Yes, but a true gamer would have them in his sig, preferably flashing, and the truly faithful would have a constantly updated temp and clock reading posted too.
The brief flash of acrobat-induced rage has passed.
I kinda see his point, but the problem is those config directives were written evolutionarily, and almost never changed again. Maybe we should have a new config system with an import option for the old stuff. Sendmail is similar, but with m4 they can keep a (somewhat) more sane config system with less effort because the app doesn't process the config data itself and the script can be edited easily (vs changing source).
Honestly, it's not a problem for most people because once you've spent the 15 minutes/4 hours/5 days setting it up, you don't have to do it again, hopefully ever. So, 10 points for fire-and-forget, -900 for learning curve and ease of updating as your needs change.
BTW, should be on the list: I used to use apache configs that didn't change much once I had them up and running, but I always ended up having to add something just after all the crap i relearned from the last update was washed out of my head by new info, hallucinogenic chemicals, horrible new sci-fi b movies, etc, so i had to relearn half of that damn config file like 10 times so far. almost makes you want to fire up iis (just kidding, do not flame!)
oh, and mod_php is a pain if you don't have a package to install from, i remember having to bypass a lot of features in apache a few times to get apache to recognize php files as mime x-application/php, outside of extensions there isn't a good way to specify that easily.
Yeah, although the innovation bit is iffy, I mean the made an SFF single board pc with a funny controller and DRM, shrug.
My point was though, they only moved at all out of fear, businesses largely act out of fear, rarely out of oppurtunity (some exceptions exist, but very rarely involve innovation as much as business maneuvers), and if their business model is secure businesses can go on for years silently pumping the same economic niche, until sadly the landscape has changed too much, and they die suddenly, often after a brief struggle.
billg is completely paranoid, which is why i think he's survived as long as he has, software changes too fast for normal businesses to thrive easily, but the paranoid tend to anticipate and exploit changes as soon as they occur. its a survival trait.
kodak, ford, and gmc are becoming more irrelevant because they are old stagnant american companies, with enormous bureaucracies, which are almost completely unable to realign themselves for new economic factors. the laws of capitalism dictate they should die, and painfully, but hopefully new american companies will arise and the cycle will begin anew.
What, you expected to lead the world forever? Read an economics book, this is part of capitalist life, like dying is a part of organic life. The resources and people those companies are using will be redistributed to other companies which are less terrible. Boeing is on the fence, but has some agility left, and enormous amounts of govt. money and trade clout, which means Airbus will have a fair fight to take over as commercial aerospace leader.
Also, teflon, kevlar, lots of radio and computer technology, lots of aerospace technology, some plastics, gps(part military), microwave ovens (i think), MRI, and thousands of other technologies have in some way been assisted in their development by the space program.
Humans only move faster than they have to when forced with a threat, and the soviet union gave us the threat we needed to push into new technology, otherwise all the money in the world wouldn't be able to keep people as healthy as they can be now without the knowledge and technology to back it up. WW2 was similar, we went from biplanes to v2 rockets, jet fighters, and atomic weapons in the course of 5 years of combat, easily the single most advanced technological progress the human race has ever known, all because we needed better ways of killing each other.
Btw, you're right about our fiscal irresponsibility, but the same political factors that cripple nasa make it "politically impossible"(god i love that phrase) to straighten our budget. There was a time during the clinton era that they said we may be debt free within 15 years and I was blown away... I miss that time.
This is slashdot, there are only 2 choices for any argument, you damn dirty communist bastard.
I agree btw, mostly because of what I consider the population coefficients of both democracy and capitalism. Both were designed when the global population was maybe 1/7th what it is today, citizens were less specialized by nature, and most cities were measured by thousands of people.
To everyone who says american democracy and capitalism are the end-all, be-all, I'd recommend they get back into their buggy carriage and drive to their 50 acre homestead to churn butter for the rest of their life, because the world changes, and no solution lasts forever.
My original question was rhetorical and sympathetic, much along the lines of saying "you gonna be all right?" to a 5 year-old leukemia patient. Thank you, for telling me the unbelievably hopeless but completely obvious truth that everyone knows and no-one is even remotely able to consider.
