... the way the author is beating round the bush (not the president) instead of focusing on the subject, he shows very well that he has been multitasking too much...
Are there still people out there who believe in the silver bullet?
Silver bullet? No, but that's not why new stuff gets actually looked at by older guys (like me). New hardware and OS advances require new paradigms and language features (sometimes) to use fully.
For example we could really use languages with good support for fine-grained multiprocessing now (not many of the established ones have it) and using languages where buffer overflows and other such techniques are often possible can get you into a lot of trouble nowdays (everything's networked...).
Sure, you can program safely in C with good knowledge and discipline and you can use some lightweight thread library if needed, but you'll have to look around when you notice that you're spending too much time on using cumbersome workarounds where other languages don't get in your way like that. After all, new languages and programming environments usually get developed to address actual issues, not because someone just wants to do things differently...
And for all the slashdotters that were offended by his "language" or "attitude" and stopped reading after the first x lines: grow up or go back to Digg. Ignore the delivery method and attempt to understand the subject and its context. Words are just words, and his points are still valid.
Really... Somehow I have a hard time trying to find any kind of "points" in his inane ramblings. It's just that, a sad rant full of self-pity and expletives from someone who failed at life (and also failed utterly at articulating himself). Perhaps you could summarize his elaborate "points" in 1-2 lines for me. Unless it's just "I'm bored out of my mind".
"When I am president, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content.
Especially video games produced outside the US and not called "America's Army" or such, since they might be promoting beliefs that the US aren't "god's army" with the mission to kill sub-human foreigners. The movie industry is of course not problematic at all, since Hollywood largely sticks to those "western values" in one violent movie after another...
Please vote liberals or something if you value human rights / find the constant warmongering in poor countries inacceptable.
considering how bad the zune is doing in bestseller / top-10 lists elsewhere, I would consider this a microsoft ad campaign. sorry amazon, but I'm not convinced (to quote Joschka Fischer).
In other words, the lack of a semi-lethal option like the Taser forces cops to either use their firearms, or find some other way to avoid escalation, ways in which they've been trained but which require more effort and may entail more risk.
There would be no issue if they actually used the Tasers as intended, to protect themselves or to stop someone who cannot be stopped by other (less harmful) means. As it is now, the Tasers are used to force someone into submission when there is no need for force at all.
Utah cop tasers a guy without provocation and then lies about it....
That rogue cop seems retarded (the way he talks etc.)... One can still hope that the sorry state of the US will be fixed some day, at least the fact that such incidents have to be recorded is a silver lining on the horizon.
it's very likely that they can decrypt it or that they have access to some backdoor in Skype... In other interviews (or other cited versions of the same?), Ziercke said that they hadn't talked to Skype yet about access to a backdoor.
This might not be a good argument in favour of surrendering all your documents to a 3rd party, but it weakens the case for protecting your privacy by keeping stuff in your home / on your computer.
Even 90% of a few million people is a fraction of 6 billion, so you might want to reword that to a "few, privileged, us".
True, but why are we even talking about the poor/starving/3rd world population when we are arguing about new technology? But since you brought it up - do you think that people in 3rd world countries will be more likely to have laptops/desktop PCs capable of running Office 2007, or low-power devices connected to the internet?
Web application developers/promoters seem to think we are living in a utopian society, with free Fiber-like speeds everywhere.
This utopian society may soon be reality for most of us.
I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked.
Laptops get stolen, hard disk drives break down, viruses can destroy your data... Data on some online provider's disks is generally better protected, the real danger is that provider or the company hosting it might go broke / rogue /...
I will always buy standalone software. You can pry my copy of Office/Visual Studio from my cold dead hands, or when I sell it for say 50%. Take that away, and I can use OpenOffice, and good old GCC/G++.
How many times have you had to pay for an upgrade that you needed because it fixed some bugs or because your old version didn't support your new operating system anymore? Software vendors are always in it for the cash, whether they sell you something (perpetually unfinished) or rent you a service. Judge them by the easy with which you can take your stuff elsewhere (try reusing Word documents elsewhere without problems).
Personally, I don't use any of those web 2.0 online tools (although I do look at online presentations occasionally - e.g. this), but I realize that they do have their use for the perpetually connected among us. I would never use such tools if I couldn't make a local copy of all my data easily though (poor webmail users...), or if I had to deal with highly confidential stuff.
One of the captivating properties of games is that they give you a sense of achievement for your efforts. Levels are one (traditional) way to implement that. They also serve to give you a sense of how far from the end you are (if there is one) and a way to communicate your progress to others efficiently.
I looked at various reviews and concluded that all existing NAS solutions had major drawbacks for my intended use (next to my desk). The Buffalo Terastation are good & silent but the software seems to be lacking a bit. The Thecus boxes should have high performance but are very noisy according to SmallNetBuilder.
