You, sir, are either a troll or utterly uninformed.
Let's see...
- We have 22 million CC customers.
- The police presented the CC companies with a warrant saying that the CC companies should check their databases for people who have bought from a specific site, since, as TFA explicitly stated the police isn't allowed to access the databases.
- The CC companies scanned their databases and returned to the police those accounts that were used to buy from that specific site.
Come on. I'm somewhat protective when it comes to my data, but there's no way that could have been conducted better. The fact that indeed databases containing 22 million perople were checked doesn't change the fact that the police didn't look at 22 million records of innocent people.
Seriosly, how do you propose they should've done this, apart from "the police should not be allowed any access to customer databases under any circumstance"?
[...] try { while (true) { audience << "Developers! "; } } catch (...) { throw (new Chair()); } [...]
By the way,/. really needs <pre> support in user comments. <ecode> just doesn't cut it. (Alternatively, make the latter use the former or come up with another way to preserve indentation.)
Electrical resistance causes heat. Heat resistance causes electricity. Thus, if we put a whole lot of these caps right above, say, a Thunderbird, we'd just need some power to get the CPU to working temperature. Once the TB is hot most of the power needed by the system can be generated by heat resistance.
Tune in next time on How Stuff Doesn't Work when I explain how you can accelerate a car to escape velocity using nothing but a stirling engine, a lighter, some batteries and a huge stack of thermoelectric heat pumps.
I'm waiting for Fedora Gentoo. You'll download an RPM (RedHat Portage, Managed) build file that specifies which exact versions of GCC and libraries to use in order to get the exact same version of the program that RedHat has on its servers. In the end your results are hashed and the hash is compared with the corresponding ones on the RedHat servers. That way you get all the advantages of Gentoo (compiling the packages yourself) and RPM (a package is binary-identical on all platforms)!
Close, but not quite. software engineering is "I want it to do blassie. Make it do blassie by yesterday." Where 'blassie' is a loose concept and the developer has to determine and define the underlying logic.
You forgot requirements like "has to work like amazon.com even though it's a GUI app and I don't want to pay royalties for the patented stuff you have to implement".
Don't worry, we'll still all have work rewriting everything in the language flavor of the month. This year everyone is getting paid to rewrite all their code in Ruby I hear.
Heh. *snicker*
This is grossly OT, but your comment just reminded me of it...
Japan-based Enterbrain, Inc. produces a series of build-your-own-SNES-style-RPG IDE/VM-bundles, the RPG Maker series. The latest incarnation, the RPG Maker XP, supports Ruby Scripting. In fact, the whole thing is built around RGSS, the Ruby Game Scripting System, essentially a library for easy Ruby-based game creation. Unfortunately, RGSS is a) Win-only, b) proprietary and c) dog slow. We're talking "An 800 MHz computer can't let RGSS do nothing at 50 fps".
Someone I know is working on OpenRGSS, which is - surprise - a portable open source implementation of RGSS. Of course there's some reverse engineering involved and the team managed to discover what makes RGSS so dog slow: It's written entirely in Ruby. No, wait, that doesn't quite capture it. The DLLs consist mostly of uncompiled Ruby code. The whole stuff is extracted from the libraries and interpreted at runtime. The complete lack of support for hardware accelerated graphics is just another drop in the ocean there...
Actually, RGSS is mostly a bunch of sloppily written Ruby code, some encrypted code, some glue and a lot of obfuscation (for example Enterbrain took great care to keep people from taking a peek at the memory at runtime in order to get around the encryption).
Seriously, one of the most screwed up software designs I've seen so far.
As for the "reasonable price" thing: You still have to figure in the development, manufacturing and maintenance costs of the device as well as the manufacturing and transport cost of the fabric(s) used. Especially when you get to the custom clothing part; small runs always are much more expensive than large ones because it's less efficient to reprogram the machine(s) for every single piece than to just let them run for a couple hundred thousand ones.
I think that if you'd completely isolate yourself you'd probably go to mass-produced clothing with a high cotton content made in partially automated manufactures. That way you don't have the short-term time and money costs associated with the development and deployment of tailoring robots. And, honestly, nobody ever thinks of the long term.
