I honestly don't want to come across as callous and mean, but you're an idiot. The fact that they expect you to have a cell phone for work but won't foot the bill should have been a huge red waving gasoline-soaked flag. The fact that they threatened to fire you if you didn't re-activate the phone you couldn't afford proves that you have little to no spine. You turned in a copy of your phone bill? Great. Bet that scared 'em. I'll bet your boss turned it into his boss and said, "Look at all the money I'm saving the company!" If you want to have any impact at all, you'd hire yourself a lawyer and then show them the phone bill, but with a subpoena attached.
Now repeat after me: "I am currently looking for a different job where they won't treat me worse than a steaming-hot pile of dog shit. I also will do my very best to not automatically bend over the next time the boss says, 'Have you ever met my assistant, Mr. Johnson?'"
To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
You misunderstood. He said they would be banning employee-owned cell phones, not locking them all in individual concrete sound-proof vaults with no communication to the outside world. Crazy as it sounds, there are many office buildings still standing that actually have ample amount of legacy copper twisted-pair plain old telephone service. I know, I know, you're saying to yourself, "Oh why, lord, why does the United States Government, in its infinite and unrelenting wisdom even allow such hideous and backward witchcraft to continue on in the face of such clearly more advanced, convenient, and sophisticated technology? WHY?!"
Well, I dunno. And sometimes, just sometimes, they actually... USE IT.
"Oh the horror!! Those poor neanderthal-like creatures..."
Well, you redeemed yourself with the rest of your post, but if I don't submit this now I'll feel like I have just wasted the previous 15 minutes. So don't take it personally. Cheers.
Does the military really pay poorly? Well, that's a big fat "depends". (No, not a diaper. Keep reading.)
I joined the Air Force a few years ago and was stationed to my first base after 8 months of tech school. The AF paid for meals, housing, medical, dental, you name it. I wasn't making a huge sum of money, but since all of the basics were covered by the government, everthing that I *did* make went straight into my wallet. In the first 6 months alone I bought myself a TV, VCR and Stereo (all fairly high-end) as well as a Playstation plus several games and built a $4000 computer. I've always heard rumors that other services had it even better when it came to pay. (But of course their quality of life sucks.)
Perhaps one downside is that even if you make good money going in, staying in for too long can cost you in the long run. Your pay goes up, of course, with your rank and time in service, but it sometimes doesn't go very high and it also does not scale with your job. A Tech Sergeant who's been serving eggs for 17 years makes the same as one who's been calibrating, testing, and repairing specialized precision analog circuits for the same length of time. The latter job might command a six-figure income in the civilain job sector, but no enlisted rank approaches that.
There, see, there was nothing wrong with that word until you came along and impregnated it with a callous expletive. Congradu-fucking-lations.
Personally, I won't be playing the GC until I can emulate it
That's going to take awhile since it's current system. Emulator authors are just now starting to properly emulate the PSX and N64, both of which are what, 10 years old or close to it? When emulation started out, the systems that were being emulated were not all that old. The gameboy emulators were first, then the NES (sorry, I mean "famicom"), then the Genesis (sorry, "MegaDrive"), then SNES (sorry, "Super Famicom"). The SNES emulators had reached near-perfect emulation just as the real thing was heading out the door. The bulk of emulator development is still centered on 2D systems such as 90's arcade games, the gameboy advance, and there are even loads of new gameboy and NES emulators still being released.
Don't forget the fact that ripping GameCube games is currently very hard or impossible. In short, don't hold your breath. GameCube emulation will come, but it's not likely to be any time soon.
(I emulate all my console games as a matter of principle)
Your principle is that you're cheap?
but just because I'm quirky like that doesn't make me respect modern games any less.
So now cheap == quirky? You respect the games enough to play them but not enough to pay for them?
Then that Sega company managed to dupe everyone in the the U.S. for almost a decade with their little sleek black boxes that say "Genesis" all over them.
Do what exactly? Run a mainframe? Server? Router? Desktop? Embedded applications? Firewall? Autopilot?
I see one, *maybe* two, areas there where I can honestly say that I would be comfortable choosing a Microsoft product over the alternatives. And that would have to be one long, hard decision. You choose your software based on how well it meets your requirements. If you consistently pick only one platform for all of your solutions, then you haven't properly identified your requirements. Or the consequences.
