You're either an idiot and have your webpage pointing to../ of where it should be, or you're very clever and have your Unix permissions set so correctly that having your home directory world visible doesn't bother you. As an IC graduate, I suspect the former, and after having seen some MIT and Berkeley computing grads make much worse mistakes, I can tell you to not feel embarassed.
Don't worry I won't tell anyone, apart from whoever reads this post. Just double-check your permissions, unless of course you're a sadist;-)
As for your comment, C++ is much more error-prone for the average coder than Java because of double free() and null pointers, but then while learning this improves your coding skill level so yeah by all means use C++ at Uni, Java in the real world unless you need the extra performance/turbo-charging of C++. Yeah the libraries are crap, but at worst you can always pipe it in from a small C++ program in Linux/Unix. JDK is as portable as you can hope for. I know you hate it now (as I did) probably because you have a difficult tutorial excercise in it due this evening or something. You know the architectural differences between systems, Java does damn well.
As for being vendor independent: don't make me laugh. Java is just as dependent on Sun as Windows is on Microsoft
True, there are other vendors selling Java Application Servers, but as for Java compilers (javac) that compile to java-bytecode, and JREs that can run java classfiles, I can't think of any bleeding edge vendors. Microsoft dropped J++ ages ago. But I don't think Microsoft copying JVM by using CLR vulnerable to embrace-and-entend tactics is something better.
In fact Java is less vendor-neutral than Windows, since the Wine project seems to have done a better job of cloning the Win32 API than the various free Java projects have with the JDK and libraries.
True, to be fair though Java is developing fast especially after having been thrown at the server-side. Windows is starting to approach the status of "Ulimate PC Desktop Operating System" via defacto standards plus usability, so they haven't added lots of new stuff to the Win32 API recently that everybody has to use (unlike from Win3.x 16-bit APIs to Win95 32-bit APIs). In other words Java is more of a moving target.
C# has some flaws, but Microsoft doesn't just sit there, it'll tweak C# until it hits Java right on target. These linux people don't want Linux to die so they love the fact that they are soon going to have a good CLR working, if MS does that on enough platforms then it WILL boil down to a C# vs. Java on every platform.
I don't know whether you have to 'purchase' the commercial version from Sun, but it can't be cheap
You're damn right it's expensive. At least they're nice enough to give away a free taster, to tempt you. It's midnight, sweet dreams.
Which starts me thinking, can you overclock the DMCA, let's see. Can you copyright a copyright or licence a licence, or copyright a licence, or licence a copyright?
Copyright a copyright - pull a copyright from the copyright office and cut & paste it, then adjust it slightly (derivative work) to your new invention/copyrightable item. But really, I think God holds copyright on all copyrights, either him or the Roswell Grays.
Licence a licence - if someone wants to use GPL they have to meet certain criteria, restricting who/what you can apply the licence to.
Copyright a licence - if someone wants to release something under GPL/whatever then you cannot use our licence without our explicit permission, making GPL a closed open-source society.
Licence a copyright - You may use this copyright only under certain conditions, this sounds like the entire free market system. Sorta franchise.
So since the free market is based on the DMCA^2 that means that..... Actually I don't know what it means, I just confused myself. GPL is retstricted by (2) licence a licence as you can't apply the GPL to say, a Hershey bar, only software and thus there's a prerequisite condition to using the GPL. So is the GPL truly open source.....?
1.I am not a troll, just more of a Rumpelstiltskin. I'm not a troll, it's just that my thinking pattern is open source, and my vocal cords aren't covered by the DMCA
"These Micronians are completely ignorant of space-war tactics. Their population centers are far to close together to allow them to survive an orbital bombardment."
Heh, it's obvious you know nothing about Canada;^). Canada is the country where this is the least true. In Toronto it probably feels like the population is dense, but come to London, England and you'll be roadkill in no time. Even 50 miles away from the city centre the population density and traffic is worse than Yonge St. at rush hour (trust me, I know).
If you want to survive orbital bombardment then go east on the 401 for 100 miles, turn left at Belleville onto Route 37, then right when the road ends onto Route 7. Continue for 80 miles to Kaladar, a town of 80 people, most of these are farmers that ended up in this count by accident. This town is 200 metres wide, has a gas station, a small convenience store and restaurant inside the gas station, and a hotel which is in fact a poorly disguised barn.
Remember, living in large cities is vulnerable to orbital bombardment, but living in a place like Kaladar makes you vulnerable to alien abduction. Now tell me honestly, which one is more dangerous?
