Well, to be fair, this is about core logic chipsets (nForce). They aren't exactly core to NVIDIA's business. Besides, given how poorly AMD is fairing in the enthusiast market, the merger of ATI/AMD making NVIDIA an AMD competitor (nForce originally made its splash, and had its "glory days", for AMD), and the desire of Intel to push its own chipsets (which have also been quite good recently, lessening the room for an "enthusiast" class third party) I wouldn't be incredibly surprised to see them make this move -- even though they apparently aren't doing it now.
According to Ars, the original source was one of the motherboard manufacturers. Aside from NVIDIA themselves, they'd be most likely to know. But again, according to NVIDIA, this is a load of crap.
I'm introverted, and shy (not the same thing), and I went through the whole "I don't want people to look at me" thing, too. Being 60lbs overweight didn't help, either. Not wanting to be seen was one of the excuses I used to use for not exercising like I should. Get past it, and do it anyway, because it's worth it.
If it bothers you that much, just run early in the morning or late in the evening. Or go find yourself a secluded area or trail to run nearby. After a few weeks, when you stop dreading your runs, and when you start making real gains in your distance/speed, you'll stop caring if other people see.
I like swimming even better, especially because it's 90+ most days when I go running now; but since you have to get half naked for that, and the facilities aren't as readily available as a sidewalk, you should just start with running. Besides, running is one of those fundamental movements that you should be relatively proficient at because it opens up a whole lot of other fun activities for you.
Anyway, the internet is full of people in your shoes (or much worse off) who have gotten themselves in great shape (I'm not there yet, but I can look in the mirror without being ashamed now). You just have to decide you want it enough to make the first few steps until it becomes enjoyable. Start now. That's the beautiful thing about running: you can do it whenever and wherever you are.
Can you just set up filters for any messages you want to save for more than 180 days, then forward them to an address you use to archive them? There are lots of emails I want to keep for more than 180 days, but not too many I need to respond to after that time, so I wouldn't care if they were actually in Exchange or not.
Forgive me if there's some kind of group policy that restricts doing something like this, but I've worked at some pretty large orgs and never run into it. I'm sure it runs counter to company policy in lots of places, but you seem to be trying to dodge that anyway.
For maximum convenience, lots of storage, and minimum privacy, just forward everything to gmail where you can search it.
Someone's going to say that the negative portrayal of this campaign is because of the Slashdot hivemind's love of Apple, but this would be pretty fucked up regardless of who they target.
Apple "Geniuses" are there regardless of whether anyone shows up or not, and they go home when the store closes. This doesn't cost Apple any time or money to deal with. The only people stunts like this hurt are folks who can't fix their own shit and who need help.
Screwing with them doesn't advance the cause of Free Software one bit. I'd be against this if they were doing it to Microsoft, too.
I did some smaller contract work on the cheap with the stipulation that I could use the code I wrote however I wanted. That's where most of my code samples come from. Smaller shops are often willing to compromise in ways bigger corps aren't, especially when it's possible for them to save money.
You could also just whip up a reasonably professional sample app and explain that your "real" code is locked up with your old employers. Companies worth working for, and recruiters worth talking to, will understand your situation. They probably have clauses in their standard employment contracts that restrict their employees in the same way, after all.
By the way, this is another good reason to contribute to Free Software.
Have compromised World of Warcraft accounts become such a serious problem, that OTPs are already neccesary for games?
Absolutely. Accounts are constantly getting hacked in the game to the point where the GMs can't keep up with the restores (such that it sometimes takes two weeks or more to get some of the items you lost back).
Compared to credit card numbers and bank accounts, WoW accounts are quite valuable. A high end account can be worth several hundred dollars in gold and materials (or you can just sell the account altogether if you can hold onto it long enough), and there's little to no risk in dealing with them. AFAIK, police aren't actively pursuing people hacking WoW accounts, and since Blizzard restores the virtual items and money anyway (eventually... for the most part), there's little reason to.
