Smalltalkers are gods among programmers. So foolish of me to think of myself before the Smalltalkers.
Hmmm, I knew there was a reason beyond supporting legacy code for taking that two week Smalltalk course. Divinity here I come.
Interesting how we see strong-arm tactics against some aussie warez-puppy, but we don't see them waltzing into Moscow to shut down the mass-piracy of the Russian mafia groups, or the cd-r markets throughout Asia.
It appears that they are doing this because they think the Austrialian Gov will roll over and just give the guy up. The Us gov would have to put a lot more pressue on the Russian of Chineese Govs before they will even start craking down of the piracy in those countries, and I doubt
the US justice dept. has enough clout to even ask for a an extradition from those countries.
Ahh yes, the wonderful world of international affairs.
In Canada, there is a a precidence that the courts use all the time in dealing with extradition (usually to the US) that the crime commited in the country asking for extradition has to have an equivelent in Candaian law. I was under the impression that extradadition worked this way in most of the western world. There are exceptions of course, especially where forigners are targeted from the host country. If I am reading this right, the guy just set up a web server and allowed anyone to access it. I doubt that this would meet the criteria of targeting Americans, meaning Australia is setting a dangerous presidence if they extradite this guy.
How is it that the government spent $160-million, got nothing in return and no one noticed?
DND (Department of National Defence) had a problem a few years back with their accounting system, and ended up paying late charges on almost all invoices because they couldn't process them in time. They have since claimed to have fixed this problem It may be that the guys in DND fixed that problem by not doing enough checking of the accounts before paying the invoice. Want to know how bad the account is over at DND. The other defence scandle this week involved some solders on training who had their daily food allowances reduced retroactivly by 2/3. Several of them had to take out loans to repay the money.
Hey these things happen. I know you are probably kicking yourself for not covering all the eventualities, but you made the best of a bad situation in an imagitive manner. You quite literally were handed a bucket of lemons and decided to make lemonaid. Way to go. Not many people would have the class or the ability to handle a disaster in this manner. I for one salute you for a job well done.
First IBM, and now DC, talk about being between a rock and a hard place. Is there some sort of comptition going on where companies see which of them can be pounded into the thinest pulp in the least ammount of time that I wasn't told about?
SCO has to know that DC won't just keel over (they have lawyers too, better ones then SCO does) and buy licences, or SCO itself. DC is one of the largest corperations on earth. SCO is an insignificant mosqueto in comparison. Why does SCO believe that that it won't be slapped?
Hmm, DC is big enought that they could try for a private prosicution of SCO for fraud charges. That would be intresting to watch.
In case anyone is intrested, there is an enhancement request for Word Perfect like reaveal-codes in Open Office. Issue 3395. Hopefully something comes of this soon.
Excuse me, exactly the same arguments could be made by substituting MS Word for Wordperfect in the comment. It is far too easy to make a big mess using a modern word processor, especially when working on pre-existing documents. The difference is that the reveal codes option in Word perfect lets you figure out what what is really going on, whereas in Word, you are screwed. I have seen people get fed up with the formatting in Word, and were forced to retype the entire document (I then showed them how to cut and past the text into a plain ascii text editor, and then back into a new word doc so they would only have to do the mark-up again)
Anyways, in conclusion, the reaveal-codes function in Wordperfect does not allow you to create a mess, but will let you get out of one quickly.
This was one of the many reasons the movie industry moved to California. Other reasosn were the dry conditions (early film was affected by humidity), the natural light (early lights were not as strong as the sun), and the year round 'mild' weather (no snow). It also helped that land was cheap at the time.
Maybe Microsoft's usability design benefits from the fact that they have a bunch of pointy haired guys around, while the open-source projects exclusively consist of collections of Dilberts?
Nahh, its the absence of Tinas on the project that are the difference. The tech writers and the User Assurance staff bridge the gap between the geeky (software)Engineers and the 'little people' who buy and use the product.
Apple and Microsoft seem to throw out their own guidelines whenever they feel the need to "innovate". There's no hope of improving usability if no one's allowed to experiment.