Tell me about it. I decided to test the "maximum 6 waypoints" on the fusion ball cannon (the guided RPG weapon). Those nasty telepathic aliens invaded Rio de Janeiro with those massive alien robots giving support. Some of my team went berserk so I zapped the flying alien. I was out of action points on all the team apart from 2 armed with light plasma guns in a massive warehouse and 1 standing on a roof at the other end of the arena with a fusion ball cannon.
I told the first guy in the warehouse to move out from behind the crates, as soon as he popped out there was a massive dual-plasma-armed robot standing there. Just in case the robot got a snap-shot off I made him hide behind the crates again, and old the other guy in the warehouse to duck and cover.
I thought they were goners, but then I remembered the fusion ball dude at the other end of the screen. I *SAVED THE GAME* and started setting his waypoints:
1. The outside of the warehouse on the 2nd floor where my men had used their heavy plasma to shoot out a couple of panels out of the warehouse wall. 2. Near the top of the stairs so that the fusion ball curves and doesn't smash into the wall because it has to make a 90-degree turn in like one pixel 3. The top of the stairs, right next to the wall. 4. The bottom of the stairs in a small office 5. As soon as it goes down the stairs it'll smash into the wall in front of the stairs, so it has to be curled again. So I put a waypoint at the wrong end of the office to curl it away from the walls and keep the turn gentle. 6. Next end of the office 7. At the bottom of the stairs again (this time it will be going in the correct direction - straight through the door between the bottom of the stairs and the wall. In other words in the small office it's flown a course in-the-figure-of-eight 270 degree turn 8. Up straight after it goes through the door 9. Over the heads of my team 10. Between two high crates 11. The target - the nasty robot.
I fired. It went across the screen, through the warehouse wall, turned and went down the stairs, turned and did a wide circle in the small manager's office, went out of the manager's door, went up and over the heads of my team, over the crates, and then it dived downwards into the robot. Even on my P2-450 it took 10 seconds because the course was so complicated. It was so close that one of my team was mortally wounded by the explosion. I managed to evacuate everyone to the transport in time though so (presumably) he was treated at my London, England base. The aliens then sent a battleship to destroy this main base but my dual-laser batteries and gravity repulsor and fusion ball battery destroyed it. I saved the game and took the rest of the day of because I was so pleased with myself. Aaaaaaaah nice.
What always pissed me off about the game was the linear repair time. It took months to repair a heavily damaged Ultimate Craft.
BTW my cousin is in Missuasaga. He's one of those MBA types that/. people diss all the time. He joined IT and then got thrown out on his ass when Wall Street busted the VCs for funding pathetic dot-coms (the/. crew can be just as cruel as the Columbine jocks sometimes). I've heard it's real bad in Toronto - hardcore C++, C kernel hacker class people that used to do coding and sysadmining now working in FutureShop, many from Nortel. Sad when resume "wrote Linux device driver, Masters degree" changes to "70 words per minute, good SATs"
Re:Also... the unpatched release had a nasty bug
on
The Sexiest Metal
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· Score: 1
The game was "locked" at the lowest difficulty level
<Squeaky Bill Gates voice>That's not a bug that's a feature.</Squeaky Bill Gates voice>
True. On my 386SX-25 the game was normal, but when I ran it on my Dell P2-450 even the slowest settings were way too fast, and I had no turbo button. On my 386SX-25 I could even tell when the aliens spotted me because the game noticeably slowed down as the algorithm for computing AliensCanSeeYou_WilltheyRetaliate? started running. This allowed me to triangulate their position. Cool stuff.
I've had some problems with an Intel board refusing to power down, even ignoring da big power switch (makes me think you will be assimilated). Anyway, RMA'd it but still didn't work. I'm thinking maybe the HD controller or GFX card is giving interference on the power rails or something. Weird.
According to popular opinion I am a freak 'cos Intel boards are the most reliable on market... ?-)
Take your overpowered Pentium 4s and Athlons and shove them. I'm talking about the good old days when code was efficient, and games consumed minimum CPU, didn't need SSE2 nor even MMX, I'm talking about UFO: Enemy Unknown 1994 back in the days when v1.0 was totally stable (as this one is)
Most of the time: *Some megacorporation* is doing bad monopolistic stuff and trying to destroy open source. The Government is corrupt and *does bad stuff*. Those damn megacorporations control the Government with campaign contributions. Enron goddammit
A year later,
News: CDBPTA thrown out of congress, Bill Gates has change of heart, Micro$oft, IBM, Sun gives half profits to charity ($5billion). Scrooge OSS developers only give $3million, 80% of their profits.
