I view ads in the same way I view my operating system. There are ground rules, and if they're followed, I will remain (mostly) happy. They should both:
Get out of my way. Let me do what I do and don't bother me.
Don't steal the focus, ever.
If I want (OS object/ad content), I know where to find it, it should blend itself to its environment.
Never lead me to question my privacy, ever
Understand that I'm in control of what I will and will not put up with
Avoid doing anything that gives me the impression that they(producer) think I'm stupid.
I understand that companies have to make a bit of a profit, and that allows me to see their content; I don't mind these ads so long as they don't break any of the rules above. A hovering popup in the top right hand corner that dissapears in 10 seconds doesn't bother me, so long as it's not covering any content. I've found some ads useful from time to time when I'm doing research on hardware. For the most part google ads satisfy all my conditions.
I was trying to be economical... That, and a mile down the road at work I have a dual processor, dual core, dual logical core Xeon 5000 1U. So, I have 8 logical cores...but, alas, you are correct; that isn't 8 physical cores. And I need a machine that reviews couldn't peg in benchmarking! Why, how else, could I keep my code safe? I'm going to write my representative immediately! Thank you, kind sir! I salute your sarcasm!:)
I'm in the same boat - the not sleeping thing, not the rest of the post. Actually, people with low income put all of their money back into the economy. It's not like they're saving it when they're living paycheck to paycheck. And, as it goes, we need people in this country to do manual labor. That's the reality of this world, for better or worse, you fill a place in society whether you want to or not. If the current generation has dumb kids, well, we'll find something for them to do and their paychecks will go back into the economy. If they're all smart kids, we'll use them for research and sell the technology, knowing that not all of their paychecks will go back into the economy as fully. Albiet, a smaller part of a much larger whole in the latter case.
Fortunately, in this case, I think that treating this idea with anything other than sarcasm lends it too much credit. All politics aside. I'm not bashing it - it really is a stupid idea.
How about the Pennsylvania Fund for Broke College Students who are holding their source code server together with duct tape and prayer? Namely, me. If they get music players, I demand that I be upgraded to an opteron at tax payers expense.
I lived, for a year, in a place that didn't have high speed access. My phone was my only means of getting online (granted, at twice the speed of dialup and then some) so, I had no choice. It was painful, but it worked. I got like 7KB down, but, like I said, it worked.
Well - as a software development student (armed with a 10mbit fiber uplink at work and a 3mbit connection at my apartment a mile down the road) I can easily churn a few gigs a day. All legal and legit, though. I'm constantly trying to stay up with tech and VMWare and open source are my best friends. At school I write code on a solaris box, at home I work with a mac, slackware box, bsd box, and my obligatory windows box (I have to interface with the rest of the world, and it's a tortoise and the hare kinda' story, if you get my drift...), at work I'm using Centos, win 2k and winXP (see forementioned interfacing reference). So, just to have a VM around of opensolaris (plus the dev kits, netbeans, open studio), a few linux distros, and the rest of my tools, I sometimes have 5 gig - 10 gig days between school work and home.
Upgrading Eclipse alone was about a gig the other day. And, I love to boot up a livecd every now and then to keep up with things...This week I got a copy of a livecd running Beryl - very cool stuff. Not to mention nearline rsyncs of archives. At work we use RAW format for our product pictures @ something like 10 megapixels and can shoot a few hundred meg in a manner of hours (we shoot more than that, but toss a good amount of the shots) which all go upstream at the end of the day. And I'm not really doing anything that extreme to use up all this bandwidth.
A few linux distros/liveCDs a month, a VMWare appliance or two, backups, and adding tools to my toolbox. If we go VOIP at work I can only imagine (we're running 4 POTS lines right now) how much more bandwidth I'd be using. But, the fact of the matter is, this is all legit traffic that I need to use. Ordering distros on CD bothers me on many levels:
"Does the beta of Centos 5 look promising, is RC1 of distro XYZ a better solution, or should we hack something together to fit our needs?"
"Well, I'm waiting for the CDs to come in the mail any day now!"
