So can I create a really really big amount of energy out of nothing, use it to go really really fast and get some place before the planck time is up? Assumming the making something outta nothing bit is viable anyway. Don't mind me, just talking out of my ass. Well, assuming I've got my quantum physics right (which I probably don't) Maybe you could harness infintesimal amounts of energy emitted by subatomic particles, the subatomic particles themselves being created out of pure energy in the first place. This, assuming you can all get it done within the planck time.
I don't know if it's my greatest failing or greatest success as a developer, but I tend to be a println debugger all the way.
I'm working on a project at the moment where this is the ONLY way to debug things. And yes, this is usually the first thing I do in any case, but good lord I really wish we had a "real" debugger.
It's very time consuming to use logging-based debugging to examine complicated interrelationships in your code. If all you need to know is "What was the value of variable xyz at this point in the code?" then anything other than println's is probably overkill.
In the same way, if you suddenly created mass (ok this is impossible).
Well, you could suddenly create it out of pure energy without breaking any rules. You could create it out of nothing if you really wanted to as long as you didn't want it hanging around any longer than the plank time, but cameras with shutter speeds that fast are probably pretty expensive.
You know what I've always thought would make a decent miniseries, if not movie[s], is the "Red Mars" Trilogy. Lots of very well-developed characters, and plenty of opportunities for Hollywood to exploit some cheesy action scences without doing too much damage to the story. I guess the year for "mars movies" is already over though.
For those interested in actually taking an active role in government (assuming you live in the U.S.), take a look at HR5522 from the 107th Congress (House of Representatives Act). Not yet passed, but referred to committee as recently as this month. You'll have to wait until all your reps get back from vaction to talk to them about it I'm sure, but speak up, they do listen. Or, more preciscely, they do count the amount of positive/negative feedback they get, assuming you live in their district (ALWAYS INCLUDE YOUR ADDRESS ON CORRESPONDENCE WITH THEM OR IT WILL NOT BE COUNTED!!!!).
I haven't looked in great detail at the contents of the bill, but the gist of it seems to be to scale back the DMCA, as it is obviously bad.
The two sponsors of this bill are Michael Honda (California) and Zoe Lofgren (California).
Latest status has it going to the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, be particularly vocal to your representatives if they serve on that committee.
You can look at the legislation yourself by going to Thomas and typing "hr5522" in the "Bill Number" text field at the top.
The government may not do things you like, but for the most part, all the information you need to speak out against it in an informed fashion is available to you for free. Use it, your tax dollars pay for it.
No offense, Tim, but that "Review" sounded a lot like what's on the back cover of the book along with some spoilers. For those who are interested, I just finished reading the book, and here is my take on it.
Overall, I found the book to be rather dull and predictable. There were 2 or 3 spots when I found myself saying "Oh... so that's where that came from", but aside from that the "plot" was predictable and dry.
I also found myself disliking a good number of characters in the book. Part of this was due to the bias of having read the rest of the series (old and new) in it's entirety, so when I read a dune book, I want want the harkonnens to be REALLY bad, and the Atreidies to be REALLY good, and it disappoints me somewhat when that doesn't happen. I'm willing to set this aside in favor of my curiosity, however.
That being said, my curiosity really wasn't satiated. The actual "Butlerian Jihad" takes a maddeningly long time to occur (in terms of pages), a more appropriate title for the book would have been "Dune: Predictable Things That Happened Before The Butlerian Jihad That Could Have been easily fit into about 100 pages", but thicker books cost more and now you'll have to go out and by the next sequel to the prequel to get the full scoop.
As in the rest of the Dune prequels written by Baby Herbert and Anderson, they just can't stand their own compared to the original works by Frank Herbert. Still, for the most part I found them interesting and mostly enjoyable. "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad" really let me down, and I had low expectations to begin with. The only reason I kept turning the pages at all was because I was hoping there would be some sort of Dune-esque layers-upon-layers of subtelty plot development, but there wasn't.
Another big dissapointment was that all the things promised on the book jacket (Suk Doctors, etc, etc) didn't happen. There were one or two allusions to such things, but they were easily missed. You shouldn't put "See the origins of the Suk Doctors" on the book jacket if all that's in the book about them is something along the lines of:
"... and Dr. Suk made somebody feel better."
Origins of the Suk Doctors? Perhaps, but what a letdown.
