Apropos of nothing, I saw a movie in the theaters a few days ago. At the official start time, the lights dimmed. Then there were 14 minutes of commercials (Pepsi, hair mousse, cologne, etc.) followed by 13 minutes of movie trailers (which are also advertising, of course), followed by a few minutes of junk, followed by a 100-minute movie.
Smooth, Sims. Funny how my last post in one of your stories got blasted to -1, Offtopic, but you have no qualms about starting out a tirade by admitting that it has nothing to do with anything relating to the story you attached it to. I wonder, is my speaking specifically to your admittedly offtopic rant offtopic?
Not only that, you forgot the most important part of your story: knowing that all of the crap you mentioned is standard practice, you were stupid enough to PAY them for the privilege to abuse you like that.
Yea, OK. Because as the software companies have learned from their massively successful bout with game pirates (assuming you use "successful" to mean "it wasn't warezed before it even hit the bloody store shelf") you can effectively use a person's PC against them.
Whatever. Looks to me like the computer geek is just going to become a staple of the successful organized crime family in Kangaroo-land, that's all. You cannot put a skilled person in front of a computer and not have them figure out how to break your stupid protections and spyware and whatever else you want to try and pull over on them. If it's on my computer, and I have a reason to go looking for it, I'll find it, and I'll break it. Guaranteed. You cannot hide things from someone on their own computer.
Yet another technology that will have absolutely no effect on the big time criminals and will waste money catching the little guys that weren't really capable of getting away in the first place. In fact, I'm now taking bets on how long until someone figures out how to sniff out the signature and disable it.
And, I should care... why? Am I supposed to load up my side by side and start booby trapping the hallways to stop the government enforcers or something? Hellloooo, cluestick: who fucking cares? Parents get to keep tabs on their kids, big news. Whoopdy doo. How is this YRO?
For a long time, everyone made fun of the "NASCAR families" for being a bunch of dumb hicks. I'll bet this is very similar to the sorts of things they do.
Guess you have to be a little smarter than the average bear to race a car around in circles after all. Not that I expect the yuppies will give up their sense of superiority (yea, golf takes brains) to admit that.
He's not trolling. The offhanded comment at the end was curt, but not unjustified. If a poster is going to make a claim, s/he should cite a source. If I had to waste my time verifying every non-obvious statement - such as data regarding volcanic eruptions - made by non-experts, I'd never get anything done.
Is Twirlip an expert on volcanic eruptions? I have no idea, so the answer for me is 'no'. I think that's the common answer for the Slashdot readership as well, as I doubt most of them know the guy.
Did Twirlip cite a source for his claim, since his word can't be taken as expert testimony? No.
Therefore, was it jutsified for my g-parent poster to demand proof? Absolutely.
Too much of this "oh, if someone said it it must be true" on Slashdot. Nothing wrong with demanding that people back up their non-obvious claims, because it's not the reader's responsibility to automatically assume everything stated on Slashdot is gospel truth.
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Sorry. Nice idea, but the Constitution applies to the U.S. only.
And, again, what's your point? The original accusation was that I was comparing software pirates to murderers.
Software piracy is to petty theft as terrorism is to murder.
The point, again, is that if the poster thinks the DOJ should ignore "petty" crimes within its jurisdiction - such as software piracy - does he also think that the police should ignore "petty" crimes within its jurisdiction such as petty theft?
Yea, right. And I guess you'd like your local police force to stop targetting speeders, drunk drivers, and robbers so that they can focus all of their resources entirely on murderers and rapists, right? Because the appropriate approach to crime is to focus on the top 5% of the worst crimes and just ignore the other 95%, right?
His post was whining that the DOJ was chasing software pirates instead of "real" criminals.
Therefore:
"If you think that the DOJ shouldn't target 'minor' criminals like software pirates, focusing instead on the 'big timers', do you think that your local police force should stop targetting 'minor' criminals like speeders and robbers and only handle crimes that involved 'big timers' like murderers"
There is no connection, implicit or otherwise, made between the pirates and anybody else. In fact, if anything, the connection would be between the 'minor' criminals like software pirates and the 'minor' criminals like speeders.
