But hey, what are you going to do, block yahoo.com?
Actually, yes. I also blocked aol.com, geocities.com, the entire.info and.biz domains (I used to get a suprising number of spams with too-cute.biz headers), msn.com and a couple of others I don't remember off the top of my head.
The last person I knew on AOL (my father, actually) left several years ago and I've never known anybody on any of the others. I really don't care if somebody who has one of those ISP's can send mail to me or not.
Done, actually... We've kept in touch since I left the original company.
And by being the "only" person, I never meant to imply that nobody else could figure it out. It's just on ugly, nasty, horrible kluge on top of 15 others on top of another 10 on top... You get the picture.
I think any half-way decent programmer would have eventually figured it out, but the company wanted changes done in such short order, it would have been next to impossible for somebody not familiar with the disgusting band-aids lying around.
I guess I could have spent a little more time explaining that... Calling them RPG programmers rather than old, washed-up, less-than-mediocre code-copiers was a slight on programmers world-wide. For that I apologize.
Perhaps a better description would be:
They were horrible RPG programmers who spent their days extolling the virtues of the mainframe computers and asking questions such as: "Why in the hell would
anybody choose to use SQL?"
When asked why they enjoyed BASIC so much, the typical reply was: "It has line numbers."
Afterall, RPG isn't a bad language. As long as you don't confuse your code and comment columns.;)
I had a situation where I was working on some horrible QuickBasic code for a POS( Piece of Shit/Point of Sale both!) system. At the time I started the job I was young, stupid and politically inept. As a result, I lost my job later due to some moves that were a result of my lack of politicking. I was correct, technically, but people don't respond well to "You're an idiot and here's how I can make you not an idiot."
Flash forward about 3 years. The main developer on the project has become extremely burned out, the company has been sold and is moving to Phoenix (where I moved to shortly after this disaster) and they're asking him to continue working on the code. This is 2000 or 2001 if memory serves...
He refuses and states that there are two people in the US - himself and me - that can maintain the code.
A little background on the "system" is probably in order before I go on. It's QuickBasic (still!) running on DOS and coded so that nothing but old Lantastic NE2000-coax cards will work. The company did not want to pay a $15 per seat license for a DOS WinSock to communicate with the NT server on site, so he had to write a TCP stack. Oh, the workstations are all diskless, too, so BOOTP had to be written in.
Add to this the fact that the original software was still in use and was written by RPG programmers who wanted to learn to program on PC's. The typical methodology in the program was to call a subroutine, use a
GOSUB
statement to jump to some other portion of the program and then use a
GOTO
to jump back to the line following the original subroutine call. Needless to say, the stack was totally hosed after a few minutes of running this type of code.
We couldn't rewrite the code because "it would be a waste of money" so we had to do neat things like write assembly code to give us a clean stack frame and put the old one back when we're done, shove it into a string and call it from within the subroutine. The really nice thing about this is that when you change the code or order of subroutines, you need to rewrite the assembly.
So, about 6 months to a year ago, the company calls me to ask if I'd be interested in working on their POS system. They're willing to offer me a whopping $15 an hour to work on it, too! I politely explain that, while I'd be interested in doing the work, an unsupported language on an operating system that you can't buy any more does nothing to further my skills. Furthermore, since I knew the state of the code and that they'd had other people working on it, there was no garuntee that I'd be able to do what they wanted. I wrapped up by explaining that, in order to guard against the potential damage of working on something that is useless in the industry, I'd have to charge $500 an hour with a minimum of 4 weeks (160 hours) billing. Payable in advance, of course.
We negotiated for a while and I did the work, getting my check up front.
When somebody wants something and you appear to be the only one who can deliver, explain that it's simply "a business decision" and take them for everything you possibly can.
Actually, at work I use FreeBSD because that's the OS a majority of our servers run; it keeps my development environment nice and in-sync.
I use WINE for my Office apps at work when I need to share between people, otherwise I use straight text or a Wiki.
At home, there's a different story. I have 5 areas that I simply can't do without:
Web Development
I use Macromedia software to develop about 90% of my web stuff because it makes life easier. Yeah, the HTML is usually shit, but it's much easier to clean up than to make it look pretty in my head before using a text editor.
Graphics
Photoshop. I've never been able to get it to run under WINE. Yeah, I know: "Learn the GIMP! GIMP rocks". Whatever. I like Photoshop, Photoshop does everything I want it to, I know the interface, I know the quirks and I'm sticking with it. Want to have me move over to the Gimp? Duplicate
everything in Photoshop exactly so I don't have to have 6 months in lost productivity while I learn the quirks of a new piece of software.
Music
I write music. Give me Fruityloops and Acid on Linux and I'll dump Windows for the music in a heartbeat. Until then, I'm stuck.
Games
I spend most of my time on the Windows box either playing games or writing music. If I need a HOWTO to get my game running, it's preventing me from having my downtime. I spend 65+ hours per week dealing with technical problems, driver issues on various *NIX systems, downtime, CISCO switches and assorted other bullshit. After all of that brain-drain, I want to put the CD in and play the game. Period. If it's more difficult than that to get my eye-candy running, I'm not interested.
Blogging
I use Userland's Radio to blog. Again, I can't seem to get it to run under WINE, so I'm stuck on Windows with it.
You'll never hear me argue that Windows is technically superior, crashes less often or is even visually more appealing than OSX, command-line Linux, FreeBSD, Plan9, VMS, CP/M or whatever OS you feel like esopusing the virtues of; it just does what I need for those five things. The software I like (at least in the music area, and possibly the games area) is available exclusively on Windows.
