Do you feel like technology has thus far failed it's idealistic goal to liberate the people from the oppression of the 'old system' ?
Instead of technology changing the system for the benefit of all, as was (and to some extent still is) the idealistic hope of hackers, we ended up with a system which regulates, dictates and controls technology for the benefit of the few ?
War on 'piracy', patents, privacy and personal information used and abused by corporations, governments, financial schemes,... the list can go on and on.
Does it seem like instead of freeing the people, we (the hackers) have build great technology which ended up in the hands of the 'old system' and gave them powerful tools to exercise even more control and oppression ?
A digital world is a place for your mind to 'live' in. We achieve this by making 'interfaces' to the digital reality, which are compatible with the user's senses - visual, auditory, touch. This way the brain is stimulated into 'believing' it and becomes part of the hardware-software machine.
Of course, we are about half way there - the next step is emulating the rest of the senses - smell, temperature as well as sensations - pain, pleasure, etc. I guess all of this can be achieved with a computer-brain interface and I personally think I'll see this during my lifetime.
So yeah, there's room for invention, but I think we're getting closer and closer to perfection in many areas.
People still have difficulty disconnecting the concept of information from physical carrier, that's why there's so much controversy on these subjects.
It does not matter how many copies of the file there are.
What matters (legally) is how many people consume the visual/audio data (material) contained in those files.
Think of a file as a pointer to material - there can be a million pointers, but just one material;).
If you look at it in this way, there is no difference to lending your book to someone - your intent is not to lend the paper on which the book is printed, you share the information contained in it (passing the pointer around).
If a dealer sells someone LSD and claims it's just a game (for the mind), then suing the seller wouldn't be that incredible. That, of course, if the experience is bad and leads to the person committing something under the influence or as a consequence of using the drug.
The altered states of consciousness, which the video games create, are quite immersive and can easily suck all the player's senses into the virtual world.
I have friends who are addicted to WOW and they have friends who are even more addicted (as in.. playing non-stop for months, losing jobs, ignoring health and hygiene, etc).
You could say that it was not Blizzard's intention to create a game as addictive as illegal drugs, but actually, it was:), otherwise they would lose the 'addictive dollar'.
They don't sell the 'substance', they sell the 'mental state generator', which releases the 'substance' in the gamer's brain, to which 'substance' the gamer can become addicted.
True for many other games, as well (like Counter Strike or other MMOGs).
So, although he's hardly going to win the case (which could mean disaster for Blizzard, because thousands others are going to sue), I think there are some valid points to consider in his case.
I used to live in Romania, had a 100Mbit connection at home. Bittorrent was always running and I did from 5 to 50 GB/day upload and ~5 GB/day download. The ISP didn't really care, because most of the bandwidth was consumed with Romanian peers, within the 'metropolitan' network, which has a lot of capacity.
So if you plan to watch HD movies and TV shows and do a lot of seeding, about 1500 GB/month should be enough:).
On the other hand, since this exploit seems to require physical access to the machine to be rooted, you might have some other security concerns to deal with at that point, like keeping the intruder from raiding your fridge on his way out. That is, if the intruder is a thief who visits your home while you're away. However, if the intruder is a business associate or 'friend', or girlfriend who runs this exploit while you're answering nature's call or visiting the fridge to get some more beer, it's a bit more serious;).
I wish Opera developers found a way to port AdBlock and Flashblock plugins - these are "killer" plugins that prevent me from switching to Opera completely. In Opera, right click on the page and choose Block Content. Now you can block any image/flash on the site. Is that what you're looking for ?
Currently I'm 'browsing around with no particular purpose' only because the new Opera is so damn fast and I'm just enjoying the ride. It's a browsing revelation, really:).
Too bad this is not considered newsworthy for a separate article on./ . I know it's not OSS and FF 3 is about to be released and all, but still, I don't think it's OK to act like nothing happened.
Every single task is solved by breaking it down into subtasks and solving each of the subtasks by breaking them down into subtasks. So single tasking is actually multitasking on a different level. In fact, it is about how you define multitasking. If the purpose of your multitasking is achieving one single goal (e.g. a software project), then I think it is no different than being focused on a single problem and crunching through the problem's details. 'Surviving in our modern world' is the one task which our brain is constantly focused on. It is just that the task is getting more and more complex.
