The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
Sadly, the word innovation and all the derivative vocabulary that comes with it due to overuse in the latest marketing fodder triggered an image of a caveman named Zog making a sharper rock. When he had finally created this technological marvel the word quickly spread in the local tribal community. The tribe would go out hunting, and those whose rocks didn't meet required sharpness criteria would be considered to be fools clinging to obsolete technology. In a matter of days, Zog had ascended from lowly rockbasher to an expert in the field of innovative hunting.
Zog had it all: finely cut food from the most tasty animals the local wildlife had to offer, the adoration of the masses, commanding power over the world because of his fearsomely sharp weaponry, and a veritable harem of alluring females. A few weeks after his rise to power though, things weren't looking so great anymore for Zog. Nerg, the foul smelling tribal lunatic, had taken his innovative rocksharpening technique and had improved the process by a factor of 2 by means of sustained repetitive bashing. No longer did Zog have the sharpest rocks in the tribe, and almost instantaneously he lost it all. The masses no longer adored him for they were too busy hunting with Nerg. His power over the world stagnated and eventually had to make way for the sharper weaponry of Nerg. But most important of all, his considerably sized harem of willing females left him for the newer more powerful rocksharpener.
And that is how the Tribal Patent Orgnanization was formed. Scratched into a cavewall for all eternity we find the worlds first patent: "TPO Issued Patent #00000001 : A technique for sharpening rocks by bashing rocks against eachother.". It includes various drawings on rock sharpening techniques and a vague description of acquiring a harem by the use of these techniques. Unfortunately Zog never got to sue Nerg in a tribal court of law, because Nerg bashed in his skull with an incredibly sharp rock several minutes after filing the patent.
To this day, Nerg is remembered as the worlds first innovator and harem owner.
True story!
(I apologize for the precious time I stole from you to read this, but the code I'm writing right now is slowly killing my brain unless I entertain it a little in small doses. Tune in next comment, when Dorg invents fire and accidentally burns down his cave, and is remembered throughout history as the worlds smartest and most stupid caveman of all time. Don't miss out on how Dorg later also invents insurance fraud.)
It is designed specially for people who love to make others miserable. It is a griefer's paradise.
I play Eve and I don't particularly enjoy making others miserable. Yeah, I'll shoot some lone miner minding his own business when he's in a place he probably shouldn't be on his own. Now most people draw a conclusion from that: I shouldn't be here alone, or I should be better prepared. But I stopped counting how often I see those exact same people appear in local 5 minutes later in the biggest most bad-ass ship they could afford, shouting various threats at me and my corp how they're going to do this and that, ruin the game for, etc etc yada yada...
Really now, we're just playing a game. Yes, I shoot people for fun. I do this in areas where the game allows me to without too grave repercussions for myself. Areas that before you enter actually have a popup window warning you about people like me, and you have to confirm that you really want to go there. I'm sorry, but I am going to shoot you. There's a relatively large and safe area provided for you if you don't like the idea of being shot at, and there's plenty of people there making more in-game money than I do.
I'm not a particular bastard. I don't go about in chat smacktalking, nor do I taunt you after your loss. But some of the in-game mails I've received could be used to create a very colorful dictionary. It doesn't have to be that way really. A while ago on a whim I decided to go have a look at a wormhole. I wasn't really prepared, by myself but was a bit bored and wanted to have some fun. Well, the natives of that particular system didn't take to kindly to my presence and told me to buzz off with various types of weaponry. But you know what, despite that they were trying to kill me, they were pretty friendly guys in chat. After all, it's just a game.
One of the main things would be the destructibility of so much in the game that takes so much time to get.
Which is why the age old Eve mantra is: don't fly something you can't afford to lose. Oh, and I've been there. I've lost some valuable things over the past couple of years, sometimes in incredibly stupid ways. But when the bank account is looking rather empty, I'll just grab a smaller ship and it'll have to do until I have more money from shooting people or from an alt character running missions or playing the market.
Also there's a real caste type system in that it takes real time to increase skills, as in you set the game to increase a skill and after a fixed amount of Earth time has passed it does. As such those that got in early have a permanent advantage.
Ah yes, the old "but the others have more skillpoints then we, so we can never beat them" argument. I'm far from the oldest character in Eve, and I've had my share of hiatuses when I didn't have the time for online games. There's a simple way of dealing with characters that are older than you: take him on in a fleet, and either outsmart him or outgun him. Oh, some in that fleet might lose a ship, but it'll be a fraction of the cost that the other guy will lose. I've been in a few nasty situations after characters a few years younger than me managed to outsmart me, and I've definitely been outgunned before. Win some, lose some. There's plenty of ways to be useful in PVP after about 2 weeks in the game. You'll need those two weeks anyway to see what's going on.
