OSes and Compilers. If MS doesn't support the hammer architecture in its OSes and compilers, then AMD is screwed. You can talk all you want about "here's a great chance for Linux to hit the desktop." Ain't gonna happen. Look, I love Linux as much as the next guy, but it's not ready for the desktop. The people that run Linux are primarily programmers and geeks.
For a really viable chip, you need the support of the mainstream, and like it or not, that's Microsoft. If they don't support it with their OSes and compilers, then this will be the death of AMD. I'd hate to see that, but those are the facts.
I'm not down with Dell customer support either. I have a machine that was clearly having hardware issues (the CD-ROM drive kept ejecting and closing, to the point where you couldn't use the machine at all.) Unplug the drive, and it works fine.
Dell refused to support it because I had installed Windows 2000 over the Windows ME that shipped with it. The only way to get support was to uninstall Windows 2000 and re-install Windows ME, even though Dell supports Windows 2000 on that model. They simply don't support it unless you bought it from them, EVEN IF IT'S HARDWARE!!!
Granted, this is in their agreement, but who reads that stuff. I should be able to install whatever software I want, including OS, without losing my hardware support. That's a load of cr@p.
I moved from developer to architect/developer and then into manager/architect/devleoper. There's no doubt that between the three jobs, I find it very hard to do any single one completely. I've been fortunate to have a really great team who I now share the management and architect duties with. I still have the final say on architecture, as I designed the flagship product for our company, but I'm very open to ideas and fortunately have very talented people working with me.
The key to keeping your skills sharp, though is to keep writing software. Not just as a hobby, but as part of your job. Find the time to do it, somehow. If you lose that skill, you're in a position where you could lose your ability to effectively architect and manage (assuming you ever do that as well). My advantage is my roots as a developer and the fact that I maintain it. My best managers in the past were technically proficient and understood problems I was facing, and I could explain it to them in my language. If you lose that, you lose that effectiveness.
This is just my opinion, but it's based on my past exerpience as a deveoper and my current experience as manager/architect/developer.
It's definitely a lot more work than it used to be, but it's also a lot more rewarding. If it wasn't, I'd go back to just being a developer.
Here's what you do: Go get a bunch of free e-mail accounts. Create a bunch of e-bay accounts with this free e-mail account. Hold auctions for stuff nobody is going to buy and do this from 1 single account. From each of those other free accounts, bid on your $1.00 crap. When you win, give yourself a bunch of good feedback. You're an instant hit.
It may be time consuming, but to swindle people for $400-$1700 per fraud, you're looking at a pretty good take for your effort.
I got outbid on a fraud auction. Shortly before I got outbid, I got suspicious and discovered this guy had tons of auctions ranging greatly in what the items were and the costs. Many were dutch auctions. Before he finished his first auction, I got together a group of high bidders, pointed out what I saw and over the next few days, one of the guys in the group said he lived near the address being advertised. He checked it out and confronted the guy.
Poor bastard wouldn't back down. Those who actually ended up sending him money filed for mail fraud with the USPS. It wasn't long before he found himself in court. So, go to the USPS would be my advice. They take this stuff seriously and don't make you wait for satisfaction.
Now, maybe I'm missing something here, but from the memo, it seems pretty clear they've been hacking into the packets of FastTrack's protocol. They know the packets are encrypted (and don't know how), which seem to me to imply that they've actually tried to determine what the encryption is. Now, wouldn't that violate the DMCA they so cherish?
While I'm unaware of whether or not FastTrack has applied for a copyright (I'm sure they have) on their protocol, it is under copyright protection the moment it is created.
Sounds like they've been reverse-engineering FastTrack's protocol. Hmm, I think it's time for these guys to sue the RIAA.
I've done both "lone-gun" programming and team programming. I prefer the latter, especially when it's with really bright, motivated people (like my current job), where you learn a lot.
The problem with school is the same problem you have in most companies. You have a few people doing most of the work. It's hard for a teacher to grade an individual's achievement in a group like this, so it's understandable why they hesitate to let people work in teams.
An anonymous team member rating system where team members rate the contributions of their team mates (at several levels: Skill, Effort, Teamwork, etc), may be one way to go. I think encouraging teamwork in software design is important. The day of the lone-gun programmer creating great software is more or less over. I realize there are exceptions to this, but they are few and far between.
Teamwork is an essential part of developing medium and large scale systems. That's the hardest part about hiring people right of school, I find. They don't have the skills for working as members of a team. They tend to try to do everything on their own without asking questions when they should be asking their co-workers for advice and learning from their experience. They tend to be defensive of their work instead of taking constructive criticism and using to write better code.
These are skills you learn as a teammember, and it takes time to learn them, so I think at some point universities should address this and incorporate it, one way or another, into their courses.
