John Connor actually turns out to be a script kiddie with some mad 0-day sploits for Skynet, which is based on IIS. When SkynetISAPI32.dll causes a general protection fault, all of the terminators will blue screen with IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL, and mankind will be saved!
Oh, you mean like the dumb asses who say Microsloth, Micro$oft, or Windoze? Yeah, that's just a terribly clever way to joke about the quality of Microsoft software.
Who am I to try to restate something Penny Arcade stated so perfectly?
For this to translate over to the gun numbers, we would need a few battle fields right in the middle of America. I will again ask. Where the hell do you people live? Were is this battle field??
Since I've lived in 5 different communities, have gone to a college with 8,000 people, and now live in a major city
Well, I don't know how the FBI or myself would disagree with your worldly experience if you've seen all that! But lets take a look at their table of crime rates in 2002.
The first thing this table shows us is that 31,128,271 people live in ridiciulously dangerous high violent crime areas. Now, rather than trying to divide numbers over all demographics to water down the figure and make it sound nonsensical, if you consider that a mere 2.5 million incidents (not people, incidents, THINK!), that would mean that 8% of the people in these terribly dangerous cities would have to fend off crime in their neighborhood with a gun, or 4% of them would have to do so twice.
Clearly those are unrealistic figures aren't they? I mean, obviously since the little communities you've lived in haven't had any such incidents and you've not heard of any happening in the big city that you live in now, clearly it's not happening. Damn all these silly people and their fantasies of crime.
convince me that you "need" your gun to protect yourself
You go live in any one of these cities for a month and we'll see if you want to take guns away from non-criminals. Your ignorance of the real world isn't uncommon and I don't damn you for it, but you should at least have the courtesy of recognizing that you're not exactly worldly enough to make such broad statements when the crime that exists in some of these hotspots is very real. I find it disrespectful to those who have been hurt, raped, or killed by violent crime to have someone like you who comes from some quiet little town to say that violent crime simply doesn't exist on the scale that it does, merely to further your anti-gun ideas and agenda. Try making an argument that involves factual information about metropolitan areas rather than anecdotal evidence about quiet towns and maybe we'll believe that college is teaching you something.
I mean, ugh. Stop and think about that. That is roughly one person per 100 (.82 per 100 according to last census - 2.5 million out of 290 million).
The town I grew up in has about 20,000 people in it. That means statistically there should have been about 164 cases of defensive uses of a gun last year.
It's a small town, and I can guarantee you that if there was a single instance of someone chasing away an intruder with a gun, I would have heard about it. Let alone almost 200.
So where are all of these gun defense scenarios taking place?
You're not too bright are you? Rather than dividing up his numbers into your city's population, why not instead take some useful statistics like the number of break-ins in your city and number of gun owners, compared to other cities, and that will tell you your appropriate ratio of gun owners chasing away criminals.
Or you could just buy a clue and figure out that just because southern california had X number of rapes and murders last year doesn't mean that in my sleepy little town (in socal) there were any. Perhaps maybe they were mostly in Los Angeles and San Diego?! I doubt the amish had their fair share of the number of people chasing away intruders with guns too. According to your logic, if your city hasn't gotten it's fair share of intruders, if instead there were 0, then by your presumed direct link to the proof or disproof of the statistic, there were NONE. Good to know the US is so safe then.
HELLO? ANYBODY HOME? THINK MCFLY! THINK!
What's really funny to me is not only that you apply this stupid method of "disproof" to your own city, but you tell people:
"Do the math for where you live now and see if it makes sense to you."
There are on average 816 tornado deaths per year in the US. As there are 290,809,777 people in the US, and 35,484,453 of them live in California, we have 12.2% of the national population so clearly we should have had about 100 of those tornado deaths here. The fact that we clearly haven't had that many of those deaths clearly shows that the tornado death number is just silly to the point of absurdity.
Again, the problem with your entire argument is that you're making uninformed statements about the Direct3D API. The design of the Direct3D API was actually far superior in a couple important ways than OpenGL at the time for the reasons I've already enumerated more than once for you. The Direct3D design allows for software implementations of any hardware function using the newest processor extensions and other compensating hardware advances to be used to their full extent. OpenGL on the other hand is more of a general API that addresses the functionality of the hardware and the process of displaying 3D graphics. Some people may consider it a rich and powerful API, but from a design perspective it lacks part of what the Direct3D and overall DirectX abstraction layers are all about. Not just the hardware abstraction of equivalent feature sets among multiple video card vendors (which is what OpenGL is), but *optimal* software emulation of lacking features providing game developers the ability to write games using the newest features without leaving the older systems behind (ideally of course).
It has nothing to do with Direct3D catching up to OpenGL in terms of implementation performance (which really had more to do with the D3D driver implementation situation than the need for the D3D API design itself to "mature"). It has to do with the design goals of Direct3D being broader and more robust than the simple functionality achieved by OpenGL.
