3. As far as I know, though I could be wrong about that, most injuries and deaths by firearms among innocent civilians (i.e. not criminals) are by accidents with legal firearms.
The legitimate accident rates are rather low (one figure I've seen placed the average child more at risk from drowning by getting stuck in a bucket of water than an accident involving firearms). One of the practices that turned me against the gun control movement was the very common practice of including of under-20 gang members and suicides in the "accident" rate numbers.
Frankly, though I don't consider this a very convincing argument. Lusers misusing things and not following safety precautions are the real problem. If you really wanted to save lives, getting these people off the road would save several orders of magnitude more.
Comparing guns to alcohol and other drugs is the next fallacy. By using alcohol or other drugs as they're intended to be used, you only endanger yourself. By using a gun the way it's intended to be used, you endanger other people's lives, by definition.
This is either very shortsighted or intentionally deceptive. Is a police officer using a gun to stop a crime not using a gun as it's intended to be used? This is because guns are neutral; the real concerns are the intentions of the owner. Unfortunately, actually reducing that threat would require real work, not just repeating "Guns == BAD!". __
Don't get me wrong -- I started out with PHP and gradually found myself using more and more Perl just because I could reuse my modules in my other (non-cgi) code. I found myself questioning my use of PHP every time I typed the PHP's real advantage is the tighter focus on web development - having developed in both, PHP is much faster to create web pages with simply because things which are useful for web developers tend to be built in commands. OTOH, PHP is less well suited for non-web scripting (e.g. I use Perl for system automation tasks). None of this prevents properly modular code as both languages have the ability to pull in code from external files and they both have component libraries, although PHP's PEAR is definitely not at the level of CPAN yet.
Lastly, PHP is commonly accepted as easier to learn than Perl. I certainly don't miss the more contrived bits of Perl syntax, particularly when you have to worry about supporting code where someone else [mis]used them.
My guess would be that, at best, BE somehow can get out of the way for smart optimizations. They mention SIMD use in PIII but I don't understand why that wouldn't be used in linux or windows to the same extent
Some of the Be developer newsletters hinted that they were doing some interesting dynamic code-rewriting features. I'm not sure how much is possible on that front, but it certainly would seem like an excellent way to improve performance - trimming a few instructions here and there (based on the host CPU & video card) based on real-time profiling would really benefit graphics routines that are being called a few trillion times over the life of the program. __
His claim of capturing a screen shot of the spammer's computer is just outrageous...Windows may be full of networking holes, but c'mon...
Don't confuse your ignorance with technical impossibility. BackOriface is similar to pcAnywhere or Microsoft's SMS, all of which give you remote GUI access to a Windows box. Want even more? According to the Back Oriface feature list BO2k supports Multimedia support for audio/video capture, and audio playback.
Note that BO is pretty easy to install. A shared drive with no password or a weak one or a trojan horse email or website (ActiveX can work for you!) would all allow you to break into a clean Windows box. One with dozens of insecure programs installed (e.g. ICQ, some IRC clients, some email clients, etc.) would be even easier.
It seems to me that nearly everyone who posts on slashdot would be *much* happier if they just didn't go see movies in general.
Many of us don't. Hollywood hasn't shown any interest in producing movies with better than elementary school level writing or even token attempts at realism. As a whole, the movie industry is a wonderful example of what happens when you combine a bunch of money, egotists and no clues.
Unfortunately, going to movies these days seems to be a question of whether you're willing to lower your tastes to the swill they crank out. What's really killed the industry is the idea of the blockbuster film - nobody tries to make a smaller film that will sell reasonably well and really please fans of the genre; everyone's focused on a multi-hundred-million epic that will get most of the movie viewers in the country. It's becoming clear that nobody really knows how to make one, probably because they ignore the fact that most of the past blockbusters were genre films that were done well enough to appeal to people outside that genre.
The problem is with the chipsets and motherboards.
More accurately, "when the chip was first released the problem was with the chipsets and motherboards.". They're in ready supply, cheaper, and rock-solid reliable and have been for many months. __
http://www.mindrover.com Basically you use a graphical programming environment to build small robots which compete in competitions. The game aspects would certainly get kids interested and the programming environment is a seductively easy way to get into modern event driven programming. __
The tag based metaphor focuses on the Output of Database information into HTML.
Of course, there is a drawback to this in that this approach really breaks down when you start to build complicated sites and the excess tag verbiage becomes excessive. ColdFusion is arguably easier to learn but I've found many former ColdFusion developers who think PHP is a better choice for the expert.
