I read the article twice and I really don't see the issue.
From reading the article I understand that there is the potential for Samba or any other open source app that realies on CIFS to have to mimic a function that happens when a user changes their password (I am asuming that this is part of MS/CHAP). The problem being that MS might hold a patent on something, that possibly would have to be implimented by said open source app and as a result MS could charge some sort of licencing fee. Maybe
What a friggin joke! The author comes up with a scenario which is has no factual basis, decides it could be a bad thing and then get various people in the community to provide quotes that agree with him.
This is FUD, a pure and perfect example of FUD. ZDnet is getting worse evey year.
If these corporations want a reliable network, they can build their own. No fucking way is control of the public net getting turned over to them for a pittance.
What public network? If I do a traceroute to www.slashdot.org it goes though my ISP, through UUNET, through exodus and hits OSDN. At no point does my request transit a publicly owned network. The people who own the pipes control the internet. Sprint, UUNET, AT&T, these guys are in control.
The vision this idiot quoted in the article scares the piss out of me too but I think we're almost too far gone to fight it. QOS (quality of service) routing means that some packets are flagged as important as they transit the netowrk and get priority routing. QOS is on its' way to a backbone near you, real soon now.
Consider this:
If I'm downloading a tarball from kernel.org and a router discovery packet shows up, it goes first. I have no problem with that, it is a good thing. However, this jackass wants the network to behave a little differently, if I'm downloading that tarball and a packet shows up that is part of the streaming movie trailer my moron neighbor is watching, it goes first. Why? Because advertising.moviestudio.com cut a deal with the backbone provider to get priority routing.
We are only a couple of years from a n-tier quality of service based network. You cough up the dough, you go first. I really don't like that at all.
You did of course notice that google is the 7th search engine on that list?
While there is obviously a big difference between paid placement (like google) and paid inclusion (not like google) you are painting with a pretty broad brush there.
I think these paid services are core to the business models of search engines as we know them. Let's face it, this is a pretty rough way to make money but is none the less an absolutely crucial service if the web is going to be useful to most people.
Prehaps the search engine is another example of a service where a subscription fee would almost make sense? A good way to provide revenue for the service provider while ensuring the integrity of the results.
We Americans are rather proud of the freedoms we've fought for. No our legal system is not perfect. But if you want to stir up American sentiment - tell them their right to free speech is going to be subject to some foreign judicial body. I'll pickup an M16 myself and overthrow any legal body that sells my First Amendment rights out from under me.
Good god, yes Americans are very damn pround "of the rights we've fought for". Its' actually pretty damn scary how every American child has been tought the same 5 sentences about "rights" and "free speach" and patriotism. It is truly a first class testament to the quality of your indoctrination system, oh sorry, education system that every person in the US sound like exactly the same asshole whenever a discussion like this takes place.
Before you flame me, think about it. How much time did you spend learning about you constitution in school? How often do you here your fellow countrymen bellow on about ammendments and "free speach"? Have you ever heard a Candaian mention their Charter of Rights and Freedoms? A Brition? Anyone from any commonwealth country? You have educated yourselves into being a bunch of obnoxious prats and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.
Re:they really need to hire better people
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VA Layoff Rumors
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· Score: 4
Once I hanged around #debian helping a guy who was obviously knew just a little more than basic things.
He told me he's in a hurry because a customer was waiting for the answer as we spoke. Out of curiosity I did a/whois on him: valinux.com...
P.S. I know there are more good people in VA then lousy ones, so no hard feeling here okay?
Man that is really not fair. Nobody knows everything. I've been tripped up by silly little things in areas that I would consider myself rather expertish. When a customer did ask him something he couldn't figure out at least he knew where to go get help, #debian would be a good place for help. Most importantly he asked, he didn't brush it off or try and BS his way through it.
I think if more support people knew when to cut out and get more information there would be a lot more happy customer's in the world. This guy finding someone to help him out so he could, in turn, help his customer is a great endorsement for VA in my books.
I've read horror stories about how in previous decades hundreds of ultra-low-paid African workers either worked in the fields to get diamonds (apparently in one spot they were so abundant they could be found above ground) or in dangerous mines.
