Hear hear. Why is it that as soon as computers or the "I" word is mentioned, common sense, or the ability to map these events onto existing law dissappers?
One such example occurred here in the UK when the ISP Demon Internet were being sued by some authority or other for offences relating to the content of one of their customer's web sites. In a feat of logic, the prosecutors claimed Demon were responsible. That's a bit like claiming that the manufacturer of the paper is responsible for what a newspaper prints on it.
I've overheard discussions, or seen threads on newsgroups where people debate whether mp3's are "legal". Well of course the format is legal - but copying copyrighted works and distributing them is still not legal, no matter what form they are in - whay is this such a big mental hurdle for people?
Theft is still theft, libel is still libel, and fraud is still fraud - no matter the instrument of perpetration!
Sorry, but I strongly disagree with this. MCSE is "the world according to Microsoft" - which is fine if thats what you wish to learn about, but for someone wishing to find out about the basics of computing, MCSE is not the answer. Almost all Windows text books concentrate on procedures as opposed to principles - ie "click this, fill in this, click OK" making most of them 1000 pages of the bleedin' obvious.
The basics I would identify for someone completeley new to IT would include things like:-
What are number bases? Why base 2? what is memory? What is a "hard disk"?
Maybe some history/family tree (Babbage, Von-Neumann, Leo, Collusus, DEC, Apple, CP/M, IBM, MS, BSD etc)
Hardware (Winn Rosch's Hardware Bible was the first IT book I ever bought, and is updated regularly)
I think it's important for any newcomer to understand the wider computing world (outside their MS desktop) and be aware of all the different arhitectures past and present. All too often I see operators clicking stuff on a Win2K server, who, when questioned, don't actually know what's behind the buttons. This is fine if all they need to do is admin tasks, but if you truely wish to understand how modern computers came to be, and why, forget MCSE.
Of course, not everyone will buy the MCSE view hook-line and sinker and from your post it appears you made the leap into the larger world, but I suspect the majority would happily finish their MCSE, having become "Instant IT experts" and beleive they know all there is worth knowing about the subject.
I'm sure I physically twitch every time someone asks me something like "Tell me about computing basics - like the "Start" menu for example"
Or "Linux? Will it run on my PC? I have Windows XP" - which is a bit like "Wales? Is that in England?"
Or, as the sales woman at BT asked me when I asked about broadband in my area - "What windows do you have?" I must confess, I couldn't resist hamming it up a little and replied "Windows? what do you mean?". She elaborated and gave 2000 or XP as the choices so I said "I don't have this Windows on any of my computers". This is in fact an outright lie as I do have one win98 box for playing games, but there ya go.
No - not MCSE, find out what a file, bit, byte, word, ASCII, EBCDIC, SNA, TCP/IP, Ethernet, Indexing/sorting AT/ISA, PCI, V24, IRQ, VMS, MVS, filesystem, RDBMS, SQL et al mean and then learn a few languages: 8086, C, Pascal, (personally, I'd skip Java - it's a right mish-mash, but given it's popularity you may come back to it later) and then some of the later.
Install BSD or a GNU/Linux OS on a machine - this will give a good platform for seeing things "for real" (a bad term I know, but I can't come up with anything better right now).
hmm indeed - do WoTC own all RPG's now? I picked up the new Star Wars RPG the other week, and not only is it now a WoTC thing (used to be West End Games) but the whole system is totally different (rendering the huge pile of source books I have for old one useless from a stats point of view). I havn't played any RPGs for 13 years now, so I'm not up on who bought who, but it seems there's WoTC and GURPS. Hell even Traveller seems to be a GURPS thing now - the last edition of that I bought was "Marc Millers Traveller" which was a very poor effort next to the old classic and advanced Trvaller that we played to death in the eighties (you know - those little black books "High Guard", "Merchant Prince" and so on). Even "Megatraveller" was better than the latest paltry efforts, and now it's just a GURPS module..
Still - WoTC do seem to produce a quality product - the new Star Wars RPG book is really nicely done. You can spend hours trying to work out whether Yoda could take Mace Windu, Kenobi and Skywalker on in a ruck and win.. Pity it's already out of date - I shoulkd wait til Lucas says "I've finished" before buying any RPGs based on Star Wars:)
Well you could, and this is probably a bit anal, but 2d10 doesn't give the same spread as D100 (the histogram would look like a hill for 2d10, whereis D100 will be linear (assuming it were possible to make a D100 with all the sides the same:-))
Not much of a market? I don't have any figures to hand, but given that a large proportion of PC games are online capable, and quite a number solely for multiplayer use (Q3, UT, CS et al) I would say there is a massive market - which is only going to get bigger. The article mentions UO pulling in $1MM per month alone!
