Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need this?
I don't know... lots of people decided that they needed sendmail, but it was bloated, unstable, insecure, and needed to run as root.
Microsoft aren't the only people who produce horrible code. They might be the only people who make billions of dollars by doing so, but that's a different matter.
"We're having serious problems with some of the junior coders writing programs that go into infinite loops and lock up our systems. I'd like you to write a program that will scan through a piece of code and determine whether or not that code ever goes in to an infinite loop".
Would you do it? If you have taken Theory of Computation you'd know that this is equivalent to the halting problem for Turing machines and thus is *impossible*.
Assuming, of course, that you're using a Turing-complete language. If you restrict yourself to a Turing-incomplete sublanguage -- which will nevertheless be sufficiently powerful for almost all purposes -- things become rather easier. As long as you maintain a strict separation between data and control (well, not quite strict: Conditional jumps are safe as long as the code paths recombine later), halting (and correctness) can be mechanically proved.
And the focus becomes more and more on mathematics as you get to higher levels.
A number of CS professors I know have commented that the best preparation for an advanced (Masters, PhD) CS degree is to start with a Bachelors in Mathematics.
You're blaming the wrong people here, unfortunately. I very much doubt that Paypal wanted to do this -- they really don't gain much as far as stopping fraud goes.
The people you should be complaining about are the various US law enforcement agencies. They've said many times that they want to shut down terrorist financing, and that they want to be able to find out how and when every dollar changes hands around the world in order to do so.
Unverified accounts on Paypal, where people move funds in and out without ever providing any more identification than an IP address, are exactly the sort of "money laundering" target the FBI are going to shut down.
In any case, I fail to understand why you don't want to link a bank account. If you change banks later, it won't matter... as long as you've linked a bank account once (and thereby proved your identity) they'll be happy.
Guys, this isn't going to be rented by the hour to amateur astronomers (or amateur spy satellite operators). And this isn't going to be competing with Hubble either.
I think the story submitter spent too long as a moderator.
From Health Canada:
But at levels between 1 and 5 mW, so much light rushes into the eye that it suffers a temporary condition called flashblindness. It is similar to the effect that occurs during flash photography where the image of the flash source remains in the eyes for a few seconds and then fades away. There is no long-term effect from flashblindness.
It may not be particularly pleasant to have one of these lasers hit you in the eye, but it won't do any permanent damage.
Is this really a limit? After two years with a cable modem (first Rogers, then Rogers@Home, then Shaw@Home, then Shaw), I never saw transfer rates of over 1.5Mbps. I generally considered myself lucky if I got half of that.
It uses fairly cheap components, such as standard LED's instead of laser diodes. This also makes it a lot safer to work with, i.e. you won't burn your eyes out if you accidently look into it.
The mere fact lasers are used in most fiber optics does not immediately render them dangerous. Typical power levels are on the order of a few mW, far too low to cause any permanent damage.
Actually, ELF executables running under a normal user account CANNOT do the most interesting part, namely run their own SMTP server. Root access is required to open a low-numbered port.
Root access is required to bind to a low-numbered port, but not to connect to a remote service, which is all you need in order to send email.
Geez, don't people know at least the rudiments here?
The media always get this one wrong. TRIUMF is not the same as UBC -- it happens to be situated near to UBC's campus, but they are about as separate as Linux and Redhat. Not completely distinct, but you'll get lots of people annoyed if you always say Redhat when you mean Linux.
The name "TRIUMF" actually comes from the original name: TRI University Meson Facility. The three founding universities being UBC, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.
Work at TRIUMF is done by people from the member universities, people from other institutions (although there's more paperwork involved IIRC), and by "facilities scientists" -- people hired by TRIUMF itself. I don't know about the rest of the research group, but Paul Schmor is listed in TRIUMF's databases as having TRIUMF affiliation -- not UBC.
Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex". Which translates roughly as "where there is no policeman, there is no speed limit".
If the two companies are coming into conflict, that means that the US company has a UK subsidiary, and/or the UK company has a US subsidiary. That means there IS someone to show up when it goes to trial. That also means that both cases will have defendants under the courts' respective jurisdiction. I don't expect reality to be that nice and neat, but it'll work for an example.