Despite the fact that you accept that you aren't technically knowledgable on the subject, you still make assertations about Direct3D (your perception of periods in which it lacked quality / performance) which aren't supported by the reality of the situation at the time. Was Direct3D and DirectX a wedge for Microsoft to drive itself into the gaming arena when gaming was looking to be one of the most profitable businesses on the horizon? Absolutely it was. But it was more than that. It was an abstraction layer in an area that absolutely needed an abstraction layer, because CPUs were starting to implement SIMD extensions, and with the AMD cpus, certain methods using x87 vs integer were faster on certain CPUs, and the greater abstraction layer allowed these optimizations to be taken into account in many areas (video, sound, etc). There's no doubt that awesome programmers like Carmack can roll their own SSE usage with inline assembly and write excellent engines using OpenGL, but we all know that most video games being released today don't have that kind of talent. What I want (and what MS provides) is a way for excellent and enjoyable games that AREN'T written by geniuses like Carmack to still take some advantage of ALL of my hardware, from my contemporary CPU with multiple SIMD instruction sets to my EAX sound card to my nvidia GPU, no matter how vanilla the video game programmer is. No matter what your opinion about the reasoning for originally introducing the API is, DirectX (and Direct3D) provides that power so that I can squeeze the power out of the hardware I paid for.
no, i'm not a professional 3d programmer, nor a professional windows programmer, and i don't care what tecnical merits may have some microsoft product, i'm just not interested. i care about microsoft just when their business strategy affects me. d3d was NOT a tecnically superior api, as usual it was only the best way they found to get rid of an open and portable standard from the consumer level instead of adopting (and possibly improving) it as the rest of the world did.
You state:
"no, i'm not a professional 3d programmer, nor a professional windows programmer, and i don't care what tecnical merits may have some microsoft product"
Then you state:
"d3d was NOT a tecnically superior api"
By your own admission, you have zero knowledge of the subject you speak of. You completely avoid the fact that the software emulation with optimized x87, MMX, SSE, 3d-Now!, SSE2, 3d-Now! Extended, and SSE3 implementations of missing hardware features provides greater performance and compatibility under D3D, whereas under OpenGL games, unless the game itself includes a software emulation of said graphical feature, you're out of luck. Again, you don't know what you're talking about, you admit you don't know what you're talking about, and most importantly, you're WRONG. Take your Microsoft business strategy bitching somewhere besides a technical discussion. You're a little out of your league to make statements like the one above.
How about this: MS supporters attack the arguments of the FOSS supporters when they are wrong instead of whining "they hate Microsoft"?
How about this: FOSS supporters and Linux fanboys attack Microsoft on it's technical merits rather than on it's business practices?
How about we compare the stagnant and limited UNIX API (or the proprietary extensions which reinvent the wheel here and there) (or POSIX extensions half supported here and half supported there) with the Win32 API which not only supports more functionality overall, but supports fundamental concepts like true multi-threading, thread local storage, semaphores, mutexes, critical sections, atomic operations, and more easily accessable to the application programmer so they can develop truly scalable applications without having to resort to what Apache foundation was forced to do, that being the implementation of the Apache Portable Runtime project, which exists not only to properly support Windows and UNIX, but to support the million different unique fragments of UNIX that exist?
How about we compare Microsoft's C/C++ compiler and wonder why to this day they're still turning out better code than gcc? If the open source development model is so superior, why haven't the millions of C/C++ programmers out there made gcc into one of the finest compilers ever created? I mean, it is the fundamental core that creates binaries from all of the hard work of all of the open source programmers.
And since you're so ready to tell people how they should complain, how about Linux fanboys carry on some kind of technical discussion about Microsoft and Linux's merits without saying M$, Micro$oft, Microsloth, etc etc etc. I mean are we professionals here or not?
And as for this "easier to kill the messenger" shit, consider that if someone is making a statement comparing two things, it is important to consider the biases of the person making these statements. That's why your entire statement doesn't make sense. The author of that site isn't the "messenger" (meaning he merely carries news of some undeniable facts or that he bears the words of others), he is the person writing the message. Therefore, considering his biases when considering his message is not only appropriate, but quite important in this type of debate.
Microsoft's business motives aside, DirectX is a completely legitimate abstraction layer that has a lot of merit. It allows people who lack certain hardware to not only have it emulated, but have it emulated with extended instruction sets like MMX and SSE for the highest performance software emulation. This allows developers to write games that take advantage of newer features while still providing a playable experience for those using older hardware. It also obviously abstracts the entire picture of video game programming, from input to sound to video to networking. OpenGL is not to be compared to DirectX as a whole, because OpenGL lacks so much of what DirectX is. DirectX is a gaming platform. Direct3D can be compared to OpenGL, but again it lacks much of what Direct3D is. It's more than an interface to a video subsystem. It's a dynamic linkage of multiple optimized implementations of functions to allow the maximum potential of your computer system to be used, rather than relying on the merits of your GPU alone.
In short sir, your entire argument is full of shit. You make a quite poor representitive of the open source community, and as a member of the open source community, I invite you to leave the debates to those who are more qualified to engage in them.
According to what policy? What type of monitoring wouldn't be excessively invasive? Monitoring typically means remote viewing of the screen of the user, in addition to HTTP logs and other resources. Most netadmins I know use Dameware NT Utilities, which allows for remote viewing without user notification if you roll your own INI file and force it on the user when you silently remotely install.
