I have a DSS and back in December DirectTV had a channel set asside to run a 24/7 infomercial on these things. It looked really neat and I ended up doing quite a bit more research online and soliciting Usenet opinions. Here are a few points I would like to add.
As many people have mentioned already is that there is another unit on the market known as the 'Replay'. This unit doesn't cost you a monthly fee to subscribe to the programming, but it costs $700 compared to $500 for the Tivo. Now the Tivo has an option to purchase a lifetime subscription for an additional $200. So as you can see there is no difference. $700 for a Tivo with lifetime subscription and $700 for Replay with lifetime subscription. With the Tivo however, you have the choice of not pre-paying the subscription fee. Useful if you can't come up with $700 or if you think perhaps the service wont be up long enough to recoup the $200 loss. There are allot of other issues to consider when deciding between the two units. Many people have made comparisons so you might want to dig around online. In any case here is a link to one such comparison: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elund/p tv.htm
I personally decided the Tivo was the superior product based on what I have read.
It also looks like the big investors think so too. Vulcan Ventures, DirectTV, and Sony all have invested into Tivo.
Another thing is that Tivo and DirectTV have struck some kind of deal. Not only has DirectTV droped a huge investment into the company there are rumors of a set top box that combines the functionality of the Tivo and a DSS into one unit. This is exactly what I would like to see, it could reduce the cost of the programming subscription for one thing as it could then be beamed down on the satellite data link. Of coarse nobody knows what they really have in store for us, at this point it is all just speculation.
If nothing else Television is changing, I like the way things are looking though.
I don't know. I once worked in a factory position and would usually get about 50 hours a week, sometimes as low as 40 or high as 60. At this job I am at work usually about 60, but I'm paid for 40. However at this job, I don't feel nearly as overworked as I did there. Sure, this is 60 hours at the office, but look at me now, Im posting on Slashdot, at my previous job I didn't even slow down to read the wrapper on my microwave burrito. I know all about the stress of meeting deadlines and being on call, but its really nothing compared to hard manual labor all day. All of this cynicism about technology workers in the workplace is getting a bit out of hand. Really, how stressful or hard could your job possibly be if you are reading Slashdot everyday? I think people tend to take any situation that is a little unsavory and make it worse for themselves than it really is, Slashdot is no exception. The truth of the matter is, times are better for the average worker than they have ever been.
If you read the study you see they are not saying that sleep deprivation increases your abilites, just that the brain tries to compensate by becoming active in regions that it normally is not. Whether or not this compensation is an improvement is up for debate, and I for one doubt that it is. With that in mind perhaps the title 'Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity' is a bit misleading, especially when coupled the comments below the title?
Come on, I have seen/. complaining about other news sites doing this, try to keep yourselves to the same standard.
Regardless of what anybody else says, here are some real world statistics.
2 and a half years ago we started a small mom/pop ISP in a small town. Started up with 12 analog 33.6 modems connected to a terminal server. As most startup ISP's do we outsourced our news service. We purchased 10 concurrent connections for $50 a month. Two and a half years later we have 204 phone lines over 2 POP's, 1200+ paying accounts, and guess what? The same 10 concurrent connections to Usenet for $50 a month. I am a nightly reader of Usenet and have never hit the connection limit, and I have never received a complaint.
Despite a fair amount of growth and an average increase in online time accross the board, Usenet is the ONLY service we offer that we have never had to increase or upgrade.
Simcity, Diablo, Starcraft, all cutting edge games that will bring Linux around as a viable gamming platform... heh, if those games weren't OLD.
Listen to what Im saying, please. The PC gaming market is driven by the hardcore gamer, 80% of the typical games revenue is made in the first few months of release, and the people who buy games when they come out are hardcore gamers. If you don't have those types of people on your gaming platform, then the game companies don't have as much of a reason to write the games.
Starcraft, and Diablo are both excellent games, I'm a huge Blizzard fan myself, but porting old games isn't going to turn Linux into the mainstream gaming platform we want it to be.