You can just type in an SQL query and output it without having to deal with all that Command/Recordset and object crap.
This sounds more like ASP than PHP. PHP certainly doesn't require any of the "C++/Java stuff" you referred to, either.
PHP may be powerful--the documentation just sucks.
This is definitely a personal preference - I've always thought the exact opposite. Allaire's documentation rarely gives you anywhere near as much useful information as the PHP documentation does and they have no equivalent to PHP's user-provided annotations. __
The division of society into "outlaws" and "law-abiding citizens", although intellectually seducing, is worthless. What about the disoriented twelve-year old how suddenly feels an urge to commit suicide, but first destroying every(thing|one) around him: in which category does he fall? What about the elderly man who, after having led a quiet and peaceful life, suddenly decides to suppress his wife?
First, it's important to know that, despite all of the attention, these are really statistically insignificant problems. The numbers used to advocate gun control go down sharply when you exclude criminal activity from the stats. Tragic as it is for the families involved, even accidental deaths (e.g. kid drowns in swimming pool, elderly person slips in bathtub) are more common than the scenarios you mentioned.
More importantly, however, people who don't use guns will still find other ways of being violent. That kid might slash his wrists, ingest something toxic or jump off of a tall object; for every case of a person who shoots their spouse, there's another 10-20 cases where someone else chose to beat, stab or run over their spouse. The real problem is that a 12 year old kid is suicidal or that a 30-year marriage will end in homicide. If it's reached that point, people will find some way of being violent. Guns are popular because they're efficient but it's not as if there aren't a million other means available to someone who's decided to harm someone.
The real tragedy is that everyone spends so much time talking about inanimate objects while so attention is given to the actual problems that make people violent. __
Thats like saying a search warrant compells you to hand over documents so you need to have that letter you threw away last year. If you don't have it they wont throw you in jail
Read the stand site - they can send you to jail unless you can prove that you never had the key. __
I'm really glad to see this. In my experience, the great flaw in the OSS model is the quality of the code. Can we be honest? The vast majority of it is complete crap, developed by amateurs with absolutely no clue how develop to professional standards
Unfortunately, Sturgeon's law applies to source code like anything else and I think that more than 90% is crap. Have you ever looked at the source code for large commercial projects? There are many which are just as bad, and a similarly small percentage of the code is well written.
OSS code looks worse only because you can see it. Commercial software houses have one big advantage, namely that they can pay people to slog through the ugly bits.
Unfortunately, non-open source also allows people to get away with crap they might be embarrassed to have included with their name in a publicly-available product. There's also a problem in that, except for the efforts a bunch of black-hats and white-hats with dissassemblers, most of us would never see just how bad some of the code in shipping products is.
In summary, I think it's extremely wrong to assume that OpenSource developers are more likely to be young, inexperienced and/or bad coders. I've found it to be more of a neutral as you have both good and bad programmers at work in either case, in roughly the same percentages and the ability of anyone to find bugs in OSS is countered to some degree by the QA departments for-profit non-open source companies fund. OpenSource has at least a small advantage in that the user can fix critical bugs, or would if they were capable of it and most are not. __
Re:What happens if you view beam-it as compression
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MP3.com Loses In Court
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· Score: 1
I forgot to mention one other point of curiosity - some of the transfer protocols I used to use back in the BBS days used some flavor of checksum to determine whether a file did in fact need to be retransmitted. This seems to be an accepted technique used by many different programs.
Would it have been legal for MP3.com to use something similar, where only the first person to upload a track would actually cause the bits to be transferred over the network? __
Does anything change if you consider My.MP3.com as a shared-dictionary compression scheme? Dictionary-based compression is a rather old idea and there are examples where programs on both sides of a slow communications link exchange only references to entries in a much larger dictionary stored locally.
The MP3s are completely identical and, had the MP3.com done a rip/upload of those identical files, it would have avoided the legal issue. I find it disturbing that something which is completely legal becomes illegal because the software avoids repeating the transfer of data it already has. If MP3.com had required users to upload the same files, this legal loophole wouldn't have existed. __
If you had to redesign ACS, what would you do differently? (Alternately, given that ArsDigita seems to be replacing some earlier modules, what was the design decision you regretted most?) __
I'm quite surprised it took this long. I heard a rumor about 2 years ago that a GPS jamming device was available in Russia with a 30 mile radius.