Those that derive their pleasure from causing pain to others love it.
<sarcasm>Oh yes, if only someone would invent a protocol that allowed stabbing over TCP/IP. I'm sure it would be hilarious</sarcasm>
It's a game. Have fun. Don't expect to win all the time though, and don't expect a single player experience. Over the years I've cultivated the mindset that whatever I'm flying is already lost. So far, I haven't been wrong.
Games from 1991-1996 are considered "old school" now? A person born in those years would be described as very young.
1991 would mean that it's 19 years old, which for video games is pretty old. I do remember enjoying Street Fighter 2 a lot when I was 19 years younger, which seems like ages ago. What's perhaps more surprising about it is that aside from the sequels, this game has actually been ported, published, republished, ported again, overhauled, balanced, given new art, rebalanced, etc etc etc and people are still playing the latest incarnation from 2008 Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.
There's also a very active competition atmosphere surrounding Street Fighter, one that probably rivals the whole starcraft thing. The last event I noticed was EVO2010, which was live streamed over the internet as well. It's pretty impressive to see some of these players go at it.
In a way, I'm a bit saddened that arcades are disappearing. We don't have a lot of cities with arcade halls here, but carnivals used to bring arcades with them. I would lose a lot of small coins to those machines, but over time the coins weren't so small any more as the prices went up. A few years after I stopped going to arcades at carnivals traditional arcade games disappeared for more lucrative things with prizes (robot arm grabbing stuffed animals, coin machine where prizes would drop down together with coins). I never really understood what's so fun about inserting coin after coin until some coins fall out and possibly a cheap watch or keychain. These days you're lucky if more than one arcade shows up at a carnival, and you're really lucky if they carry a few good arcade games. The cities where there are arcade halls have very few actual arcade machines, and are more focused on the really big stuff that takes up a lot of room: DDR machines, rythm games (think like guitar hero), and things like that.
I guess the consoles have mostly obsoleted the arcade with multiplayer over the internet, even though it's quite not the same experience. From what I gather, arcades are still very popular in some Asian countries.
Because CAPTCHA in essence is a flawed system, also because it's a fun "puzzle" and if you don't try to solve it someone else will.
It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross.
That's an overstatement if I've ever seen one, like that guy who posted here saying he felt raped when his employer didn't pay him. People just love to make controversial statements on slashdot. "Oh my god, someone found a bug for SSH and wrote an exploit. It's like that time some guy bashed in the window of my car with a rock and took my laptop, only to look up my personal information, come to my home and abduct my dog for ransom."
Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
reCAPTCHA is about CAPTCHAs, and using CAPTCHAs to get stuff digitized. No matter how "good" the intentions are, the captcha system is horribly flawed and there is an increasing amount of libraries popping up to break captchas. I would say that any real advances made to breaking captchas has the benefit of having better OCR in the short run, and in the long run maybe we get to see a better solution for the problems captchas try to deal with.
Anyway, if this guy isn't trying it, a clever spammer will and trust me, they are trying. Captcha protected sites aren't really that impervious to spam lately.
If Google said "We will no longer serve any Google content to any ISP which violates Net Neutrality", the debate would basically be over. You wouldn't even need any government regulation.
That would be Google shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun. A company whose primary source of income is advertising doesn't really have the option of abandoning a large (potential) customerbase, especially when several large companies would not wait to fill the void Google would leave behind.
Youtube? Easily replaced with some other flash video streaming site. Search? Why, Microsoft has just the thing for you. Calendar, mail, buzz and whatnot? Several alternatives exist. Wave? Nobody cares. (sorry, I couldn't help it). It's not that what they're doing is that unique, it's that they've got an incredibly large audience and did some really cool stuff at a time nobody else was doing it. Today, Google is trying to be everyone's everything exactly because they know that they're not unique, but at this moment in time they still have the advantage.
Oh, I'm not a fan of this deal at all, because I know that in the medium to long term this is going to end up costing ME money as a consumer somehow. It's also the ideal precedent that ISPs need to start bullying everyone else.
Drastic moves on either side would just upset the customers. Google can't afford to flip off all those users without basically saying they're unreliable, and Verizon can't deny access to Google without pissing off people who rely on Google for their services. But here's the advantage Verizon has: they can slow down traffic from Google when they feel other traffic should have priority. So when Joe Sixpack is showing Jane a video on Youtube and it starts to stutter and buffer he'll say "Damned Youtube" and happily stay subscribed to Verizon because the rest of the Internet works fine. And, let's not forget: some ISPs don't have any competitors in some communities, while Google will never have that kind of a bargaining chip.
