First of all, those options aren't really alternatives. Dial-up is too slow for most practical purposes. Satellite has too high of a latency, so it won't work for games or remote control. WiMax is really expensive, not very fast, and not available in a great many places. Right now, cable and DSL are the only real possibilities in the US.
Second, I'd like to point out that these things are not competition. When I want to buy cheese, I have multiple places I can go that sell the exact same cheese, and many nearly identical variants of that cheese. If I want to buy internet, I have only one option of each type. One cable provider and one DSL provider (phone company). I don't think most areas have multiple competing local cable or phone companies. So it really is a monopoly, even if you include those options. It just becomes multiple competing monopolies, which is not a whole lot better.
Going even further off-topic, this is why the carrier of the bits and the ISP need to be decoupled. It would be fine to have one cable company, so long as I had many ISPs. That's how dial-up was: one phone company and many ISPs, and the phone company was neutral to what they carried. This was why any given area had dozens or even hundreds of ISPs to choose from, each with different plans and costs and benefits. That was real competition.
If Carbon Sequestration meant that the Carbon was placed into a solid form, I might like it. Imagine:
coal --> energy + diamonds
That's not a bad formula! Or:
coal --> energy + carbon (bricks, fibers, nanofibers, etc.).
We could use that for building materials. No problem there. But:
coal --> energy + high pressure gas buried in an old mine shaft underground waiting to escape
I read these types of things, and I realize that they are trying to show that we have a solution, but really they are showing how this technology doesn't scale.
I don't think that covering 22000 square miles of the planet with solar collectors would be an environmentally friendly thing to do. And by those numbers, we would need to do it 11 more times to meet our energy needs. That just shows that this type of system isn't worth putting time or money into.
...That Trojan inserted a banner-ad displaying script into any html file on his system, which included the help files for the language pack.
That meant that anyone installing the language pack would have malicious ad displaying code inside their browser -- which could be used for other exploits.
So the language pack did not have a Trojan. I don't think the language packs even have executable code. The language packs had help files with banner ads in them. That's not even close to what the headline says. But I guess "Vietnamese help files may contain ads" doesn't sound as scary.
(I guess this means Slashdot sensationalism isn't restricted to anti-Microsoft articles.)
I thought that the Patriot Act was passed "unanimously" by a verbal vote or show of hands or something like that. I didn't think all votes were logged (which is absurd).
It isn't like asking for quiet in the reading room at all.
First, they are requiring ID in a public forum. Secondly, they are talking about a discussion area, not a quiet reading room. Thirdly, they use anonymity all the time, so requesting such a law completely screws themselves.
But seriously, I'm not saying things aren't getting better. I'm just saying that, at some point, humanity needs to look at this as a population problem, not a technology problem. If we run the numbes and say that covering the planet in wind farms isn't going to provide us enough power - then the problem isn't with the wind. And it isn't with technology. There really is a fixed number of megawatts and a fixed amount of land that we have. There is an upper-bound to the population. There seems to be a mindset that the human population can grow infinitely and that technology can compensate. That equation isn't balanced.
In order to have what we have now, we are using stores of energy from 10,000+ years ago. It might seem to be working for now, but it is not sustainable.
Suppose I start with 100 resources, I use 1 resource minute, and I can replenish it at 0.01 resources per minute. Would you say that that there are enough resources? How about after 50 minutes? After 99 minutes? It isn't enoguh to look around and say "see, I have 1 unit of resources left. See? Everything is fine"
This linked article says nothing about Spore that I can find. Unless it is buried on page 15. Even if it is there, I'll wait for something official before I get up in arms about it.
