Another upside is that there's no one but you who can fix or maintain it!;-)
Absolutely not, as the Platform SDK is pretty well documented and freely available. Only a severely impaired developer could not maintain this. I myself have been using nothing but C and Win32 for years. Before that, I had used Borland OWL with C++. Guess what, after switching to raw API and C, I never wanted to switch back. There must be a reason.
There is no old school or new school, there are just skilled and unskilled developers. Riding the hype wave and calling skilled people "old school" doesn't make a unskilled developer any more skilled. New tools and languages should be used if they are right for the job at hand and *if* you could do the same (albeit maybe in more time, or with less clarity) with simpler tools. If this line of reasoning makes me old school, so be it. Even if I am to embark on a project written in a very recent programming language (such as Java or C#, heaven forbid though...) with a sophisticated application framework, I would not hire someone on that project who could not do it in a simple procedural language such as Pascal (or Modula, Oberon...) or C if given enough time (but not 10 years either). Being unable to do this, to me, is being impaired programming-wise.
And hopefully not. If that were true, imagine what it would do to your inner ear (and possibly brain) while you phone.
Plus, the emitting power largely depends on how far the phones actually are from the relays, so unless you are in an ill-covered area, it's not even likely that the emitting power will be at its maximum...
Why trust anyone? Right... but as wary as I used to be towards Microsoft, I think this Google mania could very well end up making Microsoft an alternative to Google. And not the other way around. Google is currently doing stuff that even Microsoft hasdn't dared doing. And yet they are getting away with it, partly thanks to this wacky GPL thing. Don't get me wrong. I love GPL. For truly "open" projects. I may be wrong, but I just think Google has found a way around privacy and monopoly issues by using tools that were normally made for non-profit purposes. This is, of course, only my opinion. I'm starting to envision that one day, some of us will hope Microsoft never goes out of business... whereas we used to pray for the exact opposite at one point.
Exactly. The problem is that everything is copyrighted unless stated otherwise right from the start. That means if you make a nice drawing for fun, it is copyrighted unless you distribute it with a GPL license or the like *the first time you publish it*, even if publishing means putting it on your personal web site or showing it to a couple friends. So if sharing copyrighted material is made illegal whether the author cares or not, that would be lead to absurd situations where you could be sued for willingly sharing your own creations. Can it get more demented than this?
The problem arises when a particular free, open source app relies on a proprietary library. Then in order to modify/compile the source, you need the proprietary lib (which costs money and is usually not modifiable), thus negating the "free and open" part of the situation.
True on some level, although debatable. But that's why I avoid using any third-party library if possible. I have written a lot of Windows tools and apps that don't rely on anything other than the Win32 API and sometimes a couple open source libraries, like libpng. I, for instance, would never write an open source Win32 app with MFC. On the other hand, the Windows platform SDK is freely available, and if you use MinGW32, you don't even need to download it from Microsoft.
How is that especially "odd", considering that the guy in question didn't know squat what he was talking about... But women were considered inferior back then, so this is not surprising in the least. The word is not "odd", the word is "stupid".
Given that any two human beings on Earth have about 99% genes in common, I don't think that a couple more similar genes would make us "all the same". As long as there is reproduction, we will all be different. And even if we were totally clones, environmental factors would still make most of us different from one another, if slightly. (But then we would learn to recognize people based on more subtle cues...)
You make a very good point. All these "apparently free" services supported by ads assume on some level that you don't value your time, at least not as much as you value your money. That's twisted though; because you can always make more money; but as far as I can tell, any amount of time you have wasted is lost forever...
But you're totally free not to buy Apple products. And yes, there are lots of alternatives. Some of them quite good (especially coming from Asia). The fact that most of these alternatives imply the use of often illegally acquired music is irrelevant here: the customer doesn't really care. You don't HAVE to buy Apple. Period. So that's not a monopoly... It would be a bit as though everyone was buying BMW cars and then some would complain BMW has established a monopoly! Crap! Go buy something else for heaven's sake!;-)
Who are they kidding?:D It kinda looks like crap with the HDD being at least 4 times bigger than the iPod...