We need NEW RELEASE games damnit.
Look at http://www.neverwinternights.com For what I consider to be the most exciting example.
I am the only one who thinks that 'Foundation' is a bit much for a 13 year old? I admit that might have been about when I read it, but I barely got through it. I could be wrong about that, but there are plenty of good Sci-Fi books that aren't nearly so demanding, so why take a chance? If you try to teach someone to swim by throwing them into a whirlpool you are likely to teach them that swiming sucks. Start with a wading pool. Baby steps.
Really. I like the old games as much as the next guy but do you really think a port of Zork is going to help bring Linux into gamers homes?
If we want Linux to be on equal footing with the Other OS, as far as games go, then we must attract current gamers and current developers. A port of Zork would be neat, but if I found out Halo or Diablo 2 was going to be on Linux I would be thrilled. Those are the types of games we should be talking about here.
Even the porting of last seasons games, ala Loki isn't going to have the same effect as seeing current retail releases hit the shelves with both Linux and Windows versions.
At least it is starting to happen, as evidenced by Quake3 and Neverwinter Nights.
My vote for most anticipated game of 2000 goes to Neverwinter Nights. An excellent RPG which WILL have a Linux port. http://www.neverwinternights.com
You are not nessecarily going to be getting worse performance. How big of an impact cache speed has on your application depends on the application and the circumstances. Quake2 for instance is not much impacted by the cache as it is the raw power of the cpu and as such would see increases in framerates with this method. It all depends on what you are doing.
What is wrong with me that I get so nauseated when I see someone explaining exceedingly simple and obvious aspects of philosphy as if their thoughts were profound?
I really enjoyed The Matrix, but I was really annoyed when I overheard everyone talking about how deep it was outside of the theatre.
This is the same feeling I get when I see people using the word 'one'.
When one is using the word one to describe oneself then one perhaps has seen one too many movies?
It's elitism I know, I just can't seem to shake it.
What is your point exactly? Do you want more people to try to research the paranormal? I don't see what good that would do considering the huge number of people trying to gather evidence already. There has been a GREAT DEAL of people trying to prove the existance of the things you talk about for many many years, some scientists, some not. I'm sure you are aware of this, so I guess that probably isn't your point. You have no real need of getting more people to look into the paranormal.
Hrm, so whats left. I guess your point is that you want people to have an open mind, and by open mind you mean "Agree with me that these things are paranormal even though the thousands of people researching it can't support that claim."
Sorry bud, I guess I just can't have an open mind.
Look, I realize nobody has proved it yet, but that doesn't mean nobody is looking, lots of people are.
On the other hand, since lots of people are looking, and have been for many years, I guess maybe you should consider the possibility that they aren't finding anything because there is nothing to find?
Are you sure you are the one with an open mind?
I used to think these things might be true, or possible. I used to read all the books, watch all the shows, trying to find out the truth. Then I found out that crop circles were hoaxes. All of the information I had read about them, all kinds of things about the strange lay of the crops, or the way it wasn't possible for humans to make them because none of the stalks were broke, or because the germs didn't seem quite right, all of that went out the window when I saw films of 2 men making one crop circle. The next day I saw another film of these so called "experts" all saying that this was a "geniune crop circle" and going through their usual routines about why it couldn't have been man made. Blah blah blah. At that point I came to realize one thing: "If it is possible for people to hoax something then they will."
Couple that with the fact that a large percentage of the population will just casually lie about any given subject and you have a good explanation for the widespread belief of extraterestial encounters.
"But what about all of the people who saw them, are they liars?"
You know that guy at work or the bar who always has a story to tell? You know the one who, it doesn't matter what the subject is he has been there and done it better or seen bigger? Yeah, everybody has one or two of those around. If someone starts talking about the possibility of UFO's what do you think he is going to say?
