Because Intel famously ships only quality, well tested chips, like the first run P4s and the Itanium, right? You're 100% correct about the chatacterization of Intel (Intel Inside splashed up everywhere, and only low cost/third party machines with AMD chips, because all the big OEMs have exclusive Intel contracts....), even though it's wrong.
It's cute how it's so easy to pick out one atrocity and focus on it to the exclusion of all else. Lets say we killed all the rapists in NO right now, this very second. How many do you think there are? Do you think thats the major problem there?
People are going to act badly in those sort of circumstances. Hell, a shitload of people are acting badly in far milder ones - here in Baton Rouge people with food, water, power, and vehicles are beating the shit out of each other over cutting in line for gas. People are so scared of all the brown criminals from NO coming here that the town was practically paralyzed by rumors (non-factual) of rioting and looting at the local mall.
No, NO is not a healthy place to be right now. Poeople aren't at thier best. But honestly, a lot of people here on slashdot wouldn't do any better in the same circumstances. Get them out of there, get some food and water, clothes, basic hygiene in place and you'll see a marked improvment in character and behavior. It sure would be nice if everyone there had come together and supported each other until outside help could come. But human nature has it's dark side and getting on your own high horse about it is just hypocritical.
Disclaimer: I am an extermely cynical atheist and I am militantly anti-Christianity.
That said, the churches are a major part of the disaster recovery infrastructure here in LA (and many other places as well), and they are doing large amounts of work, feeding and sheltering many people, and helping to coordinate other efforts as well. I can't speak to any of the actual churches listed there, and some(many? all?) of them may very well end up going direct into some pastors pocket, but the local churches and pastors and parishioners actually on the scene are doing huge amounts of work.
Its pretty easy to sit in your nice comfy chair with your internet connection and talk about what animals they must be. Now, I'm not condoning whats going on there, but think about it for a minute. There's no food. There's no water. It's hot. People are literally dying of exposure and dehydration on the sidewalks. There's little or no communication with the outside world. They don't know whats going on, if anyone is coming to help them or not. They don't know if theres other priorities elsewhere, or why the water can't get it, and when you're watching your baby die right in front of you, you probably don't really care. I don't condone any of the violence, and I like to think I'd handle it better, but think a little and show a little compassion before you pass judgement.
Blizzard pulled this out of thier ass as a PR move - if there was any evidence that bnetd was actually based on leaked battle.net code (as they implied), it would be perfectly visible in the open source of bnetd, and they would have an open and shut copyright infringment case. They made no such claim, ergo, they have no such proof, only unfounded, emotional (although perhaps genuine) raving.
It's happened before. Nothing came of it, really. The retailer, quite legitimately, tells you to piss off because it's not a party to the EULA and can't be forced to accept returns. The publisher tells you to piss off because they didn't sell it to you, they sold it to the retailer, and they aren't a party to that. You'd need to go to court to enforce the return clause and nobodys been willing to spend the money on that yet.
The reason for the "limited term" part of the constitution - you know, the part that the Supreme Court said meant any amount of time, so long as it was an amount of time and not just forever - was placed there specifically so that works would not be hoarded forever, but that they would fall into the public domain and could then be used as the basis for new works. Unlike you, the founding fathers understood that the new always builds upon the old, and recognized the value of a rich commons.
The short answer is that they *don't* provide the same service for free, because Blizzards management of battle.net sucked and a lot of people hated it. The courts have apparently decided that its perfectly okay for companies to provide shitty service thats tied to a product, and that the consumer solution is supposed to be buy a new product, not get a new service. This is very similiar to allowing car companies to require cars to only be services at dealerships, by the way - the same logic applies. For some reasons otherwise sensible lawmakers go totally apeshit when it comes to software.
Blizzard may *think* theres a problem with piracy related to bnetd (although thats not supported by the facts and to my knowledge they never actually presnted any evidence of widespread piracy enabled by bnetd - they simply had to show the possibility), but thats a pretty fucking crazy viewpoint to take. Every single one of the battle.net games was a *massive* commercial and retail success. At the very best, it's like someone bitching that they should have been able to afford *2* new Hummers - it's hard to feel sorry for them even if they were 100% in the right, which I don't think they are.