It's modded funny, but the sad part is that sometimes this is true. I spent a year in a company where they had a 2 hour meeting over how to start doxygen comments:/// or//! or/** or/*!.
The sad part isn't that it took two hours to settle, but that it took two hours to agree on not agreeing with each other and not settle the issue. I left shortly after, so I don't know if they ever managed to settle that debate. Their software still hasn't made it to a public release, so I'm guessing they have more important issues right now than that
Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
On a limited (resource wise, that is) ARM board you don't really have a choice. Well you do, right up to the point where you hit the limits of the hardware.
Avoiding C++ exceptions is practically impossible if you want to play nice with memory. For example, C has malloc() which is supposed to return NULL if allocation fails for some reason. In C++ operator new throws std::bad_alloc (or at least it should, unless your compiler is ancient). The C program should be able to terminate gracefully, while the C++ program cannot without a catch statement by default.
There are ways around that though, such as setting a new_handler or using std::nothrow when constructing a new object. eg.
Foo *bar = new (std::nothrow) Foo();
if (bar == 0) { // allocation failure, handle gracefully
}
But the thing is that the moment the memory for Foo is allocated, the constructor itself can do whatever it pleases and the gloves come off. So if the constructor contains a new statement that allocates some more memory, you're right back where you started, unless you called that one with std::nothrow as well, which is something that's not always under your control (eg. 3rd party library).
C++ templates allow code re-use with exactly 0 performance loss
Performance? Sure. Binary size on the other hand is a whole other thing. On a limited platform you have little option but ignore templates, which I agree is a shame because you can do some damn convenient things that way. Sadly, this also means that STL is a no go most of the time, which is a sad thing, since now I'm back to writing my own linked lists. "Hey, I could write a template for... Oh wait..."
Anyway, I don't want to start the whole C vs C++ thing since a debate like that is pointless and out of fashion (Isn't it java vs ruby these days? I thought the word of the decade was "scalability"). My personal opinion on it is that if I'm working on an embedded system with little resources, I'd rather not have to fight against how the C++ compiler does things for a few kilobytes of extra room and just pick C. On a regular PC you're most likely right, although I do notice a lot of other languages there. Most dominantly C# and objective C on their respective platforms.
Do you all just use the 3-button mouse that came with your Dell? Back and forward buttons have been common on mice for the last decade.
The dell workstation at the office came with one of those abominations. Every now and then my thumb would hit that conveniently placed button, causing whatever webpage I was looking at to disappear for whatever webpage was in the list previously or next. Not to mention all those badly programmed javascript webpages have a tendency to break the behaviour of the back button. I have traded the mouse with one of my coworkers who was envious of it, for a regular 3 button mouse. It just gets in the way like the windows keys do.
I'm sure that some people find those things incredibly handy, windows-key-D'ing their way to the desktop, having that extra mouse button for going back in a browser, all those fancy multimedia buttons and knobs with blue leds underneath... The last keyboard I got had the six key block (insert delete home end pageup pagedown) layed out vertically. Fun times I tell you, when you wish to go to the end of a line and end up deleting something. Oh, it wouldn't be so bad if keyboard designers at least used a standard layout in case that block is vertically aligned, but they all do it differently.
Also: context menu -> move mouse a little to the right -> back
This was actually a fun conversation I had with the local jehova's witness lady who seemed to think an unmarried guy living with female roommates was somehow at high risk for "catching gay" along with other seemingly incompatible sins.
Yeah, you have to be careful with talking to Jehova's witnesses though. You don't know where they've been, and you might catch something from them.;)
Over the course of 10 years they've wasted a lot of my time. Ringing at the door in evening, stopping me at the shops, trying to have conversations with me in parks, handing out flyers at malls, trying to sell me subscriptions to their magazine, etc etc etc. One evening 3 years ago I just got tired of it. They rang my doorbell, I was in a nasty mood and didn't have a lot of time that day, and I simply said "You know, I AM really interested, but right now I have to take one of my kids to the doctor, and I'm a bit in a rush. Would you mind coming back at a later time?" (Please note that I do not have any children)
A week later, the pair showed up again, ringing my doorbell. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw them, and opened the door. "Oh hi, you know I was just thinking of you guys, but my boss called a minute ago, and I've got to deal with an emergency at work. I know this is really annoying, but could you come back at a later time?". Both gentlemen were still smiling and polite, but of course there was no emergency at work.