Don't think that this kind of pratice is over, its' not. As a matter of fact there is currently a civil war in Sierra Leonne being fought over diamond fields. THe "rebels" have taken to chopping civilian's arms off at the elbow in order to keep them in line. There are whole viliages there with only one arm.
The really twisted part of this is that DeBeers doesn't own all of the mines in the world but they do own most of the distribution network. If these guys are selling diamonds from the fields guess who they are probably selling them to.
The way I figure it, your average cheater is going to get bored pretty fast. Running around with wallhack or an aimbot can't be much fun after a while.
What gets me is bitching about cheating. I was playing Counterstrike a couple days ago and this one guy, who I'm pretty sure wasn't cheating but was doing very well, was getting constantly abused for being a cheater. It went on and on whine, bitch, complain, vote, fail. It really takes away from my enjoyment of them game.
I'd like to see a game company come up with a way to stop cheating in online games, I'm just sick of hearing about it.
I've seen this discussion come up a few times lately in social situations and most people just don't get it it. At all.
As soon as most people hear the word "radiation" they become scared out of their wits. I would bet that 80% of the North American population couldn't even acurately define the word. All they know is that in "The Hunt For Red October" they said radiation was bad! It must be bad!
Damn near everything that uses electricity radiates microwave or EMF energy. Your toaster, blender and hair dryer all put out more EMF energy than a cell phone.
It is possible that the energy from cell phones can cause a phyisical reaction, we don't know, but just beause the word radiation is used it's not automatically a bad thing.
So why are they advertising their basic service to their subscribers?
Well actually its' done for an even dumber reason than you think.
While it is possible that these ads may be viewed by someone else in your house watching TV that's not really what they're for. What happens is that Comcast guys realise that while you are watching their service there is ads for other providers on various channels. Seeing as though you are such a sheep (as we all are) chances are you'll want to switch over to cable or another dish provider just because you viewed the other guy's ad. They are advertising at you to get you to stay, they figure their quality of service isn't as powerful as the other guy's marketing messages so they need to keep sending you their message.
That's actually what I meant I figured everybody would understand the concept better if I said "MS has provided a security update tool that makes use of all the windows update services".
I guess that wasn't very clear but it was kind of late, I was too tired to think.
Ms creates just that, the illusion of simplicity. I used to be a NT admin but have moved on to Linux and Solaris stuff for the past couple of years. I still have a very good friend that is a NT admin, as part of his job he looks after some IIS boxen. He got nailed by the Solaris/IIS worm a couple of weeks ago, here's what happened.
With W2K, MS has provided a security update tool that makes use of all the windows update services. My buddy is a really bright guy, he knows his stuff and is a good admin so he makes use of the tool on a very regular basis. The day before the worm struck he ran the security check because he became aware of this vulnerability, according to windows update his system was fine, the relevant patch had been installed correctly. The box got hit anyways.
We took a look and it looks like a subsequent patch or service pack had undone the fix on him. The is the exact reason he uses the windows update service, it is supposed to keep this from happening. Now not only does MS give the hollow illusion of an effective admin tool, they make it difficult (read damn near impossible) to manage patches, hotfixes and service packs without it. MS's security bullitens are lame by any other vendor's standards. They rarely contain a decent amount of information about the problem, other hotfixes that can affect it or how to test for the vulnerability.
I just can't get over some of the stuff that NT admins put up with. They get the buffer overflow of the day, a hotfix that manages to unplug a bunch of old holes and no detailed information from the vendor on the problem! Even the qualified and effective admins like my friend don't stand a damn chance up against those odds.
1) Right now, any insecure computer can be cracked for use in a DoS attack, thereby indirectly implicating an innocent person. Anyone can get hijacked in this way and framed for another attack, particularly if the investigators choose not to trace back to the original source.
This is something that is bugging me right now. I got myself cracked on New Year's Eve. It was my own stupid fault, I had forgotten to patch ftpd and some little wiener had installed a root kit through it. As luck would have it I was in bed with the flu and happened to notice the flashing lights on my cable modem so I got the machine unplugged right away.