But, the bottom line is that if my ISP doesn't deliver at work on our business account with unlimited access, we have to go with another ISP. It's not about the cost - it's about the service. If we're paying top dollar (well, it's actually relatively cheap) for a service, and we utilize that service to full capacity, that sounds like the agreement we have with our ISP. At home is another story. If I use too much and they tell me to bugger off (@50G per month where a friend of mine got a letter), I don't have the kind of pockets to do, or say, anything about it. It just means I VNC to work or drive a mile down the road and use the ISP's lines at 3 times the speed.
Microsoft Windows Rootkit Edition - At least it's not Windows ME.
I can't resist... This all sounds like the makings of a sequel to What about Bob
Awwww - now that was just low, man! I salute you!
However, Bill's the one laughing. A negative nugget of wisdom; Bill Gates met his future wife while working with her (Melinda, IIRC) on Bob.
Windows Vista: Locked up so tight, even Symantec and Mcafee will need a third-party rootkit to get in!
...OK, OK, that was a double bladed sword and a cheap shot...
Rooted(TM) Microsoft Windows - We don't give a (bleep) where you want to go today.
Microsoft Windows Rootkit Edition - At least it's not Windows ME.
Hey kids, now you can bypass DRM to screen-cap the BSOD caused by the fully sanctioned Microsoft Digitally Signed drivers!
Please, I beg of you, man, don't give them any more Bad Ideas! I don't want to have to convert from hexidecimal to "Microsoft.NET Visual Base DOS" to decimal in order to figure out a BSOD!
Listen, dude, I've clearly hit a nerve; it wasn't my intention. I did just fire a post off from my hip, in the heat of the moment and I clearly do need to do my homework. I am quite a bit out of my league and in over my head.
Anyways, I also didn't mean for the tone of my post to be accusational, although, I could see how it could be taken that way. I'm truly sorry if I've rubbed you the wrong way. My (no sarcasm) sincere appologies.
...dating processes scientists use that result in objects older than that?
I've got karma to burn, and I feel that I'm in the minority on this one, but I'll go ahead anyways...
That, my friend, is a can of worms. There are a great many problems with carbon dating in particular. I'll leave it up to the scholarly of you to look it up, but isn't the 'benchmark' for carbon dating, carbon dating itself? When you ask a lab to date an object, why does the form ask you what age you 'think the object is', isn't this technique solely based on the speed of light never changing? Isn't the actual range of carbon dating only a few thousand years due to our ability to measure after a few half lives, yet we use it for millions of years... Wasn't there a case where the carbon dating of an animal's bones showed that it was many magnitudes of age older than the very hair found by the animal (I think it was a tiger, IIRC). Doesn't carbon dating yield results in opposition of something around 94% of other dating techniques?
I'm not trolling, and I don't realistically expect to change anyones opinion (opinions are tough, if not impossible, to change), but as this is an open forum to discuss things, I thought I would throw my hat in the ring. If we are an objective community, we can discuss things objectively without the gradeur of waving hands and being dismissive of others ideas. Unfortunately, I've found that open debates seem to be 'won' by the poster who is most dismissive in the grandest way possible. Anyone sufficiently versed arguing can convince you of most anything. To be honest, I don't have any of the answers, and I don't pretend to.
How full is your drive? Are you paging to a drive on a different channel? Are you using 5400 RPM, 7200, or 10K, SATA or IDE? Is you static data on a seperate spindle than your dynamic data? All the cycles in the world won't mean a thing if you're constantly I/O blocked. The last 15% of a 5400 RPM drive is basically unusable as far as I'm concerned (well, usable for most home users, but not anyone who considers themselves a power user). Just a few thoughts, if you've partitioned correctly and still have this problem, then it very well could be OO...
Although, I have 'guilty pleasure' pop songs that I break out when no one is around, so I have no room to talk. I just couldn't resist the urge...Sorry.
However, I don't believe that on windows you have the service forked. I can't remember what the windows version runs as, but it is a limited service account IIRC. I feel the difference is that linux is less 'soft and chewy' than windows if a black hat gets a foothold. A chrooted apache install in linux means that you've gotten yourself a foothold as 'nobody' inside a non-critical directory. (I think it depends on which install you use as to which directory this is - I'm a slackware fanboy, so everything I run is usually compiled and configured by hand...and at work I use CentOS 4, ironic.)