The problem with a "well rounded" education, as defined by most universities, is that in general, it doesn't serve you.
There are some exceptions. In the U.S. and other English speaking countries, I think English should be a core part of the curriculum. I was never a particularly good English student, but I have a decent command of the language, and that's important in most aspects of life. For example, I get illiterate e-mails from co-workers, and frankly, it affects my opinion of their intelligence, fair or not.
Politics, Geography, and History are all very important as well. Politics because to be an effective member of society, you must understand politics. History because, to coin a phrase, those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. And finally Geography because it is required by History and Politics.
I was not a particularly good student. I was a damn good programmer. I started when I was 10. School was "boring" for me. I never did particularly well.
This brings me to my final point. In the words of Mark Twain, "Never let your schooling interefere with your education." The point is this: I'm primarily self-educated in most of the subjects I've raised above. Though I was a poor English student in school, I've written a number of articles and a book in my field. Not that you have to be particularly well read or a particularly good writer to get published in the software field. Nevertheless, you must be able to put together a coherent sentence and be able to express yourself in writing.
I think that the education in the U.S. is abysmal in many respects. But school was never for me. You sit me down with a book and a need or an interest to learn something, and I'll learn it. I spent two years, more or less, vacationing in Mexico. In those two years, I learned more about medicine, biology and theoretical, particle, and astro-physics than I learned of any one subject in my many years of schooling.
With the Internet, education is available to anyone with a computer and a modem. Take advantage of it. Education is priceless. A degree has a price. Never confuse the two.
I keep hearing people talking about bombing Afghanistan to the stone age and sending in ground troops to find Bin Laden and take him out. Sounds great on paper but:
Afghanistan is not our enemy. The Taliban is. Your ordinary Afghan is poor, starving, and no enemy of ours. The Taliban has abused them, starved them, raped them. Unfortunately, the Taliban aren't in a building we can bomb. They're hidden, just like Bin Laden.
We're in a position much like Vietnam, if we send in ground forces. Who is the enemy? What does he or she look like? Are we just going to go in and shoot all the Afghanis? I hope not. At the same time, if we go in, we're going to be dealing with people who will drive trucks full of explosives into our bases/camps and kill themselves to kill more of us.
We're really looking at a war unlike any other, unless we take this course. If we take this course, then we're looking at another Vietnam. I hope we're not condemned to repeat history.
We must find a way to defeat the enemy, and how to do that, I can't say. What I can do is offer some ideas on what not to do, which is probably more important.
I really hope people here don't hold bad feelings against Arabs or Muslibs. Islam is a religion of love and understanding, just like any other religion. Let's not forget the Inquisition. Let's not forget the crusades.
Speaking of the crusades, Bush was stupid enough to use the word "crusade" in one of his speeches. The crusades were religion against religion, and let's just say the Christians didn't fare too well, so I don't think it would be (as his father says) "prudent" to use that word in comparison.
I don't know how things will be in the future. I don't think any of us really knows. It's all a scary and it's going to be a brand new lifestyle for us in the States. It will change slowly, but make no mistake, it will change. Since it will be a slow change, I think we'll all learn to adjust, just as many of our allies who have long been victims of terrorism have.
Building good software (in the mid to large-system sense) is simply a matter of good teamwork, nothing more. Good teamwork means that the team comes up with coding standards that everyone practices. Good teamwork means that management from the top to the most junior program, have a way to communicate what the company needs and when it needs to be done. Good teamwork means that the team, from management down to the most junior programmer, agree on a system for developing requirements down to designing and implementing the software.
While it's been a long road (longer than expected because of a lack of resources and a little too much confidence), we have come up with what everyone on our team believes will be a revolutionary product. Time will tell, but our customers and potential partners are mightily impressed.
The team was fairly small. It started with two developers working together as architects and me as team manager. The team is now 5 developers (me being one of them) and me still managing and architecting. I'm not bragging. I learned from better programmers and better managers and did my best to provide what I thought I could provide. Through some luck and good teamwork, we've managed to provide what I promised and a whole lot more.
The code is designed well enough that a recent hire (two weeks old) has already added significant functionality, yet the system consists of more than 40 individual components.
Anyway, I owe it all to teamwork. I couldn't have done this alone certainly. I made a number of mistakes as a manager, and even as an architect, but I think that comes with breaking new ground. In the end, the overall design was solid enough that we've been able to survive changing and new requirements and still have a very stable and well designed system.
You can argue that Microsoft sacked the competition, and I wouldn't disagree with you. I mean, the justice department isn't after them for no reason at all.