Until all of the above offer me the same functionality with the same ease of use, I'm going to use Windows for my personal stuff because it doesn't get in the way.
Yeah, I can't see why the rest of the world hates the west, can you? We turn war into a fuckin' video game, and relegate them to attacking us with swords while riding their camels.
Yeah, I know. The West is evil. Capitalism is horrid. Ad nauseaum...
I'm just comforted knowing that my side doesn't have to use camels and swords unless we really, really want to.
But please, for the love of God, don't listen to those moron college profs who say normalization is key.
This is a horrible approach to analyzing any problem. Normailized and denormalized data both have their place in today's RDBMS-driven world. Take any one of the large ERP packages available today: Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.
When working with specific data, for example Accounts Payable data, you really don't want to duplicate all of that customer data again and again and again for each row in the database, hence you normalize it. Yes, you pay a bit of a speed penalty when joining against the CUSTOMERS, CUSTOMER_ADDRESSES , INVOICES and INVOICE_LINES. In reality, that difference is never larger than a few seconds for large (read: 10 million+ record tables) when using a properly optimized (read: good index scheme) set of normalized tables.
RDBMS' are work very well when finding the 10 rows out of those 10 million that fit your search request. Where they puke is trying to manipulate 50% or more of the data contained in multiple tables: the Data Warehouse/Data Mart.
Those same Accounts Payable tables make reporting a real pain when they're normalized, so you go through a denormalization (or summarization) procedure to fill out your reporting infrastructure. Pre-summarize your data into a single row with multiple 'buckets' for every strange query procedure you want to view the numbers by. Duplicate data on every row and get those 10+ millon records per month down to a few hundred thousand at most.
If you have to write custom programs in C, Java, Perl or your language of choice in order to operate on an exported version of the data, so much the better; the database won't perform as well when acting on every row in the database as a program optimized to summarize it. Once that's done, load it back in.
By using this approach, you're able to use the best of both the normalized and denormalized approaches and satisfy both the data entry clerks -- because the data is entered quickly -- and the managers -- because they can get virtually any report in under 30 seconds.
Sweeping comments that suggest that one method or another is bad in all cases just screams: "Look at me! I don't know what I'm doing but I'm going to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, anyway!"
I think the only use for big drives is for pirating and warezing.
Bah. Hardcore gaming requires huge amounts of disk space. Pretty much all of the multi-CD games I have, I've ripped an ISO of and use Daemon tools to play them; it's just so much faster to play and easier to find. Plus, you don't wind up with scratched CDs.
I also record a lot of my own (original) music. Nothing like 24bit/96KHz audio to chew up disk space...
But high on the list next to warezing has got to be pr0n.
I thought I'd chime in on this since I used to do technical work for a company specializing in ESD control equipment. I worked some time on the production line doing actual assembly of products and the rest of my time was spent either troubleshooting returned equipment or helping to design new stuff. It was a fairly small company so most people did double duty this way.
Static electricity is odd in the fact that it isn't generated like "normal" electricity. Typically, at least one insulator, or something with a very high (100 Megaohm or more) resistance, is required to generate a static charge. A person walking across the room can, in moderately dry climates, raise the body's electrostatic potential to several tens of thousands of volts very easily; in Arizona I've charged myself up to 90,000 or so volts walking across the carpet to change CD playing in my stereo. Charges like these are the types that typically kill a device.
By far, the worst type of damage is the "walking wounded" scenario. Walking around on a tile or concrete floor with cotton cotton pants can raise the static voltage 30 to 100 volts, depending on humidity and the conductivity of the floor; concrete conducts much better than most tiles because of the water content. When you think about the super-small dimensions of a typical transistor gate in electonic devices, it's not hard to picture the damage done. In 1992, we were seeing damage caused by 20 or so volts of static. It takes something like 1800 volts to bridge an air gap of an inch. The damage caused to semiconductors occurs at much smaller potentials.
Static electricity kills devices by actually blowing portions of the semiconductor away when an arc occurs. I can see some kind of protection circuit on a piece of silicon working once, but how long does it take to totally destroy the device? The most effective way to protect from static is by grounding the device and dissipating static charge from handling via a resistive coupling to the earth to prevent the fatal arcs.
I don't think you're going to see huge increases in yields from static dissipation devices, but if you keep one or two customers because a wrist-strap or mat prevented the degradation of a chip, it sounds like a win to me.
3 phase? Wow. I knew the voltage was higher, but I thought consumer-level power was single phase.
I was working for a company making ionizers for electronic assembly and we had several customers in the UK. All of the transformers were direct swaps from 110/12 to 220/12 for the circuitry and everything worked fine.
If we're talking about delivering 3 phases to the transformers and delivering single phase to the homes, that makes more sense to me. I would think it'd still should work as long as the coupling circuitry is matched correctly.
Damn, it's been so long since I've dealt with even single-phase AC power, I'm struggling to remember all of the ins and outs.
I'll go through my Analog Circuits & Alternating Current Theory books tonight and see what I can dig up.
Although, the boss bought a couple of cases of Caffine Free(!!!) Mountain Dew last week. The can will pass a casual inspection as the real deal.
Can somebody at Pepsi tell me who's fucking sick idea of a joke Caffine Free Mountain Dew is? I almost died from the caffine-withdrawl-headache brought on by the essential missing component...
Why should anyone be surprised that the whitehouse lied to expand its powers.
I'm not supprised, but that's because it's not the administration you're accusing. More on that in a moment.
This is the same administration that tried to create the Office of Strategic Information whose mission in life was to lie to our allies and to the media in an effort to fight terrorism.
