At 16 I was into a bit of piracy myself, cracking Atari games and carts and distributing them through BBS's in the dark days before the internet. These days it's a whole different game, and anything that gets "discovered" by a clever hacker can be immediately propagated across the globe.
And of course with this new power in the hands of individuals the corporations are running scared.
Which brings me to my question:
Do you think it's appropriate for corporations to make criminal the mere discovery of their secrets? And to put it in a more loaded way... Does this situation have anything to do with "real ownership," or is this just an example of the fear and vindictiveness of an industry scared that it can't control the forces of Nature?
(colorful, eh?)
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
a study on propulsion
on
Sex in Space
·
· Score: 1
curious how the motions of manual masturbation would cause your body to rotate in zero-g...
IF THE SHUTLLES ROCKIN' DON'T COME KNOCKIN'
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
you wrote: *sigh* Someone remind me why I live in the US?
Because the US is the root of a great many problems, and you are among the best problem solvers to have ever lived. The only thing missing is the true strong heart of personal freedom.
The fictions of the elite and powerful can be mesmerizing to the people of an emerging empire. The hypnotic mass-media define and refine our daily issues, playing our tastes and desires like toy violins.
It seems to me that the US attention span is in a state of chaos. All we can do is our small part, drink less coffee, and don't feed the monkey.
!!! AND STOP THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION !!!
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Lo I fear that StarOffice will not be the messiah for the lost tribes of Macintosh. Well, at least it won't be the cure to The Balloon Problem. The nature of software is that it clumps and gloms users into a sticky ball that's hard to unglue. Where is Microsoft's consumer Word Processor? Trapped in the body of Inspector Gadget.
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Libertarianism is a Goot Thing, but not when it goes into the space realm and defends any and all business practices. It is not so much that MS is a monopoly. That in itself might be fine, but they misused their position, and wielded power in direct attacks that are not appropriate for a monopoly. Their acts in the context of their influence makes them criminal acts, just as there is a difference between consensual sex and rape. Perhaps MicroSoft didn't exactly rape anyone, but a lot of companies got f*cked when they would have rather just gone to dinner.
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Encryption is dead, will always be dead, and will always fail. Why? For the simple reason that a vast number of common hackers grok what goes into encryption technology, and no special corporate giant is going to be able to keep anything secret that is - simply put - built into the nature of things.
On the other hand, if governments and corporations want to protect information from ordinary citizens they have only to dumb down the educational system, and kill (or indoctrinate) everyone with an IQ over 130. Maybe it's just a matter of time before this occurs. Maybe it already is happening.
Vive la revolution!
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Eons ago (in pop music terms) Roger Waters released an album called Radio Kaos that is/was errily reminiscent of Lighthouse and -well- everything Townshendish. Seriously, Rob, you should get a copy of this one!
-------- Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
As a Mac user I'm completely confuddled by the decision to discontinue Half Life development. First of all, it seems that the decision is based on a kind of speculation that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We don't think the Mac users will forgive us for doing a half-assed job on the Half Life port, so we'd rather avoid looking like the idiots we are..."
Since when does pre-release user feedback based on rumors of poor PC parity have anything to do with the devotion and quality of effort that goes into a project? Why can't these guys just do a good job, and live up to the spirit of their chosen profession? Really I'm confused... oh...
Finally, I should say I was looking very much forward to Half Life single-player, had no idea of what was going on with development, and would have bought the game sight-unseen - and I hardly ever buy games. The success of Unreal on the Mac should have demonstrated that Half Life was destined to be a hit.
Seriously, something very fscked-up is going on with the psychology of these developers.... And it has all the earmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Apple sent me the cancellation email yesterday, and I wasn't very upset at all. I had the sense that rising RAM prices and the earthquake in Taiwan would make my purchase of the G4/450 a steal for me, and a loss for Apple. So I didn't feel bad, just figured I could re-order as soon as the original configuration returns. Which it will soon!
HOWEVER: Today I received the following email...
