Wow, every time I see a punch card I'm simply amazed that people used to do anything useful with them.. I find punch cards more amazing that any new technology.
I tried to write a program using punch cards once, but instead of a nice sort routine, I accidentally voted for Pat Buchannen.
Re:It is not a problem with RPM
on
Is RPM Doomed?
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· Score: 2
"So, why installing an RPM is a more hassle that installing a DEB?"
Is it? Or is it that RPMs are just more widely used?
Here's an example, one of my coworkers was installing Debian 3.0 Untested on a box.. for some reason, Debian did NOT add the untested paths to apt-get's config files. Therefore, whenever he tried to install new software, it wouldn't get the proper debs for his system.. there were ludicrous things like not being able to install mysql-client because it relies on perl5.0.5 (he had 5.6 installed) As far as I know, 5.6 is backwards compatible with 5.0.5. But Debian still insisted that 5.6 wasn't good enough and wanted to uninstall it and install 5.0.5
Of course this nightmare was all fixed when we realized that it wasn't getting the untested packages but rather the stable packages.
Now you can say blah blah blah that's why it's untested.. but if you actually looked at my example, you'd see that mysql-client from STABLE requires perl5.0.5, not perl5 or above.. but a specific version.
"When you go out on a job interview, you will most likely be given a marker and white board and told to code something."
Most likely? I doubt it. Just because you may have done it doesn't mean everyone does. I've never had to write code on a whiteboard in a job interview. I *have* had them give me a program spec and say "go home, make this work, and email it to me" That was even better in my opinion.. there wasn't a time limit, so they can judge you on how fast you work when there's no motivating deadlines, and the project can be a lot more complex than "write a 5 line routine on a whiteboard"
Now I'm the one doing the hiring, and that's exactly what I do.
"I agree that the X bug is very serious (and I'm particularly worried about it because Debian doesn't even have the newest XFree86 revision in it, so where am I going to get the patch for this)"
Actually, from what I've been able to gather, this only affects the NEWEST version of XFree (4.2), users with 4.1 aren't affected (instead of crashing X or XFS, it'll just kill the process that requested the insane font size).
So your debian is probably safe (well, it'll still kill mozilla, but won't lock up X)
It's unclear what versions of X are affected. The reporter claims to have verified the bug with 4.2.0, but on my box with XFree 4.1.0, all that happens is Mozilla closes down immediately. The Gimp does the same. No memory problems. (Still a bug, but definately not the DoS attack it's made out to be)
So it probably only affects XFree 4.2... I don't have 4.2 installed to verify.
"The most recent two movies are more of a series of events than heroes' journeys."
Well that's because they involve the development of an anti-hero. But really that's no excuse... the fact is that the anti-hero is just annoying and whiny.
Compare and contrast with Lex Luthor in Smallville. Much more depth.. and he's got charisma, something required to be a hero or an anti-hero.. something that the last two Star Wars movies have lacked.
The last two Star Wars movies are to the first 3 movies as Star Trek TNG is to the original. The former have emotion and a roguish quality.. the latter are plasticy, devoid of emotion, it's like watching robots.
"I am all for a healthy dose of cynicism, but in order to progress we need to take an open mind."
Not necessarily.. you should clarify that to *scientists willing to do the research* need to have an open mind. The rest of us can go along with "believe it when I can buy it for $49.95 at Wal*Mart" stance and the world will be just fine.
My not believing (or understanding for that matter) that this stuff works, doesn't have any impact on the future at all:)
"And you guys wonder why FreeCraft and FreeCiv have such lousy art. It's because there's no Free Art Foundation going around saying, "You should give your art away! It's immoral to charge for art!" Same thing for musicians. Same thing for level designers."
Obviously you've never played Counterstrike. Back to your bridge, troll.
"I was merely commenting that some other games don't offer a good tutorial."
True.. and there IS a balance. But I think any game that doesn't have a "practice round" for newbies isn't very smart.. why alienate your new players? They'll just take their $10 a month someplace else
You mentioned Ultima Online. UO has "Haven" for newbies.. only newbies are allowed in Haven, and you can't attack another player in haven. Of course not that many people like haven, or the idea of haven. They think UO "coddles" the newbies too much. Ignore them, they're crotchity jerks who think UO belongs to them.:)
"Then how will people who just bought a copy of the game yesterday and don't yet have full control of their input devices be able to play? How do we distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies?"