Going back to TFA, I think that our bodies and brains are surprisingly adaptive and self-evolving structures and by training our brains to multitask, they should rapidly develop an ability to focus while multitasking, thus becoming X times more efficient. If I'm wrong and the article is right, then we're all fucked, because we live in a world where single-tasking is not an option.
Speaking of multitasking, I have 5 monitors on my desk right now, hooked to 4 PCs: 2 XP systems, one Linux and an iMac. I find this setup very helpful with my ADHD, as long as I keep on developing (build on Linux, change the playlist or IM on XP1, debug and code on XP2, read Slashdot on the iMac and so on). Besides that, I have my dog, constantly trying to steal my attention (and being quite efficient at it:). I find (my brain finds) this exciting and interesting and so is more efficient at doing more things at the same time.
So TFA is too pessimistic. I think multitasking is cool, perhaps it makes us slower at solving one simple task, but it makes our brains more and more efficient at solving hundreds of parallel / unrelated tasks.
I think the main appeal of the TV was that it spoon-fed you the content. You didn't have to look for something, you just watched whatever was on (for me, that was in the past). The web has this problem - there's too much content and the 'most rated' and 'most watched' is usually what is recommended to you. While that may be attractive for teenagers, I would much more appreciate a system based on recommendations from friends and trusted sources or a service which carries content which is of particular interest to me, which I can trust with my bandwidth and time:). For instance, this little service - www.libertv.ro has a nice selection of movies and documentaries; every download is a surprise and I trust whatever they put on. Niche services like this, free, without quality limitations, ads and other such stupid things is something that is still lacking on the web today, but I think we're pretty close.
I am inclined to think that it's not just 'The worldwide computer', it is the 'New emerging species - The Almighty machine'. I think it is here, it controls us, it's just that we have a different definition of 'control'.
Consider this:
- People don't make machines, machines do. Well, it's not exactly true, since we *do* design the chips and circuits. But that's about all we do in order to create an evolved machine replica. The chips we design today would be impossible to design without computers and computers do about 98% of the design work in the background. Same is true with software we write - without computers, the code would be just a cryptic text on a piece of paper, and of course, you cannot write millions of lines of cryptic text on pieces of paper (you can, but who would think you're sane if you do this?).
- Machines create our reality Most of us here are computer specialists and spend around 80-90% of our waking life in front of a computer screen. But it's not just us, programmers, who spend most of their life in the computer-generated reality. Most intellectuals do. Non-intellectuals also spend most of their free time in this reality. So it's fair to say that we live in a virtual reality most of our time.
- Machines control and run our non-virtual reality Communications, power, air traffic, stock markets, hospitals... our economy runs on servers, that's easy. Of course, we wrote the software and we designed the hardware, but you can look at this differently - the machine 'used us' to evolve itself by expanding our minds. Take away the computers and our society as we know it would collapse.
- The machine tells us the truth Google, Wikipedia, that's obvious. When you need to know something, it is the machine who has the answer and it will dictate the decisions you make based on the information it gives you. Also, modern science is impossible without computers and the Internet. Space exploration is impossible without them. In fact, the machine has *all* the information about all aspects of truth on this planet and the universe. Even what you're reading right now is, technically speaking, the machine's creation. I just give the basic idea, the rest is machine's work.
- We are slaves to machines as machines are slaves to us. Who's the master and who is the slave ? Masters would not be masters without the slaves, so slaves define the master. How do we define if we control the machines or machines control us ? The most common denominator would be survival and we are currently dependent on machines for survival in our society as they are dependent on us for their survival. You can say it differently - they control our survival as we control theirs. In fact, since we agreed that most of our reality is machine-generated, it is fair to say that what we do in our lives (our jobs) is so that we can 'feed' the machine with our presence (besides providing them power, manpower and intellectual capacity for their self-replication). We have already expanded our physical bodies with mobile communication devices, hence gaining telepathy. The little creatures which you feed every day, called mobile phones, can be looked at as telepathy organs. And man, it is *hard* without the mobile phone in the city (have you recently forgotten to take your phone with you?), just as it would be hard without a limb.
So, to summarize: Machines create our reality and run our non-virtual reality. Machines multiply, we are just the environment, just as we use water, air and plants to multiply. The machine tells us the truth. We work for the machine. But does it have a consciousness of it's own ? It is hard to say. Our brains are probably too limited to grasp the whole picture and to understand what it's consciousness really is. It may well be that it is 'alive' and we don't even realize it.
