When I was at Auckland university we used to dread when the guys doing the stage 3 OO programming course got an assignment.
I once saw 12 of them running the eiffel compiler each instance of which was absorbing over 100M of virtual memory on, as I recall, old DEC unix boxes...
This was back in 1993 so as you can imagine (with relatively limited amounts of RAM and VM in those days and in a relatively small and underbudgeted department) the whole system came to a grinding halt for everyone else. Heck, I couldn't even read usenet news and opening a smallish text file to edit in emacs took around 10 minutes. Which, for vi devotees, *is* unusually long even for emacs;)
I think they went home for the weekend to leave their compile processes running, meaning that the rest of the comp.sci facility could barely use the unix servers for the duration.
Eventually, as I recall en-masse eiffel compiler processes were *banned* and they were told to spread out their compilation processes over a few days (ie not all 12 students at once).
Since the assignments were weekly this caused problems. I believe they turned to an alternative OO language. I wasn't doing the paper so I don't know which one.
"I wouldn't mind if Sony would make the PS3 with a built in hard drive (goodbye, memory cards!"
I'm not real keen on console games, but I know people who do and a big part of their activity is taking the memory cards over to their pals and being able to show them cool stuff, continue saved games etc.
Without memory cards the options would be reduced to; Either you and your pals have consoles with an internet connection and you leave yours on and connected when you leave the house. Or floppy disks in the console. Or a console memory cards *AND* a hard disk. Seems the most sensible option to me.
"store merchandise that rings itself up for purchase"
Imagine merchandise that recognises when its being taken out of the shop and bills your account...
"Oh I'm so brave and clever walking out of the shop without paying! I could never afford all these goodies!" (checks bank account the next day) "Oh crap I guess I'll have to find a cardboard box to live in"
Fragging brilliant; retail prices will be able to drop thru the floor! (but they won't of course; have profit, *keep* profit! INCREASE profit!)
They will have to take it up; the huge database of personal information to be created under the terms of the homeland security bill will require it.
This database will be vulnerable not only to direct attack but to attacks against the internet (on which it feeds).
On the flipside, however it has often seemed to me that governments around the world, particularly in democratic nations (so-called, more accurately 'media-cracies') governments have been steadily giving up control of critical infrastructure resources to multinational companies, almost as if they are trying to phase themselves out.
in kazaa; "How 'bout I send a bill to Kazaa for 'stealing' information about me that is used to provide ads that bother the shit about me? Oh wait, I can't threaten them with legal action like they can"
If you have kazaa installed on a filesystem that supports permissions and you deny yourself write/create permission to the directories that kazaa stores its ads in then it can't show you the ads and doesn't complain.
*zap* no ads in kazaa.
Plus adaware can make the spyware safe. But remember, the procedure I describe here is purely cosmetic.
"They may at their discretion hire others to modify the code"
Ok, so they get some third party to modify the code. Now you have a human being with memories of your code out there thinking thoughts and writing more code on different projects. There is no way that this person can guarantee that their experience of *your* code isn't influencing their design of new code. They may not even intend to, but thats how thought works with creative stuff; inspiration.
So what are you going to do if you come across something that you think they did which was inspired by your code?
Is that ok or not?
There are arguments either way, but my line would be that any restriction on intellectual property is doomed to introduce the notion of thought crimes.
I totally agree, but there is the possibility that certain people running websites don't *want* a certain type of customer.
I have nothing against this sort of thing in principle.
Take for example the other day, I wanted to order a pizza online from a local pizza house that does pretty goot pizza.
Turns out that their site *requires* Macromedia Shockwave Flash to use it. I outright refuse to install that particular plugin because its almost always used for brightly colored flickering ads. I used the phone instead.
I emailed the site admin to suggest he consider the flash phobic but heres the important bit: Its their right to set up their page how they want. Its not my right to diss them off for it.
So long as I can either go elsewhere or use the phone instead its cool.
then do I or do I not have an inalienable right to;
Block whoever I want to block, Block whatever browser agent I want to block, Or do whatever else I want to do with respect to how content my on website is served?
Whether people *visit* my site is entirely up to them.
I don't know, how would you pay the dollar? Give them your credit card details? M$ Passport I suppose? Would you really trust that shit? Even with a mere dollar?
"In the four minutes you have to make the decision, you receive false information from your people and believe an Iranian F-14 is bearing down on you. You make a decision and shoot it down, only to discover that you've destroyed an Airbus full of innocent people"
An F14 with no known means of harming an Aegis cruiser not even if the pilot decided to crash into the cruiser.
Aegis is *not* something that any _single_ airborne enemy could hope to harm. Not even if the F14 had antishipping missiles (is there such a thing? This is an air superiority fighter).