I'm Aircrew in the Air Force on the C-17 Globemaster. We have pilots who are in charge of a 320 million dollar airframe but can't figure out Outlook.
I'm in the Air Force too, and though I do not (usually) fly, I work with aircrew on a daily basis. They are some of the brightest and fastest-learning people I've ever known. (Hint: that's why they're pilots.) I'd really like to know where you got the idea that all pilots should be computer experts. If Outlook were a part of their training, you would have a point, but it isn't so you don't.
We just got E-Pubs and with it pages of documentation on how to burn a CD using WinXP. If they went to Linux we'd have major problems.
For applications such as this, the only role of the OS should be to manage the hardware. User interface should be customized per the application and should be completely separate from the OS proper. The thing that pisses me off so much about military's reliance on Windows is that the people who get paid big bucks to come up with solutions say, "Okay, we need it to this, this, and this. We don't need to worry about the interface, since we'll use Windows and everyone knows how to use Windows, right?"
That's the biggest problem with computer technology in the military today. A common scenario: Some high-up commander decides he wants a to implement computers for some solution or another, so he contacts an underling to find a contractor to do it. The underling doesn't know squat about the solution OR computers and goes with the lower bidder. The lowest bidder is usually a company that almost exclusively lives off government contracts and is staffed by older (40's and up) ex-miliarty or ex-government workers who might have once been able to sling PDP-11 code like nobody's business but now can barely pass an MCSE. These guys implement the solutions. And it goes downhill from there.
Okay, I'm really going off on a tangent now. My point is that the U.S. military is practically in the stone ages when it comes to computer technology. Sure, there are a lot of high-tech DoD-sponsored research projects that break new technological ground all the time (Los Alamos, for example), but the fact that there are so many inexperienced and even clueless minds in the military when it comes to computers means that the efficiency and cost of deploying "everyday" technology is going to continue to suffer until something is done about it.
However, I don't know of any way to get ROMs onto a Genesis/Mega Drive -- is there one?
Cart copiers exist, but they tend to be either incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to get, or both because the companies that made them stopped selling them once new systems came out. The biggest market for copiers were asian countries with lax copyright laws and rampant piracy. Reportedly, a year or two after the PSX came out, it wasn't uncommon to see someone throwing their perfectly-working copier and stack of floppies (games) right into the dumpster. Now a decent SNES copier can go for upwards of $250 on ebay.
You can often "overclock" emulators too. Many have a setting somewhere that say something like "instructions per scanline" or "percent of instructrions to execute". Just increase that number and you have an instantly faster (emulated) processor.
No, it's not okay. Technically. It's still a violation of copyright.
Unlike console games where one can just copy a CD or press a button on a cart copier, arcade games have anywhere from a couple to dozens of ROM chips that one has to figure out how to copy and that's only if you can afford the hundreds of dollars that one game will cost. In order to legally play the game, you have to own it which means finding a space to store all the cabinets. Unless you're super rich, you won't even come close to owning all of your favorites. Even then, there are many many games which aren't even out there to buy anymore no matter how much money you have.
Due to the extreme difficulty of being able to legally play the old games of yesteryear and the general apathy of companies like Sega, Capcom, and Namco towards the trading of their older games, each version of MAME has a set of games that it emulates and a corresponding set of roms to go with it. A "complete" collection of roms means that you own each and every rom that a particular version of MAME recognizes.
The ISC (which used to be the ESA or something like that, IIRC) are the only ones who actively go search the internet in active persuit of "pirated" roms. That particular house of lawyers has forced the MAME community to go underground with their roms. What happens is that some arcade enthusiast somewhere gets hold of a machine or PCB containing some unemulated arcade game, dumps the roms, and then sends the rom files to the MAME developers who then use the roms to work on a driver. When the driver gets included in a MAME release, the developers give a copy of the rom to a few of their personal friends who then spread the rom underground to the public at large.
Factoid: I don't know if they've pulled it yet, but there was one game in the MAME sources that you simply cannot get the rom for. The only known copy of the it was lost in a hard disk crash, but they kept the game in MAME just to see if it would turn up somewhere else eventually.