How can so many people be wrong? Easy, in fact it's quite common. What religion are you? Christian? Muslim? Catholic? It doesn't matter, whichever one you are, there is another group of many millions of people who believe you are wrong with all of their being, and another group that you believe is wrong with all of yours. A good example that a great many people will believe foolish things if given a reason.
Now that I understand these things about human nature, I cannot possibly believe any paranormal claims without extremely strong evidence. It's not that science forces people to be closed minded, it's the science forces you to be open to every possibility, even the possibility that everyone else is flat wrong.
This is not entirely true. My understanding is that they copying process of VHS is much more complicated and costly than the process for DVD once the initial investment is overcome. IE, its more costly to get started but cheaper in bulk.. and we all know this is gonna be BULK.
That is exactly what happened here, I either didn't read or pay enough attention to the documentation available on the subject. Had I read the documentation, there would have been no problem, I am aware of that. That aside, the cat is out of the bag. The issue that I am refering to now, is 'why is it that way?' why not just return a 4 digit year? What would lead you to decide to subtract 1900 from the year before returning it? I can't imagine the purpose for that, and since I can't imagine why you would do such a thing and I ASSUME that its a 2 digit year. To me this is a somewhat reasonable error to make, why would I look up the documentation on something if its use seems to be completely obvious? I have nothing against reading documentation, I -like- man pages, I just never had any reason to do so in this case, and I got burned. No excuses though, its my fault and I know it. I'm still terribly curious as to the where and why behind this particular design decision.
Why though? Why return the year minus 1900 if the intent is NOT to get a 2 digit year? And if the intent is to get a 2 digit year then clearly the code has a Y2K issue as it no longer does so. If the intent is NOT to get a 2 digit year, what is the intent? The function returns 'the year minus 1900' then we have to 'add 1900' to get the correct year.. how does this make sense? Given all of that information, I think it would be a reasonable mistake, and as such not treated so.. hrm.. arrogantly?
Let me just say, ack! I read the Y2K info on perl and was assured that Perl was compliant. When the rollover happened several of my scripts started printing the year as 100 or 19100. I blame myself for not having looked into the problem deeper, I just read the popular opinion information on the net about how Perl is Y2K compliant. Well it turns out it is compliant, but only if you use it 'right'. Here is an example. If you use the localtime class it will return a year in what appears to be a 2 digit format. I say 'appears' to be because it turns out that localtime isn't returning a 2 digit format at all, its actually returning a number which is the number of years elapsed since 1900, which just happens to look like the familiar 2 digit format we all know and love right up until the Y2K rollover happens. Here is what I mean, a month ago the year portion of localtime returned '99', now it returns '100'. According to many perl sites, however, this is Y2K compliant. They would have me believe that everyone has been using it wrong and that if people would have wrote their code correctly in the first place this wouldn't happen. The solution? printf("The year is %d\n", 1900 + localtime() -> year);
Thats fine by me, I don't have a problem doing that. I just get pissed off at how arrogantly all the literature on this subject treats the topic. "There is no Y2K problem in perl, you just suck"
Okay.. riigghht. That wasn't a coder problem. "We are just using an entirely new way to represent the date that isn't more human readable, or more machine friendly, that just happens to look exactly like the standard 2 digit year format until the year 2000 occurs, at which point it still works exactly as planned."
Can you spell denial?
I dont mind putting in workarounds, *shrug* big deal. I just get a bit indignant when my intelligence is insulted this way. http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html
It is easy to give credit to things like PC's or Unix as being a major factor in the creation of the Internet, but lets not forget people. I think it has allot to do with the way society is moving towards a more open mindset, and the Internet is a natural progression in the sharing of ideas. In the beginning of DARPANet scientists used it for a multitude of things but it all came down to people communicating. I think it would have happened not matter what platform it worked on. A real human desire for freedom of information, and expression of ideas, thats what made the Internet.
