I think the credits mention a joint venture between Canada and Germany. Not sure where it is filmed but I believe I heard it was done in Nova Scotia. Since the last episode ended on a beach and Nova Scotia is surrounded by beach,...
But I love this show for three reasons:
- Eva Habermann is hot. Too bad she was only on for half/dozen shows.
- It isn't politically correct. It isn't afraid to affend anyone. Compare this to Voyager which was I think was annoyingly politically correct. But then again, I wouldn't recommend it to my parents...
- It's by far got the most original concepts and ideas out there. I don't know of any other show where the humans fly around in a giant bug in one of two universes. Compare this to Roddenberry shows which all seem the same.
I find it hard to believe someone that used to earn around 100k is now homeless.
Don't you have any savings?
While the salaries were a little high at the time, humans tend to match their spending to the earnings. I've done it, I used to get along with $500 a month to live on (student loans) for quite a while. Now I make a lot more yet I am still broke. Not that I am complaining, I consider myself lucky to have experienced life like that; I know what life could be like again, and if so, would know what to do.
Just as a comment, if people are really at the end of all resources, why don't they join the Army or Navy? They almost never turn down anybody and I'm sure they have technical positions waiting. I know the Navy would just love to know what a BSOD means.
Excellent advice. I do this too and it helps a lot.
One suggestion I overheard was that the shrinking of hamstrings is often the cause of back problems. I inherited back problems but this hasn't been an issue since I started trying to reach my toes.
But this isn't why I started hitting the gym. The main reason was sitting on my ass 14 hours a day seemed to leave a excess of energy that needed to be spent. Feeling better was a bonus.
Actually, if you look into the copyright information on any music CD, you should notice (may depend on the CD) that the band members nor the record label copyright the music/lyrics. Instead, the band forms a company which copyrights the music/lyrics.
This is a loop-hole to increase the term of the copyright. Instead of expiring 70 years after the death of the writer, it expires 70 years after the company folds. The question is, how long will it take a company that is designed to have exactly $0 profit to disband? I say never.
Funny yet true. I set up my old computer for my parents and let them choose between Windows/Linux. The interesting part is that they use Windows for Internet (easier PPP) and reboot into Linux to play the games. Unbelievable how many games are shipped with (trying not to plug) some Linux distributions.
There's always the theory that lots of small polluters are better/worse than a singe massive pollutor. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that the automobile manufactures advertise fuel efficency as often as the number of sterio speakers. They will say X miles/gallon only if it happens to be good. A power company is different. They sell massive amounts of power while promoting efficency to reduce costs.
In another words, it's in the best interests for the power companies to be efficient, but not the auto manufacturers who don't buy your fuel.
Second, there is mention in the above web page about the idea of recharging during off-peak times and selling stored energy back to the power-grid during peak times. This means that this car could reduce the brownouts instead of making it worse.
NASA is one of the most inventive organizations in existence. Without them, cars would handle bad, food would take forever to cook. And who gets credit? Aliens.
In this case, they are forced to do the near impossible: take an airplane to about mach 40 while still in the atmosphere, without dropping pieces of itself, and be ready for relaunch within minutes of landing. Private has a hard enough time launching satellites on its own, never mind building a plane capable of surviving friction hot enough to melt steel.
If they can be blamed for anything, its being penny wise, dollar stupid. And I don't think that's their fault.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 1
I used to think this when I ran Doom on my 386. In reality I was just bitter because I was a broke student and couldn't afford a new 486.
Actually seeing this now kind of bugs me. I see so much work that has to be done, especially in the free software area. For example, I would love to see X run faster. But that isn't going to happen if a million people all bitch about it while only a handful actually work on it.
I think we could all benefit from learning and writing some assembly
Neither is right or wrong. It was a decision made because they found integer math was faster this way. Digital Alphas came to the same conclusion.
Either way, to do bitwise math on either is identical; calling a >> 1 will always equal a / 2, no matter if it is Intel, Alpha, Sun, or PPC. The only time it matters is when data is transfered to an unknown platform but that's what htonl is for.
I understood why Microsoft bought into Apple and Borland. These were simply an easy way to get out of lawsuits and patent issues. They gave other reasons but mostly for PR purposes.
And now these actions by Microsoft are identical, but why? The anti-trust can't be an issue, the antitrust battles center around browsers and operating systems. Plus, Office won the war not by being free or cheap nor by being preinstalled on new PCs. Last I looked, Office is rather expensive and Word Perfect comes pre-installed more often than Office (not to be confused with MS Works).