So I built a debian box (after looking at FreeNAS and OpenFiler and concluding that they were inadequate for the hardware I had already bought...).
I used: SilverStone GD01 case (it has room for 7 HDs and big, quiet fans), an Asus AM2 board with 6 SATAII connectors and 2 x gigabit ethernet, I installed a low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 and 2GB RAM as well as 6 Seagate SATA disks with 250GB each. I partitioned the disks to contain a small (2G) partition for RAID-1 and swap (2 x RAID-1 for the root/boot fs - Linux can't boot from software RAID 5 yet, 4 x swap partitions) and the rest of the disk is used for a 5+1 disk RAID-5 setup.
Performance is very good, I can saturate at least the gigabit ethernet LAN connection of my desktop PC both at reading and writing (it chokes at 44MB/s - local speeds are much higher, mail me if you want a benchmark run) and I can also run various server stuff on the box that a normal NAS wouldn't support. The box is extremely quiet, so I'm very pleased.
The entry price for a book is usually $10 or less. A $399 gadget (in the order of magnitude of a laptop or e.g. ASUS Eee PC) just to do the same is too expensive and unattractive. True, you can carry around many books with you that way, but you can do that with a laptop as well.
I'll call this revolutionary when the reader costs $50 or less (or is free) and when the books cost $2. Not when you get ripped off on the reader as well as on the book price (zero cost for the manufacturer, same or higher price than a paper book).
The last decent laptop keyboard I saw was the one on the ThinkPad 720c. From then, things have got much worse. Also, nowdays people seem to take it for granted that a laptop needs to be noisier than quiet desktop PC, with its fan running continuously or every time the CPU has a little load.
It seems that the market is driven by people who have no clue about these issues and think that the convenient size and ability to run current software is enough to make it a useful working tool. Sometimes, they are enlightened slightly when they find that they can't type a straight sentence with that keyboard.
Personally, Egerstad sounds like the kind of a sanctimonious dick that SHOULD get the beatdown. They should give him "every known signal" that the police don't like it when when someone is lying to them...tasers, nightstick, whatever.
Personally, you sound like the kind of guy the police should protect us from. Too bad that they don't seem to get people with better morals for their own ranks.
On the other hand, intentionally trying to fuck with the police after they arrested him is plain stupid. It doesn't buy you anything except bad will. It's not like the people interrogating him are the ones that made the decision to arrest him. You get pulled in by the police, if you're really not guilty, the only smart thing to do is cooperate.
Actually, no. There must be limits to the criminal acts of the police one should feel compelled to show good will with. He may be a fool because he feels confident that his country will protect him from malicious acts even of the police force, but you have to stand up for your rights. If those people who are interrogating him are in the least interested in acting lawfully, then they will not harm him for refusing to cooperate with obviously illegal practices. If they are not, then he's screwed anyway...
looks like those illegally acting cops just wanted a cheap way of getting their sweaty hands on Egerstad's code. It would be so cool to be able to spy on all those foreign guys, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.uspto.gov/sdfsd ...
"hey, I wonder where all this grey stuff came fro..."
(no wonder so many people haven't RTFA)
Silver bullet? No, but that's not why new stuff gets actually looked at by older guys (like me). New hardware and OS advances require new paradigms and language features (sometimes) to use fully.
For example we could really use languages with good support for fine-grained multiprocessing now (not many of the established ones have it) and using languages where buffer overflows and other such techniques are often possible can get you into a lot of trouble nowdays (everything's networked...).
Sure, you can program safely in C with good knowledge and discipline and you can use some lightweight thread library if needed, but you'll have to look around when you notice that you're spending too much time on using cumbersome workarounds where other languages don't get in your way like that. After all, new languages and programming environments usually get developed to address actual issues, not because someone just wants to do things differently...
Really... Somehow I have a hard time trying to find any kind of "points" in his inane ramblings. It's just that, a sad rant full of self-pity and expletives from someone who failed at life (and also failed utterly at articulating himself). Perhaps you could summarize his elaborate "points" in 1-2 lines for me. Unless it's just "I'm bored out of my mind".
Either that, or he just failed both at being funny and being someone with a professional attitude.
If you can, change your surname to "Smith".
Especially video games produced outside the US and not called "America's Army" or such, since they might be promoting beliefs that the US aren't "god's army" with the mission to kill sub-human foreigners. The movie industry is of course not problematic at all, since Hollywood largely sticks to those "western values" in one violent movie after another ...
