The only difference between a cult and a religion is that a cult is a religion with a small enough membership that it is still politically safe to give it the ridicule that all religions richly deserve.
This has already been proven to be wrong. Try searching on ebay for rare equipment from MMORPGs, or other Diablo type games. One rare piece of equipment can sell for literally hundreds of dollars
Good point. I'd forgotten about that. I keep overestimating the intelligence of the average human being.
I don't worry about it because I don't hang out with l33t hax0rz,
All it takes is one vengeful idiot-savant who knows how to set up a distributed attack, but knows nothing about social ettiquite. You don't need to hang out with lots of them to run across one. And given the current state of cluelessness with tech issues that the judicial system has, I wouldn't put any faith at all in the ability of a randomly chosen small calims court judge to be able to understand what's going on enough to rule in your favor.
The way things panned out, the rules of Magic could be replaced by this simple game and have very similar results: Every player at the table takes out their wallet. A fire is built in the middle of the table. Whoever is willing to throw the largest amount of money into the fire wins the game, and then brags about how cool he is for winning. No freakin' thanks. One look at how that thing was set up and I refused to ever take part in a game. Even though it was starting to take over my local RPG group at the time (what starts as a roleplaying session degenreates into a magic game as people rudely whip out their decks and start ignoring the GM as soon as their character happens to not be involved, and then once they are supposed to be involved again, they don't want to leave the Magic: The Addiction game they started.
When I heard of the online version I was breifly hopeful. I thought maybe since it doesn't involve the sale of cards it might actually be a fair game and be worth getting in to it. But then I see that, nope, its the same thing, only now you pay money to get the privlege to pretend you have a rare card (think about it - increased price through scarcity will fail utterly in an electronic forum where scarcity is completely artificial.)
No. Not all screwings are deliberate. Sometimes a policy that seems like a good idea has unforseen side effects. Making users pay for excess bandwith *seems* like a reasonable way to do it, until you stop to think about how a user isn't fully in control of the bandwith usage hitting his leaf node.
This upstream block, how long would it take to get it set up, and in the time between when it went up and when the problem started a lot of your bandwith got burned - would that still count against your cap or would they reset the counter for you?
And when the attack is from distributed locations, such that a block would be ineffective - what then?
What would be nice (and I don't know enough of the TCP/IP sytem to know if this is possible) would be if you did not get charged for the initial connection negotiation packets, and only got measured based on the data packets. That way if your system is configured to reject a connection, repeated attempts to make that connection don't count against your cap. Then you could actually do something about the bandwith-eating offender at your end, on your leaf node, before their actions start to affect your bandwith.
Of course, that doesn't address unstreamed traffic (datagrams) that don't need to negotiate a connection. I don't know how those could be protected against.
The point is they are selling more service without actually providing it. They are adding more subscribers without actually providing more product overall. It's essentially the same as if a McDonalds said to a crowded store full of noon-rush customers, "Well, we know we told you all that you'd be getting a full hamburger for your price you paid, we really only planned on making 20 hamburgers this hour, and there's 40 of you who purchased one. We could make 20 more hamburgers but we'd rather funnel the money you paid us into pure profit, so we'll be giving each of you half a hamgurger. Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing McDonalds." Now, those who hadn't paid yet and could still get out of the deal aren't getting screwed, but those who already did pay are getting the shaft when the terms changed after their purchase.
I'd be fearful of signing a contract that says I'll pay extra for excessive bandwith when I'm not in control of that bandwith. If someone felt like being a jackass and decided to flood my webserver there isn't a thing I could do about it on my end. I could deny the hits from that address, but that doesn't prevent the fact that the requests coming in still count against my download bandwith. I would much, much rather ask for the provider to have a cap in place that throttles my bandwith so I am not financially responsible for OTHER PEOPLE making me go over.
I have oodles of servers running on my machine right now that take very little bandwith, but just sit there waiting until I need them briefly. For example, there's everything that runs under inetd.conf.
The travesty is that cable providers give us this crap that server-denying is necessary to reduce bandwith, when more bandwith is taken up by prOn downloads than by anything I'd be putting up on a server.
Sometimes the important thing isn't "Linux supported", but "Linux is not verbotten here". It's more about finding a provider where you don't have to shut off everything that makes unix unix to meet the terms of service of the company, and not having to mess with idiots who don't know what the word "server" really means. (In an attempt to reduce bandwith a cable provider will often say servers are not allowed, not realizing that being a server says nothing about how much traffic will flow. If I put my webserver for a local gaming club up on a home computer it would generate a hell of a lot less traffic than the typical prOn downloader at home generates. Plus, they don't even have a definition of "server" that I can use to ensure I know what is and isn't allowed. (They allow ICQ and various p2p services, so clearly they aren't using the technical definition of server when they say servers are banned.)
