The web site is already toast. Looks like someone is running ASP.NET
Server Error in '/' Application. Runtime Error Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".
Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
You could try installing Linux on those older machines, which could help lengthen their life. Sure, KDE or Gnome probably won't be too speedy, but a lighter window manager might do the trick.
I've never tried installing Mandrake with anything other than KDE, but I hope that the install would still be pretty simple.
I would definitely agree. I used to live near Plochingen, Germany, where there was a wacky Hundertwasser complex, which could be seen from any train heading southeast from Stuttgart
Pictures can be seen here
and
here. Pretty interesting architecture.
How does one cheat at real life? It seems to me that one always has to play within the rules, unless the GM decides to intervene.
I had heard of a case of nepotism on the part of the GM where he let his son respawn after 3 days with more xp and an intact identity, but those may be unsubstantiated rumors flying around the player population.:)
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
05 May 2004
Dear Sir,
We vehemently object to your implication that our very important and vital job of connecting servers to databases is not a "serious software engineering and design job".
Connections between servers and databases are vital to our communications infrastructure, and although you treat the job of creating them with disdain, we happen to know that it is a very creative, difficult, and fulfilling job. We have all the Microsoft certifications to prove our skills.
We are not simply cheap labor for outsourcing, but skilled simians who are highly valued for our database-connecting expertise. We command salaries of many bushels of bananas for this fine work. When we are not producing database connections, we are also creating many fine sonnets of Shakespearean origin, a work which also gets us many bushels of bananas.
We urge you to take us seriously, as without us your precious Internet infrastructure would become as foul and mushy as a month-old banana.
I think that by 2010 or so when Longhorn is out, an upgrade to those specs will cost a lot less than $4000. Hardware tends to get cheaper over time.
Just look at 5 or 6 years ago. Current computers would have been ridiculously expensive that long ago.
I'm a bit skeptical about the dual-processor estimate, but remember that this is an estimate of what future computers will look like, not a minimum system requirement for Windows Longhorn.
That pretty much what my dad said about the 30MB hard drive we got with our 286 computer in 1991. He wanted a 20MB hard drive because he couldn't imagine filling up 30MB. It eventually was filled up, all right!
By 2010 or so I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to fill up a 1TB hard drive, some of which haven't even been conceived of yet. I certainly never would have thought 6 years ago that I could fill up a 40GB hard drive. Storing large collections of movies, music, and images, and bloated Microsoft programs simply wasn't done that long ago. Well, we complained about Microsoft programs and OS's being bloated back then too, but few imagined they would get much, much bigger.
Well, that would certainly prove that life exists on Mars. Even if all this little rover did was get ripped into shreds by martian monster, it would be making a great discovery. Any pictures it took during the process, however, would probably not get transmitted before it was destroyed, leaving us clueless why it suddenly stopped working.
It's like a horror movie where you are yelling at the rover not go in there, but the dumb, clueless rover goes in there anyways, oblivious of impending doom.:)
A year ago gaming on LCD monitors was laughed at...
It was laughed at by some perhaps, but a year ago LCD monitors were quite capable of handling games. I got my 19in. 25ms LCD monitor about a year ago, and there were already many people using them for gaming at the time. I have yet to see any problems whatsoever with any games that I have played on that monitor.
No doubt, a 12ms will be even better, but many current monitors are probably good enough for most gamers.
My first reaction to this was pure disgust. Then I thought of all the censorship software that China has employed in the past and the net nanny software installed in American libraries. People have always found a way around it.
I'm sure that some clever individuals will find a way to get around this Orwellian nonsense in no time.
Also, with the millions and millions of people using the Internet in China, that's a lot of data being generated on what people are doing. How would they parse data of this magnitude? Look for the names of "naughty" websites? Doesn't the Great Firewall already block those?
Maybe they are not really monitoring people very much, but just trying to inspire fear and obedience with the "Big Brother is watching" bit.
Information tends to be easily spread, and tends to leak from even the most secure of places. This might slow down the spread of undesirable information, but won't stop it.