If you need me I'm going to go home and cry into my rocky road haagen-dazs, because it doesn't judge me, or tell me horrible truths I really want to consciously ignore.
Also, you're missing option 4:
(4) Find a way for another party (not you or anyone you like) to offend the unpleasant party, allowing them to redirect their misplaced anger toward them, and then giving both parties weapons before stepping away.
I mention option 4 because a) it works, and 2) we've done it before, those poor soviet sob's
BTW, that's the part of this that scares me the most. If they could do this 2 weeks after the last attack, they could've killed as many people as last time. Cong stupid luck, but they will almost certainly try again, and next time they won't make the same mistake, how do you stop them again?
This is the difference between a company and a business. A business is a company that has found its cash cow, and firmly opposes any further research or innovation that does not serve that golden calf. New technologies are particularly opposed, as they tend to change the business model, which requires the company to adapt (horrifying word to mba's btw, it requires thinking), to recreate the original, and beautiful, holy equilibrium, allowing the business to slowly move on, possibly growing into associated markets, without anything ever actually changing.
Technology is only good as long as it can be seen as an evolutionary step, and is almost exlcusively performed by the marketing department, leading to the terms "new and improved", and "version 2.0"(heh, or "XP").
Change is bad, Microsoft blew $5B on the Xbox project so far simply to keep sony from possibly threatening the windows empire with the ps2.
Fear change, go with the names you trust, these are not the droids you are looking for.
you should add how they swarm any new idea or field to milk it dry, and make nests for their 401k's before moving on to "the next big thing". No surviving inventors in their wake! Fear the wrath of the SSBB Swarm!
Like the god-damned zerg, only with less individual thought.
Software Engineer: You know HP could take the computer industry by storm and create the new computing environment for the 21st century!
Stockholder/Analyst: Yes, but HP should focus on it's primary industry, printer ink, 90% margins and $10B(best guess) volume are too important to get distracted by trivialities. Perhaps we could add that to our patent portfolio.
Keep getting rid of the things that made hp and they'll kill hp for good
So... they should get rid of printer ink costing more per ounce than gold? Their operating profit is like what, 80% from ink sales? Very innovative... Microsoft would be proud.
I agree with parent, actually I've got vonage for my primary line and broadvoice for a secondary with free calls to europe (quality is awful though, drop-outs, etc), because speakeasy didn't offer voip till i signed on to vonage and switching is a pain. Also, broadvoice has very little customer service, but if you're a tweaker it's awesome, they give you asterisk pbx setup options and everything.
For 911 use a mobile. the internet isn't up to life-critical reliability yet by a long way, but it's generally cheaper and more flexible if you want to experiment. Still don't think voip is completely there for jon q yet, but for businesses it's a no-brainer.
In the end though, anything to get out of the telco's grasp is a win.
A few weeks ago some genius came up with the unbelievably (apparently for him) brilliant idea of tying 2 cell phones with in network calling into a voip system for unlimited airtime. With bluetooth and asterisk you can do that easily if that's what you need, and get cheap overseas calls. In the end voip is the flexibility to do what you want to do, but the good-ol' "plug it in and it works" aspect is lost to the comprimise.
As to the bit about the Republicans -- it's been said before that the US is run by two parties: the party of Evil and the party of Stupidity. I agree with that assessment, but I think that the roles change day-to-day. Neither one is any better than the other.
They are both equally evil and equally stupid, the point is, you get to choose.
Government officials, serving at the behest of an uninvolved electorate tend to listen to parents, as they seem to be a large and vocal constituency.
In other news, Social security and medicare are endorsed by politicians hoping to curry favor with senior citizens, another large and vocal constituency.
Yell at the parents, yell at the seniors, yell at the stupid stupid people who scream outrage at every stupid thing that happens in the world. Ridicule parents publicly for buying games anything like this without noticing "oh, timmy just stomped on a hookers bloody skull, that's nice", but being outraged when they see fake, very low-quality, and really stupid sexual scenes of things they can find easier and better by throwing "breasts" into google.