The news isn't that it's possible, just that it's so easy. People aren't used to the fact that any reasonably bright person with access to a library could build a GPS jammer (or a nuke. or poison gas. or conventional explosives. or cryptography software).
I'd expect the usual blithering lusers to talk about banning this (probably "for The Children!") for awhile until reality intrudes.
It's also worth noting that the easiest way to feel more comfortable about this sort of thing would be to realize that a) GPS counts as a vital military service, b) jamming it could be seen as a threat to the country and that civilian usages also cause threats to a variety of important services, c) to jam, it must transmit and finally d) if it transmits, you can drop something nasty on it from a squad of pissed-off Marines on up. __
Not recently.. At one point Diesel was up to US$2 per gallon with regular 87-octane gasoline at about $1.60 per...
I should mention that this is all relative to what I've seen in San Diego. (This is probably the most appropriate opportunity to trot out YMMV all year! <g>) When I bought gas last week, diesel was at $1.49/gallon vs. $1.69 for the cheapest regular unleaded. This was not the case a month ago, when the diesel was about a nickel a gallon more. I'd say on average it's 10-20 cents a gallon cheaper, modulo the usual sort of market fluctuations. __
I've been driving a Jetta TDI for about a year now. Great mileage under normal driving conditions (45-52mpg), excellent range (14.5 gallon tank), performance on par with non-sports cars[1], lower cost for fuel and maintenance and the Jetta design compares well in its class, gas or diesel. They're better for the environment, too - better economy and diesel is easier/cleaner to refine than gas.
I have a feeling that none of this will matter until someone works to remind the average luser that what they "know" about diesels is wrong. It seems that by far the majority of the American populace thinks that diesels are more expensive, slower and less reliable, none of which is true.
Right now, the diesel manufacturers seem to be pulling an IBM. They have a better product but seem allergic to actually advertising it. The timing is perfect for a strong ad campaign right now while the US gas prices remain higher than normal ("Wondering why guy who passed you was smiling? His car only needs a fillup once a month and it was cheaper, too")
[1] In practive I significantly outperform the sportier vehicles as well, but that's a function of the rather bovine drivers that are so common in San Diego: "Whoa! The light! It's green! It's been green for 30 seconds! Ooops, almost stepped on the gas ahead of the rest of the pack. Mustn't get out of line! Listen to that rude driver honking at me just because the light's turning yellow now. He'll only need to run the red a little!" (In other words, slower hardware + good software > faster hardware + lousy software) __
they/'d be really embarassed to sell a coupla million worth of mainframe with a benchmark figure lower than that of an alpha costing a couple of grand.
Even though the mainframe processors have been getting pretty fast, I think this clashes your earlier statement about mainframes being I/O beats (which is completely accurate). What embarrasment is there in the fact that a system doesn't do well in a scenario completely different from what it was designed for? That'd be like complaining that the diesel locomotive you just bought sucks on 0-60 performance.
Besides, any IBM salesdroid worth his commission would mention the RS/6000 line. __
If you are speaking as a developer, I can see the desire to implement your own control where the one Microsoft provides sucks. This is the wrong thing to do, as when MS *does* fix it, or adds new features, or adds native skinning, you will be left out. The place to fix such problems is in the OS, not in the application. Otherwise you are asking for trouble. In any case, if you fix a problem in some control in your app only, that introduces an inconsistency for your app only, which is not good.
I quite agree, with the caveat that this doesn't seem to happen all that much. Ever run through MS Office and see how many of their own guidelines they ignore? Half of the problems with Windows are things that one part of Microsoft knows about and another ignores (Fun with Corporate Politics!); needless to say, third party developers haven't exactly been better disciplined...
I switched from the default Netscape 6 skin to something smaller (the Sullivan skin). This produced what feels like at least 200% speedup in the user interface; where it felt sluggish before (presumably due to having only a 350Mhz PII and 256MB) it was perhaps a couple percent behind the native GUI.
(On a related note, I'd be more in favor of using the native controls if the ones on Windows didn't suck so much. Microsoft should see if Apple's usability lab people need work now that Apple doesn't want them.)
Someone posted something similar on one of the Be lists - he did an upgrade and moved the old HD into the new box. BeOS boots flawlessly with everything working. Inspired by this, he then swapped that drive into a couple other boxes he had with identical results except for (IIRC) a sound card that wasn't supported. This is what PnP is supposed to Be like!
Re:Where is ESS 1868 support?
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BeOS For Linux!