Windows is better than Gnome (I won't speak to KDE because I haven't used it) on usability, and certainly better than X by itself on a number of points. With the exception of developers actually going out of their way to make their app not follow the standards, 90% of all Windows programs have almost identical functionality for standard functions: File/Load, File/Save, File/Print, File/Print Preview, Edit/Cut, Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste, etc... The Window menu is consistent, the Help menu is consistent.
The toolbars are consistent between applications and how they work. The status bar is very consistent. The fact that you can turn these on and off is also consistent.
When I hit ctrl-F S, I know I'm going to get File/Save, in almost any applcation. If I hit F1, I know I'm going to get help.
I'll grant that the thing about dragging the task bar around was a stupid idea. I don't know anyone who has ever changed it on purpose. I'm also not saying to blindly copy Windows. What I'm saying is, do it as good as Windows, or do it better, but more importantly, at least TRY to enforce it to be consistent across applications.
When I create a new application in Visual C++, I automatically get the File, Edit, View, Window, and Help menu items, fully populated. I get a toolbar (if I want it), I get a status bar. I even get a basic help file started for me. Now, granted, that's a development environment, but it's also the primary Windows development environment out there (along with Visual Basic), and it helps to enforce consistency.
Read any book on user interface design, and you'll find that Windows is, in many respects, a model of good design. There are definitely problems with it, I won't argue there, but it's also the standard with which Gnome and KDE have to compete. They need to do what Windows can do, and do it better, or they'll never be the GUI of choice by the masses.
Are Gnome and KDE completely compatible? If I write an application with Gnome specifically in mind, will KDE run the application as I wrote it? If not, that's why having two will make it less likely to succeed. If so, I stand corrected?
Look, the problem with Linux, and I've said this time and again, is that we don't need a variety of desktop environments. If we did, GEM (for those of you old enough to remember what it was) and OS/2 would be competing with Windows. They're not, they're dead.
Linux needs a single GUI. Be it Gnome, KDE, or whatever. Pick one, build it right. Follow Microsoft's example and do extensive usability tests, and make it easy and intuitive for the user to use it. Otherwise, you're just not going to see Linux EVER enter the desktop market. Yeah, I know, a lot of you guys use it. You represent less than 1% of the computer using market.
I've always hoped that Linux could crack the desktop market. I want to see it compete with MS. I want to be writing applications for Linux. The problem is, I just don't think that's ever going to happen. There are too many factions, and no single one appears to have a huge advantage. All of these GUIs are being written by programmers, for programmers.
I've used Gnome. I could figure my way around it 90% of the time, but I've been programming for 22 years. I'm way less than 1% of the desktop users in that regard.
Give your GUI to your mother, your father, your grandparents. If they can all figure it out, then you're on to something. If they can't, then you've really got nothing.
Actually, that's not entirely true. The orbits of the moons would not have to be perpindicular to the plane of the system. In fact, if they were, that would probably be worse since their rotation would probably be parallel to their orbit, meaning they'd have one light side and one dark side, all the time. Not particularly good for life either.
Remember, the moon would be orbiting pretty far away from the planet. It would only be blocked by the planet for very short periods of time in it's orbit. Draw a circle and call it the planet, then draw a circle around that about 3 or 4 times the diameter of the planet, and call it the orbit. Now consider one direction where the sun is shining from. And look at how much of that orbit is blocked by the sun. I think this is a pretty realistic model.
Therefore, life could easily flourish in this type of environment. The cold darkness would last for a few days at a time. Not enough to cause any major heat change beyond what we experience between summer in the tropics and winter in northern Canada.
Sorry, but as a long-time C++ programmer, I find this only a marginal improvement in the language. Granted, it is an improvement, but how many people are going to rewrite legacy code for a marginal improvement?
Personally, I think we need a radically different way of programming. I don't know what it is, but we need it. We're really in the bronze-age of programming. We've got a long way to go. Right now, writing software is more art than engineering. The few groups that do it like engineering pay a heavy premium to do it (i.e. the Shuttle Software group)
There was a guy a while back that wrote a program that emulated a bunch of CPUs. He then wrote a language for those CPUs and had a "goal" for the program. He then introduced the idea of mutations and spawning child programs. He would start off writing a program to acheive the goal, and then feed it into the "CPUs". After several generations and mutations, and a "natural selection" type process, the computer ended up generating better code than he originally did.
I've had it in the back of my mind that that's what we really need to do in software. Come up with a way for computers to put our software through some sort of "mutation" and "natural selection" process and in the end we get better code. Obviously in the real world, this is a much more complex problem than the simulation this guy wrote. Wish I could remember where it was and what the link was. Very cool stuff.
I just built a gadget that bends space time. I can go anywhere, anytime. The problem is, this professor at MIT has come really close to doing the same thing and he patented his work. I'm worried that he'll sue me under the DMCA if I publish my work. What should I do?