Dear Apple Customer, The following products have been shipped and are expected to be delivered on 10/16/1999. _________________________ Z01B POWERMAC G4 1 2,848.00 With the following configuration: PROCESSOR............ 065-1744 450MHz G4 w/1MB L2 cache MEMORY............... 065-1608 256MB SDRAM/1 DIMM HARD DRIVE........... 065-1956 20GB Ultra ATA drive CD/DVD ROM........... 065-1902 DVD ROM drive w/DVD Video REMOVABLE STORAGE.... 065-1911 Zip drive HIGH SPEED MODEM..... 065-1821 56K internal modem w/FAXstf GRAPHIC SUPPORT...... 065-1820 RAGE 128 GL card/16MB SDRAM HIGH SPEED NETWORKING: 065-1623 10/100 BASE T Ethernet SCSI SUPPORT......... 065-1696 Ultra SCSI PCI card w/adapter KEYBOARD............. 065-1995 USB Keyboard ACCESSORY KIT........ 065-1732 ACCESSORY KIT OS LANGUAGE.......... 065-1984 MAC OS COMMUNICATION CARD... 065-1899 No AirPort Card _________________________
Looks as if Apple is doing the right thing, at least for those of us who ordered the G4 on the day it was announced! As for all the whiners out there, isn't screaming about it just the "adult" version of bawling yer poor little eyes out?
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
For example, should I have a right to say (warning: offensive example follows), "Niggers should leave!" in a public place?
In this world there is much energy bottled up inside the human body and brain, and some of it comes out in just such a way. Is there any real difference between the individual with Tourette Syndrome who yells out such a thing, or the individual who does so due to a larger and qualitatively different neural complex? I think not.
In the real world the expression of ideas is all about the one who expresses them, and to silence that person is to essentially invalidate their existence, to consign their very real life and experience into a realm of intellect - reducing them only to that which has meaning for the observer.
It seems to me this whole thread is sunk deep deep into the realm of dualistic intellect and as such lost its touch with reality. From the so-called "christians" who serve the master of their opinions rather than strving to forgive and gain insight... to the post-modern intellectuals who characterize things and ideas as "evil monsters with black scary fangs and head ripping hatred of gleeful joyous children of light and flowers."
(Mmm, I love the smell of the dualist dung-heap.)
We ought to get past the intellectual realm and find ourselves, that is the individual goal. Becoming offended, elated, or confounded by ideas is a symptom of a person who is out of touch with himself and his world, and who is really scared to find true freedom for himself.... It's paranoia.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
The general sense I get from the CyberPunk genre (and also from SlashDot) is that even as our technological prowess increases and mankind merges its genetics with silicon, we are still at heart brutal confused animals blindly chasing after meaning and purpose in an indifferent universe.
In your view, are we just groping our way blindly, trying through our technology to get past our perceived shortcomings, or is mankind actually doing something to enhance life on earth, and our future life in the cosmos?
Or to put it succinctly: Do you believe there really is such a thing as progress? Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
then wouldn't SPACE HAVE MASS It could, if it wasn't just a convenient abstraction.
Relativity is not 100% correct or the unified field theory would have been solved by now You presume that there is a unified field theory to be discovered. It may be that the very small and the very large operate in different universes. Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Some of the cooler benefits of this new processor have gone unnoted by the otherwise snappy Slashdotters. A compiler that translates any and all instruction sets into its own native code provides an amazing means for JIT, open source, and all manner of programs written in their own customized instruction sets.
If the TransMeta ideal propagates widely, it will be a new world of software design. Instead of compiling for a processor, you only need to pre-compile into a pseudocode, provide a description of that pseudocode to TransMeta, and the processor takes care of final translation, and apparently a good deal of the debugging work too. As a development platform this sounds like a serious ideal. In a world of open source and platform independence, the TransMeta sounds like a real solution.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
I'd be curious to know whether certain mental practices, like meditation, have a restorative or preventative value for such tangles and plaques. After all, aren't these chemical residues brought about by overabundance/underabundance of sustaining chemicals that are present in a more "balanced" brain? Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
As far as creationists versus militant atheists, this seems like a non-issue. A scientist merely uses the building blocks of life - atoms, molecules, amino acids, minerals - and those elements do what they (were designed to?) do. The real issue will come when scientists learn how to create matter out of nothing, and give birth to ordered universes with intelligent beings. Then, of course, the inhabitants of that new universe will wonder who created them, and whether it was a militant atheist scientist "god" or a creationist "god."
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Back in the Amiga heyday I wrote a couple of forgettable games that were actually published (!). If any Amiga diehards are curious, the titles were "Dino Wars," and "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."
My development environment was DevPac, a really sweet 68K Assembler. My favorite features in the Amiga was most definitely the 68000 processor. I wasn't ready to go from a nice clean 6502 to a sloppy creature like the x86, and when I saw the 68000 instruction set I knew I had come home.