Apple and Microsoft have large UA (User Assurance) departments that they can show existing and new UI designs to, and get feedback. This step is expensive, and as it involves non-geeks, is not done often in the FOS world. To make an interface user friendly, you need feedback from people who are not familiar with the system. People who are familiar with the system will say things like "Why would users do something like that", "Oh, to do that it would be easier to use the command line," or "RTFM." Whereas user who are not familiar with the system will have much different expectations, like being able to do what they want from the GUI, and not having to jump through a large number of hoops. Btw, this problem is not limited to FOS projects, but to all development that does not go through rigors UA step. In the book Insanely Great, Steven Levy gives a few anecdotes about how Apple got its first UI right. It involved bringing in computer illiterate people on a regular basis to try out the system while it was still in development. Feedback was given to the designers and programmer immediately about what had to be changed or polished up.
Too many FOS projects just try to make the UI "the same as" Apples or MS's interface. This works if the project does the same thing as what is being copied (plus users can move over to the FOS product without much addition training), but breaks down if there are too many differences. This is what has happened here. I don't know if the CUPS team even designed the GUI or not, however it appears the GUI was not well thought out ER is ranting about.
There is an additional problem here in that rigors UA does not currently fit very well into the FOS development model, and until we figure out a way to include it, then FOS projects will suffer from the "its too hard to use" syndrome. As I mentioned before, proper UA is expensive, and I fear that it will be done only for large and well funded projects. Some designers have a good intuition about what works and doesn't, and a crude form of UA could be done by showing the design to family and friends, but this has its own set of problems (but its still better then none at all)
In the case of Ratchet and Clank:Going Commando, they added a ton of new weapons, a few extra game modes (a cool race mode and an even cooler space sim like Wing Commander). The story is NOT just a rehash either. Some of the cutscenes are downright hilarious.
They also added an in-joke about a possible sequal.
[guy from the first game] well see you two in about a year.
[clank]What do you suppose he means by that???
[ratchet] shrugs in puzzlement.
I used the bug to get into the museum, and the ammount of things in there that didn't make it into the game is amazing, allong with some of the reasons why. The mini-spheres were amazing, but they were right, using them does cause motion sickness.
They may have problems as some people are already sending data over the lines in rural areas. I worked for a small power company that serviced mainly rural areas, and just as I was leaving, they were installing meters that transmitted useage data over the power lines so somebody didn't have to drive out to check the meter as often, (and it made the bills more accurate as the meter was only checked once or twice a year, so the charges had to be estimated on a monthly basis.)
This will only be a problem if these meters do not support the sending of other data over the lines (and I suspect that a lot of these meters were not designed to support that). If a power company is currently upgrading their infrastructure, they may include support for this scheme. If the meters are old and will not interfere with data sent over the lines, then the company may install these types of modems. If the power company recently replaced a large number of old meters with these self reporting meters that do not support other data uses for the line, then you are probably sol.
Outside of some academic/reserch application, you don't want your code to be self-modifying, as it is much much more likely to be a bug then what was intended. Self modifying code is one of the reasons why Turing's Stoping Problem is unsolvable. It is very easy for self-modifying code to get into an infinite loop.
That said, if you want to create self-modiying code for some reason (hey, its actually an intresting field), then you should probably do in an interpreted language for several reasons. First being that you don't screw-up the OS, and second, the intrepreter has a fair chance of detecting when the program has entered an infinite loop. (Hmm, its been in that loop for a few million cycles and its state does not appear to be changing). This can be done with stacks or counters. I've seen it in some Smalltalk interpreters.
A third advantage is that the Virtual machine you run this self-modifying code on doesn't even need to exist in reality, so you can do a lot of wierd and wonderful stuff with it, and it will still run.
Protected momory has exited for a long time, and x86 architecture is just about the last major processor architecture that does not have support for user and OS seperated protected memory. I am taking an OS course right now, and I was very surprised at this as it solves so many malicious code based problems like buffer overruns.