Another week passed, and yet again both gentlemen were at my door. "Oh, hello again. How nice to see you. I was kind of expecting that the both of you had given up by now, so I'll be upfront and admit that I'm not interested at all." Both gentlemen had a highly annoyed look on their face, which I'm sure is not very typical. I then said "Well, it was nice seeing you gentlemen again. Please have a nice day, and feel free to come by again next week" and closed the door while smiling sympathetic to their devotion.
It has been 3 years since one of them has shown up at my front door, so I can only guess that I've ended up on some blacklist of incorrigible sinners, homosexuals and devil worshipers. Oh yes, I am quite aware of what an enormous dick I was, but I've got to admit that it was strangely satisfying to waste their time for once.
Not just that, I've heard rumours that at least one police force actively discriminates against people who are too smart because such people might start to think for themselves.
That's nothing, last week I heard from my neighbour whose dogsitter has a cousin who's married to a policemans dog that they actually lobotomize people when they sign the contract. They don't even use any surgical equipment, just the pen the applicant signed in with and a rusty spoon. They do get the option of a sedative though, but from what I've heard from my housemates sister that has a plumber who's married to a policewoman, the sedative involves applying a hammer to someone's forehead.
Not a teenager by a long shot and I still enjoyed that. Or are you sad that someone might defile the fruit of Jobs' loins?
I don't really care for Jobs loinfruit or anything that's from that region, nor for his iGadgets, but this is just infantile at best. Now, I can appreciate an immature cock joke as much as the next guy, but I really hate waste like this. Perhaps do something cool with it?
A couple of coworkers and I had some fun with a cheap digital camera a while back. Create a water rocket, build camera inside water rocket, and let it fly. We were expecting the camera to break after the first launch, but it actually survived the entire day. Sure, it's not exactly rocket science, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than setting the camera on fire under a magnifying glass "hurr hurr fire hot". All this misses is the thoughtful narration of the modern equivalent of Beavis and Butthead, now really.
Burning a $500 phone is just a rich kids way of saying "Look at me, my parents have got money. Here, have a cigar, and a $100 bill to light it with. It's all good man, my parents paid for it."
Really, if you don't like idle don't fucking read it.
I try not too, but for some reason the RSS feeds don't take user preferences into account. But the thing is, slashdot lately has been a shadow of its former self. Perhaps the audience changed so much that most people here don't want to tinker or toy with something anymore, or perhaps the firehose has turned slashdot into a story-popularity contest.
It's like I'm browsing 4chan's/g/, but without the images. All it needs now is a couple of guys spamming a degoratory term for african americans, and the "you fags sure got told" meme and we're set.
Anyway, who am I to argue against the obvious will of the masses. Up next, will it blend? The iphone 4 down the blender, together with the fruit of Steve's loins. WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... Exciting!
This provides stability and ease of use, but it limits the quality to consumer-quality 16/44 stereo. Audio pros still need a system to hook on an 8 channel 24/192 interface.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of a 192KHz sampling rate? The maximum frequency you can push through that is 96Khz, which is way above human hearing. In fact, the human hearing range is between 20Hz and 20KHz, so even 44KHz sampling rate should be more than enough. Or am I missing something important?
Slashdot Mirror
The first person to think of trimming a sharp rock for better performance was a genuine innovator.
Sadly, the word innovation and all the derivative vocabulary that comes with it due to overuse in the latest marketing fodder triggered an image of a caveman named Zog making a sharper rock. When he had finally created this technological marvel the word quickly spread in the local tribal community. The tribe would go out hunting, and those whose rocks didn't meet required sharpness criteria would be considered to be fools clinging to obsolete technology. In a matter of days, Zog had ascended from lowly rockbasher to an expert in the field of innovative hunting.
Zog had it all: finely cut food from the most tasty animals the local wildlife had to offer, the adoration of the masses, commanding power over the world because of his fearsomely sharp weaponry, and a veritable harem of alluring females. A few weeks after his rise to power though, things weren't looking so great anymore for Zog. Nerg, the foul smelling tribal lunatic, had taken his innovative rocksharpening technique and had improved the process by a factor of 2 by means of sustained repetitive bashing. No longer did Zog have the sharpest rocks in the tribe, and almost instantaneously he lost it all. The masses no longer adored him for they were too busy hunting with Nerg. His power over the world stagnated and eventually had to make way for the sharper weaponry of Nerg. But most important of all, his considerably sized harem of willing females left him for the newer more powerful rocksharpener.
