I must say, Sir, that I salute you for your post. Not only is in Informative, it is also well drafted in the Queens English, not in the debased language of Internetland. Furthermore, you have managed to obtain the coveted pole position of posters, so to speak. As I write this epistle of congratulations, I shall drink a toast of finest port wine to you, and I wish that your correspondence with the world shall continue for all eternity.
If I may be so bold as to trouble you with two requests, it would be these. Firstly, may I post a copy of your memorandum above the post to which I fasten my servants when I whip them for dumb insolence and/or sundry grammatical errors, including the splitting of infinitives or the use of the accursed Internet language? Secondly, my wife is expecting our first child, conceived soon after she spent a night in my servants quarters, teaching them virtue of prayer. Would it be presumptive of me to command her to name her baby (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1). We are unsure at present of the sex of the baby, since we have emigrated to the 19th Century to escape the linguistic slovenliness of the later epochs, but we feel that such a name would distinguish a child of either gender?
No, I tried with Opera and got the error. Tried again now, same browser and didn't. My guess is that someone (rem)moved the file on the server. Then they spotted the error and moved it back.
The chances of armed foreign invasion of the UK are pretty much zero these days. You'd have more chance of a small number of people sneaking in and setting off some bombs, or a whole shitload of people sneaking in and bankrupting your welfare state.
Anyhow, what the state's duty is up to the people that elect the government, and opinion polls say that they want a clampdown on illegal immigration, mostly for the above reasons. Hence the ID cards.
So they should refrain from criticising China until they are perfect, even though China has a far worse human rights record?
That's completely bogus. It would do far more for human rights to do the opposite quite frankly, especially as flipping China to a democratic government would probably tip the balance to the point where Chinese clients like Burma would change too. Then there would be other benefits, like a lower chance of wars in the future. So it's not just about the Chinese.
Anyhow, you can be against the US government when it does things like Guantanamo and for it when it complains about Chinese human rights.
You should change your tag line and you'd have more luck. It all depends on attitude.
Hal Porter Consulting. We'll debug your application at the weekend. Then we'll come in on Monday, find the halfwit employee that checked in the code that broke it, put a printout of the diff on his desk, hold his face very close to it and say "NO! BAD! DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN!". Employees can be trained, like kittens or puppies.
The Human Rights Act is bogus. People don't have a right to live in the UK, or a right to an ID card. They also don't have a right to house, and yet illegal immigrants have sued local governments to give them a better one.
In fact, that's the whole purpose of ID cards. If you go to Sweden, you need to have a personal number to do anything, and getting a personal number means that you have a valid residence permit. So you can survive in Sweden as an illegal immigrant, but it's a highly marginised existance.
Whereas in the UK, I can do anything without ever having to prove I'm a legal resident. This is a bad thing - it means that the UK doesn't have any control over it's boarders, unlike Sweden. And there are loads of things that should be only accessible to legal residents, like benefits and so on. Most businesses probably don't want to deal with people who are completely untraceable either. And they make a completely mockery of immigration controls.
I've actually flown from London to Sweden and heard two Nigerians talking about 'how Sweden sucks, you can't work without papers, it's much easier in London'
I realise it's an unpopular opinion here, but the State has a duty to make sure that people can't sneak into the country and blend in with the legal residents in a way that it is completely undetectable. And if they need to modify the EU rights act, or even withdraw from it and replace it with a better drafted local version, so be it.
I like the idea of a (relatively) low energy explosion to blow the projectile apart laterally some time before it hits the target. If you got it right, you could literally atomise it so you hit the target with a cloud of atoms moving a 0.9c towards it, and some tiny fraction of c away from the centre of the projectile. When they hit, you'd make sure that they cover ~100% of it's area. That way, you should be able to transfer momentum much more effectively. Hopefully, you'd disperse the asteroid into a shower of fragments, most of which would miss the Earth completely, or be small enough to burn up.
You could use a scaled down version to attack the re-entry vehicles in ICBM's.
Umm, XP boots faster than Win2k on the same hardware because the driver initialisation is multithreaded. XP gets to the GUI in 30 seconds, unlike 2k.
Unless you have a severe RAM shortage, since the working set is bigger. But that's true of any new version of any software. But all the machines I have boot XP faster. Win2k always seemed sluggish to me, and I've never had that impression with XP.
