One of the marks of a truly great actor is the ability to give an outstanding performance even though you think the script is crap. What is really interesting about this is that Guiness got what he thought to be a part in a crappy movie (obviously a "for the money" role) and yet gave an outstanding performance. Many actors would have just farted around and done little more than read their lines in such a situation.
We have those in California too, and assuming that New Hampshire uses the same encoding scheme (almost certainly the case given that it is a credit-card industry standard format) it probably just has your driver's license number and name on there.
If you erase the stripe, the only thing you are accomplishing is that your are forcing the cop to key in your driver's license number when you are pulled over. These stripes are not intended to have volatile info on them. They are merely a key to a database somewhere, and that key is nearly always on the card, in case the stripe goes bad.
One reason that I am almost certain the encoding used is that retailers are one of the groups pushing for these stripes on cards. Why? So they can ask for ID, and then grab the name off of it for marketting purposes.
These mag stripes don't hold as much as most people seem to think. There are generally two sets of info. The first is 37 bytes, and holds the account number and some other control information. The second is 80 bytes and holds the same thing as the first, but with the addition of the name on the card. Some older equipment can't read the second.
Mitochondrial DNA is pretty well preserved over the generations. In other words, it would be almost identical in third cousins that share the same great-great-grandmother. It isn't like nuclear DNA, which is rapidly diluted from one generation to another.
In other words, it should be pretty simple to test such a case. You wouldn't necessarily need a couple that would traditionally be considered incestuous.
Another possibility concerning why this happens is that the mitochondrial DNA is somehow packaged differently in the egg than in any other cell. Perhaps it gets tagged somehow when the egg is produced.
What makes this interesting is that you could get around this, and make a "true" clone, by using a donor egg cell from the creature you are trying to clone.
This interesting part is that this only works for females!
Though I suppose that in theory, you could get much the same effect by using donor egg-cells by a female relative, as mitochondrial DNA is preserved pretty well through the generations. (i.e. you've got pretty much what your mother has, barring mutations.)
but hell, Big Evil Software Companies make stealing an art.
Hell, didn't the GT Interactive story hit the wire only yesterday?
But anyway, the error here is the confusion of teenagers with too much time on their hands with the rest of us. We seem to have a PR problem. The public (hell, even someone like Katz, who at least ought to be ready some of/.) doesn't see any difference between a couple greasy teenagers exchanging cracked software and a couple of hackers exchanging the latest versions of their code.
This geek doesn't brag about stolen software. This geek brags about once convincing the company he worked for to get rid of all illegal software.
(Caveat: this geek also had a misbegotten youth his is ashamed of. He did, however, grow up.)
Programmers frequently come up with products that are buggy, excessive, unworkable, unsupportable or overpriced. The industry's consumers are exploited and abused.
I see attitude a lot (though rarely from anyone in the industry) and it just pisses me off to no end. This is as much a management issue as a "programmer" issue. How many of us have been forced to meet unrealistic schedules? How many of have been forced to ship regardless of whether or not it is done? How many of us have been forced to skimp on quality to "get it out". How many of us have been told testing was not important?
Perhaps we should be more proactive about refusing to release in these conditions. (And I personally have, on occasion.) But I wonder if Katz knows some secret way to tell your boss he's wrong without negative consequences. Usually, you just get labelled as someone who is "not a team player" and the software gets shipped anyway.
Then you get called on the carpet for the bugs in the software.
In my last job, pleas that the software be tested got met with blank stares. "Regression testing? What's that!? I'm sorry, we have to get it there tonight, no matter what!"
And people wonder why there are bugs...
One of the reasons (the prime reason IMHO) that open source software is less buggy is that people who know nothing about programming aren't making the schedules.
I had a friend who lost his computers this way. Not only did it take three years, but to add insult to injury, the equipment was no longer functional when he got it back.
But is there a fee on balance transfers. I got hosed on one of those things that advertised low interest if you transfer money from old credit cards but then had a high fee for balance transfers.
Doing the math, it turned out that the "fee" basically jacked up the effective interest rate to roughly what their normal one was.
I suspect that what you understand, and this ZDNet guy doesn't, is that in the end, it isn't about the press. Many journalists (especially those who work for more marginal publications) seem to think that they are somehow more important because they are THE PRESS and that somehow they are owed more for this reason. They are not.
The impression I get is that Torvalds is a nice guy who doesn't give a damn about the press. That's a very healthy attitude, if you ask me. Not that the press is bad or anything. It is just that they have no more right to his time than any of the rest of us do.
