He never alleged that any of the big scares he was talking about (e.g. killer bees, millenium bug, etc) were not a threat to ANYONE. I'm sure somewhere, somebody has been killed by killer bees....I'm sure a lot of work went into fixing the Millenium bug, and somewhere, something broke because of it. That's not the point he was making.
Moore was saying that we Americans live in a culture of fear, where a lot of things that aren't a big deal at all are presented as something that we need to worry about. This is exactly the same thing that happened with Iraq; we were told that Iraq had WMD's, everyone flipped out, and we were able to invade. He never said that the whole thing was a "hoax"...he was just pointing out the idiocy of people stocking up enough food for weeks, buying bomb shelters, etc.
I'm not one to nitpick, but for Pete's sake, couldn't you have done better than "un-backed-up"? That's just pathetic.... I don't even want to look at your posting history...you probably are one of those people who uses words like "funner," aren't you?
Modifying one variable with respect to another is one of the simplest trick in the programmer's book.
Idle sensitivity and transparent windows have been around since the beginning of computing.
Combining two totally obvious ideas in an obvious way does not warrant patenting. There are a million ideas like this one...should I be able to patent all of them?
Rotating desktop background color with respect to time of month? Changing the size of a window with respect to free disk space? Activating a program when your computer is idle for a certain amount of time? Minimizing windows when they're not used for x minutes?
The point of an invention is that they're supposed to have done some WORK. Merely choosing an independent and dependent variable is the legal equivalent of calling SHOTGUN!
First of all, I think it's very unlikely that they're going to spend the resources to scan every web server on the web looking for modifications. Really, how are they going to figure out which sites are modified? I can have one installation of MT, publish it to multiple users' home directories, and use virtual hosting...it would take some investigation to even realize that the different web sites are running on the same server, let alone running off of the same copy of MT.
And furthermore, where do you draw the line? Can I modify the.css templates? What if I need to stop comment spammers, so I change the location of the comment script? What if I rewrite the script that contains the crippled code, accessing the SQL database directly?
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make here is that when it comes to individual use, an effectively open-source application has absolutely no leverage. These guys would be better off just charging for commercial use and leaving the individual users alone. As a MT user myself, I have to say that the application really isn't worth paying for; I could hack it or write something that's a much better fit for my own needs in a weekend.
Since MT is written entirely in perl and other non-compiled languages, how hard could it possibly be to hack these limitations out of the free version? I'd bet you just have to comment out a few simple checks, and then distribute a patch...via your blog, of course.:)
Any software engineer worth his salt knows that security and stability are inversely related to the number of features in a piece of software. I think it's great to see a software company that realizes that I just want to get my friggin work done...I don't want or need half of the new crap that companies have been churning out.
80% - "Leave parenting to the parents." 10% - "Who cares, kids shouldn't get violent video games anyways." 5% - "FP! W000t!" / goatse / anti-katz flames 3% - Bitching about the fp / goatse / katz-flamers 1.5% - People who observe if we only had a beowulf cluster of natalie portmans in soviet russia, the people who bitch about fp / goatse / katz-flamers would just chill out 0.5% - People who write smug predictions and then download pictures of natalie portman -- this is me
Think about it this way...if you're going to make a show that targets a specific group, you have two options. First, you can show them the most baddass members of their group. Professional sports for the jocks, CSPAN for the political geeks, The Apprentice for the unemployed, etc. Second, you can create interesting drama around people that the group can identify with. This is basically every sitcom or whatever out there.
Here's the problem though: there aren't any games that are interesting to watch. I've seen some really awesome Q3 players play, and it's just that they have better accuracy, dodging, etc. It's not like a game of chess where you see a move and you realize that he's been planning that for six moves, now. If games evolve to the point where it's possible to be an absolute master, playing the game with such skill that it's impressive to watch, then I'm sure we'll see television coverage...until then, it's just a pipe dream.
The other option, creating drama, just won't work. The interesting people in computing are so tied to idealism and teenage angst that it just wouldn't be very watchable. Sure, I agree with RMS' viewpoints almost entirely, but watching that man on television regularly would kill me. Real-life hackers? They're so angsty any movie would have to be either totally unrealistic or totally annoying.