/. peeps post "Uhhhhh, well it must be a Govt. conspiracy to make OSS illegal by *some far-fetched science-fiction reasoning*
Let's make it a virus - let's hAcK virusdefs of Symantec's definitions to recognise Kazaa/Brilliant spyware/assholeware respectively as a DDoS virus. Is there any way to hAcK the virusdefs?
It is true that even poor countries have currency and thus capitalism, however globalisation does not allow small companies (10 employees or less) to make greater profits from this strategy, instead large corporations benefit as they form a monopsony which allows them to extort these poor poor people. This distortion of capitalism is a monstrosity that forces the poorest people in the world to lower their prices sometimes below cost price, so that the megacorporations can make the profit on their supply chain. Therefore the very rich get richer. The Governments of poor nations tend to be Oligarchies making it easy for megacorporations to manipulate the Government. This effect is even apparent here in the Enron scandal.
Instead of arguing over globalisation from a top-down perspective, a bottom-up perspective is more revealing. Under Communism, a 15-20 year old Russian citizen automatically gets a car and flat, free of cost. This person is free to pursue his own activities - fine arts, philosophy, reading, going out with friends. Problem: Communist politics allowed tyrannical and oppressive regimes to persist due to the large amount of control given to them. Under democracy this political tyranny is far less likely to exist. Under the free market it's transferred to corporate entities e.g. record distributors suing Napster akin to horse-and-cart taxis trying to make petrol engines illegal 100 years ago. Under this free market the same 15-20 year old will be working nights for some avaricious affluent Manager in some fish and chip shop to pay his rent (the cheapest Central London houses are 300,000 pounds ($500,000) to buy - out of reach) and then watch TV where he will see product advertisements so that he can squander his hard-earned cash. When his friend buys the latest car using money that's stolen/earned unconscionably, this chap will feel jealousy and greed - the fiery emotions at capitalism's heart, in breach of the wise Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not covet what thy neighbour has" with equivalent statements in almost every other world religion. Then some parents *seem* surprised when they find out their children are troublemakers. Case in point: The BBC (a pseudo-governmental organisation that everyone pays for via "TV tax" and thus is free of shareholder-slavery) hosting this discussion about capitalism, whereas other channels just air ignorant shows and movies to get the maximum advertising dollar.
Why are there so few goods that are "Made in Ethiopia" or "Made in Ghana" - why are the international trade barriers so unfairly high? Why did the IMF award a massive loan to (I think) Malaysia when they knew the Government was corrupt - perhaps they knew that once a better Government was elected to take their place that the country would still have to repay the loan with interest that was squandered and embezzled, effectively economically enslaving an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people. I put it to you that only influential people (rich/political mix that the Enron scandal shows are corrupt enough to shred their papers and where the price of having a conscience is having a bullet in your head) set these policies in breach of what the public wants - making us a failing democracy. Nobody has enough time to vote for the right party because they are too busy working, earning money to spend on rent/mortgages and products that only their own greed (and advertising) dictates that they must buy; from the overworked 20 year old in the fish and chip shop whilst his Manager makes the real money and so the cycle is complete. The power of elected politicians is replaced by Managers and their own avaricious wishes. Do we wish these Managers that enslave our young children and pay them a pittance for the "privilege" of a roof over their heads to do the same to Ethiopians? A new kind of war - a hundred managers instead of a million imperialist soldiers, a victory indeed. It is time that companies stop abusing the "Developed-world hand-me-downs" culture where if a car pollutes too much, or if the pesticide DDT causes cancer then simply sell it to India or some other developing country. Companies seldom give anything to these countries, usually only taking their natural resources, so perhaps they should be grateful for these dangerous technologies. Saudi Arabia has the correct technique for dealing with this - since companies don't do them favours, then they won't do companies favours - therefore all copyrights and patents are null and void there, which many foreign legislative arms find to be a commercial threat.
The thing I wouldn't mind about metering during peak usage is the same thing I don't mind about "Nights and Weekends" on my cell phone. I don't mind that. I can shift my heavy use to a diffrent time with little inconvenience to me. But I won't pay more for it.
Welcome to the real world, they'll charge as much as they can get away with. In the states you can't really change broadband ISP without moving house - in other words in the telco field, competition is a pipe dream. At least the vast majority of other countries admit the truth that telco is an infrastructure same as electricity and sewers and should be provided by the Govt.
Would you be willing to pay half your electricity bill if you had 22 hours a day of electricity? Thus electricity is an infrastructure also. To make a company run it with the same reliability would require a contract so constraining that no business would touch it with a barge pole. Why is telco different? If the company doesn't honour their contract, all they have to do is shut everything down, transfer their assets and declare bankruptcy. And we trust our electricity and telcos to them, just to get a capitalistic 50% discount than if the Feds ran it. And then pay 4 times over when some competitor goes bust. Stoopid just stoopid.