It seems like the parent to this post just told all these morons who don't like the idea that someone can and will monitor their computer at work if they fuck around. You can talk a lot of shit about sysadmins having a "god complex" but a whole lot more network users, bosses or workers, have a "fuck around on the internet complex." If you want to argue that it isn't "right" for the admin to invade their privacy, that all depends on whether the company or agency's use policy explicitly grants the admin the power to monitor, but I submit to you that the individual who is dicking around on company time is a worthless deadweight bastard who either: (a) is useless and should probably have their position eliminated or new responsibilities assigned, or (b) is wasting time because they know that other employees are going to pick up the work load they're slacking on. Often in business, there isn't any direct way to measure productivity in numbers, so it's hard for upper management to find those slackers and bring them in line.
Again back to the beautiful parent post which hands all of you naysayers a big cup of shut-the-fuck-up, I suggest you READ your company's computer use policy. Any company I've admined for has had the same policy describing the right and responsibility of the admin to monitor the network for people wasting our time and resources. And as a stockholder in my company, I certainly have an interest in doing so. I have presented evidence in two different companies to have a total of five people terminated for recreational use of computer resources, each and every time having warned the individual and reiterated the company policy AND informing them that I am monitoring their computer.
You fuck around, you get caught. Don't blame the admin for catching you fucking around, unless you're going to blame the security guard for catching theives too.
You know if that damned security guard hadn't been invading my privacy by watching those damned security cameras...
One might argue that the difference is that a hardware software can be implemented in hardware as a finite state machine as opposed to a piece of software which could be impacted by the environment it runs under.
I'm not saying software firewalls are crap, but there is an argument for properly implemented hardware firewalls.
I never said I was a "high and mighty knower of all." In fact, I admitted I don't know as much as many people. I didn't say that people who don't pursue Ph.D.s lack intelligence, I said that people who blindly knock Ph.D.s, just like vocational certificate holders who knock real colleges, lack intelligence. As for your reasons why a Ph.D. offers people nothing, if you reread my post, I said that valid reasons not to get a Ph.D. are personal, not broad generalizations. In your following paragraph you claim that I indicated that I believed that intelligence, adaptability, and ability were determined by the level of one's education. I said nothing of the sort, in fact, I indicated the opposite by pointing out that I do as well as a BSCS with only my AA. What I said was, there are concepts taught in Computer Science that are what make up the actual *science* of it, rather than it simply being an excersize in data entry, which persons not formally trained in Computer Science are often ignorant of.
Your summary points:
"Don't climb on your high horse."
I didn't climb on any high horse, I admitted that my formal education is in its infancy and that there are many people with more knowledge than I.
"There's always someone smarter and more qualified."
Pretty sure I said that.
"Real genius and value often comes from the dark corners of life, not the fluorescent hallways of academia."
I believe I indicated that with my own current level of success, I merely refuse to dismiss the remainder of my education as useless simply because I can work at the level of other programmers with a higher level of education. Am I truly misguided because I hold a higher education in high regard, and feel that a complete education in my field is valuable? I think not.
I didn't say a Ph.D. was everything, but I refuse to listen to people say it is nothing.
Here come the ignorant assholes who will knock on getting a Ph.D. because they can't get one. Sure, I'll accept that a Ph.D. isn't terribly practical for many jobs. Our department is hiring programmers right now, and I would probably veto a Ph.D. applying for our junior software engineer position. But I am sick of hearing everyone with lesser education cover for their insecurity and lack of accomplishment by knocking higher educational goals.
I work as a "Senior Software Engineer", doing serious C++ programming including use of Win32 API, Winsock, OpenSSL, MySQL, etc in a multi-threaded multi-server multi-system programming environment which powers telecommunication systems which require very robust programs capable of maintaining the best uptimes possible. There are many developers who do work that makes my job look simple, but considering I only have an AA in CompSci, I think I am doing fairly well. I work on the same level as individuals who have BSCS in CompSci and some who have 20 years experience in development. However, I don't have a lack of appreication for their superior education and experience. I am working towards my own BSCS, Master's, and maybe even Ph.D. someday. Not to try to bring in a major paycheck (I already do very well), and not to try to be better than those who only have a BSCS, but because Computer Science is my field. It is my study, my hobby, and I have dedicated my life to it. Since I consider myself a (budding) Computer Scientist, it is simply my responsibility and my desire to continue to advance in the field and learn everything I can about all of the many aspects of Computer Science.
People with vocational certificates (MCSE, CCNA, etc), are often fine employees to do the work they've been trained to do. I find Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science from trade schools like Coleman College to be offensive mockeries of a real BSCS, which I have worked for years to gain, while they took a few classes in outdated languages like COBOL and FoxPro. (We have one such person working in our customer service department.) But people who actually attend a university, any real university, and learn the science of computers, are a league above those who would criticize what they cannot attain.
