(ever needed to match aligned groups of 5 digits in an unspaced stream of characters?)
Yes, actually. Older FORTRAN codes (that have been slowly added to/modified over time) especially exhibit this kind of behavior thanks to formats that allow you to specify columns for output. The numbers actually run into each other on the line, and the only way to read the file is to know which column the data you want is in. I would never discount any regular expression example as contrived. Somewhere, someone has developed a program that uses that formatting in an input or output file, and someone else might need to be able to speak it's language in an automated fashion.
Ah, but it does if you're the NSA! You see, those pesky terrorists/commies use some high-falutin' encryption that takes 100 years to crack using today's technology, and we're talking a big ol' pile of expensive G5s!
But those spooks are crafty. They figure that if they just wait a year, they can crack those codes by 2036 instead of having to wait until 2103! But wait, it get's better! "If the speed doubles every 18 months after that," they reason, "why not just wait until the year 2010? That way we can have the results in less than a year!"
So, you see the NSA doesn't actually have any code-breaking computers right now. They're waiting for the right moment to spring their clever trap.:-)
IDSA has a good faith belief that the Internet site found at
http://www.stormaster.com/ infringes the rights of one or more IDSA members by
offering for download one or more unauthorized copies of one or more game
products protected by copyright, including, but not limited to:
Dig Dug
Donkey Kong
Frogger
Mario
Pac Man
SWAT
Tron 2.0 (game)
Indicates to me that IDSA mistakenly thinks the site is offering the game ROMs for download, which it is not. In any case, removing the titles in question would solve the issue; there's no need to take the whole site down. IDSA has a history of this sort of thing; I suspect they google for the names of games, then send letters to all the websites that turn up hits.
While I applaud your intentions, I suspect your methodology might not be very effective. For example, beginning your letters with the words:
You sir, are a moron
Is hardly the way to win the hearts and minds of strangers. Any reasoned arguments you make later on in your letter are rendered useless thanks to the fact that you littered them with insults. Regardless of how much of a moron/corporate stooge/greedy bastard any of our public representatives might be, nobody to be called a moron, and in most cases insulting people does nothing but anger them and cause them to ignore anything else you say.
If you really want Senator Hatch (or whoever) to change the way they think about an issue, your best bet is to present a well-reasoned argument that gradually sways their opinion. If, however, you just want to vent, well I'd recommend just doing that on/. since that's what everyone else does anyway.
This information is corroborated elsewhere. You'll see a failing Japan is a lot better place to be fresh out of college/university in this world than say, 98% of all other countries in existence
That means nothing. The discussion is about how the Japanese economy is changing internally, not about how it compares to other countries.
While there are flaws in their system, and they have bizarre aspects about them, I would consider this console thing a sign that they are more interested in something else rather than on the verge of economic collapse. It is very bad, particularly coupled with the recent US slump, but by no means are people flooding from Japan to emigrate to China or North Korea.
It is possible to have a failing economy that is still better off than many other countries. Using your own link to CIA world factbook, you can see that even using numbers 2 years ago the economy is deflating, GDP is decreasing, and unemployment increasing year-to-year. Their economy is still strong compared to other countries, but it is also shrinking, which means fewer people are inclined to pick up shiny new luxury items like consoles, and are instead choosing to save that money or spend it on something more essential. And, while we're on the subject, the Japanese culture has a very strong sense of denial when dealing with this kind of problem. I realize that this statement is somewhat subjective, but take for example how shocked the Japanese people were to discover they had lost WW2, when just a week earlier they had been convinced that they were handily winning the war, despite the obvious signs that they were losing (e.g. younger and younger conscripts, loss of territory, constant blackouts and bombs dropping on major cities). While my example is a bit extreme, there are many other examples that further demonstrate this characteristic in other facets of Japanese society.
I just though it would be a lot smarter to look at a bunch of factors than to come out an claim to know the answer as the original poster did based on anecdotal evidence.
I'm sorry I didn't link the facts I quoted to trusted 3rd party sources, but they are all true. If you don't believe me, see what the Economist has to say about the Japanese economy, and how it's currently being handled by the government (as in, it's not being handled). The Diet, as they are wont to do, gleefully ignore the huge, glaring problems in the economy. Dozens of reform plans have been introduced only to be dropped or watered down to the point where they are ineffectual. Most of the attention is instead diverted to "scandalous" material such as who is sleeping with whom, or who is getting kickbacks from the construction industry, rather than the fact that more people than ever are filing for bankruptcy.
