I'd say that you're right that there's a good story hiding in The Matrix, though the screenwriters muffed it on the execution. It could have been much better, story-wise.
I'm not talking internet companies. I'm talking software packages. "e-Bay" does not sell their software.
If you have a dream for a piece of software and you want to try to get rich, go for it.
I do, actually. I just don't think that selling it is the way to get rich
Can you name anyone who has gotten rich selling software in the last ten years? (If you say "Andresson", I'll have to point out that Netscape gave away their browser pretty much for free, even in the beginning.)
I suspect that for the first few rounds, at least, you want to be one of those personable, but quiet sorts that no one notices.
NAACP and 'nigger.com'
on
Dirty Domains
·
· Score: 2
(although why the NAACP wants to be associated with nigger.com is hard for me to grasp).
I read about this recently, I thought on/., but perhaps not. Anyway, they are registering domains like this in order to prevent hate sites from registering them.
Slightly off the subject, but back in the old DOS days, I had some clock fun. I was doing a lot of TSR work, and it was fairly trivial to replace the timer interrupt. I wrote a little program called "warp" that incremented the clock by one or more extra every time the normal timer interrupt fired. Since most software (including DOS itself) normally doesn't look at the RTC, this had the effect of making the machine's time move faster than normal. I could accelerate the time to about a factor of nine before things started to blow up.
Unfortunately, in these days of real OSes, it isn't so easy to do. (Though perhaps it would be fun to try under Win95.)
Actually, now that I think of it, most windows users have rights to set their own date...
[goes to check]
Windows NT: The SetSystemTime function enables the SE_SYSTEMTIME_NAME privilege before changing the system time.
You can take the fifth and refuse to say what you remember, though.
You can also lie. If there is no contrary evidence, you can't be convicted of perjury. (Witness how a certain tycoon was able to explain what he didn't mean by "piss all over" without being brought up on charges.)
Yes, this is true, the linux community should worry about making the everything *BETTER* than Microsoft...
I agree, but I'd go even further and change that to:
"Yes, this is true, the linux community should worry about making everything *BETTER*..."
To focus on "beating Microsoft" is a fundamentally reactive strategy that is, I think, besides the point. Personally, I don't give a shit if Microsoft is "beaten". I just want software that doesn't suck.
The difference is that most browsers were produced by corporations while Linux was (produced by individuals.
Fifteen years ago, it used to be different, but today the chance of an individual without corporate backing writing a program that sells enough to make him rich (or even get him enough money to quit his day job) is virtually nil. The only chance to really make it is to sell your ability.
Being free does not guarantee success, however, I don't think that there is much chance of someone without large corporate backing to be successful without giving away their product.
I think that the idea is that it is encrypted on disk, to defeat programs that can resurrect deleted messages.
Still, I can think of so many ways to defeat this that it isn't even funny. I know it may come as a shock to some of you, but I can actually change the date a computer thinks it is.
(Please use that super-secret information wisely.)
This will give newbies a great false sense of security, though.
The fundamental problem with the whole "Open Source is communism" argument is this.
If you create a widget and give it away, you lose the widget.
If you create a program and give it away, you don't lose the software.
This is difference fundamentally effects the economics of software.
Now people like to talk about "lost sales" as a sort of loss similar to giving away a physical object, but in reality this is rarely the case. If you look at the success of "Linux" vs. the success of "Minix", it is pretty clear that the "lost sales" experienced by Linus in giving away his product for free were minimal. Had he attempted to sell it, it would have failed. Given the noteriety he has gained, I do not doubt that from a purely self-interested standpoint, he was better off in the long run giving it away. I suspect this is true for a lot of Open Source authors.
The rules amuse me greatly. Every week, the contestants vote one of their number off of the island. Seems to me that the winner will be whoever is least annoying to their fellow competitors.