Please vote liberals or something if you value human rights / find the constant warmongering in poor countries inacceptable.
it would make Perl's the most impressive "Hello, World!" program ...
considering how bad the zune is doing in bestseller / top-10 lists elsewhere, I would consider this a microsoft ad campaign. sorry amazon, but I'm not convinced (to quote Joschka Fischer).
There would be no issue if they actually used the Tasers as intended, to protect themselves or to stop someone who cannot be stopped by other (less harmful) means. As it is now, the Tasers are used to force someone into submission when there is no need for force at all.
That rogue cop seems retarded (the way he talks etc.) ... One can still hope that the sorry state of the US will be fixed some day, at least the fact that such incidents have to be recorded is a silver lining on the horizon.
it's very likely that they can decrypt it or that they have access to some backdoor in Skype ... In other interviews (or other cited versions of the same?), Ziercke said that they hadn't talked to Skype yet about access to a backdoor.
Wake up! In many countries, governments with a disregard for privacy and human rights are working on (or have already implemented) legislation that forces you to help police decrypt your stuff or go to prison, allows the police to use malware to search through your computer's harddisk and let's not forget all the illegal wiretapping / breaking into homes by police around the globe.
This might not be a good argument in favour of surrendering all your documents to a 3rd party, but it weakens the case for protecting your privacy by keeping stuff in your home / on your computer.
True, but why are we even talking about the poor/starving/3rd world population when we are arguing about new technology? But since you brought it up - do you think that people in 3rd world countries will be more likely to have laptops/desktop PCs capable of running Office 2007, or low-power devices connected to the internet?
This utopian society may soon be reality for most of us.
I have news for these people, internet connections go down, servers crash, on-line servers get hacked. Laptops get stolen, hard disk drives break down, viruses can destroy your data... Data on some online provider's disks is generally better protected, the real danger is that provider or the company hosting it might go broke / rogue / ...
I will always buy standalone software. You can pry my copy of Office/Visual Studio from my cold dead hands, or when I sell it for say 50%. Take that away, and I can use OpenOffice, and good old GCC/G++.
How many times have you had to pay for an upgrade that you needed because it fixed some bugs or because your old version didn't support your new operating system anymore? Software vendors are always in it for the cash, whether they sell you something (perpetually unfinished) or rent you a service. Judge them by the easy with which you can take your stuff elsewhere (try reusing Word documents elsewhere without problems).
Personally, I don't use any of those web 2.0 online tools (although I do look at online presentations occasionally - e.g. this), but I realize that they do have their use for the perpetually connected among us. I would never use such tools if I couldn't make a local copy of all my data easily though (poor webmail users...), or if I had to deal with highly confidential stuff.
One of the captivating properties of games is that they give you a sense of achievement for your efforts. Levels are one (traditional) way to implement that. They also serve to give you a sense of how far from the end you are (if there is one) and a way to communicate your progress to others efficiently.
So I built a debian box (after looking at FreeNAS and OpenFiler and concluding that they were inadequate for the hardware I had already bought ...).
I used: SilverStone GD01 case (it has room for 7 HDs and big, quiet fans), an Asus AM2 board with 6 SATAII connectors and 2 x gigabit ethernet, I installed a low power Athlon X2 BE-2350 and 2GB RAM as well as 6 Seagate SATA disks with 250GB each. I partitioned the disks to contain a small (2G) partition for RAID-1 and swap (2 x RAID-1 for the root/boot fs - Linux can't boot from software RAID 5 yet, 4 x swap partitions) and the rest of the disk is used for a 5+1 disk RAID-5 setup.
Performance is very good, I can saturate at least the gigabit ethernet LAN connection of my desktop PC both at reading and writing (it chokes at 44MB/s - local speeds are much higher, mail me if you want a benchmark run) and I can also run various server stuff on the box that a normal NAS wouldn't support. The box is extremely quiet, so I'm very pleased.
some artists formerly known als being successful will do anything to get some press coverage...
I'll call this revolutionary when the reader costs $50 or less (or is free) and when the books cost $2. Not when you get ripped off on the reader as well as on the book price (zero cost for the manufacturer, same or higher price than a paper book).
It seems that the market is driven by people who have no clue about these issues and think that the convenient size and ability to run current software is enough to make it a useful working tool. Sometimes, they are enlightened slightly when they find that they can't type a straight sentence with that keyboard.
Personally, you sound like the kind of guy the police should protect us from. Too bad that they don't seem to get people with better morals for their own ranks.
Actually, no. There must be limits to the criminal acts of the police one should feel compelled to show good will with. He may be a fool because he feels confident that his country will protect him from malicious acts even of the police force, but you have to stand up for your rights. If those people who are interrogating him are in the least interested in acting lawfully, then they will not harm him for refusing to cooperate with obviously illegal practices. If they are not, then he's screwed anyway...