YAMS is a total solution to e-commerce, and is open source. It uses MySQL as the backend and modperl. It seems pretty nice, you might want to look into it. http://yams.screamdesign.com/
I don't really care much what their motivations are, so long as the GPL keeps them from bastardizing linux let them do what they will. Personally I think its a big boost to linux. We really need someone to come in and 'polish' things right now for the desktop. Now hear me out, I don't want flamed, but you have to realize its true. I want a simple GUI that allows me to do simple things like 'add items' to my program menus without me really having to know what Im doing. I shouldn't have to make a distinction between if I'm modifying the 'system default' menus or my personal user menus. Not to mention I have a problem with kpanel loosing its settings or just not fixing the settings at all. Now granted these may be known bugs with fixes, but why am I still downloading the latest OS and getting these 'known bugs'? And why do I have to read a bunch of text files to fix them when they should be fixed before shipping? Now that is just one example but its not unusual in my experience. As far as I can tell, things have come a long way but the polish just needs some more work. Maybe a commercial company like Corel can help give us that last bit of 'polish'. Or am I the only person that noticed all of these desktop environments don't quite seem to be working correctly?
It really amazes me how clueless the entire entertainment industry is. Consider the amount of time, money and effort that is going into creating these encryption schemes on digital media, and for what? As several people have already pointed out, you can't stop people from copying! If your media ever has to be 'unencrypted' for someone to view it, then that is the point where it can be duplicated, be it by 'catching' the data as it goes to your monitor and sound card or by using a video camera aimed at your monitor. It is painfully obvious that there is NOTHING and I mean NOTHING that can be done to stop copying of media. People aren't even going to be slowed down. How long is it going to take them to catch on to that? This seems so obvious to me, and yet entire industries are all fighting to do... do what? Make another easily bypassed copy protection scheme... in short, not a damned thing. All wasted effort.
Re:A Role-model... but is it really a change?
on
John Carmack Answers
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· Score: 3
"He was engaged in anarchistic activities when he was young (hacking, bombs, thermite etc). But he's bounced back from that, and made a success of his life."
This is a popular train of thought in this discussion and I figured I would address it. Everyone seems to be surprised when they find out brilliant people were 'not good kids', despite the fact that it seems to be a frequent occurance. Maybe this says something about societies view of good kids.
The things John did as a child that make him 'bad' seemed to have been his expressing himself as 'different'. Its tough to be a freethinker as an adult, imagine how much more difficult it is to be one as a child. The point is; If you look at John becoming a mature and well adjusted adult as him 'changing' you might be barking up the wrong tree here. The things he does now (thinking out of the box, and forming his own opinions on virtual every aspect of his life, as well as questioning anything put forth to him), those types of things, while hallmarks of a brilliant mind, are not valued at all in children. These same children aren't having things explained to them as much as they just being told what to do.
Its not all a fault of the parents (or authority figure) as allot of what parents pass on to their kids they can't explain themselves.
Given the fact that they are expected to just swallow everything as truth, It's a small wonder that brilliant children rebell against parents, school, and the community.
Think about that the next time you tell your child 'you have to because I said so..'
"How's this for an idea - if I want to make a large contribution to a candiate, I have to go through an anonymizing proxy. "
The solution you propose is interesting but likely ineffective, and could possibly even make the situation worse by not requiring the candidate to keep track of his contributors.
Suppose a candidate has this 'anonymous' source of income, a corporation can still say 'support X bill and get mucho cash'. Of course this offer would be illegal to make but I have no doubt that they can get around that by clever use of words and perhaps using a middle man. Then said corporation just puts the huge wad of cash into the fund and the candidate sees it. At this point the candidtate knows where it came from, but has total deniability seeing as how the money was contributed 'anonymously'.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a DSS and back in December DirectTV had a channel set asside to run a 24/7 infomercial on these things. It looked really neat and I ended up doing quite a bit more research online and soliciting Usenet opinions. Here are a few points I would like to add.