Perhaps a newbie should learn how to play before joining a game. That's why there's a spectator mode and a single player game!
Imagine someone who's never played basketball before, he stumbles across a friendly neighborhood 2 on 2 game. You think he's just going to jump on in and start playing without first watching for a bit to see how it's played? In real life people would be too embarrassed to just jump on in and run the risk of looking like you don't know what your doing.
Why should it be any different online?
It's disrespectful to join a game and not know what the fuck your doing.
(In a related note, the new America's Army game will send players to jail if they shoot teammates.. damn straight.)
One followup I forgot to mention. Solving cheating probably requires open source. If game designers designed their games under the ASSUMPTION that the clients can modify the source, they may actually build security into the server.. instead of just relying on obfuscation.
A good example is Ultima Online. There was a speed hack because the server didn't check to see if there was a delay between walk requests (the client handled that). It didn't occur to OSI that people might hack the client and cause it to spit out walk requests as fast as the server accepted them. They of course had to come up with a hack to the protocol in order to fix this.
If OSI had worked under the assumption that the client was open source, they would've had the server implement the walk delay.
Talk about an overrated post. "Solving cheating requires closed source"? Please.. every multiplayer game out right now is closed source.. yet there's still cheating. More like "closed source has no affect on cheating".
Solving cheating requires servers that do more than just link up a bunch of clients. Think about it, what really needs to be sent to the client? Visible player positions and data, visible item locations and data, and data related to your character.
That's true for pretty much every game. Aim bots can't be prevented, but wallhacks and other hacks can. The server should check to see if you have the item required to cast that spell or teleport to that location (etc), the server should only send positions of players that you can actually see.
Open or closed source has nothing to do with it. I can read assembly and run a packet sniffer to know just as much about the game as if it were opensource. To solve cheating requires servers that distrust the clients.
"How can you even bitch about product placement as a way for companies to make money? It's completely non-intrusive."
Product placement isn't a problem, but have you seen the *very* intrusive ads the WB have been doing? Here in Tucson there's a god awful Car Ad that plays DURING the show. A car horn honks, and the ad "drives" across the bottom of the screen.. during the goddamn show.
Expect a crapload more of this. Soon all TV will be framed in ads.
"It's a bit like the cell phone technology vs. digial cell phones. The older stuff cracks and pops and fades, while the digital sounds fine right up until the signal strenght is too low to trip the AGC on the tower receiver. Then it looses the channel and it looses the call."
Um.. digital cell phones go "fuzzy" to.. the result is a wierd matrix-ish sound.. like a saw-tooth wave. Perhaps you live in an area with perfect reception except for the occasional mountain that cuts off reception quickly.. but trust me, I've been on my phone when reception faded (but didn't die).. it's very neat sounding.
People seem to forget that Microsoft is a publically traded company. All of that $40 billion is owned, not by microsoft, but by the shareholders.
If Microsoft stock starts to go down, and people panic and sell their stock, that $40 billion evaporates. As that $40 billion disappears, their stock will drop even faster, and more people will sell.
MS may have $40 billion in the bank, but they've also got $40 billion in IOU's to the public who own stock.
"But he has only the decryption key, which is the public key of the pair. To make a bootable disc, you need the encrypting (private) key, which is nowhere in the XBox. That key probably exists only in a vault in Redmond."
You have it backwards. The private key decrypts.. the public key encrypts. He has the private key. And you can derive the public key from the private key.
Someone please explain why you would play Return to Castle Wolfenstein with WineX when there is a native linux version? (Not to mention the fact that the linux version is ahead of the Windows version in terms of patches and bug fixes)
"i remember learning (and quickly forgetting) how to manually calculate sines and cosines"
Actually, that's exactly what I was talking about. It doesn't actually teach you anything.. it just tests your short-term memorization abilities.
But, I'm probably biased since I think college is completely worthless in most areas except for the social experience. Especially in computer science, where experience is everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Post back and let us know what you found, I too live in Pima County (Tucson).. and am too lazy to search for myself :)
Wow, every time I see a punch card I'm simply amazed that people used to do anything useful with them.. I find punch cards more amazing that any new technology.
I tried to write a program using punch cards once, but instead of a nice sort routine, I accidentally voted for Pat Buchannen.
"So, why installing an RPM is a more hassle that installing a DEB?"
Is it? Or is it that RPMs are just more widely used?