Throw in a really nifty Copper, and a fabulous Blitter, and the Amiga had everything a kid brought up on Atari display list programming could want! Imagine my shock when newer computers were coming out that didn't have any onboard co-processors to handle tasks like blitting and sound... It was a strange thing to see.
Now of course the PCI slot rules, and AGP is coming on strong, and everything is 20 times more complex and you have to spend years on a single architecture just to keep up with its APIs. And all this complexity, perhaps more than anything else, is what drives the new "information economy," which to me seems more like a dazzle 'em with bullshit, grab their wallet and run economy.
A rant, to be sure, but I always wondered how the Amiga, with its fab Intuition toolbox, a penchant for multiprocessing, a thoroughly OOP design, and a superior processor could founder while DOS continued to rule the desktops of the world. I think I must've been warped to an evil alternate universe at some point! Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Call me new-agey, but I'm concerned that such experiments do not include 'enlightened masters' as subjects or controls. Surely the fact that an 'enlightened' mind is capable of processing sensory data without recourse to symbols would have some bearing on the outcome of this kind of experiment. The theory being that such a 'natural mind' has no need to compile its data in a common area for sorting and comparison, instead relying on more parallel processes to get the job done. Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
A slightly simpler idea would be to link to his site from SlashDot through a CGI script. It would only let through a certain number of SlashDotters and tell the rest to wait til the load on the victim's site has slowed. Or perhaps even better would be to put up a countdown timer, then let the SlashDotter wait until a full minute elapses before going through the "gateway interface." Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
What if you programmed a laser beam in Thailand to shoot somebody, but you didn't actually go pull the trigger yourself. Could that be considered indirect enough to be legal?
Piling on levels of indirection will not save you from an out of bounds exception!
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
This is a VERY good reason to be suspicious of Microsoft products.
Unfortunately when I installed Microsoft Windows I checked the box that said "Always trust content from Microsoft," so I'm bound by my agreement to always trust Microsoft.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Jon,
At 16 I was into a bit of piracy myself, cracking Atari games and carts and distributing them through BBS's in the dark days before the internet. These days it's a whole different game, and anything that gets "discovered" by a clever hacker can be immediately propagated across the globe.
And of course with this new power in the hands of individuals the corporations are running scared.
Which brings me to my question:
Do you think it's appropriate for corporations to make criminal the mere discovery of their secrets? And to put it in a more loaded way... Does this situation have anything to do with "real ownership," or is this just an example of the fear and vindictiveness of an industry scared that it can't control the forces of Nature?
(colorful, eh?)
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
curious how the motions of manual masturbation would cause your body to rotate in zero-g...
IF THE SHUTLLES ROCKIN' DON'T COME KNOCKIN'
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
you wrote:
*sigh* Someone remind me why I live in the US?
Because the US is the root of a great many problems, and you are among the best problem solvers to have ever lived. The only thing missing is the true strong heart of personal freedom.
The fictions of the elite and powerful can be mesmerizing to the people of an emerging empire. The hypnotic mass-media define and refine our daily issues, playing our tastes and desires like toy violins.
It seems to me that the US attention span is in a state of chaos. All we can do is our small part, drink less coffee, and don't feed the monkey.
!!! AND STOP THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION !!!
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Lo I fear that StarOffice will not be the messiah for the lost tribes of Macintosh. Well, at least it won't be the cure to The Balloon Problem. The nature of software is that it clumps and gloms users into a sticky ball that's hard to unglue. Where is Microsoft's consumer Word Processor? Trapped in the body of Inspector Gadget.
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Libertarianism is a Goot Thing, but not when it goes into the space realm and defends any and all business practices. It is not so much that MS is a monopoly. That in itself might be fine, but they misused their position, and wielded power in direct attacks that are not appropriate for a monopoly. Their acts in the context of their influence makes them criminal acts, just as there is a difference between consensual sex and rape. Perhaps MicroSoft didn't exactly rape anyone, but a lot of companies got f*cked when they would have rather just gone to dinner.
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Encryption is dead, will always be dead, and will always fail. Why? For the simple reason that a vast number of common hackers grok what goes into encryption technology, and no special corporate giant is going to be able to keep anything secret that is - simply put - built into the nature of things.
On the other hand, if governments and corporations want to protect information from ordinary citizens they have only to dumb down the educational system, and kill (or indoctrinate) everyone with an IQ over 130. Maybe it's just a matter of time before this occurs. Maybe it already is happening.