Emerson once observed that everything, even the railroads and the urban sprawl, would eventually become poetic...it's just that these things haven't been around long enough to get integrated into our common aesthetic. It's really the same thing with the hackers...they're pretty new to the scene, so society doesn't know how to deal with them yet; they become nothing more than an oddity, a cariacture. Perhaps as our culture becomes more and more dependent on technology these new stereotypes will become fleshed out to the point that there are interesting things to say about them in the context of news or drama, but we're just not there yet.
Nothing in the Bible has ever been disproven based on ancient findings by any reputable scientific investigation.
Sure, that's probably true, if the only scientific investigation you consider reputable is the 700 club. How about the tower of babel? Surely, if they created a tower that reaches to heaven, there ought to be some rocks lying around.
How about them pesky dinosaurs? It's pretty hard to reconcile the bible with the abundance of archaeoligcal evidence that shows that dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years before the first humans showed up.
These fairy tales don't fly on slashdot because the people here are educated enough to know better. The reason Egyptian digs don't get flak is because scientists are trying to find evidence of a civilization that everyone knows exists, not trying to justify their mythology. This kind of expedition doesn't parallel excavating the parthenon, for example....it's like trying to get a group of people to climb Mount Olympus, looking for zeus.
...don't buy it. Vote with your dollars. If nobody is willing to upgrade to some next-gen hardware, then it's not going to work. However, if everyone but you is willing to upgrade, this is good news: tha means the prices on the previous generation of cards will plummet, vastly increasing the value of the second-tier hardware for those constrained by budgets.
People buy games that push the envelope because they want the next big thing. If you want to stay back in the Q2 era, go ahead. There's still plenty of great games from that era that you haven't played yet.
...they announced plans to dig up Gene Roddenberry's corpse and kick it around in the street. Sources close to the production crew said they were in the market for dead horses and clubs.
Instead of trying to get people to download trojans, we'll have script kiddies trying to get you to download a fission reaction...gives a whole new meaning to the phrase.....
Well, maybe the problem is that no one wants to deal with walking around a 3d world when they just want some text. The web is fundamentally a text-based medium...leave the 3d stuff to the video games.
I could just write something that generates a false positive, perhaps by reverse-engineering the kazaa search mechanism, and spoof it from every IP on campus....I could shut down the entire campus network in 15 minutes.:)
I propose that we all agree on a simple system, whereby each color of LED has a specific meaning.
For example:
Green - power on Red - Something's wrong, or something you need to notice (e.g. hard drive light) Blue - User has done something really stupid and deserves to have his eyeballs burned out
If you write a computer textbook
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
and you don't extensively cover OSS, the most significant movement in computing today..if you don't cover linux, which effectively runs the web, you're not doing your job. End of story.
For those of you without a clue...
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
PHB = Pointy Haired Boss. This is a Dilbert reference. Dilbert's boss' hair is just in two little horns. PHB has come to mean any boss that is generally arbitrary, ignorant, and demanding, just like Dilbert's.
Seriously, if you're coding PHP why do you need anything more advanced than syntax highlighting?
I admit, the closed-source UIs are very pretty, but they're easily outweighed by things like NFS, greater stability, etc.
Furthermore, I find that all of the bells and whistles of windows just serve to distract me from what I'm doing. When it comes to the really hard-core work, I usually go with just a straight fluxbox session.
Now, I'm not just trying to bust your chops here. I used to swear by visual studio...I used nothing but VS for all of my C++ dev for five years. I finally just threw myself into linux because I knew it would be better...it was rough at first, make no mistake.
However, once I didn't have autocompletion of my methods, and pretty charts that show all of my members, I found myself actually REMEMBERING everything instead of just relying on the program to do it for me, which actually has made me more efficient in the long run.
Installing linux was really difficult, too, especially since I picked one of the more hard-core distros (Gentoo)...but now I really know my OS inside and out. It took forever to get the damn thing working, but I'll still be upgrading this install long after I've had to wipe my windoze partition for the next XP clone.
Slashdot Mirror
He never alleged that any of the big scares he was talking about (e.g. killer bees, millenium bug, etc) were not a threat to ANYONE. I'm sure somewhere, somebody has been killed by killer bees....I'm sure a lot of work went into fixing the Millenium bug, and somewhere, something broke because of it. That's not the point he was making.