p tv.htm
As many people have mentioned already is that there is another unit on the market known as the 'Replay'. This unit doesn't cost you a monthly fee to subscribe to the programming, but it costs $700 compared to $500 for the Tivo. Now the Tivo has an option to purchase a lifetime subscription for an additional $200. So as you can see there is no difference. $700 for a Tivo with lifetime subscription and $700 for Replay with lifetime subscription. With the Tivo however, you have the choice of not pre-paying the subscription fee. Useful if you can't come up with $700 or if you think perhaps the service wont be up long enough to recoup the $200 loss. There are allot of other issues to consider when deciding between the two units. Many people have made comparisons so you might want to dig around online.
In any case here is a link to one such comparison:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elund/
I personally decided the Tivo was the superior product based on what I have read.
It also looks like the big investors think so too. Vulcan Ventures, DirectTV, and Sony all have invested into Tivo.
Another thing is that Tivo and DirectTV have struck some kind of deal. Not only has DirectTV droped a huge investment into the company there are rumors of a set top box that combines the functionality of the Tivo and a DSS into one unit. This is exactly what I would like to see, it could reduce the cost of the programming subscription for one thing as it could then be beamed down on the satellite data link. Of coarse nobody knows what they really have in store for us, at this point it is all just speculation.
If nothing else Television is changing, I like the way things are looking though.
Its just a normal harddrive is my understanding. I dont see any reason why you couldn't replace it yourself.
I didn't think you were biased at all. I thought what you said was very -insightful-, and me without moderator points.. *sigh*
I don't know. I once worked in a factory position and would usually get about 50 hours a week, sometimes as low as 40 or high as 60. At this job I am at work usually about 60, but I'm paid for 40. However at this job, I don't feel nearly as overworked as I did there. Sure, this is 60 hours at the office, but look at me now, Im posting on Slashdot, at my previous job I didn't even slow down to read the wrapper on my microwave burrito. I know all about the stress of meeting deadlines and being on call, but its really nothing compared to hard manual labor all day. All of this cynicism about technology workers in the workplace is getting a bit out of hand. Really, how stressful or hard could your job possibly be if you are reading Slashdot everyday? I think people tend to take any situation that is a little unsavory and make it worse for themselves than it really is, Slashdot is no exception. The truth of the matter is, times are better for the average worker than they have ever been.
If you read the study you see they are not saying that sleep deprivation increases your abilites, just that the brain tries to compensate by becoming active in regions that it normally is not. Whether or not this compensation is an improvement is up for debate, and I for one doubt that it is.
/. complaining about other news sites doing this, try to keep yourselves to the same standard.
With that in mind perhaps the title 'Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity' is a bit misleading, especially when coupled the comments below the title?
Come on, I have seen
I found this very informative, and me without my moderator points..
Regardless of what anybody else says, here are some real world statistics.
2 and a half years ago we started a small mom/pop ISP in a small town. Started up with 12 analog 33.6 modems connected to a terminal server. As most startup ISP's do we outsourced our news service. We purchased 10 concurrent connections for $50 a month. Two and a half years later we have 204 phone lines over 2 POP's, 1200+ paying accounts, and guess what? The same 10 concurrent connections to Usenet for $50 a month. I am a nightly reader of Usenet and have never hit the connection limit, and I have never received a complaint.
Despite a fair amount of growth and an average increase in online time accross the board, Usenet is the ONLY service we offer that we have never had to increase or upgrade.
What does that say?
Simcity, Diablo, Starcraft, all cutting edge games
that will bring Linux around as a viable gamming platform... heh, if those games weren't OLD.
Listen to what Im saying, please. The PC gaming market is driven by the hardcore gamer, 80% of the typical games revenue is made in the first few months of release, and the people who buy games when they come out are hardcore gamers. If you don't have those types of people on your gaming platform, then the game companies don't have as much of a reason to write the games.
