Firstly, I don't deny that it is possible for a religion to *contain* atheism (take Buddhism for example), but atheism by itself is just one property (or more accurately, lack thereof), and that isn't enough to be a religion by itslef. (After all, look at the inverse: If I say some set of people believe in a god that still doesn't tell you what religion they are, or even that they belong to one at all. It's not a specific enough description to nail down which religion it is.)
Secondly, you have the false notion that atheism is a belief, when it is not. All that is required is that one lack the belief in god that most of the rest of the world seems to have. If it weren't for the fact that the rest of the world was theistic, it wouldn't even be something worth mentioning. We don't have a word for "human being with only one head", because we haven't seen any other types of human being." And if there were no theists, we would not have a word for atheists. The term is only useful in that it describes someone who lacks a particular viewpoint most of the rest of the world shares.
There's a difference between not bothering to go out of the way to help a competing product, and deliberately going of the way to destroy the competing product (and no, by "destroy" I don't mean in the marketing 'make a better product so people stop using the competitor' meaning, I mean in the very real 'break their product forcibly' meaning.)
It would take less effort to leave the linux install alone than it takes to ruin it.
having to partition for two OS'es is NOT a disad to put into either column for complexity of OS install. It is a disadvantage of the fact that a dual boot is being arranged, and would be a problem no matter what two OSes were being used. If you start with the assumption that "no fdisking means Windows, and fdisking means Linux" then you are essentially saying that the machine's rightful config is to have Windows on it, and Linux is the "wrong" config that is abnormal. That isn't a fair comparasin.
(That being said, this guy's comarasin was still a load of horsepucky, for other reasons.)
If you take that metaphor you also get the flip side - that Windows users prefer a comfortable illusion to experiencing reality. That doesn't put them in a good light, you know.
"pop a different disk and hit retry" is a non-trivial task in that it assumes you have another copy of the install media in the first place. Home users installing a new version of Windows (that they previously didn't have) won't be in that situation.
Comparing the two OS installs under the case that the install media is broken is rather silly. If you have one copy of the media in both cases you can't get it to work...in both cases.
I had heard rumors that they scrapped the idea of putting out the full program for linux and are going to only put out the client (not the editor that lets you create new adventures, but just the program that lets you play in adventures someone else made.)
Does anyone know what the story is on this? Their website was almost completely informationless. I would go for a NWN program for linux only if it was the "real" thing. If it's some half-done port that only has the client then I'm not interested.
(I don't mind booting into Windows from time to time to PLAY a game, but I don't want to have to use it to DESIGN one. For designing I want to interleave the time spent designing the adventure with time spent doing other things on the machine, and those "other things" are not Windows things.)
The OS used is a lot more relevant when designing than when playing.
I could go on.
...making up more tripe about my motivations - yes, yes you could.
American History books (at least back when I was in school) never even *touched* the topic of when the first computer was invented. Besides, that point has nothing to do with anything I said anyway, since I don't recall giving or taking credit for the invention of the computer to anybody in particular or even bringing up the subject at all.
Now, I do admit that I was unaware that CERN made a httpd as well as NCSA, but if you look at the dates, the development was fairly simultaneous for them.
The internet is not a catch-all term for any sort of interconnected network of any kind. It is specific to a particular implementation. For example, if you aren't using IP protocols, you aren't on the internet, even if you have some other sort of scheme that also could do a similar thing. "the internet" is not a generic term for hooking together any sort of network. If it was, then anyone on FIDOnet or BITNET could have claimed to be on "the internet".
Speaking of predjudices, there is also a predjudice on this side of the pond that Europeans are arrogant and haughty with an irrational condescending attitude that falsely assumes all americans are stupid.. Your post was detrimental in that it helped reinforce that image, especially the bit where you implied I might have thought CERN was in the US when it was obvious from the context that I knew it was European. (It was not abvious that I also knew it was in Switzerland, but I knew that too.)