I see... Our allies like Saudi Arabi and Egypt? Those same allies who send us news reports specifically tailored to show them in a good light while simultaneously decrying America as a cespool of evil in their own government-sponsored press?
An enemy who can pose as an ally can do far more damage than one who is vocally opposed.
And people wonder why the world is reluctant to trust the US.
Actually, I don't wonder; the reasons are redily apparent if you look hard enough. We're the richest country in the world and those with less tend to be distrustful of those with more. One just has to look at the growin Have vs. Have-nots in American society to see this interaction at work.
Nevermind that a large majority of Those Who Have worked their collective asses off to get where they are, and work even harder to stay where they are. But that's another discussion, irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
This is also the same administration that has given you secret military tribunals with little or no constitutional protections for the accused.
How, exactly, should we extend our Constitution to include those outside of our borders? It's the Constitution of the United States of America, not the Constitution of Whoever Happens To Want To Use It.
We were at war in Afghanastan (sorry for the spelling), and rules and trials of war are completely different than those applied to American citizens.
Yes, John Walker is an American citizen. Notice the different direction the case moved once the Judicial branch came to an agreement on his legal status. He was an enemy combatant, as the detainees in Cuba are, but he's also a citizen. This moves him from war tribunals into Federal court for treasonous actions.
This is the same administration that imprisons individuals in secret for indefinite periods of time with no evidence or charges ever presented.
Not sure to whom you're referring here. People who were taken into custody shortly after September 11th, I'm assuming.
Yep, that overstepped the bounds set forth by our Constitution. This is a legitimate complaint.
Do you actually believe that "Dubya" walked into the FBI offices and said, "Hey, let's arrest a whole bunch 'a people and not tell them why?"
This is the same administration that wants to create a roaming death squad that would travel the globe murdering 'enemies' of the US.
Pardon me? "Roaming death squads"? Where did this come from?
This is the same administration that wants a return to the days of the J. Edgar Hoover's FBI abuses of private citizens and the McCarthy era witch hunts. (Bush's daddy used the FBI to harass groups protesting his central american policies.)
I see. Somebody proposes something you don't agree with and, immediately, it's "a return to the days of J. Edgar Hoover" and "McCarthy era witch hunts." Easiest way to spot a shaky foundation is the level of insults hurled instead of valid points.
Bush is quite good at wrapping himself in the flag and preaching the virtues of freedom, but the fact is he is the biggest threat to freedom and to the security of this country that has come along in our the 236 year history. His lies, double dealing, and school-yard-bully mentality is alienating even our most supportive allies and generating plenty of reasons why someone would want to launch a terrorist attack against the US.
Valid examples please? Or is this just another "terrorists are people, too" argument?
The sooner we're get him out of office, the safer we'll be.
And you'd probably like Clinton back? Remember, he's the one who was handed the keys to grabbing Osama bin Laden in the late nineties and responded "We don't have any reason to arrest him." This was, of course, after bin Laden's initial bombing of the World Trade Centers; it was known shortly after the attack his organization was responsible.
As to why it doesn't suprise me that the administration was doing this? The dates that all 75(!) of the abuses were filed were within the reign of the Clinton administration. The latest one was sometime in 2000. Bush didn't take office until 2001 and would have absolutely no way to affect policy before his swearing in.
The real suprise here isn't that the Justice Department was abusing it's powers, nor the fact that it was the Clinton administration that actually was the problem.
The secondary suprise is that a newspaper can look at a set of facts and point to the opposite direction. In this case, I suggest you read the
Los Angeles Times article (free registration and all that); it's close to the same sort of "Bush is bad" article, but it does disclose in the last paragraph that the violations happened before Bush's watch and Ashcroft was actually praised for doing something about it shortly after taking office.
The real suprise, however, comes in realizing that the same person who so fanatically distrusts the current administration would so blindly trust a media outlet.
<disclaimer type="no-flame">I'm a resident of the US. Since the poster didn't mention what country this is going to be in, I'm assuming that it'll be the US as well. Typical IANAL rules apply.</disclaimer>
I'm not sure I follow you on what this "Gaming Center" does. Do you rent out space and everybody brings in their own computers, software and stuff or do you actually have the computers, games and infrastructure and you rent time playing said games?
If it's the former, other than normal marketing and liability/insurance issues, I don't really see any problems.
However, if you're renting time using the games, you might run into some legal issues. I seem to remember several Internet Cafe-type establishments being shut down because they were reselling game time. This might have been because they only had one copy, or there might have been some verbage in the EULA that prohibited renting, selling or otherwise publicly performing with the software. Be sure to get your lawyers to check this out.
Regardless of which way you're going, make sure you have comfortable, adjustable height chairs, geek-friendly lighting (no flourescent light fixtures shining right onto monitors), a snack bar with the usual staples (Junk & Jolt/Mt. Dew), abundant power (not the whole room running off of two breakers), and a good network infrastructure.
Personally, on the electrical and network side, I'd build the gaming stations with 8 seats, an 8-port, 100 megabit switch for each and at least a 15 amp breaker for every 4 stations. Each station should have a nice surge protector molded in where with a couple of extra outlets for the "wall wart" transformers common with speakers.
Sounds like an interesting idea, either way. I'd really like to know when and where it'll be opening.
I just read something on I, Cringely that just might do the trick. It was in one of my Slashboxes this week.
It's a nice little technology called HomePlug and it might just be what you're looking for. In a nutshell, it's several tens of megabits over electrical copper and works on one side of the transformer. If the buildings are anything like a modern set of tract homes, they probably share a transformer. Simply use these babies and you get a nice little network via the already installed electrical lines.