The whole night-vision goggle thing to catch fools who bring their video cameras doesn't bother me, but installing metal detectors does. That does seem to be a privacy issue to me.
It's already bad enough in the airport where they regard you as a probable criminal. We really don't need to be all treated like criminals when we enter a movie theater.
Just stick to looking out for video cameras with the goggles, OK? Having to empty out my pockets and going through a metal detector every time I go to the movies would make me not want to go. I would probably want to just download the DVD-rips of the movies instead of going through all that.
The author had a good point with this one. A lot of open-source projects have rather bad UIs. I've had a lot of bad experiences with such UIs. User Interfaces aren't easy: making a good user interface can be hard. We really need more good UI designers, but they aren't exactly a dime a dozen.
Fortunately, the UI tends to be well-separated in most open-source apps, since many open-source developers have that UNIX philosophy of creating separate components that do one thing well.
2. Documentation
Very true. Many times I've been puzzled and wondered how to do something, and since the user interface isn't intuitive, turned to the documentation, only to find it scanty, incomplete or non-existent. There aren't a lot of people who enjoy doing documentation, which is probably the main reason for this.
My most recent experience was with KDevelop 3. It's a nice IDE, but it seems to be oriented around those who are already used to command-line development. Coming from a Visual Studio background, I was baffled, and forced to refer to the documentation. The documentation, while informative, was woefully incomplete, and also had some assumption of familiarity with command-line development. It would be nice if I didn't have to hunt for other documentation to understand an application.
3. Feature-centric development
This is not a problem just with open-source software, but with *all* software. Just look at the opposite of open-source software, Microsoft software. It suffers the same featuritus that open-source software can suffer from. This problem is all about project management, not the nature of open-source.
4. Programming for the self
While true, this falls under the user-interface and documentation areas. It's all about something being unintuitive and undocumented.
5. Religious blindness
This can be true in certain cases, but I don't see this as being a huge problem. Open Source is not the same as UNIX-only. There are plenty of open-source projects for MacOS and Windows. I think the main annoyance that the author expresses comes back to UI. Essentially, she's asking, "Why doesn't Linux have as good a user interface as MacOS X or in some places in Windows?"
If we have the capability to transport enough junk there to make any kind of a mess at all then our tech will be advanced enough that this won't be a problem.
I think Microsoft has been thinking along these lines all along when developing software:)
So while the bad guys still, theoretically, need nearly the same amounts of processing power and time as regular asymmetric crypto to decrypt the message, the good guys save significantly in encryption.
Unless of course it's the bad guys doing the encryption. Then it will take the good guys more time to decrypt. That evil, evil knowledge!:)
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I find it interesting that the 1st Amendment specifically mentions Congress. I never realized that before. I imagine that it was intended that Congress was the only branch that would come up with laws and regulations, with the executive enforcing those laws.
The FCC is not Congress (would it fall under the executive branch?), so shouldn't it be only able to enforce laws that Congress comes up with? Are there laws governing profanity over the airwaves? Is that constitutional?
Would anyone knowledgable in U.S. goverment care to enlighten me?
The N-Gage was a stillborn. Its mother Nokia is in therapy, mourning the loss of the child that wasn't to be.
A few months from now Nokia will feel that maternal instinct return and proceed to get knocked up again. Hopefully the next one won't come into the world with Down's Syndrome or some other genetic defect.
Slashdot Mirror
The web site is already toast. Looks like someone is running ASP.NET
You could try installing Linux on those older machines, which could help lengthen their life. Sure, KDE or Gnome probably won't be too speedy, but a lighter window manager might do the trick.
I've never tried installing Mandrake with anything other than KDE, but I hope that the install would still be pretty simple.
I would definitely agree. I used to live near Plochingen, Germany, where there was a wacky Hundertwasser complex, which could be seen from any train heading southeast from Stuttgart
Pictures can be seen here and here. Pretty interesting architecture.
The key shown on the tail of the shuttle is also a symbol that has been associated with the city of Bremen since the Middle Ages.