The consequences of this case, and others like it, go far beyond "oh noes, I can't play Warcraft 3 without an internet connection anymore", though. It provides signifigant legal standing for the totally ridiculous concept of an EULA - a construct that would, and has been, laughed out of court in every single other industry in the history of the world - along with the deciding that many of your rights with regards to software are not statutory and can be signed away, even under duress and even post-sale. This is all predicated on the bullshit idea that somehow software needs an EULA to be a viable commercial venture, which is untrue and should be obviously untrue to anyone who thinks about it for a moment.
I don't know how gullible juries are in Arizona, but seriously, can't you exploit this?
"Officer MacGruff, are you an expert in computer forensics? Can you summarize your education? Can you describe your methodology?"
This reminds me of the whole speed camera thing in AU, where they lost a major court case because, given 8 weeks, they couldn't find an expert willing to testify on the relability of hashes as MACs. Not because the testimony wasn't believed, mind, but that they didn't have any.
Each window has a "parent" window and the child is always atop the parent window.
This is wrong - "child" windows do not always float on the parent (sadly - the amazing vanishing dialog box remains a hassle in Gtk apps to this day)
on X you can hack in the ability to change the parent once the window exists, but you cannot do this on Windows
This is not true. You can dynamically reparent windows in Windows.
Unfortunatly the designers of Windows and X are way too stupid and set in their ways to ever realize this.
And neither is this. Focus policy in X is the responsibility of the WM, and all the major ones allow you to switch off raise on click. You can do it on Windows, too, although it requires some low level hackery. I believe that the Windows XP power toys includes an option for it.
Fleet ATMs, before they got bought out by BofA, did exactly that. You could set a "quick cash" amount, too. It only worked on the fancy new Windows XP ATMs, though.
If the city in question is NYC, 30 miles can absolutely be half (or more) of the cost. A hole in the wall apartment in Manhattan can easily run you $3,000 a month. Outside of the city (maybe an hour commute, by train), and you can get a very nice place for $1500.
Absolutely correct. The US abandoned the gold standard sometime in the 19th century, if memory serves. I don't believe theres a country in the world with a gold (or silver) backed currency anymore. Certainly none of the major currencies are.
Thats one of the problems with CS education - the problem of terminology.
Computer Science, the real thing, is very much based on math, but it's a *theoretical*, academic discipline, with little practical value (which is not to say that the results of CompSci R&D don't benefit practical software development). A real computer scientist isn't a good software developer any more than a physicist is a good EE.
However, lack of precise naming (not suprising, really, considerin the youth of the discipline) means that there's a vast variation in whats considered computer science. In many places it's essentially an algorithms class. In some it's essentially a tech course in Java. More commonly, it's a fairly technical but very practically oriented programming class. Thats why you get people who want to be software developers taking compsci but complaining about the math in one school, and compsci graduates from another who can't do anything except code bubble sort in a Java applet.
It's not a tough idea at all. Closed, authoritarian governments have been around as long as there have people. The problem is that this is in direct contradiction to the democratic ideal. The entire point of a democractic government is that its power derives from the citizens, and it is supposed to reflect those citizens interests. It is *not* supposed to be a totalitarian figure, benevolent or not.
Now, it may very well be that (real) democracy isn't stable in the long run - certainly the US government has moved more and more toward the totalitarian mode over the last couple centuries - but the people who're upset over that aren't confused or misled about a need for secrecy. They're concerned with the fact that a government that nominally represents thier them is actively seeking to hide information and activities from them (again, not a poke at the Bush administration - this has been happing, and gradually increasing, for the entire history of the US).
Historical fact bears this out, too - there's been more than one case of government agencies refusing FOIA requests, or censoring them, not because they contained information critical to national security, but because they were embarressing, or contradicted "official" reports.
In terms of security at all, the *best* kind is the kind that works even when everyone knows what you're doing. Thats not always possible, of course, but your example of vacation time is a great one for exactly that reason. Suppose that some city had some large fraction of it's officers on vacation on the same week of every year. Thats hurtful to security whether it's published or not. Publishing it, in fact, is probably the best way to correct such a short sighted flaw in operating procedures. "Open and transparent" means that the public (remember, the people who're supposedly the important ones) can confirm that people who claim to be acting in thier interest are actually doing so.
