he first time someone wants to diddle with a MySpace app and discovers that it won't work until you basically ratchet down the settings --often by hand in the advanced options--
You realize that MySpace is nothing but personal ads for child molesters, right?
Maybe I misunderstand your question, but I dabble in C, so let me formulate a response.
In your second paragraph, you mention that you "need to explicitly set pointers to address specific regions in memory (which may or may not be in the same address space as I/O - ie the x86 architecture." I assume you're talking about paging, swapping, segmentation, and the like.
The OS determines address space. And, if you're trying to program this kind of memory management from within a multitasking operating system, you're doing something wrong (or writing a driver.) Since the OS determines address space and whatnot, you need to make system calls to handle I/O, or to get it to map some of the virtual addresses your process owns to the physical address where the hardware buffers are (for DMA-type stuff.)
I'm not a driver programmer, and my experience with C and assembler is in real mode - no OS, no swap, no paging, flat memory, etc. But, this is an OS/hardware problem which every language has to deal with, and you'll have to interact with the operating system to transfer data outside of your memory space.
(Aside: This is why 32bit XP doesn't always see all of your memory if you install 4 GB. It gives every process its own flag 4 GB virtual address space, and maps the upper virtual addresses of every process to the same physical address that stores parts of the kernel. That way, no swapping occurs when your program makes a system call.)
There is no "bit" data type because you will never access individual bits through hardware. Registers are byte sized, and memory is accessed in word-sized chunks. A "bit", outside of software abstraction, will never be found on its own. You use masking to set/reset/toggle individual bits from within a byte (unsigned char) or other type. (Something along the lines of
variable = variable & mask;
- AND, OR, and XOR are &, |, and ^.)
My understanding is that it's not so much that C is "optimized" for low-level programming, but that there are very few abstractions between C commands and the assembly language they generate. And, ever since FORTRAN, optimizing compilers generally generate faster code than even someone skilled with an assembler.
Anyway, if there's something I misunderstood, or else another opportunity for C fanboi-ism, let me know.
I don't have the dead-tree source anymore, but I read some interesting statistics in the paper a while ago.
There are only around 65,000 (IIRC) H-1B visas handed out each year. These are snapped up the day applications are accepted.
There are millions of IT and programming jobs. Drop in the bucket.
But, visas won't end programming work. Nobody needs to come here to do programming; it can be done in India (almost) as easily as it can be done here, and adding/removing visas won't change that. I'm personally more worried about those smart gentlemen from India.
I actually like the H-1B visas; something about sucking talent from the rest of the world appeals to me. Like Einstein and all those rocket scientists we got from Germany.
Just for anyone's curiosity, HijackThis operates on #2 (Compare files/registry keys/etc. with known-good; blow it away if it differs.) This is why they recommend only "experts" use their program.
But you're right- signature scanning (which most AVs use with some kind of heuristics) is always going to be one step behind, and a lot of times can't "clean" infected files and can cause problems by blowing infected ones away. (Heck, Norton does need viruses to trash your machine ^.^)
I think there are two sources of virus infection: Program vulnerabilities/zero-day exploits and people. With 9 billion people [citation needed] on this planet, there's always going to be a critical mass who will go "lol screensaver" and run any attachment they get.
These people belong on a farm. But even in the country it's possible to get internet, even broadband lines. That's why I recommend more of a zoo-type environment. Think of it as a "virtualization environment" for dangerous or suspect processes.
I purchased a "Striker Extreme" motherboard from ASUS a couple of months back. Lotsa nice features - blue LCD screen that reads POST and pre-POST error messages, power and reset buttons built onto the board itself, and lots of other nice things that are great for system builders.
But, early versions had a temperamental BIOS, which would cause it not to boot with certain types of RAM, or with a keyboard plugged in, or any other number of things. Support forums claimed that some mobos were shipped bricked, and abounded with what amounts to superstition: "Try it with or without RAM. Try slower RAM. Mine worked after attaching a PS/2 and a USB keyboard" etc etc.
Mine wouldn't POST. But, it turned out to be a defective power supply, and firmware updates on that motherboard is ridiculously easy anyways. (When it actually has power) You can do it from a floppy, USB key, CD, or even from Windows (not that I would recommend that last one.)