I suspect that the journalists that understand that will, in the end, get more access.
That is exactly it. The nice thing about/. is not the indepedent journalism so much as a forum to poke holes in the bullshit real journalism keeps coming up with.
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
An example of why this is still not a good comparison:
Under Windows, the C runtime dynamic link libraries are in \windows\system32
Under Linux, the equivalent libraries are in/usr/lib, which you did not list.
\Windows\system32 usually ends up being a dumping ground for every third party dll. Again, not a good design, but this means that you should at least include/usr/lib in your comparison.
That is not a good comparison. Looking at my WinNT box, I see that the \Winnt directory includes such things as:
My browser cache. All of my e-mail, including attachments. Help files for much of the system. A couple of third party applications. Anything stored on "the desktop". Everything in the "personal" folders for all users. Dynamic link libraries for many third party apps.
\Windows holds much, much more than "the core operating system".
Now granted, this sort of organization sucks rocks, but to say that this is equivalent to/etc and/boot is, at best, extremely misleading.
I have just become aware of a new "feature" at your website. (http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/214 17.html).
I have been a customer of yours for years. I bought my first book from Amazon back when few had ever heard of you and "e-Commerce" was a unknown phrase throughout most of corporate America. Since then, I have spent hundreds of dollars a year at your site. I have considered myself a very loyal customer. I have refused to even visit the Barnes and Nobles site out of princible. When Slate ran an unfair attack on your site "Amazon.com", I lept into "The Fray" and loudly defended you on their message boards. I've recommended you to friends and relatives.
But until this new "feature" is removed, I will not purchase a book from you.
It doesn't matter what your "privacy policy" is, or what anyone else's rules are. That is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is that I, as a customer, can choose who I do business with. I, as a customer, choose to do business with companies that I feel treat my fairly. I do not feel this sort of thing treats me fairly. For example, if I were to get my own domain name as I have been planning to do, your site would then provide anyone with a list of my purchases. Not particularly in my best interest, I think.
So, I hope your policy on this changes, because I do want to be your customer in the future. If it doesn't, I won't be.
"Ironically," Bubb wrote in another portion of his brief, "the technology that allowed David L. Smith to spread so freely (the) 'Melissa' macro virus is the same technology used to identify David L. Smith.
Technology = Security/privacy holes in Microsoft software.
Does anyone remember the Dilbert cartoon where the Pointy-Haired Boss offered a cash incentive for every bug the programmers found and fixed?
I know of a real live company that offered $25 for every bug the programmers found and fixed. They had to cancel the program because it went over budget. (Can't say who, though.)
As someone who did some technical writing early in his career, I can state unequivically that not only do writers rarely get the same respect, they rarely get anywhere near the same pay.
The trouble with those statistics is that all sites are not equal. It should surprise no one that search engines are the most "popular" sites. That's like saying that "411" is the most popular phone number. It is like saying that the dictionary is the most popular book in the library. It isn't really a meaningful statement.
If, for example, I read the New York Times site once a day, and then spend the rest of the day checking my Stock, does that mean I like Yahoo a hundred times better than the Times? Do I prefer/. to Suck, because I check in here every couple hours while I only read Suck once a day (when they post new stories)?
I'm not all that excited about novels on an eBook sort of thing. Yeah, if the screen color and size were good, it would be ok.
What I would absolutely kill for is a way to put my ten-foot bookshelf full of technical books on an electronic device. The palm wouldn't work well for this. The screen is too small for technical documentation. But there is some future device that will be perfect.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the marks of a truly great actor is the ability to give an outstanding performance even though you think the script is crap. What is really interesting about this is that Guiness got what he thought to be a part in a crappy movie (obviously a "for the money" role) and yet gave an outstanding performance. Many actors would have just farted around and done little more than read their lines in such a situation.
We have those in California too, and assuming that New Hampshire uses the same encoding scheme (almost certainly the case given that it is a credit-card industry standard format) it probably just has your driver's license number and name on there.
If you erase the stripe, the only thing you are accomplishing is that your are forcing the cop to key in your driver's license number when you are pulled over. These stripes are not intended to have volatile info on them. They are merely a key to a database somewhere, and that key is nearly always on the card, in case the stripe goes bad.
One reason that I am almost certain the encoding used is that retailers are one of the groups pushing for these stripes on cards. Why? So they can ask for ID, and then grab the name off of it for marketting purposes.
These mag stripes don't hold as much as most people seem to think. There are generally two sets of info. The first is 37 bytes, and holds the account number and some other control information. The second is 80 bytes and holds the same thing as the first, but with the addition of the name on the card. Some older equipment can't read the second.
