Yep, that's almost exactly how it was for me. The main difference was that I knew I would die if I fell asleep. That was a surreal experience, going to sleep and not expecting to wake up.
I only had frost nip in one of my toes, but the sensitivity-to-cold thing was definitely a hassle. I think it was at least a week before my sense of temperature was back to normal.
Should we suppose that the remaining 10% died a horrible, cold death?
Even assuming the article weren't talking about terminal patients, death from hypothermia is one of the least horrible ways to go. Your higher brain functions stop working, you become very calm and stop feeling cold, and then you go to sleep.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it means supporting browsers (or in the larger view, platforms) which are so old that making your product work with them is a huge security risk.
Supporting older web browsers means allowing 40-bit SSL for "secure" transactions.
Supporting older Microsoft OSes is basically the same in terms of authentication mechanisms, for example.
Because if we didn't, the same thing would happen eighty times a year instead of once. You do as much as you can. It won't be perfect, but it helps. In most cases it's the difference between a business staying afloat and going under.
Exactly. If there were no patching, Windows would literally be unusable on a network. You can put all the firewalls and mail filters in front of it that you want, but there's still the possibility of e.g. MS06-003, which can only be prevented in that way by blocking all RTF email. Business users (i.e. the people who pay my salary) aren't willing to give it up.
I would like to see adoption of an OS without gaping security holes in every part of itself, but - again - the people who are paying me to keep their systems up want to stay on Windows. And honestly, as far as Linux has come, it's still not something that thousands of non-technical corporate users can migrate to.
If a patch breaks your machine, you would understand.
Breaking a single machine, or even a single application on all machines, is a lot less of a problem than EVERY machine being rendered unusable by an exploited vulnerability.
Right now I am testing an SMS install of Office 2000 SP3 with the MS06-003 patch. It's going out to thousands of desktops that are still running outdated versions of Office. Will it break something somewhere? Probably. But that's a lot less of a concern than all ten thousand of those machines turning into automated network doomsday devices if their users receive an email based on the MS06-003 vulnerability.
I'm thinking it would be neat if the accelerator controls had audio "themes" like desktop operating systems. Then you could make them play a sample of Trevor Goodchild in (the original) Aeon Flux saying "Congratulations, you've just wipe out the entire human race" when they detect the creation of a self-sustaining black hole.
You left out a word. "As a bad contractor you don't have to worry...". The rest of use get work by repeat business and references from satisfied prior clients.
That is generally true, and I don't mean to imply that all contractors are scam artists. However, a lot of the contracted work I've seen was very satisfying to the business users who purchased it (to the point that they had the same people do *more* work for them), but was a nightmare for us. Again, because when it broke, they assumed it was our fault that their app didn't run on anything other than the exact configuration of the original platform.
We have software in place that allows our clients to import and export their data. Any good ASP should have a system like that in place. We'll manage your data for you, but at the end of the day it's their data and they should be able to take it elsewhere. Anyone who hires an ASP who doesn't have this policy should find a new vendor.
If your software allows you clients to import and export data in a neutral format, that's awesome. Obviously it's not like we don't have access to our own databases (or in the case of the really ghetto stuff, it's not that hard to unprotect an Excel "application" and read its contents), but the data is stored in such a proprietary format (particularly WRT database normalization) that it would require a supreme effort to use it with another product.
We're an ASP, and we often get calls from users who are doing an end-run around their IT departments so that they don't have to wait forever to get the job done... If they get in the way and do everything they can to protect their jobs, then they become the "black hole" that you refer to.
I don't intend you any personal offence, but this kind of mentality is one of the main causes of headaches for me - someone who works in the IT department at a fairly large corporation.
Obviously there are some exceptions, but if we make someone "wait forever," it's usually because it will take "forever" to do it in a way that is supportable in the long term. As a contractor, you don't have to worry about whether your solution will still be working in a year.
There are many, many times that people in other parts of the company have gone off on their own and hired contractors to do something because they wanted it quickly. Usually what they've gotten is a rush-job that is barely stable to begin with, let alone a year or three in the future. Excel macro "applications" that can only run on Office 2000. Thrown-together server apps that can't handle anything other than the JRE they were originally written for, let alone an OS upgrade like Windows 2000 -> 2003. Web apps that have strict dependencies on outdated and unsupported versions of multiple products - each from a different company.