There is lots of room for interesting mathematical games as well. A good opening strategy might be to find eight fellow competitors at the beginning and form a voting block. Those joining the block garauntee their own survival for eight rounds. Then, you try to form another voting block. Lots of room for Machiavellian strategy.
That is true, but the value of sites like this is that you don't have to be super-smart to seperate the wheat from the chaff. You merely have to be knowledgable. If you've got a good layman's knowledge of the subject, then it is fairly easy to tell who the real experts are and who the bullshit artists are.
(Either that, or I've fallen for a lot more crap than I thought.)
If you an idiot, well, you are not going to be able to discriminate real knowledge from crap, but that this is a problem at anywhere. There is a lot of bullshit in the news media as well. The difference is that here, the bullshit is mixed in with the truth, while in the regular media, you almost randomly get either bullshit, or truth, depending on the ability of the reporter. If the wheel comes up "crap", then you've got little chance of finding the truth from that source, regardless of your own brains. And if your brains aren't worth much, well, you aren't going to recognize crap in the regular media either.
I recall reading more than one SF stories in which a character had a live feed hooked up to their eyes either for news reporting, or some sort of "you are there" entertainment.
Jesus Christ, I just realized that I also installed the MacMillion distribution. I hadn't realized it until just now. The book it came with was kinda mediocre, but it was cheaper than the "real" Red Hat and faster than downloading at 28.8.
Not that the system looks much like the original install right now. I'm a tinkerer at heart.
But anyway, thanks, MacMillan, for saving me $10. And thanks to Linus, the folks at GNU, RedHat, etc., for building it in the first place.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if I consider the later a wee bit more important.
Not overtly, but such ideas are built into all sorts of technologies, from doors on up on the complexity scale to nuclear power station control centers.
Do programmers still expect users to learn a new input behavior for each application?
Unfortunately, yes, and this is one area where Linux is weak. Coming from OS/2 and Windows, I'd grown accustom to standard keystrokes for all applications. Now, moving to Linux and loading up applix-ware, I suddenly have to remember a whole new set of keystrokes. It gives me 1988 DOS flashbacks.
I had the good fortune of taking a class from Dr. Norman on user centered design over ten years ago, when he was just starting on the book publishing route. And while he sometimes sounds like a more literate Andy Rooney, everyone who wants to call themselves a programmer should read at least one of his books. At the very least, it will open your eyes to the number of "human errors" that are caused by poor design, and perhaps make you think a little more about how to avoid this sort of thing of thing in the first place.
Usually the problem isn't so much that designers overtly demand that users conform to their design. Instead, it is merely a matter of designers not even thinking about what designs might confuse a user. The book that best describes this, I think, is Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", as it uses simple things like doors, ovens, showers and such to show how simple design decisions can wildly effect how usuable an item is. If you've ever accidently pushed on a door marked "pull", you've run into an example of something that was designed poorly, without thought.
This is a dumb move on e-Bay's part. If they are successful in stopping these auction search engines from searching their sites, then these auction search engines will only show items for bid at e-Bay's competitor's sites. I fail to see how that helps e-Bay.
Too many companies are full of control freaks. Just having any old person linking to their page drives them nuts and causes them to act against their own self-interest.
Wait, so Katz has a problem dealing with all the new software. All the new information. All the new gadgets. He just can't deal with all the new stuff. He wants a simpler life. He wants to avoid the complexity. His solution is...
A new software gadget.
(sigh)
No, Jon, the solution is simply to turn off the feed. Just because they tell you that it is "must see TV" doesn't mean that you have to watch. Just because it says "Cool Site of the Day", doesn't mean you have to look at it. Just because it is the blockbuster movie of the decade doesn't mean that you have to plunk down $7.50. Just because it is the cool new electronic gadget doesn't mean you have to buy it.