Google, itself, would have been libel in case of an infringement would make just about every single hosting company close up shop over night, 1) I wasn't arguing against the DMCA. I actually think it worked in this case. 2) You're argument falls under the mistaken assumption that without the DMCA, the ISP would be liable. Are phone companies being liable for slander said over the phone lines. No... how about DVD companies liable for when music and video are copied onto their media? No... how about manufacturers liable when their hardware is used for copyright infringement? No... If the DMCA did not exist, and a sensible court system was in place (Yeah, that part might be unbelieveable - but this is a hypothetical...) then ISPs would be safe. This is one of my biggest complains with the DMCA. It gives these crazy provisions under which one can have a safe harbor. But ISPs should already have that safe harbor even without the DMCA. In a way, the law really makes it harder to get safe harbor by indirectly implying that they don't have it to start with.
Wind is not population density friendly. Perhaps that says more about our population density than it says about wind.
The earth has managed to power every population that has been on it so far. Now, a population exists where the Earth's current resources can't meet their needs.
We have directly verified by downloading the file from the Site provided by Google Inc. that the file does include CoreCodec's copyrighted Software.... Respectfully, [private], CEO CoreCodec, Inc.
So according to this, the CEO has legally stated that his company downloaded the software and confirmed the violation. But today, he says it was just an overzealous legal department, and no such download happened. In that case, he signed a letter making legal statements that he knew were false.
If I ran this project, I would not be satisfied by an apology posted in a forum. They sent a legal statement and that requires a legal reply. I would continue as the DMCA stipulates, stating that the project does not infringe. I think I'd also be looking for a few lawyers to get fired. And the CEO needs to be quaking in his boots with the fact that his signature is on a legal notice that is a complete lie.
Why so harsh? They apologized, right? Because these stories happen all the time and I'm sick of companies getting away with it. If you send a legally binding letter with your signature on it, forcing someone to take down their web site, invoking a legal process - then you damn well better be sure that you were in the right. If we let this go, then the procedure becomes:
1. Company sends take down notice 2. Alleged infringer has to prove that they aren't infringing 3. Company allows them to put the project back up
That's not fair. That means any corporation can take down any site, any time, anywhere, with no fear of legal reprisal. That's not how the DMCA works and we need to stop them from using it that way. The DMCA is not carte-blanche to shut down web sites.
FYI - Cavalier Telephone does this too. I called them about it and they suggested tat I use someone else's DNS servers. Unfortunately, the only alternative I have is Comcast.:( Yay for competition, huh?
Re:This is why I don't like Master Chief/Solid Sna
on
Second Person
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· Score: 1
Master Chief/Halo and Solid Snake/MGS sold enough copies to show that there's a market for a 3rd person game where you're playing as a great character and not some faceless Joe. You misunderstood elrous0's post. He isn't saying that he doesn't like 3rd-person games, or that they don't sell well. He is saying he doesn't like games that switch from 1st-person to 3rd-person.
Based on a presentation I saw at GDC 08, he is exactly right. Gordon Freeman was one of the characters players identified with the most, and he may have just stumbled on part of the reason why.
We have the ability to remote control flies and rats and we can power devices from blood, bacteria, and sugar. So are we that far from making a remote-controlled biologically-powered recording device embedded in an insect or small animal? Seems like all the pieces are there.
I respectfully disagree.
First off, the most important thing is how large the die is. Obviously they would not change the die size. If the military orders.25mm bolts and gets.45mm bolts that don't fit, they don't need a security audit to figure that out.
Secondly, every bit of the die space you have is used. There's lots of ways to make space. De-optimize some areas: Remove the carry lookahead logic, shrink the cache. Remove some of the full-complementary logic. Replace fast structures with smaller sub-optimal things like transmission-gate XORs. If the chip has duplicate cache to compensate for manufacturing yields, that would provide TONS of space.
Some of our applications engineers can tell, without a microscope, what another manufacturer's raw silicon does, just by looking at it. Other than removing a large part of the cache, none the of the things I mentioned above would be noticable to the human eye. One could probably reduce the cache a tiny tiny bit and still have room for whatever extra logic is needed.
How many layers of metal are we up to now? If I rewired a chip and left all the transistors in place but changed the metal, would anyone be able to tell? Can you even look down to that 7th layer of metal sandwiched underneath all the transistors to even tell that it was changed? It would be tough, but the chip could be rewired without moving any of the visible surface structures.