Mitochondrial DNA is pretty well preserved over the generations. In other words, it would be almost identical in third cousins that share the same great-great-grandmother. It isn't like nuclear DNA, which is rapidly diluted from one generation to another.
In other words, it should be pretty simple to test such a case. You wouldn't necessarily need a couple that would traditionally be considered incestuous.
Another possibility concerning why this happens is that the mitochondrial DNA is somehow packaged differently in the egg than in any other cell. Perhaps it gets tagged somehow when the egg is produced.
What makes this interesting is that you could get around this, and make a "true" clone, by using a donor egg cell from the creature you are trying to clone.
This interesting part is that this only works for females!
Though I suppose that in theory, you could get much the same effect by using donor egg-cells by a female relative, as mitochondrial DNA is preserved pretty well through the generations. (i.e. you've got pretty much what your mother has, barring mutations.)
but hell, Big Evil Software Companies make stealing an art.
/.) doesn't see any difference between a couple greasy teenagers exchanging cracked software and a couple of hackers exchanging the latest versions of their code.
Hell, didn't the GT Interactive story hit the wire only yesterday?
But anyway, the error here is the confusion of teenagers with too much time on their hands with the rest of us. We seem to have a PR problem. The public (hell, even someone like Katz, who at least ought to be ready some of
This geek doesn't brag about stolen software. This geek brags about once convincing the company he worked for to get rid of all illegal software.
(Caveat: this geek also had a misbegotten youth his is ashamed of. He did, however, grow up.)
Programmers frequently come up with products that are buggy, excessive, unworkable, unsupportable or overpriced. The industry's consumers are exploited and abused.
I see attitude a lot (though rarely from anyone in the industry) and it just pisses me off to no end. This is as much a management issue as a "programmer" issue. How many of us have been forced to meet unrealistic schedules? How many of have been forced to ship regardless of whether or not it is done? How many of us have been forced to skimp on quality to "get it out". How many of us have been told testing was not important?
Perhaps we should be more proactive about refusing to release in these conditions. (And I personally have, on occasion.) But I wonder if Katz knows some secret way to tell your boss he's wrong without negative consequences. Usually, you just get labelled as someone who is "not a team player" and the software gets shipped anyway.
Then you get called on the carpet for the bugs in the software.
In my last job, pleas that the software be tested got met with blank stares. "Regression testing? What's that!? I'm sorry, we have to get it there tonight, no matter what!"
And people wonder why there are bugs...
One of the reasons (the prime reason IMHO) that open source software is less buggy is that people who know nothing about programming aren't making the schedules.
I wish it had been on purpose. It is a cool pun.
I had a friend who lost his computers this way. Not only did it take three years, but to add insult to injury, the equipment was no longer functional when he got it back.
But is there a fee on balance transfers. I got hosed on one of those things that advertised low interest if you transfer money from old credit cards but then had a high fee for balance transfers.
Doing the math, it turned out that the "fee" basically jacked up the effective interest rate to roughly what their normal one was.
I suspect that what you understand, and this ZDNet guy doesn't, is that in the end, it isn't about the press. Many journalists (especially those who work for more marginal publications) seem to think that they are somehow more important because they are THE PRESS and that somehow they are owed more for this reason. They are not.
The impression I get is that Torvalds is a nice guy who doesn't give a damn about the press. That's a very healthy attitude, if you ask me. Not that the press is bad or anything. It is just that they have no more right to his time than any of the rest of us do.
I suspect that the journalists that understand that will, in the end, get more access.
...since I don't post stuff I know nothing about...
Youll never be a journalist with that attitude.
That is exactly it. The nice thing about /. is not the indepedent journalism so much as a forum to poke holes in the bullshit real journalism keeps coming up with.
Now I wish I'd used that pun on purpose. Damn.
I gotta learn to proofread.
All that seems to be missing from Slashdot-type sites is some kind of reputation rating system, where participants are assigned a trust rating based on feedback from the group and managed by a central authority.
I found this facinating... There is, of course, a very good system in action right here. It is caled a "username". When combined with a "brain", it allows the reader to determine whether to trust articles written by someone who they've already read before.
Seems to me this used to be the way the "old" media worked.
Anyway, I find this "old media" fascination with the need for a "trusted" source ironic in the sense that the biggest problem they face right now is a complete lack of trust among the general population. I don't for a second trust any of those I see talk about the need for sources that can be "trusted".