And as for the lag - modem users don't *cause* lag for other players - if anything it's quite the opposite - broadband players grabbing more bandwidth from the server, and running with much higher frme rates, grab all the server CPU too. Before broadband (or even ISDN) became commonplace, playing Q2 (for example) on a modem was smooth and reliable.
Indeed - by the time you've added all the bits to connect, type, and move properly, you have a PC connected to your TV. And even if your TV is a multi thousand dollar Sony Wega "high res" effort, it's still pants compared to your $100 monitor. Plus you'll be sitting on the floor or on your sofa, nether of which are suitable for typing or controlling anything with any degree of precision, you you end up with a small TV on a desk, with a swivel chair. Now - just chuck out the TV, and the xbox, and buy a decent PC, and you're there - the ultimate online gaming machine. No! wait.....
Apache 2 is now the reccomended production release. What is experimental though is PHP's support for Apache 2, and this will be the same story for a number of modules.
I won't consider Apache 2 for production web sites until the PHP guys say "its ready" - as a static web server is no use to me anymore. I do plan to fire up a test server with it though, and the PHP 4.2 support is good news from an evaluation and familiarisation point of view.
Indeed - and the.conf file that ships with Apache is very well documented (i.e. the documentation is *in* the file - where you want it) with lots of examples.
Shyster - your analogies are excellent - much better than anythign I'd come up with to argue this point. I'd save them off into a file, but I'd be violating your copyright:P
I agree - it makes me laugh every time I hear some guy saying "we are destroying the planet". We may be making the planet less suitable for supporting human life, but we are not destroying it. It started off as a fairly barren rock and will probably continue to exist long after the human race (and all other 'life') has departed from it.
The "you're playing God" brigade's view of things evolves along these lines:-
No human knowledge of something - it's magic/superstition
A little knowledge but no manipulation - it's God/nature
Beggining of human manipulation - "you're playing God"
Routine manipulation - "we've never had a problem with that"
I guess there are just more jerks available for Windows - all armed with their MS "thebleedinobvious" CE certificates - a hundred hours of "to set the xyz properties, right clik on xyz and select properties..." "no shit?".
I'ts harder to cover up a lack of real knowledge on a Unix system.
Nah - I don't buy this - if "small errors" crept into data burnt onto CDs on a regular basis, half the software I downloaded and burnt would be corrupt. It never is. My burner is ancient. Therefore I don't think it likely that anyone else's writes with a detectable error rate. I take your point - that errors could creep in if a burner didn't form the marks well enough, and the more you copy a thing, the more chance of this happening - but I have yet to see it, and I burn quite a lot of stuff (all those Q3 mods n maps are quicker to download at work, and transport on CD:)
These guys make me laugh - the only thing thats gonna affect the output of one CD player over another is the DAC, PSU and other bits on the analog side. My Sony CD player even has "One bit sampling" on it LOL. That'll be a 1 or a 0 then....
Seen on a DVD the other day too: "PAL" like the data is different if your player renders PAL as opposed to NTSC or Secam. Hell I could shove it in my PC and it won't be any of those - but it'll still display - in a resizable window too if I want.
Getting back on topic - a sales guy in a Sony shop once told me that I couldn't use my current component amp. with the CD player I was thinking of buying as it didn't have a "CD" input. "Well of course not" says I "CDs weren't invented when this amp. was made - how would it be any different than any other line in? from say - a tape deck or tuner?" (needle scratcher inputs are different btw). He couldn't answer this but maintained I couldn't and got shirty when I pressed him for a reason. hehe eventually, I just shook my head slowly and left...
These days I have that very expensive CD player connected to an old set of Yamaha YST sat+bass PC speaker combo and it sounds pretty good!
Hmm and its so hard to destroy conventional CDs ??
I find a hammer works well - I bet I could smash more CDs per minute than thin ones could be shredded.
BTW - whats the deal with these black CDs (and I mean they are all black - inlcuding the recording side) they work - but whats the reason for it? Is it just a gimmick?
I don't care if he tweaks it some more - the DVD I have is the most appalling transfer to DVD I have ever seen - the picture is too small, and the edges are not masked. The sound level's too low too.
Slashdot Mirror
Hear hear. Why is it that as soon as computers or the "I" word is mentioned, common sense, or the ability to map these events onto existing law dissappers?
One such example occurred here in the UK when the ISP Demon Internet were being sued by some authority or other for offences relating to the content of one of their customer's web sites. In a feat of logic, the prosecutors claimed Demon were responsible. That's a bit like claiming that the manufacturer of the paper is responsible for what a newspaper prints on it.
I've overheard discussions, or seen threads on newsgroups where people debate whether mp3's are "legal". Well of course the format is legal - but copying copyrighted works and distributing them is still not legal, no matter what form they are in - whay is this such a big mental hurdle for people?
Theft is still theft, libel is still libel, and fraud is still fraud - no matter the instrument of perpetration!
