You need to look at it from the game publishers' point of view.
They pay thousands for developer licenses and SDK's. To them, homebrew just flies in the face of that. Some kid can write a really fun game in a couple of days and never has to bother with any red tape.
1) You need to go and find a consulting firm who, for a fee, is willing to be avaialble when you're not. You probably want somebody who is not too big, and local too, so they'll be flexible. If you can work it right, you might even be able to get it where you just have to call them 30+ days in advance and schedule them for when you'll be out of range.
2) Simplify your operations. Anything that you can't explain in 5 minutes to a reasonably intelligent person is too complex. This will have two benefits. 1- simpler systems will tend not to break as often, as you can see the problems on cursory examination. 2- You can trust somebody who maybe isn't a sysadmin/uebercoder like you, but can handle a bash prompt.
I've adopted #2 now, but in the past had #1. #2 is _by far_ the better long term solution.
Its a truly challenging game, and it can be played online for fun. A mouse is all thats needed, and the ability to pay close attention to what people do.:)
I like www.pokerroom.com, as its java based and the action in the "play money" area is actually pretty good. Don't get sucked in to putting your cash online though. Too many bots and cheaters.;)
"...Intellectual property is the incentive system for the products of the future."
Yes, and, Mr. Gates, the operating system is not a product of the future. So let it go, you made your money, now its time for the public to benefit. Get a new idea if you want to exploit the IP system.
First let me say that sites like these should not be legally responsible for their users' indiscretions. As someone else said, its like a bartender telling you where to find prostitutes and drug dealers.
But this does not make me sad, not one bit. If one person can explain to me how bittorent fits in with the fair use provisions of most copyright laws (such as those in the US and Europe), then I'll shut up.
Until then, you people need to get real and start *SUPPORTING* copyright holders who choose to allow distribution by such media.
Free software uses systems like bittorent. Free media is far less common, but maybe it shouldn't be. I know for me, I decided to follow the policy of strict adherence to copyright law, in support of Free software. I threw away pirated copies of software, and replaced them with Free alternatives.
At my place of business, when we find a piece of Free software we don't understand, we pay the author to teach us, and enhance it.
This model just doesn't work for every piece of entertainment. I mean, you can pay the guys from Monty Python's Flying Circus to come by and ply their trade.. but a local version of Enterprise or The Simpsons isn't exactly a good idea.
The bottom line is this. Bittorrent is mass distribution, and far beyond fair use. If you can't buy it locally, that doesn't entitle you to a free copy. For a long time I couldn't get any sort of broadband at my house except ISDN. I didn't go out and pirate an ISDN line. I just pissed and moaned until somebody brought me broadband.
How are we supposed to "mark your words" when you post as an AC? Also, you seem to think that downloading music is illegal everywhere, when it's not. Not everyone lives in the US of BushCo. Also, the servers holding the torrent files are not breaking any laws.
Legal or not, you know what you're doing is wrong. You know that you wouldn't want it done to your works. I'm not saying you wouldn't choose to give away your copyrighted material should you create some. I'm saying you would want to be allowed to CHOOSE to do so.
I believe in FAIR use. Fair use means sharing with your friends, not a million people who know your IP address. Fair use ends at mass distribution.
Remember, its a copyRIGHT. Linux developers excersize their rights by giving away their work. Corporate entities use their rights to protect their code. Have some respect for your fellow human beings' rights, or move to China.
You PgSQL nazis are just being ignorant. Do you think because MyISAM isn't transactional that the whole database isn't?
MySQL's InnoDB offers the same level of data integrity as PgSQL does, and about the same performance. Where it wins is in the flexibility to choose table-by-table whether you want InnoDB, MyISAM, or the new NDBCLUSTER. There's also the universal availability and familiarity when it comes to the mysql protocol and libraries.
As far as performance.. you might want to look at numbers on well designed threading systems such as Solaris or Linux 2.6. Most of PostgreSQL's gains are erased by MySQL 4.1's excellent code when it is combined with those OS's proper threading.
The only place I see PgSQL winning the performance war is the query optimizer.
PgSQL will be doomed to a BSDesque life. Touted by too many people with no social skills, nobody will ever be able to see how good it is, because they just get shouted down when asking questions.