Just because you couldn't make it in college doesn't mean college has no value. Just because you didn't stick it out long enough to learn something, doesn't mean colleges don't teach CompSci principles which no self-taught person will understand and appreciate. The only reasons to not advance your education further are your own reasons, so to attempt to apply them to everyone and make blanket statements about higher educational levels than your own seems more like a desperate attempt to cover your insecurity that there might be people out there who know more than you do, even if your non-tech manager and your family members think you're the God of Computers.
Sounds to me like you want to not screen customers very carefully and also not endure the problems associated with bad customers.
If only you knew what you were talking about. As I said before, we visually inspect new orders, we implemented a social security number checking system powered by TransUnion, and we've taken many other steps to filter our incoming clients for abuse, even though it would be highly profitable for us to simply let them sign up and not cancel their accounts (they continue to pay for the service unless you cancel them as a general rule). Yet another example of how nothing a company or corporation does, no matter what kind of steps they take, nothing satisfies the anti-corporate anti-spam type crowd. They know they can't attack the businesses responsible, so instead they attack abused service providers, implying that we aren't doing enough since the problem isn't solved. Claiming that a business should DNA test their customers to look for genes that mean the person will grow up to be an unsolicited advertiser.
It's real easy to point the finger and claim we don't do enough, but we're the ones paying the phone bills for these assholes and for your "revenge" on them, so obviously it is in our interest to do everything we can to block them from using our service while trying to remain competitive with much larger 800 number providers like AT&T.
Oh, and as much as we don't like paying their phone bills, the cost is typically a penny a minute or less, so if you think a couple die hard "vigilantes" are going to seriously impact the bill as opposed to the thousands of other people calling in asking to be removed from the guy's fax list, you're kidding yourself. The real world runs on bigger numbers than the number of penny/minutes a couple thousand dorks can rack up while they feel like they're doing something to "solve the problem."
While you're stereotypically attacking the closest business involved, why not find a way to blame Microsoft for part of this? I mean, some of our computers here (although not the servers), run Windows. Therefore, Microsoft makes the operating system that powers the business that provides the 800 number that the illegal fax spammer uses to make money from his illegal faxing. Go get em tiger!
You think you're getting back at the spammer, but here's what's really happening. I work for a mid-sized toll free 800 services provider. These bastards sign up for our services, pay the first month's cost on the system, advertise illegally, and then never pay the cost of the usage. They collect whatever amount of successful business they get, many times by spamming starting Friday night so we don't get the complaints and shut them down until Monday morning, and then when we cancel their system for abuse, they don't pay the usage bill, which is often a flood of callers screaming at them in voicemail. Then a few of the callers look up who manages the 800 number of the spammer, figure out it is our company, and they call us and scream and/or report us to the FCC or FTC for spamming, when we're not the ones doing it. This is a very very common problem for 800 toll free services providers. There is little we can do to stop it. We rapidly answer supoenas from Attornies General of states, and we report these spammers to the FCC, including every bit of information we can gather regarding the spammer. Sometimes the systems are purchased with fake credit cards. We try to ban their names and aliases, and we have a person who visually screens the orders for known spammers and fake looking orders. With all of our efforts, and by complying with all telecom regulations and reporting fraud and phone/fax abuse to the FCC, we still suffer from these morons every month. There's nothing to stop some fax spammer from getting a new name, new credit card, buying an 800 number, fax spamming up a storm, and putting that 800 number they bought from us as the call-back number.
Now, we do NOT allow people to abuse our outbound fax system for the spamming, this is typically done either with their own equipment or through some spam-friendly service. Our fax system doesn't allow faxing to large enough groups of numbers for anything but standard office groupware type faxing. All of our outbound services are heavily monitored for abuse.
My point is this: You think by flooding the 800 number with phone calls and wasting their minutes that you are punishing the spammer. That's assuming the bastard is going to pay his bill, when quite frequently, he is not. We end up paying his bill while we do everything possible to rapidly kill spam accounts and report them to authorities. If you really want to help resolve this problem, the proper response is to report them to the FCC. If the FCC receives enough complaints, they act and people get taken down (we've seen it). You can easily fill out the abuse report form located here on the FCC's site: http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/cib/fcc475.cfm
Please, understand that unlike email spammers who have positive relationships with their providers, phone providers are actually under the gun with the FCC and rarely do they ever willingly partake in phone/fax spamming which is clearly illegal under FCC and FTC regulations. Since they aren't working with us in a positive relationship, they know they can screw us and not pay their bill.
Slashdot Mirror
John Connor actually turns out to be a script kiddie with some mad 0-day sploits for Skynet, which is based on IIS. When SkynetISAPI32.dll causes a general protection fault, all of the terminators will blue screen with IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL, and mankind will be saved!
It just gives you a chaffed knob
It's called KY my friend.
Or if you're ghetto, use shampoo or something.
Oh, you mean like the dumb asses who say Microsloth, Micro$oft, or Windoze? Yeah, that's just a terribly clever way to joke about the quality of Microsoft software.
Who am I to try to restate something Penny Arcade stated so perfectly?
penny-arcade.com
I mean so you can now deliver voice mail into e-mail because it's all IP packets, does that mean I should ditch my telecom investment?