Anyways, from what I can tell the *nix environment adheres to the principles of least needed priv.s and seperations of concerns moreso than windows; granted, windows was originally a single user environment and is less tailored for this kind of work.
I think it all comes down to the competence of the admin, in the end. An 'out of the box' install is only so for a moment. I know I can secure a windows box more than some of my friends can secure a linux box, and I can secure a linux box less so than one of my friends can secure his BSD box. At least I assume, we've never gone head to head. It's the mindset of the hacker, in the original sense of the word, that everything that you have at hand is a tool and should be used accordingly. If you can only find one use for a tool, which is more useless, the tool, or you? I'm not speaking of you, of course, but a generic 'you' representing John B. Random on the street.
I hate to admit it, but you are completely correct. Judging from the tone of your message, I think we have the same stance on how wrong this entire picture is.
For the moment, let's just say that I went against my better judgement and morals and decided to download Led Zeppelin's entire CD catalogue and somehow got caught in the process... Then, for arguments sake, I decided to fight the RIAA.
I mean, if I'm guilty, and if they hire an expert (as should be the case, if they're boldly calling me a thief and trying to prove my guilt) to prove this point on technical merits, I think that sets the stage for the entire show. If I am guilty and he's an expert, then he should have nothing to fear in the way of my questions. Besides, if I managed to get myself caught, either by stupidity or incompetence, I couldn't possess that much technical knowledge to begin with. That's like the rich kid on the block who has no ability to play paintball, whupping the rest of the kids on the block because he has a gun that costs in excess of most mortgages and fires 16 rounds per second.
Your full contact debate analogy is dead-on. Except I show up to debate and find that not only are they arm to the teeth, but they're also making the rules. The rules are that any weapons I have in my arsenal are not allowed. But, they'll kindly let me have a white flag to wave for a one time price of $5K. Which is truly ironic considering that I could have bought Led Zeppelin's entire CD catalog for something like half that (if you include DVDs, box sets, etc.).
I'm reminded of the words of Billy Shakespeare "First, we kill all the lawyers." No offense NewYorkCityLawyer, you're still cool.
If you have a team of lawyers that you spend tens of millions of dollars on each year sending me a threat that you will take me to court for millions of dollars unless I pay you $5,000 -- I'm going to pay you the $5,000. No matter how justified I may feel I am and no matter how completely innocent of any accusation I may be, the $5,000 is probably a tenth the cost I will end up spending on a lawyer and there is little chance that lawyer will be able to appropriately defend me against a team of lawyers who spend $5,000 on their combined lunches.
I understand this, and I think that's how most people view it. I was, however, thinking about this the other night, and I think that if they sent me a letter, I'd fight it. I don't steal anything anymore (within the spirit of the law, sometimes not within the letter (I have multiple backups of CDs I've bought, stuff like that)) - I'm a Christian. Although I did, admittingly, have a shady past. However, stealing was the least of my crimes.
I would have to get the money from somewhere, or I would represent myself. I know, anyone representing themselves has a fool for their council... But, I would fight it for a few reasons. I don't like being called a criminal; especially by cowards. I don't think you should take the credit or the blame for something you didn't do unless it is for the good of the greater. Furthermore, I think that I could, strictly on technical grounds, defend myself quite well. I'm confident in my skills (Software development major), and I could probably rip apart any 'expert' who would allow themselves to be hired by the RIAA. They would probably beat me into the ground on the political front, although, I think that I could use my technical ability and the hacker (not cracker!)community as a great platform. I could easily show that I have no motive; I use Ruckus and have all the free music I'd like. Lastly, I have a rack of all the original CD's I've bought, (except one which I lost years ago, although I have the album in MP3 - spirit of the law, not letter) as well as my email reciepts for the music I've bought on iTunes.
I just don't think they could really establish me as a pirate. It would take a lot to try to make up that pattern of behavior. That, and, if I got a letter, it would be a wrongful accusation since I don't pirate to begin with.