Sorry, but I strongly disagree with this. MCSE is "the world according to Microsoft" - which is fine if thats what you wish to learn about, but for someone wishing to find out about the basics of computing, MCSE is not the answer. Almost all Windows text books concentrate on procedures as opposed to principles - ie "click this, fill in this, click OK" making most of them 1000 pages of the bleedin' obvious.
:)
The basics I would identify for someone completeley new to IT would include things like:-
What are number bases?
Why base 2?
what is memory?
What is a "hard disk"?
Maybe some history/family tree (Babbage, Von-Neumann, Leo, Collusus, DEC, Apple, CP/M, IBM, MS, BSD etc)
Hardware (Winn Rosch's Hardware Bible was the first IT book I ever bought, and is updated regularly)
I think it's important for any newcomer to understand the wider computing world (outside their MS desktop) and be aware of all the different arhitectures past and present. All too often I see operators clicking stuff on a Win2K server, who, when questioned, don't actually know what's behind the buttons. This is fine if all they need to do is admin tasks, but if you truely wish to understand how modern computers came to be, and why, forget MCSE.
Of course, not everyone will buy the MCSE view hook-line and sinker and from your post it appears you made the leap into the larger world, but I suspect the majority would happily finish their MCSE, having become "Instant IT experts" and beleive they know all there is worth knowing about the subject.
I'm sure I physically twitch every time someone asks me something like "Tell me about computing basics - like the "Start" menu for example"
Or "Linux? Will it run on my PC? I have Windows XP" - which is a bit like "Wales? Is that in England?"
Or, as the sales woman at BT asked me when I asked about broadband in my area - "What windows do you have?" I must confess, I couldn't resist hamming it up a little and replied "Windows? what do you mean?". She elaborated and gave 2000 or XP as the choices so I said "I don't have this Windows on any of my computers". This is in fact an outright lie as I do have one win98 box for playing games, but there ya go.
No - not MCSE, find out what a file, bit, byte, word, ASCII, EBCDIC, SNA, TCP/IP, Ethernet, Indexing/sorting AT/ISA, PCI, V24, IRQ, VMS, MVS, filesystem, RDBMS, SQL et al mean and then learn a few languages: 8086, C, Pascal, (personally, I'd skip Java - it's a right mish-mash, but given it's popularity you may come back to it later) and then some of the later.
Install BSD or a GNU/Linux OS on a machine - this will give a good platform for seeing things "for real" (a bad term I know, but I can't come up with anything better right now).
Well thats's my 2 penne'th
It's in Belgium mate.
In order to make a film about a er.. simulated world, they insist on using a real helicopter and a real city.
:)
George Lucas creates entire worlds in CGI, and these guys need to shut down an entire city just to film a helicopter flying?
Scene from the "making of" feature:-
Producer: (wakes up, eyes open) "I know CGI!"
What next? 'Disney paints Amazon rainforest in cartoon colours to film "Lion King 5" '
Still ROFL from this one
You are right - I'm talking bollox - the incident I was thinking of was someone subtituting 2d10 for a d20.
:-/
Sorry
hmm indeed - do WoTC own all RPG's now? I picked up the new Star Wars RPG the other week, and not only is it now a WoTC thing (used to be West End Games) but the whole system is totally different (rendering the huge pile of source books I have for old one useless from a stats point of view). I havn't played any RPGs for 13 years now, so I'm not up on who bought who, but it seems there's WoTC and GURPS. Hell even Traveller seems to be a GURPS thing now - the last edition of that I bought was "Marc Millers Traveller" which was a very poor effort next to the old classic and advanced Trvaller that we played to death in the eighties (you know - those little black books "High Guard", "Merchant Prince" and so on). Even "Megatraveller" was better than the latest paltry efforts, and now it's just a GURPS module..
:)
Still - WoTC do seem to produce a quality product - the new Star Wars RPG book is really nicely done. You can spend hours trying to work out whether Yoda could take Mace Windu, Kenobi and Skywalker on in a ruck and win.. Pity it's already out of date - I shoulkd wait til Lucas says "I've finished" before buying any RPGs based on Star Wars
At least AD&D doesn't have that problem
Well you could, and this is probably a bit anal, but 2d10 doesn't give the same spread as D100 (the histogram would look like a hill for 2d10, whereis D100 will be linear (assuming it were possible to make a D100 with all the sides the same :-))
Not much of a market? I don't have any figures to hand, but given that a large proportion of PC games are online capable, and quite a number solely for multiplayer use (Q3, UT, CS et al) I would say there is a massive market - which is only going to get bigger. The article mentions UO pulling in $1MM per month alone!
And as for the lag - modem users don't *cause* lag for other players - if anything it's quite the opposite - broadband players grabbing more bandwidth from the server, and running with much higher frme rates, grab all the server CPU too. Before broadband (or even ISDN) became commonplace, playing Q2 (for example) on a modem was smooth and reliable.