WTF is so complicated about that? Here, I'll spell it out explicitly: the DOJ and the police force should be doing their jobs which is catching criminals, not focusing all their resources on one narrow point of the spectrum of crime. Suggesting that the DOJ is wasting its time for not focusing explicitly on hardcore criminals is stupid just like it would be stupid to complain that the police don't focus entirely on hardcore crimes like murder and rape.
Say you have 100 people who want to get feeds from 10 sites. Regular RSS has 100 people hitting each of those sites once per minute. They all get the same data.
However, if you have a system where a group of people all want the same site feeds, you could group them by their interest in sites. Within the pool, only x% of the sites interested in, for example, eweek.com would request the feed. Then, they would be available to distribute the feed to y% of the sites who would distribute to z% of the sites until everyone in the pool is up to date.
The same goes for other sites. Another subgroup in that pool would pick up slashdot.org and distribute that out to the rest of the pool in waves.
It doesn't change the overall bandwidth used, but it does decentralize it a great deal.
You'd save about $2500 doing that assuming it costs $4/dvd to rent. I can only imagine how stupid you'd have to be to spend $27,000 on the player and then waste all that time renting and returning DVDs just to save $2500 on them...
Plus, once you hit your limit, you either have to buy a new player or you have to permanently lose one DVD for every new one you want to add...
Yea, right. And I guess you'd like your local police force to stop targetting speeders, drunk drivers, and robbers so that they can focus all of their resources entirely on murderers and rapists, right? Because the appropriate approach to crime is to focus on the top 5% of the worst crimes and just ignore the other 95%, right?
When people say a kernel alone is "useless" they're talking about useless from the perspective of a user, not from the perspective of a kernel developer. You can't really do anything useful with just a kernel if you're a user, that doesn't mean a developer can't hack it up to do things. That's like the higher level distinction between a header file and a program. The header file itself is "useless" if you're just a user, but if you're a developer, it's a critical, highly useful tool that you can use in combination with other tools to make it a part of something that a user finds useful.
I don't buy the "kernel is the OS" argument, no. When I think of an operating system, I think of a system which operates a computer of some sort in a way that is useful to a user. A kernel simply does not do that. I suppose there's nothing stopping you from creating a kernel that is a self-contained operating system, but the complexity would be so painfully mind-boggling and it would be so error-prone I don't even want to think of such a monstrosity.
Even in your embedded example, there IS a user interface - a barcode scanner acts as a sort of STDIN and the LCD screen acts as a sort of STDOUT/STDERR. These do not exist in the kernel, they exist in userland. Just because your users won't have anything but the highest level of control over that userspace doesn't mean it isn't there. Your application then becomes what would appear to be the whole of the UI and the system tools, and the kernel is STILL a distinct, crucial piece of that whole thing that you can pull out and hold up as a self-contained program that the other parts of the system rely on. You cannot pull your UI or your system tools out and call them self contained, because they won't run without the kernel.
Ahhh... mst3k.. I used to actually get up early on Saturday morning to watch that after it moved to Sci Fi.
At any rate, further complicating the problem by creating an equally abusive group with a different agenda isn't a relevant solution. Stopping the PTC from abusing the submission process is the relevant solution. What gets aired to the public tastes can, theoretically, work itself out naturally if you don't have interest groups mucking about in the process.
I don't need to read another book on computer science, I need to understand what you're trying to argue.
Operating Systems are composed of three conceptual components: a kernel, a UI, and system utilities. An example of this is a linux kernel distributed with GNU tools. Shells provide the UI, you get system utilities such as fsck and mount, and you have the kernel interfacing all of it with the actual hardware.
A kernel is a crucial piece of an operating system that interfaces userland and 'bare metal'. You cannot do anything useful with just the kernel. It's just a part of an operating system. It can run and load on its own, but nothing more.
Slashdot Mirror
Smooth, Sims. Funny how my last post in one of your stories got blasted to -1, Offtopic, but you have no qualms about starting out a tirade by admitting that it has nothing to do with anything relating to the story you attached it to. I wonder, is my speaking specifically to your admittedly offtopic rant offtopic?