A more likely scenario is where each company operates only within their own nation, but they both want control of the same.com domain name. I see nothing wrong with UK courts asserting control over.uk domain names and US courts asserting control over.us domain names; but what happens when both assert control over.com domain names?
They expect 40 [out of 50] of the markets to be cash positive by year end, with the entire company cash positive by mid 2003.
Either there's some interesting accounting going on, or they'r expecting to lose *lots* of money in the remaining 10 markets -- like over four times as much as the average profit from the profitable markets.
I bought a 1989 Honda Civic 12 years ago, and it's starting to get old. A bit of rust here and there, occasionally it has trouble starting... the sort of things you often hear about with old cars.
I wanted to replace it with a new car, but guess what? They don't make 1989 Honda Civics any more. If I want a new car, they tell me, I'll have to buy the latest model, which not only looks different and is more expensive, but would require me to learn an entirely new UI.
Somehow I don't buy (no pun intended) that the engine for building a car has changed again.
THe russians in particular claim to have done so first
My memory isn't very good for things which happened long before I was born, but IIRC the russian "inventor" publicly recognized that Marconi came first.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloat. MS Office defies the basic principles of UNIX. It will probably need to run as root and make our systems unstable. Do we need this?
I don't know... lots of people decided that they needed sendmail, but it was bloated, unstable, insecure, and needed to run as root.
Microsoft aren't the only people who produce horrible code. They might be the only people who make billions of dollars by doing so, but that's a different matter.
"We're having serious problems with some of the junior coders writing programs that go into infinite loops and lock up our systems. I'd like you to write a program that will scan through a piece of code and determine whether or not that code ever goes in to an infinite loop".
Would you do it? If you have taken Theory of Computation you'd know that this is equivalent to the halting problem for Turing machines and thus is *impossible*.
Assuming, of course, that you're using a Turing-complete language. If you restrict yourself to a Turing-incomplete sublanguage -- which will nevertheless be sufficiently powerful for almost all purposes -- things become rather easier. As long as you maintain a strict separation between data and control (well, not quite strict: Conditional jumps are safe as long as the code paths recombine later), halting (and correctness) can be mechanically proved.
The focus is on MATH.
And the focus becomes more and more on mathematics as you get to higher levels.
A number of CS professors I know have commented that the best preparation for an advanced (Masters, PhD) CS degree is to start with a Bachelors in Mathematics.
PS. Probably the best way of dealing with email messages like this would be to put it up on a website and post the URL...
You're blaming the wrong people here, unfortunately. I very much doubt that Paypal wanted to do this -- they really don't gain much as far as stopping fraud goes.
The people you should be complaining about are the various US law enforcement agencies. They've said many times that they want to shut down terrorist financing, and that they want to be able to find out how and when every dollar changes hands around the world in order to do so.
Unverified accounts on Paypal, where people move funds in and out without ever providing any more identification than an IP address, are exactly the sort of "money laundering" target the FBI are going to shut down.
In any case, I fail to understand why you don't want to link a bank account. If you change banks later, it won't matter... as long as you've linked a bank account once (and thereby proved your identity) they'll be happy.
Guys, this isn't going to be rented by the hour to amateur astronomers (or amateur spy satellite operators). And this isn't going to be competing with Hubble either.
I think the story submitter spent too long as a moderator.
Will there be a time when all computer users will talk about adding mibibytes of RAM, rather than a megabytes?
Will there be a time when all computer networks are based around OSI stacks, instead of TCP/IP?
No.
When it comes to a battle between de facto standards and de jure standards, the de facto standard always wins.
Does "gadget" mean something different in North America? There's nothing which screams "gadget" to me more than a Segway.
From Health Canada:
But at levels between 1 and 5 mW, so much light rushes into the eye that it suffers a temporary condition called flashblindness. It is similar to the effect that occurs during flash photography where the image of the flash source remains in the eyes for a few seconds and then fades away. There is no long-term effect from flashblindness.