But the biggest area of concern would be the microcode. It would be nearly impossible to see the differences and a whole lot of changes could be done without anyone noticing.
IMHO, it would be really really really hard to do any of the things I listed above. But, I think it would be completely impossible to detect.
I thought FLA was closed but SWF was open. And isn't FLV just a container format? Even if it is closed, everybody knows the format and theirs tools to read/write them (VLC player for example, plays them).
Either way, being open is really good. I know several game and media companies that use Flash now, and are strongly considering Silverlight because C# is nicer than Actionscript/Javascript, and Microsoft is oddly enough very open about their formats. Adobe needed to do this and make sure they were the "standard" before MS takes over.
That isn't the only aspect of DLL hell. DLL hell involves other problems like different DLLs with the same name, major version updates (1.1->2.0) dropping or breaking features, COM registration problems, shared DLL reference counts becoming inaccurate, and missing dependent DLLs. That's off the top of my head. I think MSI was supposed to solve the problem, but it really didn't. On an OS where the procedure is to name DLLs arbitrarily and drop them wherever the installer pleases, it is kinda hard to manage this. Although you are right in that the problem has diminished over the years. XP's safety features, better installers, and a move from COM to.NET has significantly decreased the occurrances of DLL hell.
I don't understand how this is different from NT/2000/XP. I run XP as a normal (AKA "limited") user. If an installer wants to install a service then I have to right-click on the installer and select "Run as..." and select an administrator, and type-in the administrator password. How is Vista any different from XP except that they changed the prompt?
C++ also throws all sorts of (potential) junk in the static initialization space, so you never know what might execute before main() runs. In C you have to mark things explicitly. I'm glad you mentioned that, because it is the one thing I have disliked about C++: specifically, GCC. I find that if I compile some minimal C++ code in GCC, if I use iostreams it adds about 200k to the resulting EXE - presumably static initializers are calling something deep within STL. But MSVC does not do that: I get a nice 15k executable with no noticable static initialization. This has made me avoid using iostreams when writing x-platform code, and it is kinda annoying.
Is this a known bug in GCC? Is there a way to avoid it?
Besides C++ looks like gobbledegook to me. C++ is C with about a dozen extra keywords, so it shouldn't be that hard to grasp. Many of those keywords have been added to C in recent years since they've been so useful (const, volatile, inline,...). If you can't read C++, you probably can't read C either. Usually, the C++ equivalent is easier to read, such as this example:.
C: int * foo = (int *)malloc(numElements * sizeof(int)) C++: int * foo = new int[numElements];
I barely grasp the basic concepts of OOP and I don't see any need for them Often when people don't understand something they assume there is no need for it. Saying "I don't understand OOP so I won't use it" is like saying "I don't understand diplomacy, so I'll use war." You use what you know. I suggest learning a bit about OOP - you will probably notice that many C programs are OO, and that many C++ programs are not OO. It is just a design paradigm. Most modern best practices and designs are based on OOP, so if you don't know it, you will be unable to tap into a lot of knowledge and resources.
plus I want to stick to low level programming. In low-level code, C++ will give you the benefit of extra type safety with no disadvantages.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, those options aren't really alternatives. Dial-up is too slow for most practical purposes. Satellite has too high of a latency, so it won't work for games or remote control. WiMax is really expensive, not very fast, and not available in a great many places. Right now, cable and DSL are the only real possibilities in the US.
Second, I'd like to point out that these things are not competition. When I want to buy cheese, I have multiple places I can go that sell the exact same cheese, and many nearly identical variants of that cheese. If I want to buy internet, I have only one option of each type. One cable provider and one DSL provider (phone company). I don't think most areas have multiple competing local cable or phone companies. So it really is a monopoly, even if you include those options. It just becomes multiple competing monopolies, which is not a whole lot better.