While I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence as well (I have many close Japanese friends living and working in Japan, and I personally do business in Japan regularly) I didn't cite any of it.
I think you really don't understand that the Japanese economy has *truly* been in dire straits the last couple of years. The prime lending rate has been cut to nearly zero percent for a couple of years now (and hasn't really helped stave off the drop in spending), there continue to be massive layoffs in major companies and industries, college graduates are having a very, very difficult time finding work, and sales of luxury items have been declining steadily despite your evidence of "Japanese liking the best stuff". Yes, rich Japanese people like the best stuff, just as much as rich Americans do. The rest of them can't afford it.
The legwork involved in assuring that a block of IPs is legitimate should be fairly simple and part of the network administrator's job.
But the guy selling the block already has plenty of documentation that verifies his story; that's how he got the addresses transferred to him in the first place. Are you saying every admin that wants to buy a couple of addresses needs to do more work than the company routing the traffic just to verify everything is legit?
I've seen a lot of kids learning to program because they play games on the computer, and want to learn how to make their own. For example, I know several folks whose first exposure to programming was making a mod for UT in UnrealScript. One kid I know even used UnrealScript to do homework assignments for school, until they finally started picking up other languages.
It really bothers me that the submitter mentions nothing about actually going and talking things over with management. If the company really is in rough waters, the managers are probably up to their eyeballs in work as well, meaning maybe they've been too busy to realize that their employees are surreptitiously getting the shaft. All it might take is broaching the subject with management that you are unhappy with the current situation.
A similar thing happened at my company a few years ago. We really were in dire straights, but we did get a bunch of extra stock options and other benefits, and when things turned around we all ended up with very large raises.
Open source would create more governemnt jobs, by not only keeping existing support personnel, but also by creating openings for developers that would tailor systems to the ever-evolving government technology base and needs.
I suppose I need to ask why you think having more government jobs is somehow better than having more private industry jobs. BTW there are already people that do the tailoring you describe. Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean you can't tailor it to suit your needs. Look at the huge number of custom applications developed using excel, for example.
I'm certainly not against OSS; far from it. But, there are also cases where closed-source software can save just as much (or more) money, especially when talking about applications or systems which require a large amount of expertise to produce, and where there is plenty of competition in the market. This atmosphere leads to constant R&D and refinement of the product to the point where millions of dollars have been spent in order to keep the product competitive. Oftentimes the sticker price of such a product is more than justified by its overwhelmingly better usability, functionality, and performance. In a large organization, the number of man-hours saved using such an application over a less-efficient open-source alternative dwarfs the costs of acquisition. The only alternative is to constantly add the same funcionality, performance, and usability enhancements to the open-source version that the closed-source version offers. But, since your guys probably aren't experts in this domain, and there's not a lot of people writing open-source baking software, it is more expensive for you to develop this functionality than it is for ABC corporation. Plus, paying them means you have much fewer maintainence issues to worry about, like answering tech support questions, R&D for new features, etc.
If I'm taking the train somewhere, it's not usually a problem as long as I'm in a major city. I use publicly-posted local maps when they are available. Especially in more rural areas, they are not.
But if I'm driving, it's a whole other story. If I want to read the map at a train station, or bus stop, or on the corner, etc. First I have to find a train station and/or map, then I have to find a place to park, then I have to park, walk back to the map, and read it. If I'm going to that much trouble, I'd be better off to print the maps from yahoo, even though they aren't always correct.
And yes, you can ask the local folks where something is, but that's roughly as good as not having an address to begin with, which was my point.
Gee, maybe people in my college were nicer, but I had a computer, TV, and other goodies every year of college (desktop for 2, laptop for 2), and the most expensive thing I ever had stolen from my dorm room was a shoe worth less than $5.
Of course locking the door when you're gone helps, too. In my dorm it was impossible to even go to the bathroom without a key, and you always carried your key with you everywhere you went, so it wasn't a big deal to just lock your door when you left your room.
So far as taking notes is concerned, use paper like a normal person. For most engineering courses (and even for non-engineering courses) a lot of your notes are going to be equations or diagrams; I have yet to find any software that allows me to write either one electronically even half as fast as I can write them by hand, in fact I usually spend an inordinantly large amount of time trying to transfer the stuff that takes me a few minutes to draw by hand into the computer if I'm working on a paper, for example. Plus, you can spill coffee on your paper notebook, and still recover the data with relative ease. Try doing that with your palm pilot.