Yeah, that tech can be abused, but what 1984 and others didn't think about is what happens when that tech becomes so cheap that I can afford it on my own car/person?
Then it's either useless from a provacy perspective or outlawed or simply not available.
It depends. If you have an application where a part of the window rarely contains information setting it to ~80% opacity can allow you to track stuff happening in a window in the background while still being able to completely ignore it if you want to (given that the second window fits into the "dead" region).
Of course pseudo-transparent windows like the traditional "transparent" terminals found with KDE and Gnome are pretty pointless.
Hmm, "I think Apple has been developing a(n) X version of OS X just in case for years" sounds a bit like "X will be the year of desktop Linux", just with a bit more facts behind it. It could also be just as fun to use with varying values of X...
When browing the web sites of some open source programs (Azureus, etc.), I wondered why most projects only offer binaries for Windows and Mac OSX.
Actually, autopackage tries to counter exactly that, however sometimes it's not just where to install the stuff but also which version of a library to link it against. I solved that problem by going to a source-based distribution, but that might not be everyone's cup of tea.
Some people want to treat a computer as a TOOL that is used to learn other NON-COMPUTER related things.
Some people buy a tool and learn just enough about it to be able to do their work with it. Some people buy a tool, carefully read the instruction manual and play with the thing for a while so they get a feel for what it can and can't do. The latter ones are more likely to buy pro tools that offer more functionality but operate differently from standard stuff - unsurprisingly.
There's a difference between tool users and tool users.
By the way, some people who want to convert maintain that the time lost learning the ropes of a new OS is less than the time lost working around Windows' quirks. Depending on the user and his ideaos of what an OS should do that might or might not be the case.
I would not be surprised if there are a few registry hacks that can take care of both problems.
That's the exact issue the grandparent was talking about. Many things that would've been vastly useful as a user-configurable setting (such as control over which of those goddamn balloon popups Windows may show) are buried somewhere in a corner of the registry in an undocumented key that the user has to add himself. Twaking the UI behavior in relatively minor ways might still end with the user modifying opaque values in a database that could easily render the system unbootable if damaged/modified in inappropriate way.
Let's face it, Windows' UI is only good if you don't want to do anything Microsoft didn't predict you'd do. If, for example, you want your swap file on a separate partition Windows will keep pestering you with "Drive S: is low on space!!1" popups every two minutes until you deploy, yes, an undocumented registry key that turns off drive space notification entirely.
Configuration-wise, Windows is light years behind Linux. Linux' configuration files might not be as "integrated" as the registry, but they're usually well-documented and organized in a rather transparent fashion.
If you want to do anything the GUI can't do Windows is a usability nightmare. That's one of the things that drove me away - being a Windows power user means being exposed to the aggravating internals for prolonged time which usually leads to swearing.
It really depends on how ingrained you are in your using habits. I went from the C64 to DOS to every single Windows between 3.11 and XP (except for Me, thankfully). Then I went to Linux and had to relearn pretty much everything, making my first steps really hard.
About a year I got an iBook and had to learn OS X. It was a snap. Most of everything was very intuitive and even the parts that weren't usually made sense, so I could memorize them quickly. However, I was used to anaylzing an OS, finding out how it's supposed to be operated and adapting to that.
OTOH, many people who never used anything before Windows XP only know that and can only use their knowledge of XP to navigate other OSes. Of course they have a hard time doing things when they don't know how to abstract the OS's features and expect things to work like they do in XP. Getting rid of the old habits and learning how to do things differnetly can be quite hard.
That's why I advocate getting people in contact with as many different OSes as possible while they're young. They don't even need to be fluent in all of them, they just need to learn how to do the more common tasks so they're able to treat such problems from a more abstract angle later on.
True. I'd put 2006 as the best year for desktop Linux so far, with a growing number of people in a non-techie community I'm in looking into it (or even outright abandoning Windows).