This is old news. We all heard about this months and months ago. The CIA director already quit, and I have to think there's a good chance the president will lose his over this and other bad intelligence handling. History suggests that anyway.
I have to think this was just posted to make a splash. "Bush Lied". Nice.
Anyway, blame MTV and Fonzi for this trend. When you have kids in the US who think its cool to be stupid, and totally lame to have a brain, this is what happens.
High test scores, good grades, and a strong work ethic are COOL things in young indian society. Kind if like they were in the 50's and 60's here in the U.S.
Just think about it for a second... over here we're geeks that nobody understands or cares about. Over there, they're just working stiffs who make decent money.:-/
Teach your kids that its cool and fun to be smart. Unfortunately, only the geeks will be able to do that. All the non-geeks are teaching their kids that MTV is the source of all coolness.
And yo dawg, that textbook is whack. Dump tha shizzle in the trash and break off some abercrombie and fitch yo!
>:|
The MaVerick DBMS compiles BASIC into JBC
on
The Future of Java?
·
· Score: 1
The MaVerick DBMS is a system to replace Multi-Value DBMS's such as
This one. These systems used to be what SQL based systems are today. In fact, until just a couple of years ago, Dell ran their entire operations on one.
MaVerickDBMS compiles the legacy BASIC code from these systems into Java Byte Code. This code is not the traditional "10 PRINT HELLO" BASIC. Nor is it like VisualBasic. It is a very simple, and powerful data-oriented language.
Its not just "windows" that is susceptible to viruses. It is the API that is too trusting, and the file permissions. When you run wine, you generally own all of the files (default is ~/.wine/fake_windows). So you're going to be able to do anything you could on a windows box.
Its not all that surprising that a virus would run without problems. Many of them do exploit actual bugs in the Windows code, but most of them just make regular old crappy Win32 API calls.
But most great ideas seem to be lacking in practical application. This one, however, does have some interesting strategies.
My issues:
1) Family. I can't convince my parents, and my wife's parents to pick up and move. I don't want to seperate my children from their grandparents.:P 2) Professional Saturation. Lets just face it, Ted Knight was right when he said "The world needs ditch diggers too." There will be a ton of other smart guys out there. My profession (consulting) is all about being smart for other people.
If you can solve these issues(don't see how you can with #1)... I'm there.
Checking in a little late on this story, but I didn't see anybody mention PointServers.
Instead of convergance, these guys are talking about using small, PCMCIA card size devices called "Point Servers" with gigabit UltraWideBand technology connecting to Various "clients" that would provide things like display, input, etc.
Looks pretty cool, and best of all, they're keeping the whole thing totally Open Source. I think they have a prototype using an ipaq sans screen, and a hacked up 100Mbit UWB setup.
Yes, I'm yelling. Godamn them for doing this. I mean, we already have to watch this crappy product, and now they're going to put blatant ads for products on our screens. Its MY SCREEN godamnit, SCREW THEM if they put THEIR ADS on MY SCREEN. What gives them the right? I CONTROL MY SCRE.... oh.. wait.. I do.
If you don't like what is showing, don't watch it. Get real people! This matters less than hot grits down Monica Lewinsky's thong.
However, don't make the switch to DH just yet -- IIRC, the ciphertext is effectively doubled in length (over RSA). So you can either make a bigger RSA, or you can make a bigger message every time you encrypt -- either way, you email just got longer:)
The public key algorithm in PGP(Not sure about S/MIME or other protocols, but it would be most logical this way) is only used to encrypt a symmetric key, that is then used to encrypt the payload(email). So using DH would only enlarge a very small portion, which is the key.
After that a symmetric algorithm like IDEA, AES, or Blowfish is used.
Kazaa has had some SERIOUS security flaws in the past. These were glaring errors in their code that allowed people to read your entire hard drive(well, if running a proper OS, just the files you had read access to). This is completely unacceptable, and I refuse to support a program like that.
It is for similar reasons that I do not run Microsoft products anymore either.
Computers are cheap. I have 2. One has Win2k. One has OpenBSD. That's all I need. I wish these people and their plans of "Bringing it all together" would go away and produce something useful instead.
Ok.. Do you really think this is aimed at you?