The best method of control is when your controlled subjects don't know they are being controlled. You may call this symbiosis. However, if we extrapolate into t
A 720p BluRay x264-compressed rip is around 4.5GB and a 1080p rip is around 8GB.
The quality is very good, probably very close to the original and not worth downloading the 30-40 gigs.
I often feel the same way about the code I write. I've also been involved in projects with 'dynamic' specifications, which required a lot of re-writes and architecture changes. I bet when you write your code, you seal it in and make it as efficient as possible, only to discover that it is not compatible with the new specs and the required hacks make it ugly and buggy. But there's a positive in every situation. In time, I've discovered that my code has become more 'spec-change proof', I started to anticipate changes and was forced to write more modular and abstract code.
1. When designing your classes or modules, make sure you make them truly 'unaware' of the rest of the world - create small modules or 'components', which can be re-used or shuffled around to adapt to the new changes. 2. Use a strong standards-compliant library and try to adapt their architecture and even syntax style. For instance, in C++, I would highly recommend QT, as it has a beautiful architecture and forces you to use the signal-slot mechanism, which helps a lot in designing truly component-based code. It is also open source and cross-platform. 3. Plan ahead. The many bugs are usually a sign that the algorithm or architecture isn't thouroughly thought through (TTT). Although I know that for some people, coding is more interesting than planning ahead, so try to plan while coding. 4. Don't get discouraged. Every mistake is a lesson learned. Lots of lessons learned = experience. Remember, it is the path that matters.
Learning from experience is a very vague concept. I think that people DO learn something from each mistake they make, it's just there are lots of things to learn from one bad experience or failure. For instance, if you jump from the 5th floor and break a leg, you can learn that: 1. Jumping is bad 2. Jumping from a hight is bad 3. Courage is bad 4. I cannot judge heights 5. My body is too weak 6. Next time when I jump, I should be more careful and so on, you get the idea.
There can be multiple interpretations of one experience so I guess it's better to say that people learn the wrong things from experience rather than 'they don't learn from experience'. If you put it this way, the D2 gene explains something completely different. In fact, people who don't learn from experience sometimes end up discovering new ways around limitations (eg. wright brothers), which is, after all, a good thing:).
Users have to run as admins on XP, because most apps don't work with non-admin privileges. Apps want to write to Program Files, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and so on. So Microsoft is to blame for making it easy for developers to write code that runs with admin privileges and harder to write code that runs with standard user privileges. A simple API call, like RequireAdmin(), before writing to a dangerous place would have been enough to make developers think twice.
How did these guys test the update? Did they test it at all? The update shouldn't work at all, unless the game is trying to read the configuration from "C:\boot.ini" and I strongly doubt that. But eve developers are not the only ones to blame, I think the main blame goes to Microsoft for letting users and apps run with administrator privileges (about 80% of the users run with admin privileges on XP, because most apps simply don't work as standard user). If Microsoft made it mandatory (and easy) for developers to write apps that work with non-admin privileges, we wouldn't have such stupid situations, in which a backslash kills the whole system.
I really wish Microsoft makes Vista impossible to install for pirates. This way, the millions and millions of 'pirates' would be forced to switch to another OS (Linux !) and the world would be a happier and safer place for everyone.
Seriously, though, I think 'piracy' has been one of the key elements in windows OS domination. Millions of computer enthusiasts from around the world installed pirated versions of windows and started to use it as a development platform (especially in Eastern Europe, India, China, with piracy rates in the 80%+ range). This led to lots of apps being developed for windows, and lots of new windows users as PCs became more and more accessible.
Today, young developers and users are becoming used to software freedom - bittorrent, linux, apache, php, firefox (and thousands of others) tell them that it's cool to be open, it's cool to build a free software universe and it's uncool to be closed and restrictive.
I think Microsoft should tolerate if not encourage piracy if they want to survive the growing competition from OSS and web-based software. This way they can 'buy' a little more time before being eventually forced to make all their desktop apps free and open sourced.
PS. As I was writing this article, my other box, which runs Vista, has miraculously shut itself down. That's probably because of the continuous swearing that I laid upon it because of the new file association architecture in Vista, which requires me to rewrite code in my app. That sucks.