Starcraft, and Diablo are both excellent games, I'm a huge Blizzard fan myself, but porting old games isn't going to turn Linux into the mainstream gaming platform we want it to be.
We need NEW RELEASE games damnit.
Look at http://www.neverwinternights.com
For what I consider to be the most exciting example.
I am the only one who thinks that 'Foundation' is a bit much for a 13 year old?
I admit that might have been about when I read it, but I barely got through it. I could be wrong about that, but there are plenty of good Sci-Fi books that aren't nearly so demanding, so why take a chance? If you try to teach someone to swim by throwing them into a whirlpool you are likely to teach them that swiming sucks. Start with a wading pool. Baby steps.
Really. I like the old games as much as the next guy but do you really think a port of Zork is going to help bring Linux into gamers homes?
If we want Linux to be on equal footing with the Other OS, as far as games go, then we must attract current gamers and current developers. A port of Zork would be neat, but if I found out Halo or Diablo 2 was going to be on Linux I would be thrilled. Those are the types of games we should be talking about here.
Even the porting of last seasons games, ala Loki isn't going to have the same effect as seeing current retail releases hit the shelves with both Linux and Windows versions.
At least it is starting to happen, as evidenced by Quake3 and Neverwinter Nights.
My vote for most anticipated game of 2000 goes to Neverwinter Nights. An excellent RPG which WILL have a Linux port. http://www.neverwinternights.com
Things are looking up.
You are not nessecarily going to be getting worse performance. How big of an impact cache speed has on your application depends on the application and the circumstances. Quake2 for instance is not much impacted by the cache as it is the raw power of the cpu and as such would see increases in framerates with this method. It all depends on what you are doing.
What is wrong with me that I get so nauseated
when I see someone explaining exceedingly simple and obvious aspects of philosphy as if their thoughts were profound?
I really enjoyed The Matrix, but I was really annoyed when I overheard everyone talking about how deep it was outside of the theatre.
This is the same feeling I get when I see people using the word 'one'.
When one is using the word one to describe oneself then one perhaps has seen one too many movies?
It's elitism I know, I just can't seem to shake it.
blah.
What is your point exactly? Do you want more people to try to research the paranormal? I don't see what good that would do considering the huge number of people trying to gather evidence already. There has been a GREAT DEAL of people trying to prove the existance of the things you talk about for many many years, some scientists, some not. I'm sure you are aware of this, so I guess that probably isn't your point. You have no real need of getting more people to look into the paranormal.
Hrm, so whats left. I guess your point is that you want people to have an open mind, and by open mind you mean "Agree with me that these things are paranormal even though the thousands of people researching it can't support that claim."
Sorry bud, I guess I just can't have an open mind.
Look, I realize nobody has proved it yet, but that doesn't mean nobody is looking, lots of people are.
On the other hand, since lots of people are looking, and have been for many years, I guess maybe you should consider the possibility that they aren't finding anything because there is nothing to find?
Are you sure you are the one with an open mind?
I used to think these things might be true, or possible. I used to read all the books, watch all the shows, trying to find out the truth. Then I found out that crop circles were hoaxes. All of the information I had read about them, all kinds of things about the strange lay of the crops, or the way it wasn't possible for humans to make them because none of the stalks were broke, or because the germs didn't seem quite right, all of that went out the window when I saw films of 2 men making one crop circle. The next day I saw another film of these so called "experts" all saying that this was a "geniune crop circle" and going through their usual routines about why it couldn't have been man made. Blah blah blah. At that point I came to realize one thing: "If it is possible for people to hoax something then they will."
Couple that with the fact that a large percentage of the population will just casually lie about any given subject and you have a good explanation for the widespread belief of extraterestial encounters.
"But what about all of the people who saw them, are they liars?"
You know that guy at work or the bar who always has a story to tell? You know the one who, it doesn't matter what the subject is he has been there and done it better or seen bigger? Yeah, everybody has one or two of those around. If someone starts talking about the possibility of UFO's what do you think he is going to say?