Here's an example, one of my coworkers was installing Debian 3.0 Untested on a box.. for some reason, Debian did NOT add the untested paths to apt-get's config files. Therefore, whenever he tried to install new software, it wouldn't get the proper debs for his system.. there were ludicrous things like not being able to install mysql-client because it relies on perl5.0.5 (he had 5.6 installed) As far as I know, 5.6 is backwards compatible with 5.0.5. But Debian still insisted that 5.6 wasn't good enough and wanted to uninstall it and install 5.0.5
Of course this nightmare was all fixed when we realized that it wasn't getting the untested packages but rather the stable packages.
Now you can say blah blah blah that's why it's untested.. but if you actually looked at my example, you'd see that mysql-client from STABLE requires perl5.0.5, not perl5 or above.. but a specific version.
Insightful? For failing physics? Hello, a 6 meter fall isn't the same as falling 1 meter 6 times.. there's that thing about acceleration.
"When you go out on a job interview, you will most likely be given a marker and white board and told to code something."
Most likely? I doubt it. Just because you may have done it doesn't mean everyone does. I've never had to write code on a whiteboard in a job interview. I *have* had them give me a program spec and say "go home, make this work, and email it to me" That was even better in my opinion.. there wasn't a time limit, so they can judge you on how fast you work when there's no motivating deadlines, and the project can be a lot more complex than "write a 5 line routine on a whiteboard"
Now I'm the one doing the hiring, and that's exactly what I do.
Ironically, you won't have A until you do B.. your fridge stinks!
"I agree that the X bug is very serious (and I'm particularly worried about it because Debian doesn't even have the newest XFree86 revision in it, so where am I going to get the patch for this)"
Actually, from what I've been able to gather, this only affects the NEWEST version of XFree (4.2), users with 4.1 aren't affected (instead of crashing X or XFS, it'll just kill the process that requested the insane font size).
So your debian is probably safe (well, it'll still kill mozilla, but won't lock up X)
It's unclear what versions of X are affected. The reporter claims to have verified the bug with 4.2.0, but on my box with XFree 4.1.0, all that happens is Mozilla closes down immediately. The Gimp does the same. No memory problems. (Still a bug, but definately not the DoS attack it's made out to be)
So it probably only affects XFree 4.2... I don't have 4.2 installed to verify.
Perhaps this trial should use opensource tactics. Judge Early, Judge Often!
But think about it.. this case is taking longer than it took to build Mozilla. If that's not saying something...
"The most recent two movies are more of a series of events than heroes' journeys."
Well that's because they involve the development of an anti-hero. But really that's no excuse... the fact is that the anti-hero is just annoying and whiny.
Compare and contrast with Lex Luthor in Smallville. Much more depth.. and he's got charisma, something required to be a hero or an anti-hero.. something that the last two Star Wars movies have lacked.
The last two Star Wars movies are to the first 3 movies as Star Trek TNG is to the original. The former have emotion and a roguish quality.. the latter are plasticy, devoid of emotion, it's like watching robots.
"I am all for a healthy dose of cynicism, but in order to progress we need to take an open mind."
:)
Not necessarily.. you should clarify that to *scientists willing to do the research* need to have an open mind. The rest of us can go along with "believe it when I can buy it for $49.95 at Wal*Mart" stance and the world will be just fine.
My not believing (or understanding for that matter) that this stuff works, doesn't have any impact on the future at all
"And you guys wonder why FreeCraft and FreeCiv have such lousy art. It's because there's no Free Art Foundation going around saying, "You should give your art away! It's immoral to charge for art!" Same thing for musicians. Same thing for level designers."
Obviously you've never played Counterstrike. Back to your bridge, troll.
"I was merely commenting that some other games don't offer a good tutorial."
:)
True.. and there IS a balance. But I think any game that doesn't have a "practice round" for newbies isn't very smart.. why alienate your new players? They'll just take their $10 a month someplace else
You mentioned Ultima Online. UO has "Haven" for newbies.. only newbies are allowed in Haven, and you can't attack another player in haven. Of course not that many people like haven, or the idea of haven. They think UO "coddles" the newbies too much. Ignore them, they're crotchity jerks who think UO belongs to them.
"Now I have no choice but to be careful about my setup, take stretch breaks, etc. which generally keeps things ok."
Smoking prevents carpal tunnel syndrome.
Every hour I take a break and go outside to the smoker's lounge.