It's probably a lucrative business, and people are certainly treating it that way.
The TLD system currently serves no real purpose: Large companies in all countries have.coms. CC TLDs can't be trusted because they're used for vanity as much as to indicate what country a site is in/about. CC TLDs indicate where the site was ostensibly registered, but not necessarily where it's hosted, which is what counts (along with what country you're in) from a legal perspective. Not to mention that most of the time people just don't care.
As for "TLD squatting", it shouldn't be nearly as bad as normal domain squatting if the TLDs cost "several thousand dollars"; provided there aren't any stupid loopholes -- which is never guaranteed when you're dealing with ICANN. Otherwise you'll just handle it like a regular domain dispute. While the process isn't perfect, it's already well-defined.
It will (I guess?) increase the strain on the root name servers, but hopefully the folks proposing this have thought that much through and it's not an issue.
If we had to wait for "stable OSes" and corporate adoption nothing would ever move forward. FF3 is a cutting edge browser using cutting edge libraries to get the best functionality available right now, like it should.
It's your vendor's job to live in the past with you. That's what you pay them for.
I've worked a couple places with Aeron chairs, and while I think they are probably the best chairs I've used, I have noticed that they seem to wear out rather quickly (or maybe it's just my big ass?). I don't have any experience with the other status-symbol-ergo-chairs like the Humanscale Freedom, so I don't know if the Aeron is especially good, or just that ~$1000 buys a whole lot of chair. Most of what I have to compare them to are chairs from Office Depot and such.
By the way, this might not be the best choice for a "surprise" Father's Day gift. Chairs are a very personal thing -- especially the Aeron, which comes in 3 sizes -- and it really is best to actually sit in one before you plunk down a major wad of cash for it. While I've loved the Aerons I've used, I've always been within shouting distance of someone who couldn't stand them.
I think any game that wants to be a competitive MMO nowadays needs to have some kind of free trial that doesn't involve shelling out for the game box first. The whole "first month free" is nice, but not if I have to actually buy the game to get it.
With other games you can check reviews and get a fairly clear picture of what's going on. MMOs aren't so easy because a) they take a lot more time to fully get into than a reviewer is likely to spend with the game and b) they're constantly changing. You need to let people get their feet wet with the game before expecting them to pay up.
I think that sums it up pretty nicely, and I think it cuts the other way too. "Hardcore" players have been clearing Black Temple since last, what, June? And they just recently got new content in the form of Sunwell. Now Sunwell is great -- just like Naxx was -- but really, six bosses? At least Naxx was huge. 5/6 of those bosses are already dead, and as soon as Kil'jaeden dies, there'll be no more content until WotLK is ready. Knowing Blizzard, and judging by the way they're stalling on arena season 4, that could be another year. Having another well done MMO sitting there with lots of "world firsts" available while WoW is stagnant is, I think, going to entice many of the top guilds to take a break at least until WotLK.
Meanwhile, there's a ceiling right about where Magtheridon is in progression that the average I-don't-play-WoW-like-a-full-time-job player just isn't going to get past. If you can't devote 3-4+ hours a night at least 2-3 times per week, you can't even think about stepping into the real 25 man game. There's ZA and Magister's Terrace, but they're both small, only tangentially related to the main story (Kael is just a joke at that point, he's aleady been "killed" once), and how many times can you honestly run those two instances? If you're bumping into the ceiling, and you hear about another MMO that's fun with tons of quests and story to do, I think you might just give it a try.
This is the perfect opportunity for a new game to come steal some subscribers from WoW. Will it die? No, of course not. 10 million players who have, in some cases, invested a year or more in their characters aren't just going to evaporate no matter how bad the game gets. Still, I think more people than Blizzard would necessarily like are ready to jump ship.
Having dealt with it for a couple years now, and deployed a few "important" apps with it, here's my take:
1) Rails makes easy things very, very easy. Simple CRUD apps are easier to do in Rails than they are in pretty much anything else -- other similar-level frameworks like Django excepted, of course.