The speed of light has changed over time? No kidding? I mean, after a few drinks, it takes several seconds for the light from my monitor to reach my eyes. I think that the constants change more with alcohol and drugs, than with time.
To give a really obvious example, smoke some pot, and hey, time slows down, sometimes it speeds up. I think the physicists need to stop looking at the stars and more at things like pot, LSD, etc. Things that really affect time, and therefore the speed of light 'constant';-)
WiseNut, Teoma and Vivisimo all are similar in that they put up pretty relevant categories for some searches. In fact, I'll say they do a better job than Google, from what I saw.
As an example, I did a search on "lisinopril", the generic name for a blood pressure medication I take.
Where as google provided one "category" besides the search results, WiseNut provided 10 relevant categories to further break down my search (ACE Inhibitors, brand names, blood pressure, heart attacks, drug information, etc.
Teoma provided 8 different categories, and vivisimo provided 11 categories and "more" option for more categories.
Personally, I find this to be a nice feature of all three of these engines. As for relevancy of the information, that's really a hard thing to quanitify.
Given the choice, though, I'm going to add WiseNut and Teoma to my list of search engines that I use. Beyond the features mentioned above, they took one good idea from Google and that's to keep the search screen sparse and uncluttered.
4: It's public. That means: It's like a message board. You can write whatever you want. If the "moderators" of the board don't like it, they can remove it, but 1 and 2 of my post fall under free speech, in the States, and I doubt you'll find anyone who disagrees with it.
Remember, 98% of these guys are forging their e-mail addresses, which makes them guilty in some dozen states, or so, of the U.S. So they're going to come after me for posting garbage to their forms? I doubt it.
I'm going to take heat for this, I know, but I'm really kind of tired of the "I'm just starting with Linux, what distro should I use?" questions that Slashdot gets.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but I'm a Win2K guy. I don't really choose to be one, so much as that's where my company makes its money, and I don't really have a choice, unless I want to get another job, which I don't.
I'm not down on Linux. I love it, but it seems to me this site is more about "Yeah, yeah, Linux" than "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Yeah, we get a bunch of articles that fall under the banner, but we also get a lot of this stuff, which, I'm sorry, just doesn't interest me.
I've made my points in the past about the failings of Linux. I don't want to put it down, but this site seems to be better suited for more "nerd" info than just Linux, and sometimes it seems like it's too much about Linux and not enough about "News for Nerds." Maybe I'm wrong. Shoot me. I just get tired of this kind of stuff, personally.
Re:Fill out forms
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Eliza for Spam
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This guy has a lot of interesting ideas. I would think it would be fairly simple to write a program that did the following things:
1: If a SPAM message contains a form, you forward it to the program (which would create a local SMTP server to receive messages only from you). It would fill the form with random data, but somewhat intelligently, by parsing the HTML and figuring out what is valid for the form.
2: If a SPAM message goes to a web site with a form, go to that form in your browser. Run the anti-spam program and click a button to auto-fill the form. You could configure it to fill out the form multiple times, in the background, without user intervention.
3: If the SPAM message contains a link to geocities, or other free web hosting services, forward the e-mail to your anti-spam program's local SMTP server. It will grab the link and then forward the e-mail, header, and link to the appropriate abuse@ address.
There are probably other things like this that could be done. If someone wrote this program, I'd use it religiously, and I'd imagine a lot of other people would too. If it was easy enough to use and as unobtrusive as possible, people would be using it like crazy. The spammers would get wiped out.
Believe me, if I had the spare time, I'd start writing this program today.
Amazingly annoying
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Code Redux
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· Score: 4, Informative
6 of our machines at work got infected over the weekend. I was under the impression that our web guy had been keeping them up-to-date, but 5 were inside our NAT (infected by the 1 that was outside). I was under the impression that the ones inside the NAT would be ok. Bad assumption.
The bandwidth it used was so bad that it completely wiped out our ability to get out via HTTP. We could ping, get and send mail, but we couldn't browse at all. I had innoculated my home machine, and it wasn't until this morning, when we received a notice from our ISP accusing of massive port scanning of port 80 that I made the connection. I went around the office and, even after 5 of the 6 machines were innoculated, we still couldn't get out via HTTP. It wasn't until the 6th was innoculated that we could get out.
Our line is a 768/512 DSL (I believe those are the numbers), and it amazes me that a single machine infected could cause so much trouble. This is pretty disturbing.
Slashdot Mirror
OSes and Compilers. If MS doesn't support the hammer architecture in its OSes and compilers, then AMD is screwed. You can talk all you want about "here's a great chance for Linux to hit the desktop." Ain't gonna happen. Look, I love Linux as much as the next guy, but it's not ready for the desktop. The people that run Linux are primarily programmers and geeks.