Plus Microsoft has blatently expressed their dislike for Linux. Heck, Linux source code is free, why would Microsoft have to pay a cent to anyone for it? I'm sure that Microsoft also knows that a large percentage of Linux users would rather die than use Internet Exploder and Lookout Express.
But then again, maybe Microsoft is turning over a new leaf... maybe Microsoft is going to contribute to Linux and Free Software. Ya, that's it.
A teacher I had in college did something pretty wacked. He had 16MB RAM on his Windows 3.1 box. He made a 8MB RamDisk, ran Stacker on it to increase it's size to about 16MB, and put the swap file on it.
The speed increase was huge since Stacker is faster than a hard drive. I'm not sure if this is possible or useful in Linux however. It was more important in those days because MS-DOS could only use a total of 16 MB.
There's the obvious problem that millions of/.ers have stated. Blah blah, firewalls, encryption, blah blah, blah.
While this is true, there is another problem. Recently I was camping and I found the previous camper's site reciept. After a milisecond I noticed that this person's credit card number was on it. Easy money I guess but it immediately found a fire.
This isn't an isolated incident. Has anybody ever heard of people digging in business garbage bins for reciepts that contain credit card numbers? I have. Restaurants are famous for this one.
I can never defend careless security, on or off the Internet. But either people must assume that credit card numbers are insecure or banks must find a way of making them secure.
Wouldn't that be cool; imagine if you could scream out your credit card number on/. without worring about being hosed.
I'm with you on this one. I spent a lot of money to get a bike that is both invinsible and light weight. To make one brittle and heavy would defeat the whole purpose.
Besides, I think I saw Peewee Herman driving one like this.
College doesn't teach students EVERYthing there is to know. What it does teach is a little of a lot of things. Sure, you may have to take basket weaving courses but in the long run it's better. For example, in school, I had to read the book "1984" by George Orwell. Personally I hate reading but I am thankful that when someone mentions "big-brother", I know what they are talking about.
Here's a true story: a place I used to work (around 7 years ago) for hired some big-shot Visual C programmers. These guys portrayed themselves as the end-all to Windows developement, and this may have been true. The funny thing was when we emailed them a zip file, they couldn't unzip it because they didn't know how! "Just use PkUnzip" we said. "What's that?" they replied.
You're trying to compare two types programmers and two different types of environments like they are interchangable.
According to the Space Shuttle software article on Slashdot few months back, the team working on this and their environment are nothing like anywhere else in the world. The programmers do not have any freedom. NONE. They cannot work after 5, it's not allowed. They cannot add a useful feature. Not allowed. They program with a manager looking over their shoulder the entire 8 hours.
However, I agree wholeheartedly with the paragraph that Brian wrote that upset you. I have seen programmers come and go for many years. And the ones who "swim" become nothing short of gods while the ones who leave at 5:00 end up quiting never to be heard from again.
Personally, I would hate working in an environment like this "IBM group". I love to innovate. I live for implementing ideas, no matter how late into the night it takes me. And as for myself not having a life, balony.
I believe that Open Source can be trusted, but not because it's Open Source. The software I have seen and downloaded have come from hard working ethical developers bent on providing the best software they are capable of. This compared to Windows shareware that tend to be crippled in ways that hide their bugs in the name of "not available in unregistered version".
As of now, you can download any program from Freshmeat and use it without worring about it being malicious. Atleast right now.
But I am wondering about the future. Although a program running can only clobber files the user running it owns, installing programs generally require root. Any program that is installed by "make install" or "rpm -i" are going to require temporary root access during install.
What I am asking is, is there a way of installing shared applications on a system without root? Is it possible to log in as a user that is capable of installing applications into/usr/local without being able to destroy other peoples files? If so, why doesn't anybody do it?
There are two big libraries out and they are related: SSLeay and OpenSSL. OpenSSL is based on the SSLeay libraies, both are open source. SSLeay has been around for a number of years and I have heard glowing reviews. This was also the first Open Source encryption library ever to obtain Verisign certificates.
The fellow who made SSLeay (Eric Young) also has some stand-along libraries for encrypting buffers. I saw a Blowfish one for example.
One note: encryption is easy to do, hard to do right. For example, Word Perfect had an encryption feature broken awhile back. It was broken because a section of the data was always the same. To crack the file all the person had to do was do the math:
encrypted data - known data = key.
This is a number of years ago but that will happen over and over again if the programmer doesn't understand the concepts behind data encryption.