Yes, and this is exactly why such a large percentage of people have GPS in their cars now in Japan, whereas the adoption rate in the US is (relatively speaking) very small. Unless you're a taxi driver, postal worker, or pizza delivery guy, finding any address in Japan without specific instructions (turn left at the Family Mart, right next to the kaiten sushi place) is nearly as bad as not having the address to begin with.
Why would you want a sound meter or a calorie tracking application in a cell phone?
The phone is designed for "active" people who like to work out. Just looking at the design, and noting the fact that it is water-resistant and hardened should clue anyone in that it's made for people to use while they're exercising. As such, the calorie tracking application is something I'd find useful. I don't like to carry a bunch of crap to the gym when I workout, but I usually take my cell phone with me. This one I can use as a walkman (listen to FM radio), record my calories (takes the place of similar PDA apps, or a pen & paper), and also handle any phone calls or whatever. And BTW it has other PIM features like address book, calendar, and to-do list which are the only features I really use on my PDA.
So far as the sound meter is concerned, I'm not really sure what that's for. I guess so that instead of saying "Speak up! It's really noisy here!" you can say "Speak up! It's the ambient sound level is 125dB here!"
During Thursday's hearing, DVD CCA attorney Robert Sugarman told the seven-judge panel that the software is designed "to allow individuals to steal a trade secret and, by virtue of that, hack into a system that protects the trade secrets of motion picture makers."
How did this go from stealing copyrights to stealing trade secrets all of a sudden? Exactly what part of the DVD is a trade secret? It can't possibly be the encryption, because nobody's interested in that part, they want the content. The content itself is certainly no trade secret, since it is widely distributed and available to anyone with a Blockbuster card.
There are still plenty of people who simply object to paying for music, no matter the source.
That may be true, but I'm not one of them. I don't mind paying for songs I enjoy, but I refuse to buy a full CD just to get one or two songs. A service that lets me pick and choose the songs I like and BURN THEM TO A CD I can put in my car or listen to it on my walkman is exactly what I want. I'd use iTunes but I don't have a Mac.
Having said that, there's no way in hell I'll ever install another Real product on my computer ever again, or use any service that Real offers. They are the devil, for reasons already stated in the grandparent post. Even if the only way I could watch any movies or TV were to install RealPlayer on my system, I wouldn't do it. I've got plenty of books to keep me occupied.
What if these guys used a special piece of software that ran the game in a special mode? Is that illegal? I mean, EVERYONE uses software (your OS) to run the game in a "special" mode (namely, a mode that works properly). Is this worse than exploiting the bug through the normal game interface?
What if I exploit a remote root bug in SSH or IIS on your server, gain access to your network and delete all the files on your server? Is that against the law? YES IT IS. It makes no difference if it is a game server or not.
This is exactly what I was thinking. If I were an malevolent SOB that had just been fired I could call up on from the company phone and say the server and several desktops were stolen, and provide all the relevant information as it's probably written right on the machine. Next time they ping the server, instant IT nightmare.
A new game had to look like nothing else that had come before it.
Talk about rose-colored glasses. Initially every game was different because there was only one company making games. Once 3rd-party developers started making games, there were about a million clones of all the popular games. Or perhaps you don't remember "Gobbler," "Chomper," etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, actually. Older FORTRAN codes (that have been slowly added to/modified over time) especially exhibit this kind of behavior thanks to formats that allow you to specify columns for output. The numbers actually run into each other on the line, and the only way to read the file is to know which column the data you want is in. I would never discount any regular expression example as contrived. Somewhere, someone has developed a program that uses that formatting in an input or output file, and someone else might need to be able to speak it's language in an automated fashion.
Ah, but it does if you're the NSA! You see, those pesky terrorists/commies use some high-falutin' encryption that takes 100 years to crack using today's technology, and we're talking a big ol' pile of expensive G5s!
:-)
But those spooks are crafty. They figure that if they just wait a year, they can crack those codes by 2036 instead of having to wait until 2103! But wait, it get's better! "If the speed doubles every 18 months after that," they reason, "why not just wait until the year 2010? That way we can have the results in less than a year!"
So, you see the NSA doesn't actually have any code-breaking computers right now. They're waiting for the right moment to spring their clever trap.
In Soviet Russia, papers grade YOU!
Indicates to me that IDSA mistakenly thinks the site is offering the game ROMs for download, which it is not. In any case, removing the titles in question would solve the issue; there's no need to take the whole site down. IDSA has a history of this sort of thing; I suspect they google for the names of games, then send letters to all the websites that turn up hits.