For one, $500x2 is not cheap for many people. They're still paying $40/month for their Dell to do their finances on. These people could really benefit by a more stable underlying OS, that has roots in open source. 10 years from now when they sit down to figure out this month's bills, they won't be "unsupported"... because they'll have a community. They'll also be able to run their good old MS Excel.. so they won't have to learn something new.
Lets just play the analogy game here. "I hate these people who make window shades for cars. I mean, tinted windows are cheap.. I have all my windows tinted on all my cars. Why do they have to produce this thing that I can move between cars when I don't even need it?!"
I've been using ext3 ever since I upgraded to 2.4.14 a few days ago. Its nice to have the journaled FS... as I have been testing out a lot of !cough!nvidia!cough! proprietary drivers and bleeding edge software lately, and subsequently crashing. W/ ext3, I can get back to the crashing very quickly.
That said, I also use ReiserFS for some other things(try/var first, its simple to convert). It definitely speeds up the directory access... and on my squid it cut the average response time by a full half second...:-P.
I personally think ext3 will win out, as it takes about 20 seconds to convert a 6GB partition... vs. XFS or ReiserFS taking nearly 10 minutes, and much more complexity.
"DirecTV hackers'.. that almost sounds affectionate. I'm so sick of this geek culture accepting criminals just because they find a way around the control system.
They're providing a service. Pay for it. Its not like they're price gouging either. And by "they" I mean both Satellite TV and Radio providers.
If this is going to be a sustained computing effort, you can save a lot of cash on power consumption by going with the RLX servers. RLX Servers They use Transmeta's Crusoe processor, so they actually can pack 336 of these in a single rack! Definitely worth a look.
Re:Try this again, less troll-full, this time.
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 1
Ok, I'm not going to flame. Now is a time when the temptation to flame is too great. I know we're all in a bad mood. We have good reason, whether from the US or not.
But I ask you this. Who are you to say that JonKatz can't post a story? I myself don't have the time to read the comments on SlashDot every day. Even at Level 5, there are a lot of posts here to read. Jon Katz is just offering up his own experience, and asking us to comment on it as well. If he hadn't posted that story up here, I wouldn't have seen anything like this on slashdot.
CT, you getting out enough? It seems like every posting you put up has something worthless and asinine about your day. So I ask, are you getting enough human interaction?
Slashdot Mirror
You need to look at it from the game publishers' point of view.
They pay thousands for developer licenses and SDK's. To them, homebrew just flies in the face of that. Some kid can write a really fun game in a couple of days and never has to bother with any red tape.
I'm not saying its right, but that is why.
You have two options..
1) You need to go and find a consulting firm who, for a fee, is willing to be avaialble when you're not. You probably want somebody who is not too big, and local too, so they'll be flexible. If you can work it right, you might even be able to get it where you just have to call them 30+ days in advance and schedule them for when you'll be out of range.
2) Simplify your operations. Anything that you can't explain in 5 minutes to a reasonably intelligent person is too complex. This will have two benefits. 1- simpler systems will tend not to break as often, as you can see the problems on cursory examination. 2- You can trust somebody who maybe isn't a sysadmin/uebercoder like you, but can handle a bash prompt.
I've adopted #2 now, but in the past had #1. #2 is _by far_ the better long term solution.
Its a truly challenging game, and it can be played online for fun. A mouse is all thats needed, and the ability to pay close attention to what people do. :)
;)
I like www.pokerroom.com, as its java based and the action in the "play money" area is actually pretty good. Don't get sucked in to putting your cash online though. Too many bots and cheaters.
Yes, and, Mr. Gates, the operating system is not a product of the future. So let it go, you made your money, now its time for the public to benefit. Get a new idea if you want to exploit the IP system.
First let me say that sites like these should not be legally responsible for their users' indiscretions. As someone else said, its like a bartender telling you where to find prostitutes and drug dealers.
But this does not make me sad, not one bit. If one person can explain to me how bittorent fits in with the fair use provisions of most copyright laws (such as those in the US and Europe), then I'll shut up.
Until then, you people need to get real and start *SUPPORTING* copyright holders who choose to allow distribution by such media.