For a really viable chip, you need the support of the mainstream, and like it or not, that's Microsoft. If they don't support it with their OSes and compilers, then this will be the death of AMD. I'd hate to see that, but those are the facts.
I'm not down with Dell customer support either. I have a machine that was clearly having hardware issues (the CD-ROM drive kept ejecting and closing, to the point where you couldn't use the machine at all.) Unplug the drive, and it works fine.
Dell refused to support it because I had installed Windows 2000 over the Windows ME that shipped with it. The only way to get support was to uninstall Windows 2000 and re-install Windows ME, even though Dell supports Windows 2000 on that model. They simply don't support it unless you bought it from them, EVEN IF IT'S HARDWARE!!!
Granted, this is in their agreement, but who reads that stuff. I should be able to install whatever software I want, including OS, without losing my hardware support. That's a load of cr@p.
I moved from developer to architect/developer and then into manager/architect/devleoper. There's no doubt that between the three jobs, I find it very hard to do any single one completely. I've been fortunate to have a really great team who I now share the management and architect duties with. I still have the final say on architecture, as I designed the flagship product for our company, but I'm very open to ideas and fortunately have very talented people working with me.
The key to keeping your skills sharp, though is to keep writing software. Not just as a hobby, but as part of your job. Find the time to do it, somehow. If you lose that skill, you're in a position where you could lose your ability to effectively architect and manage (assuming you ever do that as well). My advantage is my roots as a developer and the fact that I maintain it. My best managers in the past were technically proficient and understood problems I was facing, and I could explain it to them in my language. If you lose that, you lose that effectiveness.
This is just my opinion, but it's based on my past exerpience as a deveoper and my current experience as manager/architect/developer.
It's definitely a lot more work than it used to be, but it's also a lot more rewarding. If it wasn't, I'd go back to just being a developer.
Here's what you do: Go get a bunch of free e-mail accounts. Create a bunch of e-bay accounts with this free e-mail account. Hold auctions for stuff nobody is going to buy and do this from 1 single account. From each of those other free accounts, bid on your $1.00 crap. When you win, give yourself a bunch of good feedback. You're an instant hit.
It may be time consuming, but to swindle people for $400-$1700 per fraud, you're looking at a pretty good take for your effort.
I got outbid on a fraud auction. Shortly before I got outbid, I got suspicious and discovered this guy had tons of auctions ranging greatly in what the items were and the costs. Many were dutch auctions. Before he finished his first auction, I got together a group of high bidders, pointed out what I saw and over the next few days, one of the guys in the group said he lived near the address being advertised. He checked it out and confronted the guy.
Poor bastard wouldn't back down. Those who actually ended up sending him money filed for mail fraud with the USPS. It wasn't long before he found himself in court. So, go to the USPS would be my advice. They take this stuff seriously and don't make you wait for satisfaction.
simply go to this page, select the type and number of each server that you want and proceed to check out.
Remeber: Do not click twice!
Now, maybe I'm missing something here, but from the memo, it seems pretty clear they've been hacking into the packets of FastTrack's protocol. They know the packets are encrypted (and don't know how), which seem to me to imply that they've actually tried to determine what the encryption is. Now, wouldn't that violate the DMCA they so cherish?
While I'm unaware of whether or not FastTrack has applied for a copyright (I'm sure they have) on their protocol, it is under copyright protection the moment it is created.
Sounds like they've been reverse-engineering FastTrack's protocol. Hmm, I think it's time for these guys to sue the RIAA.
I've done both "lone-gun" programming and team programming. I prefer the latter, especially when it's with really bright, motivated people (like my current job), where you learn a lot.
The problem with school is the same problem you have in most companies. You have a few people doing most of the work. It's hard for a teacher to grade an individual's achievement in a group like this, so it's understandable why they hesitate to let people work in teams.
An anonymous team member rating system where team members rate the contributions of their team mates (at several levels: Skill, Effort, Teamwork, etc), may be one way to go. I think encouraging teamwork in software design is important. The day of the lone-gun programmer creating great software is more or less over. I realize there are exceptions to this, but they are few and far between.
Teamwork is an essential part of developing medium and large scale systems. That's the hardest part about hiring people right of school, I find. They don't have the skills for working as members of a team. They tend to try to do everything on their own without asking questions when they should be asking their co-workers for advice and learning from their experience. They tend to be defensive of their work instead of taking constructive criticism and using to write better code.
These are skills you learn as a teammember, and it takes time to learn them, so I think at some point universities should address this and incorporate it, one way or another, into their courses.
The problem with a "well rounded" education, as defined by most universities, is that in general, it doesn't serve you.