I'd describe now as a pretty exciting time. Linux adoption and awareness are growing and stuff like KDE 4 and widespread D-Bus adoption is to be expected in the near future. I won't follow the old mistake of assuming that the next year will be The Year Of Desktop Linux, but I expect 2007 to continue the good trend, even though Vista will probably drain away some XP-weary users. Good stuff is to be expected.
Normal user using Windows: "Why did it do that? It didn't do that before. I don't know how to turn it off."
Geek taking over the machine: "Don't worry, that's easily fixed. I just need to change-- er, first I need to find out where Microsoft has hidden that setting. Okay, it's not there... there neither... or there... Okay, I'll just google it.... Ah, right, I have to modify the Registry. Sometimes I wonder what exactly the folks at Microsoft were on when they developed this thing."
It's not just novices who are aggravated by developers who decide that information hiding is not only for OOP.
Well, the German eBay Express does German transactions quite well. I don't know if there are separate eBays for.ca and.us, though.
I recently bought something off eBay Express for two and a half reasons:
1.) I was looking for decent sound-reducing earphones and they had the ones I was looking for.
2.) The seller had a good reputstion (not conspicously perfect but not bad either) and the item was sold quite a bit below the regular price.
2.5.) eBay is vurrently running a promotion campaign, "buy something off eBay Express and you might just win 5k in Paypal money". Since they already have my data and I liked the offer anyway I might as well participate...
However, I agree with the (apparently common) notion that eBay Express is basically just an inferior version of the normal eBay, sans regular auctions.
Actually, I rather liked the time when PC games came in a cardboard box that contained a CD in a jewel case, a detailed manual and nice things like maps of the game world. There's more to a quality game than just the game itself. Nowadays it's almost considered overkill when the manual goes beyond installation and basic control schemes...
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are either a troll or utterly uninformed.
Let's see...
- We have 22 million CC customers.
- The police presented the CC companies with a warrant saying that the CC companies should check their databases for people who have bought from a specific site, since, as TFA explicitly stated the police isn't allowed to access the databases.
- The CC companies scanned their databases and returned to the police those accounts that were used to buy from that specific site.
Come on. I'm somewhat protective when it comes to my data, but there's no way that could have been conducted better. The fact that indeed databases containing 22 million perople were checked doesn't change the fact that the police didn't look at 22 million records of innocent people.
Seriosly, how do you propose they should've done this, apart from "the police should not be allowed any access to customer databases under any circumstance"?
Well, apparently Microsoft doesn't know how it works, either...
If you're writing an app for Windows, what is the alternative to using the Windows API?
Use wxWidgets, QT, GTK or a different GUI toolkit.
How could Microsoft develop Windows applications without using the Windows API?
The same way, but they buy it and call it "Visual name.NET 2007 Professional Edition".
Somehow I think "It's the gay bukkake of software engineering!" is not a slogan that will win over many folks for Open Source development...
By the way,
Electrical resistance causes heat. Heat resistance causes electricity. Thus, if we put a whole lot of these caps right above, say, a Thunderbird, we'd just need some power to get the CPU to working temperature. Once the TB is hot most of the power needed by the system can be generated by heat resistance.
Tune in next time on How Stuff Doesn't Work when I explain how you can accelerate a car to escape velocity using nothing but a stirling engine, a lighter, some batteries and a huge stack of thermoelectric heat pumps.
I'm waiting for Fedora Gentoo. You'll download an RPM (RedHat Portage, Managed) build file that specifies which exact versions of GCC and libraries to use in order to get the exact same version of the program that RedHat has on its servers. In the end your results are hashed and the hash is compared with the corresponding ones on the RedHat servers. That way you get all the advantages of Gentoo (compiling the packages yourself) and RPM (a package is binary-identical on all platforms)!
Close, but not quite. software engineering is "I want it to do blassie. Make it do blassie by yesterday." Where 'blassie' is a loose concept and the developer has to determine and define the underlying logic.
You forgot requirements like "has to work like amazon.com even though it's a GUI app and I don't want to pay royalties for the patented stuff you have to implement".
Don't worry, we'll still all have work rewriting everything in the language flavor of the month. This year everyone is getting paid to rewrite all their code in Ruby I hear.