Indeed - by the time you've added all the bits to connect, type, and move properly, you have a PC connected to your TV. And even if your TV is a multi thousand dollar Sony Wega "high res" effort, it's still pants compared to your $100 monitor. Plus you'll be sitting on the floor or on your sofa, nether of which are suitable for typing or controlling anything with any degree of precision, you you end up with a small TV on a desk, with a swivel chair. Now - just chuck out the TV, and the xbox, and buy a decent PC, and you're there - the ultimate online gaming machine. No! wait.....
ROFLOL :)
+5 seems inadeqate points for this post - very funny.
Apache 2 is now the reccomended production release. What is experimental though is PHP's support for Apache 2, and this will be the same story for a number of modules.
I won't consider Apache 2 for production web sites until the PHP guys say "its ready" - as a static web server is no use to me anymore. I do plan to fire up a test server with it though, and the PHP 4.2 support is good news from an evaluation and familiarisation point of view.
Indeed - and the .conf file that ships with Apache is very well documented (i.e. the documentation is *in* the file - where you want it) with lots of examples.
LOL Perhaps the RIAA turn a bind eye for member companies :P
Shyster - your analogies are excellent - much better than anythign I'd come up with to argue this point. I'd save them off into a file, but I'd be violating your copyright :P
Hey how about SMB shares then? Last time I looked they allowed people to share files. Same with ftp.
Shock news - fileservers allow users to swap mp3s!!
Indeed - but cured for a while is better than not at all.
"I want more Life, fucker!" - Roy Batty to his creator.
I agree - it makes me laugh every time I hear some guy saying "we are destroying the planet". We may be making the planet less suitable for supporting human life, but we are not destroying it. It started off as a fairly barren rock and will probably continue to exist long after the human race (and all other 'life') has departed from it.
The "you're playing God" brigade's view of things evolves along these lines:-
No human knowledge of something - it's magic/superstition
A little knowledge but no manipulation - it's God/nature
Beggining of human manipulation - "you're playing God"
Routine manipulation - "we've never had a problem with that"
"The world's first commercially available multi-dimensional monitors"
Last time I looked "2" counted as multiple dimensions - a Uni-dimensional monitor wouldn't be much use now would it?
I guess there are just more jerks available for Windows - all armed with their MS "thebleedinobvious" CE certificates - a hundred hours of "to set the xyz properties, right clik on xyz and select properties..." "no shit?".
I'ts harder to cover up a lack of real knowledge on a Unix system.
Nah - I don't buy this - if "small errors" crept into data burnt onto CDs on a regular basis, half the software I downloaded and burnt would be corrupt. It never is. My burner is ancient. Therefore I don't think it likely that anyone else's writes with a detectable error rate. I take your point - that errors could creep in if a burner didn't form the marks well enough, and the more you copy a thing, the more chance of this happening - but I have yet to see it, and I burn quite a lot of stuff (all those Q3 mods n maps are quicker to download at work, and transport on CD :)
These guys make me laugh - the only thing thats gonna affect the output of one CD player over another is the DAC, PSU and other bits on the analog side. My Sony CD player even has "One bit sampling" on it LOL. That'll be a 1 or a 0 then....
Seen on a DVD the other day too: "PAL" like the data is different if your player renders PAL as opposed to NTSC or Secam. Hell I could shove it in my PC and it won't be any of those - but it'll still display - in a resizable window too if I want.
Getting back on topic - a sales guy in a Sony shop once told me that I couldn't use my current component amp. with the CD player I was thinking of buying as it didn't have a "CD" input. "Well of course not" says I "CDs weren't invented when this amp. was made - how would it be any different than any other line in? from say - a tape deck or tuner?" (needle scratcher inputs are different btw). He couldn't answer this but maintained I couldn't and got shirty when I pressed him for a reason. hehe eventually, I just shook my head slowly and left...
These days I have that very expensive CD player connected to an old set of Yamaha YST sat+bass PC speaker combo and it sounds pretty good!
But again - thats no different to a normal CD, and as hipnotik points out - you can just melt the things with some microwave energy.
Hmm and its so hard to destroy conventional CDs ??
I find a hammer works well - I bet I could smash more CDs per minute than thin ones could be shredded.
BTW - whats the deal with these black CDs (and I mean they are all black - inlcuding the recording side) they work - but whats the reason for it? Is it just a gimmick?
FACT: Puttin "FACT" in front of some dubious statements does not make them true.
I thought Doom3 was imminent :)
:P
try not to used reserved words in your headlines
I don't care if he tweaks it some more - the DVD I have is the most appalling transfer to DVD I have ever seen - the picture is too small, and the edges are not masked. The sound level's too low too.