Here's the thing that's bothers me. If I hadn't noticed for a day or two and the script kiddie had gone and used my machine as a place to crack from or if he used it as a node is a DDOS attack how responsible am I. It is partialy my fault the machine got comprimised but how much trouble could I get in when the federales came and busted down my door. I honestly belive that if some subsequent attack had been traced back to my box and the feds found out it ws owned by a mid 20s UNIX geek type guy I could really been in for some grief. I would at least get all my machines confiscated for "evidence".
So to get back on topic, had we been developing to documentation provided by another designer, I'd have quit the company by now and we wouldn't have any software to deliver. Instead, by using experienced software engineers to assist and guide and making sure the development team knew their design patterns, we have created a fine piece of software. Trust your developers, they're better than you think.
I hear what you're saying and I agree with you completely. This pahse our project is really early on. The stuff I'm doing is meetings with business development and marketing types to talk about what the software is going to do. I'm trying to take that and build a feature list and some use cases so I can show the development team what we need build. The next step is pulling in some other guys and talking about an object model.
The point I was kind of trying to make was that I've seen developers doing what I am now and start thinking about objects and patterns right away, before they've organised the information they've captured into something that makes sense to other people. That way you tend to get stuck without showing anything for the effort.
There were a few people at my last employer who were pretty behind XP. We had a few people into to talk about it and they did some interesting presentations for us. I thought it was pretty interesting but I don't really want to apply it.
I did like the idea of generating a test case and coding to it. I think that in a lot of cases regular regression testing can save you big hassles down the raod.
What I didn't like was the "design as you go" concept. I can't imagine this doing anything but biting you in the ass, lots, really hard. A lack of design and forethought can only create a huge mess as soon as you try and extend anything.
I have a theory were this idea comes from. A lot of the design work that goes on in projects is done very poorly. The design as you go approach is a reaction to it. Its' pretty common to have a design team that spins its' wheels, goes off into rediculous tangents and generates reams of paper without seeming to acomplish anything tangible. This is really a common thread in my experience and a lot of other people's I've talked about it with. I think this happens because design work is really hard, its' way too easy to get stuck. Many of the people that work on design teams or as application arcitects have no buisness filling that role.
Good application design is really its' own disipline. I'm working as a design guy in the very early stages of a project right now, the first time I've done this kind of work. To my own surprise I seem to be pretty good at it. I'm able to keep the work moving, hitting the milestones I've set for myself on time and the documentation I'm producing is very well recived by the development team.
I think its' unfortunate that this approach to design is becomming more popular. I think if people made more of an effort to understand the design phase of a project and get the right people working on it they'd be way better off. To many really bright programmers get stuck doing this kind of work as they gain more experience and some of them just aren't any good at it.
Re:Incremental performance (but a driver issue?)
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GeForce3 and Linux
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· Score: 2
nVidia doesn't make money directly out of driver sales but their drivers are a major selling point for their products.
The ability to use the nVidia detenator drivers is a huge boost for anyone who owns a GeForce card. The divers that came with my Asus 6800 and the new versions on the Asus website are amazingly poor. They are pretty much unusable, not only do they have stunning incompatabilities (Real Player for god's sake) but they make my system crash very regularly.
Aside from quality issues, the drivers can also yeild some pretty big performace gains, I know I saw way better frame rates after switching from the Asus drivers to the nVidia Det 3 drivers.
I can understand why they are releasing binary only linux drivers. I'm not very happy about it but I do understand.
Re:multitasking games; windows vs linux
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GeForce3 and Linux
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· Score: 3
You have a really good point here.
I run RH 7.1 and Quake 3 is okay under linux (Geforce 256 DDR, P3500) but it's still a touch better under windows. The problem is, when something like updatedb kicks off, it slows to a crawl.
I really can't think of a good way to deal with this, when I'm starting a game I don't always think about everything that's scheduled to run in the next hour, or could be started for some reason. What I'd like to have is a script I could run that would automatically knock everything else down prority wise before I launched to game.
I guess what this comes down to is me not really understanding enough about how procoess prority is handled by the kernel so I'm not sure how fix this. Has anyone else ever tried to set something like this up before? If there were tools out there to do this I think it would do a lot to improve gaming on linux.