Heh. *snicker*
This is grossly OT, but your comment just reminded me of it...
Japan-based Enterbrain, Inc. produces a series of build-your-own-SNES-style-RPG IDE/VM-bundles, the RPG Maker series. The latest incarnation, the RPG Maker XP, supports Ruby Scripting. In fact, the whole thing is built around RGSS, the Ruby Game Scripting System, essentially a library for easy Ruby-based game creation. Unfortunately, RGSS is a) Win-only, b) proprietary and c) dog slow. We're talking "An 800 MHz computer can't let RGSS do nothing at 50 fps".
Someone I know is working on OpenRGSS, which is - surprise - a portable open source implementation of RGSS. Of course there's some reverse engineering involved and the team managed to discover what makes RGSS so dog slow: It's written entirely in Ruby. No, wait, that doesn't quite capture it. The DLLs consist mostly of uncompiled Ruby code. The whole stuff is extracted from the libraries and interpreted at runtime. The complete lack of support for hardware accelerated graphics is just another drop in the ocean there...
Actually, RGSS is mostly a bunch of sloppily written Ruby code, some encrypted code, some glue and a lot of obfuscation (for example Enterbrain took great care to keep people from taking a peek at the memory at runtime in order to get around the encryption).
Seriously, one of the most screwed up software designs I've seen so far.
As for the "reasonable price" thing: You still have to figure in the development, manufacturing and maintenance costs of the device as well as the manufacturing and transport cost of the fabric(s) used. Especially when you get to the custom clothing part; small runs always are much more expensive than large ones because it's less efficient to reprogram the machine(s) for every single piece than to just let them run for a couple hundred thousand ones.
I think that if you'd completely isolate yourself you'd probably go to mass-produced clothing with a high cotton content made in partially automated manufactures. That way you don't have the short-term time and money costs associated with the development and deployment of tailoring robots. And, honestly, nobody ever thinks of the long term.
Yeah, that tech can be abused, but what 1984 and others didn't think about is what happens when that tech becomes so cheap that I can afford it on my own car/person?
Then it's either useless from a provacy perspective or outlawed or simply not available.
(before (stop (you (this_nonsense))) (kill (I (someone))))!
It depends. If you have an application where a part of the window rarely contains information setting it to ~80% opacity can allow you to track stuff happening in a window in the background while still being able to completely ignore it if you want to (given that the second window fits into the "dead" region).
Of course pseudo-transparent windows like the traditional "transparent" terminals found with KDE and Gnome are pretty pointless.
And maybe one day you will beat it.
That's what I meant with "a bit more facts". For X = x86 the statement is true, but I've also seen it for other values of X> where it's less probable.
Hmm, "I think Apple has been developing a(n) X version of OS X just in case for years" sounds a bit like "X will be the year of desktop Linux", just with a bit more facts behind it. It could also be just as fun to use with varying values of X...
When browing the web sites of some open source programs (Azureus, etc.), I wondered why most projects only offer binaries for Windows and Mac OSX.
Actually, autopackage tries to counter exactly that, however sometimes it's not just where to install the stuff but also which version of a library to link it against. I solved that problem by going to a source-based distribution, but that might not be everyone's cup of tea.
Some people want to treat a computer as a TOOL that is used to learn other NON-COMPUTER related things.
Some people buy a tool and learn just enough about it to be able to do their work with it. Some people buy a tool, carefully read the instruction manual and play with the thing for a while so they get a feel for what it can and can't do. The latter ones are more likely to buy pro tools that offer more functionality but operate differently from standard stuff - unsurprisingly.
There's a difference between tool users and tool users.
By the way, some people who want to convert maintain that the time lost learning the ropes of a new OS is less than the time lost working around Windows' quirks. Depending on the user and his ideaos of what an OS should do that might or might not be the case.
I would not be surprised if there are a few registry hacks that can take care of both problems.
That's the exact issue the grandparent was talking about. Many things that would've been vastly useful as a user-configurable setting (such as control over which of those goddamn balloon popups Windows may show) are buried somewhere in a corner of the registry in an undocumented key that the user has to add himself. Twaking the UI behavior in relatively minor ways might still end with the user modifying opaque values in a database that could easily render the system unbootable if damaged/modified in inappropriate way.