These things go on to become critical parts of the business, with years of data stored in them. Then they break. Who do the users blame? IT. Because they don't understand why we can't make their undocumented, nonstandard, proprietary software work on a modern OS.
We do use contractors for a lot of things - when they're hired by IT, and work with IT employees, they can be great. But non-IT workers hiring contractors on their own isn't necessarily a sign of a problem in IT. Sometimes it's a sign of a lack of understanding of IT, and why sometimes it takes a little longer to do things the right way.
- A box with a handful of customizable keys that you use in conjunction with a regular keyboard, like the USB numeric keypads some people have. - It will use B&W LCDs instead of colour OLEDS. - It will be twice as thick as the rendered Optimus keyboard. - It will cost $100 or more. - The drivers and configuration software will be flakey. - It will not stand up to a year's worth of regular use.
Seriously, I like the original idea, but it's not practical right now.
I think that it would be pretty cool to use that paint scheme and display lighting on a non-iPodded geiger counter. The fresh paint and cleanliness makes it look like it could almost be a modern piece of equipment. Of course, the apple on the side would have to go, but a radiation icon or a redesigned Civil Defence symbol could work.
The original version looks very Wasteland-esque, but the grey/silver/blue thing gives it a cold, clinical feel that's almost kind of ominous.
Anyone else thinks the chances of the original question being real are less then zero? Any real geek with a nethack addicted girlfriend would be to busy thanking god on his knees to post on/.
That was my thought too. I bought it at first, but by the end it felt like the submitter was trying too hard, and lost the sense of authenticity.
First off, there are more women on the system than men.
I've never been to MySpace, but I know a LOT of girls with Livejournals, versus a handful of guys. I think it's the social aspect.
And yes, if you look at teenagers' livejournals as an aggregate, most of them are pretty similar, because the amount of unique experiences in a teenager's life is generally far outweighed by the normal ones.
If your code is not commented it's not complete. My advice is to fire every developer that doesn't think that comments are necessary.
Seriously.
I code C# for fun, on my own. I still comment, because otherwise when I go to look at it in a year or two, I will have forgotten the reasoning behind some of my decisions.
I do a bit of it at work too. I'm an engineer there, but a few people in my group use ASP, ASP.NET, and VB.NET to write simple utility apps. Trying to work with their code is a *nightmare* because there are few if any comments. There's just too many different ways to write program logic for it to be guaranteed that the next person who comes along will be able to quickly figure it out just because they know the language.
I'm not bad at reverse-engineering. I taught myself basic MIPS assembly so I could hack the PS2 versions of the Legacy of Kain games. It's certainly *possible* for me to eventually figure out someone else's code, no matter how badly-written it was, but if they had commented it I wouldn't waste time on understanding instead of changing.
If anyone is thinking "dude, you're just an engineer, developers write better code," you're wrong. I've looked at the source code for our internally-developed apps a few times, and it was frequently as bad. Allegedly since those apps were written, the development groups have started requiring comments - with exceptions for things like "//increment i" and "//iterate through the recordset" kind of stuff.
By far the most common use for copying digital entertainment is to share it in a way that deprives the creator of income.
But is that true in the big picture? When I was a kid, I used to bootleg VHS rentals all the time because I could afford 10-20 times as many movies that way. Now that I'm an adult with more income, I've bought the vast majority of those same films on DVD.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to trade copies of audio tapes too, so that we could get each other interested in whatever music we liked. Again, as I got older I bought all of the ones I liked on CD.
I know there is a tiny group of people out there who really do pirate everything and never buy digital media, but I doubt they even come close to making up for the people like me who end up bringing money *into* the music and film industry.
Yes, I'm sure the ability to determine if there is movement or not on the other side of a concrete wall will be the final nail in the coffin of freedom.
This is NOT an imaging device. It's a motion detector. Maybe on the other side of a wall is a room full of heavily-armed revolutionaries, or maybe it's a cat chasing a mouse.
It shouldn't be a problem if you fill the system with pure distilled water, because there's no conductivity, right? That would be preferable anyway to prevent the build-up of deposits in e.g. the radiator and CPU waterblock.
but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!