I don't want people bugging me on off hours, so I have a simple solution: I don't own a pager. If you don't want a toilet analyzing your piss, then don't buy one. It is not difficult. It is not a "cyberclasmic" decision to make.
first, much of her fiction prior to the more literary The Mists of Avalon was quite sloppily written
Like some other SF/Fantasy writers, she was susceptible to writing for paychecks. (A friendly way of saying "hack writing".) Some of what she wrote was great. Other things were merely servicable (or worse). (She was similar to PK Dick in this respect.)
I recall that she even wrote some soft-core porn in the sixties under a psuedonym... Fantasy paid crap back then.
But The Mists of Avalon pretty much made up for any less then perfect writing she may have done. That was an outstanding book. She does seem to have tried to duplicate its success with some sequels and that Trojan War thing, but none of them quite had the same magic. They were still worth reading, though.
One difference between Norton and Bradley was that Norton had to disguise her sex in order to start her career.
Reasons to numerous to count. One, which you mention, is standards compliance. Perhaps it is because I'm somewhat anal, but there are some annoying deviations. What makes them most anying is that they don't get fixed. As an example, this won't compile under VC++ 6.0:
for(int i=0;i10;i++); for(int i=0;i10;i++);
This, despite the fact that this has been part of the standard since 1996. What makes this most galling is that if you make it work like this:
for(int i=0;i10;i++); for(i=0;i10;i++);
it will stop compiling under compilers that do comply with the standard. Now, this is a minor thing, but it galls me that Microsoft couldn't find the time to fix the above (which should have been trivial) in between the latest iteration of the COM/OLE/ActiveX/COM+ object from hell release.)
This is mostly a myth. For every Mozart, there is a Bach, who lived to be an old man, was happily married, had seventeen kids and, as far as anyone can tell, was not tormented by anything.
For every tormented artist, there is one who is happy as a clam. Geniuses fall into the same human range as the rest of us do in most of these respects.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever since I first heard this story, I've suspected that it was a rumor that came from an urban legend inadvertantly started by Forever Peace.
Good book, too, though not as good as Forever War.
...they could have fixed some of the mistakes in the time they now spent on whining.
Not everyone can code.
The first company I ever worked for accidently shipped a version of our software with an error message that read "Stupid user error".
I'd say that you're right that there's a good story hiding in The Matrix, though the screenwriters muffed it on the execution. It could have been much better, story-wise.
(Otherwise, it was great.)
I'm not talking internet companies. I'm talking software packages. "e-Bay" does not sell their software.
If you have a dream for a piece of software and you want to try to get rich, go for it.
I do, actually. I just don't think that selling it is the way to get rich
Can you name anyone who has gotten rich selling software in the last ten years? (If you say "Andresson", I'll have to point out that Netscape gave away their browser pretty much for free, even in the beginning.)
I suspect that for the first few rounds, at least, you want to be one of those personable, but quiet sorts that no one notices.
(although why the NAACP wants to be associated with nigger.com is hard for me to grasp).
/., but perhaps not. Anyway, they are registering domains like this in order to prevent hate sites from registering them.
I read about this recently, I thought on
Slightly off the subject, but back in the old DOS days, I had some clock fun. I was doing a lot of TSR work, and it was fairly trivial to replace the timer interrupt. I wrote a little program called "warp" that incremented the clock by one or more extra every time the normal timer interrupt fired. Since most software (including DOS itself) normally doesn't look at the RTC, this had the effect of making the machine's time move faster than normal. I could accelerate the time to about a factor of nine before things started to blow up.
Unfortunately, in these days of real OSes, it isn't so easy to do. (Though perhaps it would be fun to try under Win95.)
Actually, now that I think of it, most windows users have rights to set their own date...
[goes to check]
Windows NT: The SetSystemTime function enables the SE_SYSTEMTIME_NAME privilege before changing the system time.
[evil grin]
You can take the fifth and refuse to say what you remember, though.
You can also lie. If there is no contrary evidence, you can't be convicted of perjury. (Witness how a certain tycoon was able to explain what he didn't mean by "piss all over" without being brought up on charges.)
Yes, this is true, the linux community should worry about making the everything *BETTER* than Microsoft...