Let's face it, Windows' UI is only good if you don't want to do anything Microsoft didn't predict you'd do. If, for example, you want your swap file on a separate partition Windows will keep pestering you with "Drive S: is low on space!!1" popups every two minutes until you deploy, yes, an undocumented registry key that turns off drive space notification entirely.
Configuration-wise, Windows is light years behind Linux. Linux' configuration files might not be as "integrated" as the registry, but they're usually well-documented and organized in a rather transparent fashion.
If you want to do anything the GUI can't do Windows is a usability nightmare. That's one of the things that drove me away - being a Windows power user means being exposed to the aggravating internals for prolonged time which usually leads to swearing.
It really depends on how ingrained you are in your using habits. I went from the C64 to DOS to every single Windows between 3.11 and XP (except for Me, thankfully). Then I went to Linux and had to relearn pretty much everything, making my first steps really hard.
About a year I got an iBook and had to learn OS X. It was a snap. Most of everything was very intuitive and even the parts that weren't usually made sense, so I could memorize them quickly. However, I was used to anaylzing an OS, finding out how it's supposed to be operated and adapting to that.
OTOH, many people who never used anything before Windows XP only know that and can only use their knowledge of XP to navigate other OSes. Of course they have a hard time doing things when they don't know how to abstract the OS's features and expect things to work like they do in XP. Getting rid of the old habits and learning how to do things differnetly can be quite hard.
That's why I advocate getting people in contact with as many different OSes as possible while they're young. They don't even need to be fluent in all of them, they just need to learn how to do the more common tasks so they're able to treat such problems from a more abstract angle later on.
True. I'd put 2006 as the best year for desktop Linux so far, with a growing number of people in a non-techie community I'm in looking into it (or even outright abandoning Windows).
I'd describe now as a pretty exciting time. Linux adoption and awareness are growing and stuff like KDE 4 and widespread D-Bus adoption is to be expected in the near future. I won't follow the old mistake of assuming that the next year will be The Year Of Desktop Linux, but I expect 2007 to continue the good trend, even though Vista will probably drain away some XP-weary users. Good stuff is to be expected.
...we had 90cm and we liked it that way!
SIXAXIS rolls off the tounge a lot better than SIXDEGREESOFFREEDOM
But the latter might be more appealing to people whom like to watch FOX News etc. "The Wii gives you motion tracking, but does it give you FREEDOM?"
Then again, Americans might object to getting their freedom from Japan...
Normal user using Windows: "Why did it do that? It didn't do that before. I don't know how to turn it off."
... Ah, right, I have to modify the Registry. Sometimes I wonder what exactly the folks at Microsoft were on when they developed this thing."
Geek taking over the machine: "Don't worry, that's easily fixed. I just need to change-- er, first I need to find out where Microsoft has hidden that setting. Okay, it's not there... there neither... or there... Okay, I'll just google it.
It's not just novices who are aggravated by developers who decide that information hiding is not only for OOP.
Well, the German eBay Express does German transactions quite well. I don't know if there are separate eBays for .ca and .us, though.
I recently bought something off eBay Express for two and a half reasons:
1.) I was looking for decent sound-reducing earphones and they had the ones I was looking for.
2.) The seller had a good reputstion (not conspicously perfect but not bad either) and the item was sold quite a bit below the regular price.
2.5.) eBay is vurrently running a promotion campaign, "buy something off eBay Express and you might just win 5k in Paypal money". Since they already have my data and I liked the offer anyway I might as well participate...
However, I agree with the (apparently common) notion that eBay Express is basically just an inferior version of the normal eBay, sans regular auctions.
Vista: Whoa! ... Whoa! ... Whoa!
So Vista is based on Keanu Reeves?
Actually, I rather liked the time when PC games came in a cardboard box that contained a CD in a jewel case, a detailed manual and nice things like maps of the game world. There's more to a quality game than just the game itself. Nowadays it's almost considered overkill when the manual goes beyond installation and basic control schemes...