The science in the book was also a tad lacking. I think the Dune series in general does a very good job at acheiving suspension of disbelief, but "Jihad" seemed like it didn't even try. My main gripe is that all throughout the book, people are zipping to and fro between planets (this is before there were guild navigators who could fold space), and these planets are supposed to be REALLY far apart. I think the longest time it took for anybody to get from one planet to another was a few months. And presumably, the distances between these planets were considerably longer than a few light-months (assuming light-speed travel). So, logically the only way for this to occur would be to have superluminal travel capabilities, which is alluded to only once, and indirectly at that, it seemed like an afterthought. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the human race had acheived faster-than-light travel, that seems to me like a fairly striking scientific development, don't you think that in some little bit of background historical information in the book it would have been mentioned? Maybe I'm just too much of a nerd.
Regardless, I'll probably buy the next book too just because I'm a fan of the original Dune series and I probably won't be able to resist (and the cover pictures are kind of cool).
Isn't it our duty as "citizens" of the internet to revolt and overthrow what we beleive to be an unjust, ineffective governing body?
After all, what has collectively been dubbed 'the Internet' should exist primarily for our benefit, not to purely serve commercial needs. And primarily American commercial needs, at that.
Screw ICANN, who needs 'em? Let's make our own root nameservers. Sure, the only people using them in the near future will probably be the type of people who hang around on slashdot and complain about [Microsoft|ICANN|Lack of Nude Natalie Portman] all day, but who cares? It's still a nice little f***-you in ICANN's direction. Not that they'd care, but it's a good symbolic gesture at the very least.
This is a completely off-the-cuff statement with practicaly no research to back it up, so please forgive me if there are already movements like this floating around somewhere. If there are, could somebody kindly point me in their direction? If not, who wants to start one? I think it would be an interesting experiment at the very least.
I'm serious about this, I'm totally down with starting something up, or helping out somebody else who wants to start something up. Reply if you're interested, there's nothing to lose [save me being completely uninformed and missing the bigger picture, which is not entirely unlikely].
I suppose there's always the possibility of some people actually liking.Net;-)
As someone who's used.NET a bit, but not a whole lot, I have to say I'm not terribly impressed. Had it come out say... 6-7 years ago (in a somewhat stripped-down form, granted), then maybe. I'd have the anti-MS bias going, but at least it would have been semi-innovative.
All it is is Java, except they're calling it "Visual Basic.NET", "Visual C++.NET", and "Visual C#.NET". Oh, and while there's no technical basis for me disliking it "Visual C#" gets mad demerit points on name alone:)
What I will give it, is that from a programmer's point of view, I think it's probably better than VS6, all things considered. There's a lot of new APIs to learn, most of which are at least a little more intuitive than the older ones (but that's not saying much).
I still find the documentation to be abysmal. There certainly is a lot of it, but have you ever tried to FIND anything on MSDN? And the class reference pages, while being not terribly difficult to find, occaisionally neglect things such as what header file or library things live in - which is important if you're an old-fashioned C++ programmer like me. Not all of them are this way, but I have found a few.
And of course, the main driving force behind all of this is XML Web Services. Which I am in fact, a big supporter of. And I think their integration with SOAP and UDDI is "neat", although it's still a little early for it to be entirely practical on a large scale, but that's the whole point of releasing.NET in the first place, isn't it? But heck, there are reference implementations (free ones, beer and speech) of this stuff in Java if you want it. Sure, it's not all automagically integrated into an IDE, but if you can't work outside of something like Visual Studio, then what kind of a programmer are you?
In conclusion, why use.NET over Java? The main reason you'd write something in native Win32 over Java in the past is that Java would just run slower than a native Win32 app most of the time. So why would you want to compile your code to an M$ specific VM? At least if you wrote it in Java, it would be [mostly] platform-independent..NET still seems to run faster than something in straight Java, but there is a difference, and I think it's reaching the point with computers getting as fast as they are, and with more and more people using "Alternative" OS's, that the benefit of having something run faster on Windows, but ONLY on windows is greatly diminished.
I, for one, would be interested in helping out through some volunteer work, as long as I agreed with the bigger picture.
People have made some good points about putting the needs of a local community ahead of those of the international community, but I've always been of the opinion that no matter who you help, it benefits everyone in the long run.