I have a friend who worked at annother major Canadian ISP (in house). Anyway, he left shortly after management had the idea that tech support should be a 'cost recovery centre.' No I am not making this up, the tech support workers were asked to hawk other things after the call was resolved and before they hung up. At first, it was upgrades to service (dial up to DSL) This was sort of a joke as basically the only people who hadn't upgraded already could not as DSL was not avaliable in their area. Later the ISP started selling other equipment, like software and hardware (hubs, routers, etc.). This was a further joke as the ISP did not support the items they were selling.
I'd like to see Salon and the NYT removed from the "special pass" list.
Thre is a partner code for NYT that bypasses the registration, however the submission system does not seem to be able to automatically convert the NYT urs to this format. If anyone knows how to do this, please post how to do it here. I know it involves something more complicated then applying &PARTNER=SLASHDOT to the end of the URL.
Its otherwise known as Orbital Artillery, or Ortillery for short. It consists of rods about the size of crowbars constructed of a heavy metal such as Uranium. The version from the 60s had a orbital platform for a launcher (the first satellite seen in 2001 was supposably one of these weapon platforms) Anyways, I think it was called project Thor. The point of it is to hit a target hard with the same ammount of energy as a small nuke, without the radiation. With a large number of satellites, a target could be hit in far less time then by firing a ICBM at it.
The problem with all of these schemes is that it is easier to put junk into orbit then anything meaninful, hence denying it to everyone. If the US goes forward with this scheme, then look for someone else to developweapons that will turn LEO into a junkyard filled with small pieces of debris traveling at high speeds, destroying anything they hit. This includes all the military satellites, as well as all the civilian ones as well, so say goodby to most earth observation satellites, and more or less all communication satellite not in Geosyncronous orbit. In sort, communications will go back to were we were in the 60's.
A few more tips.
After you finish writing something in Perl, clean it up. Yes it is easy to write anything in Perl and get it to run, the trick is to make it look nice afterward.
If some code's function is not immediatly obvious, comment it. Perl is one of the few languages where a comment per line code can be appropriate (especially the regexes). The rest of the code should be self documenting. If it isn't, clean it up.
I have seen a lot of programming languages that try to promote tmenselves by comparing how nice a piece of there code is so some very ugly examples of Perl code. There examples are usually quite funny as there is usually a better way of writting the Perl code to do the same thing in much less space and in a much more elagent manner then the brand X language could even attempt. I have ever herd comments (here on Slashdot) about how Perl coders had to be retrained to use other languages. Well I am one of those tained perl codes that have moved on to other languages, and I am shocked that the rest of the programming community has not caught up to were Perl is. Things like arrays that know how long they are, so that you can use a foreach command go go through every element. Java is just getting this now (1.5) even though they have had dynamic arrays since the beginning. We all know how useful hash tables are. Why is it that no other 'modern' programming language makes them as easy to use as Perl?
I don't know what the next generation of programming languages will look like, however it is a good bet that they will be strongly influenced by Perl.
There is a one person version of Catan avaliable. You will have to google for it. Be warned that it is German (not a major problem), for DOS (alt enter to get full screen DOS window), and the AI seems to cheat, other then that its fun.
It seems to me in the US the priorities between corporate life and "lifestyle" or personal development are all out of whack
You are not alone in observing this. Here in Canada, we have a saying about this;
In Canada, people work to live, in the US, people live to work.
Slashdot Mirror
Smalltalkers are gods among programmers. So foolish of me to think of myself before the Smalltalkers.
Hmmm, I knew there was a reason beyond supporting legacy code for taking that two week Smalltalk course. Divinity here I come.
It appears that they are doing this because they think the Austrialian Gov will roll over and just give the guy up. The Us gov would have to put a lot more pressue on the Russian of Chineese Govs before they will even start craking down of the piracy in those countries, and I doubt the US justice dept. has enough clout to even ask for a an extradition from those countries.
Ahh yes, the wonderful world of international affairs.
In Canada, there is a a precidence that the courts use all the time in dealing with extradition (usually to the US) that the crime commited in the country asking for extradition has to have an equivelent in Candaian law. I was under the impression that extradadition worked this way in most of the western world. There are exceptions of course, especially where forigners are targeted from the host country. If I am reading this right, the guy just set up a web server and allowed anyone to access it. I doubt that this would meet the criteria of targeting Americans, meaning Australia is setting a dangerous presidence if they extradite this guy.