Vive la revolution!
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Eons ago (in pop music terms) Roger Waters released an album called Radio Kaos that is/was errily reminiscent of Lighthouse and -well- everything Townshendish. Seriously, Rob, you should get a copy of this one!
--------
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
As a Mac user I'm completely confuddled by the decision to discontinue Half Life development. First of all, it seems that the decision is based on a kind of speculation that leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy. "We don't think the Mac users will forgive us for doing a half-assed job on the Half Life port, so we'd rather avoid looking like the idiots we are..."
Since when does pre-release user feedback based on rumors of poor PC parity have anything to do with the devotion and quality of effort that goes into a project? Why can't these guys just do a good job, and live up to the spirit of their chosen profession? Really I'm confused... oh...
Finally, I should say I was looking very much forward to Half Life single-player, had no idea of what was going on with development, and would have bought the game sight-unseen - and I hardly ever buy games. The success of Unreal on the Mac should have demonstrated that Half Life was destined to be a hit.
Seriously, something very fscked-up is going on with the psychology of these developers.... And it has all the earmarks of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Apple sent me the cancellation email yesterday, and I wasn't very upset at all. I had the sense that rising RAM prices and the earthquake in Taiwan would make my purchase of the G4/450 a steal for me, and a loss for Apple. So I didn't feel bad, just figured I could re-order as soon as the original configuration returns. Which it will soon!
............ 065-1744 450MHz G4 w/1MB L2 cache ............... 065-1608 256MB SDRAM/1 DIMM ........... 065-1956 20GB Ultra ATA drive ........... 065-1902 DVD ROM drive w/DVD Video .... 065-1911 Zip drive ..... 065-1821 56K internal modem w/FAXstf ...... 065-1820 RAGE 128 GL card/16MB SDRAM ......... 065-1696 Ultra SCSI PCI card w/adapter ............. 065-1995 USB Keyboard ........ 065-1732 ACCESSORY KIT .......... 065-1984 MAC OS ... 065-1899 No AirPort Card
HOWEVER: Today I received the following email...
Dear Apple Customer,
The following products have been shipped and are expected to be delivered on 10/16/1999.
_________________________
Z01B POWERMAC G4 1 2,848.00
With the following configuration:
PROCESSOR
MEMORY
HARD DRIVE
CD/DVD ROM
REMOVABLE STORAGE
HIGH SPEED MODEM
GRAPHIC SUPPORT
HIGH SPEED NETWORKING: 065-1623 10/100 BASE T Ethernet
SCSI SUPPORT
KEYBOARD
ACCESSORY KIT
OS LANGUAGE
COMMUNICATION CARD
_________________________
Looks as if Apple is doing the right thing, at least for those of us who ordered the G4 on the day it was announced! As for all the whiners out there, isn't screaming about it just the "adult" version of bawling yer poor little eyes out?
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
For example, should I have a right to say (warning: offensive example follows), "Niggers should leave!" in a public place?
In this world there is much energy bottled up inside the human body and brain, and some of it comes out in just such a way. Is there any real difference between the individual with Tourette Syndrome who yells out such a thing, or the individual who does so due to a larger and qualitatively different neural complex? I think not.
In the real world the expression of ideas is all about the one who expresses them, and to silence that person is to essentially invalidate their existence, to consign their very real life and experience into a realm of intellect - reducing them only to that which has meaning for the observer.
It seems to me this whole thread is sunk deep deep into the realm of dualistic intellect and as such lost its touch with reality. From the so-called "christians" who serve the master of their opinions rather than strving to forgive and gain insight... to the post-modern intellectuals who characterize things and ideas as "evil monsters with black scary fangs and head ripping hatred of gleeful joyous children of light and flowers."
(Mmm, I love the smell of the dualist dung-heap.)
We ought to get past the intellectual realm and find ourselves, that is the individual goal. Becoming offended, elated, or confounded by ideas is a symptom of a person who is out of touch with himself and his world, and who is really scared to find true freedom for himself.... It's paranoia.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
The general sense I get from the CyberPunk genre (and also from SlashDot) is that even as our technological prowess increases and mankind merges its genetics with silicon, we are still at heart brutal confused animals blindly chasing after meaning and purpose in an indifferent universe.
In your view, are we just groping our way blindly, trying through our technology to get past our perceived shortcomings, or is mankind actually doing something to enhance life on earth, and our future life in the cosmos?