Is hardly the way to win the hearts and minds of strangers. Any reasoned arguments you make later on in your letter are rendered useless thanks to the fact that you littered them with insults. Regardless of how much of a moron/corporate stooge/greedy bastard any of our public representatives might be, nobody to be called a moron, and in most cases insulting people does nothing but anger them and cause them to ignore anything else you say.
If you really want Senator Hatch (or whoever) to change the way they think about an issue, your best bet is to present a well-reasoned argument that gradually sways their opinion. If, however, you just want to vent, well I'd recommend just doing that on
That means nothing. The discussion is about how the Japanese economy is changing internally, not about how it compares to other countries.
It is possible to have a failing economy that is still better off than many other countries. Using your own link to CIA world factbook, you can see that even using numbers 2 years ago the economy is deflating, GDP is decreasing, and unemployment increasing year-to-year. Their economy is still strong compared to other countries, but it is also shrinking, which means fewer people are inclined to pick up shiny new luxury items like consoles, and are instead choosing to save that money or spend it on something more essential. And, while we're on the subject, the Japanese culture has a very strong sense of denial when dealing with this kind of problem. I realize that this statement is somewhat subjective, but take for example how shocked the Japanese people were to discover they had lost WW2, when just a week earlier they had been convinced that they were handily winning the war, despite the obvious signs that they were losing (e.g. younger and younger conscripts, loss of territory, constant blackouts and bombs dropping on major cities). While my example is a bit extreme, there are many other examples that further demonstrate this characteristic in other facets of Japanese society.
I'm sorry I didn't link the facts I quoted to trusted 3rd party sources, but they are all true. If you don't believe me, see what the Economist has to say about the Japanese economy, and how it's currently being handled by the government (as in, it's not being handled). The Diet, as they are wont to do, gleefully ignore the huge, glaring problems in the economy. Dozens of reform plans have been introduced only to be dropped or watered down to the point where they are ineffectual. Most of the attention is instead diverted to "scandalous" material such as who is sleeping with whom, or who is getting kickbacks from the construction industry, rather than the fact that more people than ever are filing for bankruptcy.
While I do have plenty of anecdotal evidence as well (I have many close Japanese friends living and working in Japan, and I personally do business in Japan regularly) I didn't cite any of it.
I think you really don't understand that the Japanese economy has *truly* been in dire straits the last couple of years. The prime lending rate has been cut to nearly zero percent for a couple of years now (and hasn't really helped stave off the drop in spending), there continue to be massive layoffs in major companies and industries, college graduates are having a very, very difficult time finding work, and sales of luxury items have been declining steadily despite your evidence of "Japanese liking the best stuff". Yes, rich Japanese people like the best stuff, just as much as rich Americans do. The rest of them can't afford it.
But the guy selling the block already has plenty of documentation that verifies his story; that's how he got the addresses transferred to him in the first place. Are you saying every admin that wants to buy a couple of addresses needs to do more work than the company routing the traffic just to verify everything is legit?
I've seen a lot of kids learning to program because they play games on the computer, and want to learn how to make their own. For example, I know several folks whose first exposure to programming was making a mod for UT in UnrealScript. One kid I know even used UnrealScript to do homework assignments for school, until they finally started picking up other languages.
It really bothers me that the submitter mentions nothing about actually going and talking things over with management. If the company really is in rough waters, the managers are probably up to their eyeballs in work as well, meaning maybe they've been too busy to realize that their employees are surreptitiously getting the shaft. All it might take is broaching the subject with management that you are unhappy with the current situation.
A similar thing happened at my company a few years ago. We really were in dire straights, but we did get a bunch of extra stock options and other benefits, and when things turned around we all ended up with very large raises.
I suppose I need to ask why you think having more government jobs is somehow better than having more private industry jobs. BTW there are already people that do the tailoring you describe. Just because something isn't open source doesn't mean you can't tailor it to suit your needs. Look at the huge number of custom applications developed using excel, for example.
I'm certainly not against OSS; far from it. But, there are also cases where closed-source software can save just as much (or more) money, especially when talking about applications or systems which require a large amount of expertise to produce, and where there is plenty of competition in the market. This atmosphere leads to constant R&D and refinement of the product to the point where millions of dollars have been spent in order to keep the product competitive. Oftentimes the sticker price of such a product is more than justified by its overwhelmingly better usability, functionality, and performance. In a large organization, the number of man-hours saved using such an application over a less-efficient open-source alternative dwarfs the costs of acquisition. The only alternative is to constantly add the same funcionality, performance, and usability enhancements to the open-source version that the closed-source version offers. But, since your guys probably aren't experts in this domain, and there's not a lot of people writing open-source baking software, it is more expensive for you to develop this functionality than it is for ABC corporation. Plus, paying them means you have much fewer maintainence issues to worry about, like answering tech support questions, R&D for new features, etc.