What I wouldn't like to do is devote several hours/days/months of my time to a largely useless cause ('We're going to give all the kids in Namibia a web page!'). What sorts of things could one volunteer their time for that we could actually beleive would help those we're volunteering for? Are we talking about automating agriculture or streamlining AIDS testing in african countries? (I'm not sure if either of those makes much sense in this context, but you get the point)
How about some good, concrete examples? I've often thought about how much I'd like to be able to help out various orginizations by loaning myself to them to write a bit of code or somesuch. Of course there's always handing out soup to the homeless, but I tend to think your average geek has enough know-how and intelligence to do a little more good than just preforming manual labor. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but if some impoverished 3rd world country could actually _benefit_ from me helping out, then hey, I'm all for it.
I'm sure there's a really good reason not to, but can't you just stick a big magnet on the space shuttle or something and at the very least suck all the trash into one spot? Then I suppose you could put it all in a cosmic hefty bag and shoot it into the sun or something.
And you realize that if you don't have some kind of metallic enclosure for you computer, you are very likely violating FCC regulations by generating electromagnetic interference (the metal case normally shields the noise that the processor and motors in the case create)?
Sure, but who the heck leaves their case intact anyway?
I'd just like to say something in support of (publicly-run) alternative schools. I was what you might call a "discipline problem" back in my high school days. You know the drill, bored with classes, extremely dissaproving of the way the school was run, etc. But I broke out of the having 2-friends and playing with computers all day mold (although, granted, it was still where I spent a lot of my time). I got into partying and drinking and drugs and whatnot in a pretty major way, and ended up taking out a lot of my rebellious energy on the School Administration, the details of which I will not bore you with now.
But long story short, there reached a point when it was not so subtely hinted to me that if I didn't get my butt into an Altnernative school (or private school, but I didn't have the money for that), I would be expelled. So, since my parents refused to let me drop out entirely, I ended up going to an Alternative school, and I would just like to say that it was a godsend.
I got straight A's for the first time in my life, and I actually LIKED my teachers, and was even sort of friendly with a lot of them.
I'd scope out the alternative school options available to you (if there is more than 1), as there are several that are bad, but you can get a feel for those almost as soon as you walk in the door. And I wouldn't worry about the effects "Down the line". It hasn't hurt me in any way. The thing that stopped me from getting into most of the colleges I applied to was my pre-alternative school record. Schools like Berkeley actually look more favorably upon an Alternative school education, because it is generally indicitive of just the qualities that Sean seems to have. But it's also a good wake-up call to the fact that it's actually OK (if not better) to live outside the "I must get straight A's and go to an ivy league college to validate my life" box. I ended up deciding that College wasn't for me after a year or so, and ended up moving to Silicon Valley and getting a very good, high paying job.
I'd still fight the school as much as possible just on principle, but don't automatically rule out alternative school, I think that they are actually a very good thing, and contrary to popular belief are not an automatic straight-A ticket, there's just less busywork - the academic requirements are still the same (if not more stringent).
You can download a free 'evaluation' version of RealServer that can serve up to 20 simultaneous streams of live or pre-recorded audio or video, and AFAICT is not feature-limited. I'm using it to serve record and CD clips on this site and it has worked really well.
I'm aware of their eval product - and I'm not sure about the person who originally posed the question, but my guess was they probably wanted the capability to do more than 20 simultaneous streams... And probably more than 60 would be a fair guess. I know we were paying somewhere around ~$100k/server for RealServer licenses, and I think that got us 500... maybe it was 1000, but it still wasn't _THAT_ many. And even for $100k, you don't get ALL the features. Acting as a pull splitting source (if my terminoligy is correct) is still disabled unless you buy something like the "Unlimited Internet Gold License", which costs an ungodly amount of money as to discourage anybody from actually trying to compete with RBN.
Apple's QT4 is free(beer) and open-source, and works fairly well from what I remember, and that was about a year ago. I remember having a few problems with it under FreeBSD, but it worked like a charm under Solaris.
I'm not sure about encoding for it however, I think that might be where they slap you with the fees, but it's still a pittance compared to what Real wants.
Ritalin is really useful for people who are ADD. The problem is that only maybe 25% of ADD diagnoses are accurate.
Here, Here. When I was in school I was of the opinion that ritalin was merely a vehicle for the pharmeceutical companies to fill their pockets either more, and children were easy targets. I mean, what parent would deny their children the chance to be "normal" if all it takes is a little pill?
Now that I'm an adult, and after I've had some rather serious psychological problems that very nearly drove me the point of needing hospitilization, I'm a little more lenient with my views on drugs for mental health. Among other things, my shrink diagnosed me with ADD, and I laughed at first. But after being on wellbutrin for a while, I think he's right. I still don't think I should have been on anything in high school, however. I'd probably still be wasting my time in college and doing what society told me I should be doing, instead of doing what I actually wanted to do. I think adult ADD should probably be treated, and it's not a bad thing. I think it's probably also diagnosed more accurately.