Not only that, you forgot the most important part of your story: knowing that all of the crap you mentioned is standard practice, you were stupid enough to PAY them for the privilege to abuse you like that .
If you're going to have "nothing to see here" pages on new stories, don't put the goddamn story on the freaking page that has "nothing to see".
@ -> a = array .... who knows, it's perl. But the only thing left to remember is the Hash, unless you want to talk globs -> *
$ -> s = scalar
% ->
Yea, OK. Because as the software companies have learned from their massively successful bout with game pirates (assuming you use "successful" to mean "it wasn't warezed before it even hit the bloody store shelf") you can effectively use a person's PC against them.
Whatever. Looks to me like the computer geek is just going to become a staple of the successful organized crime family in Kangaroo-land, that's all. You cannot put a skilled person in front of a computer and not have them figure out how to break your stupid protections and spyware and whatever else you want to try and pull over on them. If it's on my computer, and I have a reason to go looking for it, I'll find it, and I'll break it. Guaranteed. You cannot hide things from someone on their own computer.
Yet another technology that will have absolutely no effect on the big time criminals and will waste money catching the little guys that weren't really capable of getting away in the first place. In fact, I'm now taking bets on how long until someone figures out how to sniff out the signature and disable it.
Says the guy who bit on an intuitively obvious troll....
Better idea.
"If parents can watch what their kids do at home, why not make oversight mandatory in all homes and have the government track it?"
Idiot.
And, I should care... why? Am I supposed to load up my side by side and start booby trapping the hallways to stop the government enforcers or something? Hellloooo, cluestick: who fucking cares? Parents get to keep tabs on their kids, big news. Whoopdy doo. How is this YRO?
For a long time, everyone made fun of the "NASCAR families" for being a bunch of dumb hicks. I'll bet this is very similar to the sorts of things they do.
Guess you have to be a little smarter than the average bear to race a car around in circles after all. Not that I expect the yuppies will give up their sense of superiority (yea, golf takes brains) to admit that.
He's not trolling. The offhanded comment at the end was curt, but not unjustified. If a poster is going to make a claim, s/he should cite a source. If I had to waste my time verifying every non-obvious statement - such as data regarding volcanic eruptions - made by non-experts, I'd never get anything done.
Is Twirlip an expert on volcanic eruptions? I have no idea, so the answer for me is 'no'. I think that's the common answer for the Slashdot readership as well, as I doubt most of them know the guy.
Did Twirlip cite a source for his claim, since his word can't be taken as expert testimony? No.
Therefore, was it jutsified for my g-parent poster to demand proof? Absolutely.
Too much of this "oh, if someone said it it must be true" on Slashdot. Nothing wrong with demanding that people back up their non-obvious claims, because it's not the reader's responsibility to automatically assume everything stated on Slashdot is gospel truth.
Preamble:
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Sorry. Nice idea, but the Constitution applies to the U.S. only.
And, again, what's your point? The original accusation was that I was comparing software pirates to murderers.
Software piracy is to petty theft as terrorism is to murder.
The point, again, is that if the poster thinks the DOJ should ignore "petty" crimes within its jurisdiction - such as software piracy - does he also think that the police should ignore "petty" crimes within its jurisdiction such as petty theft?
http://www.gimp.org/contest/gallery.cgi?display=G
See? Right below the list of allowed HTML:
Therefore:
"If you think that the DOJ shouldn't target 'minor' criminals like software pirates, focusing instead on the 'big timers', do you think that your local police force should stop targetting 'minor' criminals like speeders and robbers and only handle crimes that involved 'big timers' like murderers"
There is no connection, implicit or otherwise, made between the pirates and anybody else. In fact, if anything, the connection would be between the 'minor' criminals like software pirates and the 'minor' criminals like speeders.
WTF is so complicated about that? Here, I'll spell it out explicitly: the DOJ and the police force should be doing their jobs which is catching criminals, not focusing all their resources on one narrow point of the spectrum of crime. Suggesting that the DOJ is wasting its time for not focusing explicitly on hardcore criminals is stupid just like it would be stupid to complain that the police don't focus entirely on hardcore crimes like murder and rape.
