You are mistaken if you think that people die completely at random.
It is very likely that certain traits are being bred out of the human race. For example, the trait that causes young men to drink like fish and then go drag racing.
Yes, someone really opposed to this would deliberately wait until the technology is released, and a lot of money is sunk into it, before cracking it and thereby making it fail.
If I were better at code-breaking stuff, I'd be working my ass off to crack it. But I sure as hell wouldn't notify anyone involved as to my results. Not until after they've ship a whole lot of impossible-to-recall hardware.
Then I'd post the code to crack it to freshmeat.
Not only would that stop the particular instance, but it would serve as a warning to corporations that future attempts are going to be as much a waste of money as DVD encryption was.
They don't need direct light. (And, in fact, it is bad for them). I've got mine on a desk in a fairly dim den. Those little buggers have been going strong for about two years now.
Ahh, but it is. People's body chemistry varies quite a bit.
When I was younger, I experimented with quite a few different drugs. Cocaine never did much for me. I smoke a lot of pot socially. I became quite a fan of LSD, for a while taking it as often as I had time for. (Or mushrooms, or other psychadelics.)
That was all ten years or more ago. I never conciously quit. I just found different things to occupy myself with.
Especially here, YMMV. I am fortunate enough not to have a body chemistry that addicts easily to those substances.
Some people are really screwed. They have a body chemistry that addicts itself to alcohol.
Me, I seem utterly incapable of staying off of caffiene for any long period. It's the only drug I've ever had a problem with.
It's all a matter of luck. And different chemistries.
(Ok, well, it was Wolfenstein 3D on LSD as it has been ages since I did that sort of thing. The game actually seemed easier except for the times I got shot in the back while being distracted by graphical effects. "How did they get the pixels on the wall to move around like that???")
"The MFC library is a true C++ OO wrapper around win32, which is function oriented, non-C++. "
This can be the source of a lot of nasty bugs, by the way, especially if you fall into the trap of assuming everything is trully OO. One of the biggest (though unavoidable) problems with MFC is a CWnd is not a window. It is a source of many nasty design problems.
I've got a lot of experience with MFC and others. I've found MFC mostly useful in powering out quick stuff in which speed and size aren't important. Mostly internal utilities but sometimes released software. For that kind of thing, it is fairly nice, though quirky.
Otherwise, it is either straight API work, or ATL. ATL is far superior to MFC in terms of speed. It is pretty much as fast as rolling your own. And you don't have to be using COM, despite what a lot of people think. OTOH, it is not as fully featured as MFC and you end up doing some stuff raw.
Having either under Linux would be nice for porting, though I can't imagine an ATL port would be easy.
There is no "illegal" stuff. This whole thing is just legal intimidation. They know damn well that there is nothing illegal about this. They are just hoping that they'll scare the guy enough to make him stop.
If you read the letters posted carefully, you'll note that they never actually accuse him of doing anything illegal. At one point they use the phrase "unauthorized or illegal". That "or" is important. They're hoping he'll panic and take it down before realizing that "unauthorized" has nothing to do with "illegal" in this context.
Just thought I'd waste more moderation points by throwing in more offtopic info. "Forty" was often used in the original languages of the region to poetically denote a big number. That's why it repeats so often. You get "forty days and forty nights". You get Christ going into the desert for forty days and you get the isrealites wandering for forty years. It isn't meant to be taken as literally the exact number 40.
As an interesting sidenote, the Chinese use ten-thousand in much the same way all throw the Tao Te Ching.
I've looked at Sonique a fair amount with dev tools like Spy++, and read their dev documentation, and from what I've seen, there's good reason to believe porting might be fairly simple. They claim not to use the Windows API at all for their window handling. From what I've seen, that may well be true. Despite the appearance of lots of buttons and things, their app appears to be a black hole in Spy++. Just one big window with no controls. I suspect that they create their single window and draw everything with straight BitBlt commands, doing the mouse handling on their own.
That's definitely the hard way under Windows, but given the cool graphical things their UI does, may have been necessary. It also seems like it'd make a port much easier, as they only have to port the few low-level calls they use, not an application rife with Windows message handlers.
Well, I'm not much in favor of the "Software wants to be free" types, but the most obvious difference is that if you take the cabinet, the carpenter loses use of the cabinet while if you take the software, the programmer retains use of the program.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good [sic] software.