I think the only thing that they have shown is not that there is any intelligent life out there, but that the power company probably is now richer than bill gates, andrew carnegie, and john t. rockefeller combined ever were.
Actually, it's run from Berkeley, which is in California, where thanks to deregulation power rates (to consumers) are locked. The power companies here are actually on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
Re:Christmas isn't about presents
on
Gifts For Geeks
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· Score: 1
You know, I used to think this way too, and then something occurred to
me. I figure there's at least three (* somebody pointed out to me years ago that there's a fourth) stages of looking at Christmas (or gift giving in general):
This used to actually be my attitude, but it's a little different this year. I don't really do the whole Christmas thing at all - personally I think it's a pretty ridiculous holiday (I'll gladly take the days off of work though:). But far be it from me to ruin it for everyone else. For the past 5 years or so, I've just told everybody not to get me a present, I don't want them, thanks for the thought, but please, I really don't want one. Well, every year they give them to me anyway. That's nice and all, but I honestly do not want to be given presents on Christmas. So this year I told everybody if they really felt like blowing some of their money around Christmas, just use the money you would have spent on my present, and give it to charity. Just pick one, they need it more than me. They seem to be a bit more accepting of it. I'd suggest it to anyone else who shares my views on Christmas, besides, isn't it really more in line with the "Spirit of Christmas"?
Just my $0.02.
Re:Changing the EULAs on Windows software
on
EULA In Games
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· Score: 1
"Reverse engineering" is recreating a design by analyzing a final
product. I don't see how editing a file called "license.txt" is even remotely similar. I'm not decompiling or disassembling the software.
Legal terms are often not even remotely close to the definitions you or I (arguably the CORRECT definitions) may have for them. "Reverse Engineering" in the legal sense would probably be determined by whatever statute it is that says that it's either OK or not OK. Barring that, it would be at the discretion of the presiding judge I would imagine, I have no idea of any sort of legal precedent for that particular matter, but it's probably just because I don't pay much attention.
Disclaimer: IANALBITAFLC2YA (I am not a lawyer but I took a freshman law class 2 years ago:)
This reminds me of a funny story back from my Tech Support days at Erol's Internet. This was back when Comet Hale-Bopp was in the neighborhood, and I beleive just a day or two after all of those cult wackos commited ritual suicide over it.
Anyway, we used to tell our more gullible customers who refused to be satisfied with the real explinations for their problem, that it was due to files being sucked to the top of their hard drive because the comet and moon were aligned and causing some sort of gravitational anomaly. You'd be surprised how many people had absolutely no problem with that.
Write us back in a year and say whether the corporation actually cared or not. IMHO a corporation
is a corporation, in SV or the Ruhr, and they won't actually care in the long run. But that's just my
opinion, I could be wrong...
I don't think that's really true, there are a lot of good (yes, good) corporations out there that do really give a damn, you just have to look to find them, or sometimes you just get lucky. I'm quite happy with the company I'm working for right now (We're hiring - go to www.urbanite.com), I'm treated like a person, it's well managed, and I get to do stuff I like to do, if I ever lose interest in it, I get to pick something else to do. Probably the closest you can get to an ideal work situation outside of doing consulting. I could probably make a little bit more money if I went elsewhere, but still, they aren't gipping me, and you get generous preformance-based raises if you deserve them.
I think people's opinions are just heavily tainted by the sheer amount of BAD corporations that are out there that run sweatshops. Just look around, there are good companies out there.
Well, just to toss my $0.02 in, Minidiscs just don't skip... or I never have seen them do it anyway, I've literally dribbled my portable and it didn't skip a beat.
In addition, I think minidiscs (especially the ones in iMac-esque cases) look really cool.
To make sure this splash stuff stays informative and doesn't get irritating we need a generic way to turn it all off, and that method has to act early in the boot sequence. That means it has to be some kind of kernel flag, and everybody who wants to put in non-functional information (e.g. credits) has to use it. This would require a fairly broad concensus...
Actually, I think it would be a good idea to make a kernel mod or somesuch that creates something like a/proc/credits or/proc/splash or what have you. If you want, you can change your boot sequence so it gets displayed, or you could just look at it later. There's obviously no way to force people to use it, but it's a decent idea and I think the linux community in general would be fairly willing to use such a mechanism for things like this.