Ok, so after installing unzip on my box and extracting the box, the source code is there. It did seem that all of the original copyright notices were removed from the source, though.
Must look before leaping.
So, maybe it strictly complies with the GPL, but I do believe that it violates US Copyright law almost certainly qualifies as plagiarism. Usual non-lawyler disclaimers apply.
Free as in freedom means just that, you are free to use the code, ridistribute, repackage, and sell, so lomng as you adhere to the GPL. Freedom means you are free to do something that the original autjors might object to as easiy as anything else.
My emphasis is added there.
I agree with you about the whole spyware thing; if you want to distribute a GPL app in binary form with Spyware, be my guest.
The problem come in when they release the application. The GPL allows you to derrive works from the code, redistribute, package, sell, eat for dinner or wipe your ass with it; there's also a little clause that requires you to make include (or at least make available) the changes to the application.
OSS prompts us toward code that is most fit for a purpose, this example helps illustrate that point IMO
I would agree with you had they actually followed the full terms of the GPL. Instead, they found an application (with source) that they liked, tweaked the look, released it and sat back and said "Look what we did!"
Definately not an example I'd like to use for illustrating GPL/Open Source methodologies.
I know it's sick, but I had this name from a few years ago when we had a Superbowl party for the code crew at a jobsite...
There's quite a bit of prep time involved between roasting the peppers and cooking the meat, but it's well worth the "Oh my God! I didn't know you could cook!" that you'll get when you serve it.
Ingredients
(1) 16 oz can of Refried Beans
(1) 8 to 10 oz can of peeled, diced tomatoes.
(1) 16 oz package of sour cream
(1) Block of sharp Cheddar Cheese
(1) Block of Monterey Jack or Pepper Jack cheese
(1) Pound of ground beef
(1) Package of Taco Seasonings
(2) cans of diced Ortega Chili
(3) medium Avocados OR 8 oz of Guacamole
(1) Medium green bell pepper
(1) Medium yellow bell pepper
(1) Medium red bell pepper
(1) 8 oz. can sliced black olives
(1) 4 oz. can sliced jalapeno peppers
(1) package of shredded lettuce
(1) medium white or Vidalia onion
Cooking instructions
Ground Beef
Cook the ground beef according to the instructions on your Taco Seasoning packet.
Bell Peppers
In order for the best taste, the bell peppers need to be roasted.
Using either an open flame (gas grill, gas stove) or the oven (on the highest setting, normally "Broil"), roast the bell peppers until the skin is blistered and black. Once blackened, place the peppers into a brown paper bag to cool - about 10 to 30 minutes.
Remove the charred skin from the peppers by holding it under cold, running tap water and peeling the chard skin away. Keep the pepper under the water, it will be hot inside! The meat should be moist, tender and slightly sweet-smelling.
Open the pepper under the water, remove the seeds and veins, dice into small pieces, and set aside on a few (read: 10 or so) paper towels to dry.
Onions
You can cook or not cook the onions as you decide. If you cook them, brown them in a little butter, margerine or olive oil until they're slightly translucent. Drain and set aside.
Preparation
Using the back of a large spoon, spread a smooth, even layer of the refried beans in the bottom of a large ( 10"x15" works well) baking pan.
Next, drain the juice from the tomatoes and spread them in an even layer over the beans.
Spread the sour cream over the tomatoes.
Sprinkle the ground beef evenly over the sour cream.
Put the jalapenos in an even layer over the ground beef.
Place the onions over the jalapenos.
Peel and dice the avacados and scatter them evenly over the onions. If using guacamole instead, spread a layer similarly to the sour cream
Drain and scatter the black olives over the avacado layer evenly.
Drain and scatter the diced ortega chilis over the olives.
Place a very thin layer of lettuce over the Ortegas. It's very important not to put too much lettuce; we're not making a salad.
Grate the Cheddar and Jack cheeses and spread over the top of the lettuce, making sure that the cheese is mixed enough to give a multi-color appearance. For a little different effect, you could place the Jack and Cheddar on different halves of the dish.
Mix the three colors of the bell peppers and scatter over the top of the cheese. The green and red peppers will mostly make it look nice, while the yellow peppers (and, to a lesser extent, the red) will add a distinct peppery-sweetness to the dish.
Serving
Grab your favorite bag of corn tortilla chips, a serving spoon and dig in!
For something different, you can use warmed flour fajita tortillas (the small ones) instead of, or as a suppliment to, the corn chips.
Serve with your favorite soft drink, beer, Margaritas or or Tequila Shooters.
As has been mentioned before, Daemon Tools is probably what you're looking for.
Daemon Tools allows you to mount a 1 to 1 copy of a CD (an ISO image, not a file copy) as a virtual CD.
It also emulates most (if not all) of the current "copy protection" schemes in use.
Note that you must keep the ISO around if you want to continue to use the CD. With the files ranging in size from 50 or so Meg to 700 Meg or more, this can quickly eat up space. With disk prices being as cheap as they are, this isn't as big of a problem as it was in years past.
You'll also need a good duplication package for that 1 to 1 copy mentioned above. I have had very limited success with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and no success at all with Veritas' CD Pro software.
The one package I've yet to have a problem with is CloneCD. This product also seems to be able to copy most "copy protected" discs with the schemes intact on the duplicate; a nice bonus.