But mostly, I just couldn't live with myself if I backed down to a bully. Granted, I'd most likely lose, but I'd still know that I showed more spine than a good percentage of the populace. I guess it boils down to it being a personal issue. I guess it would be worth it for me to lose everything I have (broke college student: all I really own is old hardware that I keep fixing to get by) simply to send the RIAA the message that not everyone is spineless, and not everyone is a criminal. What do you do when confronted by bullies? Drop the biggest one as fast as possible and hope the rest leave. As the quote goes, "nothing asserts authority so much as silence".
I understand those who buckle simply because they really do have something to lose; sometimes what you stand for has to take a back seat to providing for your family. The idealist would say no, but we can all be extorted when the right pressure point is found. I happen to be in a position where I can't afford $3K, I don't really have any possessions; for me giving in would be a 'loss', whereas fighting and losing in court would be more akin to a 'tie'.
I guess it's a matter of heart in a head-on collision with the reality of the world we live in. I'm sure I'd fold if they could find the right button to push; but it's very unlikely at this point in time.
I'm learning right now on SPARC - I really like it! Then, again, I'm really geeky.
I just don't like delay slots... I mean, I can squeeze more out of them, but I lose points on projects for using 'set' commands in the delay. I don't much see the harm. Oh well. I guess I should learn X86 as well, since the world is married to the architecture, whether I like it or not.
So, I guess that's why java programmers have a layer of abstraction between them and the pointers. I've found that java is *mostly* pointers under the APIs, but they don't let you touch very much. Coming from a C/C++ background when I started java, I always wondered why they kept smacking my hands when I wanted to touch the memory... I guess this is the difference - true OOP is about tying together objects, not programming in the classical sense. Unless you're the implementor, but in that case, you're not really leveraging (buzz word!) the OOP API, rather, you're constructing it.
I guess that's where the gap is. The people who don't understand the abstraction are content to just use the objects and tie them together. Whereas those implementing and designing (not in that order, obviously) 'get it' and take care of the pointer details.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of java programmers that could code around me, but I've wondered what it was about them that I've never much 'clicked' with them much. I 'click' with C/C++ programmers just fine, and I'm guessing that it has to do with like minds on some level where concepts are concerned.
Just as a for instance, I've wondered why java is so rigid on its use of language to describe things. All definitions are set in stone and simply must be used in the correct context or you can lose a group of people. Like, I know the difference between a class and an object, but in more casual conversation I use them somewhat interchangably. I take it for granted that whomever I'm speaking with understands when I'm using class or object out of context, I'm speaking of an object. I might say 'X' is a class that I use for yadda yadda, while talking about it's instianted object XY. It seems now, while thinking about it, that there are programmers that work in the concrete but not at all in the abstract (no, I'm NOT talking about abstract classes!), while other can move from abstract to concrete seamlessly.
It seems, to me at least, that ASM has elements of both. Registers are concrete, but they can hold memory addresses, and then they become abstract.
So, from the code that I've seen:
90% of coders need not apply
The greater majority of the remaining 10% are probably reading this article, the rest are hacking right now.
Ironic, those who don't know, don't know they don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, What?! Humility on Slashdot?! Mine eyes deceive me and I recoil in horror as I start to question everything I've ever known! I salute you!
I understand that companies have to make a bit of a profit, and that allows me to see their content; I don't mind these ads so long as they don't break any of the rules above. A hovering popup in the top right hand corner that dissapears in 10 seconds doesn't bother me, so long as it's not covering any content. I've found some ads useful from time to time when I'm doing research on hardware. For the most part google ads satisfy all my conditions.
Just my $.02 - take it as you will.
I was trying to be economical... That, and a mile down the road at work I have a dual processor, dual core, dual logical core Xeon 5000 1U. So, I have 8 logical cores...but, alas, you are correct; that isn't 8 physical cores. And I need a machine that reviews couldn't peg in benchmarking! Why, how else, could I keep my code safe? I'm going to write my representative immediately! Thank you, kind sir! I salute your sarcasm! :)
I'm in the same boat - the not sleeping thing, not the rest of the post. Actually, people with low income put all of their money back into the economy. It's not like they're saving it when they're living paycheck to paycheck. And, as it goes, we need people in this country to do manual labor. That's the reality of this world, for better or worse, you fill a place in society whether you want to or not. If the current generation has dumb kids, well, we'll find something for them to do and their paychecks will go back into the economy. If they're all smart kids, we'll use them for research and sell the technology, knowing that not all of their paychecks will go back into the economy as fully. Albiet, a smaller part of a much larger whole in the latter case.