And the captain took absolutely no consequences for his actions. So far as I am aware, and you have your finger on the facts it seems so correct me if I'm wrong please, the captain wasn't even admonished or disciplined in any way whatsoever. He commited an action in violation of several international laws and nothing happens.
I don't think thats right; to my mind any action that *could* be a war crime should be prosecuted as such regardless of whether the perpetrator says it was an accident! The claimed intent of the perp should have nothing to do with whether or not charges are brought.
Whatever nation they hail from, whatever the just cause they believe they serve. Either there is international justice or there isn't. (The way things look to me, theres international courts, and international laws, but there really is no such thing as international justice).
I'm very dissapointed in the human race in general in this regard.
"People who are involved in friendly fire incidents can be, and are, court marshalled for their negligence, and are subject to being booted out of the service, imprisoned, etc"
I wonder if non-american civilian deaths count? Like an Aegis cruiser shooting down a foreign airliner while said cruiser is unlawfully in the territorial waters of the airliners originating nation? Under those conditions I'd also like to see courts martial called into action and the commanding officer booted out of the service.
That sort of thing might even prevent retaliatory terrorist attacks too, one never knows.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in New Zealand, so the entire country counts as a rural area.
When I was at Auckland university we used to dread when the guys doing the stage 3 OO programming course got an assignment.
;)
I once saw 12 of them running the eiffel compiler each instance of which was absorbing over 100M of virtual memory on, as I recall, old DEC unix boxes...
This was back in 1993 so as you can imagine (with relatively limited amounts of RAM and VM in those days and in a relatively small and underbudgeted department) the whole system came to a grinding halt for everyone else. Heck, I couldn't even read usenet news and opening a smallish text file to edit in emacs took around 10 minutes. Which, for vi devotees, *is* unusually long even for emacs
I think they went home for the weekend to leave their compile processes running, meaning that the rest of the comp.sci facility could barely use the unix servers for the duration.
Eventually, as I recall en-masse eiffel compiler processes were *banned* and they were told to spread out their compilation processes over a few days (ie not all 12 students at once).
Since the assignments were weekly this caused problems. I believe they turned to an alternative OO language. I wasn't doing the paper so I don't know which one.
Well I've never seen one, not in a shop, and not in nearly 20 years of working in the industry.
Unless you count those tiny little handheld devices of the 1980s and they wern't exactly PCs...
Anyone on here use sony PC or even seen one for sale?
"I wouldn't mind if Sony would make the PS3 with a built in hard drive (goodbye, memory cards!"
I'm not real keen on console games, but I know people who do and a big part of their activity is taking the memory cards over to their pals and being able to show them cool stuff, continue saved games etc.
Without memory cards the options would be reduced to;
Either you and your pals have consoles with an internet connection and you leave yours on and connected when you leave the house.
Or floppy disks in the console.
Or a console memory cards *AND* a hard disk.
Seems the most sensible option to me.
I think that any statement to the effect that
"The official rule is that blarg is not allowed therefore blarg does not happen (on any large or widespread scale)"
should, for any given blarg, be taken with a large pinch of salt (or whatever other white powder you choose).
Oh I just picked the most tried and tested method.
I'm sure you could come up with more ingeneous ways than eating brains, but hey, eating brains makes you smarter!
Depends,
are you gonna start feeding deer heads to cattle?
"store merchandise that rings itself up for purchase"
Imagine merchandise that recognises when its being taken out of the shop and bills your account...
"Oh I'm so brave and clever walking out of the shop without paying! I could never afford all these goodies!"
(checks bank account the next day)
"Oh crap I guess I'll have to find a cardboard box to live in"
Fragging brilliant; retail prices will be able to drop thru the floor! (but they won't of course; have profit, *keep* profit! INCREASE profit!)
something like
"Be sure your sins are born in secret!"
Meaning that you are FAR more likely to do *naughty* things, if you feel that your naughtyness is secret and won't be found out.
Its an old saying and it damn sure applies to programmers!
yes I'd thought of that one too, rhymes with mediocrity.
Unfortunately, the political power wielded by mediacracies is far from mediocre.
(Off topic I know but) Thing is, in a democracy, what you really have to look at is how do people decide how to cast their vote.
Then consider whether or not advertising works for *anything*
Then consider who runs advertising and media coverage of the antics of politicians.
Who has the power?
They will have to take it up; the huge database of personal information to be created under the terms of the homeland security bill will require it.
This database will be vulnerable not only to direct attack but to attacks against the internet (on which it feeds).
