read and write from it. say there is some huge disaster and the associated fall of civilization - even if there is a priesthood of computer geeks holed up in a building somewhere who wants to maintain all these records over the centuries, they aren't going to be able to maintain the hardware without the spare parts.
I ran into a bug in one of the Oracle drivers last week, one that I could have fixed in seconds if I had the source (EBDCIC to ascii conversion on number fields wasn't converting decimal points. One frigging missing line in a case statement).
With (small) pascal strings, there's no size tradeoff - you're getting rid of the terminating null in favor of a pre-pended length. For strings 255 characters and shorter, there's basically no good reason to not use them. I know all about classes and C++ strings and the standard library and all that jazz, this is more about the fundamental C datatypes.
Please re-think everything you just said, but replace "drugs" with any or all of the following:
Alcohol
Nicotine
Caffeine
Guns
Cars
Free speech
For what it's worth, while I have done drugs, I don't now (and haven't in years, and never was a heavy user), I only rarely drink, and I don't smoke. There's no personal gain for me here, I just think it's moronic to outlaw something that doesn't need to be.
Spending money on anything will benefit somebody, whose goals you may not agree with. Hell, I don't like the fact that my income tax goes to congressional pork projects in other states. That's at least as bad as a drug dealers Mercedes. My poor performance at work doesn't have jack shit to do with anyone but me and my employer - and drugs aren't going to hurt it anymore than alcohol will. Insurance doesn't cost society anything, it comes right out of my paycheck. The impact on my family is, again, nobody's buisness but mine and my families. If were were going to make laws about that, how about we make stressfull Thanksgiving dinners with the in-laws illegal?
Everything you mention is a consequence of free will - there's no harm to anyone except me.
When they sell _MY_ phone number, and who _I_ call, and for how long, and when, so that someone else can call _ME_ to try to sell me something, I'd say that has alot to do with me, and not "generic usage patterns".
As for how much it cost them to run the line, it didn't cost them shit, because all that was paid for years ago by the Bells, and in no small part with federal money.
Legalize drugs and magically watch most of the crime surrounding it vanish. The war on drugs is a political tool, plain and simple, and while some drug dealers may very well be heineous people, there's plenty that aren't - depending on where you are, of course. I used to live in Northern California, where pot is a HUGE, if underground part of the local economy. There's very little crime related to it, and what there is, is totally derived from the rabid pursuit of the drug war. Drug dealing is the classic victimless crime - there's no societal gain from it being a crime, and certainly none for the extreme penalties associated with it.
As for jail sentences - the rules on possession with intent to sell are very loose, so being a "user" is not really different from being a "dealer" in the eyes of the law.
XML can do alot of things, but when you're just using it to store formatting information, it's not much more than a glorfied HTML. As a previous poster said, anything you'll do with an XML document format you can do faster and smaller with a binary format. There's nothing inherently bad about binary files - you just need a well-defined spec to read them. The same is true of an XML document. An open office document standard is good. It being XML is okay. It being something else, like RTF, would be okay too.
Look and feel is a trademark issue, and doesn't apply to interfaces. The copyright belongs on the code itself, again, not in the interfaces. Patents are about the only thing that can catch them, and MS has hisorically shied away from using patents to slap people down. Nothing illegal about reverse engineering. As long as they don't look at the MS code, they're in the clear.
You don't need to do anything but promptly and efficently respond to spam complaints, by terminating accounts. Maybe change your TOS on your cheaper accounts so you can throttle port 25 traffic. You don't need to do any of the extreme things mentioned. From the reports in this case, it looks like the ISP had no real interest in preventing spam, even in the face of complaints, so a block is exactly what they needed to get a boot.
Best Buy near ME had a Sony machine with all this stuff (TV in/out, PVR software, remote control, firewire, USB 2, DVD burner.. pretty nice stuff) for 1500. Not sure if it was XP MC, but if it's not, then the next release of it will probably have it.
The aluminum-foil theory I've heard is that some company owned by a Korean spammer managed to get the government contract to provide mail servers to a whole ton of schools, and intentionally set them up as relays. There actually was some evidence (company names, specific configuration options on the servers), but I don't remember any of them.