Yes! http://www.freedomvoice.com
I am BasharTeg.
My balls are bigger than yours.
Come to ToorCon and I'll show you.
I agree that DragonFly has fantastic potential and that FreeBSD 5.x has been a long and bumpy road. However, when your post begins with:
Yeah, I know. It's a beta. However,
Stop typing.
Oh snap!
For this to translate over to the gun numbers, we would need a few battle fields right in the middle of America. I will again ask. Where the hell do you people live? Were is this battle field??
Since I've lived in 5 different communities, have gone to a college with 8,000 people, and now live in a major city
Well, I don't know how the FBI or myself would disagree with your worldly experience if you've seen all that! But lets take a look at their table of crime rates in 2002.
The first thing this table shows us is that 31,128,271 people live in ridiciulously dangerous high violent crime areas. Now, rather than trying to divide numbers over all demographics to water down the figure and make it sound nonsensical, if you consider that a mere 2.5 million incidents (not people, incidents, THINK!), that would mean that 8% of the people in these terribly dangerous cities would have to fend off crime in their neighborhood with a gun, or 4% of them would have to do so twice.
Clearly those are unrealistic figures aren't they? I mean, obviously since the little communities you've lived in haven't had any such incidents and you've not heard of any happening in the big city that you live in now, clearly it's not happening. Damn all these silly people and their fantasies of crime.
convince me that you "need" your gun to protect yourself
You go live in any one of these cities for a month and we'll see if you want to take guns away from non-criminals. Your ignorance of the real world isn't uncommon and I don't damn you for it, but you should at least have the courtesy of recognizing that you're not exactly worldly enough to make such broad statements when the crime that exists in some of these hotspots is very real. I find it disrespectful to those who have been hurt, raped, or killed by violent crime to have someone like you who comes from some quiet little town to say that violent crime simply doesn't exist on the scale that it does, merely to further your anti-gun ideas and agenda. Try making an argument that involves factual information about metropolitan areas rather than anecdotal evidence about quiet towns and maybe we'll believe that college is teaching you something.
Here are your battle zones:
Metropolitan Areas with the Highest Violent Crime Rates in the United States
I think I'll just finish this one off with:
Oh snap!
I mean, ugh. Stop and think about that. That is roughly one person per 100 (.82 per 100 according to last census - 2.5 million out of 290 million).
The town I grew up in has about 20,000 people in it. That means statistically there should have been about 164 cases of defensive uses of a gun last year.
It's a small town, and I can guarantee you that if there was a single instance of someone chasing away an intruder with a gun, I would have heard about it. Let alone almost 200.
So where are all of these gun defense scenarios taking place?
You're not too bright are you? Rather than dividing up his numbers into your city's population, why not instead take some useful statistics like the number of break-ins in your city and number of gun owners, compared to other cities, and that will tell you your appropriate ratio of gun owners chasing away criminals.
Or you could just buy a clue and figure out that just because southern california had X number of rapes and murders last year doesn't mean that in my sleepy little town (in socal) there were any. Perhaps maybe they were mostly in Los Angeles and San Diego?! I doubt the amish had their fair share of the number of people chasing away intruders with guns too. According to your logic, if your city hasn't gotten it's fair share of intruders, if instead there were 0, then by your presumed direct link to the proof or disproof of the statistic, there were NONE. Good to know the US is so safe then.
HELLO? ANYBODY HOME? THINK MCFLY! THINK!
What's really funny to me is not only that you apply this stupid method of "disproof" to your own city, but you tell people:
"Do the math for where you live now and see if it makes sense to you."
There are on average 816 tornado deaths per year in the US. As there are 290,809,777 people in the US, and 35,484,453 of them live in California, we have 12.2% of the national population so clearly we should have had about 100 of those tornado deaths here. The fact that we clearly haven't had that many of those deaths clearly shows that the tornado death number is just silly to the point of absurdity.
Again, the problem with your entire argument is that you're making uninformed statements about the Direct3D API. The design of the Direct3D API was actually far superior in a couple important ways than OpenGL at the time for the reasons I've already enumerated more than once for you. The Direct3D design allows for software implementations of any hardware function using the newest processor extensions and other compensating hardware advances to be used to their full extent. OpenGL on the other hand is more of a general API that addresses the functionality of the hardware and the process of displaying 3D graphics. Some people may consider it a rich and powerful API, but from a design perspective it lacks part of what the Direct3D and overall DirectX abstraction layers are all about. Not just the hardware abstraction of equivalent feature sets among multiple video card vendors (which is what OpenGL is), but *optimal* software emulation of lacking features providing game developers the ability to write games using the newest features without leaving the older systems behind (ideally of course).
It has nothing to do with Direct3D catching up to OpenGL in terms of implementation performance (which really had more to do with the D3D driver implementation situation than the need for the D3D API design itself to "mature"). It has to do with the design goals of Direct3D being broader and more robust than the simple functionality achieved by OpenGL.