2) Rails makes hard things possible. You can dig into the nuts and bolts of the framework and there's usually some way to do anything you might possibly want to do. This is more about Ruby than Rails, because Ruby lets you do just about whatever you want to just about any object you want. Monkey patching is a pretty powerful technique, and
#1 is great. #2 would be great except that:
1) Rails is still lacking up to date documentation in many places. This means you have to read the source code to do anything that is "off the beaten path". For example, Rails has nice web helper functions that make generating forms tied to objects and such a snap. Unfortunately, they generate code that some people might call "crappy". You can make it better by writing your own FormBuilder, and the web helpers even accept a:builder option to make that easy, but the FormBuilder class has zero documentation; so the best way to learn to do it is to Google until you find someone else who has already done it. You wind up doing things like that a lot with Rails.
2) That wouldn't be so terrible, except Rails uses pretty much every Ruby metaprogramming technique in the book. If you want to become a Ruby expert, try to understand the non-trivial sections of the Rails code. Rails is basically the de facto "test suite" for new Ruby implementations: if they can run Rails, they can probably run any Ruby program. Let's face it, most new Rails developers are new Ruby developers too, so reading source code written by experts for experts isn't going to be their strong suit. I know Ruby inside out and I still find code in Rails from time to time that makes me scratch my head.
3) Some of the conventions it uses are documentation-and-developer-unfriendly too. For example, almost every method in Rails accepts keyword arguments. Unfortunately, Ruby doesn't officially *do* keyword arguments. This means that the documentation for a method that accepts a thousand different arguments often looks like this:
method some_complicated_method(opts)
If you're in a well-travelled piece of documentation, they'll spell out every option you can use along with the defaults. If not, you're off to source code land. Unfortunately, those options are often passed up, down, and all-around unchanged or processed one at a time in dozens of different locations in the source code; so just understanding which options are available to you when you call a given method can be an hour-long undertaking.
I have a lot of individual gripes with Rails itself, and I wish Merb+DataMapper would hurry up and mature so I could use it more often in place of Rails, but mainly it comes down to this:
Rails expects you to do things its way. At the same time, almost any non-trivial webapp is going to have to do at least one thing that the developers of Rails didn't build in a handy little facility to do. You will run into that problem constantly, and many times the only way around it is to grok the exact way the framework works. Unfortunately, Rails is huge and oftentimes the code doesn't make it particularly easy to do this -- and while the documentation for the traditional "developer" interfaces of the framework are fine (for the most part), there exists huge swaths of code that have either zero documentation, or documentation that has nothing to do with how the framework currently works.
Depending on your outlook, Ruby bears some responsibility for Rails' problems too. It's ridiculously easy to muck with the internals of objects that you really shouldn't have access to. I subscribe to the ideals of personal responsibility and think that it should be up to the developers to not abuse the facilities Ruby has
I don't even use Ubuntu, but this guy appears to be saying that they're not "open source" because they try to make money off support and don't give away the server side of their RHN-style web service. Really? So the two vectors through which open source companies are "supposed" to make money (support and value-adds) are no longer acceptable either? Fuck off.
If you have PGSQL installed on your system, just make a directory in your home dir, add PGDATA= to your environment, run initdb, pg_ctl start, and you can connect to your own instance as your own user without having to worry about permissions at all (by default). That's what I tend to do if I'm working on a web app or something, and it's not any harder than connecting to your MySQL server and changing the empty root password.
Slashdot Mirror
Sayonara, personal responsibility!
Well, to be fair, this is about core logic chipsets (nForce). They aren't exactly core to NVIDIA's business. Besides, given how poorly AMD is fairing in the enthusiast market, the merger of ATI/AMD making NVIDIA an AMD competitor (nForce originally made its splash, and had its "glory days", for AMD), and the desire of Intel to push its own chipsets (which have also been quite good recently, lessening the room for an "enthusiast" class third party) I wouldn't be incredibly surprised to see them make this move -- even though they apparently aren't doing it now.