And that is how the Tribal Patent Orgnanization was formed. Scratched into a cavewall for all eternity we find the worlds first patent: "TPO Issued Patent #00000001 : A technique for sharpening rocks by bashing rocks against eachother.". It includes various drawings on rock sharpening techniques and a vague description of acquiring a harem by the use of these techniques. Unfortunately Zog never got to sue Nerg in a tribal court of law, because Nerg bashed in his skull with an incredibly sharp rock several minutes after filing the patent.
To this day, Nerg is remembered as the worlds first innovator and harem owner.
True story!
(I apologize for the precious time I stole from you to read this, but the code I'm writing right now is slowly killing my brain unless I entertain it a little in small doses. Tune in next comment, when Dorg invents fire and accidentally burns down his cave, and is remembered throughout history as the worlds smartest and most stupid caveman of all time. Don't miss out on how Dorg later also invents insurance fraud.)
It's pretty apparent that the set designers on ST:TNG were visionaries
The clothes designers though...
It is designed specially for people who love to make others miserable. It is a griefer's paradise.
I play Eve and I don't particularly enjoy making others miserable. Yeah, I'll shoot some lone miner minding his own business when he's in a place he probably shouldn't be on his own. Now most people draw a conclusion from that: I shouldn't be here alone, or I should be better prepared. But I stopped counting how often I see those exact same people appear in local 5 minutes later in the biggest most bad-ass ship they could afford, shouting various threats at me and my corp how they're going to do this and that, ruin the game for, etc etc yada yada...
Really now, we're just playing a game. Yes, I shoot people for fun. I do this in areas where the game allows me to without too grave repercussions for myself. Areas that before you enter actually have a popup window warning you about people like me, and you have to confirm that you really want to go there. I'm sorry, but I am going to shoot you. There's a relatively large and safe area provided for you if you don't like the idea of being shot at, and there's plenty of people there making more in-game money than I do.
I'm not a particular bastard. I don't go about in chat smacktalking, nor do I taunt you after your loss. But some of the in-game mails I've received could be used to create a very colorful dictionary. It doesn't have to be that way really. A while ago on a whim I decided to go have a look at a wormhole. I wasn't really prepared, by myself but was a bit bored and wanted to have some fun. Well, the natives of that particular system didn't take to kindly to my presence and told me to buzz off with various types of weaponry. But you know what, despite that they were trying to kill me, they were pretty friendly guys in chat. After all, it's just a game.
One of the main things would be the destructibility of so much in the game that takes so much time to get.
Which is why the age old Eve mantra is: don't fly something you can't afford to lose. Oh, and I've been there. I've lost some valuable things over the past couple of years, sometimes in incredibly stupid ways. But when the bank account is looking rather empty, I'll just grab a smaller ship and it'll have to do until I have more money from shooting people or from an alt character running missions or playing the market.
Also there's a real caste type system in that it takes real time to increase skills, as in you set the game to increase a skill and after a fixed amount of Earth time has passed it does. As such those that got in early have a permanent advantage.
Ah yes, the old "but the others have more skillpoints then we, so we can never beat them" argument. I'm far from the oldest character in Eve, and I've had my share of hiatuses when I didn't have the time for online games. There's a simple way of dealing with characters that are older than you: take him on in a fleet, and either outsmart him or outgun him. Oh, some in that fleet might lose a ship, but it'll be a fraction of the cost that the other guy will lose. I've been in a few nasty situations after characters a few years younger than me managed to outsmart me, and I've definitely been outgunned before. Win some, lose some. There's plenty of ways to be useful in PVP after about 2 weeks in the game. You'll need those two weeks anyway to see what's going on.
Those that derive their pleasure from causing pain to others love it.
<sarcasm>Oh yes, if only someone would invent a protocol that allowed stabbing over TCP/IP. I'm sure it would be hilarious</sarcasm>
It's a game. Have fun. Don't expect to win all the time though, and don't expect a single player experience. Over the years I've cultivated the mindset that whatever I'm flying is already lost. So far, I haven't been wrong.
Of course, it may not necessarily be plagiarism, because he's been saying this for years
Little known fact is that he has sentences pre-programmed into his voice synthesizer. Things like:
So yes, he does quite often mistakenly say it while ordering a cup of coffee, during a casual interview about his work.
Games from 1991-1996 are considered "old school" now? A person born in those years would be described as very young.
1991 would mean that it's 19 years old, which for video games is pretty old. I do remember enjoying Street Fighter 2 a lot when I was 19 years younger, which seems like ages ago. What's perhaps more surprising about it is that aside from the sequels, this game has actually been ported, published, republished, ported again, overhauled, balanced, given new art, rebalanced, etc etc etc and people are still playing the latest incarnation from 2008 Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.