And the what matters as well, especially when we're a supposedly moral nation. For example, many people are uncomfortable with the idea of torturing prisoners, or assassinating foreign politicians. Now, those actions may be neccesary to protect the US. Or they may not. But, supposedly, it's the *people* of the US who should determine what the line they will not cross is. Thats why we have laws and such about treatment of prisoners, and regulating our international operations. And history has shown that we need public oversight if our government is to be trusted to abide by those laws. Here I will poke specifically at the Bush administration, because, whether you support torturing prisoners for information or not, the Bush adminstration official policy is to do it via legal loopholing and word games, not via straightforward public policy.
Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that a democratic society is stable or even a good idea. Theres a lot of people who would disagree, even Americans (from the sound of it, even yourself). Humans are social animals and being led is very comforting to many people.
Supporting multiple compilers is harder than you'd think. Look at the code base & makefiles for pretty much *any* major cross platform project and you'll find all kinds of wierd hacks and little tweaks because such and such a compiler can't handle such and such a thing. Thats not even counting the compiler-specific extensions you might want to use for performance reasons. The state of C++ compilers has improved a lot in the last few years, but there's still a lot of older compilers (MSVC 6 being a shining example) and a lot of code to support on those compilers.
I've seen news footage of the body lying in the carriage (clearly wearing a light jean jacket, by the way, not any sort of "bulky" thing). It had to have come from somewhere. The footage I saw was high resolution and color though, so maybe a news crew made it to the scene before the corpse was cleaned up? Seems unlikely. Or maybe it was a "re-enactment".
Blair should resign because he's taking this stonewall "I support my officers" line when its clear to anyone paying any attention that they freaked out and shot a suspect. We'll probably never know exactly why but I wouldn't be suprised if it was a revenge/anger type thing. Or hell, even a Pulp Fiction style bump. But it's abundently clear that there was a fuckup, and while I'd stop short of saying there was a "coverup", the immediate police response was half-truths and justifications. It'd be a lot more honest, now that it's being exposed, to be forthcoming and straightfoward.
Honestly, with a few exceptions my experience has been that the usability, stability, and reliability of a program is inverse proportion to the price. Once you remove the spyware laden crap from the picture (and granted that the average non-computer literate person doesn't have the knowledge or experience to jump over these options), the best Windows software out there is mostly OSS, Freeware, or low-cost shareware. The *worst* applications I have ever used on Windows have been incredibly expensive commercial applications (5 figure per seat licensing, that sort of thing). Not even the horror of Gtk-Win32 is that bad.
Commercial software on Unix is even worse (amazingly).
Slashdot Mirror
Because Intel famously ships only quality, well tested chips, like the first run P4s and the Itanium, right? You're 100% correct about the chatacterization of Intel (Intel Inside splashed up everywhere, and only low cost/third party machines with AMD chips, because all the big OEMs have exclusive Intel contracts....), even though it's wrong.
People are going to act badly in those sort of circumstances. Hell, a shitload of people are acting badly in far milder ones - here in Baton Rouge people with food, water, power, and vehicles are beating the shit out of each other over cutting in line for gas. People are so scared of all the brown criminals from NO coming here that the town was practically paralyzed by rumors (non-factual) of rioting and looting at the local mall.
No, NO is not a healthy place to be right now. Poeople aren't at thier best. But honestly, a lot of people here on slashdot wouldn't do any better in the same circumstances. Get them out of there, get some food and water, clothes, basic hygiene in place and you'll see a marked improvment in character and behavior. It sure would be nice if everyone there had come together and supported each other until outside help could come. But human nature has it's dark side and getting on your own high horse about it is just hypocritical.
That said, the churches are a major part of the disaster recovery infrastructure here in LA (and many other places as well), and they are doing large amounts of work, feeding and sheltering many people, and helping to coordinate other efforts as well. I can't speak to any of the actual churches listed there, and some(many? all?) of them may very well end up going direct into some pastors pocket, but the local churches and pastors and parishioners actually on the scene are doing huge amounts of work.