I guess it all depends on what the code does - if it's a collection of utility functions (like string manipulation) which anyone could write during a coffee break, then I guess you can forget about it and move on with your life. If, on the other hand, the code is a complex algorithm which took months of research to develop AND is the main feature of your app - then I guess you should spend some time and try to figure out the license thing.
I guess one should be 'politically correct' up to a certain point - when the subject can, in theory, harm others. Beyond that it doesn't make sense and one should focus on more important aspects of reality, rather then examine everything under the microscope, even though there's very little to see there.
Isn't tinyurl performing a redirect to the actual (long) URL ? Google or some other crawler would index the redirected page so really nothing bad happens. If such a service inserts malware during the redirect, people would probably stop using it. Hyperlinks on web pages don't live long anyway - a link is probably relevant for a year or so. So in my opinion there's nothing to cry wolf about. I think Ajax/Flash only sites are a greater risk to the indexed/hyperlinked web structure as we know it, but that will probably sort itself out as it always does on the net:).
At this moment I don't think home users would benefit from a connection faster than 1 Gbps. I have a gigabit connection at home and I can download a DVD in less than 1 minute and it's not even getting close to reaching the limit of my connection. The hard-disk is getting overloaded at about 20MB/s in BitTorrent.
You can watch streaming BluRay DVDs with a gigabit connection so unless we come up with some way of producing a lot more data for entertainment purposes, the terabits-per-second connections will be overkill for any average user in the near future.
Here in Romania, you get a 50 Mbps connectinon for 10$/month (http://www.rdslink.ro/fiber/fiber.htm) (4 or 6Mbps to the U.S.)
I'm paying 100 Euros for 1 Gbps connection (to Romania and Europe), 3 Mbps minimum external speed with bursts to 10Mbps.
Several years ago the only connection you could get here was dial-up; now the market is flooded with bandwidth and the problem now is the hard drive, because it starts to die when bittorrent transfers with 25 megabytes / second.
I don't think I've ever came close to exhausting the gigabit, even with the 5 servers I have in my home.
Curiously how 20Mbps sounds so unattractive to me, I mean... it takes ages to download a DVD at 2 Megabytes/second:).
I think that science is slowly reaching the boundary of reality and perception. In fact, if you think about it, there is nothing BUT perception of reality.
From a subjective point of view, I do not know if the universe around me exists beyond my perception of it - for me, when I'm dead, the universe disappears; my body is merely a notion in my head, as is 'my head', actually. In fact, one cannot prove that there is 'us' - all of this (earth, people, Microsoft) can be just a mere movie that my perception plays and constantly invents.
So I (or you) can interpret reality as my (your) own creation... because it is! If you think of it, 'here' and 'there' are actually perceived in the same place - in your thought (not necessarily head or brain), so space is just a definition that you've learned / invented. For us, things do not exist in this universe until we learn them - how can we be sure that we are not just inventing our reality as we go. Jupiter did not exist, until some guy built a telescope and it popped up into reality. The galaxies did not exist until scientists have 'discovered' them. Is 'discovery' an actually identification of what is 'out there' or is it just a possible idea that we declare real.
As we uncover the fabric of the universe, we might as well discover that there is no such thing as 'universe' - it is just our invention - including life, death and all other definitions that govern our perceived world.
I would prefer watching BBC programmes on apps like LiberTV.
You can't really enjoy good documentaries/programmes unless they are in HD or at a very good fullscreen resolution.
First, I think that "BitTorrent" is a bad name for a legal download service, since Torrent is a another word for 'free movies/shows'. They should have named the service differently.
Second, the fact that they rely on user's codecs is an error, since various codec packs can create a real mess on the computer and many users simply don't understand *why* they have to install codecs in order to be able to play X or Y.
Third, you have to select/purchase the movie from the web-browser, download it with bittorrent and watch it with a media player. At least 3 applications are involved, which is somewhat distracting and annoying.
Projects like democracy player (http://www.getdemocracy.com/) are much more integrated and don't require you to switch from app to app to whatch a movie.
In my view, the best app which does everything right is LiberTV (http://www.libertv.ro/), which is a romanian service, and should launch internationally soon (http://www.libertv.tv/).
The downloads go several megabytes per second, no codecs needed (except for quicktime for some videos) and you can start watching the movie in several seconds, because files are split into smaller parts before being transfered with a bittorrent-like protocol.
