Posts by Phill

Go Fedora!

>> " Users of RHEL and other distributions have been safe for some time now"

w00t, Fedora for the world! Eat that Ubuntu you fucking noobs!

/troll

Should have brought an iPod

Boo ya'

Microsoft's reputation strikes again. No, I don't feel bad for those people. They knew who they were buying from. Ha ha ha ha.

What new features?

"The short answer is that Server 2008 delivers new features that customers wanted, whereas Vista delivers new features that Microsoft thought its customers should want."

....what new features are these?

If they open...they lose

Within a week of open sourcing Windows, Wine would have all your Windows only apps on Linux and suddenly everyone would switch

I'm seriously pissed off

The information I type into a browser is for the target only. There is a huge difference between a company putting ads on their website and for my ISP to track my browsing across the ENTIRE INTERNET. One is fine. One is completely immoral.

It is irrelevent whether there is money in advertising. My ISP is an ISP and has a sole duty to provide me with nothing but a packet routing server. Injection or modification should be illegal.

This service is opt in because nobody wants it. It is theft.

Is that the issue?

is it not about the validation of the date? or is it about the fact that calendar goes 28th Feb -> 1st March without processing all the records between those dates? Hence those people who registered their b day on the 29th feb never get their record in a batch job?

I'm confused what you said the problem is. If they can't get on the list then surely they already know they aren't getting a card.

I felt it

I live in Lincoln and I woke up in the middle of the night confused like i was woken up by an external force rather than of my own brain. I looked at the alarm clock at it was 12:55am. I thought is that right? should be AM? I was 99% sure the clock was accurate and I hadn't even altered it recently but for some reason I was just unsure. I woke up later and looked at the clock and it was 1:10am. Now the am was against the one I was 100% sure it was okay. I went back to sleep.

Then this morning I was watching BBC Breakfast and they said there was an earthquake at 1am and I was like "oh wow, that must have been the reason I was woke up last night". I wasn't concious or quick enough to actually feel tremors and I can't remember what was going through my head when I first woke up but I guess it must have been the earthquake.

Hello I am here!

I think I'm one of those 400,000 people

-- It used to be a vibrant way to communicate with friends and share pictures. Now it's just pages of shit like ninja's vs. wankers or something.

comment

This extends much further than you think. For example, Digg and Reddit which are supposed to be a "social news network" has turned into a popularity content with people like "MrBabyMan" submitting shit which automatically makes it to the front page. These "more than average" people are then brought out by companies and soon the notion of "for the community" is left in the dark unpopular home videos of bands who can't resist uploading their "hits" and skateboarders, who devoid of any skill, upload people falling off skateboards.

There isn't a community which businesses haven't tried to be a part of. The open source community and various kernels have developers paid by companies, the new products pages on Facebook, companies editing their own Wikipedia entries and getting away with it. Did you even know that companies can buy their way to the top of the google search results?

Vista security flaw eh?

Vista: more flaws in 1 year than OpenBSD in 10.

It's not the player....It's the format

The problem is not Apple with it's so called "restrictive ipod" but more the fact you downloaded music (or ripped music) to a restricted format. You gave up the option to play the music as you wish when you brought DRM encumbered WMA music files.

But if the hassle of this case helps the RIAA towards DRM free music then I'm sure it's a good thing. Maybe Open Sourcers could sue Apple for not supporting OGG.

It's a question of IF

I agree completely with Mark Rendle who I think is agreeing with someone else.

The whole aim is to reduce complexity of a function. The biggest factor in complexity is not the number of exit points - but the structure of the IF statements.

Early bailouts are usually based on simple tests - that's why they are effective and easy to understand.

Complicated if statements should be avoided at all cost. If a single exit point comes at the cost of repetition of IF statements in a function then it instantly becomes harder to read.

When I read code, I stop to evaluate the IF statements exactly, in my mind - when the read normal statements, I subconsciously read them as pseudo-code.

100% just possible

"I didn't think 100% reliability was possible..."

"I always thought we aimed for the five 9s? 99.999% reliability. :-)"

99.999% reliability...to the nearest whole percent is 100%

Something wrong in general

In Wikipedia (Community Encyclopedia) were seeing secret lists and power-seekers in groups attacking other people. It's sad that community ideas are corrupted by the few.

We see the exact same thing on Digg.com (Community Propigated (?) News). Of the million members there are a few people who's submissions are upmodded to fuck. Mr BabyMan springs to mind. http://www.digg.com/users/MrBabyMan/history/submissions Nothing he submits fails anywhere short of popular, all 7 submissions yesterday did.