Rambling point: even at their worst, Asus makes good stuff. And now they crammed an OS in there, too. I imagine a very flat penguin pressed into the PCB between the north and south bridge, accompanied with some robot chicken music...
What you described sounds similar to how signature/definition-based scanners work. I'm sure a lot of scanners make bootable versions - I know that older versions of McAfee came with a boot floppy.
But, a better way is to make a BartPE image with all of your tools (HijackThis, AdAware, SpyBot S&D, AVG, etc.)
And while I'm giving out advice: Partition your Windows disk into C: and D: partitions. Install programs and Windows on C; save your irreplaceable personal things (music, homework, etc.) on D. If you ever have to reinstall Windows (assuming you also clean the viruses off of D too!) you won't have to backup/restore anything.
Microsoft's evangelism team has been advising employees and partners to participate more in tech discussion sites. They're particularly encouraged to post positive comments about MS products. That's why you see a million "[MS product] works fine for me" posts whenever Microsoft breaks something.
Well, Windows 3.11 worked fine for my dad until last year. (He'd argue that it would still work fine if we let him plug the box back in ^.^)
Does this mean Microsoft will write him a check? And do I get a cut for astroturfing here?
I believe they switched their download center website over to silverlight quite a while ago. They used to bug you to install it and "test out the beta" version of their site if they hadn't left you a cookie the last time you visited.
I wonder what happened to their "beta" Silverlight version of the download center. They don't bug you to install Silverlight anymore, but there's an inconspicuous link to install it at the top left hand corner.
I'm waiting until they make an x64 IE7 version. (Wait, I'm thinking of Flash.)
Perfectly good TINSTAAFL point, but another way is developer's conferences.
Microsoft gives out a lot of free stuff - I got my copy of Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007 from these, along with the first (non-public) Internet Explorer 7 beta.
They really believe that having developers (and therefore software) on your platform is important. Software packages are probably the only thing keeping people from switching to a Ubuntu-style distro in droves.
There's a happy medium to be found in computer peripherals.
I use the Das Keyboard II. (I used to use an IBM Model M I got from an old PS/1, but I missed the Windows key.) $80 isn't cheap, but it's a dream to type on, and built like a tank. All the keys make happy click-click-click! noises, too. (But then again, I am a computer science major. I spend a lot of time on this thing.)
I've also been really happy with the Logitech G5 mouse. The weights are mostly gimmicky, but were handy for the one I got for my parent's computer - my mother-dearest can pop them out and use a lighter mouse. (She now refuses to work on any other computer, because the mouse is different.) It's really comfortable and tracks well, but it only has one side button, which bugs me somewhat.
(No, I don't work for either company. But, if you are a Logitech employee and would like to send me a check, I have a PayPal account!)
What I'm thinking of is more of a static IP for individuals, not routers, or a common username.
Would being known as Bloodoflethe elsewhere on the tubes really affect your anonymity? Make it easier to find your SSN? But it would make it possible for the admin of an SMTP server to block individual spammers without the "collateral damage" that comes from blocking dynamic IPs or IP ranges.
Implementation of this magical system is a problem (giving Verisign your driver's license number probably isn't the best way), but nonetheless I think it makes for an intersting thought exercise.
I didn't say that my system would be easy, or practical, or even possible - I note that in my "perfect" world, none of these would be issues. Keep practical implementation out of my hypothetical pipe-dream, mm-kay? Probably the easiest way would be to have a private key/security certificate system that would "identify" you between ISPs. Think of it as keeping your phone number.
I'm guessing that your university buys access from a telco, that Starbucks buys access from AT&T, that your company also has a deal with a telco, and that the library is a government institution. Especially at work and at the library, they try to exercise "total and complete control" of what you can and cannot do.
Any "access to the network without necessarily directly participating," whatever that means, is going to be subject to filtering when it pleases your ISP, bandwidth caps, and DMCA takedown notices. Everything you do is already completely and totally controlled, because nobody needs to know who you are to do that.
Now, what freedom do we give up by making the internet more public? If you had said something like "data mining," then I would absolutely have to agree with you - but the "freedoms" you worry about losing are ones you have already lost, and never had.