How can so many people be wrong? Easy, in fact it's quite common. What religion are you? Christian? Muslim? Catholic? It doesn't matter, whichever one you are, there is another group of many millions of people who believe you are wrong with all of their being, and another group that you believe is wrong with all of yours. A good example that a great many people will believe foolish things if given a reason.
Now that I understand these things about human nature, I cannot possibly believe any paranormal claims without extremely strong evidence. It's not that science forces people to be closed minded, it's the science forces you to be open to every possibility, even the possibility that everyone else is flat wrong.
This is not entirely true. My understanding is that they copying process of VHS is much more complicated and costly than the process for DVD once the initial investment is overcome. IE, its more costly to get started but cheaper in bulk.. and we all know this is gonna be BULK.
That is exactly what happened here, I either didn't read or pay enough attention to the documentation available on the subject. Had I read the documentation, there would have been no problem, I am aware of that. That aside, the cat is out of the bag. The issue that I am refering to now, is 'why is it that way?' why not just return a 4 digit year? What would lead you to decide to subtract 1900 from the year before returning it?
I can't imagine the purpose for that, and since I can't imagine why you would do such a thing and I ASSUME that its a 2 digit year. To me this is a somewhat reasonable error to make, why would I look up the documentation on something if its use seems to be completely obvious? I have nothing against reading documentation, I -like- man pages, I just never had any reason to do so in this case, and I got burned. No excuses though, its my fault and I know it. I'm still terribly curious as to the where and why behind this particular design decision.
Why though? Why return the year minus 1900 if the intent is NOT to get a 2 digit year? And if the intent is to get a 2 digit year then clearly the code has a Y2K issue as it no longer does so. If the intent is NOT to get a 2 digit year, what is the intent? The function returns 'the year minus 1900' then we have to 'add 1900' to get the correct year.. how does this make sense?
Given all of that information, I think it would be a reasonable mistake, and as such not treated so.. hrm.. arrogantly?
It was the result of a cut-paste and some hasty editing. Blah.. sorry.
Let me just say, ack! I read the Y2K info on perl and was assured that Perl was compliant. When the rollover happened several of my scripts started printing the year as 100 or 19100. I blame myself for not having looked into the problem deeper, I just read the popular opinion information on the net about how Perl is Y2K compliant. Well it turns out it is compliant, but only if you use it 'right'. Here is an example. If you use the localtime class it will return a year in what appears to be a 2 digit format. I say 'appears' to be because it turns out that localtime isn't returning a 2 digit format at all, its actually returning a number which is the number of years elapsed since 1900, which just happens to look like the familiar 2 digit format we all know and love right up until the Y2K rollover happens. Here is what I mean, a month ago the year portion of localtime returned '99', now it returns '100'. According to many perl sites, however, this is Y2K compliant. They would have me believe that everyone has been using it wrong and that if people would have wrote their code correctly in the first place this wouldn't happen.
The solution?
printf("The year is %d\n", 1900 + localtime() -> year);
Thats fine by me, I don't have a problem doing that. I just get pissed off at how arrogantly all the literature on this subject treats the topic. "There is no Y2K problem in perl, you just suck"
Okay.. riigghht. That wasn't a coder problem.
"We are just using an entirely new way to represent the date that isn't more human readable, or more machine friendly, that just happens to look exactly like the standard 2 digit year format until the year 2000 occurs, at which point it still works exactly as planned."
Can you spell denial?
I dont mind putting in workarounds, *shrug* big deal. I just get a bit indignant when my intelligence is insulted this way.
http://language.perl.com/news/y2k.html
So, would the ethics of todays US Army have cost us the campaign had they been the ethics used by the US Army of WW2?
It is easy to give credit to things like PC's or Unix as being a major factor in the creation of the Internet, but lets not forget people. I think it has allot to do with the way society is moving towards a more open mindset, and the Internet is a natural progression in the sharing of ideas. In the beginning of DARPANet scientists used it for a multitude of things but it all came down to people communicating. I think it would have happened not matter what platform it worked on.