Its pretty easy to sit in your nice comfy chair with your internet connection and talk about what animals they must be. Now, I'm not condoning whats going on there, but think about it for a minute. There's no food. There's no water. It's hot. People are literally dying of exposure and dehydration on the sidewalks. There's little or no communication with the outside world. They don't know whats going on, if anyone is coming to help them or not. They don't know if theres other priorities elsewhere, or why the water can't get it, and when you're watching your baby die right in front of you, you probably don't really care. I don't condone any of the violence, and I like to think I'd handle it better, but think a little and show a little compassion before you pass judgement.
Usage of packet sniffers to monitor battle.net traffic is a violation of the EULA. It doesn't matter what you're using it for, either.
Blizzard pulled this out of thier ass as a PR move - if there was any evidence that bnetd was actually based on leaked battle.net code (as they implied), it would be perfectly visible in the open source of bnetd, and they would have an open and shut copyright infringment case. They made no such claim, ergo, they have no such proof, only unfounded, emotional (although perhaps genuine) raving.
It's happened before. Nothing came of it, really. The retailer, quite legitimately, tells you to piss off because it's not a party to the EULA and can't be forced to accept returns. The publisher tells you to piss off because they didn't sell it to you, they sold it to the retailer, and they aren't a party to that. You'd need to go to court to enforce the return clause and nobodys been willing to spend the money on that yet.
The reason for the "limited term" part of the constitution - you know, the part that the Supreme Court said meant any amount of time, so long as it was an amount of time and not just forever - was placed there specifically so that works would not be hoarded forever, but that they would fall into the public domain and could then be used as the basis for new works. Unlike you, the founding fathers understood that the new always builds upon the old, and recognized the value of a rich commons.
Blizzard may *think* theres a problem with piracy related to bnetd (although thats not supported by the facts and to my knowledge they never actually presnted any evidence of widespread piracy enabled by bnetd - they simply had to show the possibility), but thats a pretty fucking crazy viewpoint to take. Every single one of the battle.net games was a *massive* commercial and retail success. At the very best, it's like someone bitching that they should have been able to afford *2* new Hummers - it's hard to feel sorry for them even if they were 100% in the right, which I don't think they are.
The consequences of this case, and others like it, go far beyond "oh noes, I can't play Warcraft 3 without an internet connection anymore", though. It provides signifigant legal standing for the totally ridiculous concept of an EULA - a construct that would, and has been, laughed out of court in every single other industry in the history of the world - along with the deciding that many of your rights with regards to software are not statutory and can be signed away, even under duress and even post-sale. This is all predicated on the bullshit idea that somehow software needs an EULA to be a viable commercial venture, which is untrue and should be obviously untrue to anyone who thinks about it for a moment.
"Officer MacGruff, are you an expert in computer forensics? Can you summarize your education? Can you describe your methodology?"
This reminds me of the whole speed camera thing in AU, where they lost a major court case because, given 8 weeks, they couldn't find an expert willing to testify on the relability of hashes as MACs. Not because the testimony wasn't believed, mind, but that they didn't have any.
What the hell kind of translation tool has "preg-reprehending" in it's dictionary?
Yes, because humans are amazingly capable of inferring meaning from contextual clues. In fact, it's how pretty much all of our senses work.
Heard on the radio this morning that hams in Indianna have been helping coordinate rescue efforts in the absence of landline and spotty cell service.
This is wrong - "child" windows do not always float on the parent (sadly - the amazing vanishing dialog box remains a hassle in Gtk apps to this day)
on X you can hack in the ability to change the parent once the window exists, but you cannot do this on Windows
This is not true. You can dynamically reparent windows in Windows.
Unfortunatly the designers of Windows and X are way too stupid and set in their ways to ever realize this.
And neither is this. Focus policy in X is the responsibility of the WM, and all the major ones allow you to switch off raise on click. You can do it on Windows, too, although it requires some low level hackery. I believe that the Windows XP power toys includes an option for it.
Fleet ATMs, before they got bought out by BofA, did exactly that. You could set a "quick cash" amount, too. It only worked on the fancy new Windows XP ATMs, though.