There are some exceptions. In the U.S. and other English speaking countries, I think English should be a core part of the curriculum. I was never a particularly good English student, but I have a decent command of the language, and that's important in most aspects of life. For example, I get illiterate e-mails from co-workers, and frankly, it affects my opinion of their intelligence, fair or not.
Politics, Geography, and History are all very important as well. Politics because to be an effective member of society, you must understand politics. History because, to coin a phrase, those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. And finally Geography because it is required by History and Politics.
I was not a particularly good student. I was a damn good programmer. I started when I was 10. School was "boring" for me. I never did particularly well.
This brings me to my final point. In the words of Mark Twain, "Never let your schooling interefere with your education." The point is this: I'm primarily self-educated in most of the subjects I've raised above. Though I was a poor English student in school, I've written a number of articles and a book in my field. Not that you have to be particularly well read or a particularly good writer to get published in the software field. Nevertheless, you must be able to put together a coherent sentence and be able to express yourself in writing.
I think that the education in the U.S. is abysmal in many respects. But school was never for me. You sit me down with a book and a need or an interest to learn something, and I'll learn it. I spent two years, more or less, vacationing in Mexico. In those two years, I learned more about medicine, biology and theoretical, particle, and astro-physics than I learned of any one subject in my many years of schooling.
With the Internet, education is available to anyone with a computer and a modem. Take advantage of it. Education is priceless. A degree has a price. Never confuse the two.
I keep hearing people talking about bombing Afghanistan to the stone age and sending in ground troops to find Bin Laden and take him out. Sounds great on paper but:
Afghanistan is not our enemy. The Taliban is. Your ordinary Afghan is poor, starving, and no enemy of ours. The Taliban has abused them, starved them, raped them. Unfortunately, the Taliban aren't in a building we can bomb. They're hidden, just like Bin Laden.
We're in a position much like Vietnam, if we send in ground forces. Who is the enemy? What does he or she look like? Are we just going to go in and shoot all the Afghanis? I hope not. At the same time, if we go in, we're going to be dealing with people who will drive trucks full of explosives into our bases/camps and kill themselves to kill more of us.
We're really looking at a war unlike any other, unless we take this course. If we take this course, then we're looking at another Vietnam. I hope we're not condemned to repeat history.
We must find a way to defeat the enemy, and how to do that, I can't say. What I can do is offer some ideas on what not to do, which is probably more important.
I really hope people here don't hold bad feelings against Arabs or Muslibs. Islam is a religion of love and understanding, just like any other religion. Let's not forget the Inquisition. Let's not forget the crusades.
Speaking of the crusades, Bush was stupid enough to use the word "crusade" in one of his speeches. The crusades were religion against religion, and let's just say the Christians didn't fare too well, so I don't think it would be (as his father says) "prudent" to use that word in comparison.
I don't know how things will be in the future. I don't think any of us really knows. It's all a scary and it's going to be a brand new lifestyle for us in the States. It will change slowly, but make no mistake, it will change. Since it will be a slow change, I think we'll all learn to adjust, just as many of our allies who have long been victims of terrorism have.
God Bless America!
Building good software (in the mid to large-system sense) is simply a matter of good teamwork, nothing more. Good teamwork means that the team comes up with coding standards that everyone practices. Good teamwork means that management from the top to the most junior program, have a way to communicate what the company needs and when it needs to be done. Good teamwork means that the team, from management down to the most junior programmer, agree on a system for developing requirements down to designing and implementing the software.
While it's been a long road (longer than expected because of a lack of resources and a little too much confidence), we have come up with what everyone on our team believes will be a revolutionary product. Time will tell, but our customers and potential partners are mightily impressed.
The team was fairly small. It started with two developers working together as architects and me as team manager. The team is now 5 developers (me being one of them) and me still managing and architecting. I'm not bragging. I learned from better programmers and better managers and did my best to provide what I thought I could provide. Through some luck and good teamwork, we've managed to provide what I promised and a whole lot more.
The code is designed well enough that a recent hire (two weeks old) has already added significant functionality, yet the system consists of more than 40 individual components.
Anyway, I owe it all to teamwork. I couldn't have done this alone certainly. I made a number of mistakes as a manager, and even as an architect, but I think that comes with breaking new ground. In the end, the overall design was solid enough that we've been able to survive changing and new requirements and still have a very stable and well designed system.
Okay, looks like a long brag, I guess. Sorry.
You can argue that Microsoft sacked the competition, and I wouldn't disagree with you. I mean, the justice department isn't after them for no reason at all.
Windows is better than Gnome (I won't speak to KDE because I haven't used it) on usability, and certainly better than X by itself on a number of points. With the exception of developers actually going out of their way to make their app not follow the standards, 90% of all Windows programs have almost identical functionality for standard functions: File/Load, File/Save, File/Print, File/Print Preview, Edit/Cut, Edit/Copy, Edit/Paste, etc... The Window menu is consistent, the Help menu is consistent.