No government has ever taken freedoms from its citizens, we are far too eager to deliver them with ribbons attached. That parents are giving freedoms away for the rest of us is disturbing.
I seriously hate this game for its unbelievable senselessness (i believe a so-called game should have a point beyond "look i shot the nun again!"), but I can see no reason for senator clinton to be talking about this in a federal forum, at least none that fits into our constitution.
While I don't agree with you about ASN.1 specifically (bad h323 experiences), I agree in the general sense about strictly typed data. I cannot believe in 2005 people still go around throwing char*'s at each other, and then wonder where the buffer overflows come from. Simple data typing is easier to debug overall than ascii fire/forget, and one of the things I think java could have brought to the software mainstream was implicit member length and auto-alloc/free.
As a unix junkie myself I don't see why everyone still tends to program like they're on a vax-10, with the basic c declarations and pointer throwing. Why in hell are unix strings still defined as char*'s? We've had length prefixed unicode for 20 years, it's infinitely more secure, use it instead of patching sendmail and apache every time someone finds a new way around the length specifier.
Ironically, windows has a spec for length prefixed unicode strings, but people hate using them because they use 6 different api's and semantics, and have to be converted back to lpstr's any time you want to use a string function or most api calls, so almost all of windows uses the same string type.
Makes me wonder why nobody made a (length prefixed unicode) lib, with the same api semantics that could convert ascii and allocate/free easily.
Yes, but we invented a lot of stuff. By that logic Europe should be the only ones allowed to brew beer?
Not that I think for a second we should give control to the UN (that just sounds crazy), but I still worry about what rights our govt might decide they absolutely need for the next "terror war".
How bout making an(other) independent international body to deal with this crap?
Or just give control to me, I'm a nice guy, I promise./grin, All your pr0n is belong to me.
I'm not trolling, I just remember what it was like to be that age, and... in a way it is stupid, but more like common-sense impaired, priorities are different, and you see things from a different perspective.
I also do not like the idea of raising penalties to prevent behavior, that is a slippery slope. Personally I disobey a lot of literal laws I see as inappropriate, and while you can easily call me arrogant for seeing myself as above the law (I am arrogant btw), I also see law as a thing that exists to better society, and not a rule that exists in it's own right. Laws have been written which are unjust, and unjust laws will be written again in the future.
When I defend these things I remember my childhood, going to a magnet school in Indiana, and everyone did some mischief because that many smart people put together, especially under the supervision of adults who we did not always respect kind of begs for that. That's part of childhood, and while it's not a good thing, I would hate the thought of someone going to jail for 5 years for something they considered only a prank.
So I offer a very bad comprimise: Outbound firewalls which restrict the kind of things you can post, IE your isp filters virus's and hacking attempts being sent rather than being recieved. Consider it steel bars on the bank window, they make it much harder for any idiot to fire off a script without really understanding what they are doing.
Point in fact features like this exist in IPv6 which nobody has really gotten around to deploying.
The downside is it's essentially censorship in a way, and could easily go too far and be used to filter p2p or free speech, but it is an alternative.
I can't countenance the idea of giving prison sentences for a crime that can be so easy to commit. The concept of prosecuting crimes that require skill more harshly does not fully apply here because a large, untrained segment of the population has these skills. My twin 13 yr old cousins could easily hack some computers, but they were fortunate to be raised by parents who taught them right from wrong very well, so they wouldn't. Can you say the same about every 14-yr old?
How many kids saw "Spy Kids" 1-3 and try to use the characters as a role model? The line between game and reality is blurry for some people, even some adults, if you can fix that then sure put the knowing violators in jail.
Thanks for the offer, lived in ocala for a while, how the hell do you drink a guiness in that weather? hehe.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but a true gamer would have them in his sig, preferably flashing, and the truly faithful would have a constantly updated temp and clock reading posted too.
Damn kids are lazy these days.
The brief flash of acrobat-induced rage has passed.
I kinda see his point, but the problem is those config directives were written evolutionarily, and almost never changed again. Maybe we should have a new config system with an import option for the old stuff. Sendmail is similar, but with m4 they can keep a (somewhat) more sane config system with less effort because the app doesn't process the config data itself and the script can be edited easily (vs changing source).