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· Score: 2
[the ESS 1868 chipset]. It pains me to throw away a perfectly good full-duplex 16-bit sound card and go buy SBLives.
This is not normal! Normally you *NEVER* need to reboot BeOS for *ANYTHING*, any more than you need to reboot a well-configured Linux box. At least on my system, BeOS is just as stable as Linux (neither one has ever crashed) and the only thing preventing me from having insane uptimes is rebooting to Win98 to play MindRover. Installing new hardware is a breeze, too - BeOS boots up in the normal 5 seconds after the install and everything is working fine. You can reconfigure things like the network and multimedia subsystems without ever needing to do more than configure & restart the service.
However, in this particular case, the 3c509 driver is BROKEN and requires you to reboot. There were similar driver nuisances with earlier Linux versions, too - ever hear from someone who had to boot DOS and initialize their soundcard before Linux would use it? Driver support can be a royal PITA.
Also, BeOS is a LOT closer to Linux than Windows. Don't let the Evil Corporate Backing scare you off. The OS isn't opensource but it's very opensource friendly - half the utilities are GNU and Be has opensourced some of the UI. Frankly, I consider it being like Linux with a much better user interface, much easier hardware configuration (no work is hard to beat) and a tighter architecture. The downsides are some difficulties porting Unix code that depends on a couple things like mmap() or sockets-as-files and a much weaker network subsystem. (Of course, Linux's network code makes most other operating systems look bad, too.)
Consider the effort necessary to completely support HTML 4, CSS1/2, ECMAScript 1.5 and the W3 DOM. None of these are simple standards, particularly not when you consider all of the possible variations and the interactions between the various standards. (There's a reason you need a gigabyte of free disk space to build Mozilla)
The original Netscape codebase was built by continuously hacking in the minimal functionality necessary to claim support for a given feature and it shows.
Doing it the right way, and making it fast and robust and portable and building the application framework is a huge task. I'm just glad someone decided to bankroll it.
Finally, don't forget that Mozilla also includes mail and news clients. (Not that I think this is a particularly good thing)
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, though I don't consider this a very convincing argument. Lusers misusing things and not following safety precautions are the real problem. If you really wanted to save lives, getting these people off the road would save several orders of magnitude more.
This is either very shortsighted or intentionally deceptive. Is a police officer using a gun to stop a crime not using a gun as it's intended to be used? This is because guns are neutral; the real concerns are the intentions of the owner. Unfortunately, actually reducing that threat would require real work, not just repeating "Guns == BAD!".__
__
__
Don't confuse your ignorance with technical impossibility. BackOriface is similar to pcAnywhere or Microsoft's SMS, all of which give you remote GUI access to a Windows box. Want even more? According to the Back Oriface feature list BO2k supports Multimedia support for audio/video capture, and audio playback.
Note that BO is pretty easy to install. A shared drive with no password or a weak one or a trojan horse email or website (ActiveX can work for you!) would all allow you to break into a clean Windows box. One with dozens of insecure programs installed (e.g. ICQ, some IRC clients, some email clients, etc.) would be even easier.
__
Unfortunately, going to movies these days seems to be a question of whether you're willing to lower your tastes to the swill they crank out. What's really killed the industry is the idea of the blockbuster film - nobody tries to make a smaller film that will sell reasonably well and really please fans of the genre; everyone's focused on a multi-hundred-million epic that will get most of the movie viewers in the country. It's becoming clear that nobody really knows how to make one, probably because they ignore the fact that most of the past blockbusters were genre films that were done well enough to appeal to people outside that genre.
You can't just throw money at the problem.
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http://www.mindrover.com Basically you use a graphical programming environment to build small robots which compete in competitions. The game aspects would certainly get kids interested and the programming environment is a seductively easy way to get into modern event driven programming.
__
__
More importantly, however, people who don't use guns will still find other ways of being violent. That kid might slash his wrists, ingest something toxic or jump off of a tall object; for every case of a person who shoots their spouse, there's another 10-20 cases where someone else chose to beat, stab or run over their spouse. The real problem is that a 12 year old kid is suicidal or that a 30-year marriage will end in homicide. If it's reached that point, people will find some way of being violent. Guns are popular because they're efficient but it's not as if there aren't a million other means available to someone who's decided to harm someone.
The real tragedy is that everyone spends so much time talking about inanimate objects while so attention is given to the actual problems that make people violent.
__
__
OSS code looks worse only because you can see it. Commercial software houses have one big advantage, namely that they can pay people to slog through the ugly bits.