If I ever catch the bastards who sent the checks that allowed him to hire those progammers, I'll...I'll...I'll... Well, it won't be pretty, I can tell you that!
I've seen examples where salaried, full-time employees make roughly half of their contracted counterparts. Granted there are no benefits, but double the salary is hard to ignore.
Hell, I've worked (as a contracter:-) ) for a company that had employees quit, and then immediately hired them as contractors for twice the price. (This happened multiple times.) That same company approached me to be an employee, and was surprised when I pretty much laughed at them. They just couldn't understand why they could never staff up.
When I first joined the workforce in 1990, I went through about 5 layoff situations in about 2 years, luckily surviving them all.
I wasn't always so lucky, and it just goes to show how worthless the "stability" of employement is. My average tenure as an employee at any one place is a little over a year. My average contract was about two years.
There are reasons to be an employee. "Stability" is not one of them, because employer loyalty is mostly a thing of the past.
It really angers me when I see companies complain about how employees today lack loyalty. I saw a company dump an entire department, six months after saying explicitly that they would not, and then watched as a few months later, saw memos expressing confusion as to why there was so much turnover and obvious lack of loyalty in other departments.
It is stupid of them, really, and your advise is spot on. In the eighties, companies decided that cutting short-term costs was a good reason to cut jobs. "Sorry, it is just a business decision, no hard feelings". In other words, they are in it just for the bottom-line. Remember that as an employee. It is in your best interest to do the same. Work with who suits you. What you owe is labor. What you do not owe is loyalty to people who aren't loyal to you.
(One caveat: one of the few places where you can find employers with some loyalty is in smaller startups. Not they are more stable, after all, they often dump everyone all at once, but hey, they are better than some corporate beancounter cutting your job because he's too ignorant to realize that you do something critical. (That's never happened to me, but it has happened numerous times to people I've worked with!))
My advice: cultivate secondary skills. Being a top-notch Perl programmer is great when it's in demand, but it won't keep you fed if you get tossed out of a job and there's no market for your obsessively-honed skills.
My Advice: cultivate generic skills. Being a top-notch programmer will keep you fed long after being a top-notch Perl(C++/Java/Lisp/PLI/Cobol/Visual Basic/Whatever) programmer will leave you starving.
Want to always work? Never, ever tie yourself to one language, one OS or one set of hardware.
Not only are you less likely to end up on the death-train to doom (speaking as a former OS/2 programmer) but if you can point to times you've picked up language X in the past, employers are much more likely to take a chance that you can pick up language Y in the future.
This is one reason I feel sorry for some of the more obsessive Linux fanatics. (Don't get me wrong. This isn't meant as a troll. Linux is currently my OS of choice.) They may find themselves in trouble years down the road. Because while I don't know the future, I am fairly sure of one thing, based on experience: The hot OS of 2015 won't be Linux. (As it won't be Windows, OS/2 or anything else we've seen in the past.) For that reason, my advice to any young coder is to immediately run out and install the OS you know nothing about. If you're a Linux hacker, learn Windows. If you're a Windows dron^H^H^H^Hcoder, learn Linux. Not only will this make you a better coder on your OS of choice today, but it will prepare you for the OS you'll use in fifteen years. Unless, of course, you plan on using the same OS in 2015 that you are using today.
And if you want to be one of those, well, I've got a word of warning: There are still DOS programmers out there today. They don't earn much.
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You are mistaken if you think that people die completely at random.
It is very likely that certain traits are being bred out of the human race. For example, the trait that causes young men to drink like fish and then go drag racing.
Yes, someone really opposed to this would deliberately wait until the technology is released, and a lot of money is sunk into it, before cracking it and thereby making it fail.
If I were better at code-breaking stuff, I'd be working my ass off to crack it. But I sure as hell wouldn't notify anyone involved as to my results. Not until after they've ship a whole lot of impossible-to-recall hardware.
Then I'd post the code to crack it to freshmeat.
Not only would that stop the particular instance, but it would serve as a warning to corporations that future attempts are going to be as much a waste of money as DVD encryption was.
As long as we procreate by exchanging genetic material, we continue to evolve.
I mean, what do you think the Darwin awards are about, anyway?
I've got one. They are way cool.
They don't need direct light. (And, in fact, it is bad for them). I've got mine on a desk in a fairly dim den. Those little buggers have been going strong for about two years now.
Ahh, but it is. People's body chemistry varies quite a bit.