Honestly, it's not a problem for most people because once you've spent the 15 minutes/4 hours/5 days setting it up, you don't have to do it again, hopefully ever. So, 10 points for fire-and-forget, -900 for learning curve and ease of updating as your needs change.
BTW, should be on the list:
I used to use apache configs that didn't change much once I had them up and running, but I always ended up having to add something just after all the crap i relearned from the last update was washed out of my head by new info, hallucinogenic chemicals, horrible new sci-fi b movies, etc, so i had to relearn half of that damn config file like 10 times so far. almost makes you want to fire up iis (just kidding, do not flame!)
oh, and mod_php is a pain if you don't have a package to install from, i remember having to bypass a lot of features in apache a few times to get apache to recognize php files as mime x-application/php, outside of extensions there isn't a good way to specify that easily.
Yeah, although the innovation bit is iffy, I mean the made an SFF single board pc with a funny controller and DRM, shrug.
My point was though, they only moved at all out of fear, businesses largely act out of fear, rarely out of oppurtunity (some exceptions exist, but very rarely involve innovation as much as business maneuvers), and if their business model is secure businesses can go on for years silently pumping the same economic niche, until sadly the landscape has changed too much, and they die suddenly, often after a brief struggle.
billg is completely paranoid, which is why i think he's survived as long as he has, software changes too fast for normal businesses to thrive easily, but the paranoid tend to anticipate and exploit changes as soon as they occur. its a survival trait.
kodak, ford, and gmc are becoming more irrelevant because they are old stagnant american companies, with enormous bureaucracies, which are almost completely unable to realign themselves for new economic factors. the laws of capitalism dictate they should die, and painfully, but hopefully new american companies will arise and the cycle will begin anew.
What, you expected to lead the world forever? Read an economics book, this is part of capitalist life, like dying is a part of organic life. The resources and people those companies are using will be redistributed to other companies which are less terrible. Boeing is on the fence, but has some agility left, and enormous amounts of govt. money and trade clout, which means Airbus will have a fair fight to take over as commercial aerospace leader.
Also, teflon, kevlar, lots of radio and computer technology, lots of aerospace technology, some plastics, gps(part military), microwave ovens (i think), MRI, and thousands of other technologies have in some way been assisted in their development by the space program.
Humans only move faster than they have to when forced with a threat, and the soviet union gave us the threat we needed to push into new technology, otherwise all the money in the world wouldn't be able to keep people as healthy as they can be now without the knowledge and technology to back it up. WW2 was similar, we went from biplanes to v2 rockets, jet fighters, and atomic weapons in the course of 5 years of combat, easily the single most advanced technological progress the human race has ever known, all because we needed better ways of killing each other.
Btw, you're right about our fiscal irresponsibility, but the same political factors that cripple nasa make it "politically impossible"(god i love that phrase) to straighten our budget. There was a time during the clinton era that they said we may be debt free within 15 years and I was blown away... I miss that time.
I see the picture on newsweek already
"marsbase alpha decimated by excessive flatulence!"
I mean no politician would dream of making a promise like that that had a decent chance of failing so publicly.
I mean great idea, but humans are just too damn stupid on average to cope with life beyond earth (and usually earth).
flamebait?
joke?
dude what are all the mods from america or what??
This is slashdot, there are only 2 choices for any argument, you damn dirty communist bastard.
I agree btw, mostly because of what I consider the population coefficients of both democracy and capitalism. Both were designed when the global population was maybe 1/7th what it is today, citizens were less specialized by nature, and most cities were measured by thousands of people.
To everyone who says american democracy and capitalism are the end-all, be-all, I'd recommend they get back into their buggy carriage and drive to their 50 acre homestead to churn butter for the rest of their life, because the world changes, and no solution lasts forever.
You are a horrible, depressing, son of a bitch.
My original question was rhetorical and sympathetic, much along the lines of saying "you gonna be all right?" to a 5 year-old leukemia patient. Thank you, for telling me the unbelievably hopeless but completely obvious truth that everyone knows and no-one is even remotely able to consider.