Daemon Tools is fairly intuitive for the stuff it's doing and it's also the only software I've used that loaded a Windows VXD and didn't require a reboot after doing it. It is not, however, 4-year-old intuitive, so you'll probably have to either mount the ISO images as separate drive letters or mount them for your kid yourself.
That's odd, because I use Macs and I know dozens of other Mac users. I've never experienced anything like you mentioned, even when in the company of Mac and PC users.
You probably wouldn't experience it personally, being a Mac user.
As for the PC users, ask them how the viewed the discussions. You might be suprised.
I'm not trying to refute your expreiences; we've both just got a very small sample pool for our experiences. If I had more experiences closer to yours, I'd probably be singing a different tune.
I do have a solution for you, though. If you do become a Mac user, and least the rabid fanatics will stop annoying you.
Heh. Maybe, but I'd still have PC's in addition to the Mac; there would still be pleanty of fuel for the evangelical fires.
Sure, the hard-core Mac evangelists can get overly emotional, but then again you just don't see PC people getting excited about what they can do with their computers the way Mac people do...
Sure, I've seen PC users get excited about what they can do with their machine; something like "Cool, I can get Quake running at 346 frames per second on my PC."
I've even seen PC enthusiasts, myself included, compliment somebody on their Mac. The transparent acrylic cases rock. And PC people who mod their cases often use the stylishness of Mac's as inspiration. Comments from the Mac guys at work regarding my case mods: "No matter what you do to the case, it's still a piece of shit PC."
Yet I've never encountered a PC user who would scream, yell, make outrageous statements ( the "worse than a racist" comment above) or the like because a person uses a Mac instead of a PC.
Let's try to have a rational discussion about this, please. Nothing in recent memory has touched off Holy-war-like flames as the PC/Mac debate.
There are three reasons I haven't used Mac's in the past:
It's been too expensive for me.
I got really heavy into computers in the late eighties; the Mac had already come out and the PC arena domination by IBM was breaking hard.
I was making $8 an hour and had a social life. Saving the $3000 to buy a Mac wasn't possible or desirable for me. My main reason for using a computer was gaming; Mac didn't have the games I wanted at the time. I also could buy the PC a piece at a time, where that wasn't (and still isn't) a possiblity with the Mac. It's much easier for a 16 year old to spend $300 for something than it is to save $3000 for another.
My work prevents it
I develop software for a living. Without exception, my clients use PC's and Sun's. The tools I use in developing Oracle stuff just aren't available. If I don't have the software to do what I want, I won't use the system. Period.
Claiming that people like me switching platforms would cause the software to appear doesn't work. I'm not an evangelist, I'm a consultant. If I sit around and wait for the software to magically appear on another platform, I don't eat.
Which brings me to my third reason...
Mac Evangelists
With two exceptions, every Mac user I've encountered has preached at me with the furvor of a Deep-South Bible Thumper. I know that not all Mac users are this fanatical, but 95% of the encounters I've had have been.
I've actually been told, while in a "discussion" with one of the above-mentioned users, that my points were "more offensive than being criticized by a racist". In my experiences, this is the norm, not the exception. I don't care what the topic is, if you accuse me of being worse than a racist when I debate your points, you look like an asshole.
As long as I encounter this type of person a majority of the time when trying to discuss the merits and disadvantages of a platform, I have no interest in discussing it any more. Furthermore, all of the (possibly valid) arguments made on the Mac's behalf are now in the category of
Finally...
All that being said, OSX looks really nice. The compatibility isn't as much of an issue now that it's based on a BSD operating system and I can run real Unix apps on it. I haven't heard any complaints about the Linux ABI layer not working, so maybe my Oracle stuff will run under OSX, as well as a host of other applications that aren't available on the Mac.
I'm contemplating buying an iBook as my next laptop because of these reasons. Had I been able to have a rational discussion with somebody about the pros and cons of the system, I'd might just be a Mac user today.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that the horny.kids.us would be pointing to the naked.kids.us, not the other way around...
Actually, yes. I also blocked aol.com, geocities.com, the entire .info and .biz domains (I used to get a suprising number of spams with too-cute.biz headers), msn.com and a couple of others I don't remember off the top of my head.
The last person I knew on AOL (my father, actually) left several years ago and I've never known anybody on any of the others. I really don't care if somebody who has one of those ISP's can send mail to me or not.
And by being the "only" person, I never meant to imply that nobody else could figure it out. It's just on ugly, nasty, horrible kluge on top of 15 others on top of another 10 on top... You get the picture.
I think any half-way decent programmer would have eventually figured it out, but the company wanted changes done in such short order, it would have been next to impossible for somebody not familiar with the disgusting band-aids lying around.
I guess I could have spent a little more time explaining that... Calling them RPG programmers rather than old, washed-up, less-than-mediocre code-copiers was a slight on programmers world-wide. For that I apologize.
Perhaps a better description would be:
Afterall, RPG isn't a bad language. As long as you don't confuse your code and comment columns. ;)
I had a situation where I was working on some horrible QuickBasic code for a POS( Piece of Shit/Point of Sale both!) system. At the time I started the job I was young, stupid and politically inept. As a result, I lost my job later due to some moves that were a result of my lack of politicking. I was correct, technically, but people don't respond well to "You're an idiot and here's how I can make you not an idiot."
Flash forward about 3 years. The main developer on the project has become extremely burned out, the company has been sold and is moving to Phoenix (where I moved to shortly after this disaster) and they're asking him to continue working on the code. This is 2000 or 2001 if memory serves...
He refuses and states that there are two people in the US - himself and me - that can maintain the code.