Despite the fact that you accept that you aren't technically knowledgable on the subject, you still make assertations about Direct3D (your perception of periods in which it lacked quality / performance) which aren't supported by the reality of the situation at the time. Was Direct3D and DirectX a wedge for Microsoft to drive itself into the gaming arena when gaming was looking to be one of the most profitable businesses on the horizon? Absolutely it was. But it was more than that. It was an abstraction layer in an area that absolutely needed an abstraction layer, because CPUs were starting to implement SIMD extensions, and with the AMD cpus, certain methods using x87 vs integer were faster on certain CPUs, and the greater abstraction layer allowed these optimizations to be taken into account in many areas (video, sound, etc). There's no doubt that awesome programmers like Carmack can roll their own SSE usage with inline assembly and write excellent engines using OpenGL, but we all know that most video games being released today don't have that kind of talent. What I want (and what MS provides) is a way for excellent and enjoyable games that AREN'T written by geniuses like Carmack to still take some advantage of ALL of my hardware, from my contemporary CPU with multiple SIMD instruction sets to my EAX sound card to my nvidia GPU, no matter how vanilla the video game programmer is. No matter what your opinion about the reasoning for originally introducing the API is, DirectX (and Direct3D) provides that power so that I can squeeze the power out of the hardware I paid for.
no, i'm not a professional 3d programmer, nor a professional windows programmer, and i don't care what tecnical merits may have some microsoft product, i'm just not interested. i care about microsoft just when their business strategy affects me. d3d was NOT a tecnically superior api, as usual it was only the best way they found to get rid of an open and portable standard from the consumer level instead of adopting (and possibly improving) it as the rest of the world did.
You state:
"no, i'm not a professional 3d programmer, nor a professional windows programmer, and i don't care what tecnical merits may have some microsoft product"
Then you state:
"d3d was NOT a tecnically superior api"
By your own admission, you have zero knowledge of the subject you speak of. You completely avoid the fact that the software emulation with optimized x87, MMX, SSE, 3d-Now!, SSE2, 3d-Now! Extended, and SSE3 implementations of missing hardware features provides greater performance and compatibility under D3D, whereas under OpenGL games, unless the game itself includes a software emulation of said graphical feature, you're out of luck. Again, you don't know what you're talking about, you admit you don't know what you're talking about, and most importantly, you're WRONG. Take your Microsoft business strategy bitching somewhere besides a technical discussion. You're a little out of your league to make statements like the one above.
How about this: MS supporters attack the arguments of the FOSS supporters when they are wrong instead of whining "they hate Microsoft"?
How about this: FOSS supporters and Linux fanboys attack Microsoft on it's technical merits rather than on it's business practices?
How about we compare the stagnant and limited UNIX API (or the proprietary extensions which reinvent the wheel here and there) (or POSIX extensions half supported here and half supported there) with the Win32 API which not only supports more functionality overall, but supports fundamental concepts like true multi-threading, thread local storage, semaphores, mutexes, critical sections, atomic operations, and more easily accessable to the application programmer so they can develop truly scalable applications without having to resort to what Apache foundation was forced to do, that being the implementation of the Apache Portable Runtime project, which exists not only to properly support Windows and UNIX, but to support the million different unique fragments of UNIX that exist?
How about we compare Microsoft's C/C++ compiler and wonder why to this day they're still turning out better code than gcc? If the open source development model is so superior, why haven't the millions of C/C++ programmers out there made gcc into one of the finest compilers ever created? I mean, it is the fundamental core that creates binaries from all of the hard work of all of the open source programmers.
And since you're so ready to tell people how they should complain, how about Linux fanboys carry on some kind of technical discussion about Microsoft and Linux's merits without saying M$, Micro$oft, Microsloth, etc etc etc. I mean are we professionals here or not?
And as for this "easier to kill the messenger" shit, consider that if someone is making a statement comparing two things, it is important to consider the biases of the person making these statements. That's why your entire statement doesn't make sense. The author of that site isn't the "messenger" (meaning he merely carries news of some undeniable facts or that he bears the words of others), he is the person writing the message. Therefore, considering his biases when considering his message is not only appropriate, but quite important in this type of debate.
Microsoft's business motives aside, DirectX is a completely legitimate abstraction layer that has a lot of merit. It allows people who lack certain hardware to not only have it emulated, but have it emulated with extended instruction sets like MMX and SSE for the highest performance software emulation. This allows developers to write games that take advantage of newer features while still providing a playable experience for those using older hardware. It also obviously abstracts the entire picture of video game programming, from input to sound to video to networking. OpenGL is not to be compared to DirectX as a whole, because OpenGL lacks so much of what DirectX is. DirectX is a gaming platform. Direct3D can be compared to OpenGL, but again it lacks much of what Direct3D is. It's more than an interface to a video subsystem. It's a dynamic linkage of multiple optimized implementations of functions to allow the maximum potential of your computer system to be used, rather than relying on the merits of your GPU alone.
In short sir, your entire argument is full of shit. You make a quite poor representitive of the open source community, and as a member of the open source community, I invite you to leave the debates to those who are more qualified to engage in them.
BETA. B-E-T-A. BETA TESTING. BETA
B
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Can you understand that?
Not really. Most processors optimize xchg eax,eax by just throwing it away anymore.