According to Ars, the original source was one of the motherboard manufacturers. Aside from NVIDIA themselves, they'd be most likely to know. But again, according to NVIDIA, this is a load of crap.
Just get your ass outside and run.
I'm introverted, and shy (not the same thing), and I went through the whole "I don't want people to look at me" thing, too. Being 60lbs overweight didn't help, either. Not wanting to be seen was one of the excuses I used to use for not exercising like I should. Get past it, and do it anyway, because it's worth it.
If it bothers you that much, just run early in the morning or late in the evening. Or go find yourself a secluded area or trail to run nearby. After a few weeks, when you stop dreading your runs, and when you start making real gains in your distance/speed, you'll stop caring if other people see.
I like swimming even better, especially because it's 90+ most days when I go running now; but since you have to get half naked for that, and the facilities aren't as readily available as a sidewalk, you should just start with running. Besides, running is one of those fundamental movements that you should be relatively proficient at because it opens up a whole lot of other fun activities for you.
Anyway, the internet is full of people in your shoes (or much worse off) who have gotten themselves in great shape (I'm not there yet, but I can look in the mirror without being ashamed now). You just have to decide you want it enough to make the first few steps until it becomes enjoyable. Start now. That's the beautiful thing about running: you can do it whenever and wherever you are.
Can you just set up filters for any messages you want to save for more than 180 days, then forward them to an address you use to archive them? There are lots of emails I want to keep for more than 180 days, but not too many I need to respond to after that time, so I wouldn't care if they were actually in Exchange or not.
Forgive me if there's some kind of group policy that restricts doing something like this, but I've worked at some pretty large orgs and never run into it. I'm sure it runs counter to company policy in lots of places, but you seem to be trying to dodge that anyway.
For maximum convenience, lots of storage, and minimum privacy, just forward everything to gmail where you can search it.
Someone's going to say that the negative portrayal of this campaign is because of the Slashdot hivemind's love of Apple, but this would be pretty fucked up regardless of who they target.
Apple "Geniuses" are there regardless of whether anyone shows up or not, and they go home when the store closes. This doesn't cost Apple any time or money to deal with. The only people stunts like this hurt are folks who can't fix their own shit and who need help.
Screwing with them doesn't advance the cause of Free Software one bit. I'd be against this if they were doing it to Microsoft, too.
Every time something good happens to me, you say it's some kind of madness, or I'm drunk, or I ate too much candy.
Tell them you already got your license entitlements via BitTorrent.
I did some smaller contract work on the cheap with the stipulation that I could use the code I wrote however I wanted. That's where most of my code samples come from. Smaller shops are often willing to compromise in ways bigger corps aren't, especially when it's possible for them to save money.
You could also just whip up a reasonably professional sample app and explain that your "real" code is locked up with your old employers. Companies worth working for, and recruiters worth talking to, will understand your situation. They probably have clauses in their standard employment contracts that restrict their employees in the same way, after all.
By the way, this is another good reason to contribute to Free Software.
So Google isn't "geared... culturally" to deliver enterprise class reliability.
What's Microsoft's excuse?
I'm sorry, it's just that these thieves make me so damn mad.
You know who you are.
THIEVES!
Absolutely. Accounts are constantly getting hacked in the game to the point where the GMs can't keep up with the restores (such that it sometimes takes two weeks or more to get some of the items you lost back).
Compared to credit card numbers and bank accounts, WoW accounts are quite valuable. A high end account can be worth several hundred dollars in gold and materials (or you can just sell the account altogether if you can hold onto it long enough), and there's little to no risk in dealing with them. AFAIK, police aren't actively pursuing people hacking WoW accounts, and since Blizzard restores the virtual items and money anyway (eventually... for the most part), there's little reason to.