I don't care about linux being "supported" - I just care about it being allowed. I don't need support on my own computer.
All those fears and doubts you list are things that MS already has a track record of doing in the past. It is more uncertain to say they won't do them again than it is to say they will continue the same pattern.
They didn't have to make internet exploiter any good in order to get it on most desktops around the world. IE proliferated FIRST, and started becoming usable SECOND. A change to the network layer underneath could be propigated using the same exact technique - make it mandatory to have it installed if you want any recent updates or new versions of Windows.
First of all, how the hell am I supposed to back it up? Conduct a survey?
That's what I thought. You *felt* it was true without really *knowing* it is true, and made the claim based on that gut feeling.
Because most people don't want offensive (however you define the term is unimportant, you know what I mean) magazines in the stores that they shop at.
I see offensive written material in stores all the time, like the Bible - which is more corruptive than any smut magazine could ever hope to be.
Companies are in the same boat you are with regards to predicting what their customers want - they don't really know, so they guess. They guess the number of people offended by a particular magazine cover is large, so they guess that the impact of carrying it would be large, and so they decide not to carry it unless the publisher changes the cover. But it's all based on pure guesswork, and the fallacy of believing that the most vocal group must be the majority group. If something does not offend you, you aren't going to start up a grassroots campaign to publicize the fact that it isn't offensive to you. Negative comments always outnumber positive ones when it comes to customer feedback, because the people who are annoyed feel a greater need to say something than the ones that are satsified.
There are two meanings of "support" in the computer biz. Sometimes "we support foo" means "We'll help you on the phone with problems about foo". Other times it means "We make sure our product will work in conjunction with foo." It isn't clear which meaning is meant here, but I suspect it's the second, not the first. And that *is* a problem even for knowlegable linux users, because it means the next Thinkpad you buy might come with some peripheral hardware device that can't work with linux, like a winmodem, or a proprietary video adapter with unpublished specs. And since it's a laptop, swapping the device out for one that works might not be an option.
The problem is that most people who shop at walmart *do* want covers to not be offensive
Well, *everyone* wants things not to be offensive - simply by the definition of what the word "offensive" means. The problem is that different people find different things offensive.
The claim I think you are trying to make is that most walmart customers agree with walmart's stance on what is and isn't offensive.
That would have made sense if the statement was "each *algorithm* must be set in stone before you begin typing", but that's not what the post said. It said each *line of code* must be set in stone, which is saying that there must be some form of the entire verbatim program in existence somewhere before you even begin typing (which would preclude using an editor to actually edit the code rather than just type it in). Now, maybe that's not the meaning you meant to get across, but that *is* what your words said. I would have assumed that that's not really what you meant except that you later also mentioned all the peer reviews being done before you type, and that, to my mind, includes code reviews as well as design reviews.
The point is that there are reasons besides the ones that were given for shopping at wallmart, when they are the only game in town. Whether that happend because the other businesses screwed up or not is irrelevant to the person who finds himself walking in to wallmart to buy his new TV. Price, selection, and convenience are irrelevant when they're the only game in town.
I used to know someone who always wrote his c-code equals conditionals such that if one operand was an lvalue and one was an rvalue, he'd put the rvalue on the left, where it isn't allowed for assignment statements, like so:
if( 0 == myFileSize )
{// TO-DO: print some error and die
}
Instead of the more human-readable:
if( myFileSize == 0 ) ,,,etc,,,
The theory was, if he screwed up and put in a '=', instead of a '==', then the compiler would catch it for him that way. An interesting idea, but I figure if you expend the mental effort to remember to type it in backward, you are already thinking about the difference between '=' and '==', and so at that point you aren't likely to make that mistake anyway.
What the hell is wrong with admitting that BOTH the government AND Microsoft are in the wrong here? Why is it that people insist on ignoring the obvious evidence of Microsoft wrongdoing in order to argue against the government case agaisnt them? It's not necessary. Microsoft has done wrong, chiefly becasue their squashing of the competition is often through means other than producting better product at a better price. But that doesn't mean that any of the remedies proposed by the government make any damn sense either. (I am very glad the "split them in two" remedy is now dead - I don't want to see the tech-ignorant government trying to decide where the dividing line between OS and Application is - even techies themselves have never really drawn a clear line. After all, what is "COMMAND.EXE"? It's an application. What is "/bin/sh"? It's an application. But they are also quite integral to what makes their OSes what they are.)