"Screengrabs are excessively invasive"
According to what policy? What type of monitoring wouldn't be excessively invasive? Monitoring typically means remote viewing of the screen of the user, in addition to HTTP logs and other resources. Most netadmins I know use Dameware NT Utilities, which allows for remote viewing without user notification if you roll your own INI file and force it on the user when you silently remotely install.
OH NOES (http://www.ohnoes.org)
It seems like the parent to this post just told all these morons who don't like the idea that someone can and will monitor their computer at work if they fuck around. You can talk a lot of shit about sysadmins having a "god complex" but a whole lot more network users, bosses or workers, have a "fuck around on the internet complex." If you want to argue that it isn't "right" for the admin to invade their privacy, that all depends on whether the company or agency's use policy explicitly grants the admin the power to monitor, but I submit to you that the individual who is dicking around on company time is a worthless deadweight bastard who either: (a) is useless and should probably have their position eliminated or new responsibilities assigned, or (b) is wasting time because they know that other employees are going to pick up the work load they're slacking on. Often in business, there isn't any direct way to measure productivity in numbers, so it's hard for upper management to find those slackers and bring them in line.
Again back to the beautiful parent post which hands all of you naysayers a big cup of shut-the-fuck-up, I suggest you READ your company's computer use policy. Any company I've admined for has had the same policy describing the right and responsibility of the admin to monitor the network for people wasting our time and resources. And as a stockholder in my company, I certainly have an interest in doing so. I have presented evidence in two different companies to have a total of five people terminated for recreational use of computer resources, each and every time having warned the individual and reiterated the company policy AND informing them that I am monitoring their computer.
You fuck around, you get caught. Don't blame the admin for catching you fucking around, unless you're going to blame the security guard for catching theives too.
You know if that damned security guard hadn't been invading my privacy by watching those damned security cameras...
One might argue that the difference is that a hardware software can be implemented in hardware as a finite state machine as opposed to a piece of software which could be impacted by the environment it runs under.
I'm not saying software firewalls are crap, but there is an argument for properly implemented hardware firewalls.
We can only dream.
No, I live in the San Diego area.
I never said I was a "high and mighty knower of all." In fact, I admitted I don't know as much as many people. I didn't say that people who don't pursue Ph.D.s lack intelligence, I said that people who blindly knock Ph.D.s, just like vocational certificate holders who knock real colleges, lack intelligence. As for your reasons why a Ph.D. offers people nothing, if you reread my post, I said that valid reasons not to get a Ph.D. are personal, not broad generalizations. In your following paragraph you claim that I indicated that I believed that intelligence, adaptability, and ability were determined by the level of one's education. I said nothing of the sort, in fact, I indicated the opposite by pointing out that I do as well as a BSCS with only my AA. What I said was, there are concepts taught in Computer Science that are what make up the actual *science* of it, rather than it simply being an excersize in data entry, which persons not formally trained in Computer Science are often ignorant of.
Your summary points:
"Don't climb on your high horse."
I didn't climb on any high horse, I admitted that my formal education is in its infancy and that there are many people with more knowledge than I.
"There's always someone smarter and more qualified."
Pretty sure I said that.
"Real genius and value often comes from the dark corners of life, not the fluorescent hallways of academia."
I believe I indicated that with my own current level of success, I merely refuse to dismiss the remainder of my education as useless simply because I can work at the level of other programmers with a higher level of education. Am I truly misguided because I hold a higher education in high regard, and feel that a complete education in my field is valuable? I think not.
I didn't say a Ph.D. was everything, but I refuse to listen to people say it is nothing.
Here come the ignorant assholes who will knock on getting a Ph.D. because they can't get one. Sure, I'll accept that a Ph.D. isn't terribly practical for many jobs. Our department is hiring programmers right now, and I would probably veto a Ph.D. applying for our junior software engineer position. But I am sick of hearing everyone with lesser education cover for their insecurity and lack of accomplishment by knocking higher educational goals.
I work as a "Senior Software Engineer", doing serious C++ programming including use of Win32 API, Winsock, OpenSSL, MySQL, etc in a multi-threaded multi-server multi-system programming environment which powers telecommunication systems which require very robust programs capable of maintaining the best uptimes possible. There are many developers who do work that makes my job look simple, but considering I only have an AA in CompSci, I think I am doing fairly well. I work on the same level as individuals who have BSCS in CompSci and some who have 20 years experience in development. However, I don't have a lack of appreication for their superior education and experience. I am working towards my own BSCS, Master's, and maybe even Ph.D. someday. Not to try to bring in a major paycheck (I already do very well), and not to try to be better than those who only have a BSCS, but because Computer Science is my field. It is my study, my hobby, and I have dedicated my life to it. Since I consider myself a (budding) Computer Scientist, it is simply my responsibility and my desire to continue to advance in the field and learn everything I can about all of the many aspects of Computer Science.