I'm not nearly the gamer I used to be, so this doesn't affect me like it would have 5 years ago. Back then I was seriously opposed to product placement, since I viewed games as pieces of art first and games second. (And still do, to a degree.) How long before these advertisers generate so much revenue for the developers that they begin to dictate the content of the games?
No, no, no, you guys got it all wrong. Duke should say, "Slim Fast replaces two daily meals and contains 24 essential vitamins and minerals yet is still 99% fat free," chug a whole can, and then say, "Damn, that's good!"
As long as they just stick with product placement and don't try to put actual commercials in the game, that's fine by me. I don't want to pay $40 for a game and then have to be subject to ads. (Which is the main reason I don't watch TV.)
Another concern is that the vast quantity of games out there take place in completely fantastic worlds that you just can't easily inject ads into. Most movies are still filmed in live action and take place in environments that at least look to some degree like the real world. If I'm meserized by WarCraft 7 and I'm trying to concentrate on kicking the enemy's ass, one thing that's sure to create a large mental disconnect with the game is to suddenly see a teeny little Mountain Dew truck enter my village from the west and back up to one of the barracks.
Save your link-whoring, Commander. Build Your Own Arcade Controls lists hundreds of documentary pages written by people who've built their own acrade machines or controls.
I finished my own professional-looking arcade control panel with real arcade machine parts just last week, but I haven't had time to post the info to my website just yet. For those looking for the ultimate arcade experience, you can't beat the feel of the real thing.
We need to find another term for describing these immature, yet skilled, adolescents that discover vulnerabilities by themselves in order to higher their social rank. (Cf article where they talk about '0day servers' with newly found vulnerabilities ready for kiddies' next war)
Well that's really where the whole cracker/hacker nonsense started. The problem is that you've had these two groups around for decades each calling themselves the same thing. Both legitimate and black hat hackers are computer experts on one level or another no matter how you look at it. So what's needed are a few supplementary terms, not replacements because you're never going get either group to change. And those supplementary terms need to come from within in order to stick. Nobody likes being told, "You are now X" especially hackers, whether legit or black hat. That's why you don't see 2600 changing its subtitle to The Cracker Quarterly. (Well, that and it just sounds utterly ridiculous.)
In all likelihod, SCO will continue to use and distriubute nmap just as they always have. Same goes for any other GPL product if they try to pull the same (unfortunately futile) stunt. Why? SCO has already stated publicly that the GPL is invalid and/or possibly unconstituional. This means that they probably don't see the license as applying to them and will continue distributing GPL'd software. When called on it, they're answer will be, "Look, something shiny over there!" and then run off. SCO are probably experts at legal footwork (or surely will be at the end of this) so this issue will likely be irrelavent by the time it actually comes before a judge that could make a legal and binding decision one way or the other.
One thing that no one seems to have addressed yet: I was always under the assumption that if you added an exclusion to the GPL, then it wasn't the GPL anymore. Right? Wrong?
In any event, it's nice to see delopers making their opinions known, but monkeying with open sources licenses is A) not going to make an iota of difference either in the long or short term and B) not at all going to contribute to the sense of trust that many of us are trying to build between open source and the worlds of business and government.
Actually, a lot of people have independently thought these up. I've seen the idea pop up on newsgroups, web sites, and overheard conversations. I first came across the idea on my own about 5 years ago, but still haven't actually made one of my own. I've even dreamed up a cool voice recognition interface augmented by a small LCD display and a couple of buttons so you can make your own messages on the fly.
I think that a company could literally rake in the dough producing these and selling them to the bling-bling crowd. With all the other silly shit those people do to their cars, I'm 100% positive that LED signs would take off like wildfire. I'm tempted to guess that they might be illegal through some obscure law because they might be misinterpreted by other motorists as brake lights or something, but I've never researched it.
Heh. I thought about doing something like that once with my car but eventually ruled it out as being too big a project and I didn't particularly want to risk the reliability of my vehicle and the potential for a large amount of wasted time should I hit a major stumbling block.
That said, do you have a web site to show this thing off? What happens when you have a hard disk crash or some other kind of relatively catastrophic failure? Do you at least have backup gauges or manual override switches for critical systems (e.g. headlights)?
There are two things that I particularly hate about cygwin. One, its package management. The interface for that is just awful and I'm both shocked and appalled that there's nothing for the command line to manage cygwin packages.