Fortunately, in this case, I think that treating this idea with anything other than sarcasm lends it too much credit. All politics aside. I'm not bashing it - it really is a stupid idea.
How about the Pennsylvania Fund for Broke College Students who are holding their source code server together with duct tape and prayer? Namely, me. If they get music players, I demand that I be upgraded to an opteron at tax payers expense.
Considering how often you post and your sig., I'd say that you, my friend, have flame retardant underwear!
I salute you!
I lived, for a year, in a place that didn't have high speed access. My phone was my only means of getting online (granted, at twice the speed of dialup and then some) so, I had no choice. It was painful, but it worked. I got like 7KB down, but, like I said, it worked.
Upgrading Eclipse alone was about a gig the other day. And, I love to boot up a livecd every now and then to keep up with things...This week I got a copy of a livecd running Beryl - very cool stuff. Not to mention nearline rsyncs of archives. At work we use RAW format for our product pictures @ something like 10 megapixels and can shoot a few hundred meg in a manner of hours (we shoot more than that, but toss a good amount of the shots) which all go upstream at the end of the day. And I'm not really doing anything that extreme to use up all this bandwidth.
A few linux distros/liveCDs a month, a VMWare appliance or two, backups, and adding tools to my toolbox. If we go VOIP at work I can only imagine (we're running 4 POTS lines right now) how much more bandwidth I'd be using. But, the fact of the matter is, this is all legit traffic that I need to use. Ordering distros on CD bothers me on many levels:
"Does the beta of Centos 5 look promising, is RC1 of distro XYZ a better solution, or should we hack something together to fit our needs?"
"Well, I'm waiting for the CDs to come in the mail any day now!"
But, the bottom line is that if my ISP doesn't deliver at work on our business account with unlimited access, we have to go with another ISP. It's not about the cost - it's about the service. If we're paying top dollar (well, it's actually relatively cheap) for a service, and we utilize that service to full capacity, that sounds like the agreement we have with our ISP. At home is another story. If I use too much and they tell me to bugger off (@50G per month where a friend of mine got a letter), I don't have the kind of pockets to do, or say, anything about it. It just means I VNC to work or drive a mile down the road and use the ISP's lines at 3 times the speed.
However, Bill's the one laughing. A negative nugget of wisdom; Bill Gates met his future wife while working with her (Melinda, IIRC) on Bob.
Windows Vista: Locked up so tight, even Symantec and Mcafee will need a third-party rootkit to get in!
...OK, OK, that was a double bladed sword and a cheap shot...
If the OS is compromised at the kernel level, I think changing the boot sector should be fairly easy and trivial.
Rooted(TM) Microsoft Windows - We don't give a (bleep) where you want to go today.
Microsoft Windows Rootkit Edition - At least it's not Windows ME.
Hey kids, now you can bypass DRM to screen-cap the BSOD caused by the fully sanctioned Microsoft Digitally Signed drivers!
"Human beings are not an endangered species; however, this isn't for a lack of trying." - DNA
OK - we'll settle and give you the title of 'Great Java Programmer'.
Hey, at least I didn't say J#.
*DUCKS*
I only wish I hadn't blown my mod points 2 days ago.
Please, I beg of you, man, don't give them any more Bad Ideas! I don't want to have to convert from hexidecimal to "Microsoft .NET Visual Base DOS" to decimal in order to figure out a BSOD!
Listen, dude, I've clearly hit a nerve; it wasn't my intention.
I did just fire a post off from my hip, in the heat of the moment and I clearly do need to do my homework. I am quite a bit out of my league and in over my head.
Anyways, I also didn't mean for the tone of my post to be accusational, although, I could see how it could be taken that way.
I'm truly sorry if I've rubbed you the wrong way. My (no sarcasm) sincere appologies.