Just a plug: you might find Blowfish to be considerably faster than other algorithms. This is not because of simplicity but because the algorithm can take advantage of 32bit processors. It also does not have known weaknesses like DES nor patent restrictions like IDEA. Elliptical Curve is another worth looking into if you can't wait for the RSA patent to expire.
If a script has access to the same resources as a compiled program, both are capable of equal damage. VB script can access Windows' API which includes file i/o and the Windows registry. Perl isn't much different, it even has been used to create a hard-drive partitioning tool.
Java on the other hand does not have access to the operating system. It was designed for the sole purpose of downloading applications and scripts without ever worring about the security of the computer or operating system. That is why Sun was so choked at Micros~1 for added such features as API access to their virtual machine.
I predict in a few years, every program will be interpreted, BECAUSE of security. Why? Interpreters if designed properly are far more secure than compiled programs (ie Java, Html). Its when interpreters (VB Script) get into the wrong hands, that is when they sink to the same level as compiled programs.
Something that I think a lot of people are missing is that music is released under licenses just like software. Music can be public domain just like software.
But Metallica did not release their CD under public domain. NOT!!! NOT!!! NOT!!! NOT!!! Therefor, people do not have the right to buy the CD and distribute CD's information to others, even if the third party also owns the CD. No different than distributing a Windows 98 CD on the web.
Think about it this way: how many times has someone on/. cried bloody murder when a closed source commercial software package is released containing GPL'ed code? Tonnes. Why? Because someone worked very hard for little or no money to create the software and now someone is taking advantage of it. Metallica looks at it this way too. They spend a lot money making each CD and they want equal return. Napster threatens that.
If people are going to bitch about Metallica, I think they automatically lose the right to bitch about GPL violations, and vise versa. Is that fair?
Slashdot Mirror
I think the credits mention a joint venture between Canada and Germany. Not sure where it is filmed but I believe I heard it was done in Nova Scotia. Since the last episode ended on a beach and Nova Scotia is surrounded by beach,...
But I love this show for three reasons:
- Eva Habermann is hot. Too bad she was only on for half/dozen shows.
- It isn't politically correct. It isn't afraid to affend anyone. Compare this to Voyager which was I think was annoyingly politically correct. But then again, I wouldn't recommend it to my parents...
- It's by far got the most original concepts and ideas out there. I don't know of any other show where the humans fly around in a giant bug in one of two universes. Compare this to Roddenberry shows which all seem the same.
Ozwald
I find it hard to believe someone that used to earn around 100k is now homeless.
Don't you have any savings?
While the salaries were a little high at the time, humans tend to match their spending to the earnings. I've done it, I used to get along with $500 a month to live on (student loans) for quite a while. Now I make a lot more yet I am still broke. Not that I am complaining, I consider myself lucky to have experienced life like that; I know what life could be like again, and if so, would know what to do.
Just as a comment, if people are really at the end of all resources, why don't they join the Army or Navy? They almost never turn down anybody and I'm sure they have technical positions waiting. I know the Navy would just love to know what a BSOD means.
Ozwald
I got stuck on the part:
We've got to think out of the box
In other words, original thinking requires copying Sci-fi...
Ozwald
Excellent advice. I do this too and it helps a lot.
One suggestion I overheard was that the shrinking of hamstrings is often the cause of back problems. I inherited back problems but this hasn't been an issue since I started trying to reach my toes.
But this isn't why I started hitting the gym. The main reason was sitting on my ass 14 hours a day seemed to leave a excess of energy that needed to be spent. Feeling better was a bonus.
Ozwald
Not as funny as "General Public License".
Pretty soon, Linux will be a cooperative 16-bit operating system.
Ozwald
If I'm not mistaken, that's a Vic20 running the Avengers. Oh, the memories.
Ozwald
Actually, if you look into the copyright information on any music CD, you should notice (may depend on the CD) that the band members nor the record label copyright the music/lyrics. Instead, the band forms a company which copyrights the music/lyrics.
This is a loop-hole to increase the term of the copyright. Instead of expiring 70 years after the death of the writer, it expires 70 years after the company folds. The question is, how long will it take a company that is designed to have exactly $0 profit to disband? I say never.
Ozwald
Funny yet true. I set up my old computer for my parents and let them choose between Windows/Linux. The interesting part is that they use Windows for Internet (easier PPP) and reboot into Linux to play the games. Unbelievable how many games are shipped with (trying not to plug) some Linux distributions.