Moore was saying that we Americans live in a culture of fear, where a lot of things that aren't a big deal at all are presented as something that we need to worry about. This is exactly the same thing that happened with Iraq; we were told that Iraq had WMD's, everyone flipped out, and we were able to invade. He never said that the whole thing was a "hoax"...he was just pointing out the idiocy of people stocking up enough food for weeks, buying bomb shelters, etc.
I'm not one to nitpick, but for Pete's sake, couldn't you have done better than "un-backed-up"? That's just pathetic.... I don't even want to look at your posting history...you probably are one of those people who uses words like "funner," aren't you?
> In a word: Hell Yeah!"
That's two words, genius.
That just goes to show ya, there are three kinds of people in this world...those who can count, and those who can't.
Modifying one variable with respect to another is one of the simplest trick in the programmer's book.
Idle sensitivity and transparent windows have been around since the beginning of computing.
Combining two totally obvious ideas in an obvious way does not warrant patenting. There are a million ideas like this one...should I be able to patent all of them?
Rotating desktop background color with respect to time of month?
Changing the size of a window with respect to free disk space?
Activating a program when your computer is idle for a certain amount of time?
Minimizing windows when they're not used for x minutes?
The point of an invention is that they're supposed to have done some WORK. Merely choosing an independent and dependent variable is the legal equivalent of calling SHOTGUN!
First of all, I think it's very unlikely that they're going to spend the resources to scan every web server on the web looking for modifications. Really, how are they going to figure out which sites are modified? I can have one installation of MT, publish it to multiple users' home directories, and use virtual hosting...it would take some investigation to even realize that the different web sites are running on the same server, let alone running off of the same copy of MT.
.css templates? What if I need to stop comment spammers, so I change the location of the comment script? What if I rewrite the script that contains the crippled code, accessing the SQL database directly?
And furthermore, where do you draw the line? Can I modify the
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make here is that when it comes to individual use, an effectively open-source application has absolutely no leverage. These guys would be better off just charging for commercial use and leaving the individual users alone. As a MT user myself, I have to say that the application really isn't worth paying for; I could hack it or write something that's a much better fit for my own needs in a weekend.
Well, technically, you're not redistributing their work, you're redistributing a PATCH you wrote, which is your work.
Since MT is written entirely in perl and other non-compiled languages, how hard could it possibly be to hack these limitations out of the free version? I'd bet you just have to comment out a few simple checks, and then distribute a patch...via your blog, of course. :)
Any software engineer worth his salt knows that security and stability are inversely related to the number of features in a piece of software. I think it's great to see a software company that realizes that I just want to get my friggin work done...I don't want or need half of the new crap that companies have been churning out.
Hahaha, better get a mirror for that mirror!
...maybe that's because it's....well....DYING. ;)
80% - "Leave parenting to the parents."
10% - "Who cares, kids shouldn't get violent video games anyways."
5% - "FP! W000t!" / goatse / anti-katz flames
3% - Bitching about the fp / goatse / katz-flamers
1.5% - People who observe if we only had a beowulf cluster of natalie portmans in soviet russia, the people who bitch about fp / goatse / katz-flamers would just chill out
0.5% - People who write smug predictions and then download pictures of natalie portman -- this is me
Think about it this way...if you're going to make a show that targets a specific group, you have two options. First, you can show them the most baddass members of their group. Professional sports for the jocks, CSPAN for the political geeks, The Apprentice for the unemployed, etc. Second, you can create interesting drama around people that the group can identify with. This is basically every sitcom or whatever out there.
Here's the problem though: there aren't any games that are interesting to watch. I've seen some really awesome Q3 players play, and it's just that they have better accuracy, dodging, etc. It's not like a game of chess where you see a move and you realize that he's been planning that for six moves, now. If games evolve to the point where it's possible to be an absolute master, playing the game with such skill that it's impressive to watch, then I'm sure we'll see television coverage...until then, it's just a pipe dream.