There's also a very active competition atmosphere surrounding Street Fighter, one that probably rivals the whole starcraft thing. The last event I noticed was EVO2010, which was live streamed over the internet as well. It's pretty impressive to see some of these players go at it.
In a way, I'm a bit saddened that arcades are disappearing. We don't have a lot of cities with arcade halls here, but carnivals used to bring arcades with them. I would lose a lot of small coins to those machines, but over time the coins weren't so small any more as the prices went up. A few years after I stopped going to arcades at carnivals traditional arcade games disappeared for more lucrative things with prizes (robot arm grabbing stuffed animals, coin machine where prizes would drop down together with coins). I never really understood what's so fun about inserting coin after coin until some coins fall out and possibly a cheap watch or keychain. These days you're lucky if more than one arcade shows up at a carnival, and you're really lucky if they carry a few good arcade games. The cities where there are arcade halls have very few actual arcade machines, and are more focused on the really big stuff that takes up a lot of room: DDR machines, rythm games (think like guitar hero), and things like that.
I guess the consoles have mostly obsoleted the arcade with multiplayer over the internet, even though it's quite not the same experience. From what I gather, arcades are still very popular in some Asian countries.
Why would anyone want to do this?
Because CAPTCHA in essence is a flawed system, also because it's a fun "puzzle" and if you don't try to solve it someone else will.
It's like attacking the UN peace keeping troops or the Red Cross.
That's an overstatement if I've ever seen one, like that guy who posted here saying he felt raped when his employer didn't pay him. People just love to make controversial statements on slashdot. "Oh my god, someone found a bug for SSH and wrote an exploit. It's like that time some guy bashed in the window of my car with a rock and took my laptop, only to look up my personal information, come to my home and abduct my dog for ransom."
Breaking reCAPTCHA is like defecating in the village well, ensuring that everyone suffers. No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
reCAPTCHA is about CAPTCHAs, and using CAPTCHAs to get stuff digitized. No matter how "good" the intentions are, the captcha system is horribly flawed and there is an increasing amount of libraries popping up to break captchas. I would say that any real advances made to breaking captchas has the benefit of having better OCR in the short run, and in the long run maybe we get to see a better solution for the problems captchas try to deal with.
Anyway, if this guy isn't trying it, a clever spammer will and trust me, they are trying. Captcha protected sites aren't really that impervious to spam lately.
If Google said "We will no longer serve any Google content to any ISP which violates Net Neutrality", the debate would basically be over. You wouldn't even need any government regulation.
That would be Google shooting themselves in the foot with a shotgun. A company whose primary source of income is advertising doesn't really have the option of abandoning a large (potential) customerbase, especially when several large companies would not wait to fill the void Google would leave behind.
Youtube? Easily replaced with some other flash video streaming site. Search? Why, Microsoft has just the thing for you. Calendar, mail, buzz and whatnot? Several alternatives exist. Wave? Nobody cares. (sorry, I couldn't help it). It's not that what they're doing is that unique, it's that they've got an incredibly large audience and did some really cool stuff at a time nobody else was doing it. Today, Google is trying to be everyone's everything exactly because they know that they're not unique, but at this moment in time they still have the advantage.
Oh, I'm not a fan of this deal at all, because I know that in the medium to long term this is going to end up costing ME money as a consumer somehow. It's also the ideal precedent that ISPs need to start bullying everyone else.
Drastic moves on either side would just upset the customers. Google can't afford to flip off all those users without basically saying they're unreliable, and Verizon can't deny access to Google without pissing off people who rely on Google for their services. But here's the advantage Verizon has: they can slow down traffic from Google when they feel other traffic should have priority. So when Joe Sixpack is showing Jane a video on Youtube and it starts to stutter and buffer he'll say "Damned Youtube" and happily stay subscribed to Verizon because the rest of the Internet works fine. And, let's not forget: some ISPs don't have any competitors in some communities, while Google will never have that kind of a bargaining chip.
Ask "Should I use spaces or tabs for newlines?"
It's modded funny, but the sad part is that sometimes this is true. I spent a year in a company where they had a 2 hour meeting over how to start doxygen comments:/// or //! or /** or /*! .
The sad part isn't that it took two hours to settle, but that it took two hours to agree on not agreeing with each other and not settle the issue. I left shortly after, so I don't know if they ever managed to settle that debate. Their software still hasn't made it to a public release, so I'm guessing they have more important issues right now than that
http://www.chriscanfield.net/Offsite/fbiRobocopPony.jpg
BRILLIANT!