But I'm sure if you installed it on a machine with 64MB ram, it would run like a dog unless you agressively stripped down the services it runs.
They should do a version of Genuine Adantage in the game.
E.g. Genuine Advantage Super Elites with a plasma sword and indestructibility would attack people with cracked PC copies on XP, then people running on non Genuine Vista. People with paid for copies of the game on a supported platform would be immune. They'd Elites chase 'em for a bit, maybe ten minutes to discourage piracy attempts, and then chop 'em down.
There'd need to be some support in XBox live to work out which software was ok of course. But I think it could be done. You could have a peek, poke and exec messages, to check on memory. So the server would say - "give me n bytes at address m". The task is just to find the bytes which differ between supported versions (XBOX or Vista) and cracks. The cracks would learn to lie at the right time of course, but you could download code that would run and check the speed and results, or poke some locations and see if the client malfunctions in the expected way.
That would be very hard to fake 100%. The server could try well known checks, then random ones, hopefully learning which were cracked copies with some algorithm. Once it found a new crack - e.g. difference that occurs in a minority of clients, it would check with humans, and then set the Super Elites to work hunting down pirates.
You could give it a sample of all known cracks too, and tell it any difference it found there meant that it had found a crack.
I think the key thing is to make it an automated check. My guess is that peek, poke, exec, and a sample of known bad and known good machines is enough. Oh, you'd need a way to see if the good machines crashed too, since you want to avoid nuking machines that belong to real customers.
Re:Although this seems "reasonable" in light of th
on
Google Delists BMW-Germany
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?
Look at it this way. BMW felt that Google was putting them too low on the search list. So they make a page to 'fix' this. Then Google de lists them.
If Google was one of many equally popular search engines, I'd say that they were within their rights to do this. But they aren't. People use 'Google' as a verb, i.e. just f**king Google it. Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. So if I have a site, and I'm way down on the list, I'll try to fix it. Now I could use a different search engine of course, and even lobby other people to do the same. But my customers will still be using Google.
Actually, I do some work on a site with an open source FAT32 formatter. It's pretty popular, I get a 2-3 emails a day with people that have downloaded it, and all of them are satisfied. Now this site is way down on the list with any reasonable search terms, unless you know the name of the company. I actually emailed them, and got a reply IIRC about buying advertising. My solution was to email people who are high up on the pagerank and get them to link to me. And link to it from here, tight bastard that I am;-)
So suddenly you have a de facto monopoly, and thus pagerank is valuable enough that they can charge for it, and punish people for trying to exploit it. That doesn't sit too well with me. Whatever you think of the people that run Google, in the end it is a business and one that has carved out a rather novel monopoly. And history shows that businesses have a tendency to exploit that in a way that is in their interests, even when their interests diverge from most people's.
The interesting thing is that in America at least, the law says that there are things like tying agreements that are legal unless you are a monopoly (or abusive monopoly, I forget the wording). So Microsoft could insist that you used Internet Explorer with Windows and not break the law, right up to the lawsuit that declared them to be a monopoly at which point it became illegal. But for Google, I don't think there is any legal restraint on them. They could of course claim that they are a not a monopoly, on the grounds that mind share is not market share, and people are still free to use yahoo or altavista. And asking for money to improve pagerank, or delisting people that try to exploit it would probably still be legal even if their competitors managed to get a Microsoft style judgement against them.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together," he wrote, without concocting "a conspiracy against the public."
I.e. that businesses have zero qualms about creating and abusing monopoly power. It's not about Bill Gates being a bad person, or the Google guys being good ones. It's something that businesses do, if they want to succeed and keep the shareholders happy. And in the Google case, it's a new sort of monopoly, one that won't be restrained by the laws that affected Microsoft, not that those proved particularly effective in any case.
I liked the way the pychopathic anti hero, Patrick Bateman, is completely souless and amoral and actually _thinks_ in advert speak - lists of features and so on.
Penthouse called it "a sexy satire on the 1980's".
Narc out your roomate. I did, and I bought a Gateway FPD2185W with the reward. It has a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels, an aspect Ratio: 16:10, triple video inputs: 2xComponent and one S-Video. PC Magazine described it as "a stylish 21-inch widescreen LCD that delivers better-than-average performance and lots of features". I also bought a 60GB iPod with a 2.5" 320 x 240 color TFT screen which I store all my Huey Lewis and the News mp3s on. Rolling Stone Magazine described Huey as the "misunderstood genius of American Rock".