If I'm taking the train somewhere, it's not usually a problem as long as I'm in a major city. I use publicly-posted local maps when they are available. Especially in more rural areas, they are not.
But if I'm driving, it's a whole other story. If I want to read the map at a train station, or bus stop, or on the corner, etc. First I have to find a train station and/or map, then I have to find a place to park, then I have to park, walk back to the map, and read it. If I'm going to that much trouble, I'd be better off to print the maps from yahoo, even though they aren't always correct.
And yes, you can ask the local folks where something is, but that's roughly as good as not having an address to begin with, which was my point.
Gee, maybe people in my college were nicer, but I had a computer, TV, and other goodies every year of college (desktop for 2, laptop for 2), and the most expensive thing I ever had stolen from my dorm room was a shoe worth less than $5.
Of course locking the door when you're gone helps, too. In my dorm it was impossible to even go to the bathroom without a key, and you always carried your key with you everywhere you went, so it wasn't a big deal to just lock your door when you left your room.
So far as taking notes is concerned, use paper like a normal person. For most engineering courses (and even for non-engineering courses) a lot of your notes are going to be equations or diagrams; I have yet to find any software that allows me to write either one electronically even half as fast as I can write them by hand, in fact I usually spend an inordinantly large amount of time trying to transfer the stuff that takes me a few minutes to draw by hand into the computer if I'm working on a paper, for example. Plus, you can spill coffee on your paper notebook, and still recover the data with relative ease. Try doing that with your palm pilot.
Yes, and this is exactly why such a large percentage of people have GPS in their cars now in Japan, whereas the adoption rate in the US is (relatively speaking) very small. Unless you're a taxi driver, postal worker, or pizza delivery guy, finding any address in Japan without specific instructions (turn left at the Family Mart, right next to the kaiten sushi place) is nearly as bad as not having the address to begin with.
The phone is designed for "active" people who like to work out. Just looking at the design, and noting the fact that it is water-resistant and hardened should clue anyone in that it's made for people to use while they're exercising. As such, the calorie tracking application is something I'd find useful. I don't like to carry a bunch of crap to the gym when I workout, but I usually take my cell phone with me. This one I can use as a walkman (listen to FM radio), record my calories (takes the place of similar PDA apps, or a pen & paper), and also handle any phone calls or whatever. And BTW it has other PIM features like address book, calendar, and to-do list which are the only features I really use on my PDA.
So far as the sound meter is concerned, I'm not really sure what that's for. I guess so that instead of saying "Speak up! It's really noisy here!" you can say "Speak up! It's the ambient sound level is 125dB here!"
How did this go from stealing copyrights to stealing trade secrets all of a sudden? Exactly what part of the DVD is a trade secret? It can't possibly be the encryption, because nobody's interested in that part, they want the content. The content itself is certainly no trade secret, since it is widely distributed and available to anyone with a Blockbuster card.
Yes, and at least $34 trillion in lost movie ticket revenues for every copy of Waterworld or Earnest Goes to Camp they find on the network.
I never leave the house without my towel.
That may be true, but I'm not one of them. I don't mind paying for songs I enjoy, but I refuse to buy a full CD just to get one or two songs. A service that lets me pick and choose the songs I like and BURN THEM TO A CD I can put in my car or listen to it on my walkman is exactly what I want. I'd use iTunes but I don't have a Mac.
Having said that, there's no way in hell I'll ever install another Real product on my computer ever again, or use any service that Real offers. They are the devil, for reasons already stated in the grandparent post. Even if the only way I could watch any movies or TV were to install RealPlayer on my system, I wouldn't do it. I've got plenty of books to keep me occupied.
What if I exploit a remote root bug in SSH or IIS on your server, gain access to your network and delete all the files on your server? Is that against the law? YES IT IS. It makes no difference if it is a game server or not.
This is exactly what I was thinking. If I were an malevolent SOB that had just been fired I could call up on from the company phone and say the server and several desktops were stolen, and provide all the relevant information as it's probably written right on the machine. Next time they ping the server, instant IT nightmare.
Talk about rose-colored glasses. Initially every game was different because there was only one company making games. Once 3rd-party developers started making games, there were about a million clones of all the popular games. Or perhaps you don't remember "Gobbler," "Chomper," etc.
You mean El Mariachi, right? Desperado definitely had studio backing, and wasn't exactly cutting edge IMHO.