A little background on the "system" is probably in order before I go on. It's QuickBasic (still!) running on DOS and coded so that nothing but old Lantastic NE2000-coax cards will work. The company did not want to pay a $15 per seat license for a DOS WinSock to communicate with the NT server on site, so he had to write a TCP stack. Oh, the workstations are all diskless, too, so BOOTP had to be written in.
Add to this the fact that the original software was still in use and was written by RPG programmers who wanted to learn to program on PC's. The typical methodology in the program was to call a subroutine, use a
statement to jump to some other portion of the program and then use a to jump back to the line following the original subroutine call. Needless to say, the stack was totally hosed after a few minutes of running this type of code.We couldn't rewrite the code because "it would be a waste of money" so we had to do neat things like write assembly code to give us a clean stack frame and put the old one back when we're done, shove it into a string and call it from within the subroutine. The really nice thing about this is that when you change the code or order of subroutines, you need to rewrite the assembly.
So, about 6 months to a year ago, the company calls me to ask if I'd be interested in working on their POS system. They're willing to offer me a whopping $15 an hour to work on it, too! I politely explain that, while I'd be interested in doing the work, an unsupported language on an operating system that you can't buy any more does nothing to further my skills. Furthermore, since I knew the state of the code and that they'd had other people working on it, there was no garuntee that I'd be able to do what they wanted. I wrapped up by explaining that, in order to guard against the potential damage of working on something that is useless in the industry, I'd have to charge $500 an hour with a minimum of 4 weeks (160 hours) billing. Payable in advance, of course.
We negotiated for a while and I did the work, getting my check up front.
When somebody wants something and you appear to be the only one who can deliver, explain that it's simply "a business decision" and take them for everything you possibly can.
I use WINE for my Office apps at work when I need to share between people, otherwise I use straight text or a Wiki.
At home, there's a different story. I have 5 areas that I simply can't do without:
Web Development
Graphics Music Games BloggingYou'll never hear me argue that Windows is technically superior, crashes less often or is even visually more appealing than OSX, command-line Linux, FreeBSD, Plan9, VMS, CP/M or whatever OS you feel like esopusing the virtues of; it just does what I need for those five things. The software I like (at least in the music area, and possibly the games area) is available exclusively on Windows.
Until all of the above offer me the same functionality with the same ease of use, I'm going to use Windows for my personal stuff because it doesn't get in the way.
Yeah, I know. The West is evil. Capitalism is horrid. Ad nauseaum...
I'm just comforted knowing that my side doesn't have to use camels and swords unless we really, really want to.
Jeez... The guy can build a frigging 747 simulator in his house but he can't resist using... The BLINK tag! ...
This is a horrible approach to analyzing any problem. Normailized and denormalized data both have their place in today's RDBMS-driven world. Take any one of the large ERP packages available today: Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.
When working with specific data, for example Accounts Payable data, you really don't want to duplicate all of that customer data again and again and again for each row in the database, hence you normalize it. Yes, you pay a bit of a speed penalty when joining against the CUSTOMERS, CUSTOMER_ADDRESSES , INVOICES and INVOICE_LINES. In reality, that difference is never larger than a few seconds for large (read: 10 million+ record tables) when using a properly optimized (read: good index scheme) set of normalized tables.
RDBMS' are work very well when finding the 10 rows out of those 10 million that fit your search request. Where they puke is trying to manipulate 50% or more of the data contained in multiple tables: the Data Warehouse/Data Mart.
Those same Accounts Payable tables make reporting a real pain when they're normalized, so you go through a denormalization (or summarization) procedure to fill out your reporting infrastructure. Pre-summarize your data into a single row with multiple 'buckets' for every strange query procedure you want to view the numbers by. Duplicate data on every row and get those 10+ millon records per month down to a few hundred thousand at most.
If you have to write custom programs in C, Java, Perl or your language of choice in order to operate on an exported version of the data, so much the better; the database won't perform as well when acting on every row in the database as a program optimized to summarize it. Once that's done, load it back in.
By using this approach, you're able to use the best of both the normalized and denormalized approaches and satisfy both the data entry clerks -- because the data is entered quickly -- and the managers -- because they can get virtually any report in under 30 seconds.
Sweeping comments that suggest that one method or another is bad in all cases just screams: "Look at me! I don't know what I'm doing but I'm going to tell you that what you're doing is wrong, anyway!"
Static electricity is odd in the fact that it isn't generated like "normal" electricity. Typically, at least one insulator, or something with a very high (100 Megaohm or more) resistance, is required to generate a static charge. A person walking across the room can, in moderately dry climates, raise the body's electrostatic potential to several tens of thousands of volts very easily; in Arizona I've charged myself up to 90,000 or so volts walking across the carpet to change CD playing in my stereo. Charges like these are the types that typically kill a device.
By far, the worst type of damage is the "walking wounded" scenario. Walking around on a tile or concrete floor with cotton cotton pants can raise the static voltage 30 to 100 volts, depending on humidity and the conductivity of the floor; concrete conducts much better than most tiles because of the water content. When you think about the super-small dimensions of a typical transistor gate in electonic devices, it's not hard to picture the damage done. In 1992, we were seeing damage caused by 20 or so volts of static. It takes something like 1800 volts to bridge an air gap of an inch. The damage caused to semiconductors occurs at much smaller potentials.
Static electricity kills devices by actually blowing portions of the semiconductor away when an arc occurs. I can see some kind of protection circuit on a piece of silicon working once, but how long does it take to totally destroy the device? The most effective way to protect from static is by grounding the device and dissipating static charge from handling via a resistive coupling to the earth to prevent the fatal arcs.