To use a sadder example of web journalism, Matt Drudge, while completely lacking in the sort of reputation that would earn my trust is no different from the mainstream media in this respect. I see people I have no trust in complain about how Drudge isn't a "real journalist" because he is not trustworthy. Well, yeah... That's what makes him a journalist.
I trust those who post to slashdot to the extent that I can check them out, and to what checking I've done, posters here are often more accurate, and more inciteful, then anything in the "mainstream" media. It is nice to have a media outlet that actually pokes bullshit stories full of holes within the hour. This is far better than the idiocy that gets printed in most newspapers or news magazines today.
An example of why this is still not a good comparison:
/usr/lib, which you did not list.
/usr/lib in your comparison.
Under Windows, the C runtime dynamic link libraries are in \windows\system32
Under Linux, the equivalent libraries are in
\Windows\system32 usually ends up being a dumping ground for every third party dll. Again, not a good design, but this means that you should at least include
That is not a good comparison. Looking at my WinNT box, I see that the \Winnt directory includes such things as:
/etc and /boot is, at best, extremely misleading.
My browser cache.
All of my e-mail, including attachments.
Help files for much of the system.
A couple of third party applications.
Anything stored on "the desktop".
Everything in the "personal" folders for all users.
Dynamic link libraries for many third party apps.
\Windows holds much, much more than "the core operating system".
Now granted, this sort of organization sucks rocks, but to say that this is equivalent to
You always want to give them a "If you change I'll come back". Otherwise, they just roundfile your comment as a lost cause.
I have just become aware of a new "feature" at your website. (http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/214 17.html).
I have been a customer of yours for years. I bought my first book from Amazon back when few had ever heard of you and "e-Commerce" was a unknown phrase throughout most of corporate America. Since then, I have spent hundreds of dollars a year at your site. I have considered myself a very loyal customer. I have refused to even visit the Barnes and Nobles site out of princible. When Slate ran an unfair attack on your site "Amazon.com", I lept into "The Fray" and loudly defended you on their message boards. I've recommended you to friends and relatives.
But until this new "feature" is removed, I will not purchase a book from you.
It doesn't matter what your "privacy policy" is, or what anyone else's rules are. That is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is that I, as a customer, can choose who I do business with. I, as a customer, choose to do business with companies that I feel treat my fairly. I do not feel this sort of thing treats me fairly. For example, if I were to get my own domain name as I have been planning to do, your site would then provide anyone with a list of my purchases. Not particularly in my best interest, I think.
So, I hope your policy on this changes, because I do want to be your customer in the future. If it doesn't, I won't be.
"Ironically," Bubb wrote in another portion of his brief, "the technology that allowed David L. Smith to spread so freely (the) 'Melissa' macro virus is the same technology used to identify David L. Smith.
Technology = Security/privacy holes in Microsoft software.
Does anyone remember the Dilbert cartoon where the Pointy-Haired Boss offered a cash incentive for every bug the programmers found and fixed?
I know of a real live company that offered $25 for every bug the programmers found and fixed. They had to cancel the program because it went over budget. (Can't say who, though.)
Uhh..... I was browsing in CompUSA the other day, and, there, sitting next to "RedHat Linux" was "RedHat-Mandrake Linux".
And guess what? They were pretty much the same price.
As someone who did some technical writing early in his career, I can state unequivically that not only do writers rarely get the same respect, they rarely get anywhere near the same pay.
1) Trying to type in my first C "Hello World" program on terminals where '#' defaulted to kill. (I didn't get far, as you can imagine.)
/long/set/of/directories".)
2) It was months before I figured out why I couldn't use complex pathnames with cd under DOS, like I had been able to under Unix. (circa 1985)
(I was typing "cd
Anyone else want to fess up?
The trouble with those statistics is that all sites are not equal. It should surprise no one that search engines are the most "popular" sites. That's like saying that "411" is the most popular phone number. It is like saying that the dictionary is the most popular book in the library. It isn't really a meaningful statement.
/. to Suck, because I check in here every couple hours while I only read Suck once a day (when they post new stories)?
If, for example, I read the New York Times site once a day, and then spend the rest of the day checking my Stock, does that mean I like Yahoo a hundred times better than the Times? Do I prefer
These statistics mean nothing, really.
I'm not all that excited about novels on an eBook sort of thing. Yeah, if the screen color and size were good, it would be ok.
What I would absolutely kill for is a way to put my ten-foot bookshelf full of technical books on an electronic device. The palm wouldn't work well for this. The screen is too small for technical documentation. But there is some future device that will be perfect.