Thoughts? I doubt anybody will read this anyway, it's like 2 levels deep:)
Maybe if I get around to it I can make it tonight, but what's more likely is that I'll just go to bed. Oh well:)
Generally, they are not. However, since you get this one by running an.EXE, it could be. Anyone care to do a bdiff from two copies?
Well, it was a good bit of paranoia, but it doesn't look like it. Oh well, I'm sure they're doing something though (grumble, grumble, insert-anti-ms-comment-here, grumble..):)
Slashdot Mirror
So can I create a really really big amount of energy out of nothing, use it to go really really fast and get some place before the planck time is up? Assumming the making something outta nothing bit is viable anyway. Don't mind me, just talking out of my ass.
Well, assuming I've got my quantum physics right (which I probably don't) Maybe you could harness infintesimal amounts of energy emitted by subatomic particles, the subatomic particles themselves being created out of pure energy in the first place. This, assuming you can all get it done within the planck time.
I don't know if it's my greatest failing or greatest success as a developer, but I tend to be a println debugger all the way.
I'm working on a project at the moment where this is the ONLY way to debug things. And yes, this is usually the first thing I do in any case, but good lord I really wish we had a "real" debugger.
It's very time consuming to use logging-based debugging to examine complicated interrelationships in your code. If all you need to know is "What was the value of variable xyz at this point in the code?" then anything other than println's is probably overkill.
In the same way, if you suddenly created mass (ok this is impossible).
Well, you could suddenly create it out of pure energy without breaking any rules. You could create it out of nothing if you really wanted to as long as you didn't want it hanging around any longer than the plank time, but cameras with shutter speeds that fast are probably pretty expensive.
You know what I've always thought would make a decent miniseries, if not movie[s], is the "Red Mars" Trilogy. Lots of very well-developed characters, and plenty of opportunities for Hollywood to exploit some cheesy action scences without doing too much damage to the story. I guess the year for "mars movies" is already over though.
For those interested in actually taking an active role in government (assuming you live in the U.S.), take a look at HR5522 from the 107th Congress (House of Representatives Act). Not yet passed, but referred to committee as recently as this month. You'll have to wait until all your reps get back from vaction to talk to them about it I'm sure, but speak up, they do listen. Or, more preciscely, they do count the amount of positive/negative feedback they get, assuming you live in their district (ALWAYS INCLUDE YOUR ADDRESS ON CORRESPONDENCE WITH THEM OR IT WILL NOT BE COUNTED!!!!).
I haven't looked in great detail at the contents of the bill, but the gist of it seems to be to scale back the DMCA, as it is obviously bad.
The two sponsors of this bill are Michael Honda (California) and Zoe Lofgren (California).
Latest status has it going to the Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, be particularly vocal to your representatives if they serve on that committee.
You can look at the legislation yourself by going to Thomas and typing "hr5522" in the "Bill Number" text field at the top.
The government may not do things you like, but for the most part, all the information you need to speak out against it in an informed fashion is available to you for free. Use it, your tax dollars pay for it.
No offense, Tim, but that "Review" sounded a lot like what's on the back cover of the book along with some spoilers. For those who are interested, I just finished reading the book, and here is my take on it.
Overall, I found the book to be rather dull and predictable. There were 2 or 3 spots when I found myself saying "Oh... so that's where that came from", but aside from that the "plot" was predictable and dry.
I also found myself disliking a good number of characters in the book. Part of this was due to the bias of having read the rest of the series (old and new) in it's entirety, so when I read a dune book, I want want the harkonnens to be REALLY bad, and the Atreidies to be REALLY good, and it disappoints me somewhat when that doesn't happen. I'm willing to set this aside in favor of my curiosity, however.
That being said, my curiosity really wasn't satiated. The actual "Butlerian Jihad" takes a maddeningly long time to occur (in terms of pages), a more appropriate title for the book would have been "Dune: Predictable Things That Happened Before The Butlerian Jihad That Could Have been easily fit into about 100 pages", but thicker books cost more and now you'll have to go out and by the next sequel to the prequel to get the full scoop.
As in the rest of the Dune prequels written by Baby Herbert and Anderson, they just can't stand their own compared to the original works by Frank Herbert. Still, for the most part I found them interesting and mostly enjoyable. "Dune: The Butlerian Jihad" really let me down, and I had low expectations to begin with. The only reason I kept turning the pages at all was because I was hoping there would be some sort of Dune-esque layers-upon-layers of subtelty plot development, but there wasn't.