Oh, and I love that comment too: We found in our benchmarking results that the addition of the ATA hard drive adversely affected battery life. Big surprise, really!
So, not content with the actual state of things (an ever decreasing number of young people willing to chose a career in the software development field, at least in most developed western countries), the guy wants developers to be held responsible for the bugs they introduce (and as if that was that easy to determine): so basically no one will want to be in the field anymore, which will just make all things worse and force us to outsource every development work even more than we already do. Yes, all in all, a great move indeed.
Doesn't really go with the "hype aside" comment they make. You don't need no frecking 1 GB for such a project. Come on, 1 GB is overkill even for most desktop users, except for the "heavy-users". Half of that is perfectly good enough. You can use a bigger hard drive, though. So for the money saved with 512 MB less, I'd put in a 400 GB HD instead, or something like that. Even the suggested processor is largely overkill. A Pentium M 2.13 GHz? It's practically like the most expensive processor you can find, except for the server-oriented ones. Holy crap. They must be kididing us, really. My own HTPC for the moment has a P3/800 with 512 MB and it fits the bill royally.
done it, including open and free tools, and has proven that it was useful, Microsoft decides to include PDF export in its coming Office suite. Talk about innovation. Same old, same old...:(
A lot of people. I do and have always done. I'm sorry, but I don't want anyone messing with my mail. I'm OK with my ISP doing so, because it's its main job. Not the case of the free email services. Plus: something very important: most, if not all, free email services actually *don't* give any guarantee about the quality of service. Most serious ISPs do. Other reasons, to name a few: 1) I wouldn't be surprised if Google or Yahoo reserved the right to actually use the content of emails for corporate needs (such as building databases of what interests people, etc); 2) Privacy is not guaranteed; 3) Security is not guaranteed; 4) The fact that all e-mails are archived on the server freaks me out. I always configure my e-mail clients to immediately download the content of emails and delete them on the server. This way, I know they don't stay too long somewhere I don't want them to be, plus they are all archived on my own computer. I can't lose any of them; 5) TB (and others) has nice filtering functions, search functions, multiple accounts, etc.
I don't care much about having a fixed e-mail address "for life". Mind you, pretty much nothing is "for life". If I move out, I'll change addresses and probably phone numbers. That doesn't bother me a lot. Besides, there are e-mail redirection services if you really want to have a fixed e-mail address with the ability of actually changing e-mail accounts/providers. I like that a lot better. That's freedom.
If just that (but I stated a lot of other serious reasons above), free e-mail services don't satisfy the "geek factor" at all. People who have been in the field for a long time tend to see these as "e-mail solutions for the masses". Inferior solutions for people who don't know any better...
And last, I'm not comfortable at all with these giant corporations delivering e-mails for everyone. That's freaky. A lot too centralized for my taste.
That said, according to the dictionary, art is "the application of knowledge or power to practical purposes". In that meaning, hacking is art. It's not a science in itself, since there is nothing particular about hacking. The only sure thing is, the more knowledge of the system you want to hack, the easier you can hack it. It's all about lots of knowledge of how things work and how to apply this knowledge. But the "applying" part of this "equation" is basically within each and every one of us, as someone else pointed out (the problem-solving ability). So a good hacker is someone who happens to... know a lot! Knowing about "hacking" won't particularly help - it's knowing about the system you'll hack and your problem-solving abilities (which are much more general that just applied to hacking). So in conclusion we could say that hacking is definitely not a science. It borrows to the scientific spirit, but it's just plain art.
Lots of people see hacking as some kind of "black art" - as if it required some magical powers and random tricks. But it's not! Good hackers are knowledgeable people with a medium to high IQ. Period.
Since the author mentions that. I use a cheap FX5200 for my "home theater" PC, the video output is great and it doesn't have any fan, just a small heatsink. And it's cheap as hell. Why use stuff too powerful for the job at hand? Not only is this a waste of money, but usually a big waste of electricity as well...