"Eliminate freedom in exchange for your right to avoid being insulted online?" "If free thought scares you and rudeness hurts your feelings, perhaps you should stick to network television?" Ouch - that definitely explains why I post to slashdot. But, knowing you as "CowTipperGore" elsewhere on the tubes, (and likewise you knowing me as "Z34107") does nothing to eliminate anonymity, free thought, rudeness, hurt feelings, scraped knees, etc. etc.
There are a lot of benefits to this idea, and few drawbacks that I can see. Why not have a "public" network?
Slow down there, cowboy. Having a unique identity on the internet is the same as "complete government and corporate control"? You invoked the world's two greatest evils in one go. Throw in Nazi's and and a car metaphor, and you'd have hit it out of the park.
The internet is already under "government and corporate control." ICANN hands out domain names and IP addresses - it's a non-profit corporation that operates on behalf of the government. (Both of 'em right there!) You buy access from private telephone, cable, and satellite companies. The other ends are mostly private networks, and much of it is ad supported.
In fact, much of the "control" exerted on the tubes would be unnecessary - spammers could be definitively and permanently banned, for example. Pwned boxes could have their internet access permanently revoked - think of what would happen to people repeatedly failing internet security if there would eventually be consequences. (If twitter is right, everyone would then move to Linux and abandon Windoze and M$ lol, and everyone wins!)
Having one and only one (but still anonymous) internet persona does little to give any nebulous government or corporation any more control than they already have. The wrinkle is how to keep real-life personally identifiable stuff from being associated with your online persona, and to keep that online persona from being forged by others. In my perfect world, both are easy.
Perhaps IPv7 will route by static IPs to people, and we'll have a hybrid system. (Patent pending!)
What I'd like to see is a more "public" internet. Register your name, address, drivers license, arc of your piss, etc. at some place like Verisign. Let them hold on to all of the information, and on the web just go by a first name and a user ID. (I'm assuming that security happens by magic, and that these details are kept private.)
On the internet, everyone is an anonymous coward, and people behave differently when they have perfect anonymity. (It breeds asshats - check my posting history, I assure you that I have more kneejerk rants on this site than anyplace in the oxygenated world.)
If through some system, people were the same individuals everywhere they ent on the net - you only have a single account, everywhere - I bet they would behave differently. Even if there was no way to trace each netizen back to their flesh-and-blood doppelganger, it would be an improvement. It would let you ban people, not user accounts, or e-mail or IP addresses.
In some ways, this seems to be the original "spirit" of the internet, if there is such a thing. Someone more knowledgeable (read: older) can chime in, but relics like finger and.plan files seem to hint at this.
Anyone caught abusing copyright like the record companies do and like Blizzard is doing here loses all copyrights they hold, and may not hold copyright for another five years
Define "abuse."
Laws against monopoly abuse (the Sherman Antitrust Act, IIRC) were originally used to break up labor unions for leveraging their "monopoly" power in labor disputes.
And who's to say that Blizzard's abusing copyright, anyway? Sounds like they're just going for broke, and any reasonable judge will say that a lot of this is over the top. (Besides, if any of this goes through, it will only serve to show how broke our copyright law is to begin with. But you all know that.)
No copyright can be held by a corporation. All copyrights are held by the works author or authors
And why not? Because no corporation has ever created a useful work? A problem I see: Anyone employed in an even remotely creative capacity (creating art and textures for videogame, sound tracks for movies, etc.) can say "Nope, the copyright's mine!" and walk away from their employer. Or worse yet, sue for infringement after the game they were paid to make the art for is released.
Somebody who thinks the nebulous, all-powerful "corporation" is to blame for the world's ills is ignoring all the corruption that happens outside of the narrow realm of commerce.
I agree with you! I worked with an older version of Solaris for an operating systems class - we were studying POSIX things like pipes, sockets, processes, forking, fun little things like that.
I did my development and debugging on Visual Studio 2005 on Vista. (No, this is not a troll.) When it compiled OK, I'd FTP my source over to the Solaris box, open a TTY, run gcc and go.
Not that we did anything all that complicated - the most interesting thing we did was write a multiprocess talk-style chat server. But, Visual Studio sure beats the heck out of ed, the closest thing to an "IDE" they had installed for us to develop on.