If the city in question is NYC, 30 miles can absolutely be half (or more) of the cost. A hole in the wall apartment in Manhattan can easily run you $3,000 a month. Outside of the city (maybe an hour commute, by train), and you can get a very nice place for $1500.
I think a Turkish coder using "Steve" as his nick would be totally awesome.
Absolutely correct. The US abandoned the gold standard sometime in the 19th century, if memory serves. I don't believe theres a country in the world with a gold (or silver) backed currency anymore. Certainly none of the major currencies are.
Perfect 10 already caters to the geek market. They have a booth at Dragoncon and presumably other geeky conventions.
Computer Science, the real thing, is very much based on math, but it's a *theoretical*, academic discipline, with little practical value (which is not to say that the results of CompSci R&D don't benefit practical software development). A real computer scientist isn't a good software developer any more than a physicist is a good EE.
However, lack of precise naming (not suprising, really, considerin the youth of the discipline) means that there's a vast variation in whats considered computer science. In many places it's essentially an algorithms class. In some it's essentially a tech course in Java. More commonly, it's a fairly technical but very practically oriented programming class. Thats why you get people who want to be software developers taking compsci but complaining about the math in one school, and compsci graduates from another who can't do anything except code bubble sort in a Java applet.
Now, it may very well be that (real) democracy isn't stable in the long run - certainly the US government has moved more and more toward the totalitarian mode over the last couple centuries - but the people who're upset over that aren't confused or misled about a need for secrecy. They're concerned with the fact that a government that nominally represents thier them is actively seeking to hide information and activities from them (again, not a poke at the Bush administration - this has been happing, and gradually increasing, for the entire history of the US).
Historical fact bears this out, too - there's been more than one case of government agencies refusing FOIA requests, or censoring them, not because they contained information critical to national security, but because they were embarressing, or contradicted "official" reports.
In terms of security at all, the *best* kind is the kind that works even when everyone knows what you're doing. Thats not always possible, of course, but your example of vacation time is a great one for exactly that reason. Suppose that some city had some large fraction of it's officers on vacation on the same week of every year. Thats hurtful to security whether it's published or not. Publishing it, in fact, is probably the best way to correct such a short sighted flaw in operating procedures. "Open and transparent" means that the public (remember, the people who're supposedly the important ones) can confirm that people who claim to be acting in thier interest are actually doing so.
And the what matters as well, especially when we're a supposedly moral nation. For example, many people are uncomfortable with the idea of torturing prisoners, or assassinating foreign politicians. Now, those actions may be neccesary to protect the US. Or they may not. But, supposedly, it's the *people* of the US who should determine what the line they will not cross is. Thats why we have laws and such about treatment of prisoners, and regulating our international operations. And history has shown that we need public oversight if our government is to be trusted to abide by those laws. Here I will poke specifically at the Bush administration, because, whether you support torturing prisoners for information or not, the Bush adminstration official policy is to do it via legal loopholing and word games, not via straightforward public policy.
Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that a democratic society is stable or even a good idea. Theres a lot of people who would disagree, even Americans (from the sound of it, even yourself). Humans are social animals and being led is very comforting to many people.
Supporting multiple compilers is harder than you'd think. Look at the code base & makefiles for pretty much *any* major cross platform project and you'll find all kinds of wierd hacks and little tweaks because such and such a compiler can't handle such and such a thing. Thats not even counting the compiler-specific extensions you might want to use for performance reasons. The state of C++ compilers has improved a lot in the last few years, but there's still a lot of older compilers (MSVC 6 being a shining example) and a lot of code to support on those compilers.
Blair should resign because he's taking this stonewall "I support my officers" line when its clear to anyone paying any attention that they freaked out and shot a suspect. We'll probably never know exactly why but I wouldn't be suprised if it was a revenge/anger type thing. Or hell, even a Pulp Fiction style bump. But it's abundently clear that there was a fuckup, and while I'd stop short of saying there was a "coverup", the immediate police response was half-truths and justifications. It'd be a lot more honest, now that it's being exposed, to be forthcoming and straightfoward.
Commercial software on Unix is even worse (amazingly).