Realistic bits ain't any harder than any other body part - you just need artists to draw and.. erm... animate them. As for hair - it's only long hair that's really hard, which is why the fairy in the demo and almost every other CG actor has a crew cut. For porn stars, this is not an issue anyway.
Re:Real gamers use Win32, not linux
on
Mesa 5.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
pssshht, they'd be free if I could actually download the damn things. Some sort of funky javascripted activeX control that errors out on all the breeds of IE I've tried (IE 5.55, 6 on 2k and XP). *glare microsoft*
Peapod does exactly this. In fact, if you know your monthly usage, you can just set up a shopping list and re-order it. All these people talking about how you can do it on a bike or whatnot are missing the point - it takes less time and is cheaper to have them delivered. It's not new to do it over the internet, but it's getting major stores like Shop & stop into delivery where they weren't before. It's cheap. It's convenient. It's MORE convenient than making the trip yourself, which is the point of the service, and has ALWAYS been the point of getting anything delivered. I haven't seen such righteous justification of doing things the hard way since the last time I visited my Baptist relatives.
Shrug, you're running into the classic problem of security vrs convenience. And thats actually a policy decision, so either you have that power and it's not hard, you just tell em they can't do that, or someone else makes the decision that they can, and you better give them what they ask for. Sounds like your problem is a screwed up org chart more than the skills of your people.
Bah, it's only hard to do your job because you don't know what your job is. Your job is to make the environment the way the coders want it. If that means leaving everything open so the hackers can walk in, that's what you should do. Then you get all the shitty coders fired, you hire new, good coders, and you respect thier opinions and don't force them to come up with cheesy hacks like web services because you refuse to open up anything except port 80.
SOMEONE has to use the new stuff, in order to get the bugs worked out. Hire skilled, intelligent people who stay on top of new technology and are able to intelligently evaluate it's strengths and weaknesses, as well as compensate and correct any new bugs in less-tested systems. That way you can get the benefits of new technology, and you don't need to get bitten by every bug that comes along.
While I may have had my terminology wrong (I hadn't had coffee yet and was following the parents usage of the term), I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft is doing any of those things in the console market - even though they are selling below cost (are they? I know they haven't paid off R & D, but are they selling below manufacturing cost?), they're doing it in order to be competitive with established leaders in the market. If an XBox cost 50 bucks, they'd be getting some serious investigating.
It's not just selling under your own costs - it's selling under your own costs, AND your competitors price point. For example: I have a better engineering line, so I can make my units 10% cheaper than my competition. If I then undercut them by 10%, that's not dumping. I'm just passing on my savings. If my pipeline sucks, and it costs me 10% more, but I sell at the same price because otherwise I won't sell anything at all, thats not dumping either. But if I make them for the same price, but I sell for 10% cheaper(note that I'm assuming in all these cases that we sell for the exact price it costs to produce), because I've got large cash reserves and they don't, THEN I'm dumping.
It's actually in C that I've wanted access to pascal style strings more than C++ - as you said, in C++, if you make consistent use of classes then the overhead is pretty minimal. On the other hand, I'm dealing with a nice bug chunk of legacy C code that makes enourmous use of buffers that are, incidently, 255 bytes long. Pascal strings would speed things up enormously. Not that I would ever expect such a thing it happen, but it'd be nice if I had em.
Well, I use em alot:P Screw people who don't speak english:P And if you start end the end and iterate up, you can probably eliminate the loop overhead... I'm no expert in unrolling loops. I hate strcmp() anyway - 90% of the time you don't care how different the strings are, you only care if they aren't the same, and in that case, being able to drop out early based on length will end up being a gain alot of the time.
Well, the vast majority of the time I'm working with raw strings, I'm working with short ones. Large quantities of text are wrapped in a string class which, yes, stores it's length in an int. But whenever I use a small buffer, and everytime I have to work with a literal, I'm using strlen(). That's extra iterations and cpu cycles that are totally unnecesary.