As for other uses: not sure I see the point. This card is not really powerful enough for professional intensive graphics work, and gamers usually don't care much about the noise, since the game itself usually makes a lot of noises and sounds...
With the "CustomizeGoogle" extension you also get search suggestions, plus you can throw away Google ads and stuff, and it's much lighter. Not sure what the Google toolbar exactly does, but I'm not comfortable with huge commercial companies like Google trying to sneak into the Open Source software like this, when you know their intentions are anything but close to the notion of freedom that OSS promotes...
To produce a copy of themselves, living entities need to carry the information needed to express how to turn matter (usually proteins, for us on Earth) into a similarly-organized entity. I think the "code", however it is encoded (DNA or otherwise) is the very hallmark of life. A code seems essential to turn matter into organized forms - that's practically a given. An interesting way of defining the line between life and non-life. Non-life may well be defined as any material (or even purely energetic, although there's a fine line between the two on some levels) compound that doesn't need any specific "code" to organize itself. We could then consider that if it doesn't need any specific code to organize itself, it doesn't need "reproduction" (one of the often-thought hallmark of life). In that vein, we could even define intermediate states between life and non-life. Interesting stuff. as they say, "the mind boggles"...;-)
It's what you do with it. And you can do as much damage with little information as you can with a lot of it. Quantity of information, if such information is objective, of course, only helps making informed decisions. That's when information becomes biased that we have a problem. Bias is not related to quantity.
You obviously don't know what Intel makes beside desktop Pentium chips... they have some excellent embedded processors. The XScale series, for instance, which is wildly used in PDAs nowadays...
How many of the users of Mozilla have gotten malware/virii? I don't know any, personally. I know of an awful lot of people who have through the use of IE. Enough said. The rest is the same old, with fallacious arguments, and as someone once said (famous line): the author of this article "doesn't deserve to smell my shit".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely not, as the Platform SDK is pretty well documented and freely available. Only a severely impaired developer could not maintain this. I myself have been using nothing but C and Win32 for years. Before that, I had used Borland OWL with C++. Guess what, after switching to raw API and C, I never wanted to switch back. There must be a reason.
There is no old school or new school, there are just skilled and unskilled developers. Riding the hype wave and calling skilled people "old school" doesn't make a unskilled developer any more skilled. New tools and languages should be used if they are right for the job at hand and *if* you could do the same (albeit maybe in more time, or with less clarity) with simpler tools. If this line of reasoning makes me old school, so be it. Even if I am to embark on a project written in a very recent programming language (such as Java or C#, heaven forbid though...) with a sophisticated application framework, I would not hire someone on that project who could not do it in a simple procedural language such as Pascal (or Modula, Oberon...) or C if given enough time (but not 10 years either). Being unable to do this, to me, is being impaired programming-wise.
And hopefully not. If that were true, imagine what it would do to your inner ear (and possibly brain) while you phone. Plus, the emitting power largely depends on how far the phones actually are from the relays, so unless you are in an ill-covered area, it's not even likely that the emitting power will be at its maximum...
Why trust anyone? Right... but as wary as I used to be towards Microsoft, I think this Google mania could very well end up making Microsoft an alternative to Google. And not the other way around. Google is currently doing stuff that even Microsoft hasdn't dared doing. And yet they are getting away with it, partly thanks to this wacky GPL thing. Don't get me wrong. I love GPL. For truly "open" projects. I may be wrong, but I just think Google has found a way around privacy and monopoly issues by using tools that were normally made for non-profit purposes. This is, of course, only my opinion. I'm starting to envision that one day, some of us will hope Microsoft never goes out of business... whereas we used to pray for the exact opposite at one point.
Exactly. The problem is that everything is copyrighted unless stated otherwise right from the start. That means if you make a nice drawing for fun, it is copyrighted unless you distribute it with a GPL license or the like *the first time you publish it*, even if publishing means putting it on your personal web site or showing it to a couple friends. So if sharing copyrighted material is made illegal whether the author cares or not, that would be lead to absurd situations where you could be sued for willingly sharing your own creations. Can it get more demented than this?