That made my day. Thank you sir!
How long until we move to using dedicated terminals to access our online banking.
What? You mean like those things you see at a bank?
Frankly, there is no valid reason for starting a new program in C in this day and age.
On a limited (resource wise, that is) ARM board you don't really have a choice. Well you do, right up to the point where you hit the limits of the hardware.
Avoiding C++ exceptions is practically impossible if you want to play nice with memory. For example, C has malloc() which is supposed to return NULL if allocation fails for some reason. In C++ operator new throws std::bad_alloc (or at least it should, unless your compiler is ancient). The C program should be able to terminate gracefully, while the C++ program cannot without a catch statement by default.
There are ways around that though, such as setting a new_handler or using std::nothrow when constructing a new object. eg.
Foo *bar = new (std::nothrow) Foo();
// allocation failure, handle gracefully
if (bar == 0) {
}
But the thing is that the moment the memory for Foo is allocated, the constructor itself can do whatever it pleases and the gloves come off. So if the constructor contains a new statement that allocates some more memory, you're right back where you started, unless you called that one with std::nothrow as well, which is something that's not always under your control (eg. 3rd party library).
C++ templates allow code re-use with exactly 0 performance loss
Performance? Sure. Binary size on the other hand is a whole other thing. On a limited platform you have little option but ignore templates, which I agree is a shame because you can do some damn convenient things that way. Sadly, this also means that STL is a no go most of the time, which is a sad thing, since now I'm back to writing my own linked lists. "Hey, I could write a template for ... Oh wait..."
Anyway, I don't want to start the whole C vs C++ thing since a debate like that is pointless and out of fashion (Isn't it java vs ruby these days? I thought the word of the decade was "scalability"). My personal opinion on it is that if I'm working on an embedded system with little resources, I'd rather not have to fight against how the C++ compiler does things for a few kilobytes of extra room and just pick C. On a regular PC you're most likely right, although I do notice a lot of other languages there. Most dominantly C# and objective C on their respective platforms.
Do you all just use the 3-button mouse that came with your Dell? Back and forward buttons have been common on mice for the last decade.
The dell workstation at the office came with one of those abominations. Every now and then my thumb would hit that conveniently placed button, causing whatever webpage I was looking at to disappear for whatever webpage was in the list previously or next. Not to mention all those badly programmed javascript webpages have a tendency to break the behaviour of the back button. I have traded the mouse with one of my coworkers who was envious of it, for a regular 3 button mouse. It just gets in the way like the windows keys do.
I'm sure that some people find those things incredibly handy, windows-key-D'ing their way to the desktop, having that extra mouse button for going back in a browser, all those fancy multimedia buttons and knobs with blue leds underneath... The last keyboard I got had the six key block (insert delete home end pageup pagedown) layed out vertically. Fun times I tell you, when you wish to go to the end of a line and end up deleting something. Oh, it wouldn't be so bad if keyboard designers at least used a standard layout in case that block is vertically aligned, but they all do it differently.
Also: context menu -> move mouse a little to the right -> back
Bank robbers usually escape in cars so maybe we should ban automobiles to cut down on the number of bank robberies! Its' the same logic.
Why is it always cars for the analogies? Why not ducks? Or oranges?
sed
/bin/grep'ing a bit too much for the right spelling there have we?
That's nothing different than Doom 3 having a higher RAM/processor requirement than Doom 2.
HEY! That engine required a fuckton of horsepower to render several hundreds different shades of black.
Darkness never looked so dark before.
This was actually a fun conversation I had with the local jehova's witness lady who seemed to think an unmarried guy living with female roommates was somehow at high risk for "catching gay" along with other seemingly incompatible sins.
Yeah, you have to be careful with talking to Jehova's witnesses though. You don't know where they've been, and you might catch something from them. ;)
Over the course of 10 years they've wasted a lot of my time. Ringing at the door in evening, stopping me at the shops, trying to have conversations with me in parks, handing out flyers at malls, trying to sell me subscriptions to their magazine, etc etc etc. One evening 3 years ago I just got tired of it. They rang my doorbell, I was in a nasty mood and didn't have a lot of time that day, and I simply said "You know, I AM really interested, but right now I have to take one of my kids to the doctor, and I'm a bit in a rush. Would you mind coming back at a later time?" (Please note that I do not have any children)
A week later, the pair showed up again, ringing my doorbell. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw them, and opened the door. "Oh hi, you know I was just thinking of you guys, but my boss called a minute ago, and I've got to deal with an emergency at work. I know this is really annoying, but could you come back at a later time?". Both gentlemen were still smiling and polite, but of course there was no emergency at work.