Two, don't even think of using cygwin for Win32 development for non-GPL code. I first got interested in cygwin because I wanted an easy unix-style environment in which to develop a couple of trivial BSD-licensed programs. Turns out, however, that the cygwin libraries are GPL'ed (not even LGPL'd, mind you) which means that you are prohibited from distributing non-GPL binaries.
So, the moral is, if you want to do non-GPL win32 development, cygwin isn't an option. I used to be a proponent of the GPL but now that I've been bitten, I'm going to be a lot more cautious about using GPL software (especially for development) from now on.
Cygwin, like the GPL, embodies the oxymoron of "forced freedom".
The Software Express site says that in order to use Software Express, you have to have an existing Solaris license, but I downloaded the ISOs a few days ago just fine without having to prove that I had one.
If it came to it, I highly doubt that would hold up legally. Besides, much of the stuff in Windows is patented, and there's simply no way to re-implment it (different code or no) without violating a patent.
Why in the hell do you want to copy windows anyway? Open source to me is about making new or simply better software. (Speaking generally to everyone here, not just the parent...) If you absolutely must have win32 compatibility, then buy a Windows license like everyone else. If that's not acceptable, then figure out a solution that doesn't require win32 compatibility. But for god's sake, don't be a common criminal and steal someone else's implementation.
I digress. Chances are pretty good that writing a specification from such crufty code (and a good deal of it is crufty) would be more difficult than legally reverse-engineering a working implementation anyway.
Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?
I sure hope not.
XHTML sent as text/xml is unsupported by 95% of the browser market. Sending XHTML as text/html works in many cases, but is an even worse idea because agents that XHTML as HTML wind up interpreting something that is neither correct XHTML or HTML.
On the other hand, there's little wrong with HTML 4.01.
Heh, that reminds me of a shell account I had with a ma-and-pa ISP a few years ago. Apparently, the admins of the ISP were colossal idiots and/or hired colossal idiots. They ran some ancient version of BSDI. A little poking around through the directory structure of the machine found an admin's world-readable home directory, which I remember was in an odd location (/w/user/foo/idiot or something like that). I thought to myself, oh, interesting.
There was some mildly entertaining stuff like audit logs, but my jaw hit the floor when I found several files listing, in plaintext, usernames and passwords for hundreds of customers. Some were obviously home users and others were companies in the local area. My account didn't show up because the latest listing was from about a year before I signed up. I tried a couple of the logins from a machine that couldn't easily be traced to me and found that about 75% of the logins still worked.
I sent an anonymous email to them telling them about gaping black hole in their security and that their whole operation could have been destroyed in a few seconds by someone with sufficient motivation. Given the overall lack of attention that the machine had seemingly had, I doubt they even had adequate backups. A week or so before I cancelled my account, I found that the world-readable password files were still there.
What do they show? At least as far as I am concerned, the "95% of the people use IE" is a myth, a lie, a marketing gimmick, whatever you want to call it.
The following numbers come from one of my web pages in which the audience is arguably more diverse than any of yours.
All these numbers are from February, i.e. as fresh as they can be.
My numbers come from the last 2 1/2 years and total over 38,000 visits.
92% -- Internet Explorer 5.x, 6.x 4.4% -- Netscape 4.x, 6.x, 7.x 3.4% -- Mozilla 1.x 1.1% -- Unknown
Hmm, you may be right. IE market share is not, in fact, 95%.
All of the computer systems that I set up for my friends and family generally have the following two desktop icons in addition to the standard Windows cruft:
* Email
* Web Browser
That's it. Sometimes the icons change and that throws them off for a bit, but this, in general, Just Works. Every once in awhile, I've had the temptation to change "Web Browser" to "The Internet" for the less gifted users but I could never quite bring myself to go quite that low.
However, I would also assert that you shouldn't really be using the alpha-quality Firefox on family or production systems when there's a perfectly good and stable (even in respect to naming) Mozilla 1.x available.
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly don't want to come across as callous and mean, but you're an idiot. The fact that they expect you to have a cell phone for work but won't foot the bill should have been a huge red waving gasoline-soaked flag. The fact that they threatened to fire you if you didn't re-activate the phone you couldn't afford proves that you have little to no spine. You turned in a copy of your phone bill? Great. Bet that scared 'em. I'll bet your boss turned it into his boss and said, "Look at all the money I'm saving the company!" If you want to have any impact at all, you'd hire yourself a lawyer and then show them the phone bill, but with a subpoena attached.