Free software uses systems like bittorent. Free media is far less common, but maybe it shouldn't be. I know for me, I decided to follow the policy of strict adherence to copyright law, in support of Free software. I threw away pirated copies of software, and replaced them with Free alternatives.
At my place of business, when we find a piece of Free software we don't understand, we pay the author to teach us, and enhance it.
This model just doesn't work for every piece of entertainment. I mean, you can pay the guys from Monty Python's Flying Circus to come by and ply their trade.. but a local version of Enterprise or The Simpsons isn't exactly a good idea.
The bottom line is this. Bittorrent is mass distribution, and far beyond fair use. If you can't buy it locally, that doesn't entitle you to a free copy. For a long time I couldn't get any sort of broadband at my house except ISDN. I didn't go out and pirate an ISDN line. I just pissed and moaned until somebody brought me broadband.
Legal or not, you know what you're doing is wrong. You know that you wouldn't want it done to your works. I'm not saying you wouldn't choose to give away your copyrighted material should you create some. I'm saying you would want to be allowed to CHOOSE to do so.
I believe in FAIR use. Fair use means sharing with your friends, not a million people who know your IP address. Fair use ends at mass distribution.
Remember, its a copyRIGHT. Linux developers excersize their rights by giving away their work. Corporate entities use their rights to protect their code. Have some respect for your fellow human beings' rights, or move to China.
You PgSQL nazis are just being ignorant. Do you think because MyISAM isn't transactional that the whole database isn't?
MySQL's InnoDB offers the same level of data integrity as PgSQL does, and about the same performance. Where it wins is in the flexibility to choose table-by-table whether you want InnoDB, MyISAM, or the new NDBCLUSTER. There's also the universal availability and familiarity when it comes to the mysql protocol and libraries.
As far as performance.. you might want to look at numbers on well designed threading systems such as Solaris or Linux 2.6. Most of PostgreSQL's gains are erased by MySQL 4.1's excellent code when it is combined with those OS's proper threading.
The only place I see PgSQL winning the performance war is the query optimizer.
PgSQL will be doomed to a BSDesque life. Touted by too many people with no social skills, nobody will ever be able to see how good it is, because they just get shouted down when asking questions.
This is old news. We all heard about this months and months ago. The CIA director already quit, and I have to think there's a good chance the president will lose his over this and other bad intelligence handling. History suggests that anyway.
I have to think this was just posted to make a splash. "Bush Lied". Nice.
Seriously.. this is a new low for Slashdot.
Don't be a slave to your language. You know what he meant.
The resolutions don't say "prove you don't have them." They say "prove that you got rid of what we documented you DID have at one time."
Otherwise why send inspectors in to "prove a negative."?
(damn I wish I'd weighed in on this yesterday)
:-/
Anyway, blame MTV and Fonzi for this trend. When you have kids in the US who think its cool to be stupid, and totally lame to have a brain, this is what happens.
High test scores, good grades, and a strong work ethic are COOL things in young indian society. Kind if like they were in the 50's and 60's here in the U.S.
Just think about it for a second... over here we're geeks that nobody understands or cares about. Over there, they're just working stiffs who make decent money.
Teach your kids that its cool and fun to be smart. Unfortunately, only the geeks will be able to do that. All the non-geeks are teaching their kids that MTV is the source of all coolness.
And yo dawg, that textbook is whack. Dump tha shizzle in the trash and break off some abercrombie and fitch yo!
>:|
MaVerickDBMS compiles the legacy BASIC code from these systems into Java Byte Code. This code is not the traditional "10 PRINT HELLO" BASIC. Nor is it like VisualBasic. It is a very simple, and powerful data-oriented language.
I just wanted to say thanks to all of the people who replied to this comment. Great points all of you.
Its not just "windows" that is susceptible to viruses. It is the API that is too trusting, and the file permissions. When you run wine, you generally own all of the files (default is ~/.wine/fake_windows). So you're going to be able to do anything you could on a windows box.
Its not all that surprising that a virus would run without problems. Many of them do exploit actual bugs in the Windows code, but most of them just make regular old crappy Win32 API calls.
But most great ideas seem to be lacking in practical application. This one, however, does have some interesting strategies.
:P
My issues:
1) Family. I can't convince my parents, and my wife's parents to pick up and move. I don't want to seperate my children from their grandparents.