I paid for the service - essentially you're telling me if I go to McDonalds and eat all of the food I ordered,
Not true. Contracts can change. Each time you renew your rental contract the supplier can change the small print. When you buy your next burger by law the price could different or it could have been discontinued. If you don't agree with the terms then simply walk away. A contract is not a shackle that lasts forever more. They just have to give reasonable notice, give an option to terminate and then change the contract. Like Yahoo! changing it's privacy policy.
If someone rents your apartment, then 1 year later you decide you don't like the colour of their shoes, just don't renew the rental terms and they have to go. Simple as that. Your apartment, your terms. Time Warner's network, so their terms. Don't like their terms, put a Cisco 6500 in your yard with a dedicated T1 to the backbone via microwave link. You make it sound like you've commited a felony and been imprisoned by Time Warner.
Then maybe these stupid users will use Norton and not get infected. The fewer viruses there are running around the better.
Here in UK there's a cellular company called one2one, and a few years ago they sold phones with free calls at weekends and evenings. A year later they changed their contract, and now they're buying back the phones sold under the old calling plan for 7000 pounds ($10,000). The courts ruled they MUST honour their contract until it expires. Trouble is the contract doesn't expire... Nice.
Though, the real cost is provisioning for peak usage
MOD PARENT UP! You've hit the jackpot dude. If you're using at peak times then the only way the ISP can expand that is by purchasing another upstream pipe and/or purchasing new backbone routers. This purchasing is what puts companies into trouble like Excite@home. If Excite@home didn't purchase stuff then it's impossible to go bankrupt. For the rest of the time they don't need to do anything, apart from a fixed tariff to keep sendmail, DHCP, DNS, DDoS detectors, BGP humming and to keep the lights on.
People got pissed off when the electricity companies installed meters and said they'd start charging for actual usage. The latest meters give a 60% discount if you use electricity during the night, so everyone in this area does their laundry at 2 in the morning.
What's needed is an application on every customers' machine that shows green if bandwidth is free, yellow if bandwidth is tariffed with the charge visible, red if the network isn't working. A lot better than "PPP dial-up anomaly error #761278367821" or "tariff &H6786AFF please telnet into 12221.cisco6500.timewarnerbroadband.com for charging details"
With bandwidth so expensive, people might start switching back to dial-up to get around the extra costs. Real world prices = real world decisions. Bandwidth + Variable setup cost is very close to the proper telco cost model. Free lunch is over people.
Charging for bandwidth could kill P2P systems because everyone must pay for upload bandwidth. To survive P2P node software e.g. Kazaa must make sharing compulsory and disallow the "kicking" of uploaders.
To draw a parallel, the majority of people have 15-year old Buicks, they would love an SUV but can't afford it, and can't afford the fuel to go with it. But with their own Buick they have just as much flexibility as someone with an SUV, it's just not as nice. If you look at it objectively though all these dot-com layoffs should sell their SUVs and buy 15 year old Buicks
and (hopefully) security conscientiousness continues past the end of the month
Hmmm interesting those corporate buzzword generators win again. Trouble is there first has to be a great awakening like WTC. This has not happened in the Internet world yet, after all bin Laden didn't recruit any script-kiddies. Anyways here's a better article that's been posted before on/. that's relevant here about how Linus likes lots of kernel trees and why he thinks this helps development.
Friend, I don't think you understand who this guy is. Imperial College Computing Department is in the same class as MIT and Berkeley Computing Department and is in many regards better as a centre of excellence. This will not start a flame war between Universities because you can't really start a flame-war between equals.
This gentleman said nothing about Microsoft keeling over. Microsoft Windows had one of the largest codebases in the world, as does Unix and Linux. He is pointing out the natural resistance to do a complete redesign and refactor that all corporations have (simple lack of middle-management foresight). As a matter of fact Microsoft is now the exception. Halting all software development and performing a "security and bug sweep" has most corporate software managers scratching their heads thinking Bill Gates is insane. This is developer garbage collection on a grand scale. He points out in his report that if this maintenance of the core of the software is not done then a time will come when the software will collapse and be beyond all human understanding, even if stabilisation methods are used such as compartmentalisation (JavaBeans, C++ libraries and OOP) or abstraction (4GL).