Going even further off-topic, this is why the carrier of the bits and the ISP need to be decoupled. It would be fine to have one cable company, so long as I had many ISPs. That's how dial-up was: one phone company and many ISPs, and the phone company was neutral to what they carried. This was why any given area had dozens or even hundreds of ISPs to choose from, each with different plans and costs and benefits. That was real competition.
If Carbon Sequestration meant that the Carbon was placed into a solid form, I might like it.
:(
Imagine:
coal --> energy + diamonds
That's not a bad formula! Or:
coal --> energy + carbon (bricks, fibers, nanofibers, etc.).
We could use that for building materials. No problem there. But:
coal --> energy + high pressure gas buried in an old mine shaft underground waiting to escape
is not a good idea.
I read these types of things, and I realize that they are trying to show that we have a solution, but really they are showing how this technology doesn't scale.
I don't think that covering 22000 square miles of the planet with solar collectors would be an environmentally friendly thing to do. And by those numbers, we would need to do it 11 more times to meet our energy needs. That just shows that this type of system isn't worth putting time or money into.
(I guess this means Slashdot sensationalism isn't restricted to anti-Microsoft articles.)
I thought that the Patriot Act was passed "unanimously" by a verbal vote or show of hands or something like that. I didn't think all votes were logged (which is absurd).
Maybe someone can correct me here?
I guess Will Wright's super influence in the market doesn't extend to publishers, just developers. :(
It isn't like asking for quiet in the reading room at all.
First, they are requiring ID in a public forum. Secondly, they are talking about a discussion area, not a quiet reading room. Thirdly, they use anonymity all the time, so requesting such a law completely screws themselves.
Yeah, I was being clever. :)
But seriously, I'm not saying things aren't getting better. I'm just saying that, at some point, humanity needs to look at this as a population problem, not a technology problem. If we run the numbes and say that covering the planet in wind farms isn't going to provide us enough power - then the problem isn't with the wind. And it isn't with technology. There really is a fixed number of megawatts and a fixed amount of land that we have. There is an upper-bound to the population. There seems to be a mindset that the human population can grow infinitely and that technology can compensate. That equation isn't balanced.
In order to have what we have now, we are using stores of energy from 10,000+ years ago. It might seem to be working for now, but it is not sustainable.
Suppose I start with 100 resources, I use 1 resource minute, and I can replenish it at 0.01 resources per minute. Would you say that that there are enough resources? How about after 50 minutes? After 99 minutes? It isn't enoguh to look around and say "see, I have 1 unit of resources left. See? Everything is fine"
This linked article says nothing about Spore that I can find. Unless it is buried on page 15. Even if it is there, I'll wait for something official before I get up in arms about it.
Precisely! This makes no sense coming from a newspaper. It would be like a librarian asking for censorship.
2) You're argument falls under the mistaken assumption that without the DMCA, the ISP would be liable. Are phone companies being liable for slander said over the phone lines. No... how about DVD companies liable for when music and video are copied onto their media? No... how about manufacturers liable when their hardware is used for copyright infringement? No... If the DMCA did not exist, and a sensible court system was in place (Yeah, that part might be unbelieveable - but this is a hypothetical...) then ISPs would be safe. This is one of my biggest complains with the DMCA. It gives these crazy provisions under which one can have a safe harbor. But ISPs should already have that safe harbor even without the DMCA. In a way, the law really makes it harder to get safe harbor by indirectly implying that they don't have it to start with.
You're example is flawed: Any wind-power-advocate will point out that birds don't chirp while flying.
The earth has managed to power every population that has been on it so far. Now, a population exists where the Earth's current resources can't meet their needs.
So according to this, the CEO has legally stated that his company downloaded the software and confirmed the violation. But today, he says it was just an overzealous legal department, and no such download happened. In that case, he signed a letter making legal statements that he knew were false.
If I ran this project, I would not be satisfied by an apology posted in a forum. They sent a legal statement and that requires a legal reply. I would continue as the DMCA stipulates, stating that the project does not infringe. I think I'd also be looking for a few lawyers to get fired. And the CEO needs to be quaking in his boots with the fact that his signature is on a legal notice that is a complete lie.