I agree, but I'd go even further and change that to:
"Yes, this is true, the linux community should worry about making everything *BETTER*..."
To focus on "beating Microsoft" is a fundamentally reactive strategy that is, I think, besides the point. Personally, I don't give a shit if Microsoft is "beaten". I just want software that doesn't suck.
The difference is that most browsers were produced by corporations while Linux was (produced by individuals.
Fifteen years ago, it used to be different, but today the chance of an individual without corporate backing writing a program that sells enough to make him rich (or even get him enough money to quit his day job) is virtually nil. The only chance to really make it is to sell your ability.
Being free does not guarantee success, however, I don't think that there is much chance of someone without large corporate backing to be successful without giving away their product.
I think that the idea is that it is encrypted on disk, to defeat programs that can resurrect deleted messages.
Still, I can think of so many ways to defeat this that it isn't even funny. I know it may come as a shock to some of you, but I can actually change the date a computer thinks it is.
(Please use that super-secret information wisely.)
This will give newbies a great false sense of security, though.
The fundamental problem with the whole "Open Source is communism" argument is this.
If you create a widget and give it away, you lose the widget.
If you create a program and give it away, you don't lose the software.
This is difference fundamentally effects the economics of software.
Now people like to talk about "lost sales" as a sort of loss similar to giving away a physical object, but in reality this is rarely the case. If you look at the success of "Linux" vs. the success of "Minix", it is pretty clear that the "lost sales" experienced by Linus in giving away his product for free were minimal. Had he attempted to sell it, it would have failed. Given the noteriety he has gained, I do not doubt that from a purely self-interested standpoint, he was better off in the long run giving it away. I suspect this is true for a lot of Open Source authors.
The rules amuse me greatly. Every week, the contestants vote one of their number off of the island. Seems to me that the winner will be whoever is least annoying to their fellow competitors.
There is lots of room for interesting mathematical games as well. A good opening strategy might be to find eight fellow competitors at the beginning and form a voting block. Those joining the block garauntee their own survival for eight rounds. Then, you try to form another voting block. Lots of room for Machiavellian strategy.
That is true, but the value of sites like this is that you don't have to be super-smart to seperate the wheat from the chaff. You merely have to be knowledgable. If you've got a good layman's knowledge of the subject, then it is fairly easy to tell who the real experts are and who the bullshit artists are.
(Either that, or I've fallen for a lot more crap than I thought.)
If you an idiot, well, you are not going to be able to discriminate real knowledge from crap, but that this is a problem at anywhere. There is a lot of bullshit in the news media as well. The difference is that here, the bullshit is mixed in with the truth, while in the regular media, you almost randomly get either bullshit, or truth, depending on the ability of the reporter. If the wheel comes up "crap", then you've got little chance of finding the truth from that source, regardless of your own brains. And if your brains aren't worth much, well, you aren't going to recognize crap in the regular media either.
The corkscrew is for dates.
I recall reading more than one SF stories in which a character had a live feed hooked up to their eyes either for news reporting, or some sort of "you are there" entertainment.
Jesus Christ, I just realized that I also installed the MacMillion distribution. I hadn't realized it until just now. The book it came with was kinda mediocre, but it was cheaper than the "real" Red Hat and faster than downloading at 28.8.
Not that the system looks much like the original install right now. I'm a tinkerer at heart.
But anyway, thanks, MacMillan, for saving me $10. And thanks to Linus, the folks at GNU, RedHat, etc., for building it in the first place.
It shouldn't surprise anyone if I consider the later a wee bit more important.
In case anyone's interested, there's a Sterling FAQ.
My question? Would you reconsider revisting the world of systems crackers and the like? The Hacker Crackdown was a damn good book.
Not overtly, but such ideas are built into all sorts of technologies, from doors on up on the complexity scale to nuclear power station control centers.
Do programmers still expect users to learn a new input behavior for each application?