The login thing with knoq si the only thing that stops me from using it 100% of the time right now. Doesn't only happen with ebay, slashdot k5 and a bunch of others mess up too. Can't figure it out for the life of me.
I see a lot of people here jumpning up and down like this is a big nasty thing. It's not.
Using something like this should be covered under fair use. Let face it, 5 or 6 notes of the latest boy band crud comming out of you cell phone isn't going to cause record companies any grief, if you programmed it in yourself. I doubt that even if you had a site that gave the little tunes you programmed away for free they would care. The problem comes up when somebody starts selling these little clips to other people. That's not fair use, that's generating profit from someone else's trademark. That's why record companies are going to get pissed.
The issue the article brings up is that people are selling these things and not giving artists, composers or publishers their cut of the revenue. I have a hard time thinking that it's a fair use situation.
I started having some issues with wrist pain about a year ago. I did some reading on the different types of wrist problems you can get and came to the conclusion that my problems were mostly realated to muscle fatigue in the wrists.
I went out and bought a Microsoft Natural Elite (USB without the extra idiot buttons) and started using it at work 100% of the time. My problem actually became worse for a couple weeks, I had to take more breaks in order to shake out my wrists and relax. After I got used to it though, wow. Not only do I rarely get sore from typing but my speed and acuracy has increased quite a bit as well.
Anyone having trouble with this type of thing should really give one of the MS keyboards a try first. They're not for everyone but compared to the other stuff on the market they are really cheap.
One thing you might want to keep in mind, once you get used to one of these keyboards you will absolutely hate anything else. I can't type on a standard keyboard at all anymore, it just doesn't feel right. I had to buy one for home and I also bought an extra one a little while ago because the the ones without the idiot buttons are getting harder to find.
For a network running Microsoft software, taking common steps such as ensuring Guest access is disabled and that passwords are required for all resources will do the job.
Password protecting resorces isn't going to do any good at all. If you read the article it is clear that these guys are running some king of packet sniffer.
"There -- someone just turned on an NT machine and is getting mail."
There is no way to know this unless you have are collecting and looking at packets on the network. Unless all traffic on the wireless segment is encrypted you will have NO security on that segment.
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever
I used to work for a large VARish type place that required everyone in a service type role to have the A+ cert. I went and took the exam one afternoon when it was slow in the office, took me 20 minutes and I got some rediculous score like 97% or something (couldn't remember the switches for smartdrive). Another guy I know managed to only miss 1 question on both exams. That thing is a joke, or at least was 6 years ago.
Did he go to the school then? Did he report the bullying? Did he demand that the bullies (if they actually touched Sean) be charged with assault? Whatever you may think of Texas criminal justice, there are still laws against assault, you know.
When I was in Junior High I got picked on a whole lot, my Mom complained to the school and got a shrink to help me deal with it. The end result of all this was ME getting sent to a special school.
The school I went to was basically a boarding school for kids that the school boards couldn't handle, I spent grade 9 there. The bullies in the school had things refined to an art. However it was about this time that genetics took over and I went from the little fat kid to being a good bit bigger and stronger than my classmates. It also happened that there and when I returned to high school I also got meaner than most of the idiots that used to pick on me. After a while it wasn't so much of a problem.
Based on my experience I understand why Sean's father might have been reluctant to get the school involved (I don't actually know what he did about it). All I learned was how to not get picked on by getting a reputation as a tough guy and beating the snot out of people that weren't intimidated by it. It worked but its' hardly a solution I feel good about.
People that run schools have absolutely no idea how to deal with problems like this and they almost never try. Yeah, Sean shouldn't have said that but I would have just hit the prick. Sean's way is still better.
Full support for the automatic downloading of Windows 2000 and Windows NT printer drivers, providing the first full implementation of the Windows NT point-and-print functionality independent of Microsoft code.
This is a huge acomplishment. Using samba's print services has always been a bit of a PITA in large networks. You get a print spooler that doesn't hang when you look at it funny but you had to install drivers for each printer on the workstations. Micrsoft's server products will automagicly provide a driver for clients when you connect to the shared printer, now samba does it too.