Why so harsh? They apologized, right? Because these stories happen all the time and I'm sick of companies getting away with it. If you send a legally binding letter with your signature on it, forcing someone to take down their web site, invoking a legal process - then you damn well better be sure that you were in the right. If we let this go, then the procedure becomes:
1. Company sends take down notice
2. Alleged infringer has to prove that they aren't infringing
3. Company allows them to put the project back up
That's not fair. That means any corporation can take down any site, any time, anywhere, with no fear of legal reprisal. That's not how the DMCA works and we need to stop them from using it that way. The DMCA is not carte-blanche to shut down web sites.
FYI - Cavalier Telephone does this too. I called them about it and they suggested tat I use someone else's DNS servers. Unfortunately, the only alternative I have is Comcast. :( Yay for competition, huh?
Based on a presentation I saw at GDC 08, he is exactly right. Gordon Freeman was one of the characters players identified with the most, and he may have just stumbled on part of the reason why.
We have the ability to remote control flies and rats and we can power devices from blood, bacteria,
and sugar. So are we that far from making a remote-controlled biologically-powered recording device embedded in an insect or small animal? Seems like all the pieces are there.
How many layers of metal are we up to now? If I rewired a chip and left all the transistors in place but changed the metal, would anyone be able to tell? Can you even look down to that 7th layer of metal sandwiched underneath all the transistors to even tell that it was changed? It would be tough, but the chip could be rewired without moving any of the visible surface structures.
But the biggest area of concern would be the microcode. It would be nearly impossible to see the differences and a whole lot of changes could be done without anyone noticing.
IMHO, it would be really really really hard to do any of the things I listed above. But, I think it would be completely impossible to detect.
I thought FLA was closed but SWF was open. And isn't FLV just a container format? Even if it is closed, everybody knows the format and theirs tools to read/write them (VLC player for example, plays them).
Either way, being open is really good. I know several game and media companies that use Flash now, and are strongly considering Silverlight because C# is nicer than Actionscript/Javascript, and Microsoft is oddly enough very open about their formats. Adobe needed to do this and make sure they were the "standard" before MS takes over.
ISO approval might be nice too.
That isn't the only aspect of DLL hell. DLL hell involves other problems like different DLLs with the same name, major version updates (1.1->2.0) dropping or breaking features, COM registration problems, shared DLL reference counts becoming inaccurate, and missing dependent DLLs. That's off the top of my head. I think MSI was supposed to solve the problem, but it really didn't. On an OS where the procedure is to name DLLs arbitrarily and drop them wherever the installer pleases, it is kinda hard to manage this. Although you are right in that the problem has diminished over the years. XP's safety features, better installers, and a move from COM to .NET has significantly decreased the occurrances of DLL hell.
If a CAPTCHA is displayed, and no one is around to see it, does it have a correct answer?
And yes, that's XHTML!
You obviously don't have children.
I don't understand how this is different from NT/2000/XP. I run XP as a normal (AKA "limited") user. If an installer wants to install a service then I have to right-click on the installer and select "Run as..." and select an administrator, and type-in the administrator password. How is Vista any different from XP except that they changed the prompt?
Is this a known bug in GCC? Is there a way to avoid it?
C: int * foo = (int *)malloc(numElements * sizeof(int))
C++: int * foo = new int[numElements]; I barely grasp the basic concepts of OOP and I don't see any need for them Often when people don't understand something they assume there is no need for it. Saying "I don't understand OOP so I won't use it" is like saying "I don't understand diplomacy, so I'll use war." You use what you know. I suggest learning a bit about OOP - you will probably notice that many C programs are OO, and that many C++ programs are not OO. It is just a design paradigm. Most modern best practices and designs are based on OOP, so if you don't know it, you will be unable to tap into a lot of knowledge and resources. plus I want to stick to low level programming. In low-level code, C++ will give you the benefit of extra type safety with no disadvantages.