I don't think you're going to see huge increases in yields from static dissipation devices, but if you keep one or two customers because a wrist-strap or mat prevented the degradation of a chip, it sounds like a win to me.
I was working for a company making ionizers for electronic assembly and we had several customers in the UK. All of the transformers were direct swaps from 110/12 to 220/12 for the circuitry and everything worked fine.
If we're talking about delivering 3 phases to the transformers and delivering single phase to the homes, that makes more sense to me. I would think it'd still should work as long as the coupling circuitry is matched correctly.
Damn, it's been so long since I've dealt with even single-phase AC power, I'm struggling to remember all of the ins and outs.
I'll go through my Analog Circuits & Alternating Current Theory books tonight and see what I can dig up.
Really.
Although, the boss bought a couple of cases of Caffine Free(!!!) Mountain Dew last week. The can will pass a casual inspection as the real deal.
Can somebody at Pepsi tell me who's fucking sick idea of a joke Caffine Free Mountain Dew is? I almost died from the caffine-withdrawl-headache brought on by the essential missing component...
I'm not supprised, but that's because it's not the administration you're accusing. More on that in a moment.
This is the same administration that tried to create the Office of Strategic Information whose mission in life was to lie to our allies and to the media in an effort to fight terrorism.
I see... Our allies like Saudi Arabi and Egypt? Those same allies who send us news reports specifically tailored to show them in a good light while simultaneously decrying America as a cespool of evil in their own government-sponsored press?
An enemy who can pose as an ally can do far more damage than one who is vocally opposed.
And people wonder why the world is reluctant to trust the US.
Actually, I don't wonder; the reasons are redily apparent if you look hard enough. We're the richest country in the world and those with less tend to be distrustful of those with more. One just has to look at the growin Have vs. Have-nots in American society to see this interaction at work.
Nevermind that a large majority of Those Who Have worked their collective asses off to get where they are, and work even harder to stay where they are. But that's another discussion, irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
This is also the same administration that has given you secret military tribunals with little or no constitutional protections for the accused.
How, exactly, should we extend our Constitution to include those outside of our borders? It's the Constitution of the United States of America, not the Constitution of Whoever Happens To Want To Use It.
We were at war in Afghanastan (sorry for the spelling), and rules and trials of war are completely different than those applied to American citizens.
Yes, John Walker is an American citizen. Notice the different direction the case moved once the Judicial branch came to an agreement on his legal status. He was an enemy combatant, as the detainees in Cuba are, but he's also a citizen. This moves him from war tribunals into Federal court for treasonous actions.
This is the same administration that imprisons individuals in secret for indefinite periods of time with no evidence or charges ever presented.
Not sure to whom you're referring here. People who were taken into custody shortly after September 11th, I'm assuming.
Yep, that overstepped the bounds set forth by our Constitution. This is a legitimate complaint.
Do you actually believe that "Dubya" walked into the FBI offices and said, "Hey, let's arrest a whole bunch 'a people and not tell them why?"
This is the same administration that wants to create a roaming death squad that would travel the globe murdering 'enemies' of the US.
Pardon me? "Roaming death squads"? Where did this come from?
This is the same administration that wants a return to the days of the J. Edgar Hoover's FBI abuses of private citizens and the McCarthy era witch hunts. (Bush's daddy used the FBI to harass groups protesting his central american policies.)
I see. Somebody proposes something you don't agree with and, immediately, it's "a return to the days of J. Edgar Hoover" and "McCarthy era witch hunts." Easiest way to spot a shaky foundation is the level of insults hurled instead of valid points.
Bush is quite good at wrapping himself in the flag and preaching the virtues of freedom, but the fact is he is the biggest threat to freedom and to the security of this country that has come along in our the 236 year history. His lies, double dealing, and school-yard-bully mentality is alienating even our most supportive allies and generating plenty of reasons why someone would want to launch a terrorist attack against the US.
Valid examples please? Or is this just another "terrorists are people, too" argument?
The sooner we're get him out of office, the safer we'll be.
And you'd probably like Clinton back? Remember, he's the one who was handed the keys to grabbing Osama bin Laden in the late nineties and responded "We don't have any reason to arrest him." This was, of course, after bin Laden's initial bombing of the World Trade Centers; it was known shortly after the attack his organization was responsible.
As to why it doesn't suprise me that the administration was doing this? The dates that all 75(!) of the abuses were filed were within the reign of the Clinton administration. The latest one was sometime in 2000. Bush didn't take office until 2001 and would have absolutely no way to affect policy before his swearing in.
The real suprise here isn't that the Justice Department was abusing it's powers, nor the fact that it was the Clinton administration that actually was the problem.
The secondary suprise is that a newspaper can look at a set of facts and point to the opposite direction. In this case, I suggest you read the Los Angeles Times article (free registration and all that); it's close to the same sort of "Bush is bad" article, but it does disclose in the last paragraph that the violations happened before Bush's watch and Ashcroft was actually praised for doing something about it shortly after taking office.
The real suprise, however, comes in realizing that the same person who so fanatically distrusts the current administration would so blindly trust a media outlet.
I'm not sure I follow you on what this "Gaming Center" does. Do you rent out space and everybody brings in their own computers, software and stuff or do you actually have the computers, games and infrastructure and you rent time playing said games?
If it's the former, other than normal marketing and liability/insurance issues, I don't really see any problems.
However, if you're renting time using the games, you might run into some legal issues. I seem to remember several Internet Cafe-type establishments being shut down because they were reselling game time. This might have been because they only had one copy, or there might have been some verbage in the EULA that prohibited renting, selling or otherwise publicly performing with the software. Be sure to get your lawyers to check this out.