A real human desire for freedom of information, and expression of ideas, thats what made the Internet.
YAMS is a total solution to e-commerce, and is open source. It uses MySQL as the backend and modperl. It seems pretty nice, you might want to look into it.
http://yams.screamdesign.com/
I don't really care much what their motivations are, so long as the GPL keeps them from bastardizing linux let them do what they will. Personally I think its a big boost to linux. We really need someone to come in and 'polish' things right now for the desktop. Now hear me out, I don't want flamed, but you have to realize its true. I want a simple GUI that allows me to do simple things like 'add items' to my program menus without me really having to know what Im doing. I shouldn't have to make a distinction between if I'm modifying the 'system default' menus or my personal user menus. Not to mention I have a problem with kpanel loosing its settings or just not fixing the settings at all. Now granted these may be known bugs with fixes, but why am I still downloading the latest OS and getting these 'known bugs'? And why do I have to read a bunch of text files to fix them when they should be fixed before shipping? Now that is just one example but its not unusual in my experience. As far as I can tell, things have come a long way but the polish just needs some more work. Maybe a commercial company like Corel can help give us that last bit of 'polish'. Or am I the only person that noticed all of these desktop environments don't quite seem to be working correctly?
It really amazes me how clueless the entire entertainment industry is. Consider the amount of time, money and effort that is going into creating these encryption schemes on digital media, and for what? As several people have already pointed out, you can't stop people from copying! If your media ever has to be 'unencrypted' for someone to view it, then that is the point where it can be duplicated, be it by 'catching' the data as it goes to your monitor and sound card or by using a video camera aimed at your monitor. It is painfully obvious that there is NOTHING and I mean NOTHING that can be done to stop copying of media. People aren't even going to be slowed down. How long is it going to take them to catch on to that? This seems so obvious to me, and yet entire industries are all fighting to do... do what? Make another easily bypassed copy protection scheme... in short, not a damned thing.
All wasted effort.
"He was engaged in anarchistic activities when he was young (hacking, bombs, thermite etc). But he's bounced back from that, and made a success of his life."
This is a popular train of thought in this discussion and I figured I would address it. Everyone seems to be surprised when they find out brilliant people were 'not good kids', despite the fact that it seems to be a frequent occurance. Maybe this says something about societies view of good kids.
The things John did as a child that make him 'bad' seemed to have been his expressing himself as 'different'. Its tough to be a freethinker as an adult, imagine how much more difficult it is to be one as a child.
The point is;
If you look at John becoming a mature and well adjusted adult as him 'changing' you might be barking up the wrong tree here. The things he does now (thinking out of the box, and forming his own opinions on virtual every aspect of his life, as well as questioning anything put forth to him), those types of things, while hallmarks of a brilliant mind, are not valued at all in children. These same children aren't having things explained to them as much as they just being told what to do.
Its not all a fault of the parents (or authority figure) as allot of what parents pass on to their kids they can't explain themselves.
Given the fact that they are expected to just swallow everything as truth, It's a small wonder that brilliant children rebell against parents, school, and the community.
Think about that the next time you tell your child 'you have to because I said so..'
"How's this for an idea - if I want to make a large contribution to a candiate, I have to go through an anonymizing proxy. "
The solution you propose is interesting but likely ineffective, and could possibly even make the situation worse by not requiring
the candidate to keep track of his contributors.
Suppose a candidate has this 'anonymous' source of income, a corporation can still say 'support X bill and get mucho cash'. Of course this offer would be illegal to make but I have no doubt that they can get around that by clever use of words and perhaps using a middle man.
Then said corporation just puts the huge wad of cash into the fund and the candidate sees it.
At this point the candidtate knows where it came from, but has total deniability seeing as how
the money was contributed 'anonymously'.
This would be a nightmare to enforce.