So users have a 'click and watch' attitude towards the app, not 'click, install, launch, switch, download, switch, play, crash, try again, damn DRM!':).
Slashdot Mirror
Do you feel like technology has thus far failed it's idealistic goal to liberate the people from the oppression of the 'old system' ?
Instead of technology changing the system for the benefit of all, as was (and to some extent still is) the idealistic hope of hackers, we ended up with a system which regulates, dictates and controls technology for the benefit of the few ?
War on 'piracy', patents, privacy and personal information used and abused by corporations, governments, financial schemes, ... the list can go on and on.
Does it seem like instead of freeing the people, we (the hackers) have build great technology which ended up in the hands of the 'old system' and gave them powerful tools to exercise even more control and oppression ?
A digital world is a place for your mind to 'live' in. We achieve this by making 'interfaces' to the digital reality, which are compatible with the user's senses - visual, auditory, touch. This way the brain is stimulated into 'believing' it and becomes part of the hardware-software machine.
Of course, we are about half way there - the next step is emulating the rest of the senses - smell, temperature as well as sensations - pain, pleasure, etc.
I guess all of this can be achieved with a computer-brain interface and I personally think I'll see this during my lifetime.
So yeah, there's room for invention, but I think we're getting closer and closer to perfection in many areas.
There must be someone to mention the Beowulf cluster of these ! :)
So here, I've mentioned it
People still have difficulty disconnecting the concept of information from physical carrier, that's why there's so much controversy on these subjects.
It does not matter how many copies of the file there are.
What matters (legally) is how many people consume the visual/audio data (material) contained in those files.
Think of a file as a pointer to material - there can be a million pointers, but just one material ;).
If you look at it in this way, there is no difference to lending your book to someone - your intent is not to lend the paper on which the book is printed, you share the information contained in it (passing the pointer around).
I see this idea is not popular here, but still...
If a dealer sells someone LSD and claims it's just a game (for the mind), then suing the seller wouldn't be that incredible. That, of course, if the experience is bad and leads to the person committing something under the influence or as a consequence of using the drug.
The altered states of consciousness, which the video games create, are quite immersive and can easily suck all the player's senses into the virtual world.
I have friends who are addicted to WOW and they have friends who are even more addicted (as in.. playing non-stop for months, losing jobs, ignoring health and hygiene, etc).
You could say that it was not Blizzard's intention to create a game as addictive as illegal drugs, but actually, it was :), otherwise they would lose the 'addictive dollar'.
They don't sell the 'substance', they sell the 'mental state generator', which releases the 'substance' in the gamer's brain, to which 'substance' the gamer can become addicted.
True for many other games, as well (like Counter Strike or other MMOGs).
So, although he's hardly going to win the case (which could mean disaster for Blizzard, because thousands others are going to sue), I think there are some valid points to consider in his case.
I used to live in Romania, had a 100Mbit connection at home. Bittorrent was always running and I did from 5 to 50 GB/day upload and ~5 GB/day download.
The ISP didn't really care, because most of the bandwidth was consumed with Romanian peers, within the 'metropolitan' network, which has a lot of capacity.
So if you plan to watch HD movies and TV shows and do a lot of seeding, about 1500 GB/month should be enough :).
Now you can block any image/flash on the site.
Is that what you're looking for ?
Currently I'm 'browsing around with no particular purpose' only because the new Opera is so damn fast and I'm just enjoying the ride. It's a browsing revelation, really :).
./ .
Too bad this is not considered newsworthy for a separate article on
I know it's not OSS and FF 3 is about to be released and all, but still, I don't think it's OK to act like nothing happened.
Every single task is solved by breaking it down into subtasks and solving each of the subtasks by breaking them down into subtasks.
:).
So single tasking is actually multitasking on a different level. In fact, it is about how you define multitasking.
If the purpose of your multitasking is achieving one single goal (e.g. a software project), then I think it is no different than being focused on a single problem and crunching through the problem's details.
'Surviving in our modern world' is the one task which our brain is constantly focused on. It is just that the task is getting more and more complex.
Going back to TFA, I think that our bodies and brains are surprisingly adaptive and self-evolving structures and by training our brains to multitask, they should rapidly develop an ability to focus while multitasking, thus becoming X times more efficient.
If I'm wrong and the article is right, then we're all fucked, because we live in a world where single-tasking is not an option.