Ozwald
There's always the theory that lots of small polluters are better/worse than a singe massive pollutor. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
But that's not the issue. The issue is that the automobile manufactures advertise fuel efficency as often as the number of sterio speakers. They will say X miles/gallon only if it happens to be good. A power company is different. They sell massive amounts of power while promoting efficency to reduce costs.
In another words, it's in the best interests for the power companies to be efficient, but not the auto manufacturers who don't buy your fuel.
Second, there is mention in the above web page about the idea of recharging during off-peak times and selling stored energy back to the power-grid during peak times. This means that this car could reduce the brownouts instead of making it worse.
I think that is very exciting.
Ozwald
NASA is one of the most inventive organizations in existence. Without them, cars would handle bad, food would take forever to cook. And who gets credit? Aliens.
In this case, they are forced to do the near impossible: take an airplane to about mach 40 while still in the atmosphere, without dropping pieces of itself, and be ready for relaunch within minutes of landing. Private has a hard enough time launching satellites on its own, never mind building a plane capable of surviving friction hot enough to melt steel.
If they can be blamed for anything, its being penny wise, dollar stupid. And I don't think that's their fault.
Ozwald
One word: Spam
Ozwald
I used to think this when I ran Doom on my 386. In reality I was just bitter because I was a broke student and couldn't afford a new 486.
Actually seeing this now kind of bugs me. I see so much work that has to be done, especially in the free software area. For example, I would love to see X run faster. But that isn't going to happen if a million people all bitch about it while only a handful actually work on it.
I think we could all benefit from learning and writing some assembly
Great! We have a volunteer!
Ozwald
Neither is right or wrong. It was a decision made because they found integer math was faster this way. Digital Alphas came to the same conclusion.
Either way, to do bitwise math on either is identical; calling a >> 1 will always equal a / 2, no matter if it is Intel, Alpha, Sun, or PPC. The only time it matters is when data is transfered to an unknown platform but that's what htonl is for.
Ozwald
I understood why Microsoft bought into Apple and Borland. These were simply an easy way to get out of lawsuits and patent issues. They gave other reasons but mostly for PR purposes.
And now these actions by Microsoft are identical, but why? The anti-trust can't be an issue, the antitrust battles center around browsers and operating systems. Plus, Office won the war not by being free or cheap nor by being preinstalled on new PCs. Last I looked, Office is rather expensive and Word Perfect comes pre-installed more often than Office (not to be confused with MS Works).
Plus Microsoft has blatently expressed their dislike for Linux. Heck, Linux source code is free, why would Microsoft have to pay a cent to anyone for it? I'm sure that Microsoft also knows that a large percentage of Linux users would rather die than use Internet Exploder and Lookout Express.
But then again, maybe Microsoft is turning over a new leaf... maybe Microsoft is going to contribute to Linux and Free Software. Ya, that's it.
Ozwald
Pre-note: I hate Windows.
A teacher I had in college did something pretty wacked. He had 16MB RAM on his Windows 3.1 box. He made a 8MB RamDisk, ran Stacker on it to increase it's size to about 16MB, and put the swap file on it.
The speed increase was huge since Stacker is faster than a hard drive. I'm not sure if this is possible or useful in Linux however. It was more important in those days because MS-DOS could only use a total of 16 MB.
Ozwald
There's the obvious problem that millions of /.ers have stated. Blah blah, firewalls, encryption, blah blah, blah.
/. without worring about being hosed.
While this is true, there is another problem. Recently I was camping and I found the previous camper's site reciept. After a milisecond I noticed that this person's credit card number was on it. Easy money I guess but it immediately found a fire.
This isn't an isolated incident. Has anybody ever heard of people digging in business garbage bins for reciepts that contain credit card numbers? I have. Restaurants are famous for this one.
I can never defend careless security, on or off the Internet. But either people must assume that credit card numbers are insecure or banks must find a way of making them secure.
Wouldn't that be cool; imagine if you could scream out your credit card number on
Ozwald
I'm with you on this one. I spent a lot of money to get a bike that is both invinsible and light weight. To make one brittle and heavy would defeat the whole purpose.
Besides, I think I saw Peewee Herman driving one like this.
Ozwald
College doesn't teach students EVERYthing there is to know. What it does teach is a little of a lot of things. Sure, you may have to take basket weaving courses but in the long run it's better. For example, in school, I had to read the book "1984" by George Orwell. Personally I hate reading but I am thankful that when someone mentions "big-brother", I know what they are talking about.