Unfortunately, yes, and this is one area where Linux is weak. Coming from OS/2 and Windows, I'd grown accustom to standard keystrokes for all applications. Now, moving to Linux and loading up applix-ware, I suddenly have to remember a whole new set of keystrokes. It gives me 1988 DOS flashbacks.
I had the good fortune of taking a class from Dr. Norman on user centered design over ten years ago, when he was just starting on the book publishing route. And while he sometimes sounds like a more literate Andy Rooney, everyone who wants to call themselves a programmer should read at least one of his books. At the very least, it will open your eyes to the number of "human errors" that are caused by poor design, and perhaps make you think a little more about how to avoid this sort of thing of thing in the first place.
Usually the problem isn't so much that designers overtly demand that users conform to their design. Instead, it is merely a matter of designers not even thinking about what designs might confuse a user. The book that best describes this, I think, is Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things", as it uses simple things like doors, ovens, showers and such to show how simple design decisions can wildly effect how usuable an item is. If you've ever accidently pushed on a door marked "pull", you've run into an example of something that was designed poorly, without thought.
This is a dumb move on e-Bay's part. If they are successful in stopping these auction search engines from searching their sites, then these auction search engines will only show items for bid at e-Bay's competitor's sites. I fail to see how that helps e-Bay.
Too many companies are full of control freaks. Just having any old person linking to their page drives them nuts and causes them to act against their own self-interest.
Wait, so Katz has a problem dealing with all the new software. All the new information. All the new gadgets. He just can't deal with all the new stuff. He wants a simpler life. He wants to avoid the complexity. His solution is...
A new software gadget.
(sigh)
No, Jon, the solution is simply to turn off the feed. Just because they tell you that it is "must see TV" doesn't mean that you have to watch. Just because it says "Cool Site of the Day", doesn't mean you have to look at it. Just because it is the blockbuster movie of the decade doesn't mean that you have to plunk down $7.50. Just because it is the cool new electronic gadget doesn't mean you have to buy it.
I don't want people bugging me on off hours, so I have a simple solution: I don't own a pager. If you don't want a toilet analyzing your piss, then don't buy one. It is not difficult. It is not a "cyberclasmic" decision to make.
first, much of her fiction prior to the more literary The Mists of Avalon was quite sloppily written
Like some other SF/Fantasy writers, she was susceptible to writing for paychecks. (A friendly way of saying "hack writing".) Some of what she wrote was great. Other things were merely servicable (or worse). (She was similar to PK Dick in this respect.)
I recall that she even wrote some soft-core porn in the sixties under a psuedonym... Fantasy paid crap back then.
But The Mists of Avalon pretty much made up for any less then perfect writing she may have done. That was an outstanding book. She does seem to have tried to duplicate its success with some sequels and that Trojan War thing, but none of them quite had the same magic. They were still worth reading, though.
One difference between Norton and Bradley was that Norton had to disguise her sex in order to start her career.
Reasons to numerous to count. One, which you mention, is standards compliance. Perhaps it is because I'm somewhat anal, but there are some annoying deviations. What makes them most anying is that they don't get fixed. As an example, this won't compile under VC++ 6.0:
for(int i=0;i10;i++);
for(int i=0;i10;i++);
This, despite the fact that this has been part of the standard since 1996. What makes this most galling is that if you make it work like this:
for(int i=0;i10;i++);
for(i=0;i10;i++);
it will stop compiling under compilers that do comply with the standard. Now, this is a minor thing, but it galls me that Microsoft couldn't find the time to fix the above (which should have been trivial) in between the latest iteration of the COM/OLE/ActiveX/COM+ object from hell release.)
This is mostly a myth. For every Mozart, there is a Bach, who lived to be an old man, was happily married, had seventeen kids and, as far as anyone can tell, was not tormented by anything.
For every tormented artist, there is one who is happy as a clam. Geniuses fall into the same human range as the rest of us do in most of these respects.