When I was younger, I experimented with quite a few different drugs. Cocaine never did much for me. I smoke a lot of pot socially. I became quite a fan of LSD, for a while taking it as often as I had time for. (Or mushrooms, or other psychadelics.)
That was all ten years or more ago. I never conciously quit. I just found different things to occupy myself with.
Especially here, YMMV. I am fortunate enough not to have a body chemistry that addicts easily to those substances.
Some people are really screwed. They have a body chemistry that addicts itself to alcohol.
Me, I seem utterly incapable of staying off of caffiene for any long period. It's the only drug I've ever had a problem with.
It's all a matter of luck. And different chemistries.
Yes, but Quake on LSD is interesting!
(Ok, well, it was Wolfenstein 3D on LSD as it has been ages since I did that sort of thing. The game actually seemed easier except for the times I got shot in the back while being distracted by graphical effects. "How did they get the pixels on the wall to move around like that???")
Hell, that's why I gave up on LSD. Your weekend is then basically shot for anything useful. Sure, its fun, but I've got a home network to configure!
How many times have you been looking at old code and thought "What was I smoking when I wrote this, and why don't I remember taking it?"
But in practice I've found that signatures are often meaningless unless you actually dispute things.
I once forgot to sign a whole batch of checks. Sent them out to the power company, phone company, etc, etc.
Only discovered this a month later when I got the cancelled checks back from my bank. Every single check had been honored.
Good for me in that case, though a little frightening, to say the least...
"The MFC library is a true C++ OO wrapper around win32, which is function oriented, non-C++. "
This can be the source of a lot of nasty bugs, by the way, especially if you fall into the trap of assuming everything is trully OO. One of the biggest (though unavoidable) problems with MFC is a CWnd is not a window. It is a source of many nasty design problems.
Oh come on, writing raw Win32 isn't that hard. It is pretty damn easy, and you can always use ATL.
I've got a lot of experience with MFC and others. I've found MFC mostly useful in powering out quick stuff in which speed and size aren't important. Mostly internal utilities but sometimes released software. For that kind of thing, it is fairly nice, though quirky.
Otherwise, it is either straight API work, or ATL. ATL is far superior to MFC in terms of speed. It is pretty much as fast as rolling your own. And you don't have to be using COM, despite what a lot of people think. OTOH, it is not as fully featured as MFC and you end up doing some stuff raw.
Having either under Linux would be nice for porting, though I can't imagine an ATL port would be easy.
There is no "illegal" stuff. This whole thing is just legal intimidation. They know damn well that there is nothing illegal about this. They are just hoping that they'll scare the guy enough to make him stop.
If you read the letters posted carefully, you'll note that they never actually accuse him of doing anything illegal. At one point they use the phrase "unauthorized or illegal". That "or" is important. They're hoping he'll panic and take it down before realizing that "unauthorized" has nothing to do with "illegal" in this context.
Just thought I'd waste more moderation points by throwing in more offtopic info. "Forty" was often used in the original languages of the region to poetically denote a big number. That's why it repeats so often. You get "forty days and forty nights". You get Christ going into the desert for forty days and you get the isrealites wandering for forty years. It isn't meant to be taken as literally the exact number 40.
As an interesting sidenote, the Chinese use ten-thousand in much the same way all throw the Tao Te Ching.
One of the questions asked was "Would the Linux community accept a program called 'WinAmp' or should we change the name?"
And yeah, "LinAmp" was a favorite!
I've looked at Sonique a fair amount with dev tools like Spy++, and read their dev documentation, and from what I've seen, there's good reason to believe porting might be fairly simple. They claim not to use the Windows API at all for their window handling. From what I've seen, that may well be true. Despite the appearance of lots of buttons and things, their app appears to be a black hole in Spy++. Just one big window with no controls. I suspect that they create their single window and draw everything with straight BitBlt commands, doing the mouse handling on their own.
That's definitely the hard way under Windows, but given the cool graphical things their UI does, may have been necessary. It also seems like it'd make a port much easier, as they only have to port the few low-level calls they use, not an application rife with Windows message handlers.
Just thought I'd mention that the WinAmp guys put out a "what should we name a Linux version?" e-mail out on their dev mailing list a few weeks back.
It didn't seem like that release was imminant or anything, though
People with user ids over 150,000 look real stupid when they try to pull to "old-timer" card on people with user ids under 25,000.