This line in parent AC is what caught my attention:
Microsoft sees a future in which a physician in a hospital calls up a patient records and instantly sees a dashboard of relevant information drawn from all the patient records going back many years
I thought it was hilarious - he's spinning it as Microsoft has some dastardly for FrontPage to serve up your medical records over the tubes when there are companies out there that actually earn their bread and butter doing just that.
I don't think so. I'd advocate "consumer education" - maybe posters about "1024 not 1000!" and class-action lawsuits. ^.^
I don't like the 1000^3 system used by marketers to inflate drive sizes, and I don't want to grant legitimacy to it gimping the name of the "true" system. If we're going to be pendantic (no, I don't know what that word means) force Create to use "imperial decabytes." As long as consumers know that Seagate is gypping them out of ~93GB on their terabyte drive.
I wasn't going for "rage", more of "flamebait" + "funny". (I got informative!) I was hoping "kirbybits" and "dinosaurs" would peg people's sarcasm meters. (Why did I get informative?)
We only need one system: 1 KB = 1024 bytes. 1 MB = 1024 KB. 1 GB = 1024 MB. 1 TB = 1024 GB. And 1 TB ought to be enough for anyone ^.^
That's the way it's always been, which of course is in no way a logical fallacy. But, those units had their own well-understood meanings within the technology community until hard drive manufacturers out to make a buck supplied their own meanings.
The duplicity of the One Prefix comes from storage manufacturers trying to gyp consumers - and guess what, they're getting sued for it! The system works.
Slashdot Mirror
he first time someone wants to diddle with a MySpace app and discovers that it won't work until you basically ratchet down the settings --often by hand in the advanced options--
You realize that MySpace is nothing but personal ads for child molesters, right?
If you're running apps from there... be careful
Maybe I misunderstand your question, but I dabble in C, so let me formulate a response.
In your second paragraph, you mention that you "need to explicitly set pointers to address specific regions in memory (which may or may not be in the same address space as I/O - ie the x86 architecture." I assume you're talking about paging, swapping, segmentation, and the like.
The OS determines address space. And, if you're trying to program this kind of memory management from within a multitasking operating system, you're doing something wrong (or writing a driver.) Since the OS determines address space and whatnot, you need to make system calls to handle I/O, or to get it to map some of the virtual addresses your process owns to the physical address where the hardware buffers are (for DMA-type stuff.)
I'm not a driver programmer, and my experience with C and assembler is in real mode - no OS, no swap, no paging, flat memory, etc. But, this is an OS/hardware problem which every language has to deal with, and you'll have to interact with the operating system to transfer data outside of your memory space.
(Aside: This is why 32bit XP doesn't always see all of your memory if you install 4 GB. It gives every process its own flag 4 GB virtual address space, and maps the upper virtual addresses of every process to the same physical address that stores parts of the kernel. That way, no swapping occurs when your program makes a system call.)
There is no "bit" data type because you will never access individual bits through hardware. Registers are byte sized, and memory is accessed in word-sized chunks. A "bit", outside of software abstraction, will never be found on its own. You use masking to set/reset/toggle individual bits from within a byte (unsigned char) or other type. (Something along the lines of
- AND, OR, and XOR are &, |, and ^.)My understanding is that it's not so much that C is "optimized" for low-level programming, but that there are very few abstractions between C commands and the assembly language they generate. And, ever since FORTRAN, optimizing compilers generally generate faster code than even someone skilled with an assembler.
Anyway, if there's something I misunderstood, or else another opportunity for C fanboi-ism, let me know.
I may be a retard, but why call me "fucking" retard?
If he called you a "fucking" retard on Slashdot, it was probably meant as a complement. ^.^
Besides: American website. Texas interest story.
I don't have the dead-tree source anymore, but I read some interesting statistics in the paper a while ago.
There are only around 65,000 (IIRC) H-1B visas handed out each year. These are snapped up the day applications are accepted.
There are millions of IT and programming jobs. Drop in the bucket.
But, visas won't end programming work. Nobody needs to come here to do programming; it can be done in India (almost) as easily as it can be done here, and adding/removing visas won't change that. I'm personally more worried about those smart gentlemen from India.