I saw people doing this with disposable lighters.
The irony lost on them.
DND (Department of National Defence) had a problem a few years back with their accounting system, and ended up paying late charges on almost all invoices because they couldn't process them in time. They have since claimed to have fixed this problem It may be that the guys in DND fixed that problem by not doing enough checking of the accounts before paying the invoice.
Want to know how bad the account is over at DND. The other defence scandle this week involved some solders on training who had their daily food allowances reduced retroactivly by 2/3. Several of them had to take out loans to repay the money.
Hey these things happen. I know you are probably kicking yourself for not covering all the eventualities, but you made the best of a bad situation in an imagitive manner. You quite literally were handed a bucket of lemons and decided to make lemonaid. Way to go. Not many people would have the class or the ability to handle a disaster in this manner. I for one salute you for a job well done.
SCO has to know that DC won't just keel over (they have lawyers too, better ones then SCO does) and buy licences, or SCO itself. DC is one of the largest corperations on earth. SCO is an insignificant mosqueto in comparison. Why does SCO believe that that it won't be slapped?
Hmm, DC is big enought that they could try for a private prosicution of SCO for fraud charges. That would be intresting to watch.
In case anyone is intrested, there is an enhancement request for Word Perfect like reaveal-codes in Open Office. Issue 3395. Hopefully something comes of this soon.
Anyways, in conclusion, the reaveal-codes function in Wordperfect does not allow you to create a mess, but will let you get out of one quickly.
And this differs from Clear Channel's version how?
This was one of the many reasons the movie industry moved to California. Other reasosn were the dry conditions (early film was affected by humidity), the natural light (early lights were not as strong as the sun), and the year round 'mild' weather (no snow). It also helped that land was cheap at the time.
Nahh, its the absence of Tinas on the project that are the difference. The tech writers and the User Assurance staff bridge the gap between the geeky (software)Engineers and the 'little people' who buy and use the product.
Apple and Microsoft have large UA (User Assurance) departments that they can show existing and new UI designs to, and get feedback. This step is expensive, and as it involves non-geeks, is not done often in the FOS world. To make an interface user friendly, you need feedback from people who are not familiar with the system. People who are familiar with the system will say things like "Why would users do something like that", "Oh, to do that it would be easier to use the command line," or "RTFM." Whereas user who are not familiar with the system will have much different expectations, like being able to do what they want from the GUI, and not having to jump through a large number of hoops. Btw, this problem is not limited to FOS projects, but to all development that does not go through rigors UA step. In the book Insanely Great, Steven Levy gives a few anecdotes about how Apple got its first UI right. It involved bringing in computer illiterate people on a regular basis to try out the system while it was still in development. Feedback was given to the designers and programmer immediately about what had to be changed or polished up.
Too many FOS projects just try to make the UI "the same as" Apples or MS's interface. This works if the project does the same thing as what is being copied (plus users can move over to the FOS product without much addition training), but breaks down if there are too many differences. This is what has happened here. I don't know if the CUPS team even designed the GUI or not, however it appears the GUI was not well thought out ER is ranting about.
There is an additional problem here in that rigors UA does not currently fit very well into the FOS development model, and until we figure out a way to include it, then FOS projects will suffer from the "its too hard to use" syndrome. As I mentioned before, proper UA is expensive, and I fear that it will be done only for large and well funded projects. Some designers have a good intuition about what works and doesn't, and a crude form of UA could be done by showing the design to family and friends, but this has its own set of problems (but its still better then none at all)
His identity and modivations are revealed by the end of the first season. Just watch it, and all will be revealed.
Um, you are all aware that Britain doesn't have free speech?
Isn't there an exception for Speakers Corner in Hyde Park?
They also added an in-joke about a possible sequal.
[guy from the first game] well see you two in about a year.
[clank]What do you suppose he means by that???
[ratchet] shrugs in puzzlement.