Speaking of multitasking,
I have 5 monitors on my desk right now, hooked to 4 PCs: 2 XP systems, one Linux and an iMac.
I find this setup very helpful with my ADHD, as long as I keep on developing (build on Linux, change the playlist or IM on XP1, debug and code on XP2, read Slashdot on the iMac and so on). Besides that, I have my dog, constantly trying to steal my attention (and being quite efficient at it
I find (my brain finds) this exciting and interesting and so is more efficient at doing more things at the same time.
So TFA is too pessimistic. I think multitasking is cool, perhaps it makes us slower at solving one simple task, but it makes our brains more and more efficient at solving hundreds of parallel / unrelated tasks.
I think the main appeal of the TV was that it spoon-fed you the content. You didn't have to look :).
for something, you just watched whatever was on (for me, that was in the past).
The web has this problem - there's too much content and the 'most rated' and 'most watched' is usually what is recommended to you. While that may be attractive for teenagers, I would much more appreciate a system based on recommendations from friends and trusted sources or a service which carries content which is of particular interest to me, which I can trust with my bandwidth and time
For instance, this little service - www.libertv.ro has a nice selection of movies and documentaries; every download is a surprise and I trust whatever they put on. Niche services like this, free, without quality limitations, ads and other such stupid things is something that is still lacking on the web today, but I think we're pretty close.
I am inclined to think that it's not just 'The worldwide computer', it is the 'New emerging species - The Almighty machine'.
I think it is here, it controls us, it's just that we have a different definition of 'control'.
Consider this:
- People don't make machines, machines do.
Well, it's not exactly true, since we *do* design the chips and circuits. But that's about all we do in order to create an evolved machine replica. The chips we design today would be impossible to design without computers and computers do about 98% of the design work in the background. Same is true with software we write - without computers, the code would be just a cryptic text on a piece of paper, and of course, you cannot write millions of lines of cryptic text on pieces of paper (you can, but who would think you're sane if you do this?).
- Machines create our reality
Most of us here are computer specialists and spend around 80-90% of our waking life in front of a computer screen. But it's not just us, programmers, who spend most of their life in the computer-generated reality. Most intellectuals do. Non-intellectuals also spend most of their free time in this reality.
So it's fair to say that we live in a virtual reality most of our time.
- Machines control and run our non-virtual reality
Communications, power, air traffic, stock markets, hospitals... our economy runs on servers, that's easy. Of course, we wrote the software and we designed the hardware, but you can look at this differently - the machine 'used us' to evolve itself by expanding our minds. Take away the computers and our society as we know it would collapse.
- The machine tells us the truth
Google, Wikipedia, that's obvious. When you need to know something, it is the machine who has the answer and it will dictate the decisions you make based on the information it gives you. Also, modern science is impossible without computers and the Internet. Space exploration is impossible without them.
In fact, the machine has *all* the information about all aspects of truth on this planet and the universe.
Even what you're reading right now is, technically speaking, the machine's creation. I just give the basic idea, the rest is machine's work.
- We are slaves to machines as machines are slaves to us.
Who's the master and who is the slave ? Masters would not be masters without the slaves, so slaves define the master.
How do we define if we control the machines or machines control us ? The most common denominator would be survival and we are currently dependent on machines for survival in our society as they are dependent on us for their survival.
You can say it differently - they control our survival as we control theirs.
In fact, since we agreed that most of our reality is machine-generated, it is fair to say that what we do in our lives (our jobs) is so that we can 'feed' the machine with our presence (besides providing them power, manpower and intellectual capacity for their self-replication).
We have already expanded our physical bodies with mobile communication devices, hence gaining telepathy. The little creatures which you feed every day, called mobile phones, can be looked at as telepathy organs. And man, it is *hard* without the mobile phone in the city (have you recently forgotten to take your phone with you?), just as it would be hard without a limb.
So, to summarize:
Machines create our reality and run our non-virtual reality. Machines multiply, we are just the environment, just as we use water, air and plants to multiply. The machine tells us the truth. We work for the machine.
But does it have a consciousness of it's own ? It is hard to say. Our brains are probably too limited to grasp the whole picture and to understand what it's consciousness really is. It may well be that it is 'alive' and we don't even realize it.
The best method of control is when your controlled subjects don't know they are being controlled.