That, my friend, is a can of worms. There are a great many problems with carbon dating in particular. I'll leave it up to the scholarly of you to look it up, but isn't the 'benchmark' for carbon dating, carbon dating itself? When you ask a lab to date an object, why does the form ask you what age you 'think the object is', isn't this technique solely based on the speed of light never changing? Isn't the actual range of carbon dating only a few thousand years due to our ability to measure after a few half lives, yet we use it for millions of years... Wasn't there a case where the carbon dating of an animal's bones showed that it was many magnitudes of age older than the very hair found by the animal (I think it was a tiger, IIRC). Doesn't carbon dating yield results in opposition of something around 94% of other dating techniques?
I'm not trolling, and I don't realistically expect to change anyones opinion (opinions are tough, if not impossible, to change), but as this is an open forum to discuss things, I thought I would throw my hat in the ring. If we are an objective community, we can discuss things objectively without the gradeur of waving hands and being dismissive of others ideas. Unfortunately, I've found that open debates seem to be 'won' by the poster who is most dismissive in the grandest way possible. Anyone sufficiently versed arguing can convince you of most anything. To be honest, I don't have any of the answers, and I don't pretend to.
How full is your drive? Are you paging to a drive on a different channel? Are you using 5400 RPM, 7200, or 10K, SATA or IDE? Is you static data on a seperate spindle than your dynamic data? All the cycles in the world won't mean a thing if you're constantly I/O blocked. The last 15% of a 5400 RPM drive is basically unusable as far as I'm concerned (well, usable for most home users, but not anyone who considers themselves a power user). Just a few thoughts, if you've partitioned correctly and still have this problem, then it very well could be OO...
Precisely.
Although, I have 'guilty pleasure' pop songs that I break out when no one is around, so I have no room to talk. I just couldn't resist the urge...Sorry.
Anyways, from what I can tell the *nix environment adheres to the principles of least needed priv.s and seperations of concerns moreso than windows; granted, windows was originally a single user environment and is less tailored for this kind of work.
I think it all comes down to the competence of the admin, in the end. An 'out of the box' install is only so for a moment. I know I can secure a windows box more than some of my friends can secure a linux box, and I can secure a linux box less so than one of my friends can secure his BSD box. At least I assume, we've never gone head to head. It's the mindset of the hacker, in the original sense of the word, that everything that you have at hand is a tool and should be used accordingly. If you can only find one use for a tool, which is more useless, the tool, or you? I'm not speaking of you, of course, but a generic 'you' representing John B. Random on the street.
For the moment, let's just say that I went against my better judgement and morals and decided to download Led Zeppelin's entire CD catalogue and somehow got caught in the process... Then, for arguments sake, I decided to fight the RIAA. I mean, if I'm guilty, and if they hire an expert (as should be the case, if they're boldly calling me a thief and trying to prove my guilt) to prove this point on technical merits, I think that sets the stage for the entire show. If I am guilty and he's an expert, then he should have nothing to fear in the way of my questions. Besides, if I managed to get myself caught, either by stupidity or incompetence, I couldn't possess that much technical knowledge to begin with. That's like the rich kid on the block who has no ability to play paintball, whupping the rest of the kids on the block because he has a gun that costs in excess of most mortgages and fires 16 rounds per second.
Your full contact debate analogy is dead-on. Except I show up to debate and find that not only are they arm to the teeth, but they're also making the rules. The rules are that any weapons I have in my arsenal are not allowed. But, they'll kindly let me have a white flag to wave for a one time price of $5K. Which is truly ironic considering that I could have bought Led Zeppelin's entire CD catalog for something like half that (if you include DVDs, box sets, etc.).
I'm reminded of the words of Billy Shakespeare "First, we kill all the lawyers." No offense NewYorkCityLawyer, you're still cool.
I understand this, and I think that's how most people view it. I was, however, thinking about this the other night, and I think that if they sent me a letter, I'd fight it. I don't steal anything anymore (within the spirit of the law, sometimes not within the letter (I have multiple backups of CDs I've bought, stuff like that)) - I'm a Christian. Although I did, admittingly, have a shady past. However, stealing was the least of my crimes.