Hats of to Jeremy and the Samba team, this is a great feature.
Would have been kind of nice to see 9x clients supported too though.
Slashdot Mirror
From reading the article I understand that there is the potential for Samba or any other open source app that realies on CIFS to have to mimic a function that happens when a user changes their password (I am asuming that this is part of MS/CHAP). The problem being that MS might hold a patent on something, that possibly would have to be implimented by said open source app and as a result MS could charge some sort of licencing fee. Maybe
What a friggin joke! The author comes up with a scenario which is has no factual basis, decides it could be a bad thing and then get various people in the community to provide quotes that agree with him.
This is FUD, a pure and perfect example of FUD. ZDnet is getting worse evey year.
What public network? If I do a traceroute to www.slashdot.org it goes though my ISP, through UUNET, through exodus and hits OSDN. At no point does my request transit a publicly owned network. The people who own the pipes control the internet. Sprint, UUNET, AT&T, these guys are in control.
The vision this idiot quoted in the article scares the piss out of me too but I think we're almost too far gone to fight it. QOS (quality of service) routing means that some packets are flagged as important as they transit the netowrk and get priority routing. QOS is on its' way to a backbone near you, real soon now.
Consider this:
If I'm downloading a tarball from kernel.org and a router discovery packet shows up, it goes first. I have no problem with that, it is a good thing. However, this jackass wants the network to behave a little differently, if I'm downloading that tarball and a packet shows up that is part of the streaming movie trailer my moron neighbor is watching, it goes first. Why? Because advertising.moviestudio.com cut a deal with the backbone provider to get priority routing.
We are only a couple of years from a n-tier quality of service based network. You cough up the dough, you go first. I really don't like that at all.
You did of course notice that google is the 7th search engine on that list?
While there is obviously a big difference between paid placement (like google) and paid inclusion (not like google) you are painting with a pretty broad brush there.
I think these paid services are core to the business models of search engines as we know them. Let's face it, this is a pretty rough way to make money but is none the less an absolutely crucial service if the web is going to be useful to most people.
Prehaps the search engine is another example of a service where a subscription fee would almost make sense? A good way to provide revenue for the service provider while ensuring the integrity of the results.
We Americans are rather proud of the freedoms we've fought for. No our legal system is not perfect. But if you want to stir up American sentiment - tell them their right to free speech is going to be subject to some foreign judicial body. I'll pickup an M16 myself and overthrow any legal body that sells my First Amendment rights out from under me.
Good god, yes Americans are very damn pround "of the rights we've fought for". Its' actually pretty damn scary how every American child has been tought the same 5 sentences about "rights" and "free speach" and patriotism. It is truly a first class testament to the quality of your indoctrination system, oh sorry, education system that every person in the US sound like exactly the same asshole whenever a discussion like this takes place.
Before you flame me, think about it. How much time did you spend learning about you constitution in school? How often do you here your fellow countrymen bellow on about ammendments and "free speach"? Have you ever heard a Candaian mention their Charter of Rights and Freedoms? A Brition? Anyone from any commonwealth country? You have educated yourselves into being a bunch of obnoxious prats and the rest of us are tired of hearing it.
He told me he's in a hurry because a customer was waiting for the answer as we spoke. Out of curiosity I did a /whois on him: valinux.com...
P.S. I know there are more good people in VA then lousy ones, so no hard feeling here okay?
Man that is really not fair. Nobody knows everything. I've been tripped up by silly little things in areas that I would consider myself rather expertish. When a customer did ask him something he couldn't figure out at least he knew where to go get help, #debian would be a good place for help. Most importantly he asked, he didn't brush it off or try and BS his way through it.
I think if more support people knew when to cut out and get more information there would be a lot more happy customer's in the world. This guy finding someone to help him out so he could, in turn, help his customer is a great endorsement for VA in my books.
I've read horror stories about how in previous decades hundreds of ultra-low-paid African workers either worked in the fields to get diamonds (apparently in one spot they were so abundant they could be found above ground) or in dangerous mines.