I used the bug to get into the museum, and the ammount of things in there that didn't make it into the game is amazing, allong with some of the reasons why. The mini-spheres were amazing, but they were right, using them does cause motion sickness.
This will only be a problem if these meters do not support the sending of other data over the lines (and I suspect that a lot of these meters were not designed to support that). If a power company is currently upgrading their infrastructure, they may include support for this scheme. If the meters are old and will not interfere with data sent over the lines, then the company may install these types of modems. If the power company recently replaced a large number of old meters with these self reporting meters that do not support other data uses for the line, then you are probably sol.
That said, if you want to create self-modiying code for some reason (hey, its actually an intresting field), then you should probably do in an interpreted language for several reasons. First being that you don't screw-up the OS, and second, the intrepreter has a fair chance of detecting when the program has entered an infinite loop. (Hmm, its been in that loop for a few million cycles and its state does not appear to be changing). This can be done with stacks or counters. I've seen it in some Smalltalk interpreters.
A third advantage is that the Virtual machine you run this self-modifying code on doesn't even need to exist in reality, so you can do a lot of wierd and wonderful stuff with it, and it will still run.
Protected momory has exited for a long time, and x86 architecture is just about the last major processor architecture that does not have support for user and OS seperated protected memory. I am taking an OS course right now, and I was very surprised at this as it solves so many malicious code based problems like buffer overruns.
I have a friend who worked at annother major Canadian ISP (in house). Anyway, he left shortly after management had the idea that tech support should be a 'cost recovery centre.' No I am not making this up, the tech support workers were asked to hawk other things after the call was resolved and before they hung up. At first, it was upgrades to service (dial up to DSL) This was sort of a joke as basically the only people who hadn't upgraded already could not as DSL was not avaliable in their area. Later the ISP started selling other equipment, like software and hardware (hubs, routers, etc.). This was a further joke as the ISP did not support the items they were selling.
I'd like to see Salon and the NYT removed from the "special pass" list.
Thre is a partner code for NYT that bypasses the registration, however the submission system does not seem to be able to automatically convert the NYT urs to this format. If anyone knows how to do this, please post how to do it here. I know it involves something more complicated then applying &PARTNER=SLASHDOT to the end of the URL.
Save Earth2 for Computerized warfare.
The problem with all of these schemes is that it is easier to put junk into orbit then anything meaninful, hence denying it to everyone. If the US goes forward with this scheme, then look for someone else to developweapons that will turn LEO into a junkyard filled with small pieces of debris traveling at high speeds, destroying anything they hit. This includes all the military satellites, as well as all the civilian ones as well, so say goodby to most earth observation satellites, and more or less all communication satellite not in Geosyncronous orbit. In sort, communications will go back to were we were in the 60's.
After you finish writing something in Perl, clean it up. Yes it is easy to write anything in Perl and get it to run, the trick is to make it look nice afterward.
If some code's function is not immediatly obvious, comment it. Perl is one of the few languages where a comment per line code can be appropriate (especially the regexes). The rest of the code should be self documenting. If it isn't, clean it up.
I have seen a lot of programming languages that try to promote tmenselves by comparing how nice a piece of there code is so some very ugly examples of Perl code. There examples are usually quite funny as there is usually a better way of writting the Perl code to do the same thing in much less space and in a much more elagent manner then the brand X language could even attempt. I have ever herd comments (here on Slashdot) about how Perl coders had to be retrained to use other languages. Well I am one of those tained perl codes that have moved on to other languages, and I am shocked that the rest of the programming community has not caught up to were Perl is. Things like arrays that know how long they are, so that you can use a foreach command go go through every element. Java is just getting this now (1.5) even though they have had dynamic arrays since the beginning. We all know how useful hash tables are. Why is it that no other 'modern' programming language makes them as easy to use as Perl?
I don't know what the next generation of programming languages will look like, however it is a good bet that they will be strongly influenced by Perl.
There is a one person version of Catan avaliable. You will have to google for it. Be warned that it is German (not a major problem), for DOS (alt enter to get full screen DOS window), and the AI seems to cheat, other then that its fun.
You are not alone in observing this. Here in Canada, we have a saying about this;