The other option, creating drama, just won't work. The interesting people in computing are so tied to idealism and teenage angst that it just wouldn't be very watchable. Sure, I agree with RMS' viewpoints almost entirely, but watching that man on television regularly would kill me. Real-life hackers? They're so angsty any movie would have to be either totally unrealistic or totally annoying.
Emerson once observed that everything, even the railroads and the urban sprawl, would eventually become poetic...it's just that these things haven't been around long enough to get integrated into our common aesthetic. It's really the same thing with the hackers...they're pretty new to the scene, so society doesn't know how to deal with them yet; they become nothing more than an oddity, a cariacture. Perhaps as our culture becomes more and more dependent on technology these new stereotypes will become fleshed out to the point that there are interesting things to say about them in the context of news or drama, but we're just not there yet.
Sure, that's probably true, if the only scientific investigation you consider reputable is the 700 club. How about the tower of babel? Surely, if they created a tower that reaches to heaven, there ought to be some rocks lying around.
How about them pesky dinosaurs? It's pretty hard to reconcile the bible with the abundance of archaeoligcal evidence that shows that dinosaurs ruled the earth for millions of years before the first humans showed up.
These fairy tales don't fly on slashdot because the people here are educated enough to know better. The reason Egyptian digs don't get flak is because scientists are trying to find evidence of a civilization that everyone knows exists, not trying to justify their mythology. This kind of expedition doesn't parallel excavating the parthenon, for example....it's like trying to get a group of people to climb Mount Olympus, looking for zeus.
...don't buy it. Vote with your dollars. If nobody is willing to upgrade to some next-gen hardware, then it's not going to work. However, if everyone but you is willing to upgrade, this is good news: tha means the prices on the previous generation of cards will plummet, vastly increasing the value of the second-tier hardware for those constrained by budgets.
People buy games that push the envelope because they want the next big thing. If you want to stay back in the Q2 era, go ahead. There's still plenty of great games from that era that you haven't played yet.
...they announced plans to dig up Gene Roddenberry's corpse and kick it around in the street. Sources close to the production crew said they were in the market for dead horses and clubs.
I deleted my flash plugins for that very reason.
Instead of trying to get people to download trojans, we'll have script kiddies trying to get you to download a fission reaction...gives a whole new meaning to the phrase.....
m3g4-pwn3d!!
Well, maybe the problem is that no one wants to deal with walking around a 3d world when they just want some text. The web is fundamentally a text-based medium...leave the 3d stuff to the video games.
Well, they'd probably notice if one IP was being excluded...
I could just write something that generates a false positive, perhaps by reverse-engineering the kazaa search mechanism, and spoof it from every IP on campus....I could shut down the entire campus network in 15 minutes. :)
I propose that we all agree on a simple system, whereby each color of LED has a specific meaning.
For example:
Green - power on
Red - Something's wrong, or something you need to notice (e.g. hard drive light)
Blue - User has done something really stupid and deserves to have his eyeballs burned out
That's US foreign policy.
and you don't extensively cover OSS, the most significant movement in computing today..if you don't cover linux, which effectively runs the web, you're not doing your job. End of story.
PHB = Pointy Haired Boss. This is a Dilbert reference. Dilbert's boss' hair is just in two little horns. PHB has come to mean any boss that is generally arbitrary, ignorant, and demanding, just like Dilbert's.
Seriously, if you're coding PHP why do you need anything more advanced than syntax highlighting?
I admit, the closed-source UIs are very pretty, but they're easily outweighed by things like NFS, greater stability, etc.
Furthermore, I find that all of the bells and whistles of windows just serve to distract me from what I'm doing. When it comes to the really hard-core work, I usually go with just a straight fluxbox session.
Now, I'm not just trying to bust your chops here. I used to swear by visual studio...I used nothing but VS for all of my C++ dev for five years. I finally just threw myself into linux because I knew it would be better...it was rough at first, make no mistake.
However, once I didn't have autocompletion of my methods, and pretty charts that show all of my members, I found myself actually REMEMBERING everything instead of just relying on the program to do it for me, which actually has made me more efficient in the long run.
Installing linux was really difficult, too, especially since I picked one of the more hard-core distros (Gentoo)...but now I really know my OS inside and out. It took forever to get the damn thing working, but I'll still be upgrading this install long after I've had to wipe my windoze partition for the next XP clone.