I actually like the H-1B visas; something about sucking talent from the rest of the world appeals to me. Like Einstein and all those rocket scientists we got from Germany.
Just for anyone's curiosity, HijackThis operates on #2 (Compare files/registry keys/etc. with known-good; blow it away if it differs.) This is why they recommend only "experts" use their program.
But you're right- signature scanning (which most AVs use with some kind of heuristics) is always going to be one step behind, and a lot of times can't "clean" infected files and can cause problems by blowing infected ones away. (Heck, Norton does need viruses to trash your machine ^.^)
I think there are two sources of virus infection: Program vulnerabilities/zero-day exploits and people. With 9 billion people [citation needed] on this planet, there's always going to be a critical mass who will go "lol screensaver" and run any attachment they get.
These people belong on a farm. But even in the country it's possible to get internet, even broadband lines. That's why I recommend more of a zoo-type environment. Think of it as a "virtualization environment" for dangerous or suspect processes.
I purchased a "Striker Extreme" motherboard from ASUS a couple of months back. Lotsa nice features - blue LCD screen that reads POST and pre-POST error messages, power and reset buttons built onto the board itself, and lots of other nice things that are great for system builders.
But, early versions had a temperamental BIOS, which would cause it not to boot with certain types of RAM, or with a keyboard plugged in, or any other number of things. Support forums claimed that some mobos were shipped bricked, and abounded with what amounts to superstition: "Try it with or without RAM. Try slower RAM. Mine worked after attaching a PS/2 and a USB keyboard" etc etc.
Mine wouldn't POST. But, it turned out to be a defective power supply, and firmware updates on that motherboard is ridiculously easy anyways. (When it actually has power) You can do it from a floppy, USB key, CD, or even from Windows (not that I would recommend that last one.)
Rambling point: even at their worst, Asus makes good stuff. And now they crammed an OS in there, too. I imagine a very flat penguin pressed into the PCB between the north and south bridge, accompanied with some robot chicken music...
What you described sounds similar to how signature/definition-based scanners work. I'm sure a lot of scanners make bootable versions - I know that older versions of McAfee came with a boot floppy.
But, a better way is to make a BartPE image with all of your tools (HijackThis, AdAware, SpyBot S&D, AVG, etc.)
And while I'm giving out advice: Partition your Windows disk into C: and D: partitions. Install programs and Windows on C; save your irreplaceable personal things (music, homework, etc.) on D. If you ever have to reinstall Windows (assuming you also clean the viruses off of D too!) you won't have to backup/restore anything.
Microsoft's evangelism team has been advising employees and partners to participate more in tech discussion sites. They're particularly encouraged to post positive comments about MS products. That's why you see a million "[MS product] works fine for me" posts whenever Microsoft breaks something.
Well, Windows 3.11 worked fine for my dad until last year. (He'd argue that it would still work fine if we let him plug the box back in ^.^)
Does this mean Microsoft will write him a check? And do I get a cut for astroturfing here?
I believe they switched their download center website over to silverlight quite a while ago. They used to bug you to install it and "test out the beta" version of their site if they hadn't left you a cookie the last time you visited.
I wonder what happened to their "beta" Silverlight version of the download center. They don't bug you to install Silverlight anymore, but there's an inconspicuous link to install it at the top left hand corner.
I'm waiting until they make an x64 IE7 version. (Wait, I'm thinking of Flash.)
Perfectly good TINSTAAFL point, but another way is developer's conferences.
Microsoft gives out a lot of free stuff - I got my copy of Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007 from these, along with the first (non-public) Internet Explorer 7 beta.
They really believe that having developers (and therefore software) on your platform is important. Software packages are probably the only thing keeping people from switching to a Ubuntu-style distro in droves.
There's a happy medium to be found in computer peripherals.
I use the Das Keyboard II. (I used to use an IBM Model M I got from an old PS/1, but I missed the Windows key.) $80 isn't cheap, but it's a dream to type on, and built like a tank. All the keys make happy click-click-click! noises, too. (But then again, I am a computer science major. I spend a lot of time on this thing.)