The toolbars are consistent between applications and how they work. The status bar is very consistent. The fact that you can turn these on and off is also consistent.
When I hit ctrl-F S, I know I'm going to get File/Save, in almost any applcation. If I hit F1, I know I'm going to get help.
I'll grant that the thing about dragging the task bar around was a stupid idea. I don't know anyone who has ever changed it on purpose. I'm also not saying to blindly copy Windows. What I'm saying is, do it as good as Windows, or do it better, but more importantly, at least TRY to enforce it to be consistent across applications.
When I create a new application in Visual C++, I automatically get the File, Edit, View, Window, and Help menu items, fully populated. I get a toolbar (if I want it), I get a status bar. I even get a basic help file started for me. Now, granted, that's a development environment, but it's also the primary Windows development environment out there (along with Visual Basic), and it helps to enforce consistency.
Read any book on user interface design, and you'll find that Windows is, in many respects, a model of good design. There are definitely problems with it, I won't argue there, but it's also the standard with which Gnome and KDE have to compete. They need to do what Windows can do, and do it better, or they'll never be the GUI of choice by the masses.
Are Gnome and KDE completely compatible? If I write an application with Gnome specifically in mind, will KDE run the application as I wrote it? If not, that's why having two will make it less likely to succeed. If so, I stand corrected?
Look, the problem with Linux, and I've said this time and again, is that we don't need a variety of desktop environments. If we did, GEM (for those of you old enough to remember what it was) and OS/2 would be competing with Windows. They're not, they're dead.
Linux needs a single GUI. Be it Gnome, KDE, or whatever. Pick one, build it right. Follow Microsoft's example and do extensive usability tests, and make it easy and intuitive for the user to use it. Otherwise, you're just not going to see Linux EVER enter the desktop market. Yeah, I know, a lot of you guys use it. You represent less than 1% of the computer using market.
I've always hoped that Linux could crack the desktop market. I want to see it compete with MS. I want to be writing applications for Linux. The problem is, I just don't think that's ever going to happen. There are too many factions, and no single one appears to have a huge advantage. All of these GUIs are being written by programmers, for programmers.
I've used Gnome. I could figure my way around it 90% of the time, but I've been programming for 22 years. I'm way less than 1% of the desktop users in that regard.
Give your GUI to your mother, your father, your grandparents. If they can all figure it out, then you're on to something. If they can't, then you've really got nothing.
Now someone's going to get into my hotmail spam account and be able to read all my spam. What to do?
I mean, really, does anyone use hotmail for anything other than a spam repository?
Looks like Banjo got Slashdot'ed. Does that qualify as a bug?
Actually, that's not entirely true. The orbits of the moons would not have to be perpindicular to the plane of the system. In fact, if they were, that would probably be worse since their rotation would probably be parallel to their orbit, meaning they'd have one light side and one dark side, all the time. Not particularly good for life either.
Remember, the moon would be orbiting pretty far away from the planet. It would only be blocked by the planet for very short periods of time in it's orbit. Draw a circle and call it the planet, then draw a circle around that about 3 or 4 times the diameter of the planet, and call it the orbit. Now consider one direction where the sun is shining from. And look at how much of that orbit is blocked by the sun. I think this is a pretty realistic model.
Therefore, life could easily flourish in this type of environment. The cold darkness would last for a few days at a time. Not enough to cause any major heat change beyond what we experience between summer in the tropics and winter in northern Canada.
That's definitely a habitable range.
Sorry, but as a long-time C++ programmer, I find this only a marginal improvement in the language. Granted, it is an improvement, but how many people are going to rewrite legacy code for a marginal improvement?
Personally, I think we need a radically different way of programming. I don't know what it is, but we need it. We're really in the bronze-age of programming. We've got a long way to go. Right now, writing software is more art than engineering. The few groups that do it like engineering pay a heavy premium to do it (i.e. the Shuttle Software group)
There was a guy a while back that wrote a program that emulated a bunch of CPUs. He then wrote a language for those CPUs and had a "goal" for the program. He then introduced the idea of mutations and spawning child programs. He would start off writing a program to acheive the goal, and then feed it into the "CPUs". After several generations and mutations, and a "natural selection" type process, the computer ended up generating better code than he originally did.
I've had it in the back of my mind that that's what we really need to do in software. Come up with a way for computers to put our software through some sort of "mutation" and "natural selection" process and in the end we get better code. Obviously in the real world, this is a much more complex problem than the simulation this guy wrote. Wish I could remember where it was and what the link was. Very cool stuff.