Unfortunately, non-open source also allows people to get away with crap they might be embarrassed to have included with their name in a publicly-available product. There's also a problem in that, except for the efforts a bunch of black-hats and white-hats with dissassemblers, most of us would never see just how bad some of the code in shipping products is.
In summary, I think it's extremely wrong to assume that OpenSource developers are more likely to be young, inexperienced and/or bad coders. I've found it to be more of a neutral as you have both good and bad programmers at work in either case, in roughly the same percentages and the ability of anyone to find bugs in OSS is countered to some degree by the QA departments for-profit non-open source companies fund. OpenSource has at least a small advantage in that the user can fix critical bugs, or would if they were capable of it and most are not.
__
Would it have been legal for MP3.com to use something similar, where only the first person to upload a track would actually cause the bits to be transferred over the network?
__
The MP3s are completely identical and, had the MP3.com done a rip/upload of those identical files, it would have avoided the legal issue. I find it disturbing that something which is completely legal becomes illegal because the software avoids repeating the transfer of data it already has. If MP3.com had required users to upload the same files, this legal loophole wouldn't have existed.
__
If you had to redesign ACS, what would you do differently? (Alternately, given that ArsDigita seems to be replacing some earlier modules, what was the design decision you regretted most?)
__
I'd expect the usual blithering lusers to talk about banning this (probably "for The Children!") for awhile until reality intrudes.
It's also worth noting that the easiest way to feel more comfortable about this sort of thing would be to realize that a) GPS counts as a vital military service, b) jamming it could be seen as a threat to the country and that civilian usages also cause threats to a variety of important services, c) to jam, it must transmit and finally d) if it transmits, you can drop something nasty on it from a squad of pissed-off Marines on up.
__
__
I have a feeling that none of this will matter until someone works to remind the average luser that what they "know" about diesels is wrong. It seems that by far the majority of the American populace thinks that diesels are more expensive, slower and less reliable, none of which is true.
Right now, the diesel manufacturers seem to be pulling an IBM. They have a better product but seem allergic to actually advertising it. The timing is perfect for a strong ad campaign right now while the US gas prices remain higher than normal ("Wondering why guy who passed you was smiling? His car only needs a fillup once a month and it was cheaper, too")
[1] In practive I significantly outperform the sportier vehicles as well, but that's a function of the rather bovine drivers that are so common in San Diego: "Whoa! The light! It's green! It's been green for 30 seconds! Ooops, almost stepped on the gas ahead of the rest of the pack. Mustn't get out of line! Listen to that rude driver honking at me just because the light's turning yellow now. He'll only need to run the red a little!"
(In other words, slower hardware + good software > faster hardware + lousy software)
__
Besides, any IBM salesdroid worth his commission would mention the RS/6000 line.
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__
(On a related note, I'd be more in favor of using the native controls if the ones on Windows didn't suck so much. Microsoft should see if Apple's usability lab people need work now that Apple doesn't want them.)
Someone posted something similar on one of the Be lists - he did an upgrade and moved the old HD into the new box. BeOS boots flawlessly with everything working. Inspired by this, he then swapped that drive into a couple other boxes he had with identical results except for (IIRC) a sound card that wasn't supported. This is what PnP is supposed to Be like!
(the Be Adventure was also worth reading).
However, in this particular case, the 3c509 driver is BROKEN and requires you to reboot. There were similar driver nuisances with earlier Linux versions, too - ever hear from someone who had to boot DOS and initialize their soundcard before Linux would use it? Driver support can be a royal PITA.
Also, BeOS is a LOT closer to Linux than Windows. Don't let the Evil Corporate Backing scare you off. The OS isn't opensource but it's very opensource friendly - half the utilities are GNU and Be has opensourced some of the UI. Frankly, I consider it being like Linux with a much better user interface, much easier hardware configuration (no work is hard to beat) and a tighter architecture. The downsides are some difficulties porting Unix code that depends on a couple things like mmap() or sockets-as-files and a much weaker network subsystem. (Of course, Linux's network code makes most other operating systems look bad, too.)
The original Netscape codebase was built by continuously hacking in the minimal functionality necessary to claim support for a given feature and it shows.
Doing it the right way, and making it fast and robust and portable and building the application framework is a huge task. I'm just glad someone decided to bankroll it.
Finally, don't forget that Mozilla also includes mail and news clients. (Not that I think this is a particularly good thing)