I've also been really happy with the Logitech G5 mouse. The weights are mostly gimmicky, but were handy for the one I got for my parent's computer - my mother-dearest can pop them out and use a lighter mouse. (She now refuses to work on any other computer, because the mouse is different.) It's really comfortable and tracks well, but it only has one side button, which bugs me somewhat.
(No, I don't work for either company. But, if you are a Logitech employee and would like to send me a check, I have a PayPal account!)
Somebody owns an iPod. ^.^
What I'm thinking of is more of a static IP for individuals, not routers, or a common username.
Would being known as Bloodoflethe elsewhere on the tubes really affect your anonymity? Make it easier to find your SSN? But it would make it possible for the admin of an SMTP server to block individual spammers without the "collateral damage" that comes from blocking dynamic IPs or IP ranges.
Implementation of this magical system is a problem (giving Verisign your driver's license number probably isn't the best way), but nonetheless I think it makes for an intersting thought exercise.
I didn't say that my system would be easy, or practical, or even possible - I note that in my "perfect" world, none of these would be issues. Keep practical implementation out of my hypothetical pipe-dream, mm-kay? Probably the easiest way would be to have a private key/security certificate system that would "identify" you between ISPs. Think of it as keeping your phone number.
I'm guessing that your university buys access from a telco, that Starbucks buys access from AT&T, that your company also has a deal with a telco, and that the library is a government institution. Especially at work and at the library, they try to exercise "total and complete control" of what you can and cannot do.
Any "access to the network without necessarily directly participating," whatever that means, is going to be subject to filtering when it pleases your ISP, bandwidth caps, and DMCA takedown notices. Everything you do is already completely and totally controlled, because nobody needs to know who you are to do that.
Now, what freedom do we give up by making the internet more public? If you had said something like "data mining," then I would absolutely have to agree with you - but the "freedoms" you worry about losing are ones you have already lost, and never had.
"Eliminate freedom in exchange for your right to avoid being insulted online?" "If free thought scares you and rudeness hurts your feelings, perhaps you should stick to network television?" Ouch - that definitely explains why I post to slashdot. But, knowing you as "CowTipperGore" elsewhere on the tubes, (and likewise you knowing me as "Z34107") does nothing to eliminate anonymity, free thought, rudeness, hurt feelings, scraped knees, etc. etc.
There are a lot of benefits to this idea, and few drawbacks that I can see. Why not have a "public" network?
Slow down there, cowboy. Having a unique identity on the internet is the same as "complete government and corporate control"? You invoked the world's two greatest evils in one go. Throw in Nazi's and and a car metaphor, and you'd have hit it out of the park.
The internet is already under "government and corporate control." ICANN hands out domain names and IP addresses - it's a non-profit corporation that operates on behalf of the government. (Both of 'em right there!) You buy access from private telephone, cable, and satellite companies. The other ends are mostly private networks, and much of it is ad supported.
In fact, much of the "control" exerted on the tubes would be unnecessary - spammers could be definitively and permanently banned, for example. Pwned boxes could have their internet access permanently revoked - think of what would happen to people repeatedly failing internet security if there would eventually be consequences. (If twitter is right, everyone would then move to Linux and abandon Windoze and M$ lol, and everyone wins!)
Having one and only one (but still anonymous) internet persona does little to give any nebulous government or corporation any more control than they already have. The wrinkle is how to keep real-life personally identifiable stuff from being associated with your online persona, and to keep that online persona from being forged by others. In my perfect world, both are easy.
Perhaps IPv7 will route by static IPs to people, and we'll have a hybrid system. (Patent pending!)
What I'd like to see is a more "public" internet. Register your name, address, drivers license, arc of your piss, etc. at some place like Verisign. Let them hold on to all of the information, and on the web just go by a first name and a user ID. (I'm assuming that security happens by magic, and that these details are kept private.)
On the internet, everyone is an anonymous coward, and people behave differently when they have perfect anonymity. (It breeds asshats - check my posting history, I assure you that I have more kneejerk rants on this site than anyplace in the oxygenated world.)
If through some system, people were the same individuals everywhere they ent on the net - you only have a single account, everywhere - I bet they would behave differently. Even if there was no way to trace each netizen back to their flesh-and-blood doppelganger, it would be an improvement. It would let you ban people, not user accounts, or e-mail or IP addresses.