Don't think that this kind of pratice is over, its' not. As a matter of fact there is currently a civil war in Sierra Leonne being fought over diamond fields. THe "rebels" have taken to chopping civilian's arms off at the elbow in order to keep them in line. There are whole viliages there with only one arm.
The really twisted part of this is that DeBeers doesn't own all of the mines in the world but they do own most of the distribution network. If these guys are selling diamonds from the fields guess who they are probably selling them to.
The way I figure it, your average cheater is going to get bored pretty fast. Running around with wallhack or an aimbot can't be much fun after a while.
What gets me is bitching about cheating. I was playing Counterstrike a couple days ago and this one guy, who I'm pretty sure wasn't cheating but was doing very well, was getting constantly abused for being a cheater. It went on and on whine, bitch, complain, vote, fail. It really takes away from my enjoyment of them game.
I'd like to see a game company come up with a way to stop cheating in online games, I'm just sick of hearing about it.
I've seen this discussion come up a few times lately in social situations and most people just don't get it it. At all.
As soon as most people hear the word "radiation" they become scared out of their wits. I would bet that 80% of the North American population couldn't even acurately define the word. All they know is that in "The Hunt For Red October" they said radiation was bad! It must be bad!
Damn near everything that uses electricity radiates microwave or EMF energy. Your toaster, blender and hair dryer all put out more EMF energy than a cell phone.
It is possible that the energy from cell phones can cause a phyisical reaction, we don't know, but just beause the word radiation is used it's not automatically a bad thing.
How exectly is hockey a blood sport?
So why are they advertising their basic service to their subscribers?
Well actually its' done for an even dumber reason than you think.
While it is possible that these ads may be viewed by someone else in your house watching TV that's not really what they're for. What happens is that Comcast guys realise that while you are watching their service there is ads for other providers on various channels. Seeing as though you are such a sheep (as we all are) chances are you'll want to switch over to cable or another dish provider just because you viewed the other guy's ad. They are advertising at you to get you to stay, they figure their quality of service isn't as powerful as the other guy's marketing messages so they need to keep sending you their message.
Pretty sad really.
That's actually what I meant I figured everybody would understand the concept better if I said "MS has provided a security update tool that makes use of all the windows update services".
I guess that wasn't very clear but it was kind of late, I was too tired to think.
Ms creates just that, the illusion of simplicity. I used to be a NT admin but have moved on to Linux and Solaris stuff for the past couple of years. I still have a very good friend that is a NT admin, as part of his job he looks after some IIS boxen. He got nailed by the Solaris/IIS worm a couple of weeks ago, here's what happened.
With W2K, MS has provided a security update tool that makes use of all the windows update services. My buddy is a really bright guy, he knows his stuff and is a good admin so he makes use of the tool on a very regular basis. The day before the worm struck he ran the security check because he became aware of this vulnerability, according to windows update his system was fine, the relevant patch had been installed correctly. The box got hit anyways.
We took a look and it looks like a subsequent patch or service pack had undone the fix on him. The is the exact reason he uses the windows update service, it is supposed to keep this from happening. Now not only does MS give the hollow illusion of an effective admin tool, they make it difficult (read damn near impossible) to manage patches, hotfixes and service packs without it. MS's security bullitens are lame by any other vendor's standards. They rarely contain a decent amount of information about the problem, other hotfixes that can affect it or how to test for the vulnerability.
I just can't get over some of the stuff that NT admins put up with. They get the buffer overflow of the day, a hotfix that manages to unplug a bunch of old holes and no detailed information from the vendor on the problem! Even the qualified and effective admins like my friend don't stand a damn chance up against those odds.
1) Right now, any insecure computer can be cracked for use in a DoS attack, thereby indirectly implicating an innocent person. Anyone can get hijacked in this way and framed for another attack, particularly if the investigators choose not to trace back to the original source.
This is something that is bugging me right now. I got myself cracked on New Year's Eve. It was my own stupid fault, I had forgotten to patch ftpd and some little wiener had installed a root kit through it. As luck would have it I was in bed with the flu and happened to notice the flashing lights on my cable modem so I got the machine unplugged right away.