Liar. If you really did, you'd be capping his ass instead of posting a rebuttal. Although, come to think of it, that would make for a pretty awesome version of Slashdot. "Slashback: North-North Soldier writes to tell us that CNN has photos of the carnage that arose when i_want_you_to_throw threw down on John H. Doe earlier this week..."
When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader.
I think you'd have to do a lot of image correction in software in order to get something stable enough for that. In his example app, there's way too much alignment error between samples.
Also, one of the reasons regular barcode scanners are a bit more expensive is that they use a laser with a motorized mirror (or something along those lines) so that you can do the scanning from a distance and the beam scans the barcode area itself.
The CueCat (which someone else mentioned) operates like what you're describing. It works, and it's cheap, but if you're scanning a lot of barcodes it's a LOT more of a hassle to swiped the scanner over the barcode physically each time instead of just pointing and shooting. There's also much more error in terms of reads. If the barcode isn't high-contrast enough (like black on grey instead of black on white, or some other odd colour combination), the CueCat won't read it at all. Finally, most true barcode reader-enabled software does the equivalent of hitting "enter," "next," or "lookup" once it's got the number. With a hack, you have to do that yourself. Again, it's a small difference, but if you're scanning hundreds of things at once, it adds up into a hassle.
If you went back in time and told me in 1995 that in 2006 I'd have 512MB to 2GB of RAM, but still have to use a page file, I would never have believed you.
I'm sure it's possible to have entertainment center-type PCs that don't use them, but things like graphics and video editing software always seem to outpace the limits of RAM.
Yep. Especially because I *have* a Voodoo5 in my current PC. My GeForce4 card burned itself up, and I was able to get a the Voodoo for free as a replacement until I buy something else. It really reminded me how quickly the cutting edge depreciates.
Please, stop shattering my illusions. Right now, to me Microsoft is the pinnacle of reliable software and support, and IBM is sort of a legend, waiting in the far corners of the Earth to provide to me software that genuinely works when my need is greatest.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, that's almost exactly how it was for me. The main difference was that I knew I would die if I fell asleep. That was a surreal experience, going to sleep and not expecting to wake up.
I only had frost nip in one of my toes, but the sensitivity-to-cold thing was definitely a hassle. I think it was at least a week before my sense of temperature was back to normal.
Should we suppose that the remaining 10% died a horrible, cold death?
Even assuming the article weren't talking about terminal patients, death from hypothermia is one of the least horrible ways to go. Your higher brain functions stop working, you become very calm and stop feeling cold, and then you go to sleep.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it means supporting browsers (or in the larger view, platforms) which are so old that making your product work with them is a huge security risk.
Supporting older web browsers means allowing 40-bit SSL for "secure" transactions.
Supporting older Microsoft OSes is basically the same in terms of authentication mechanisms, for example.
do you really think we have evolved enough to be impervious to anything "out there"?
Do you really think that the people at NASA haven't thought of this?
Because if we didn't, the same thing would happen eighty times a year instead of once. You do as much as you can. It won't be perfect, but it helps. In most cases it's the difference between a business staying afloat and going under.
Exactly. If there were no patching, Windows would literally be unusable on a network. You can put all the firewalls and mail filters in front of it that you want, but there's still the possibility of e.g. MS06-003, which can only be prevented in that way by blocking all RTF email. Business users (i.e. the people who pay my salary) aren't willing to give it up.
I would like to see adoption of an OS without gaping security holes in every part of itself, but - again - the people who are paying me to keep their systems up want to stay on Windows. And honestly, as far as Linux has come, it's still not something that thousands of non-technical corporate users can migrate to.
Enjoy SMS, what a POS
2003 is actually pretty nice. It was a big surprise, because I worked with 2.0 for two years and learned just how abysmal it is.
If a patch breaks your machine, you would understand.
Breaking a single machine, or even a single application on all machines, is a lot less of a problem than EVERY machine being rendered unusable by an exploited vulnerability.
Right now I am testing an SMS install of Office 2000 SP3 with the MS06-003 patch. It's going out to thousands of desktops that are still running outdated versions of Office. Will it break something somewhere? Probably. But that's a lot less of a concern than all ten thousand of those machines turning into automated network doomsday devices if their users receive an email based on the MS06-003 vulnerability.
I'm thinking it would be neat if the accelerator controls had audio "themes" like desktop operating systems. Then you could make them play a sample of Trevor Goodchild in (the original) Aeon Flux saying "Congratulations, you've just wipe out the entire human race" when they detect the creation of a self-sustaining black hole.