If you need me I'm going to go home and cry into my rocky road haagen-dazs, because it doesn't judge me, or tell me horrible truths I really want to consciously ignore.
Also, you're missing option 4:
(4) Find a way for another party (not you or anyone you like) to offend the unpleasant party, allowing them to redirect their misplaced anger toward them, and then giving both parties weapons before stepping away.
I mention option 4 because a) it works, and 2) we've done it before, those poor soviet sob's
dude, i'd learn to speak french for that.
BTW, that's the part of this that scares me the most. If they could do this 2 weeks after the last attack, they could've killed as many people as last time. Cong stupid luck, but they will almost certainly try again, and next time they won't make the same mistake, how do you stop them again?
I forsee xray machines on the tube...
google al-quada operations manual. It would be funny if it weren't so damn scary, though I'm not sure if its still circulating.
uhh dude, you got any room and maybe a beer over there?
uhh, i've got a prescription for my glaucoma too, wink wink.
I am sorry, the line doesn't quite work without Natalie Portman.
Few women could make reading the king james bible into a blockbuster.
This is the difference between a company and a business. A business is a company that has found its cash cow, and firmly opposes any further research or innovation that does not serve that golden calf. New technologies are particularly opposed, as they tend to change the business model, which requires the company to adapt (horrifying word to mba's btw, it requires thinking), to recreate the original, and beautiful, holy equilibrium, allowing the business to slowly move on, possibly growing into associated markets, without anything ever actually changing.
Technology is only good as long as it can be seen as an evolutionary step, and is almost exlcusively performed by the marketing department, leading to the terms "new and improved", and "version 2.0"(heh, or "XP").
Change is bad, Microsoft blew $5B on the Xbox project so far simply to keep sony from possibly threatening the windows empire with the ps2.
Fear change, go with the names you trust, these are not the droids you are looking for.
And the band played on.
dude, nice.
you should add how they swarm any new idea or field to milk it dry, and make nests for their 401k's before moving on to "the next big thing". No surviving inventors in their wake! Fear the wrath of the SSBB Swarm!
Like the god-damned zerg, only with less individual thought.
Hi, software engineer, meet stockholder.
Software Engineer: You know HP could take the computer industry by storm and create the new computing environment for the 21st century!
Stockholder/Analyst: Yes, but HP should focus on it's primary industry, printer ink, 90% margins and $10B(best guess) volume are too important to get distracted by trivialities. Perhaps we could add that to our patent portfolio.
So... they should get rid of printer ink costing more per ounce than gold? Their operating profit is like what, 80% from ink sales? Very innovative... Microsoft would be proud.
sorry, gates was misquoted, type:
cat gatesarticle.html| sed 's/linux/windows/'
should fix it up.
sorry bout the mistake
--ed
I agree with parent, actually I've got vonage for my primary line and broadvoice for a secondary with free calls to europe (quality is awful though, drop-outs, etc), because speakeasy didn't offer voip till i signed on to vonage and switching is a pain. Also, broadvoice has very little customer service, but if you're a tweaker it's awesome, they give you asterisk pbx setup options and everything.
For 911 use a mobile. the internet isn't up to life-critical reliability yet by a long way, but it's generally cheaper and more flexible if you want to experiment. Still don't think voip is completely there for jon q yet, but for businesses it's a no-brainer.
In the end though, anything to get out of the telco's grasp is a win.
A few weeks ago some genius came up with the unbelievably (apparently for him) brilliant idea of tying 2 cell phones with in network calling into a voip system for unlimited airtime. With bluetooth and asterisk you can do that easily if that's what you need, and get cheap overseas calls. In the end voip is the flexibility to do what you want to do, but the good-ol' "plug it in and it works" aspect is lost to the comprimise.
They are both equally evil and equally stupid, the point is, you get to choose.
Viva democracy!
Government officials, serving at the behest of an uninvolved electorate tend to listen to parents, as they seem to be a large and vocal constituency.
In other news, Social security and medicare are endorsed by politicians hoping to curry favor with senior citizens, another large and vocal constituency.