It's probably a lucrative business, and people are certainly treating it that way.
Congress for sale! Also, world round and water wet!
I don't think Gmail uses GWT. In fact, I don't think any of Google's major web services use GWT.
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe things have changed, but I'm pretty sure I read that somewhere.
The TLD system currently serves no real purpose: Large companies in all countries have .coms. CC TLDs can't be trusted because they're used for vanity as much as to indicate what country a site is in/about. CC TLDs indicate where the site was ostensibly registered, but not necessarily where it's hosted, which is what counts (along with what country you're in) from a legal perspective. Not to mention that most of the time people just don't care.
As for "TLD squatting", it shouldn't be nearly as bad as normal domain squatting if the TLDs cost "several thousand dollars"; provided there aren't any stupid loopholes -- which is never guaranteed when you're dealing with ICANN. Otherwise you'll just handle it like a regular domain dispute. While the process isn't perfect, it's already well-defined.
It will (I guess?) increase the strain on the root name servers, but hopefully the folks proposing this have thought that much through and it's not an issue.
If we had to wait for "stable OSes" and corporate adoption nothing would ever move forward. FF3 is a cutting edge browser using cutting edge libraries to get the best functionality available right now, like it should.
It's your vendor's job to live in the past with you. That's what you pay them for.
I've worked a couple places with Aeron chairs, and while I think they are probably the best chairs I've used, I have noticed that they seem to wear out rather quickly (or maybe it's just my big ass?). I don't have any experience with the other status-symbol-ergo-chairs like the Humanscale Freedom, so I don't know if the Aeron is especially good, or just that ~$1000 buys a whole lot of chair. Most of what I have to compare them to are chairs from Office Depot and such.
By the way, this might not be the best choice for a "surprise" Father's Day gift. Chairs are a very personal thing -- especially the Aeron, which comes in 3 sizes -- and it really is best to actually sit in one before you plunk down a major wad of cash for it. While I've loved the Aerons I've used, I've always been within shouting distance of someone who couldn't stand them.
I think any game that wants to be a competitive MMO nowadays needs to have some kind of free trial that doesn't involve shelling out for the game box first. The whole "first month free" is nice, but not if I have to actually buy the game to get it.
With other games you can check reviews and get a fairly clear picture of what's going on. MMOs aren't so easy because a) they take a lot more time to fully get into than a reviewer is likely to spend with the game and b) they're constantly changing. You need to let people get their feet wet with the game before expecting them to pay up.
I think that sums it up pretty nicely, and I think it cuts the other way too. "Hardcore" players have been clearing Black Temple since last, what, June? And they just recently got new content in the form of Sunwell. Now Sunwell is great -- just like Naxx was -- but really, six bosses? At least Naxx was huge. 5/6 of those bosses are already dead, and as soon as Kil'jaeden dies, there'll be no more content until WotLK is ready. Knowing Blizzard, and judging by the way they're stalling on arena season 4, that could be another year. Having another well done MMO sitting there with lots of "world firsts" available while WoW is stagnant is, I think, going to entice many of the top guilds to take a break at least until WotLK.
Meanwhile, there's a ceiling right about where Magtheridon is in progression that the average I-don't-play-WoW-like-a-full-time-job player just isn't going to get past. If you can't devote 3-4+ hours a night at least 2-3 times per week, you can't even think about stepping into the real 25 man game. There's ZA and Magister's Terrace, but they're both small, only tangentially related to the main story (Kael is just a joke at that point, he's aleady been "killed" once), and how many times can you honestly run those two instances? If you're bumping into the ceiling, and you hear about another MMO that's fun with tons of quests and story to do, I think you might just give it a try.
This is the perfect opportunity for a new game to come steal some subscribers from WoW. Will it die? No, of course not. 10 million players who have, in some cases, invested a year or more in their characters aren't just going to evaporate no matter how bad the game gets. Still, I think more people than Blizzard would necessarily like are ready to jump ship.