So the real question is, is there a keyboard out there that prevents wheezing cough?
"Then how will people who just bought a copy of the game yesterday and don't yet have full control of their input devices be able to play? How do we distinguish trolls from legitimate newbies?"
Perhaps a newbie should learn how to play before joining a game. That's why there's a spectator mode and a single player game!
Imagine someone who's never played basketball before, he stumbles across a friendly neighborhood 2 on 2 game. You think he's just going to jump on in and start playing without first watching for a bit to see how it's played? In real life people would be too embarrassed to just jump on in and run the risk of looking like you don't know what your doing.
Why should it be any different online?
It's disrespectful to join a game and not know what the fuck your doing.
(In a related note, the new America's Army game will send players to jail if they shoot teammates.. damn straight.)
One followup I forgot to mention. Solving cheating probably requires open source. If game designers designed their games under the ASSUMPTION that the clients can modify the source, they may actually build security into the server.. instead of just relying on obfuscation.
A good example is Ultima Online. There was a speed hack because the server didn't check to see if there was a delay between walk requests (the client handled that). It didn't occur to OSI that people might hack the client and cause it to spit out walk requests as fast as the server accepted them. They of course had to come up with a hack to the protocol in order to fix this.
If OSI had worked under the assumption that the client was open source, they would've had the server implement the walk delay.
Talk about an overrated post. "Solving cheating requires closed source"? Please.. every multiplayer game out right now is closed source.. yet there's still cheating. More like "closed source has no affect on cheating".
Solving cheating requires servers that do more than just link up a bunch of clients. Think about it, what really needs to be sent to the client? Visible player positions and data, visible item locations and data, and data related to your character.
That's true for pretty much every game. Aim bots can't be prevented, but wallhacks and other hacks can. The server should check to see if you have the item required to cast that spell or teleport to that location (etc), the server should only send positions of players that you can actually see.
Open or closed source has nothing to do with it. I can read assembly and run a packet sniffer to know just as much about the game as if it were opensource. To solve cheating requires servers that distrust the clients.
"Ruby Ranch sets up the DSL, Slashdot effect takes it down..."
At least it's not the FBI this time.
"How can you even bitch about product placement as a way for companies to make money? It's completely non-intrusive."
Product placement isn't a problem, but have you seen the *very* intrusive ads the WB have been doing? Here in Tucson there's a god awful Car Ad that plays DURING the show. A car horn honks, and the ad "drives" across the bottom of the screen.. during the goddamn show.
Expect a crapload more of this. Soon all TV will be framed in ads.
"It's a bit like the cell phone technology vs. digial cell phones. The older stuff cracks and pops and fades, while the digital sounds fine right up until the signal strenght is too low to trip the AGC on the tower receiver. Then it looses the channel and it looses the call."
Um.. digital cell phones go "fuzzy" to.. the result is a wierd matrix-ish sound.. like a saw-tooth wave. Perhaps you live in an area with perfect reception except for the occasional mountain that cuts off reception quickly.. but trust me, I've been on my phone when reception faded (but didn't die).. it's very neat sounding.
Then it hit me, they must be using this to replay dvd versions of production tests under linux :)
Ah, the old $40 billion fallacy.
People seem to forget that Microsoft is a publically traded company. All of that $40 billion is owned, not by microsoft, but by the shareholders.
If Microsoft stock starts to go down, and people panic and sell their stock, that $40 billion evaporates. As that $40 billion disappears, their stock will drop even faster, and more people will sell.
MS may have $40 billion in the bank, but they've also got $40 billion in IOU's to the public who own stock.
"But he has only the decryption key, which is the public key of the pair. To make a bootable disc, you need the encrypting (private) key, which is nowhere in the XBox. That key probably exists only in a vault in Redmond."
You have it backwards. The private key decrypts.. the public key encrypts. He has the private key. And you can derive the public key from the private key.
Someone please explain why you would play Return to Castle Wolfenstein with WineX when there is a native linux version? (Not to mention the fact that the linux version is ahead of the Windows version in terms of patches and bug fixes)
"i remember learning (and quickly forgetting) how to manually calculate sines and cosines"
Actually, that's exactly what I was talking about. It doesn't actually teach you anything.. it just tests your short-term memorization abilities.
But, I'm probably biased since I think college is completely worthless in most areas except for the social experience. Especially in computer science, where experience is everything.