I would have to get the money from somewhere, or I would represent myself. I know, anyone representing themselves has a fool for their council... But, I would fight it for a few reasons. I don't like being called a criminal; especially by cowards. I don't think you should take the credit or the blame for something you didn't do unless it is for the good of the greater. Furthermore, I think that I could, strictly on technical grounds, defend myself quite well. I'm confident in my skills (Software development major), and I could probably rip apart any 'expert' who would allow themselves to be hired by the RIAA. They would probably beat me into the ground on the political front, although, I think that I could use my technical ability and the hacker (not cracker!)community as a great platform. I could easily show that I have no motive; I use Ruckus and have all the free music I'd like. Lastly, I have a rack of all the original CD's I've bought, (except one which I lost years ago, although I have the album in MP3 - spirit of the law, not letter) as well as my email reciepts for the music I've bought on iTunes.
I just don't think they could really establish me as a pirate. It would take a lot to try to make up that pattern of behavior. That, and, if I got a letter, it would be a wrongful accusation since I don't pirate to begin with.
But mostly, I just couldn't live with myself if I backed down to a bully. Granted, I'd most likely lose, but I'd still know that I showed more spine than a good percentage of the populace. I guess it boils down to it being a personal issue. I guess it would be worth it for me to lose everything I have (broke college student: all I really own is old hardware that I keep fixing to get by) simply to send the RIAA the message that not everyone is spineless, and not everyone is a criminal. What do you do when confronted by bullies? Drop the biggest one as fast as possible and hope the rest leave. As the quote goes, "nothing asserts authority so much as silence".
I understand those who buckle simply because they really do have something to lose; sometimes what you stand for has to take a back seat to providing for your family. The idealist would say no, but we can all be extorted when the right pressure point is found. I happen to be in a position where I can't afford $3K, I don't really have any possessions; for me giving in would be a 'loss', whereas fighting and losing in court would be more akin to a 'tie'.
I guess it's a matter of heart in a head-on collision with the reality of the world we live in. I'm sure I'd fold if they could find the right button to push; but it's very unlikely at this point in time.
I just don't like delay slots... I mean, I can squeeze more out of them, but I lose points on projects for using 'set' commands in the delay. I don't much see the harm. Oh well. I guess I should learn X86 as well, since the world is married to the architecture, whether I like it or not.
So, I guess that's why java programmers have a layer of abstraction between them and the pointers. I've found that java is *mostly* pointers under the APIs, but they don't let you touch very much. Coming from a C/C++ background when I started java, I always wondered why they kept smacking my hands when I wanted to touch the memory... I guess this is the difference - true OOP is about tying together objects, not programming in the classical sense. Unless you're the implementor, but in that case, you're not really leveraging (buzz word!) the OOP API, rather, you're constructing it.
I guess that's where the gap is. The people who don't understand the abstraction are content to just use the objects and tie them together. Whereas those implementing and designing (not in that order, obviously) 'get it' and take care of the pointer details.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are plenty of java programmers that could code around me, but I've wondered what it was about them that I've never much 'clicked' with them much. I 'click' with C/C++ programmers just fine, and I'm guessing that it has to do with like minds on some level where concepts are concerned.
Just as a for instance, I've wondered why java is so rigid on its use of language to describe things. All definitions are set in stone and simply must be used in the correct context or you can lose a group of people. Like, I know the difference between a class and an object, but in more casual conversation I use them somewhat interchangably. I take it for granted that whomever I'm speaking with understands when I'm using class or object out of context, I'm speaking of an object. I might say 'X' is a class that I use for yadda yadda, while talking about it's instianted object XY. It seems now, while thinking about it, that there are programmers that work in the concrete but not at all in the abstract (no, I'm NOT talking about abstract classes!), while other can move from abstract to concrete seamlessly.
It seems, to me at least, that ASM has elements of both. Registers are concrete, but they can hold memory addresses, and then they become abstract.
Am I way off base here?
90% of coders need not apply
The greater majority of the remaining 10% are probably reading this article, the rest are hacking right now.
Ironic, those who don't know, don't know they don't know.