People with vocational certificates (MCSE, CCNA, etc), are often fine employees to do the work they've been trained to do. I find Bachelor's degrees in Computer Science from trade schools like Coleman College to be offensive mockeries of a real BSCS, which I have worked for years to gain, while they took a few classes in outdated languages like COBOL and FoxPro. (We have one such person working in our customer service department.) But people who actually attend a university, any real university, and learn the science of computers, are a league above those who would criticize what they cannot attain.
Just because you couldn't make it in college doesn't mean college has no value. Just because you didn't stick it out long enough to learn something, doesn't mean colleges don't teach CompSci principles which no self-taught person will understand and appreciate. The only reasons to not advance your education further are your own reasons, so to attempt to apply them to everyone and make blanket statements about higher educational levels than your own seems more like a desperate attempt to cover your insecurity that there might be people out there who know more than you do, even if your non-tech manager and your family members think you're the God of Computers.
Uhhh, I don't know, the fact that you can override your MAC address a little easier than you could override your processor ID number?
I don't agree with processor IDs, but that was a stupid question to be modded so high.
I am hereby claiming this quote to be the first law of trolling. Many more will follow!
"If they are willing to be trolled, let them be trolled."
Sounds to me like you want to not screen customers very carefully and also not endure the problems associated with bad customers.
If only you knew what you were talking about. As I said before, we visually inspect new orders, we implemented a social security number checking system powered by TransUnion, and we've taken many other steps to filter our incoming clients for abuse, even though it would be highly profitable for us to simply let them sign up and not cancel their accounts (they continue to pay for the service unless you cancel them as a general rule). Yet another example of how nothing a company or corporation does, no matter what kind of steps they take, nothing satisfies the anti-corporate anti-spam type crowd. They know they can't attack the businesses responsible, so instead they attack abused service providers, implying that we aren't doing enough since the problem isn't solved. Claiming that a business should DNA test their customers to look for genes that mean the person will grow up to be an unsolicited advertiser.
It's real easy to point the finger and claim we don't do enough, but we're the ones paying the phone bills for these assholes and for your "revenge" on them, so obviously it is in our interest to do everything we can to block them from using our service while trying to remain competitive with much larger 800 number providers like AT&T.
Oh, and as much as we don't like paying their phone bills, the cost is typically a penny a minute or less, so if you think a couple die hard "vigilantes" are going to seriously impact the bill as opposed to the thousands of other people calling in asking to be removed from the guy's fax list, you're kidding yourself. The real world runs on bigger numbers than the number of penny/minutes a couple thousand dorks can rack up while they feel like they're doing something to "solve the problem."
While you're stereotypically attacking the closest business involved, why not find a way to blame Microsoft for part of this? I mean, some of our computers here (although not the servers), run Windows. Therefore, Microsoft makes the operating system that powers the business that provides the 800 number that the illegal fax spammer uses to make money from his illegal faxing. Go get em tiger!
Hang on a second,
You think you're getting back at the spammer, but here's what's really happening. I work for a mid-sized toll free 800 services provider. These bastards sign up for our services, pay the first month's cost on the system, advertise illegally, and then never pay the cost of the usage. They collect whatever amount of successful business they get, many times by spamming starting Friday night so we don't get the complaints and shut them down until Monday morning, and then when we cancel their system for abuse, they don't pay the usage bill, which is often a flood of callers screaming at them in voicemail. Then a few of the callers look up who manages the 800 number of the spammer, figure out it is our company, and they call us and scream and/or report us to the FCC or FTC for spamming, when we're not the ones doing it. This is a very very common problem for 800 toll free services providers. There is little we can do to stop it. We rapidly answer supoenas from Attornies General of states, and we report these spammers to the FCC, including every bit of information we can gather regarding the spammer. Sometimes the systems are purchased with fake credit cards. We try to ban their names and aliases, and we have a person who visually screens the orders for known spammers and fake looking orders. With all of our efforts, and by complying with all telecom regulations and reporting fraud and phone/fax abuse to the FCC, we still suffer from these morons every month. There's nothing to stop some fax spammer from getting a new name, new credit card, buying an 800 number, fax spamming up a storm, and putting that 800 number they bought from us as the call-back number.
Now, we do NOT allow people to abuse our outbound fax system for the spamming, this is typically done either with their own equipment or through some spam-friendly service. Our fax system doesn't allow faxing to large enough groups of numbers for anything but standard office groupware type faxing. All of our outbound services are heavily monitored for abuse.
My point is this: You think by flooding the 800 number with phone calls and wasting their minutes that you are punishing the spammer. That's assuming the bastard is going to pay his bill, when quite frequently, he is not. We end up paying his bill while we do everything possible to rapidly kill spam accounts and report them to authorities. If you really want to help resolve this problem, the proper response is to report them to the FCC. If the FCC receives enough complaints, they act and people get taken down (we've seen it). You can easily fill out the abuse report form located here on the FCC's site: http://svartifoss2.fcc.gov/cib/fcc475.cfm
Please, understand that unlike email spammers who have positive relationships with their providers, phone providers are actually under the gun with the FCC and rarely do they ever willingly partake in phone/fax spamming which is clearly illegal under FCC and FTC regulations. Since they aren't working with us in a positive relationship, they know they can screw us and not pay their bill.