Linux however has shown that the core (kernel) itself is altered almost as much as the source code of gcc and other heavy-development software. The jump to kernel 2.2 to 2.4 with increased SMP capabilities needed the kernel core to be re-examined and re-engineered. Gutting a whale and putting it back together >> gutting an amoeba and putting it back together. The low latency and kernel pre-emption patches make big changes (not algorithmically but widespread and far-reaching) than ANY Microsoft patch, even a jump from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I mean replacing almost all OS spinlocks - WHOA! Although the growing pains are starting to show such as VM problems and Linus keeping up with patches. I remember that article that stated that Microsoft Office is 2000% oversized, and I bet that's just because they got rid of clippy. Well that is what this researcher states happens - more bloat, double the software size and all you can add is one new feature because there are so many bugs and nobody understands how your change will cascade to the rest of the program - you could have broken it, simply because the program is too damn complicated.
I am not holding my breath waiting for Microsoft to keel over into a monstrous pile of cyberwreckage any time soon
I was until Microsoft did their code audit. It was an unprecedented moment, it was like I'd heard on the news that Ford had stopped building cars for the next 10 years to cut out the unnecessary transistors from the Engine Management Unit. I always imagined some dumbass Micro$oft manager trying to insert a patch to make XML-RPC backwards compatible with DCOM screwing the company over. Damn, Billy-boy Gates is not that stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry I won't tell anyone, apart from whoever reads this post. Just double-check your permissions, unless of course you're a sadist ;-)
As for your comment, C++ is much more error-prone for the average coder than Java because of double free() and null pointers, but then while learning this improves your coding skill level so yeah by all means use C++ at Uni, Java in the real world unless you need the extra performance/turbo-charging of C++. Yeah the libraries are crap, but at worst you can always pipe it in from a small C++ program in Linux/Unix. JDK is as portable as you can hope for. I know you hate it now (as I did) probably because you have a difficult tutorial excercise in it due this evening or something. You know the architectural differences between systems, Java does damn well.
True, there are other vendors selling Java Application Servers, but as for Java compilers (javac) that compile to java-bytecode, and JREs that can run java classfiles, I can't think of any bleeding edge vendors. Microsoft dropped J++ ages ago. But I don't think Microsoft copying JVM by using CLR vulnerable to embrace-and-entend tactics is something better.True, to be fair though Java is developing fast especially after having been thrown at the server-side. Windows is starting to approach the status of "Ulimate PC Desktop Operating System" via defacto standards plus usability, so they haven't added lots of new stuff to the Win32 API recently that everybody has to use (unlike from Win3.x 16-bit APIs to Win95 32-bit APIs). In other words Java is more of a moving target.C# has some flaws, but Microsoft doesn't just sit there, it'll tweak C# until it hits Java right on target. These linux people don't want Linux to die so they love the fact that they are soon going to have a good CLR working, if MS does that on enough platforms then it WILL boil down to a C# vs. Java on every platform.
You're damn right it's expensive. At least they're nice enough to give away a free taster, to tempt you. It's midnight, sweet dreams.Copyright a copyright - pull a copyright from the copyright office and cut & paste it, then adjust it slightly (derivative work) to your new invention/copyrightable item. But really, I think God holds copyright on all copyrights, either him or the Roswell Grays.
Licence a licence - if someone wants to use GPL they have to meet certain criteria, restricting who/what you can apply the licence to.
Copyright a licence - if someone wants to release something under GPL/whatever then you cannot use our licence without our explicit permission, making GPL a closed open-source society.
Licence a copyright - You may use this copyright only under certain conditions, this sounds like the entire free market system. Sorta franchise.
So since the free market is based on the DMCA^2 that means that..... Actually I don't know what it means, I just confused myself. GPL is retstricted by (2) licence a licence as you can't apply the GPL to say, a Hershey bar, only software and thus there's a prerequisite condition to using the GPL. So is the GPL truly open source.....?
1.I am not a troll, just more of a Rumpelstiltskin.
I'm not a troll, it's just that my thinking pattern is open source, and my vocal cords aren't covered by the DMCA
Heh, it's obvious you know nothing about Canada ;^). Canada is the country where this is the least true. In Toronto it probably feels like the population is dense, but come to London, England and you'll be roadkill in no time. Even 50 miles away from the city centre the population density and traffic is worse than Yonge St. at rush hour (trust me, I know).
If you want to survive orbital bombardment then go east on the 401 for 100 miles, turn left at Belleville onto Route 37, then right when the road ends onto Route 7. Continue for 80 miles to Kaladar, a town of 80 people, most of these are farmers that ended up in this count by accident. This town is 200 metres wide, has a gas station, a small convenience store and restaurant inside the gas station, and a hotel which is in fact a poorly disguised barn.