Now repeat after me:
"I am currently looking for a different job where they won't treat me worse than a steaming-hot pile of dog shit. I also will do my very best to not automatically bend over the next time the boss says, 'Have you ever met my assistant, Mr. Johnson?'"
To be potentially unreachable by family in the case of emergency is not a condition I would tolerate.
You misunderstood. He said they would be banning employee-owned cell phones, not locking them all in individual concrete sound-proof vaults with no communication to the outside world. Crazy as it sounds, there are many office buildings still standing that actually have ample amount of legacy copper twisted-pair plain old telephone service. I know, I know, you're saying to yourself, "Oh why, lord, why does the United States Government, in its infinite and unrelenting wisdom even allow such hideous and backward witchcraft to continue on in the face of such clearly more advanced, convenient, and sophisticated technology? WHY?!"
Well, I dunno. And sometimes, just sometimes, they actually... USE IT.
"Oh the horror!! Those poor neanderthal-like creatures..."
Well, you redeemed yourself with the rest of your post, but if I don't submit this now I'll feel like I have just wasted the previous 15 minutes. So don't take it personally. Cheers.
Why is Slashdot covering such a biased piece?
Uh...
Er, that's not quite enough. You also have to be a good officer which is a career all unto its own.
Does the military really pay poorly? Well, that's a big fat "depends". (No, not a diaper. Keep reading.)
I joined the Air Force a few years ago and was stationed to my first base after 8 months of tech school. The AF paid for meals, housing, medical, dental, you name it. I wasn't making a huge sum of money, but since all of the basics were covered by the government, everthing that I *did* make went straight into my wallet. In the first 6 months alone I bought myself a TV, VCR and Stereo (all fairly high-end) as well as a Playstation plus several games and built a $4000 computer. I've always heard rumors that other services had it even better when it came to pay. (But of course their quality of life sucks.)
Perhaps one downside is that even if you make good money going in, staying in for too long can cost you in the long run. Your pay goes up, of course, with your rank and time in service, but it sometimes doesn't go very high and it also does not scale with your job. A Tech Sergeant who's been serving eggs for 17 years makes the same as one who's been calibrating, testing, and repairing specialized precision analog circuits for the same length of time. The latter job might command a six-figure income in the civilain job sector, but no enlisted rank approaches that.
Ex-fucking-actly.
There, see, there was nothing wrong with that word until you came along and impregnated it with a callous expletive. Congradu-fucking-lations.
Personally, I won't be playing the GC until I can emulate it
That's going to take awhile since it's current system. Emulator authors are just now starting to properly emulate the PSX and N64, both of which are what, 10 years old or close to it? When emulation started out, the systems that were being emulated were not all that old. The gameboy emulators were first, then the NES (sorry, I mean "famicom"), then the Genesis (sorry, "MegaDrive"), then SNES (sorry, "Super Famicom"). The SNES emulators had reached near-perfect emulation just as the real thing was heading out the door. The bulk of emulator development is still centered on 2D systems such as 90's arcade games, the gameboy advance, and there are even loads of new gameboy and NES emulators still being released.
Don't forget the fact that ripping GameCube games is currently very hard or impossible. In short, don't hold your breath. GameCube emulation will come, but it's not likely to be any time soon.
(I emulate all my console games as a matter of principle)
Your principle is that you're cheap?
but just because I'm quirky like that doesn't make me respect modern games any less.
So now cheap == quirky? You respect the games enough to play them but not enough to pay for them?
(it's not a Genesis, silly Americans)
Then that Sega company managed to dupe everyone in the the U.S. for almost a decade with their little sleek black boxes that say "Genesis" all over them.
Quit being so retro-ethnocentric.
MS is the best way to do it.
Do what exactly? Run a mainframe? Server? Router? Desktop? Embedded applications? Firewall? Autopilot?
I see one, *maybe* two, areas there where I can honestly say that I would be comfortable choosing a Microsoft product over the alternatives. And that would have to be one long, hard decision. You choose your software based on how well it meets your requirements. If you consistently pick only one platform for all of your solutions, then you haven't properly identified your requirements. Or the consequences.