2) Professional Saturation. Lets just face it, Ted Knight was right when he said "The world needs ditch diggers too." There will be a ton of other smart guys out there. My profession (consulting) is all about being smart for other people.
If you can solve these issues(don't see how you can with #1)... I'm there.
Instead of convergance, these guys are talking about using small, PCMCIA card size devices called "Point Servers" with gigabit UltraWideBand technology connecting to Various "clients" that would provide things like display, input, etc.
Looks pretty cool, and best of all, they're keeping the whole thing totally Open Source. I think they have a prototype using an ipaq sans screen, and a hacked up 100Mbit UWB setup.
Yes, I'm yelling. Godamn them for doing this. I mean, we already have to watch this crappy product, and now they're going to put blatant ads for products on our screens. Its MY SCREEN godamnit, SCREW THEM if they put THEIR ADS on MY SCREEN. What gives them the right? I CONTROL MY SCRE.... oh.. wait.. I do.
If you don't like what is showing, don't watch it. Get real people! This matters less than hot grits down Monica Lewinsky's thong.
The public key algorithm in PGP(Not sure about S/MIME or other protocols, but it would be most logical this way) is only used to encrypt a symmetric key, that is then used to encrypt the payload(email). So using DH would only enlarge a very small portion, which is the key.
After that a symmetric algorithm like IDEA, AES, or Blowfish is used.
Kazaa has had some SERIOUS security flaws in the past. These were glaring errors in their code that allowed people to read your entire hard drive(well, if running a proper OS, just the files you had read access to). This is completely unacceptable, and I refuse to support a program like that.
It is for similar reasons that I do not run Microsoft products anymore either.
Kazaa Vuln:
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/3125
Ok.. Do you really think this is aimed at you?
For one, $500x2 is not cheap for many people. They're still paying $40/month for their Dell to do their finances on. These people could really benefit by a more stable underlying OS, that has roots in open source. 10 years from now when they sit down to figure out this month's bills, they won't be "unsupported" ... because they'll have a community. They'll also be able to run their good old MS Excel.. so they won't have to learn something new.
Lets just play the analogy game here. "I hate these people who make window shades for cars. I mean, tinted windows are cheap.. I have all my windows tinted on all my cars. Why do they have to produce this thing that I can move between cars when I don't even need it?!"
BAH!
I've been using ext3 ever since I upgraded to 2.4.14 a few days ago. Its nice to have the journaled FS... as I have been testing out a lot of !cough!nvidia!cough! proprietary drivers and bleeding edge software lately, and subsequently crashing. W/ ext3, I can get back to the crashing very quickly.
/var first, its simple to convert). It definitely speeds up the directory access... and on my squid it cut the average response time by a full half second... :-P.
That said, I also use ReiserFS for some other things(try
I personally think ext3 will win out, as it takes about 20 seconds to convert a 6GB partition... vs. XFS or ReiserFS taking nearly 10 minutes, and much more complexity.
Wasn't there a Seinfeld episode along those lines?
"We need a marine biologist!!"
"DirecTV hackers' .. that almost sounds affectionate. I'm so sick of this geek culture accepting criminals just because they find a way around the control system.
They're providing a service. Pay for it. Its not like they're price gouging either. And by "they" I mean both Satellite TV and Radio providers.
If this is going to be a sustained computing effort, you can save a lot of cash on power consumption by going with the RLX servers. RLX Servers They use Transmeta's Crusoe processor, so they actually can pack 336 of these in a single rack! Definitely worth a look.
Ok, I'm not going to flame. Now is a time when the temptation to flame is too great. I know we're all in a bad mood. We have good reason, whether from the US or not.
But I ask you this. Who are you to say that JonKatz can't post a story? I myself don't have the time to read the comments on SlashDot every day. Even at Level 5, there are a lot of posts here to read. Jon Katz is just offering up his own experience, and asking us to comment on it as well. If he hadn't posted that story up here, I wouldn't have seen anything like this on slashdot.
Don't be so insensitive. We're geeks, not robots.
CT, you getting out enough? It seems like every posting you put up has something worthless and asinine about your day. So I ask, are you getting enough human interaction?
:-P
We're just concerned for your well being!