Dual use stuff has more chance of being bought. Hence all those Uk games consoles with keyboards in the 80's.
Mind you, more people learnt to program on them than almost anything else, so it's not completely untrue. And it's not as if they were designed to be games consoles exclusively either.
fat-tony@mob.org: Hiya, me and Luigi have come for a chat. Our good buddy Mr Gates made some suggestions on your... whatta you geeks call that thing you spend your lives sending emails to. wine-geek1:Er, A Mailing list? fat-tony@mob.org: NO! you call it a 'Mailing list SIR' fat-tony@mob.org: He made some suggestions on this mailing list. When he did that, you people disrespected him. One of you, who has since disappeared, called him a noob. What's a noob? wine-geek1:An inexperienced person. fat-tony@mob.org:... wine-geek1:Sir. fat-tony@mob.org:I suggest you be more polite in future. Whaddya say? wine-geek1: Sir! Yes! Sir! fat-tony@mob.org: Mr Gates has a list of suggestions for you here. He wants them merged by tomorrow. wine-geek1: SIR! YES! SIR! fat-tony@mob.org: I love how you guys are so smart. Luigi, put him down. And tell Mr Gates to deposit the money in the usual way.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1),
I must say, Sir, that I salute you for your post. Not only is in Informative, it is also well drafted in the Queens English, not in the debased language of Internetland. Furthermore, you have managed to obtain the coveted pole position of posters, so to speak. As I write this epistle of congratulations, I shall drink a toast of finest port wine to you, and I wish that your correspondence with the world shall continue for all eternity.
If I may be so bold as to trouble you with two requests, it would be these. Firstly, may I post a copy of your memorandum above the post to which I fasten my servants when I whip them for dumb insolence and/or sundry grammatical errors, including the splitting of infinitives or the use of the accursed Internet language? Secondly, my wife is expecting our first child, conceived soon after she spent a night in my servants quarters, teaching them virtue of prayer. Would it be presumptive of me to command her to name her baby (1+-sqrt(5))*(2**-1). We are unsure at present of the sex of the baby, since we have emigrated to the 19th Century to escape the linguistic slovenliness of the later epochs, but we feel that such a name would distinguish a child of either gender?
Yours, etc
Hal Porter, esq.
No, I tried with Opera and got the error. Tried again now, same browser and didn't. My guess is that someone (rem)moved the file on the server. Then they spotted the error and moved it back.
Hmm, so the server running Windows can't show me the article about why Apple is about to switch because of an ASP error. Irony or what?
Yeah, I know it's probably operator error, the irony would be stronger if it was ActiveX component can`t create object
The web design is a big primitive, but once you get past that the work that went into it is astonishing -
t m
http://www.idkk.com/C012_052_InterstellarTravel.h
Which is kind of refreshing actually, given that most web sites are slick but content free.
The chances of armed foreign invasion of the UK are pretty much zero these days. You'd have more chance of a small number of people sneaking in and setting off some bombs, or a whole shitload of people sneaking in and bankrupting your welfare state.
Anyhow, what the state's duty is up to the people that elect the government, and opinion polls say that they want a clampdown on illegal immigration, mostly for the above reasons. Hence the ID cards.
So they should refrain from criticising China until they are perfect, even though China has a far worse human rights record?
That's completely bogus. It would do far more for human rights to do the opposite quite frankly, especially as flipping China to a democratic government would probably tip the balance to the point where Chinese clients like Burma would change too. Then there would be other benefits, like a lower chance of wars in the future. So it's not just about the Chinese.
Anyhow, you can be against the US government when it does things like Guantanamo and for it when it complains about Chinese human rights.
You should change your tag line and you'd have more luck. It all depends on attitude.
Hal Porter Consulting.
We'll debug your application at the weekend. Then we'll come in on Monday, find the halfwit employee that checked in the code that broke it, put a printout of the diff on his desk, hold his face very close to it and say "NO! BAD! DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN!". Employees can be trained, like kittens or puppies.
The Human Rights Act is bogus. People don't have a right to live in the UK, or a right to an ID card. They also don't have a right to house, and yet illegal immigrants have sued local governments to give them a better one.