You left out a word. "As a bad contractor you don't have to worry...". The rest of use get work by repeat business and references from satisfied prior clients.
That is generally true, and I don't mean to imply that all contractors are scam artists. However, a lot of the contracted work I've seen was very satisfying to the business users who purchased it (to the point that they had the same people do *more* work for them), but was a nightmare for us. Again, because when it broke, they assumed it was our fault that their app didn't run on anything other than the exact configuration of the original platform.
We have software in place that allows our clients to import and export their data. Any good ASP should have a system like that in place. We'll manage your data for you, but at the end of the day it's their data and they should be able to take it elsewhere. Anyone who hires an ASP who doesn't have this policy should find a new vendor.
If your software allows you clients to import and export data in a neutral format, that's awesome. Obviously it's not like we don't have access to our own databases (or in the case of the really ghetto stuff, it's not that hard to unprotect an Excel "application" and read its contents), but the data is stored in such a proprietary format (particularly WRT database normalization) that it would require a supreme effort to use it with another product.
We're an ASP, and we often get calls from users who are doing an end-run around their IT departments so that they don't have to wait forever to get the job done... If they get in the way and do everything they can to protect their jobs, then they become the "black hole" that you refer to.
I don't intend you any personal offence, but this kind of mentality is one of the main causes of headaches for me - someone who works in the IT department at a fairly large corporation.
Obviously there are some exceptions, but if we make someone "wait forever," it's usually because it will take "forever" to do it in a way that is supportable in the long term. As a contractor, you don't have to worry about whether your solution will still be working in a year.
There are many, many times that people in other parts of the company have gone off on their own and hired contractors to do something because they wanted it quickly. Usually what they've gotten is a rush-job that is barely stable to begin with, let alone a year or three in the future. Excel macro "applications" that can only run on Office 2000. Thrown-together server apps that can't handle anything other than the JRE they were originally written for, let alone an OS upgrade like Windows 2000 -> 2003. Web apps that have strict dependencies on outdated and unsupported versions of multiple products - each from a different company.
These things go on to become critical parts of the business, with years of data stored in them. Then they break. Who do the users blame? IT. Because they don't understand why we can't make their undocumented, nonstandard, proprietary software work on a modern OS.
We do use contractors for a lot of things - when they're hired by IT, and work with IT employees, they can be great. But non-IT workers hiring contractors on their own isn't necessarily a sign of a problem in IT. Sometimes it's a sign of a lack of understanding of IT, and why sometimes it takes a little longer to do things the right way.
I think they're going to release:
- A box with a handful of customizable keys that you use in conjunction with a regular keyboard, like the USB numeric keypads some people have.
- It will use B&W LCDs instead of colour OLEDS.
- It will be twice as thick as the rendered Optimus keyboard.
- It will cost $100 or more.
- The drivers and configuration software will be flakey.
- It will not stand up to a year's worth of regular use.
Seriously, I like the original idea, but it's not practical right now.
I think that it would be pretty cool to use that paint scheme and display lighting on a non-iPodded geiger counter. The fresh paint and cleanliness makes it look like it could almost be a modern piece of equipment. Of course, the apple on the side would have to go, but a radiation icon or a redesigned Civil Defence symbol could work.
The original version looks very Wasteland-esque, but the grey/silver/blue thing gives it a cold, clinical feel that's almost kind of ominous.
Anyone else thinks the chances of the original question being real are less then zero? Any real geek with a nethack addicted girlfriend would be to busy thanking god on his knees to post on /.
That was my thought too. I bought it at first, but by the end it felt like the submitter was trying too hard, and lost the sense of authenticity.
First off, there are more women on the system than men.
I've never been to MySpace, but I know a LOT of girls with Livejournals, versus a handful of guys. I think it's the social aspect.
And yes, if you look at teenagers' livejournals as an aggregate, most of them are pretty similar, because the amount of unique experiences in a teenager's life is generally far outweighed by the normal ones.
If your code is not commented it's not complete. My advice is to fire every developer that doesn't think that comments are necessary.
Seriously.
I code C# for fun, on my own. I still comment, because otherwise when I go to look at it in a year or two, I will have forgotten the reasoning behind some of my decisions.