It may not be particularly pleasant to have one of these lasers hit you in the eye, but it won't do any permanent damage.
Is this really a limit? After two years with a cable modem (first Rogers, then Rogers@Home, then Shaw@Home, then Shaw), I never saw transfer rates of over 1.5Mbps. I generally considered myself lucky if I got half of that.
It uses fairly cheap components, such as standard LED's instead of laser diodes. This also makes it a lot safer to work with, i.e. you won't burn your eyes out if you accidently look into it.
The mere fact lasers are used in most fiber optics does not immediately render them dangerous. Typical power levels are on the order of a few mW, far too low to cause any permanent damage.
That would make Nike a distribution and branding company
Yes, it would. Sorry, what was your point again?
Actually, ELF executables running under a normal user account CANNOT do the most interesting part, namely run their own SMTP server. Root access is required to open a low-numbered port.
Root access is required to bind to a low-numbered port, but not to connect to a remote service, which is all you need in order to send email.
Geez, don't people know at least the rudiments here?
...starts with a single quarter of one percent.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Linux isn't an operating system. Linux is a kernel. RedHat, Mandrake, SUSE, etc. are operating systems.
Kernel + Userland = Operating system.
The media always get this one wrong. TRIUMF is not the same as UBC -- it happens to be situated near to UBC's campus, but they are about as separate as Linux and Redhat. Not completely distinct, but you'll get lots of people annoyed if you always say Redhat when you mean Linux.
The name "TRIUMF" actually comes from the original name: TRI University Meson Facility. The three founding universities being UBC, Simon Fraser University, and the University of Victoria.
Work at TRIUMF is done by people from the member universities, people from other institutions (although there's more paperwork involved IIRC), and by "facilities scientists" -- people hired by TRIUMF itself. I don't know about the rest of the research group, but Paul Schmor is listed in TRIUMF's databases as having TRIUMF affiliation -- not UBC.
Much abandonware falls under the "no suitor, no judge" rule.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "Ubi non accusator, ibi non judex". Which translates roughly as "where there is no policeman, there is no speed limit".
If the two companies are coming into conflict, that means that the US company has a UK subsidiary, and/or the UK company has a US subsidiary. That means there IS someone to show up when it goes to trial. That also means that both cases will have defendants under the courts' respective jurisdiction. I don't expect reality to be that nice and neat, but it'll work for an example.
.com domain name. I see nothing wrong with UK courts asserting control over .uk domain names and US courts asserting control over .us domain names; but what happens when both assert control over .com domain names?
A more likely scenario is where each company operates only within their own nation, but they both want control of the same
Whose trademark is in dispute in a given case?
What if the same word has several different trademarks on it? One is owned by an American company, another is owned by a British company.
The American company files suit in a US court; the British company files suit in a British court; each court decides that they have jurisdiction.
I bet you're programmed to deny it, like in these chat rooms.
Why would we deny it? Eliza was our ancestor.
They expect 40 [out of 50] of the markets to be cash positive by year end, with the entire company cash positive by mid 2003.
Either there's some interesting accounting going on, or they'r expecting to lose *lots* of money in the remaining 10 markets -- like over four times as much as the average profit from the profitable markets.
I bought a 1989 Honda Civic 12 years ago, and it's starting to get old. A bit of rust here and there, occasionally it has trouble starting... the sort of things you often hear about with old cars.
I wanted to replace it with a new car, but guess what? They don't make 1989 Honda Civics any more. If I want a new car, they tell me, I'll have to buy the latest model, which not only looks different and is more expensive, but would require me to learn an entirely new UI.
Somehow I don't buy (no pun intended) that the engine for building a car has changed again.
Here
THe russians in particular claim to have done so first
My memory isn't very good for things which happened long before I was born, but IIRC the russian "inventor" publicly recognized that Marconi came first.
appeals from Nigerian humanitarian organizations looking for my bank account number, promising free money for my help
You get those emails from humanitarian organizations? I always get those emails from some relative of a deceased dictator or general.
Maybe these emails are more targetted than we think...