I'm Aircrew in the Air Force on the C-17 Globemaster. We have pilots who are in charge of a 320 million dollar airframe but can't figure out Outlook.
I'm in the Air Force too, and though I do not (usually) fly, I work with aircrew on a daily basis. They are some of the brightest and fastest-learning people I've ever known. (Hint: that's why they're pilots.) I'd really like to know where you got the idea that all pilots should be computer experts. If Outlook were a part of their training, you would have a point, but it isn't so you don't.
We just got E-Pubs and with it pages of documentation on how to burn a CD using WinXP. If they went to Linux we'd have major problems.
For applications such as this, the only role of the OS should be to manage the hardware. User interface should be customized per the application and should be completely separate from the OS proper. The thing that pisses me off so much about military's reliance on Windows is that the people who get paid big bucks to come up with solutions say, "Okay, we need it to this, this, and this. We don't need to worry about the interface, since we'll use Windows and everyone knows how to use Windows, right?"
That's the biggest problem with computer technology in the military today. A common scenario: Some high-up commander decides he wants a to implement computers for some solution or another, so he contacts an underling to find a contractor to do it. The underling doesn't know squat about the solution OR computers and goes with the lower bidder. The lowest bidder is usually a company that almost exclusively lives off government contracts and is staffed by older (40's and up) ex-miliarty or ex-government workers who might have once been able to sling PDP-11 code like nobody's business but now can barely pass an MCSE. These guys implement the solutions. And it goes downhill from there.
Okay, I'm really going off on a tangent now. My point is that the U.S. military is practically in the stone ages when it comes to computer technology. Sure, there are a lot of high-tech DoD-sponsored research projects that break new technological ground all the time (Los Alamos, for example), but the fact that there are so many inexperienced and even clueless minds in the military when it comes to computers means that the efficiency and cost of deploying "everyday" technology is going to continue to suffer until something is done about it.
However, I don't know of any way to get ROMs onto a Genesis/Mega Drive -- is there one?
Cart copiers exist, but they tend to be either incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to get, or both because the companies that made them stopped selling them once new systems came out. The biggest market for copiers were asian countries with lax copyright laws and rampant piracy. Reportedly, a year or two after the PSX came out, it wasn't uncommon to see someone throwing their perfectly-working copier and stack of floppies (games) right into the dumpster. Now a decent SNES copier can go for upwards of $250 on ebay.
You can often "overclock" emulators too. Many have a setting somewhere that say something like "instructions per scanline" or "percent of instructrions to execute". Just increase that number and you have an instantly faster (emulated) processor.
Mame roms: http://www.mamereactor.com
Or am I out of the loop and its all alright now?
Depends on which Slashdotter you ask.
No, it's not okay. Technically. It's still a violation of copyright.
Unlike console games where one can just copy a CD or press a button on a cart copier, arcade games have anywhere from a couple to dozens of ROM chips that one has to figure out how to copy and that's only if you can afford the hundreds of dollars that one game will cost. In order to legally play the game, you have to own it which means finding a space to store all the cabinets. Unless you're super rich, you won't even come close to owning all of your favorites. Even then, there are many many games which aren't even out there to buy anymore no matter how much money you have.
Due to the extreme difficulty of being able to legally play the old games of yesteryear and the general apathy of companies like Sega, Capcom, and Namco towards the trading of their older games, each version of MAME has a set of games that it emulates and a corresponding set of roms to go with it. A "complete" collection of roms means that you own each and every rom that a particular version of MAME recognizes.
The ISC (which used to be the ESA or something like that, IIRC) are the only ones who actively go search the internet in active persuit of "pirated" roms. That particular house of lawyers has forced the MAME community to go underground with their roms. What happens is that some arcade enthusiast somewhere gets hold of a machine or PCB containing some unemulated arcade game, dumps the roms, and then sends the rom files to the MAME developers who then use the roms to work on a driver. When the driver gets included in a MAME release, the developers give a copy of the rom to a few of their personal friends who then spread the rom underground to the public at large.
Factoid: I don't know if they've pulled it yet, but there was one game in the MAME sources that you simply cannot get the rom for. The only known copy of the it was lost in a hard disk crash, but they kept the game in MAME just to see if it would turn up somewhere else eventually.