How does one cheat at real life? It seems to me that one always has to play within the rules, unless the GM decides to intervene.
:)
I had heard of a case of nepotism on the part of the GM where he let his son respawn after 3 days with more xp and an intact identity, but those may be unsubstantiated rumors flying around the player population.
How the gun companies have managed to, ahem, dodge the bullet in this regard so long is beyond me.
Lots of $$$$$, which buys them plenty of puppet congressmen. Just look at the power of the NRA.
Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo
05 May 2004
Dear Sir,
We vehemently object to your implication that our very important and vital job of connecting servers to databases is not a "serious software engineering and design job".
Connections between servers and databases are vital to our communications infrastructure, and although you treat the job of creating them with disdain, we happen to know that it is a very creative, difficult, and fulfilling job. We have all the Microsoft certifications to prove our skills.
We are not simply cheap labor for outsourcing, but skilled simians who are highly valued for our database-connecting expertise. We command salaries of many bushels of bananas for this fine work. When we are not producing database connections, we are also creating many fine sonnets of Shakespearean origin, a work which also gets us many bushels of bananas.
We urge you to take us seriously, as without us your precious Internet infrastructure would become as foul and mushy as a month-old banana.
Sincerely,
Monkeys of the Congo
I think that by 2010 or so when Longhorn is out, an upgrade to those specs will cost a lot less than $4000. Hardware tends to get cheaper over time.
Just look at 5 or 6 years ago. Current computers would have been ridiculously expensive that long ago.
I'm a bit skeptical about the dual-processor estimate, but remember that this is an estimate of what future computers will look like, not a minimum system requirement for Windows Longhorn.
That pretty much what my dad said about the 30MB hard drive we got with our 286 computer in 1991. He wanted a 20MB hard drive because he couldn't imagine filling up 30MB. It eventually was filled up, all right!
By 2010 or so I'm sure there will be plenty of ways to fill up a 1TB hard drive, some of which haven't even been conceived of yet. I certainly never would have thought 6 years ago that I could fill up a 40GB hard drive. Storing large collections of movies, music, and images, and bloated Microsoft programs simply wasn't done that long ago. Well, we complained about Microsoft programs and OS's being bloated back then too, but few imagined they would get much, much bigger.
Well, that would certainly prove that life exists on Mars. Even if all this little rover did was get ripped into shreds by martian monster, it would be making a great discovery. Any pictures it took during the process, however, would probably not get transmitted before it was destroyed, leaving us clueless why it suddenly stopped working.
:)
It's like a horror movie where you are yelling at the rover not go in there, but the dumb, clueless rover goes in there anyways, oblivious of impending doom.
Having dealt with a Baby Bell as a customer (Pacific Bell/SBC), I can say that they aren't exactly wonderful companies either.
From what I hear though, they are better than the original AT&T monopoly, which was way before my time.
A year ago gaming on LCD monitors was laughed at...
It was laughed at by some perhaps, but a year ago LCD monitors were quite capable of handling games. I got my 19in. 25ms LCD monitor about a year ago, and there were already many people using them for gaming at the time. I have yet to see any problems whatsoever with any games that I have played on that monitor.
No doubt, a 12ms will be even better, but many current monitors are probably good enough for most gamers.
My first reaction to this was pure disgust. Then I thought of all the censorship software that China has employed in the past and the net nanny software installed in American libraries. People have always found a way around it.
I'm sure that some clever individuals will find a way to get around this Orwellian nonsense in no time.
Also, with the millions and millions of people using the Internet in China, that's a lot of data being generated on what people are doing. How would they parse data of this magnitude? Look for the names of "naughty" websites? Doesn't the Great Firewall already block those?
Maybe they are not really monitoring people very much, but just trying to inspire fear and obedience with the "Big Brother is watching" bit.
Information tends to be easily spread, and tends to leak from even the most secure of places. This might slow down the spread of undesirable information, but won't stop it.
The site appears to be slashdotted already.
:(
Bummer
Simpson's Hit & Run for the PC is $10 cheaper than any of the console version.