In some ways, this seems to be the original "spirit" of the internet, if there is such a thing. Someone more knowledgeable (read: older) can chime in, but relics like finger and .plan files seem to hint at this.
What if this guy were a Democrat instead? Would it be hypocrisy, or "Hooray, somebody knowledgeable about computers is in politics"?
So, famous internet hacker is GOP chairman. Watch out, Diebold...
"Best possible light" and "fair trial" are mutually exclusive.
Only if you assume that the defendant is guilty to begin with. Putting a guilty person in the "best possible light" sure isn't "fair' now, is it?
But, putting innocent people in the "best possible light" definitely is. Too bad absolutely everybody brought to court is guilty, then.
Anyone caught abusing copyright like the record companies do and like Blizzard is doing here loses all copyrights they hold, and may not hold copyright for another five years
Define "abuse."
Laws against monopoly abuse (the Sherman Antitrust Act, IIRC) were originally used to break up labor unions for leveraging their "monopoly" power in labor disputes.
And who's to say that Blizzard's abusing copyright, anyway? Sounds like they're just going for broke, and any reasonable judge will say that a lot of this is over the top. (Besides, if any of this goes through, it will only serve to show how broke our copyright law is to begin with. But you all know that.)
No copyright can be held by a corporation. All copyrights are held by the works author or authors
And why not? Because no corporation has ever created a useful work? A problem I see: Anyone employed in an even remotely creative capacity (creating art and textures for videogame, sound tracks for movies, etc.) can say "Nope, the copyright's mine!" and walk away from their employer. Or worse yet, sue for infringement after the game they were paid to make the art for is released.
Somebody who thinks the nebulous, all-powerful "corporation" is to blame for the world's ills is ignoring all the corruption that happens outside of the narrow realm of commerce.
Canon hacking has hit mainstream, it seems...
Yes, but what does this mean for our navy?!
I agree with you! I worked with an older version of Solaris for an operating systems class - we were studying POSIX things like pipes, sockets, processes, forking, fun little things like that.
I did my development and debugging on Visual Studio 2005 on Vista. (No, this is not a troll.) When it compiled OK, I'd FTP my source over to the Solaris box, open a TTY, run gcc and go.
Not that we did anything all that complicated - the most interesting thing we did was write a multiprocess talk-style chat server. But, Visual Studio sure beats the heck out of ed, the closest thing to an "IDE" they had installed for us to develop on.
That is what I meant. They will save a soldier's life. Not of those who are against the soldiers.
Maybe I'm just don't know what I'm talking about, but, y'know, I kinda thought that was the point
Or are 4000+ soldier deaths in Iraq a good thing? Hmm?
This line in parent AC is what caught my attention:
Microsoft sees a future in which a physician in a hospital calls up a patient records and instantly sees a dashboard of relevant information drawn from all the patient records going back many years
I thought it was hilarious - he's spinning it as Microsoft has some dastardly for FrontPage to serve up your medical records over the tubes when there are companies out there that actually earn their bread and butter doing just that.
I don't think so. I'd advocate "consumer education" - maybe posters about "1024 not 1000!" and class-action lawsuits. ^.^
I don't like the 1000^3 system used by marketers to inflate drive sizes, and I don't want to grant legitimacy to it gimping the name of the "true" system. If we're going to be pendantic (no, I don't know what that word means) force Create to use "imperial decabytes." As long as consumers know that Seagate is gypping them out of ~93GB on their terabyte drive.
I wasn't going for "rage", more of "flamebait" + "funny". (I got informative!) I was hoping "kirbybits" and "dinosaurs" would peg people's sarcasm meters. (Why did I get informative?)
We only need one system: 1 KB = 1024 bytes. 1 MB = 1024 KB. 1 GB = 1024 MB. 1 TB = 1024 GB. And 1 TB ought to be enough for anyone ^.^
That's the way it's always been, which of course is in no way a logical fallacy. But, those units had their own well-understood meanings within the technology community until hard drive manufacturers out to make a buck supplied their own meanings.
The duplicity of the One Prefix comes from storage manufacturers trying to gyp consumers - and guess what, they're getting sued for it! The system works.