I'm not nearly the gamer I used to be, so this doesn't affect me like it would have 5 years ago. Back then I was seriously opposed to product placement, since I viewed games as pieces of art first and games second. (And still do, to a degree.) How long before these advertisers generate so much revenue for the developers that they begin to dictate the content of the games?
No, no, no, you guys got it all wrong. Duke should say, "Slim Fast replaces two daily meals and contains 24 essential vitamins and minerals yet is still 99% fat free," chug a whole can, and then say, "Damn, that's good!"
As long as they just stick with product placement and don't try to put actual commercials in the game, that's fine by me. I don't want to pay $40 for a game and then have to be subject to ads. (Which is the main reason I don't watch TV.)
Another concern is that the vast quantity of games out there take place in completely fantastic worlds that you just can't easily inject ads into. Most movies are still filmed in live action and take place in environments that at least look to some degree like the real world. If I'm meserized by WarCraft 7 and I'm trying to concentrate on kicking the enemy's ass, one thing that's sure to create a large mental disconnect with the game is to suddenly see a teeny little Mountain Dew truck enter my village from the west and back up to one of the barracks.
Save your link-whoring, Commander. Build Your Own Arcade Controls lists hundreds of documentary pages written by people who've built their own acrade machines or controls.
I finished my own professional-looking arcade control panel with real arcade machine parts just last week, but I haven't had time to post the info to my website just yet. For those looking for the ultimate arcade experience, you can't beat the feel of the real thing.
We need to find another term for describing these immature, yet skilled, adolescents that discover vulnerabilities by themselves in order to higher their social rank. (Cf article where they talk about '0day servers' with newly found vulnerabilities ready for kiddies' next war)
Well that's really where the whole cracker/hacker nonsense started. The problem is that you've had these two groups around for decades each calling themselves the same thing. Both legitimate and black hat hackers are computer experts on one level or another no matter how you look at it. So what's needed are a few supplementary terms, not replacements because you're never going get either group to change. And those supplementary terms need to come from within in order to stick. Nobody likes being told, "You are now X" especially hackers, whether legit or black hat. That's why you don't see 2600 changing its subtitle to The Cracker Quarterly. (Well, that and it just sounds utterly ridiculous.)
In all likelihod, SCO will continue to use and distriubute nmap just as they always have. Same goes for any other GPL product if they try to pull the same (unfortunately futile) stunt. Why? SCO has already stated publicly that the GPL is invalid and/or possibly unconstituional. This means that they probably don't see the license as applying to them and will continue distributing GPL'd software. When called on it, they're answer will be, "Look, something shiny over there!" and then run off. SCO are probably experts at legal footwork (or surely will be at the end of this) so this issue will likely be irrelavent by the time it actually comes before a judge that could make a legal and binding decision one way or the other.
One thing that no one seems to have addressed yet: I was always under the assumption that if you added an exclusion to the GPL, then it wasn't the GPL anymore. Right? Wrong?
In any event, it's nice to see delopers making their opinions known, but monkeying with open sources licenses is A) not going to make an iota of difference either in the long or short term and B) not at all going to contribute to the sense of trust that many of us are trying to build between open source and the worlds of business and government.
So to the authors of nmap: Thanks, but no thanks.
You stole my idea!
Actually, a lot of people have independently thought these up. I've seen the idea pop up on newsgroups, web sites, and overheard conversations. I first came across the idea on my own about 5 years ago, but still haven't actually made one of my own. I've even dreamed up a cool voice recognition interface augmented by a small LCD display and a couple of buttons so you can make your own messages on the fly.
I think that a company could literally rake in the dough producing these and selling them to the bling-bling crowd. With all the other silly shit those people do to their cars, I'm 100% positive that LED signs would take off like wildfire. I'm tempted to guess that they might be illegal through some obscure law because they might be misinterpreted by other motorists as brake lights or something, but I've never researched it.
Heh. I thought about doing something like that once with my car but eventually ruled it out as being too big a project and I didn't particularly want to risk the reliability of my vehicle and the potential for a large amount of wasted time should I hit a major stumbling block.
That said, do you have a web site to show this thing off? What happens when you have a hard disk crash or some other kind of relatively catastrophic failure? Do you at least have backup gauges or manual override switches for critical systems (e.g. headlights)?