Georgia Tech has a "Management" major. It's where all the folks who couldn't cut it in their engineering programs wind up.
Finally, a reason not to buy a Zune.
I voted for American Ninja.
Having dealt with it for a couple years now, and deployed a few "important" apps with it, here's my take:
:builder option to make that easy, but the FormBuilder class has zero documentation; so the best way to learn to do it is to Google until you find someone else who has already done it. You wind up doing things like that a lot with Rails.
1) Rails makes easy things very, very easy. Simple CRUD apps are easier to do in Rails than they are in pretty much anything else -- other similar-level frameworks like Django excepted, of course.
2) Rails makes hard things possible. You can dig into the nuts and bolts of the framework and there's usually some way to do anything you might possibly want to do. This is more about Ruby than Rails, because Ruby lets you do just about whatever you want to just about any object you want. Monkey patching is a pretty powerful technique, and
#1 is great. #2 would be great except that:
1) Rails is still lacking up to date documentation in many places. This means you have to read the source code to do anything that is "off the beaten path". For example, Rails has nice web helper functions that make generating forms tied to objects and such a snap. Unfortunately, they generate code that some people might call "crappy". You can make it better by writing your own FormBuilder, and the web helpers even accept a
2) That wouldn't be so terrible, except Rails uses pretty much every Ruby metaprogramming technique in the book. If you want to become a Ruby expert, try to understand the non-trivial sections of the Rails code. Rails is basically the de facto "test suite" for new Ruby implementations: if they can run Rails, they can probably run any Ruby program. Let's face it, most new Rails developers are new Ruby developers too, so reading source code written by experts for experts isn't going to be their strong suit. I know Ruby inside out and I still find code in Rails from time to time that makes me scratch my head.
3) Some of the conventions it uses are documentation-and-developer-unfriendly too. For example, almost every method in Rails accepts keyword arguments. Unfortunately, Ruby doesn't officially *do* keyword arguments. This means that the documentation for a method that accepts a thousand different arguments often looks like this:
method some_complicated_method(opts)
If you're in a well-travelled piece of documentation, they'll spell out every option you can use along with the defaults. If not, you're off to source code land. Unfortunately, those options are often passed up, down, and all-around unchanged or processed one at a time in dozens of different locations in the source code; so just understanding which options are available to you when you call a given method can be an hour-long undertaking.
I have a lot of individual gripes with Rails itself, and I wish Merb+DataMapper would hurry up and mature so I could use it more often in place of Rails, but mainly it comes down to this:
Rails expects you to do things its way. At the same time, almost any non-trivial webapp is going to have to do at least one thing that the developers of Rails didn't build in a handy little facility to do. You will run into that problem constantly, and many times the only way around it is to grok the exact way the framework works. Unfortunately, Rails is huge and oftentimes the code doesn't make it particularly easy to do this -- and while the documentation for the traditional "developer" interfaces of the framework are fine (for the most part), there exists huge swaths of code that have either zero documentation, or documentation that has nothing to do with how the framework currently works.
Depending on your outlook, Ruby bears some responsibility for Rails' problems too. It's ridiculously easy to muck with the internals of objects that you really shouldn't have access to. I subscribe to the ideals of personal responsibility and think that it should be up to the developers to not abuse the facilities Ruby has
I don't even use Ubuntu, but this guy appears to be saying that they're not "open source" because they try to make money off support and don't give away the server side of their RHN-style web service. Really? So the two vectors through which open source companies are "supposed" to make money (support and value-adds) are no longer acceptable either? Fuck off.
The JavaScript Ruby interpreter is faster than the "real" one
If you have PGSQL installed on your system, just make a directory in your home dir, add PGDATA= to your environment, run initdb, pg_ctl start, and you can connect to your own instance as your own user without having to worry about permissions at all (by default). That's what I tend to do if I'm working on a web app or something, and it's not any harder than connecting to your MySQL server and changing the empty root password.