Here's the thing that's bothers me. If I hadn't noticed for a day or two and the script kiddie had gone and used my machine as a place to crack from or if he used it as a node is a DDOS attack how responsible am I. It is partialy my fault the machine got comprimised but how much trouble could I get in when the federales came and busted down my door. I honestly belive that if some subsequent attack had been traced back to my box and the feds found out it ws owned by a mid 20s UNIX geek type guy I could really been in for some grief. I would at least get all my machines confiscated for "evidence".
Something to think about anyways.
So to get back on topic, had we been developing to documentation provided by another designer, I'd have quit the company by now and we wouldn't have any software to deliver. Instead, by using experienced software engineers to assist and guide and making sure the development team knew their design patterns, we have created a fine piece of software. Trust your developers, they're better than you think.
I hear what you're saying and I agree with you completely. This pahse our project is really early on. The stuff I'm doing is meetings with business development and marketing types to talk about what the software is going to do. I'm trying to take that and build a feature list and some use cases so I can show the development team what we need build. The next step is pulling in some other guys and talking about an object model.
The point I was kind of trying to make was that I've seen developers doing what I am now and start thinking about objects and patterns right away, before they've organised the information they've captured into something that makes sense to other people. That way you tend to get stuck without showing anything for the effort.
There were a few people at my last employer who were pretty behind XP. We had a few people into to talk about it and they did some interesting presentations for us. I thought it was pretty interesting but I don't really want to apply it.
I did like the idea of generating a test case and coding to it. I think that in a lot of cases regular regression testing can save you big hassles down the raod.
What I didn't like was the "design as you go" concept. I can't imagine this doing anything but biting you in the ass, lots, really hard. A lack of design and forethought can only create a huge mess as soon as you try and extend anything.
I have a theory were this idea comes from. A lot of the design work that goes on in projects is done very poorly. The design as you go approach is a reaction to it. Its' pretty common to have a design team that spins its' wheels, goes off into rediculous tangents and generates reams of paper without seeming to acomplish anything tangible. This is really a common thread in my experience and a lot of other people's I've talked about it with. I think this happens because design work is really hard, its' way too easy to get stuck. Many of the people that work on design teams or as application arcitects have no buisness filling that role.
Good application design is really its' own disipline. I'm working as a design guy in the very early stages of a project right now, the first time I've done this kind of work. To my own surprise I seem to be pretty good at it. I'm able to keep the work moving, hitting the milestones I've set for myself on time and the documentation I'm producing is very well recived by the development team.
I think its' unfortunate that this approach to design is becomming more popular. I think if people made more of an effort to understand the design phase of a project and get the right people working on it they'd be way better off. To many really bright programmers get stuck doing this kind of work as they gain more experience and some of them just aren't any good at it.
nVidia doesn't make money directly out of driver sales but their drivers are a major selling point for their products.
The ability to use the nVidia detenator drivers is a huge boost for anyone who owns a GeForce card. The divers that came with my Asus 6800 and the new versions on the Asus website are amazingly poor. They are pretty much unusable, not only do they have stunning incompatabilities (Real Player for god's sake) but they make my system crash very regularly.
Aside from quality issues, the drivers can also yeild some pretty big performace gains, I know I saw way better frame rates after switching from the Asus drivers to the nVidia Det 3 drivers.
I can understand why they are releasing binary only linux drivers. I'm not very happy about it but I do understand.
You have a really good point here.
I run RH 7.1 and Quake 3 is okay under linux (Geforce 256 DDR, P3500) but it's still a touch better under windows. The problem is, when something like updatedb kicks off, it slows to a crawl.
I really can't think of a good way to deal with this, when I'm starting a game I don't always think about everything that's scheduled to run in the next hour, or could be started for some reason. What I'd like to have is a script I could run that would automatically knock everything else down prority wise before I launched to game.
I guess what this comes down to is me not really understanding enough about how procoess prority is handled by the kernel so I'm not sure how fix this. Has anyone else ever tried to set something like this up before? If there were tools out there to do this I think it would do a lot to improve gaming on linux.
The login thing with knoq si the only thing that stops me from using it 100% of the time right now. Doesn't only happen with ebay, slashdot k5 and a bunch of others mess up too. Can't figure it out for the life of me.