There are two things that I particularly hate about cygwin. One, its package management. The interface for that is just awful and I'm both shocked and appalled that there's nothing for the command line to manage cygwin packages.
Two, don't even think of using cygwin for Win32 development for non-GPL code. I first got interested in cygwin because I wanted an easy unix-style environment in which to develop a couple of trivial BSD-licensed programs. Turns out, however, that the cygwin libraries are GPL'ed (not even LGPL'd, mind you) which means that you are prohibited from distributing non-GPL binaries.
So, the moral is, if you want to do non-GPL win32 development, cygwin isn't an option. I used to be a proponent of the GPL but now that I've been bitten, I'm going to be a lot more cautious about using GPL software (especially for development) from now on.
Cygwin, like the GPL, embodies the oxymoron of "forced freedom".
The Software Express site says that in order to use Software Express, you have to have an existing Solaris license, but I downloaded the ISOs a few days ago just fine without having to prove that I had one.
If it came to it, I highly doubt that would hold up legally. Besides, much of the stuff in Windows is patented, and there's simply no way to re-implment it (different code or no) without violating a patent.
Why in the hell do you want to copy windows anyway? Open source to me is about making new or simply better software. (Speaking generally to everyone here, not just the parent...) If you absolutely must have win32 compatibility, then buy a Windows license like everyone else. If that's not acceptable, then figure out a solution that doesn't require win32 compatibility. But for god's sake, don't be a common criminal and steal someone else's implementation.
I digress. Chances are pretty good that writing a specification from such crufty code (and a good deal of it is crufty) would be more difficult than legally reverse-engineering a working implementation anyway.
Should be: "...agents that send XHTML as HTML..."
My mistake. I even previewed.
Surely it's about time for Slashdot to go XHTML+CSS?
I sure hope not.
XHTML sent as text/xml is unsupported by 95% of the browser market. Sending XHTML as text/html works in many cases, but is an even worse idea because agents that XHTML as HTML wind up interpreting something that is neither correct XHTML or HTML.
On the other hand, there's little wrong with HTML 4.01.
Heh, that reminds me of a shell account I had with a ma-and-pa ISP a few years ago. Apparently, the admins of the ISP were colossal idiots and/or hired colossal idiots. They ran some ancient version of BSDI. A little poking around through the directory structure of the machine found an admin's world-readable home directory, which I remember was in an odd location (/w/user/foo/idiot or something like that). I thought to myself, oh, interesting.
There was some mildly entertaining stuff like audit logs, but my jaw hit the floor when I found several files listing, in plaintext, usernames and passwords for hundreds of customers. Some were obviously home users and others were companies in the local area. My account didn't show up because the latest listing was from about a year before I signed up. I tried a couple of the logins from a machine that couldn't easily be traced to me and found that about 75% of the logins still worked.
I sent an anonymous email to them telling them about gaping black hole in their security and that their whole operation could have been destroyed in a few seconds by someone with sufficient motivation. Given the overall lack of attention that the machine had seemingly had, I doubt they even had adequate backups. A week or so before I cancelled my account, I found that the world-readable password files were still there.
Logic cannot explain this magnitude of stupidity.
What do they show? At least as far as I am concerned, the "95% of the people use IE" is a myth, a lie, a marketing gimmick, whatever you want to call it.
The following numbers come from one of my web pages in which the audience is arguably more diverse than any of yours.
All these numbers are from February, i.e. as fresh as they can be.
My numbers come from the last 2 1/2 years and total over 38,000 visits.
92% -- Internet Explorer 5.x, 6.x
4.4% -- Netscape 4.x, 6.x, 7.x
3.4% -- Mozilla 1.x
1.1% -- Unknown
Hmm, you may be right. IE market share is not, in fact, 95%.
All of the computer systems that I set up for my friends and family generally have the following two desktop icons in addition to the standard Windows cruft:
* Email
* Web Browser
That's it. Sometimes the icons change and that throws them off for a bit, but this, in general, Just Works. Every once in awhile, I've had the temptation to change "Web Browser" to "The Internet" for the less gifted users but I could never quite bring myself to go quite that low.
However, I would also assert that you shouldn't really be using the alpha-quality Firefox on family or production systems when there's a perfectly good and stable (even in respect to naming) Mozilla 1.x available.