Or to put it succinctly: Do you believe there really is such a thing as progress?
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
then wouldn't SPACE HAVE MASS
It could, if it wasn't just a convenient abstraction.
Relativity is not 100% correct or the unified field theory would have been solved by now
You presume that there is a unified field theory to be discovered. It may be that the very small and the very large operate in different universes.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Some of the cooler benefits of this new processor have gone unnoted by the otherwise snappy Slashdotters. A compiler that translates any and all instruction sets into its own native code provides an amazing means for JIT, open source, and all manner of programs written in their own customized instruction sets.
If the TransMeta ideal propagates widely, it will be a new world of software design. Instead of compiling for a processor, you only need to pre-compile into a pseudocode, provide a description of that pseudocode to TransMeta, and the processor takes care of final translation, and apparently a good deal of the debugging work too. As a development platform this sounds like a serious ideal. In a world of open source and platform independence, the TransMeta sounds like a real solution.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
You're quite right, of course. OTOH Why not do it anyways and see what happens? :)
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
I'd be curious to know whether certain mental practices, like meditation, have a restorative or preventative value for such tangles and plaques. After all, aren't these chemical residues brought about by overabundance/underabundance of sustaining chemicals that are present in a more "balanced" brain?
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Super soldiers that look like Kurt Russell!
As far as creationists versus militant atheists, this seems like a non-issue. A scientist merely uses the building blocks of life - atoms, molecules, amino acids, minerals - and those elements do what they (were designed to?) do. The real issue will come when scientists learn how to create matter out of nothing, and give birth to ordered universes with intelligent beings. Then, of course, the inhabitants of that new universe will wonder who created them, and whether it was a militant atheist scientist "god" or a creationist "god."
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Dave's not here!
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Back in the Amiga heyday I wrote a couple of forgettable games that were actually published (!). If any Amiga diehards are curious, the titles were "Dino Wars," and "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure."
My development environment was DevPac, a really sweet 68K Assembler. My favorite features in the Amiga was most definitely the 68000 processor. I wasn't ready to go from a nice clean 6502 to a sloppy creature like the x86, and when I saw the 68000 instruction set I knew I had come home.
Throw in a really nifty Copper, and a fabulous Blitter, and the Amiga had everything a kid brought up on Atari display list programming could want! Imagine my shock when newer computers were coming out that didn't have any onboard co-processors to handle tasks like blitting and sound... It was a strange thing to see.
Now of course the PCI slot rules, and AGP is coming on strong, and everything is 20 times more complex and you have to spend years on a single architecture just to keep up with its APIs. And all this complexity, perhaps more than anything else, is what drives the new "information economy," which to me seems more like a dazzle 'em with bullshit, grab their wallet and run economy.
A rant, to be sure, but I always wondered how the Amiga, with its fab Intuition toolbox, a penchant for multiprocessing, a thoroughly OOP design, and a superior processor could founder while DOS continued to rule the desktops of the world. I think I must've been warped to an evil alternate universe at some point!
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Call me new-agey, but I'm concerned that such experiments do not include 'enlightened masters' as subjects or controls. Surely the fact that an 'enlightened' mind is capable of processing sensory data without recourse to symbols would have some bearing on the outcome of this kind of experiment. The theory being that such a 'natural mind' has no need to compile its data in a common area for sorting and comparison, instead relying on more parallel processes to get the job done.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
A slightly simpler idea would be to link to his site from SlashDot through a CGI script. It would only let through a certain number of SlashDotters and tell the rest to wait til the load on the victim's site has slowed. Or perhaps even better would be to put up a countdown timer, then let the SlashDotter wait until a full minute elapses before going through the "gateway interface."
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
The post was an analogy about Windows NT.
An analogy compares one thing to another.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
What if you programmed a laser beam in Thailand to shoot somebody, but you didn't actually go pull the trigger yourself. Could that be considered indirect enough to be legal?
Piling on levels of indirection will not save you from an out of bounds exception!
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Oh yeah, you're right I was smoking something.
Shouldn't mix SlashDot and HashPot...
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Network Security Administrator
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?
Andrew Wrote:
This is a VERY good reason to be suspicious of Microsoft products.
Unfortunately when I installed Microsoft Windows I checked the box that said "Always trust content from Microsoft," so I'm bound by my agreement to always trust Microsoft.
Yeah, I'm a Mac programmer. You got a problem with that?