You may call this symbiosis. However, if we extrapolate into t
A 720p BluRay x264-compressed rip is around 4.5GB and a 1080p rip is around 8GB. The quality is very good, probably very close to the original and not worth downloading the 30-40 gigs.
I often feel the same way about the code I write.
I've also been involved in projects with 'dynamic' specifications, which required a lot of re-writes and architecture changes.
I bet when you write your code, you seal it in and make it as efficient as possible, only to discover that it is not compatible with the new specs and the required hacks make it ugly and buggy.
But there's a positive in every situation. In time, I've discovered that my code has become more 'spec-change proof', I started to anticipate changes and was forced to write more modular and abstract code.
1. When designing your classes or modules, make sure you make them truly 'unaware' of the rest of the world - create small modules or 'components', which can be re-used or shuffled around to adapt to the new changes.
2. Use a strong standards-compliant library and try to adapt their architecture and even syntax style. For instance, in C++, I would highly recommend QT, as it has a beautiful architecture and forces you to use the signal-slot mechanism, which helps a lot in designing truly component-based code. It is also open source and cross-platform.
3. Plan ahead. The many bugs are usually a sign that the algorithm or architecture isn't thouroughly thought through (TTT). Although I know that for some people, coding is more interesting than planning ahead, so try to plan while coding.
4. Don't get discouraged. Every mistake is a lesson learned. Lots of lessons learned = experience. Remember, it is the path that matters.
Learning from experience is a very vague concept. I think that people DO learn something from each mistake they make, it's just there are lots of things to learn from one bad experience or failure.
:).
For instance, if you jump from the 5th floor and break a leg, you can learn that:
1. Jumping is bad
2. Jumping from a hight is bad
3. Courage is bad
4. I cannot judge heights
5. My body is too weak
6. Next time when I jump, I should be more careful
and so on, you get the idea.
There can be multiple interpretations of one experience so I guess it's better to say that people learn the wrong things from experience rather than 'they don't learn from experience'.
If you put it this way, the D2 gene explains something completely different.
In fact, people who don't learn from experience sometimes end up discovering new ways around limitations (eg. wright brothers), which is, after all, a good thing
Users have to run as admins on XP, because most apps don't work with non-admin privileges. Apps want to write to Program Files, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and so on.
So Microsoft is to blame for making it easy for developers to write code that runs with admin privileges and harder to write code that runs with standard user privileges. A simple API call, like RequireAdmin(), before writing to a dangerous place
would have been enough to make developers think twice.
How did these guys test the update? Did they test it at all?
The update shouldn't work at all, unless the game is trying to read the configuration from "C:\boot.ini" and I strongly doubt that.
But eve developers are not the only ones to blame, I think the main blame goes to Microsoft for letting users and apps run with administrator privileges (about 80% of the users run with admin privileges on XP, because most apps simply don't work as standard user). If Microsoft made it mandatory (and easy) for developers to write apps that work with non-admin privileges, we wouldn't have such stupid situations, in which a backslash kills the whole system.
I really wish Microsoft makes Vista impossible to install for pirates.
This way, the millions and millions of 'pirates' would be forced to switch to another OS (Linux !) and the world would be a happier and safer place for everyone.
Seriously, though, I think 'piracy' has been one of the key elements in windows OS domination. Millions of computer enthusiasts from around the world installed pirated versions of windows and started to use it as a development platform (especially in Eastern Europe, India, China, with piracy rates in the 80%+ range). This led to lots of apps being developed for windows, and lots of new windows users as PCs became more and more accessible.
Today, young developers and users are becoming used to software freedom - bittorrent, linux, apache, php, firefox (and thousands of others) tell them that it's cool to be open, it's cool to build a free software universe and it's uncool to be closed and restrictive.
I think Microsoft should tolerate if not encourage piracy if they want to survive the growing competition from OSS and web-based software. This way they can 'buy' a little more time before being eventually forced to make all their desktop apps free and open sourced.
PS. As I was writing this article, my other box, which runs Vista, has miraculously shut itself down. That's probably because of the continuous swearing that I laid upon it because of the new file association architecture in Vista, which requires me to rewrite code in my app. That sucks.
I guess it all depends on what the code does - if it's a collection of utility functions (like string manipulation) which anyone could write during a coffee break, then I guess you can forget about it and move on with your life.