Another big dissapointment was that all the things promised on the book jacket (Suk Doctors, etc, etc) didn't happen. There were one or two allusions to such things, but they were easily missed. You shouldn't put "See the origins of the Suk Doctors" on the book jacket if all that's in the book about them is something along the lines of:
"... and Dr. Suk made somebody feel better."
Origins of the Suk Doctors? Perhaps, but what a letdown.
The science in the book was also a tad lacking. I think the Dune series in general does a very good job at acheiving suspension of disbelief, but "Jihad" seemed like it didn't even try. My main gripe is that all throughout the book, people are zipping to and fro between planets (this is before there were guild navigators who could fold space), and these planets are supposed to be REALLY far apart. I think the longest time it took for anybody to get from one planet to another was a few months. And presumably, the distances between these planets were considerably longer than a few light-months (assuming light-speed travel). So, logically the only way for this to occur would be to have superluminal travel capabilities, which is alluded to only once, and indirectly at that, it seemed like an afterthought. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if the human race had acheived faster-than-light travel, that seems to me like a fairly striking scientific development, don't you think that in some little bit of background historical information in the book it would have been mentioned? Maybe I'm just too much of a nerd.
Regardless, I'll probably buy the next book too just because I'm a fan of the original Dune series and I probably won't be able to resist (and the cover pictures are kind of cool).
Isn't it our duty as "citizens" of the internet to revolt and overthrow what we beleive to be an unjust, ineffective governing body?
After all, what has collectively been dubbed 'the Internet' should exist primarily for our benefit, not to purely serve commercial needs. And primarily American commercial needs, at that.
Screw ICANN, who needs 'em? Let's make our own root nameservers. Sure, the only people using them in the near future will probably be the type of people who hang around on slashdot and complain about [Microsoft|ICANN|Lack of Nude Natalie Portman] all day, but who cares? It's still a nice little f***-you in ICANN's direction. Not that they'd care, but it's a good symbolic gesture at the very least.
This is a completely off-the-cuff statement with practicaly no research to back it up, so please forgive me if there are already movements like this floating around somewhere. If there are, could somebody kindly point me in their direction? If not, who wants to start one? I think it would be an interesting experiment at the very least.
I'm serious about this, I'm totally down with starting something up, or helping out somebody else who wants to start something up. Reply if you're interested, there's nothing to lose [save me being completely uninformed and missing the bigger picture, which is not entirely unlikely].
I suppose there's always the possibility of some people actually liking
As someone who's used
All it is is Java, except they're calling it "Visual Basic
What I will give it, is that from a programmer's point of view, I think it's probably better than VS6, all things considered. There's a lot of new APIs to learn, most of which are at least a little more intuitive than the older ones (but that's not saying much).
I still find the documentation to be abysmal. There certainly is a lot of it, but have you ever tried to FIND anything on MSDN? And the class reference pages, while being not terribly difficult to find, occaisionally neglect things such as what header file or library things live in - which is important if you're an old-fashioned C++ programmer like me. Not all of them are this way, but I have found a few.
And of course, the main driving force behind all of this is XML Web Services. Which I am in fact, a big supporter of. And I think their integration with SOAP and UDDI is "neat", although it's still a little early for it to be entirely practical on a large scale, but that's the whole point of releasing
In conclusion, why use
Just my $0.02, anyway.
I, for one, would be interested in helping out through some volunteer work, as long as I agreed with the bigger picture.
People have made some good points about putting the needs of a local community ahead of those of the international community, but I've always been of the opinion that no matter who you help, it benefits everyone in the long run.
What I wouldn't like to do is devote several hours/days/months of my time to a largely useless cause ('We're going to give all the kids in Namibia a web page!'). What sorts of things could one volunteer their time for that we could actually beleive would help those we're volunteering for? Are we talking about automating agriculture or streamlining AIDS testing in african countries? (I'm not sure if either of those makes much sense in this context, but you get the point)
How about some good, concrete examples? I've often thought about how much I'd like to be able to help out various orginizations by loaning myself to them to write a bit of code or somesuch. Of course there's always handing out soup to the homeless, but I tend to think your average geek has enough know-how and intelligence to do a little more good than just preforming manual labor. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but if some impoverished 3rd world country could actually _benefit_ from me helping out, then hey, I'm all for it.
I'm sure there's a really good reason not to, but can't you just stick a big magnet on the space shuttle or something and at the very least suck all the trash into one spot? Then I suppose you could put it all in a cosmic hefty bag and shoot it into the sun or something.