True on some level, although debatable. But that's why I avoid using any third-party library if possible. I have written a lot of Windows tools and apps that don't rely on anything other than the Win32 API and sometimes a couple open source libraries, like libpng. I, for instance, would never write an open source Win32 app with MFC. On the other hand, the Windows platform SDK is freely available, and if you use MinGW32, you don't even need to download it from Microsoft.
How is that especially "odd", considering that the guy in question didn't know squat what he was talking about... But women were considered inferior back then, so this is not surprising in the least. The word is not "odd", the word is "stupid".
Given that any two human beings on Earth have about 99% genes in common, I don't think that a couple more similar genes would make us "all the same". As long as there is reproduction, we will all be different. And even if we were totally clones, environmental factors would still make most of us different from one another, if slightly. (But then we would learn to recognize people based on more subtle cues...)
You make a very good point. All these "apparently free" services supported by ads assume on some level that you don't value your time, at least not as much as you value your money. That's twisted though; because you can always make more money; but as far as I can tell, any amount of time you have wasted is lost forever...
But you're totally free not to buy Apple products. And yes, there are lots of alternatives. Some of them quite good (especially coming from Asia). The fact that most of these alternatives imply the use of often illegally acquired music is irrelevant here: the customer doesn't really care. You don't HAVE to buy Apple. Period. So that's not a monopoly... It would be a bit as though everyone was buying BMW cars and then some would complain BMW has established a monopoly! Crap! Go buy something else for heaven's sake! ;-)
Oh my. That is what I call damning evidence... 8)
Who are they kidding? :D It kinda looks like crap with the HDD being at least 4 times bigger than the iPod...
Oh, and I love that comment too: We found in our benchmarking results that the addition of the ATA hard drive adversely affected battery life. Big surprise, really!
So, not content with the actual state of things (an ever decreasing number of young people willing to chose a career in the software development field, at least in most developed western countries), the guy wants developers to be held responsible for the bugs they introduce (and as if that was that easy to determine): so basically no one will want to be in the field anymore, which will just make all things worse and force us to outsource every development work even more than we already do. Yes, all in all, a great move indeed.
Oh really. Can your Tivo play XVID/VIDX/DVD videos in full screen in 640x400 or over? You must be smoking something I don't care to know about... ;-)
Doesn't really go with the "hype aside" comment they make. You don't need no frecking 1 GB for such a project. Come on, 1 GB is overkill even for most desktop users, except for the "heavy-users". Half of that is perfectly good enough. You can use a bigger hard drive, though. So for the money saved with 512 MB less, I'd put in a 400 GB HD instead, or something like that. Even the suggested processor is largely overkill. A Pentium M 2.13 GHz? It's practically like the most expensive processor you can find, except for the server-oriented ones. Holy crap. They must be kididing us, really. My own HTPC for the moment has a P3/800 with 512 MB and it fits the bill royally.
done it, including open and free tools, and has proven that it was useful, Microsoft decides to include PDF export in its coming Office suite. Talk about innovation. Same old, same old... :(
A lot of people. I do and have always done. I'm sorry, but I don't want anyone messing with my mail. I'm OK with my ISP doing so, because it's its main job. Not the case of the free email services. Plus: something very important: most, if not all, free email services actually *don't* give any guarantee about the quality of service. Most serious ISPs do. Other reasons, to name a few: 1) I wouldn't be surprised if Google or Yahoo reserved the right to actually use the content of emails for corporate needs (such as building databases of what interests people, etc); 2) Privacy is not guaranteed; 3) Security is not guaranteed; 4) The fact that all e-mails are archived on the server freaks me out. I always configure my e-mail clients to immediately download the content of emails and delete them on the server. This way, I know they don't stay too long somewhere I don't want them to be, plus they are all archived on my own computer. I can't lose any of them; 5) TB (and others) has nice filtering functions, search functions, multiple accounts, etc.