If you want to flame someone for being ignorant, be damn careful to restrict the flames to points they actually said. Don't add extra strawmen claims they didn't make and flame over them too, or you will ruin whatever credibility you have and your other points (which may be valid) will get ignored.
What color is the sky on your planet? It's a funny world you live in where people aren't allowed to declare their religion publicly, and the US has a state religion of atheism, and that atheism is even a religion in the first place. Meanwhile the rest of us will be here on earth.
What an idiot. Firstly, there's the false impliction that since a guy at CERN wrote the first specs for the WWW that this means the internet was made by Europeans. (First off, it was the university of illinois that was communicating with CERN that worked on actually making mosaic and httpd to implement the spec, and secondly there's the fact that "the internet" != "the WWW".)
Secondly, there's the fact that he's ignoring the two-way street to international poisoning of laws here. Countries that censor end up censoring everywhere, inside and outside their jurisdiction, or not at all. And that holds true in both directions, leading to a situation where only the lowest common denominator of what is legal in every country ends up being legal worldwide. He cited the case with yahoo showing hits for nazi sites in France, but forgets that that's a case of France trying to censor the world, not just inside it's own boundries. When Yahoo was asked to block access to that information from French viewers, they raised the objection that it isn't even technically possible to do that and the only reliable way for Yahoo to comply would be to remove that information for everyone, not just the French. Just because a hit is coming from somewhere other than a *.fr address, that doesn't imply that the viewer cannot be French. Lots of.net and.com addresses are not in the US. The only way on the net to reliably censor for one country is to censor from all of them.
Yes, the DMCA is bad, but the solution is to have countries with the balls to stand up to the US and say, "you don't have jurisdiction here". When Norway caved in in the famous DeCSS incident, they just bend over and accepted it without question. THAT attitude is just as much responsible for the US's hegemony as anything the US has done itself.
But building a seperate independant EU network??? That's absurd on the face of it. There must be interconnection with the rest of the world and once that happens you have one unified internet again. I don't think this guy understands what the internet really is. There already is a collection of independant EU-based hosts with their own network connections to other hosts. And this network is also connected to the outside world. It's called "that portion of the internet that resides in the EU." I don't think this guy "gets" how unstructured the 'net really is.
I've never done the time test. For one thing for it to be fair I'd need a carefully crafted example that keeps things fair. The paper sample has to be the same text as the computer sample to ensure they are of equal complexity, for one thing. (for example, no fair reading a technical manual on the computer and comparing that to The Little Engine That Could on paper.)
However, for comparable work I find I'm just as fast on both as long as I'm doing short sprints of reading - 10 pages or less at a time. What slows me down on computer is typically the subject matter. On paper I'm usually reading a story for entertainment. On the computer monitor I'm usually reading something more technical (slashdot excepted).
I've never tested something long term like a novel because usually on computer I'm not reading that type of material. It may be that the slowdown is due to fatigue and that's why I haven't felt it. I don't read off the computer screen in long unbroken periods like that. I'm usually stopping every so often to type something, for example when reading a manual to help me write a program.)
But regardless of why, I haven't felt it.
But, on topic, I agree that going paperless is a stupid idea because you lose the historical stuff. The books written in the past won't be digitized in any reasonable length of time. You can't fold up an iPaq and stick it in your pocket. You can't tape it up to the wall. Without buying multiple iPaqs, you can't have serveral "pages" sprawled out in front of you at once, which is essential for some types of schoolwork. While a desk may be a poor interface for organizing and searching, it has a really wide "screen" to lay out your documents.
if there is a real possibility of overflowing the 120 chars, then snprintf still isn't really a solution. It just prevents overflowed buffers, while letting the program happily continue under the delusion that it got the right result in the string. If there really is a chance of overflow, then the length of the buffer has to be calculated and malloc'ed anyway for a correct result, whether dealing with sprintf of snprintf.
snprintf() isn't standard. I can't trust that it exists in any randomly chosen C environment. So you replace a theoretical future problem (128 bit ints) with a real existing problem today that renders the program uncompilable.) If that is a concern, use format-width specifiers for the values in the string, which is something that exists for both sprintf and snprintf. Truncating the string to 120 chars doesn't actually produce a usable result (it cuts off the last part of the string) if you are working with numbers large enough to need it.