The originally analogy was of something desirable and harmless looking that contained something dangerous hidden inside.
I mean, the Trojans didn't wake up one morning and say "Hey, those damn Greeks filled it up with ads!!!"
But really, analogies only go so far, so who the fuck cares about accuracy?
...Produce a cheap, easy-to-support OS for the home user...
Really? When is that coming out?
Well, I'm not much in favor of the "Software wants to be free" types, but the most obvious difference is that if you take the cabinet, the carpenter loses use of the cabinet while if you take the software, the programmer retains use of the program.
That is really the crux of the issue.
I just want to point of that Lotus can no more take credit for spreadsheets than Microsoft can take credit for Windowing systems.
Lotus basically copied an earlier program called Visicalc, which I personally used quite a bit before "1-2-3" even existed.
I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up, or has a suggestion or comment. Just write to me at 1180 Alvarado SE, #114, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87108. Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good [sic] software.
If I ever catch the bastards who sent the checks that allowed him to hire those progammers, I'll...I'll...I'll... Well, it won't be pretty, I can tell you that!
I've seen examples where salaried, full-time employees make roughly half of their contracted counterparts. Granted there are no benefits, but double the salary is hard to ignore.
:-) ) for a company that had employees quit, and then immediately hired them as contractors for twice the price. (This happened multiple times.) That same company approached me to be an employee, and was surprised when I pretty much laughed at them. They just couldn't understand why they could never staff up.
Hell, I've worked (as a contracter
When I first joined the workforce in 1990, I went through about 5 layoff situations in about 2 years, luckily surviving them all.
I wasn't always so lucky, and it just goes to show how worthless the "stability" of employement is. My average tenure as an employee at any one place is a little over a year. My average contract was about two years.
There are reasons to be an employee. "Stability" is not one of them, because employer loyalty is mostly a thing of the past.
It really angers me when I see companies complain about how employees today lack loyalty. I saw a company dump an entire department, six months after saying explicitly that they would not, and then watched as a few months later, saw memos expressing confusion as to why there was so much turnover and obvious lack of loyalty in other departments.
It is stupid of them, really, and your advise is spot on. In the eighties, companies decided that cutting short-term costs was a good reason to cut jobs. "Sorry, it is just a business decision, no hard feelings". In other words, they are in it just for the bottom-line. Remember that as an employee. It is in your best interest to do the same. Work with who suits you. What you owe is labor. What you do not owe is loyalty to people who aren't loyal to you.
(One caveat: one of the few places where you can find employers with some loyalty is in smaller startups. Not they are more stable, after all, they often dump everyone all at once, but hey, they are better than some corporate beancounter cutting your job because he's too ignorant to realize that you do something critical. (That's never happened to me, but it has happened numerous times to people I've worked with!))
Sorry for rambling. I'll shut up now.
My advice: cultivate secondary skills. Being a top-notch Perl programmer is great when it's in demand, but it won't keep you fed if you get tossed out of a job and there's no market for your obsessively-honed skills.
My Advice: cultivate generic skills. Being a top-notch programmer will keep you fed long after being a top-notch Perl(C++/Java/Lisp/PLI/Cobol/Visual Basic/Whatever) programmer will leave you starving.
Want to always work? Never, ever tie yourself to one language, one OS or one set of hardware.
Not only are you less likely to end up on the death-train to doom (speaking as a former OS/2 programmer) but if you can point to times you've picked up language X in the past, employers are much more likely to take a chance that you can pick up language Y in the future.
This is one reason I feel sorry for some of the more obsessive Linux fanatics. (Don't get me wrong. This isn't meant as a troll. Linux is currently my OS of choice.) They may find themselves in trouble years down the road. Because while I don't know the future, I am fairly sure of one thing, based on experience: The hot OS of 2015 won't be Linux. (As it won't be Windows, OS/2 or anything else we've seen in the past.) For that reason, my advice to any young coder is to immediately run out and install the OS you know nothing about. If you're a Linux hacker, learn Windows. If you're a Windows dron^H^H^H^Hcoder, learn Linux. Not only will this make you a better coder on your OS of choice today, but it will prepare you for the OS you'll use in fifteen years. Unless, of course, you plan on using the same OS in 2015 that you are using today.
And if you want to be one of those, well, I've got a word of warning: There are still DOS programmers out there today. They don't earn much.