Here's a true story: a place I used to work (around 7 years ago) for hired some big-shot Visual C programmers. These guys portrayed themselves as the end-all to Windows developement, and this may have been true. The funny thing was when we emailed them a zip file, they couldn't unzip it because they didn't know how! "Just use PkUnzip" we said. "What's that?" they replied.
Yikes.
Ozwald
You're trying to compare two types programmers and two different types of environments like they are interchangable.
According to the Space Shuttle software article on Slashdot few months back, the team working on this and their environment are nothing like anywhere else in the world. The programmers do not have any freedom. NONE. They cannot work after 5, it's not allowed. They cannot add a useful feature. Not allowed. They program with a manager looking over their shoulder the entire 8 hours.
However, I agree wholeheartedly with the paragraph that Brian wrote that upset you. I have seen programmers come and go for many years. And the ones who "swim" become nothing short of gods while the ones who leave at 5:00 end up quiting never to be heard from again.
Personally, I would hate working in an environment like this "IBM group". I love to innovate. I live for implementing ideas, no matter how late into the night it takes me. And as for myself not having a life, balony.
Ozwald
I believe that Open Source can be trusted, but not because it's Open Source. The software I have seen and downloaded have come from hard working ethical developers bent on providing the best software they are capable of. This compared to Windows shareware that tend to be crippled in ways that hide their bugs in the name of "not available in unregistered version".
/usr/local without being able to destroy other peoples files? If so, why doesn't anybody do it?
As of now, you can download any program from Freshmeat and use it without worring about it being malicious. Atleast right now.
But I am wondering about the future. Although a program running can only clobber files the user running it owns, installing programs generally require root. Any program that is installed by "make install" or "rpm -i" are going to require temporary root access during install.
What I am asking is, is there a way of installing shared applications on a system without root? Is it possible to log in as a user that is capable of installing applications into
Ozwald
There are two big libraries out and they are related: SSLeay and OpenSSL. OpenSSL is based on the SSLeay libraies, both are open source. SSLeay has been around for a number of years and I have heard glowing reviews. This was also the first Open Source encryption library ever to obtain Verisign certificates.
The fellow who made SSLeay (Eric Young) also has some stand-along libraries for encrypting buffers. I saw a Blowfish one for example.
One note: encryption is easy to do, hard to do right. For example, Word Perfect had an encryption feature broken awhile back. It was broken because a section of the data was always the same. To crack the file all the person had to do was do the math:
encrypted data - known data = key.
This is a number of years ago but that will happen over and over again if the programmer doesn't understand the concepts behind data encryption.
Just a plug: you might find Blowfish to be considerably faster than other algorithms. This is not because of simplicity but because the algorithm can take advantage of 32bit processors. It also does not have known weaknesses like DES nor patent restrictions like IDEA. Elliptical Curve is another worth looking into if you can't wait for the RSA patent to expire.
Ozwald
If a script has access to the same resources as a compiled program, both are capable of equal damage. VB script can access Windows' API which includes file i/o and the Windows registry. Perl isn't much different, it even has been used to create a hard-drive partitioning tool.
Java on the other hand does not have access to the operating system. It was designed for the sole purpose of downloading applications and scripts without ever worring about the security of the computer or operating system. That is why Sun was so choked at Micros~1 for added such features as API access to their virtual machine.
I predict in a few years, every program will be interpreted, BECAUSE of security. Why? Interpreters if designed properly are far more secure than compiled programs (ie Java, Html). Its when interpreters (VB Script) get into the wrong hands, that is when they sink to the same level as compiled programs.
Ozwald
Wrong! Notepad is not bug free! Ever try to edit a 65K file in it?
Ozwald
Something that I think a lot of people are missing is that music is released under licenses just like software. Music can be public domain just like software.
/. cried bloody murder when a closed source commercial software package is released containing GPL'ed code? Tonnes. Why? Because someone worked very hard for little or no money to create the software and now someone is taking advantage of it. Metallica looks at it this way too. They spend a lot money making each CD and they want equal return. Napster threatens that.
But Metallica did not release their CD under public domain. NOT!!! NOT!!! NOT!!! NOT!!! Therefor, people do not have the right to buy the CD and distribute CD's information to others, even if the third party also owns the CD. No different than distributing a Windows 98 CD on the web.
Think about it this way: how many times has someone on
If people are going to bitch about Metallica, I think they automatically lose the right to bitch about GPL violations, and vise versa. Is that fair?
Ozwald
Why bother? They are doing a good job all by themselves.
Ozwald