It's not necessary to disagree with the findings that Microsoft has done wrong in order to disagree with the sentencing proposals they face. I just think that any government cure would be worse than the disease at this point. The time at which something could have been done about in a fair manner it is long gone. MS got where they are because the majority of the market is people who are extremely ignorant about computers. No other industry has that degree of ignorance in the marketplace - even a total newbie knows, for example, that you put gasoline in a car or it won't go, and that when it makes odd noises that means something is wrong and needs looking after. The computer consumer doesn't even know that level of knowlege about his machine, because no product before has ever been sold that had this level of complexity and flexability before. And it was that ignorance that propelled MS to it's current position.
Allright, who's the jerk who keeps modding this guy's posts as flamebaits? I think maybe someone has a vendetta. Nothing he said is inflamatory. I think he's *wrong*, mind you, but agreement isn't the same thing as on-topicness or non-flamedness.
Liking something to show that you hate something else isn't rational thinking.
And pretending to be able to read people's minds and know what they are thinking better than they do is? If you are getting flamed on slashdot, it has zero to do with your age. I have no clue how old you are. I can infer it might be "over 40" because of the comment you made earlier, but that's just a wild guess, and until you mentioned that comment, I would have had no clue about your age. All I know about you is what you post. And if you assume that from your opinions I can mark you as someone "over 40", then you are being sterotypical - assuming that people of similar ages must have similar opinions about everything.
And you slamming slashdotters for stereotyping you while at the same time you stereotype slashdotters as a bunch of kids is something I find quite funny.
The purpose of a lot of these software engineering techniques is to make the design of the *algorithm* independant from the typing of the code. The goal is to make someone with more experience write out the design in a rather pseudocode fashion and then someone else can convert that to actual compiling code. In theory this means the experienced developers lead the newbies through the process, with the experienced ones doing the design, and the newbies doing the muckwork typing. That actually makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice, it didn't seem the work that way at the job I first got out of college (where this approach was used). The deep, deep problem with this approach is that the psuedocode has to be phrased in such a way that everyone involved in the meeting can understand it, and that means no high-falutin' computer science terminology or any o' that techie stuff. So your design has to be at the level a PHB can handle, and since the coders aren't allowed to get too creative with their implentation of the design, the actual code ends up being just as simple-minded as the design. Thus time and time again we ended up with slow wasteful brute-force approaches to problems, not because the coders and designers didn't know any better, but because that's all that was expressable at the high-level meetings where the design was being hammered out.
Then the problem got worse after several years of that situation ended up making people believe that design work doesn't require a programming background, and then we started having designs made by people who only have a cursory understanding of programming (and by deisgns here, I'm talking about stuff that dictates the algorithm that must be used, not just high-level 'what does it look like' interface design.)
Another big problem is that after spending a year or two doing the "design but don't code" job, even someone who once knew what he was doing starts getting rusty and making dumb algorithmic decisions.
I don't know what the solution is, but it certainly doesn't involve putting a programmer into a position where he never programs again in his lifetime before he can affect the design.
Slashdot Mirror
The only difference between a cult and a religion is that a cult is a religion with a small enough membership that it is still politically safe to give it the ridicule that all religions richly deserve.
All it takes is one vengeful idiot-savant who knows how to set up a distributed attack, but knows nothing about social ettiquite. You don't need to hang out with lots of them to run across one. And given the current state of cluelessness with tech issues that the judicial system has, I wouldn't put any faith at all in the ability of a randomly chosen small calims court judge to be able to understand what's going on enough to rule in your favor.
When I heard of the online version I was breifly hopeful. I thought maybe since it doesn't involve the sale of cards it might actually be a fair game and be worth getting in to it. But then I see that, nope, its the same thing, only now you pay money to get the privlege to pretend you have a rare card (think about it - increased price through scarcity will fail utterly in an electronic forum where scarcity is completely artificial.)
No. Not all screwings are deliberate. Sometimes a policy that seems like a good idea has unforseen side effects. Making users pay for excess bandwith *seems* like a reasonable way to do it, until you stop to think about how a user isn't fully in control of the bandwith usage hitting his leaf node.
This upstream block, how long would it take to get it set up, and in the time between when it went up and when the problem started a lot of your bandwith got burned - would that still count against your cap or would they reset the counter for you?
And when the attack is from distributed locations, such that a block would be ineffective - what then?
What would be nice (and I don't know enough of the TCP/IP sytem to know if this is possible) would be if you did not get charged for the initial connection negotiation packets, and only got measured based on the data packets. That way if your system is configured to reject a connection, repeated attempts to make that connection don't count against your cap. Then you could actually do something about the bandwith-eating offender at your end, on your leaf node, before their actions start to affect your bandwith.