So introducing snprintf doesn't fix a damn thing. It just destroys portability.
I know that that is the recommendation from MS. The difference of opinion is that you think telling programmers to not use it absolves MS of responsibility for their insecure GUI. I do not. If an application fails to jump through the reccomended hoops to avoid the flaw in MS's default behaviour, that doesn't magically shift the blame to the app. Note the word "default". It's very important here. The bug is what surfaces if you *don't* do anything special in your application program. If I burned a CPU chip that had a flaw that started the chip on fire whenever you execute an illegal instruction, it would still be my fault, even if I say "please don't have illegal instructions" in the programmer's manual for it.
The fuss of the GUI is because the default handlers for the GUI WM_TIMER messages is exploitable. Using it one can cause the process attached to that GUI context to jump to any arbitrary instruction in its code. This bug occurs whenever a program has any GUI of any kind and doesn't override the default exploitable behaviour of this type of message that is *built in to Windows*. It's one thing to blame the app when the app added code that caused an exploit. It's something else entirely to blame the app when the app didn't add code to override the exploit in the default system it runs on top of.
Re:Microsoft has had 7 years of warning.
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 2
The point is that the *default* behavior you get if you don't *override* one of the message handlers is the one that has the exploit. It's one thing to say that it's the application's fault when it opens a hole by code *it* added. It's something else entirely to say that it's the application's fault when it failed to write extra code to override some exploitable default behaviour. Any Windows program that has any GUI has this hole *unless* it overrides the default behaviour for the messages in question.
The following code has zero chance of having a buffer overflow, yet you want to have me replace it with an ugly mess of seperate calls because sprintf can be abused by ignorant coders: char strVal[120]; int val1; .../*then, further down somewhere*/... sprintf( strVal, "val is: %d (decimal), %x (hex), %o (octal)", val1, val1, val1 );
There's no way for that to overflow the allotted 120 chars. No way at all. Yet you would take that away. Why?
If it is your goal to prevent all possible programmer mistakes then just delete the compiler from the system. It's a quicker means to the same ends.
Where did you pull that 1/3 figure from? It doesn't seem to be true for me. It is probably heavily dependant on the font used. Books are typically written with a thicker font than is used on a computer screen. Change the font and the computer screen becomes a lot more legible.
Attributing a position to someone that they didn't say they had, nor imply they had, as you did when you claimed I thought GPL was a law, is not sarcasm. Sarcasm is exaggeration of something that *was* said, not making up a strawman that was not said.
There's no rule that says you must adhere to a particlar position in order to participate on Slashdot. Therefore there will be people who disagree on such questions. I hope this clears up your confusion.
The problem you complain about is smaller that the problem that is generated when servers check for browser type and assume that all browsers not of that type will fail utterly. I'd much rather be fed an incompatable page with sloppy layout than NO HTML AT ALL and an error message that just lies and says my browser doesn't support feature foo when it fact it does.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, you have the false notion that atheism is a belief, when it is not. All that is required is that one lack the belief in god that most of the rest of the world seems to have. If it weren't for the fact that the rest of the world was theistic, it wouldn't even be something worth mentioning. We don't have a word for "human being with only one head", because we haven't seen any other types of human being." And if there were no theists, we would not have a word for atheists. The term is only useful in that it describes someone who lacks a particular viewpoint most of the rest of the world shares.
There's a difference between not bothering to go out of the way to help a competing product, and deliberately going of the way to destroy the competing product (and no, by "destroy" I don't mean in the marketing 'make a better product so people stop using the competitor' meaning, I mean in the very real 'break their product forcibly' meaning.)
It would take less effort to leave the linux install alone than it takes to ruin it.
(That being said, this guy's comarasin was still a load of horsepucky, for other reasons.)
Last I checked, his post said "partitioning screen and the package screen". That indicates he was talking about OS and apps, not just OS.