I don't really expect the C++ or C standards to change just because I want a string data type. But the fact is, there's no downside to having one, and a potentially signifigant gain to having one. That's all I'm saying.
Slashdot Mirror
Something I don't see anyone keeping in mind is the infrastructure you need to maintain in order to keep copying. One of the reason so many manuscripts and such survived the dark ages was that there were alot of monks who just sat there and copied stuff all day. They were able to do that because it's not all that difficult to make parchment and ink (well, good ink is harder, but even crappy ink will last long enough for it to be copied again). CDs and other digital media, on the other hand, take a signifigant infrastructure to create - making a blank CD involves an enormous pipeline of goods and processing, to say nothing of the hardware and software you need to read and write from it. say there is some huge disaster and the associated fall of civilization - even if there is a priesthood of computer geeks holed up in a building somewhere who wants to maintain all these records over the centuries, they aren't going to be able to maintain the hardware without the spare parts.
If they ain't speech, then they aren't protected by copyright, either. Make up your fucking mind.
I ran into a bug in one of the Oracle drivers last week, one that I could have fixed in seconds if I had the source (EBDCIC to ascii conversion on number fields wasn't converting decimal points. One frigging missing line in a case statement).
With (small) pascal strings, there's no size tradeoff - you're getting rid of the terminating null in favor of a pre-pended length. For strings 255 characters and shorter, there's basically no good reason to not use them. I know all about classes and C++ strings and the standard library and all that jazz, this is more about the fundamental C datatypes.
For what it's worth, while I have done drugs, I don't now (and haven't in years, and never was a heavy user), I only rarely drink, and I don't smoke. There's no personal gain for me here, I just think it's moronic to outlaw something that doesn't need to be.
Spending money on anything will benefit somebody, whose goals you may not agree with. Hell, I don't like the fact that my income tax goes to congressional pork projects in other states. That's at least as bad as a drug dealers Mercedes.
My poor performance at work doesn't have jack shit to do with anyone but me and my employer - and drugs aren't going to hurt it anymore than alcohol will.
Insurance doesn't cost society anything, it comes right out of my paycheck.
The impact on my family is, again, nobody's buisness but mine and my families. If were were going to make laws about that, how about we make stressfull Thanksgiving dinners with the in-laws illegal?
Everything you mention is a consequence of free will - there's no harm to anyone except me.
As for how much it cost them to run the line, it didn't cost them shit, because all that was paid for years ago by the Bells, and in no small part with federal money.
As for jail sentences - the rules on possession with intent to sell are very loose, so being a "user" is not really different from being a "dealer" in the eyes of the law.
XML can do alot of things, but when you're just using it to store formatting information, it's not much more than a glorfied HTML. As a previous poster said, anything you'll do with an XML document format you can do faster and smaller with a binary format. There's nothing inherently bad about binary files - you just need a well-defined spec to read them. The same is true of an XML document. An open office document standard is good. It being XML is okay. It being something else, like RTF, would be okay too.
OOL explicitly advertises thier service as being superior to a T1 line. If they ever implement a cap, I will be one very peeved customer.
Look and feel is a trademark issue, and doesn't apply to interfaces. The copyright belongs on the code itself, again, not in the interfaces. Patents are about the only thing that can catch them, and MS has hisorically shied away from using patents to slap people down. Nothing illegal about reverse engineering. As long as they don't look at the MS code, they're in the clear.
You don't need to do anything but promptly and efficently respond to spam complaints, by terminating accounts. Maybe change your TOS on your cheaper accounts so you can throttle port 25 traffic. You don't need to do any of the extreme things mentioned. From the reports in this case, it looks like the ISP had no real interest in preventing spam, even in the face of complaints, so a block is exactly what they needed to get a boot.
Best Buy near ME had a Sony machine with all this stuff (TV in/out, PVR software, remote control, firewire, USB 2, DVD burner.. pretty nice stuff) for 1500. Not sure if it was XP MC, but if it's not, then the next release of it will probably have it.