That does not mean that the FBI couldn't put a BIG HONKING device
Like a truck horn or a duck? That would be more of a nuisance than a privacy threat, would it not?
I apologize for the previous pathetic attempt at humor, I just couldn't resist for some reason.
And you realize that if you don't have some kind of metallic enclosure for you computer, you are very likely violating FCC regulations by generating electromagnetic interference (the metal case normally shields the noise that the processor and motors in the case create)?
Sure, but who the heck leaves their case intact anyway?
I'd just like to say something in support of (publicly-run) alternative schools. I was what you might call a "discipline problem" back in my high school days. You know the drill, bored with classes, extremely dissaproving of the way the school was run, etc. But I broke out of the having 2-friends and playing with computers all day mold (although, granted, it was still where I spent a lot of my time). I got into partying and drinking and drugs and whatnot in a pretty major way, and ended up taking out a lot of my rebellious energy on the School Administration, the details of which I will not bore you with now.
But long story short, there reached a point when it was not so subtely hinted to me that if I didn't get my butt into an Altnernative school (or private school, but I didn't have the money for that), I would be expelled. So, since my parents refused to let me drop out entirely, I ended up going to an Alternative school, and I would just like to say that it was a godsend.
I got straight A's for the first time in my life, and I actually LIKED my teachers, and was even sort of friendly with a lot of them.
I'd scope out the alternative school options available to you (if there is more than 1), as there are several that are bad, but you can get a feel for those almost as soon as you walk in the door. And I wouldn't worry about the effects "Down the line". It hasn't hurt me in any way. The thing that stopped me from getting into most of the colleges I applied to was my pre-alternative school record. Schools like Berkeley actually look more favorably upon an Alternative school education, because it is generally indicitive of just the qualities that Sean seems to have. But it's also a good wake-up call to the fact that it's actually OK (if not better) to live outside the "I must get straight A's and go to an ivy league college to validate my life" box. I ended up deciding that College wasn't for me after a year or so, and ended up moving to Silicon Valley and getting a very good, high paying job.
I'd still fight the school as much as possible just on principle, but don't automatically rule out alternative school, I think that they are actually a very good thing, and contrary to popular belief are not an automatic straight-A ticket, there's just less busywork - the academic requirements are still the same (if not more stringent).
Just my ~$0.02
You can download a free 'evaluation' version of RealServer that can serve up to 20 simultaneous streams of live or pre-recorded audio or video, and AFAICT is not feature-limited. I'm using it to serve record and CD clips on this site and it has worked really well.
I'm aware of their eval product - and I'm not sure about the person who originally posed the question, but my guess was they probably wanted the capability to do more than 20 simultaneous streams... And probably more than 60 would be a fair guess. I know we were paying somewhere around ~$100k/server for RealServer licenses, and I think that got us 500... maybe it was 1000, but it still wasn't _THAT_ many. And even for $100k, you don't get ALL the features. Acting as a pull splitting source (if my terminoligy is correct) is still disabled unless you buy something like the "Unlimited Internet Gold License", which costs an ungodly amount of money as to discourage anybody from actually trying to compete with RBN.
Apple's QT4 is free(beer) and open-source, and works fairly well from what I remember, and that was about a year ago. I remember having a few problems with it under FreeBSD, but it worked like a charm under Solaris.
I'm not sure about encoding for it however, I think that might be where they slap you with the fees, but it's still a pittance compared to what Real wants.
Ritalin is really useful for people who are ADD. The problem is that only maybe 25% of ADD diagnoses are accurate.
Here, Here. When I was in school I was of the opinion that ritalin was merely a vehicle for the pharmeceutical companies to fill their pockets either more, and children were easy targets. I mean, what parent would deny their children the chance to be "normal" if all it takes is a little pill?
Now that I'm an adult, and after I've had some rather serious psychological problems that very nearly drove me the point of needing hospitilization, I'm a little more lenient with my views on drugs for mental health. Among other things, my shrink diagnosed me with ADD, and I laughed at first. But after being on wellbutrin for a while, I think he's right. I still don't think I should have been on anything in high school, however. I'd probably still be wasting my time in college and doing what society told me I should be doing, instead of doing what I actually wanted to do. I think adult ADD should probably be treated, and it's not a bad thing. I think it's probably also diagnosed more accurately.
Just my 2 (drugged :) cents.