Remember, living in large cities is vulnerable to orbital bombardment, but living in a place like Kaladar makes you vulnerable to alien abduction. Now tell me honestly, which one is more dangerous?
I told the first guy in the warehouse to move out from behind the crates, as soon as he popped out there was a massive dual-plasma-armed robot standing there. Just in case the robot got a snap-shot off I made him hide behind the crates again, and old the other guy in the warehouse to duck and cover.
I thought they were goners, but then I remembered the fusion ball dude at the other end of the screen. I *SAVED THE GAME* and started setting his waypoints:
1. The outside of the warehouse on the 2nd floor where my men had used their heavy plasma to shoot out a couple of panels out of the warehouse wall.
2. Near the top of the stairs so that the fusion ball curves and doesn't smash into the wall because it has to make a 90-degree turn in like one pixel
3. The top of the stairs, right next to the wall.
4. The bottom of the stairs in a small office
5. As soon as it goes down the stairs it'll smash into the wall in front of the stairs, so it has to be curled again. So I put a waypoint at the wrong end of the office to curl it away from the walls and keep the turn gentle.
6. Next end of the office
7. At the bottom of the stairs again (this time it will be going in the correct direction - straight through the door between the bottom of the stairs and the wall. In other words in the small office it's flown a course in-the-figure-of-eight 270 degree turn
8. Up straight after it goes through the door
9. Over the heads of my team
10. Between two high crates
11. The target - the nasty robot.
I fired. It went across the screen, through the warehouse wall, turned and went down the stairs, turned and did a wide circle in the small manager's office, went out of the manager's door, went up and over the heads of my team, over the crates, and then it dived downwards into the robot. Even on my P2-450 it took 10 seconds because the course was so complicated. It was so close that one of my team was mortally wounded by the explosion. I managed to evacuate everyone to the transport in time though so (presumably) he was treated at my London, England base. The aliens then sent a battleship to destroy this main base but my dual-laser batteries and gravity repulsor and fusion ball battery destroyed it. I saved the game and took the rest of the day of because I was so pleased with myself. Aaaaaaaah nice.
What always pissed me off about the game was the linear repair time. It took months to repair a heavily damaged Ultimate Craft. BTW my cousin is in Missuasaga. He's one of those MBA types that /. people diss all the time. He joined IT and then got thrown out on his ass when Wall Street busted the VCs for funding pathetic dot-coms (the /. crew can be just as cruel as the Columbine jocks sometimes). I've heard it's real bad in Toronto - hardcore C++, C kernel hacker class people that used to do coding and sysadmining now working in FutureShop, many from Nortel. Sad when resume "wrote Linux device driver, Masters degree" changes to "70 words per minute, good SATs"
<Squeaky Bill Gates voice>That's not a bug that's a feature.</Squeaky Bill Gates voice>
The one on the case. That's more firmware controlled I think or something like that.
True. On my 386SX-25 the game was normal, but when I ran it on my Dell P2-450 even the slowest settings were way too fast, and I had no turbo button. On my 386SX-25 I could even tell when the aliens spotted me because the game noticeably slowed down as the algorithm for computing AliensCanSeeYou_WilltheyRetaliate? started running. This allowed me to triangulate their position. Cool stuff.
According to popular opinion I am a freak 'cos Intel boards are the most reliable on market... ?-)
Well Pop quiz hotshot, if I'm the only geek in this area (ie. I don't live in California), where do I find out which board has a good reputation?
Take your overpowered Pentium 4s and Athlons and shove them. I'm talking about the good old days when code was efficient, and games consumed minimum CPU, didn't need SSE2 nor even MMX, I'm talking about UFO: Enemy Unknown 1994 back in the days when v1.0 was totally stable (as this one is)
I said that Selenium was sexy, I didn't say that it wasn't homosexual ;-)
Thor's new advanced space vessels like the O'Neill are made from a Naqadah, Trinium alloy, here's how to build it.
A sexier metal is Selenium. Runner up is Elerium-115
Told you so! Woohoo!
Most of the time:
*Some megacorporation* is doing bad monopolistic stuff and trying to destroy open source. The Government is corrupt and *does bad stuff*. Those damn megacorporations control the Government with campaign contributions. Enron goddammit
A year later,
News: CDBPTA thrown out of congress, Bill Gates has change of heart, Micro$oft, IBM, Sun gives half profits to charity ($5billion). Scrooge OSS developers only give $3million, 80% of their profits.