I do a bit of it at work too. I'm an engineer there, but a few people in my group use ASP, ASP.NET, and VB.NET to write simple utility apps. Trying to work with their code is a *nightmare* because there are few if any comments. There's just too many different ways to write program logic for it to be guaranteed that the next person who comes along will be able to quickly figure it out just because they know the language.
I'm not bad at reverse-engineering. I taught myself basic MIPS assembly so I could hack the PS2 versions of the Legacy of Kain games. It's certainly *possible* for me to eventually figure out someone else's code, no matter how badly-written it was, but if they had commented it I wouldn't waste time on understanding instead of changing.
If anyone is thinking "dude, you're just an engineer, developers write better code," you're wrong. I've looked at the source code for our internally-developed apps a few times, and it was frequently as bad. Allegedly since those apps were written, the development groups have started requiring comments - with exceptions for things like "//increment i" and "//iterate through the recordset" kind of stuff.
By far the most common use for copying digital entertainment is to share it in a way that deprives the creator of income.
But is that true in the big picture? When I was a kid, I used to bootleg VHS rentals all the time because I could afford 10-20 times as many movies that way. Now that I'm an adult with more income, I've bought the vast majority of those same films on DVD.
When I was a kid, my friends and I used to trade copies of audio tapes too, so that we could get each other interested in whatever music we liked. Again, as I got older I bought all of the ones I liked on CD.
I know there is a tiny group of people out there who really do pirate everything and never buy digital media, but I doubt they even come close to making up for the people like me who end up bringing money *into* the music and film industry.
As soon as the water comes in contact with the motherboard, it's no longer pure distilled water.
But will it pick up enough electrolytes from the surface of a motherboard to become conductive to the point of being a problem? I doubt it.
Yes, I'm sure the ability to determine if there is movement or not on the other side of a concrete wall will be the final nail in the coffin of freedom.
This is NOT an imaging device. It's a motion detector. Maybe on the other side of a wall is a room full of heavily-armed revolutionaries, or maybe it's a cat chasing a mouse.
It shouldn't be a problem if you fill the system with pure distilled water, because there's no conductivity, right? That would be preferable anyway to prevent the build-up of deposits in e.g. the radiator and CPU waterblock.
but I live in the ghetto you insensitive clod!!!!!
Liar. If you really did, you'd be capping his ass instead of posting a rebuttal. Although, come to think of it, that would make for a pretty awesome version of Slashdot. "Slashback: North-North Soldier writes to tell us that CNN has photos of the carnage that arose when i_want_you_to_throw threw down on John H. Doe earlier this week..."
When I first saw this I thought it would be useful to turn the mouse into a barcode reader.
I think you'd have to do a lot of image correction in software in order to get something stable enough for that. In his example app, there's way too much alignment error between samples.
Also, one of the reasons regular barcode scanners are a bit more expensive is that they use a laser with a motorized mirror (or something along those lines) so that you can do the scanning from a distance and the beam scans the barcode area itself.
The CueCat (which someone else mentioned) operates like what you're describing. It works, and it's cheap, but if you're scanning a lot of barcodes it's a LOT more of a hassle to swiped the scanner over the barcode physically each time instead of just pointing and shooting. There's also much more error in terms of reads. If the barcode isn't high-contrast enough (like black on grey instead of black on white, or some other odd colour combination), the CueCat won't read it at all. Finally, most true barcode reader-enabled software does the equivalent of hitting "enter," "next," or "lookup" once it's got the number. With a hack, you have to do that yourself. Again, it's a small difference, but if you're scanning hundreds of things at once, it adds up into a hassle.
If you went back in time and told me in 1995 that in 2006 I'd have 512MB to 2GB of RAM, but still have to use a page file, I would never have believed you.
I'm sure it's possible to have entertainment center-type PCs that don't use them, but things like graphics and video editing software always seem to outpace the limits of RAM.
Yep. Especially because I *have* a Voodoo5 in my current PC. My GeForce4 card burned itself up, and I was able to get a the Voodoo for free as a replacement until I buy something else. It really reminded me how quickly the cutting edge depreciates.
Please, stop shattering my illusions. Right now, to me Microsoft is the pinnacle of reliable software and support, and IBM is sort of a legend, waiting in the far corners of the Earth to provide to me software that genuinely works when my need is greatest.