I see a lot of people here jumpning up and down like this is a big nasty thing. It's not.
Using something like this should be covered under fair use. Let face it, 5 or 6 notes of the latest boy band crud comming out of you cell phone isn't going to cause record companies any grief, if you programmed it in yourself. I doubt that even if you had a site that gave the little tunes you programmed away for free they would care. The problem comes up when somebody starts selling these little clips to other people. That's not fair use, that's generating profit from someone else's trademark. That's why record companies are going to get pissed.
The issue the article brings up is that people are selling these things and not giving artists, composers or publishers their cut of the revenue. I have a hard time thinking that it's a fair use situation.
I started having some issues with wrist pain about a year ago. I did some reading on the different types of wrist problems you can get and came to the conclusion that my problems were mostly realated to muscle fatigue in the wrists.
I went out and bought a Microsoft Natural Elite (USB without the extra idiot buttons) and started using it at work 100% of the time. My problem actually became worse for a couple weeks, I had to take more breaks in order to shake out my wrists and relax. After I got used to it though, wow. Not only do I rarely get sore from typing but my speed and acuracy has increased quite a bit as well.
Anyone having trouble with this type of thing should really give one of the MS keyboards a try first. They're not for everyone but compared to the other stuff on the market they are really cheap.
One thing you might want to keep in mind, once you get used to one of these keyboards you will absolutely hate anything else. I can't type on a standard keyboard at all anymore, it just doesn't feel right. I had to buy one for home and I also bought an extra one a little while ago because the the ones without the idiot buttons are getting harder to find.
For a network running Microsoft software, taking common steps such as ensuring Guest access is disabled and that passwords are required for all resources will do the job.
Password protecting resorces isn't going to do any good at all. If you read the article it is clear that these guys are running some king of packet sniffer.
"There -- someone just turned on an NT machine and is getting mail."
There is no way to know this unless you have are collecting and looking at packets on the network. Unless all traffic on the wireless segment is encrypted you will have NO security on that segment.
We both would have passed the A+ cert without any studying whatsoever
I used to work for a large VARish type place that required everyone in a service type role to have the A+ cert. I went and took the exam one afternoon when it was slow in the office, took me 20 minutes and I got some rediculous score like 97% or something (couldn't remember the switches for smartdrive). Another guy I know managed to only miss 1 question on both exams. That thing is a joke, or at least was 6 years ago.
Did he go to the school then? Did he report the bullying? Did he demand that the bullies (if they actually touched Sean) be charged with assault? Whatever you may think of Texas criminal justice, there are still laws against assault, you know.
When I was in Junior High I got picked on a whole lot, my Mom complained to the school and got a shrink to help me deal with it. The end result of all this was ME getting sent to a special school.
The school I went to was basically a boarding school for kids that the school boards couldn't handle, I spent grade 9 there. The bullies in the school had things refined to an art. However it was about this time that genetics took over and I went from the little fat kid to being a good bit bigger and stronger than my classmates. It also happened that there and when I returned to high school I also got meaner than most of the idiots that used to pick on me. After a while it wasn't so much of a problem.
Based on my experience I understand why Sean's father might have been reluctant to get the school involved (I don't actually know what he did about it). All I learned was how to not get picked on by getting a reputation as a tough guy and beating the snot out of people that weren't intimidated by it. It worked but its' hardly a solution I feel good about.
People that run schools have absolutely no idea how to deal with problems like this and they almost never try. Yeah, Sean shouldn't have said that but I would have just hit the prick. Sean's way is still better.
My mistake, good job guys.
Full support for the automatic downloading of Windows 2000 and Windows NT printer drivers, providing the first full implementation of the Windows NT point-and-print functionality independent of Microsoft code.
This is a huge acomplishment. Using samba's print services has always been a bit of a PITA in large networks. You get a print spooler that doesn't hang when you look at it funny but you had to install drivers for each printer on the workstations. Micrsoft's server products will automagicly provide a driver for clients when you connect to the shared printer, now samba does it too.
Hats of to Jeremy and the Samba team, this is a great feature.
Would have been kind of nice to see 9x clients supported too though.