/. peeps post "Uhhhhh, well it must be a Govt. conspiracy to make OSS illegal by *some far-fetched science-fiction reasoning*
Nice, maybe things should simply stay this way.
throws DOJException
Let's make it a virus - let's hAcK virusdefs of Symantec's definitions to recognise Kazaa/Brilliant spyware/assholeware respectively as a DDoS virus. Is there any way to hAcK the virusdefs?
Instead of arguing over globalisation from a top-down perspective, a bottom-up perspective is more revealing. Under Communism, a 15-20 year old Russian citizen automatically gets a car and flat, free of cost. This person is free to pursue his own activities - fine arts, philosophy, reading, going out with friends. Problem: Communist politics allowed tyrannical and oppressive regimes to persist due to the large amount of control given to them. Under democracy this political tyranny is far less likely to exist. Under the free market it's transferred to corporate entities e.g. record distributors suing Napster akin to horse-and-cart taxis trying to make petrol engines illegal 100 years ago. Under this free market the same 15-20 year old will be working nights for some avaricious affluent Manager in some fish and chip shop to pay his rent (the cheapest Central London houses are 300,000 pounds ($500,000) to buy - out of reach) and then watch TV where he will see product advertisements so that he can squander his hard-earned cash. When his friend buys the latest car using money that's stolen/earned unconscionably, this chap will feel jealousy and greed - the fiery emotions at capitalism's heart, in breach of the wise Christian commandment, "Thou shalt not covet what thy neighbour has" with equivalent statements in almost every other world religion. Then some parents *seem* surprised when they find out their children are troublemakers. Case in point: The BBC (a pseudo-governmental organisation that everyone pays for via "TV tax" and thus is free of shareholder-slavery) hosting this discussion about capitalism, whereas other channels just air ignorant shows and movies to get the maximum advertising dollar.
Why are there so few goods that are "Made in Ethiopia" or "Made in Ghana" - why are the international trade barriers so unfairly high? Why did the IMF award a massive loan to (I think) Malaysia when they knew the Government was corrupt - perhaps they knew that once a better Government was elected to take their place that the country would still have to repay the loan with interest that was squandered and embezzled, effectively economically enslaving an entire nation of hundreds of millions of people. I put it to you that only influential people (rich/political mix that the Enron scandal shows are corrupt enough to shred their papers and where the price of having a conscience is having a bullet in your head) set these policies in breach of what the public wants - making us a failing democracy. Nobody has enough time to vote for the right party because they are too busy working, earning money to spend on rent/mortgages and products that only their own greed (and advertising) dictates that they must buy; from the overworked 20 year old in the fish and chip shop whilst his Manager makes the real money and so the cycle is complete. The power of elected politicians is replaced by Managers and their own avaricious wishes. Do we wish these Managers that enslave our young children and pay them a pittance for the "privilege" of a roof over their heads to do the same to Ethiopians? A new kind of war - a hundred managers instead of a million imperialist soldiers, a victory indeed. It is time that companies stop abusing the "Developed-world hand-me-downs" culture where if a car pollutes too much, or if the pesticide DDT causes cancer then simply sell it to India or some other developing country. Companies seldom give anything to these countries, usually only taking their natural resources, so perhaps they should be grateful for these dangerous technologies. Saudi Arabia has the correct technique for dealing with this - since companies don't do them favours, then they won't do companies favours - therefore all copyrights and patents are null and void there, which many foreign legislative arms find to be a commercial threat.
Welcome to the real world, they'll charge as much as they can get away with. In the states you can't really change broadband ISP without moving house - in other words in the telco field, competition is a pipe dream. At least the vast majority of other countries admit the truth that telco is an infrastructure same as electricity and sewers and should be provided by the Govt.
Would you be willing to pay half your electricity bill if you had 22 hours a day of electricity? Thus electricity is an infrastructure also. To make a company run it with the same reliability would require a contract so constraining that no business would touch it with a barge pole. Why is telco different? If the company doesn't honour their contract, all they have to do is shut everything down, transfer their assets and declare bankruptcy. And we trust our electricity and telcos to them, just to get a capitalistic 50% discount than if the Feds ran it. And then pay 4 times over when some competitor goes bust. Stoopid just stoopid.
Not true. Contracts can change. Each time you renew your rental contract the supplier can change the small print. When you buy your next burger by law the price could different or it could have been discontinued. If you don't agree with the terms then simply walk away. A contract is not a shackle that lasts forever more. They just have to give reasonable notice, give an option to terminate and then change the contract. Like Yahoo! changing it's privacy policy.