In fact, that's the whole purpose of ID cards. If you go to Sweden, you need to have a personal number to do anything, and getting a personal number means that you have a valid residence permit. So you can survive in Sweden as an illegal immigrant, but it's a highly marginised existance.
Whereas in the UK, I can do anything without ever having to prove I'm a legal resident. This is a bad thing - it means that the UK doesn't have any control over it's boarders, unlike Sweden. And there are loads of things that should be only accessible to legal residents, like benefits and so on. Most businesses probably don't want to deal with people who are completely untraceable either. And they make a completely mockery of immigration controls.
I've actually flown from London to Sweden and heard two Nigerians talking about 'how Sweden sucks, you can't work without papers, it's much easier in London'
I realise it's an unpopular opinion here, but the State has a duty to make sure that people can't sneak into the country and blend in with the legal residents in a way that it is completely undetectable. And if they need to modify the EU rights act, or even withdraw from it and replace it with a better drafted local version, so be it.
Interactive novels, like comics are graphic novels perhaps.
In other news, we should call dogs "Canine Americans"
AMD Will Have To Avoid Unnecessary Capitalisation, True.
E.g. AMD 64 X2 Dual core = OK.
E.g. AMD 64 X2 Dual Core = OMFG Lawsuit!!!11!!!
I like the idea of a (relatively) low energy explosion to blow the projectile apart laterally some time before it hits the target. If you got it right, you could literally atomise it so you hit the target with a cloud of atoms moving a 0.9c towards it, and some tiny fraction of c away from the centre of the projectile. When they hit, you'd make sure that they cover ~100% of it's area. That way, you should be able to transfer momentum much more effectively. Hopefully, you'd disperse the asteroid into a shower of fragments, most of which would miss the Earth completely, or be small enough to burn up.
You could use a scaled down version to attack the re-entry vehicles in ICBM's.
No, it's important to find the minigun and the Big Ol' Keg Of Health.
I believe the correct term is Wicked Sick
[Quote from Hitler which when taken wildely out of context which has some similarities to #3's post, comparison of #3 to Hitler]
Raymond Chen seems pretty smart to me.
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/
Umm, XP boots faster than Win2k on the same hardware because the driver initialisation is multithreaded. XP gets to the GUI in 30 seconds, unlike 2k.
Unless you have a severe RAM shortage, since the working set is bigger. But that's true of any new version of any software. But all the machines I have boot XP faster. Win2k always seemed sluggish to me, and I've never had that impression with XP.
But I'm sure if you installed it on a machine with 64MB ram, it would run like a dog unless you agressively stripped down the services it runs.
They should do a version of Genuine Adantage in the game.
E.g. Genuine Advantage Super Elites with a plasma sword and indestructibility would attack people with cracked PC copies on XP, then people running on non Genuine Vista. People with paid for copies of the game on a supported platform would be immune. They'd Elites chase 'em for a bit, maybe ten minutes to discourage piracy attempts, and then chop 'em down.
There'd need to be some support in XBox live to work out which software was ok of course. But I think it could be done. You could have a peek, poke and exec messages, to check on memory. So the server would say - "give me n bytes at address m". The task is just to find the bytes which differ between supported versions (XBOX or Vista) and cracks. The cracks would learn to lie at the right time of course, but you could download code that would run and check the speed and results, or poke some locations and see if the client malfunctions in the expected way.
That would be very hard to fake 100%. The server could try well known checks, then random ones, hopefully learning which were cracked copies with some algorithm. Once it found a new crack - e.g. difference that occurs in a minority of clients, it would check with humans, and then set the Super Elites to work hunting down pirates.
You could give it a sample of all known cracks too, and tell it any difference it found there meant that it had found a crack.
I think the key thing is to make it an automated check. My guess is that peek, poke, exec, and a sample of known bad and known good machines is enough. Oh, you'd need a way to see if the good machines crashed too, since you want to avoid nuking machines that belong to real customers.
But you don't think it's dangerous that a site that has a de-facto monopoly on searches is doing this?
;-)
Look at it this way. BMW felt that Google was putting them too low on the search list. So they make a page to 'fix' this. Then Google de lists them.
If Google was one of many equally popular search engines, I'd say that they were within their rights to do this. But they aren't. People use 'Google' as a verb, i.e. just f**king Google it. Most of the world uses them as their only search engine. So if I have a site, and I'm way down on the list, I'll try to fix it. Now I could use a different search engine of course, and even lobby other people to do the same. But my customers will still be using Google.