Even though I have a GameCube, I would have wanted the PC version anyways, as it has much better resolution. The cheaper price was an extra bonus.
I wonder why it's priced cheaper than the console versions.
This is such a bizarre idea that I find it hard to believe it isn't some really late April Fool's Joke.
The whole night-vision goggle thing to catch fools who bring their video cameras doesn't bother me, but installing metal detectors does. That does seem to be a privacy issue to me.
It's already bad enough in the airport where they regard you as a probable criminal. We really don't need to be all treated like criminals when we enter a movie theater.
Just stick to looking out for video cameras with the goggles, OK? Having to empty out my pockets and going through a metal detector every time I go to the movies would make me not want to go. I would probably want to just download the DVD-rips of the movies instead of going through all that.
1. User interface design
The author had a good point with this one. A lot of open-source projects have rather bad UIs. I've had a lot of bad experiences with such UIs. User Interfaces aren't easy: making a good user interface can be hard. We really need more good UI designers, but they aren't exactly a dime a dozen.
Fortunately, the UI tends to be well-separated in most open-source apps, since many open-source developers have that UNIX philosophy of creating separate components that do one thing well.
2. Documentation
Very true. Many times I've been puzzled and wondered how to do something, and since the user interface isn't intuitive, turned to the documentation, only to find it scanty, incomplete or non-existent. There aren't a lot of people who enjoy doing documentation, which is probably the main reason for this.
My most recent experience was with KDevelop 3. It's a nice IDE, but it seems to be oriented around those who are already used to command-line development. Coming from a Visual Studio background, I was baffled, and forced to refer to the documentation. The documentation, while informative, was woefully incomplete, and also had some assumption of familiarity with command-line development. It would be nice if I didn't have to hunt for other documentation to understand an application.
3. Feature-centric development
This is not a problem just with open-source software, but with *all* software. Just look at the opposite of open-source software, Microsoft software. It suffers the same featuritus that open-source software can suffer from. This problem is all about project management, not the nature of open-source.
4. Programming for the self
While true, this falls under the user-interface and documentation areas. It's all about something being unintuitive and undocumented.
5. Religious blindness
This can be true in certain cases, but I don't see this as being a huge problem. Open Source is not the same as UNIX-only. There are plenty of open-source projects for MacOS and Windows. I think the main annoyance that the author expresses comes back to UI. Essentially, she's asking, "Why doesn't Linux have as good a user interface as MacOS X or in some places in Windows?"
If we have the capability to transport enough junk there to make any kind of a mess at all then our tech will be advanced enough that this won't be a problem.
I think Microsoft has been thinking along these lines all along when developing software :)
So while the bad guys still, theoretically, need nearly the same amounts of processing power and time as regular asymmetric crypto to decrypt the message, the good guys save significantly in encryption.
Unless of course it's the bad guys doing the encryption. Then it will take the good guys more time to decrypt. That evil, evil knowledge! :)
I didn't even know it was possible for people to write software for the iPod.
How on earth is that done? It there some sort of development kit for it?
Am I the only one who kept thinking of Windows XP when they were talking about "XP"? Windows "Extreme Programming".
I thought that was a decent review: definitely more informative that most of the book reviews they have here on Slashdot.
Text of the 1st Amendment
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I find it interesting that the 1st Amendment specifically mentions Congress. I never realized that before. I imagine that it was intended that Congress was the only branch that would come up with laws and regulations, with the executive enforcing those laws.
The FCC is not Congress (would it fall under the executive branch?), so shouldn't it be only able to enforce laws that Congress comes up with? Are there laws governing profanity over the airwaves? Is that constitutional?
Would anyone knowledgable in U.S. goverment care to enlighten me?
3 out of 4 people come up with statistics off the top of their heads :)
The N-Gage was a stillborn. Its mother Nokia is in therapy, mourning the loss of the child that wasn't to be.
A few months from now Nokia will feel that maternal instinct return and proceed to get knocked up again. Hopefully the next one won't come into the world with Down's Syndrome or some other genetic defect.