Of course, that doesn't address unstreamed traffic (datagrams) that don't need to negotiate a connection. I don't know how those could be protected against.
The point is they are selling more service without actually providing it. They are adding more subscribers without actually providing more product overall. It's essentially the same as if a McDonalds said to a crowded store full of noon-rush customers, "Well, we know we told you all that you'd be getting a full hamburger for your price you paid, we really only planned on making 20 hamburgers this hour, and there's 40 of you who purchased one. We could make 20 more hamburgers but we'd rather funnel the money you paid us into pure profit, so we'll be giving each of you half a hamgurger. Have a nice day, and thank you for choosing McDonalds." Now, those who hadn't paid yet and could still get out of the deal aren't getting screwed, but those who already did pay are getting the shaft when the terms changed after their purchase.
I'd be fearful of signing a contract that says I'll pay extra for excessive bandwith when I'm not in control of that bandwith. If someone felt like being a jackass and decided to flood my webserver there isn't a thing I could do about it on my end. I could deny the hits from that address, but that doesn't prevent the fact that the requests coming in still count against my download bandwith. I would much, much rather ask for the provider to have a cap in place that throttles my bandwith so I am not financially responsible for OTHER PEOPLE making me go over.
I have oodles of servers running on my machine right now that take very little bandwith, but just sit there waiting until I need them briefly. For example, there's everything that runs under inetd.conf.
The travesty is that cable providers give us this crap that server-denying is necessary to reduce bandwith, when more bandwith is taken up by prOn downloads than by anything I'd be putting up on a server.
Sometimes the important thing isn't "Linux supported", but "Linux is not verbotten here". It's more about finding a provider where you don't have to shut off everything that makes unix unix to meet the terms of service of the company, and not having to mess with idiots who don't know what the word "server" really means. (In an attempt to reduce bandwith a cable provider will often say servers are not allowed, not realizing that being a server says nothing about how much traffic will flow. If I put my webserver for a local gaming club up on a home computer it would generate a hell of a lot less traffic than the typical prOn downloader at home generates. Plus, they don't even have a definition of "server" that I can use to ensure I know what is and isn't allowed. (They allow ICQ and various p2p services, so clearly they aren't using the technical definition of server when they say servers are banned.)
I don't care about linux being "supported" - I just care about it being allowed. I don't need support on my own computer.
All those fears and doubts you list are things that MS already has a track record of doing in the past. It is more uncertain to say they won't do them again than it is to say they will continue the same pattern.
They didn't have to make internet exploiter any good in order to get it on most desktops around the world. IE proliferated FIRST, and started becoming usable SECOND. A change to the network layer underneath could be propigated using the same exact technique - make it mandatory to have it installed if you want any recent updates or new versions of Windows.
Clue stick: *whack*
When was the last time you saw a laptop with the video adapter being a replacable PCMCIA card? Did you even read my list of examples?
That's what I thought. You *felt* it was true without really *knowing* it is true, and made the claim based on that gut feeling.
I see offensive written material in stores all the time, like the Bible - which is more corruptive than any smut magazine could ever hope to be.
Companies are in the same boat you are with regards to predicting what their customers want - they don't really know, so they guess. They guess the number of people offended by a particular magazine cover is large, so they guess that the impact of carrying it would be large, and so they decide not to carry it unless the publisher changes the cover. But it's all based on pure guesswork, and the fallacy of believing that the most vocal group must be the majority group. If something does not offend you, you aren't going to start up a grassroots campaign to publicize the fact that it isn't offensive to you. Negative comments always outnumber positive ones when it comes to customer feedback, because the people who are annoyed feel a greater need to say something than the ones that are satsified.
There are two meanings of "support" in the computer biz. Sometimes "we support foo" means "We'll help you on the phone with problems about foo". Other times it means "We make sure our product will work in conjunction with foo."
It isn't clear which meaning is meant here, but I suspect it's the second, not the first. And that *is* a problem even for knowlegable linux users, because it means the next Thinkpad you buy might come with some peripheral hardware device that can't work with linux, like a winmodem, or a proprietary video adapter with unpublished specs. And since it's a laptop, swapping the device out for one that works might not be an option.
Well, *everyone* wants things not to be offensive - simply by the definition of what the word "offensive" means. The problem is that different people find different things offensive.
The claim I think you are trying to make is that most walmart customers agree with walmart's stance on what is and isn't offensive.
I'd like to see you back that up.
The sad thing is you probably thought you were being sarcastic there.