You are not a very good troll. Please slap yourself across the face and try again.
Okay, what about a distributed RSS feeder system?
Say you have 100 people who want to get feeds from 10 sites. Regular RSS has 100 people hitting each of those sites once per minute. They all get the same data.
However, if you have a system where a group of people all want the same site feeds, you could group them by their interest in sites. Within the pool, only x% of the sites interested in, for example, eweek.com would request the feed. Then, they would be available to distribute the feed to y% of the sites who would distribute to z% of the sites until everyone in the pool is up to date.
The same goes for other sites. Another subgroup in that pool would pick up slashdot.org and distribute that out to the rest of the pool in waves.
It doesn't change the overall bandwidth used, but it does decentralize it a great deal.
Again... please show me where this comparison is.... I see sarcastic remarks drawing a parrellel... I see no comparison...
It is making your point.
YJL. HAND.
And that's a comparison..... how? I ask, because you normally need more than one entity to have a ... you know... COMPARISON.
Wow. You're dumb. Snipe hunt time: show me where I made any such comparison, idiot-boy.
You'd save about $2500 doing that assuming it costs $4/dvd to rent. I can only imagine how stupid you'd have to be to spend $27,000 on the player and then waste all that time renting and returning DVDs just to save $2500 on them...
Plus, once you hit your limit, you either have to buy a new player or you have to permanently lose one DVD for every new one you want to add...
Yea, right. And I guess you'd like your local police force to stop targetting speeders, drunk drivers, and robbers so that they can focus all of their resources entirely on murderers and rapists, right? Because the appropriate approach to crime is to focus on the top 5% of the worst crimes and just ignore the other 95%, right?
Idiot.
When people say a kernel alone is "useless" they're talking about useless from the perspective of a user, not from the perspective of a kernel developer. You can't really do anything useful with just a kernel if you're a user, that doesn't mean a developer can't hack it up to do things. That's like the higher level distinction between a header file and a program. The header file itself is "useless" if you're just a user, but if you're a developer, it's a critical, highly useful tool that you can use in combination with other tools to make it a part of something that a user finds useful.
I don't buy the "kernel is the OS" argument, no. When I think of an operating system, I think of a system which operates a computer of some sort in a way that is useful to a user. A kernel simply does not do that. I suppose there's nothing stopping you from creating a kernel that is a self-contained operating system, but the complexity would be so painfully mind-boggling and it would be so error-prone I don't even want to think of such a monstrosity.
Even in your embedded example, there IS a user interface - a barcode scanner acts as a sort of STDIN and the LCD screen acts as a sort of STDOUT/STDERR. These do not exist in the kernel, they exist in userland. Just because your users won't have anything but the highest level of control over that userspace doesn't mean it isn't there. Your application then becomes what would appear to be the whole of the UI and the system tools, and the kernel is STILL a distinct, crucial piece of that whole thing that you can pull out and hold up as a self-contained program that the other parts of the system rely on. You cannot pull your UI or your system tools out and call them self contained, because they won't run without the kernel.
Ahhh... mst3k.. I used to actually get up early on Saturday morning to watch that after it moved to Sci Fi.
At any rate, further complicating the problem by creating an equally abusive group with a different agenda isn't a relevant solution. Stopping the PTC from abusing the submission process is the relevant solution. What gets aired to the public tastes can, theoretically, work itself out naturally if you don't have interest groups mucking about in the process.
I don't need to read another book on computer science, I need to understand what you're trying to argue.
Operating Systems are composed of three conceptual components: a kernel, a UI, and system utilities. An example of this is a linux kernel distributed with GNU tools. Shells provide the UI, you get system utilities such as fsck and mount, and you have the kernel interfacing all of it with the actual hardware.
A kernel is a crucial piece of an operating system that interfaces userland and 'bare metal'. You cannot do anything useful with just the kernel. It's just a part of an operating system. It can run and load on its own, but nothing more.