Regardless of which way you're going, make sure you have comfortable, adjustable height chairs, geek-friendly lighting (no flourescent light fixtures shining right onto monitors), a snack bar with the usual staples (Junk & Jolt/Mt. Dew), abundant power (not the whole room running off of two breakers), and a good network infrastructure.
Personally, on the electrical and network side, I'd build the gaming stations with 8 seats, an 8-port, 100 megabit switch for each and at least a 15 amp breaker for every 4 stations. Each station should have a nice surge protector molded in where with a couple of extra outlets for the "wall wart" transformers common with speakers.
Sounds like an interesting idea, either way. I'd really like to know when and where it'll be opening.
It's a nice little technology called HomePlug and it might just be what you're looking for. In a nutshell, it's several tens of megabits over electrical copper and works on one side of the transformer. If the buildings are anything like a modern set of tract homes, they probably share a transformer. Simply use these babies and you get a nice little network via the already installed electrical lines.
Good luck!
Must look before leaping.
So, maybe it strictly complies with the GPL, but I do believe that it violates US Copyright law almost certainly qualifies as plagiarism. Usual non-lawyler disclaimers apply.
I agree with you about the whole spyware thing; if you want to distribute a GPL app in binary form with Spyware, be my guest.
The problem come in when they release the application. The GPL allows you to derrive works from the code, redistribute, package, sell, eat for dinner or wipe your ass with it; there's also a little clause that requires you to make include (or at least make available) the changes to the application.
I would agree with you had they actually followed the full terms of the GPL. Instead, they found an application (with source) that they liked, tweaked the look, released it and sat back and said "Look what we did!"Definately not an example I'd like to use for illustrating GPL/Open Source methodologies.
I'd shave my eyebrows and fart in a minor key...
There's quite a bit of prep time involved between roasting the peppers and cooking the meat, but it's well worth the "Oh my God! I didn't know you could cook!" that you'll get when you serve it.
Ingredients
Cooking instructions Preparation
Serving
Daemon Tools allows you to mount a 1 to 1 copy of a CD (an ISO image, not a file copy) as a virtual CD. It also emulates most (if not all) of the current "copy protection" schemes in use.
Note that you must keep the ISO around if you want to continue to use the CD. With the files ranging in size from 50 or so Meg to 700 Meg or more, this can quickly eat up space. With disk prices being as cheap as they are, this isn't as big of a problem as it was in years past.
You'll also need a good duplication package for that 1 to 1 copy mentioned above. I have had very limited success with Adaptec's Easy CD Creator and no success at all with Veritas' CD Pro software.
The one package I've yet to have a problem with is CloneCD. This product also seems to be able to copy most "copy protected" discs with the schemes intact on the duplicate; a nice bonus.
Daemon Tools is fairly intuitive for the stuff it's doing and it's also the only software I've used that loaded a Windows VXD and didn't require a reboot after doing it. It is not, however, 4-year-old intuitive, so you'll probably have to either mount the ISO images as separate drive letters or mount them for your kid yourself.
Hope that helps.
As for the PC users, ask them how the viewed the discussions. You might be suprised.
I'm not trying to refute your expreiences; we've both just got a very small sample pool for our experiences. If I had more experiences closer to yours, I'd probably be singing a different tune.
Heh. Maybe, but I'd still have PC's in addition to the Mac; there would still be pleanty of fuel for the evangelical fires.There are three reasons I haven't used Mac's in the past:
It's been too expensive for me.
I got really heavy into computers in the late eighties; the Mac had already come out and the PC arena domination by IBM was breaking hard.
I was making $8 an hour and had a social life. Saving the $3000 to buy a Mac wasn't possible or desirable for me. My main reason for using a computer was gaming; Mac didn't have the games I wanted at the time. I also could buy the PC a piece at a time, where that wasn't (and still isn't) a possiblity with the Mac. It's much easier for a 16 year old to spend $300 for something than it is to save $3000 for another.
My work prevents it
I develop software for a living. Without exception, my clients use PC's and Sun's. The tools I use in developing Oracle stuff just aren't available. If I don't have the software to do what I want, I won't use the system. Period.
Claiming that people like me switching platforms would cause the software to appear doesn't work. I'm not an evangelist, I'm a consultant. If I sit around and wait for the software to magically appear on another platform, I don't eat.
Which brings me to my third reason...
Mac Evangelists
With two exceptions, every Mac user I've encountered has preached at me with the furvor of a Deep-South Bible Thumper. I know that not all Mac users are this fanatical, but 95% of the encounters I've had have been.
I've actually been told, while in a "discussion" with one of the above-mentioned users, that my points were "more offensive than being criticized by a racist". In my experiences, this is the norm, not the exception. I don't care what the topic is, if you accuse me of being worse than a racist when I debate your points, you look like an asshole.
As long as I encounter this type of person a majority of the time when trying to discuss the merits and disadvantages of a platform, I have no interest in discussing it any more. Furthermore, all of the (possibly valid) arguments made on the Mac's behalf are now in the category of
Finally...
All that being said, OSX looks really nice. The compatibility isn't as much of an issue now that it's based on a BSD operating system and I can run real Unix apps on it. I haven't heard any complaints about the Linux ABI layer not working, so maybe my Oracle stuff will run under OSX, as well as a host of other applications that aren't available on the Mac.
I'm contemplating buying an iBook as my next laptop because of these reasons. Had I been able to have a rational discussion with somebody about the pros and cons of the system, I'd might just be a Mac user today.