I just built a gadget that bends space time. I can go anywhere, anytime. The problem is, this professor at MIT has come really close to doing the same thing and he patented his work. I'm worried that he'll sue me under the DMCA if I publish my work. What should I do?
The speed of light has changed over time? No kidding? I mean, after a few drinks, it takes several seconds for the light from my monitor to reach my eyes. I think that the constants change more with alcohol and drugs, than with time.
;-)
To give a really obvious example, smoke some pot, and hey, time slows down, sometimes it speeds up. I think the physicists need to stop looking at the stars and more at things like pot, LSD, etc. Things that really affect time, and therefore the speed of light 'constant'
WiseNut, Teoma and Vivisimo all are similar in that they put up pretty relevant categories for some searches. In fact, I'll say they do a better job than Google, from what I saw.
As an example, I did a search on "lisinopril", the generic name for a blood pressure medication I take.
Where as google provided one "category" besides the search results, WiseNut provided 10 relevant categories to further break down my search (ACE Inhibitors, brand names, blood pressure, heart attacks, drug information, etc.
Teoma provided 8 different categories, and vivisimo provided 11 categories and "more" option for more categories.
Personally, I find this to be a nice feature of all three of these engines. As for relevancy of the information, that's really a hard thing to quanitify.
Given the choice, though, I'm going to add WiseNut and Teoma to my list of search engines that I use. Beyond the features mentioned above, they took one good idea from Google and that's to keep the search screen sparse and uncluttered.
Just my humble opinion...
Why not? Hell, I'd pay a ton of money for one of them. And I know just the client to test it out on too.
How is it fraud to fill out a form that:
1: You didn't request
2: You don't want to read
3: It's SPAM
4: It's public. That means: It's like a message board. You can write whatever you want. If the "moderators" of the board don't like it, they can remove it, but 1 and 2 of my post fall under free speech, in the States, and I doubt you'll find anyone who disagrees with it.
Remember, 98% of these guys are forging their e-mail addresses, which makes them guilty in some dozen states, or so, of the U.S. So they're going to come after me for posting garbage to their forms? I doubt it.
I'm going to take heat for this, I know, but I'm really kind of tired of the "I'm just starting with Linux, what distro should I use?" questions that Slashdot gets.
I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here, but I'm a Win2K guy. I don't really choose to be one, so much as that's where my company makes its money, and I don't really have a choice, unless I want to get another job, which I don't.
I'm not down on Linux. I love it, but it seems to me this site is more about "Yeah, yeah, Linux" than "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Yeah, we get a bunch of articles that fall under the banner, but we also get a lot of this stuff, which, I'm sorry, just doesn't interest me.
I've made my points in the past about the failings of Linux. I don't want to put it down, but this site seems to be better suited for more "nerd" info than just Linux, and sometimes it seems like it's too much about Linux and not enough about "News for Nerds." Maybe I'm wrong. Shoot me. I just get tired of this kind of stuff, personally.
This guy has a lot of interesting ideas. I would think it would be fairly simple to write a program that did the following things:
1: If a SPAM message contains a form, you forward it to the program (which would create a local SMTP server to receive messages only from you). It would fill the form with random data, but somewhat intelligently, by parsing the HTML and figuring out what is valid for the form.
2: If a SPAM message goes to a web site with a form, go to that form in your browser. Run the anti-spam program and click a button to auto-fill the form. You could configure it to fill out the form multiple times, in the background, without user intervention.
3: If the SPAM message contains a link to geocities, or other free web hosting services, forward the e-mail to your anti-spam program's local SMTP server. It will grab the link and then forward the e-mail, header, and link to the appropriate abuse@ address.
There are probably other things like this that could be done. If someone wrote this program, I'd use it religiously, and I'd imagine a lot of other people would too. If it was easy enough to use and as unobtrusive as possible, people would be using it like crazy. The spammers would get wiped out.
Believe me, if I had the spare time, I'd start writing this program today.
6 of our machines at work got infected over the weekend. I was under the impression that our web guy had been keeping them up-to-date, but 5 were inside our NAT (infected by the 1 that was outside). I was under the impression that the ones inside the NAT would be ok. Bad assumption.
The bandwidth it used was so bad that it completely wiped out our ability to get out via HTTP. We could ping, get and send mail, but we couldn't browse at all. I had innoculated my home machine, and it wasn't until this morning, when we received a notice from our ISP accusing of massive port scanning of port 80 that I made the connection. I went around the office and, even after 5 of the 6 machines were innoculated, we still couldn't get out via HTTP. It wasn't until the 6th was innoculated that we could get out.
Our line is a 768/512 DSL (I believe those are the numbers), and it amazes me that a single machine infected could cause so much trouble. This is pretty disturbing.