Yell at the parents, yell at the seniors, yell at the stupid stupid people who scream outrage at every stupid thing that happens in the world. Ridicule parents publicly for buying games anything like this without noticing "oh, timmy just stomped on a hookers bloody skull, that's nice", but being outraged when they see fake, very low-quality, and really stupid sexual scenes of things they can find easier and better by throwing "breasts" into google.
No government has ever taken freedoms from its citizens, we are far too eager to deliver them with ribbons attached. That parents are giving freedoms away for the rest of us is disturbing.
I seriously hate this game for its unbelievable senselessness (i believe a so-called game should have a point beyond "look i shot the nun again!"), but I can see no reason for senator clinton to be talking about this in a federal forum, at least none that fits into our constitution.
Wow, you're absolutely right, iTunes music sucks!
kelly clarkson and jessica simpson? on the same list? Is this a music ranking or a pr0n site?
While I don't agree with you about ASN.1 specifically (bad h323 experiences), I agree in the general sense about strictly typed data. I cannot believe in 2005 people still go around throwing char*'s at each other, and then wonder where the buffer overflows come from. Simple data typing is easier to debug overall than ascii fire/forget, and one of the things I think java could have brought to the software mainstream was implicit member length and auto-alloc/free.
As a unix junkie myself I don't see why everyone still tends to program like they're on a vax-10, with the basic c declarations and pointer throwing. Why in hell are unix strings still defined as char*'s? We've had length prefixed unicode for 20 years, it's infinitely more secure, use it instead of patching sendmail and apache every time someone finds a new way around the length specifier.
Ironically, windows has a spec for length prefixed unicode strings, but people hate using them because they use 6 different api's and semantics, and have to be converted back to lpstr's any time you want to use a string function or most api calls, so almost all of windows uses the same string type.
Makes me wonder why nobody made a (length prefixed unicode) lib, with the same api semantics that could convert ascii and allocate/free easily.
Yes, but we invented a lot of stuff. By that logic Europe should be the only ones allowed to brew beer?
/grin, All your pr0n is belong to me.
Not that I think for a second we should give control to the UN (that just sounds crazy), but I still worry about what rights our govt might decide they absolutely need for the next "terror war".
How bout making an(other) independent international body to deal with this crap?
Or just give control to me, I'm a nice guy, I promise.
I'm not trolling, I just remember what it was like to be that age, and ... in a way it is stupid, but more like common-sense impaired, priorities are different, and you see things from a different perspective.
I also do not like the idea of raising penalties to prevent behavior, that is a slippery slope. Personally I disobey a lot of literal laws I see as inappropriate, and while you can easily call me arrogant for seeing myself as above the law (I am arrogant btw), I also see law as a thing that exists to better society, and not a rule that exists in it's own right. Laws have been written which are unjust, and unjust laws will be written again in the future.
When I defend these things I remember my childhood, going to a magnet school in Indiana, and everyone did some mischief because that many smart people put together, especially under the supervision of adults who we did not always respect kind of begs for that. That's part of childhood, and while it's not a good thing, I would hate the thought of someone going to jail for 5 years for something they considered only a prank.
So I offer a very bad comprimise:
Outbound firewalls which restrict the kind of things you can post, IE your isp filters virus's and hacking attempts being sent rather than being recieved. Consider it steel bars on the bank window, they make it much harder for any idiot to fire off a script without really understanding what they are doing.
Point in fact features like this exist in IPv6 which nobody has really gotten around to deploying.
The downside is it's essentially censorship in a way, and could easily go too far and be used to filter p2p or free speech, but it is an alternative.
I can't countenance the idea of giving prison sentences for a crime that can be so easy to commit. The concept of prosecuting crimes that require skill more harshly does not fully apply here because a large, untrained segment of the population has these skills. My twin 13 yr old cousins could easily hack some computers, but they were fortunate to be raised by parents who taught them right from wrong very well, so they wouldn't. Can you say the same about every 14-yr old?
How many kids saw "Spy Kids" 1-3 and try to use the characters as a role model? The line between game and reality is blurry for some people, even some adults, if you can fix that then sure put the knowing violators in jail.
Thanks for the offer, lived in ocala for a while, how the hell do you drink a guiness in that weather? hehe.