Actually, I do some work on a site with an open source FAT32 formatter. It's pretty popular, I get a 2-3 emails a day with people that have downloaded it, and all of them are satisfied. Now this site is way down on the list with any reasonable search terms, unless you know the name of the company. I actually emailed them, and got a reply IIRC about buying advertising. My solution was to email people who are high up on the pagerank and get them to link to me. And link to it from here, tight bastard that I am
So suddenly you have a de facto monopoly, and thus pagerank is valuable enough that they can charge for it, and punish people for trying to exploit it. That doesn't sit too well with me. Whatever you think of the people that run Google, in the end it is a business and one that has carved out a rather novel monopoly. And history shows that businesses have a tendency to exploit that in a way that is in their interests, even when their interests diverge from most people's.
The interesting thing is that in America at least, the law says that there are things like tying agreements that are legal unless you are a monopoly (or abusive monopoly, I forget the wording). So Microsoft could insist that you used Internet Explorer with Windows and not break the law, right up to the lawsuit that declared them to be a monopoly at which point it became illegal. But for Google, I don't think there is any legal restraint on them. They could of course claim that they are a not a monopoly, on the grounds that mind share is not market share, and people are still free to use yahoo or altavista. And asking for money to improve pagerank, or delisting people that try to exploit it would probably still be legal even if their competitors managed to get a Microsoft style judgement against them.
You have to remember Adam Smith's quote:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together," he wrote, without concocting "a conspiracy against the public."
I.e. that businesses have zero qualms about creating and abusing monopoly power. It's not about Bill Gates being a bad person, or the Google guys being good ones. It's something that businesses do, if they want to succeed and keep the shareholders happy. And in the Google case, it's a new sort of monopoly, one that won't be restrained by the laws that affected Microsoft, not that those proved particularly effective in any case.
Actually it's a reference to American Psycho.
I liked the way the pychopathic anti hero, Patrick Bateman, is completely souless and amoral and actually _thinks_ in advert speak - lists of features and so on.
Penthouse called it "a sexy satire on the 1980's".
Narc out your roomate. I did, and I bought a Gateway FPD2185W with the reward. It has a native resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels, an aspect Ratio: 16:10, triple video inputs: 2xComponent and one S-Video. PC Magazine described it as "a stylish 21-inch widescreen LCD that delivers better-than-average performance and lots of features". I also bought a 60GB iPod with a 2.5" 320 x 240 color TFT screen which I store all my Huey Lewis and the News mp3s on. Rolling Stone Magazine described Huey as the "misunderstood genius of American Rock".
Framerate in Doom 3?
We should DDOS/Mailbomb their servers. Get Eben Moglen to sue them for copyright violation. Force them to release all their source code.
Oh, wait it's (allegedly) Microsoft code that was reverse engineered. No problem then.
Dude I checked the ftp sites every day for Daikatana. For three years.
"But Muuuuum, I neeeed one for my homework"
Dual use stuff has more chance of being bought. Hence all those Uk games consoles with keyboards in the 80's.
Mind you, more people learnt to program on them than almost anything else, so it's not completely untrue. And it's not as if they were designed to be games consoles exclusively either.
fat-tony@mob.org: Hiya, me and Luigi have come for a chat. Our good buddy Mr Gates made some suggestions on your ... whatta you geeks call that thing you spend your lives sending emails to. ...
wine-geek1:Er, A Mailing list?
fat-tony@mob.org: NO! you call it a 'Mailing list SIR'
fat-tony@mob.org: He made some suggestions on this mailing list. When he did that, you people disrespected him. One of you, who has since disappeared, called him a noob. What's a noob?
wine-geek1:An inexperienced person.
fat-tony@mob.org:
wine-geek1:Sir.
fat-tony@mob.org:I suggest you be more polite in future. Whaddya say?
wine-geek1: Sir! Yes! Sir!
fat-tony@mob.org: Mr Gates has a list of suggestions for you here. He wants them merged by tomorrow.
wine-geek1: SIR! YES! SIR!
fat-tony@mob.org: I love how you guys are so smart. Luigi, put him down. And tell Mr Gates to deposit the money in the usual way.