If you take that metaphor you also get the flip side - that Windows users prefer a comfortable illusion to experiencing reality. That doesn't put them in a good light, you know.
"pop a different disk and hit retry" is a non-trivial task in that it assumes you have another copy of the install media in the first place. Home users installing a new version of Windows (that they previously didn't have) won't be in that situation. Comparing the two OS installs under the case that the install media is broken is rather silly. If you have one copy of the media in both cases you can't get it to work...in both cases.
I had heard rumors that they scrapped the idea of putting out the full program for linux and are going to only put out the client (not the editor that lets you create new adventures, but just the program that lets you play in adventures someone else made.)
Does anyone know what the story is on this? Their website was almost completely informationless. I would go for a NWN program for linux only if it was the "real" thing. If it's some half-done port that only has the client then I'm not interested.
(I don't mind booting into Windows from time to time to PLAY a game, but I don't want to have to use it to DESIGN one. For designing I want to interleave the time spent designing the adventure with time spent doing other things on the machine, and those "other things" are not Windows things.)
The OS used is a lot more relevant when designing than when playing.
What color is the sky on your planet? It's a funny world you live in where people aren't allowed to declare their religion publicly, and the US has a state religion of atheism, and that atheism is even a religion in the first place. Meanwhile the rest of us will be here on earth.
What an idiot. Firstly, there's the false impliction that since a guy at CERN wrote the first specs for the WWW that this means the internet was made by Europeans. (First off, it was the university of illinois that was communicating with CERN that worked on actually making mosaic and httpd to implement the spec, and secondly there's the fact that "the internet" != "the WWW".)
.net and .com addresses are not in the US. The only way on the net to reliably censor for one country is to censor from all of them.
Secondly, there's the fact that he's ignoring the two-way street to international poisoning of laws here. Countries that censor end up censoring everywhere, inside and outside their jurisdiction, or not at all. And that holds true in both directions, leading to a situation where only the lowest common denominator of what is legal in every country ends up being legal worldwide. He cited the case with yahoo showing hits for nazi sites in France, but forgets that that's a case of France trying to censor the world, not just inside it's own boundries. When Yahoo was asked to block access to that information from French viewers, they raised the objection that it isn't even technically possible to do that and the only reliable way for Yahoo to comply would be to remove that information for everyone, not just the French. Just because a hit is coming from somewhere other than a *.fr address, that doesn't imply that the viewer cannot be French. Lots of
Yes, the DMCA is bad, but the solution is to have countries with the balls to stand up to the US and say, "you don't have jurisdiction here". When Norway caved in in the famous DeCSS incident, they just bend over and accepted it without question. THAT attitude is just as much responsible for the US's hegemony as anything the US has done itself.
But building a seperate independant EU network??? That's absurd on the face of it. There must be interconnection with the rest of the world and once that happens you have one unified internet again. I don't think this guy understands what the internet really is. There already is a collection of independant EU-based hosts with their own network connections to other hosts. And this network is also connected to the outside world. It's called "that portion of the internet that resides in the EU." I don't think this guy "gets" how unstructured the 'net really is.
However, for comparable work I find I'm just as fast on both as long as I'm doing short sprints of reading - 10 pages or less at a time. What slows me down on computer is typically the subject matter. On paper I'm usually reading a story for entertainment. On the computer monitor I'm usually reading something more technical (slashdot excepted).
I've never tested something long term like a novel because usually on computer I'm not reading that type of material. It may be that the slowdown is due to fatigue and that's why I haven't felt it. I don't read off the computer screen in long unbroken periods like that. I'm usually stopping every so often to type something, for example when reading a manual to help me write a program.)
But regardless of why, I haven't felt it.
But, on topic, I agree that going paperless is a stupid idea because you lose the historical stuff. The books written in the past won't be digitized in any reasonable length of time. You can't fold up an iPaq and stick it in your pocket. You can't tape it up to the wall. Without buying multiple iPaqs, you can't have serveral "pages" sprawled out in front of you at once, which is essential for some types of schoolwork. While a desk may be a poor interface for organizing and searching, it has a really wide "screen" to lay out your documents.
if there is a real possibility of overflowing the 120 chars, then snprintf still isn't really a solution. It just prevents overflowed buffers, while letting the program happily continue under the delusion that it got the right result in the string.