Another week passed, and yet again both gentlemen were at my door. "Oh, hello again. How nice to see you. I was kind of expecting that the both of you had given up by now, so I'll be upfront and admit that I'm not interested at all." Both gentlemen had a highly annoyed look on their face, which I'm sure is not very typical. I then said "Well, it was nice seeing you gentlemen again. Please have a nice day, and feel free to come by again next week" and closed the door while smiling sympathetic to their devotion.
It has been 3 years since one of them has shown up at my front door, so I can only guess that I've ended up on some blacklist of incorrigible sinners, homosexuals and devil worshipers. Oh yes, I am quite aware of what an enormous dick I was, but I've got to admit that it was strangely satisfying to waste their time for once.
You take them in, feed them, and so on. Even offer them one (or some) of your women.
BEST... RELIGION... EVER! That's some hospitality right there. Where do I join, and who can I be a stranger to today?
A woman does not deserve to be raped just because she wore a skimpy black dress, and neither did I deserve to be unpaid
I fail to see how those two are related, unless your intention was having sex in exchange for money.
Yes... because pointing and clicking through a webpage is such a burden.
9/10 users in a statistical population of a size of 1 user find that clicking a mouse might or might not injure their index finger.
Not just that, I've heard rumours that at least one police force actively discriminates against people who are too smart because such people might start to think for themselves.
That's nothing, last week I heard from my neighbour whose dogsitter has a cousin who's married to a policemans dog that they actually lobotomize people when they sign the contract. They don't even use any surgical equipment, just the pen the applicant signed in with and a rusty spoon. They do get the option of a sedative though, but from what I've heard from my housemates sister that has a plumber who's married to a policewoman, the sedative involves applying a hammer to someone's forehead.
Not a teenager by a long shot and I still enjoyed that. Or are you sad that someone might defile the fruit of Jobs' loins?
I don't really care for Jobs loinfruit or anything that's from that region, nor for his iGadgets, but this is just infantile at best. Now, I can appreciate an immature cock joke as much as the next guy, but I really hate waste like this. Perhaps do something cool with it?
A couple of coworkers and I had some fun with a cheap digital camera a while back. Create a water rocket, build camera inside water rocket, and let it fly. We were expecting the camera to break after the first launch, but it actually survived the entire day. Sure, it's not exactly rocket science, but it's a hell of a lot more fun than setting the camera on fire under a magnifying glass "hurr hurr fire hot". All this misses is the thoughtful narration of the modern equivalent of Beavis and Butthead, now really.
Burning a $500 phone is just a rich kids way of saying "Look at me, my parents have got money. Here, have a cigar, and a $100 bill to light it with. It's all good man, my parents paid for it."
Really, if you don't like idle don't fucking read it.
I try not too, but for some reason the RSS feeds don't take user preferences into account. But the thing is, slashdot lately has been a shadow of its former self. Perhaps the audience changed so much that most people here don't want to tinker or toy with something anymore, or perhaps the firehose has turned slashdot into a story-popularity contest.
It's like I'm browsing 4chan's /g/, but without the images. All it needs now is a couple of guys spamming a degoratory term for african americans, and the "you fags sure got told" meme and we're set.
Anyway, who am I to argue against the obvious will of the masses. Up next, will it blend? The iphone 4 down the blender, together with the fruit of Steve's loins. WHIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR... Exciting!
SourceForget.net
What a splendid idea. A source revision control system hooked up straight to /dev/null, with a webinterface. FUND IT!
This provides stability and ease of use, but it limits the quality to consumer-quality 16/44 stereo. Audio pros still need a system to hook on an 8 channel 24/192 interface.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of a 192KHz sampling rate? The maximum frequency you can push through that is 96Khz, which is way above human hearing. In fact, the human hearing range is between 20Hz and 20KHz, so even 44KHz sampling rate should be more than enough. Or am I missing something important?
The mouse is going away, no doubt
From my cold dead hands, sir!
Then match the poorly rated people with each other. Or just have an obscenity button and if a person triggers it multiple times they get kicked off.
Foolproof! Nobody is ever going to abuse that system.
I thought the whole point of chatroulette was a gamble between seeing an actual person or just a dude jacking off.
Like global thermonuclear war, "The only way to win is not to play".
I believe the term Mutually Assured Destruction disagrees with you. What that means in regards to chatroulette though... I don't want to go there.