That would have made sense if the statement was "each *algorithm* must be set in stone before you begin typing", but that's not what the post said. It said each *line of code* must be set in stone, which is saying that there must be some form of the entire verbatim program in existence somewhere before you even begin typing (which would preclude using an editor to actually edit the code rather than just type it in). Now, maybe that's not the meaning you meant to get across, but that *is* what your words said. I would have assumed that that's not really what you meant except that you later also mentioned all the peer reviews being done before you type, and that, to my mind, includes code reviews as well as design reviews.
The point is that there are reasons besides the ones that were given for shopping at wallmart, when they are the only game in town. Whether that happend because the other businesses screwed up or not is irrelevant to the person who finds himself walking in to wallmart to buy his new TV. Price, selection, and convenience are irrelevant when they're the only game in town.
That is the answer why.
I used to know someone who always wrote his c-code equals conditionals such that if one operand was an lvalue and one was an rvalue, he'd put the rvalue on the left, where it isn't allowed for assignment statements, like so: if( 0 == myFileSize ) // TO-DO: print some error and die
,,,etc,,,
{
}
Instead of the more human-readable: if( myFileSize == 0 )
The theory was, if he screwed up and put in a '=', instead of a '==', then the compiler would catch it for him that way. An interesting idea, but I figure if you expend the mental effort to remember to type it in backward, you are already thinking about the difference between '=' and '==', and so at that point you aren't likely to make that mistake anyway.
What the hell is wrong with admitting that BOTH the government AND Microsoft are in the wrong here? Why is it that people insist on ignoring the obvious evidence of Microsoft wrongdoing in order to argue against the government case agaisnt them? It's not necessary. Microsoft has done wrong, chiefly becasue their squashing of the competition is often through means other than producting better product at a better price. But that doesn't mean that any of the remedies proposed by the government make any damn sense either. (I am very glad the "split them in two" remedy is now dead - I don't want to see the tech-ignorant government trying to decide where the dividing line between OS and Application is - even techies themselves have never really drawn a clear line. After all, what is "COMMAND.EXE"? It's an application. What is "/bin/sh"? It's an application. But they are also quite integral to what makes their OSes what they are.)
It's not necessary to disagree with the findings that Microsoft has done wrong in order to disagree with the sentencing proposals they face. I just think that any government cure would be worse than the disease at this point. The time at which something could have been done about in a fair manner it is long gone. MS got where they are because the majority of the market is people who are extremely ignorant about computers. No other industry has that degree of ignorance in the marketplace - even a total newbie knows, for example, that you put gasoline in a car or it won't go, and that when it makes odd noises that means something is wrong and needs looking after. The computer consumer doesn't even know that level of knowlege about his machine, because no product before has ever been sold that had this level of complexity and flexability before. And it was that ignorance that propelled MS to it's current position.
Allright, who's the jerk who keeps modding this guy's posts as flamebaits? I think maybe someone has a vendetta. Nothing he said is inflamatory. I think he's *wrong*, mind you, but agreement isn't the same thing as on-topicness or non-flamedness.
Uhm, actually it is not. Seatbelt laws vary from state to state. It is not illegal everywhere in the US.
The purpose of a lot of these software engineering techniques is to make the design of the *algorithm* independant from the typing of the code. The goal is to make someone with more experience write out the design in a rather pseudocode fashion and then someone else can convert that to actual compiling code. In theory this means the experienced developers lead the newbies through the process, with the experienced ones doing the design, and the newbies doing the muckwork typing. That actually makes a lot of sense in theory, but in practice, it didn't seem the work that way at the job I first got out of college (where this approach was used). The deep, deep problem with this approach is that the psuedocode has to be phrased in such a way that everyone involved in the meeting can understand it, and that means no high-falutin' computer science terminology or any o' that techie stuff. So your design has to be at the level a PHB can handle, and since the coders aren't allowed to get too creative with their implentation of the design, the actual code ends up being just as simple-minded as the design. Thus time and time again we ended up with slow wasteful brute-force approaches to problems, not because the coders and designers didn't know any better, but because that's all that was expressable at the high-level meetings where the design was being hammered out.
Then the problem got worse after several years of that situation ended up making people believe that design work doesn't require a programming background, and then we started having designs made by people who only have a cursory understanding of programming (and by deisgns here, I'm talking about stuff that dictates the algorithm that must be used, not just high-level 'what does it look like' interface design.)
Another big problem is that after spending a year or two doing the "design but don't code" job, even someone who once knew what he was doing starts getting rusty and making dumb algorithmic decisions.
I don't know what the solution is, but it certainly doesn't involve putting a programmer into a position where he never programs again in his lifetime before he can affect the design.