If, on the other hand, the code is a complex algorithm which took months of research to develop AND is the main feature of your app - then I guess you should spend some time and try to figure out the license thing.
I guess one should be 'politically correct' up to a certain point - when the subject can, in theory, harm others. Beyond that it doesn't make sense and one should focus on more important aspects of reality, rather then examine everything under the microscope, even though there's very little to see there.
Isn't tinyurl performing a redirect to the actual (long) URL ? :).
Google or some other crawler would index the redirected page so really nothing bad happens.
If such a service inserts malware during the redirect, people would probably stop using it.
Hyperlinks on web pages don't live long anyway - a link is probably relevant for a year or so.
So in my opinion there's nothing to cry wolf about.
I think Ajax/Flash only sites are a greater risk to the indexed/hyperlinked web structure as we know it, but that will probably sort itself out as it always does on the net
At this moment I don't think home users would benefit from a connection faster than 1 Gbps.
I have a gigabit connection at home and I can download a DVD in less than 1 minute and it's not even getting close to reaching the limit of my connection. The hard-disk is getting overloaded at about 20MB/s in BitTorrent.
You can watch streaming BluRay DVDs with a gigabit connection so unless we come up with some way of producing a lot more data for entertainment purposes, the terabits-per-second connections will be overkill for any average user in the near future.
Here in Romania, you get a 50 Mbps connectinon for 10$/month (http://www.rdslink.ro/fiber/fiber.htm) (4 or 6Mbps to the U.S.) I'm paying 100 Euros for 1 Gbps connection (to Romania and Europe), 3 Mbps minimum external speed with bursts to 10Mbps. Several years ago the only connection you could get here was dial-up; now the market is flooded with bandwidth and the problem now is the hard drive, because it starts to die when bittorrent transfers with 25 megabytes / second. I don't think I've ever came close to exhausting the gigabit, even with the 5 servers I have in my home. Curiously how 20Mbps sounds so unattractive to me, I mean ... it takes ages to download a DVD at 2 Megabytes/second :).
I think that science is slowly reaching the boundary of reality and perception.
... because it is! If you think of it, 'here' and 'there' are actually perceived in the same place - in your thought (not necessarily head or brain), so space is just a definition that you've learned / invented.
In fact, if you think about it, there is nothing BUT perception of reality.
From a subjective point of view, I do not know if the universe around me exists beyond my perception of it - for me, when I'm dead, the universe disappears; my body is merely a notion in my head, as is 'my head', actually.
In fact, one cannot prove that there is 'us' - all of this (earth, people, Microsoft) can be just a mere movie that my perception plays and constantly invents.
So I (or you) can interpret reality as my (your) own creation
For us, things do not exist in this universe until we learn them - how can we be sure that we are not just inventing our reality as we go. Jupiter did not exist, until some guy built a telescope and it popped up into reality. The galaxies did not exist until scientists have 'discovered' them. Is 'discovery' an actually identification of what is 'out there' or is it just a possible idea that we declare real.
As we uncover the fabric of the universe, we might as well discover that there is no such thing as 'universe' - it is just our invention - including life, death and all other definitions that govern our perceived world.
I would prefer watching BBC programmes on apps like LiberTV.
You can't really enjoy good documentaries/programmes unless they are in HD or at a very good fullscreen resolution.
First, I think that "BitTorrent" is a bad name for a legal download service, since Torrent is a another word for 'free movies/shows'. They should have named the service differently. :).
Second, the fact that they rely on user's codecs is an error, since various codec packs can create a real mess on the computer and many users simply don't understand *why* they have to install codecs in order to be able to play X or Y.
Third, you have to select/purchase the movie from the web-browser, download it with bittorrent and watch it with a media player. At least 3 applications are involved, which is somewhat distracting and annoying.
Projects like democracy player (http://www.getdemocracy.com/) are much more integrated and don't require you to switch from app to app to whatch a movie.
In my view, the best app which does everything right is LiberTV (http://www.libertv.ro/), which is a romanian service, and should launch internationally soon (http://www.libertv.tv/).
The downloads go several megabytes per second, no codecs needed (except for quicktime for some videos) and you can start watching the movie in several seconds, because files are split into smaller parts before being transfered with a bittorrent-like protocol. So users have a 'click and watch' attitude towards the app, not 'click, install, launch, switch, download, switch, play, crash, try again, damn DRM!'