If someone rents your apartment, then 1 year later you decide you don't like the colour of their shoes, just don't renew the rental terms and they have to go. Simple as that. Your apartment, your terms. Time Warner's network, so their terms. Don't like their terms, put a Cisco 6500 in your yard with a dedicated T1 to the backbone via microwave link. You make it sound like you've commited a felony and been imprisoned by Time Warner.
Then maybe these stupid users will use Norton and not get infected. The fewer viruses there are running around the better.
Here in UK there's a cellular company called one2one, and a few years ago they sold phones with free calls at weekends and evenings. A year later they changed their contract, and now they're buying back the phones sold under the old calling plan for 7000 pounds ($10,000). The courts ruled they MUST honour their contract until it expires. Trouble is the contract doesn't expire... Nice.
MOD PARENT UP! You've hit the jackpot dude. If you're using at peak times then the only way the ISP can expand that is by purchasing another upstream pipe and/or purchasing new backbone routers. This purchasing is what puts companies into trouble like Excite@home. If Excite@home didn't purchase stuff then it's impossible to go bankrupt. For the rest of the time they don't need to do anything, apart from a fixed tariff to keep sendmail, DHCP, DNS, DDoS detectors, BGP humming and to keep the lights on.
People got pissed off when the electricity companies installed meters and said they'd start charging for actual usage. The latest meters give a 60% discount if you use electricity during the night, so everyone in this area does their laundry at 2 in the morning.
What's needed is an application on every customers' machine that shows green if bandwidth is free, yellow if bandwidth is tariffed with the charge visible, red if the network isn't working. A lot better than "PPP dial-up anomaly error #761278367821" or "tariff &H6786AFF please telnet into 12221.cisco6500.timewarnerbroadband.com for charging details"
With bandwidth so expensive, people might start switching back to dial-up to get around the extra costs. Real world prices = real world decisions. Bandwidth + Variable setup cost is very close to the proper telco cost model. Free lunch is over people.
Charging for bandwidth could kill P2P systems because everyone must pay for upload bandwidth. To survive P2P node software e.g. Kazaa must make sharing compulsory and disallow the "kicking" of uploaders.
To draw a parallel, the majority of people have 15-year old Buicks, they would love an SUV but can't afford it, and can't afford the fuel to go with it. But with their own Buick they have just as much flexibility as someone with an SUV, it's just not as nice. If you look at it objectively though all these dot-com layoffs should sell their SUVs and buy 15 year old Buicks
Hmmm interesting those corporate buzzword generators win again. Trouble is there first has to be a great awakening like WTC. This has not happened in the Internet world yet, after all bin Laden didn't recruit any script-kiddies. Anyways here's a better article that's been posted before on /. that's relevant here about how Linus likes lots of kernel trees and why he thinks this helps development.
This gentleman said nothing about Microsoft keeling over. Microsoft Windows had one of the largest codebases in the world, as does Unix and Linux. He is pointing out the natural resistance to do a complete redesign and refactor that all corporations have (simple lack of middle-management foresight). As a matter of fact Microsoft is now the exception. Halting all software development and performing a "security and bug sweep" has most corporate software managers scratching their heads thinking Bill Gates is insane. This is developer garbage collection on a grand scale. He points out in his report that if this maintenance of the core of the software is not done then a time will come when the software will collapse and be beyond all human understanding, even if stabilisation methods are used such as compartmentalisation (JavaBeans, C++ libraries and OOP) or abstraction (4GL).
Linux however has shown that the core (kernel) itself is altered almost as much as the source code of gcc and other heavy-development software. The jump to kernel 2.2 to 2.4 with increased SMP capabilities needed the kernel core to be re-examined and re-engineered. Gutting a whale and putting it back together >> gutting an amoeba and putting it back together. The low latency and kernel pre-emption patches make big changes (not algorithmically but widespread and far-reaching) than ANY Microsoft patch, even a jump from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I mean replacing almost all OS spinlocks - WHOA! Although the growing pains are starting to show such as VM problems and Linus keeping up with patches. I remember that article that stated that Microsoft Office is 2000% oversized, and I bet that's just because they got rid of clippy. Well that is what this researcher states happens - more bloat, double the software size and all you can add is one new feature because there are so many bugs and nobody understands how your change will cascade to the rest of the program - you could have broken it, simply because the program is too damn complicated.
I was until Microsoft did their code audit. It was an unprecedented moment, it was like I'd heard on the news that Ford had stopped building cars for the next 10 years to cut out the unnecessary transistors from the Engine Management Unit. I always imagined some dumbass Micro$oft manager trying to insert a patch to make XML-RPC backwards compatible with DCOM screwing the company over. Damn, Billy-boy Gates is not that stupid.