I think the only thing that they have shown is not that there is any intelligent life out there, but that the power company probably is now richer than bill gates, andrew carnegie, and john t. rockefeller combined ever were. Actually, it's run from Berkeley, which is in California, where thanks to deregulation power rates (to consumers) are locked. The power companies here are actually on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
You know, I used to think this way too, and then something occurred to me. I figure there's at least three (* somebody pointed out to me years ago that there's a fourth) stages of looking at Christmas (or gift giving in general):
This used to actually be my attitude, but it's a little different this year. I don't really do the whole Christmas thing at all - personally I think it's a pretty ridiculous holiday (I'll gladly take the days off of work though :). But far be it from me to ruin it for everyone else. For the past 5 years or so, I've just told everybody not to get me a present, I don't want them, thanks for the thought, but please, I really don't want one. Well, every year they give them to me anyway. That's nice and all, but I honestly do not want to be given presents on Christmas. So this year I told everybody if they really felt like blowing some of their money around Christmas, just use the money you would have spent on my present, and give it to charity. Just pick one, they need it more than me. They seem to be a bit more accepting of it. I'd suggest it to anyone else who shares my views on Christmas, besides, isn't it really more in line with the "Spirit of Christmas"?
Just my $0.02.
"Reverse engineering" is recreating a design by analyzing a final product. I don't see how editing a file called "license.txt" is even remotely similar. I'm not decompiling or disassembling the software.
Legal terms are often not even remotely close to the definitions you or I (arguably the CORRECT definitions) may have for them. "Reverse Engineering" in the legal sense would probably be determined by whatever statute it is that says that it's either OK or not OK. Barring that, it would be at the discretion of the presiding judge I would imagine, I have no idea of any sort of legal precedent for that particular matter, but it's probably just because I don't pay much attention.
Disclaimer: IANALBITAFLC2YA (I am not a lawyer but I took a freshman law class 2 years ago :)
This reminds me of a funny story back from my Tech Support days at Erol's Internet. This was back when Comet Hale-Bopp was in the neighborhood, and I beleive just a day or two after all of those cult wackos commited ritual suicide over it.
Anyway, we used to tell our more gullible customers who refused to be satisfied with the real explinations for their problem, that it was due to files being sucked to the top of their hard drive because the comet and moon were aligned and causing some sort of gravitational anomaly. You'd be surprised how many people had absolutely no problem with that.
Write us back in a year and say whether the corporation actually cared or not. IMHO a corporation is a corporation, in SV or the Ruhr, and they won't actually care in the long run. But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
I don't think that's really true, there are a lot of good (yes, good) corporations out there that do really give a damn, you just have to look to find them, or sometimes you just get lucky. I'm quite happy with the company I'm working for right now (We're hiring - go to www.urbanite.com), I'm treated like a person, it's well managed, and I get to do stuff I like to do, if I ever lose interest in it, I get to pick something else to do. Probably the closest you can get to an ideal work situation outside of doing consulting. I could probably make a little bit more money if I went elsewhere, but still, they aren't gipping me, and you get generous preformance-based raises if you deserve them.
I think people's opinions are just heavily tainted by the sheer amount of BAD corporations that are out there that run sweatshops. Just look around, there are good companies out there.
Just my $0.02
Well, just to toss my $0.02 in, Minidiscs just don't skip... or I never have seen them do it anyway, I've literally dribbled my portable and it didn't skip a beat.
In addition, I think minidiscs (especially the ones in iMac-esque cases) look really cool.
To make sure this splash stuff stays informative and doesn't get irritating we need a generic way to turn it all off, and that method has to act early in the boot sequence. That means it has to be some kind of kernel flag, and everybody who wants to put in non-functional information (e.g. credits) has to use it. This would require a fairly broad concensus...
Actually, I think it would be a good idea to make a kernel mod or somesuch that creates something like a /proc/credits or /proc/splash or what have you. If you want, you can change your boot sequence so it gets displayed, or you could just look at it later. There's obviously no way to force people to use it, but it's a decent idea and I think the linux community in general would be fairly willing to use such a mechanism for things like this.
Thoughts? I doubt anybody will read this anyway, it's like 2 levels deep :)
Maybe if I get around to it I can make it tonight, but what's more likely is that I'll just go to bed. Oh well :)
Generally, they are not. However, since you get this one by running an .EXE, it could be. Anyone care to do a bdiff from two copies?
Well, it was a good bit of paranoia, but it doesn't look like it. Oh well, I'm sure they're doing something though (grumble, grumble, insert-anti-ms-comment-here, grumble..) :)
Wow... that's a really excellent idea. I think I will check it out.