On the flipside, however it has often seemed to me that governments around the world, particularly in democratic nations (so-called, more accurately 'media-cracies') governments have been steadily giving up control of critical infrastructure resources to multinational companies, almost as if they are trying to phase themselves out.
in kazaa;
"How 'bout I send a bill to Kazaa for 'stealing' information about me that is used to provide ads that bother the shit about me? Oh wait, I can't threaten them with legal action like they can"
If you have kazaa installed on a filesystem that supports permissions and you deny yourself write/create permission to the directories that kazaa stores its ads in then it can't show you the ads and doesn't complain.
*zap* no ads in kazaa.
Plus adaware can make the spyware safe.
But remember, the procedure I describe here is purely cosmetic.
Have fun!
"They may at their discretion hire others to modify the code"
Ok, so they get some third party to modify the code.
Now you have a human being with memories of your code out there thinking thoughts and writing more code on different projects.
There is no way that this person can guarantee that their experience of *your* code isn't influencing their design of new code.
They may not even intend to, but thats how thought works with creative stuff; inspiration.
So what are you going to do if you come across something that you think they did which was inspired by your code?
Is that ok or not?
There are arguments either way, but my line would be that any restriction on intellectual property is doomed to introduce the notion of thought crimes.
cripes!
Of course, a ballista with one of these trees in it would call the wrath of the UN down on ones heads.
I could just imagine the weapons inspectors too
those trees, and every splinter is going to need to be accounted for, you know.
The sawdust could be used by terrorists!!!
Call out the national guard!
Think of the children!!!
a honking great radioactive sharpened *tree* hurtling toward you as an *arrow* you go right ahead.
I will duck.
I totally agree, but there is the possibility that certain people running websites don't *want* a certain type of customer.
I have nothing against this sort of thing in principle.
Take for example the other day, I wanted to order a pizza online from a local pizza house that does pretty goot pizza.
Turns out that their site *requires* Macromedia Shockwave Flash to use it.
I outright refuse to install that particular plugin because its almost always used for brightly colored flickering ads.
I used the phone instead.
I emailed the site admin to suggest he consider the flash phobic but heres the important bit:
Its their right to set up their page how they want.
Its not my right to diss them off for it.
So long as I can either go elsewhere or use the phone instead its cool.
When thats not an option, *then* its not cool.
then do I or do I not have an inalienable right to;
Block whoever I want to block,
Block whatever browser agent I want to block,
Or do whatever else I want to do with respect to how content my on website is served?
Whether people *visit* my site is entirely up to them.
You mean like Goku?
Geneva is in Switzerland which is not an EU country.
So I don't get your comment;
"Few of those countries, oddly, are in the EU, even though the treaty was signed in Geneva"
I don't know, how would you pay the dollar?
Give them your credit card details?
M$ Passport I suppose?
Would you really trust that shit? Even with a mere dollar?
Who will be left to defend us?????
It takes more than a few good men to man an aircraft carrier!
the RIAA was evading taxes?
Or because they need those downloaded mp3s to stop the reactor going critical?
a working penis enlargement technology, and I see no reason why it shouldn't, then any politician (even female) would definitely support it!!
"In the four minutes you have to make the decision, you receive false information from your people and believe an Iranian F-14 is bearing down on you. You make a decision and shoot it down, only to discover that you've destroyed an Airbus full of innocent people"
An F14 with no known means of harming an Aegis cruiser not even if the pilot decided to crash into the cruiser.
Aegis is *not* something that any _single_ airborne enemy could hope to harm.
Not even if the F14 had antishipping missiles (is there such a thing? This is an air superiority fighter).
And the captain took absolutely no consequences for his actions. So far as I am aware, and you have your finger on the facts it seems so correct me if I'm wrong please, the captain wasn't even admonished or disciplined in any way whatsoever.
He commited an action in violation of several international laws and nothing happens.
I don't think thats right; to my mind any action that *could* be a war crime should be prosecuted as such regardless of whether the perpetrator says it was an accident! The claimed intent of the perp should have nothing to do with whether or not charges are brought.
Whatever nation they hail from, whatever the just cause they believe they serve. Either there is international justice or there isn't.
(The way things look to me, theres international courts, and international laws, but there really is no such thing as international justice).
I'm very dissapointed in the human race in general in this regard.
"People who are involved in friendly fire incidents can be, and are, court marshalled for their negligence, and are subject to being booted out of the service, imprisoned, etc"
I wonder if non-american civilian deaths count?
Like an Aegis cruiser shooting down a foreign airliner while said cruiser is unlawfully in the territorial waters of the airliners originating nation?
Under those conditions I'd also like to see courts martial called into action and the commanding officer booted out of the service.
That sort of thing might even prevent retaliatory terrorist attacks too, one never knows.
Ok mod me down for being off topic...