The aluminum-foil theory I've heard is that some company owned by a Korean spammer managed to get the government contract to provide mail servers to a whole ton of schools, and intentionally set them up as relays. There actually was some evidence (company names, specific configuration options on the servers), but I don't remember any of them.
Realistic bits ain't any harder than any other body part - you just need artists to draw and.. erm... animate them. As for hair - it's only long hair that's really hard, which is why the fairy in the demo and almost every other CG actor has a crew cut. For porn stars, this is not an issue anyway.
pssshht, they'd be free if I could actually download the damn things. Some sort of funky javascripted activeX control that errors out on all the breeds of IE I've tried (IE 5.55, 6 on 2k and XP). *glare microsoft*
Peapod does exactly this. In fact, if you know your monthly usage, you can just set up a shopping list and re-order it. All these people talking about how you can do it on a bike or whatnot are missing the point - it takes less time and is cheaper to have them delivered. It's not new to do it over the internet, but it's getting major stores like Shop & stop into delivery where they weren't before. It's cheap. It's convenient. It's MORE convenient than making the trip yourself, which is the point of the service, and has ALWAYS been the point of getting anything delivered. I haven't seen such righteous justification of doing things the hard way since the last time I visited my Baptist relatives.
Shrug, you're running into the classic problem of security vrs convenience. And thats actually a policy decision, so either you have that power and it's not hard, you just tell em they can't do that, or someone else makes the decision that they can, and you better give them what they ask for. Sounds like your problem is a screwed up org chart more than the skills of your people.
Bah, it's only hard to do your job because you don't know what your job is. Your job is to make the environment the way the coders want it. If that means leaving everything open so the hackers can walk in, that's what you should do. Then you get all the shitty coders fired, you hire new, good coders, and you respect thier opinions and don't force them to come up with cheesy hacks like web services because you refuse to open up anything except port 80.
SOMEONE has to use the new stuff, in order to get the bugs worked out. Hire skilled, intelligent people who stay on top of new technology and are able to intelligently evaluate it's strengths and weaknesses, as well as compensate and correct any new bugs in less-tested systems. That way you can get the benefits of new technology, and you don't need to get bitten by every bug that comes along.
While I may have had my terminology wrong (I hadn't had coffee yet and was following the parents usage of the term), I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft is doing any of those things in the console market - even though they are selling below cost (are they? I know they haven't paid off R & D, but are they selling below manufacturing cost?), they're doing it in order to be competitive with established leaders in the market. If an XBox cost 50 bucks, they'd be getting some serious investigating.
It's not just selling under your own costs - it's selling under your own costs, AND your competitors price point. For example: I have a better engineering line, so I can make my units 10% cheaper than my competition. If I then undercut them by 10%, that's not dumping. I'm just passing on my savings. If my pipeline sucks, and it costs me 10% more, but I sell at the same price because otherwise I won't sell anything at all, thats not dumping either. But if I make them for the same price, but I sell for 10% cheaper(note that I'm assuming in all these cases that we sell for the exact price it costs to produce), because I've got large cash reserves and they don't, THEN I'm dumping.
I'd rather to pay per download, but there's no real reason they couldn't have 2 pricing plans.
It's actually in C that I've wanted access to pascal style strings more than C++ - as you said, in C++, if you make consistent use of classes then the overhead is pretty minimal. On the other hand, I'm dealing with a nice bug chunk of legacy C code that makes enourmous use of buffers that are, incidently, 255 bytes long. Pascal strings would speed things up enormously. Not that I would ever expect such a thing it happen, but it'd be nice if I had em.
Well, I use em alot :P Screw people who don't speak english :P And if you start end the end and iterate up, you can probably eliminate the loop overhead... I'm no expert in unrolling loops. I hate strcmp() anyway - 90% of the time you don't care how different the strings are, you only care if they aren't the same, and in that case, being able to drop out early based on length will end up being a gain alot of the time.
I don't really expect the C++ or C standards to change just because I want a string data type. But the fact is, there's no downside to having one, and a potentially signifigant gain to having one. That's all I'm saying.