If there really is a chance of overflow, then the length of the buffer has to be calculated and malloc'ed anyway for a correct result, whether dealing with sprintf of snprintf.
snprintf() isn't standard. I can't trust that it exists in any randomly chosen C environment. So you replace a theoretical future problem (128 bit ints) with a real existing problem today that renders the program uncompilable.) If that is a concern, use format-width specifiers for the values in the string, which is something that exists for both sprintf and snprintf. Truncating the string to 120 chars doesn't actually produce a usable result (it cuts off the last part of the string) if you are working with numbers large enough to need it.
So introducing snprintf doesn't fix a damn thing. It just destroys portability.
I know that that is the recommendation from MS. The difference of opinion is that you think telling programmers to not use it absolves MS of responsibility for their insecure GUI. I do not. If an application fails to jump through the reccomended hoops to avoid the flaw in MS's default behaviour, that doesn't magically shift the blame to the app. Note the word "default". It's very important here. The bug is what surfaces if you *don't* do anything special in your application program. If I burned a CPU chip that had a flaw that started the chip on fire whenever you execute an illegal instruction, it would still be my fault, even if I say "please don't have illegal instructions" in the programmer's manual for it.
So you think it's unfair to blame Windows when the exploit is in the default behaviour it gives you when you do nothing about one of the GUI messages?
The fuss of the GUI is because the default handlers for the GUI WM_TIMER messages is exploitable. Using it one can cause the process attached to that GUI context to jump to any arbitrary instruction in its code. This bug occurs whenever a program has any GUI of any kind and doesn't override the default exploitable behaviour of this type of message that is *built in to Windows*. It's one thing to blame the app when the app added code that caused an exploit. It's something else entirely to blame the app when the app didn't add code to override the exploit in the default system it runs on top of.
The point is that the *default* behavior you get if you don't *override* one of the message handlers is the one that has the exploit. It's one thing to say that it's the application's fault when it opens a hole by code *it* added. It's something else entirely to say that it's the application's fault when it failed to write extra code to override some exploitable default behaviour. Any Windows program that has any GUI has this hole *unless* it overrides the default behaviour for the messages in question.
char strVal[120];
int val1;
sprintf( strVal, "val is: %d (decimal), %x (hex), %o (octal)", val1, val1, val1 );
There's no way for that to overflow the allotted 120 chars. No way at all. Yet you would take that away. Why?
If it is your goal to prevent all possible programmer mistakes then just delete the compiler from the system. It's a quicker means to the same ends.
Where did you pull that 1/3 figure from? It doesn't
seem to be true for me. It is probably heavily dependant on the font used. Books are typically written with a thicker font than is used on a computer screen. Change the font and the computer screen becomes a lot more legible.
Attributing a position to someone that they didn't say they had, nor imply they had, as you did when you claimed I thought GPL was a law, is not sarcasm. Sarcasm is exaggeration of something that *was* said, not making up a strawman that was not said.
Then explain why when opera lies and pretends to be IE it gets a better page sent to it than when it is honest and calls itself opera.
Here's the difference:
The GPL was written using copyright laws as they have always existed since the inception of the country.
The DMCA is a brand new addition to copyright law that didn't exist back when the GPL was written.
So therefore it is NOT neessarily hypocitical to be in favor of one and not the other. They are different laws.
There's no rule that says you must adhere to a particlar position in order to participate on Slashdot. Therefore there will be people who disagree on such questions. I hope this clears up your confusion.
The problem you complain about is smaller that the problem that is generated when servers check for browser type and assume that all browsers not of that type will fail utterly. I'd much rather be fed an incompatable page with sloppy layout than NO HTML AT ALL and an error message that just lies and says my browser doesn't support feature foo when it fact it does.