I don't care much about having a fixed e-mail address "for life". Mind you, pretty much nothing is "for life". If I move out, I'll change addresses and probably phone numbers. That doesn't bother me a lot. Besides, there are e-mail redirection services if you really want to have a fixed e-mail address with the ability of actually changing e-mail accounts/providers. I like that a lot better. That's freedom.
If just that (but I stated a lot of other serious reasons above), free e-mail services don't satisfy the "geek factor" at all. People who have been in the field for a long time tend to see these as "e-mail solutions for the masses". Inferior solutions for people who don't know any better...
And last, I'm not comfortable at all with these giant corporations delivering e-mails for everyone. That's freaky. A lot too centralized for my taste.
That said, according to the dictionary, art is "the application of knowledge or power to practical purposes". In that meaning, hacking is art. It's not a science in itself, since there is nothing particular about hacking. The only sure thing is, the more knowledge of the system you want to hack, the easier you can hack it. It's all about lots of knowledge of how things work and how to apply this knowledge. But the "applying" part of this "equation" is basically within each and every one of us, as someone else pointed out (the problem-solving ability). So a good hacker is someone who happens to... know a lot! Knowing about "hacking" won't particularly help - it's knowing about the system you'll hack and your problem-solving abilities (which are much more general that just applied to hacking). So in conclusion we could say that hacking is definitely not a science. It borrows to the scientific spirit, but it's just plain art.
Lots of people see hacking as some kind of "black art" - as if it required some magical powers and random tricks. But it's not! Good hackers are knowledgeable people with a medium to high IQ. Period.
Since the author mentions that. I use a cheap FX5200 for my "home theater" PC, the video output is great and it doesn't have any fan, just a small heatsink. And it's cheap as hell. Why use stuff too powerful for the job at hand? Not only is this a waste of money, but usually a big waste of electricity as well...
As for other uses: not sure I see the point. This card is not really powerful enough for professional intensive graphics work, and gamers usually don't care much about the noise, since the game itself usually makes a lot of noises and sounds...
Looks like this kind of analysis about Firefox hits Slashdot about twice a month, lately. Some "analysts" have too much time on their hands...
With the "CustomizeGoogle" extension you also get search suggestions, plus you can throw away Google ads and stuff, and it's much lighter. Not sure what the Google toolbar exactly does, but I'm not comfortable with huge commercial companies like Google trying to sneak into the Open Source software like this, when you know their intentions are anything but close to the notion of freedom that OSS promotes...
To produce a copy of themselves, living entities need to carry the information needed to express how to turn matter (usually proteins, for us on Earth) into a similarly-organized entity. I think the "code", however it is encoded (DNA or otherwise) is the very hallmark of life. A code seems essential to turn matter into organized forms - that's practically a given. An interesting way of defining the line between life and non-life. Non-life may well be defined as any material (or even purely energetic, although there's a fine line between the two on some levels) compound that doesn't need any specific "code" to organize itself. We could then consider that if it doesn't need any specific code to organize itself, it doesn't need "reproduction" (one of the often-thought hallmark of life). In that vein, we could even define intermediate states between life and non-life. Interesting stuff. as they say, "the mind boggles"... ;-)
I think you're saddly mistaken about that...
It's what you do with it. And you can do as much damage with little information as you can with a lot of it. Quantity of information, if such information is objective, of course, only helps making informed decisions. That's when information becomes biased that we have a problem. Bias is not related to quantity.
You obviously don't know what Intel makes beside desktop Pentium chips... they have some excellent embedded processors. The XScale series, for instance, which is wildly used in PDAs nowadays...
How many of the users of Mozilla have gotten malware/virii? I don't know any, personally. I know of an awful lot of people who have through the use of IE. Enough said. The rest is the same old, with fallacious arguments, and as someone once said (famous line): the author of this article "doesn't deserve to smell my shit". ;-)