Then there's what everyone calls the massive success, the pinicle of sharing, Open Source Software. What's the one thing saving Open Source Software? It's a feature I call "Forkation" that isn't possible with those listed above. That's why they fail where Stallman succeeds. It's not the only argument. Software is measurable against metrics, much more so than the written word so where as your submission seems better than someone elses you can only compare code, not articles.

In the long run, I think Wiki's reputation will go downhill (And it should. It's full of trolls and empowered idiots) and people will run out of steam for it's development.

Good idea

Maybe they can pull this off. Although it would be hard. With Digg.com filtering their content worse than the Chinese goverment and the problem of "Armies of upmodders" and "Bury Brigades" trolling the search results this would need something extremely well written.

What we really need though is a way to disable the google bomb which is "wikipedia".

Accountability

A lot of the comments above say software vendors shouldn't be able to use the "get out clause" and basically take responsibility for the quality of their software but I can't see this happening, for two reasons.

Firstly, the complexity is too high. Writing software can be more complicated than landing a person on the moon. One is the theory of moving an object (a space ship), the other is creating a virtual world with true-to-life physics, including the modeling of all 4 dimensions (width, height, depth and time) not to mention gravity, handling object collisions (bullets, player contact, player movement on the ground). All this has to be simulated in real time over a distributed network of computers where processor time, ping time and other factors cannot be controlled. object collisions, theory and algorithms that produce *realistic* shrapnel are not easy to calculate. Developer's often resort to cheats in the 3D environment, one being "hit blocks", because of course, even if you represent your data with true-to-life physics, you have to map that back into a grid of squares pixmaps and make it logical to the user. Surely we've all seen bullets kill someone even through you shot over the dudes ear. Then on top of that, you have the problem of speed. CPU, Memory, and Graphics capability are limited so you can't model true-to-life physics due because those physics take too long to calculate and the bullets have less than 10 ms to register. You can increase speed by using a lower level programming language such as C or Assembly but these simpler languages require you to write more code to achieve the final result and your under time-contraints. You can't spend 10 years writing a game because the sales will never cover the cost of 10 years development time for a team of developers.

Whilst I would like to see higher levels of quality in place and perhaps a little forced, where do you draw the line? You have to remember that no program contains no bugs. No developer will ever tell you they are certain their application is bug free.

The second problem is integration. Let's say a bug is found. What happens if the bug is in DirectX or a third party library you didn't write? Do you then sue them. What if that company argues the bug is a feature and you miss read the documentation? Documentation is truly a contract and it would open a whole painful legal process.

Basically the whole area is a mine-field. If it's any consolation, were seeing DirectX and underlying libraries become more robust and games in general becoming more robust so just accept this is a luxury and not a right and that as the field of development matures we can start to take more accountability for our work.

We never managed to sell a licence...

...Which speaks volumes about your "invention" being so novel.

I think this guy is a joke to be honest. Your talking about the smallest change to the internal process of a card reader. It's just an act of blocking other people and trolling what is *supposed* to be a technology designed for the public to keep them safe. Why do you need to patent such trivial bullshit? Why do you even have the rights to develop chip and pin devices in the first place? Surely that was someone elses novel invention? Quit moaning and do something that actually helps move I.T. forward.

Black, Oily finger prints all over the screen

And big smudges where people are zooming in and out.

Virtualisation is good for....

1) Testing. If your a web developer it allows you to test your site on all platforms at the same time, without rebooting, without swapping machines and without assuming that Safari renders the same on Macs as it does on Windows. You can be writing a script and testing it across all browsers at the same time. The same goes for the development of ANY software. I can test my app on a machine that mirrors the client machines. Ever written a program and completely tested it only to find out that the client doesn't have the libraries installed you needed?

2) Testing. It's a great way to see what a new OS is going to be like without actually trashing a machine in the process.

3) Testing. You can abuse a virtual machine and install freeware on it (to verify it's actually FREEware and not pop-up register ware). You can trash the config to see if new set ups work without actually breaking your existing machine

4) Admin. You can have admin abilities of a virtual machine and not need to check with your real admin. You can compile software and get around desktop restrictions imposed on you without actually having to explain what happened to a machine on "his" domain.

5) Power. You can run different software by different people at the same time.

"Green" isn't really a worthwhile consideration in "desktop" virtualisation like it is on servers but I'm sure I've justified it.

I plan on buy talent we don't have here

So why would he do this?

- Lack of talent and innovation at HQ

- To reduce competition or potential competition

- To take profits which aren't coming from their usual sources

All in all it's basically a quote from Ballmer saying...we don't know where were going. We'll piggy back on a growing company to ensure success for our investors.

Well...

Video of the hilarious moment

http://view.break.com/379748

How Exactly

How did an unreleased album end up on BitTorrent / P2P networks? Hacker? Inside job? Idiot at the company accidentally running a P2P client?

These questions need answers.

Dunstan Vavasour

i agree with him