But is pear:db standard PHP? I thought there was this thing called PDO?
It annoys me that PHP is a newer language but the devs did not learn from the mistakes of the older languages.
PHP seems to be a language that makes it HARD to do the right thing, and easy to do the "nearly-right" (AKA wrong) thing - addslashes, magic quotes.
I have to deal with tons of PHP code written the wrong way (by someone else), because at that point in time there was no real good right way. Even now, it doesn't seem like the official way is to use PEAR.
Can you point me to somewhere that will make protocol and API/module interface design more formalized and math-ish?
For me most of the common hard software problems aren't to do with finding the best algorithms. They are more to do with architecture and design.
Because if the problem is the "wrong" algorithm you can usually easily change the algorithm to match. They are "small picture stuff". Usually just a google search or two away.
But if the problem is the wrong architecture, it is hard. Changing the design, interfaces or protocols often involves a LOT more work. Same goes for changing the database schema - you may have to rewrite tons of code.
It's trivial for a novice to make software that is wrong in so many ways, while using the best possible algorithms;).
So any formalized way of getting it right from the start?
Worse: how about determining what is the best possible compatible architecture for an old wrong architecture and the migration plan? Quite subjective what "best" is isn't it?
Is TCP/IP worse or better than the OSI protocol stuff? IPX? Any math for that?
Lastly while playing a bunch of notes is very much like math, coming up with a great symphony that an orchestra made up of real people can play starts to look a fair bit less like math.
Nah just post the vulnerabilities immediately on some high-profile public site/list.
Whether OSS or non OSS I don't see the big deal about not giving any forewarning. Seems most people are used to running unpatched software MONTHS (or even longer) after patches are released anyway.
If companies don't like that, I believe a Mr Guninski at one time was paid to report Netscape problems to Netscape instead of to Bugtraq.
Don't release exploits of course, or test any on systems that aren't yours.
When I last checked palladium was USD338 per ounce.
If the palladium required costs more than the hydrogen it carries then you have one of the following problems:
a) People paying for the hydrogen at the fuel station, but not returning the palladium. b) People not being able to pay for both the hydrogen and the palladium and thus not using your fancy new fuel.
If it turns out you can squeeze so much hydrogen into your palladium you might end up replicating the cold fusion thing by accident.;).
About the hotel thingy. If the software gives the private IPs and mac-addresses then that's good enough in many places to figure out which room/area that laptop is in.
Of course if it's WiFi the area could be a bit big.
Y'know, I think part of the reason why the nordic countries are the way they are nowadays is that the more violent and troublesome genes went elsewhere (like Britain etc) in the form of "vikings", leaving the more reasonable bunch at home...
Anyway, I'm not a US citizen but the US has similar laws. It's just that everything appears to "endanger national security" nowadays;).
And given the polarizing nature of the.xxx TLD, such a query could in theory provide qualitatively better results, than a similar query without the site:.xxx
The people who don't want to see porn that are being forced to see porn should take it up with the authorities in charge of preventing unauthorized modification to computer systems (I don't see why they should spend so much effort trying to extradite that UK guy to the US, they should go round up all the trojan and spyware people who have broken computer crime laws in practically every country with a computer crime law).
It's more probably that the spyware and trojans cause the little innocent kiddies to see porn (the not-so-innocent kiddies will find it themselves, and I doubt anything will stop them[1]).
[1] I'm not a parent but kids not smart enough to bypass filtering software shouldn't be allowed to see porn;).
Perhaps parents should gradually increase the technical barriers to seeing porn as a part of training their children. That way kids could learn more and more about networking, transparent proxying, bypassing firewalls etc. sex being one of the significant motivators.
And in the future when the kids inherit a Gov like the current Chinese Gov (or the future US Gov?) they might stand a better chance of survival.
Then again, maybe they should be brought up to just consume, produce and conform, much like egg laying chickens.
I wasn't affected by McAfee either, but I sure won't recommend McAfee to anyone.
The fact is that McAfee allowed that to happen. For something like that to pass their internal (nonexistent?) testing procedures means their processes are really _crap_.
Sure most companies have crap processes, but when it comes to mass deletion of files crap, it's time to walk away and not look back (unless you're going to sue them).
A few other AV companies also have had similar problems: Sophos had a false positive for Mac OSX system files and seems Trend was quarantining all emails containing the letter P at one point;).
And Norton is pretty crap too: the email scanner used to crash pretty often - to me crashing indicates poor quality software - probably has buffer overflows etc. Such problems are not acceptable in AV software since they usually run with higher privileges.
I installed AVG for a few of my relatives because its free, and I don't see it as being much worse than McAfee or Norton (heck seems a lot less of a resource hog than those two). It's not that great, but oh well... If you are going to get crap, its better not to have to pay for it AND not get any compensation when they screw up.
Hmmm, why don't you go swallow a tapeworm egg or something;).
Many parasites would have had many generations of "fine tuning" in weakening the host's immune system (and possibly actively adjusting it). Too much the host dies and so does the parasite. Too little and the parasite dies.
Uh never forget: the games have to at least be somewhat _enjoyable_.
Enjoyable != super opponent.
If you really have a "smart" computer opponent, it will make many popular genres (FPS, hack and slash RPGs, RTS) much harder. It would be hard for most human players to defeat many computer opponents.
Making a really "smart" game opponent does not need major advances in AI (IMO the AI field has not made significant progress anyway - rather dismal lot). Given the narrow boundaries of most games, game makers can "hard code" in various assumptions, heuristics and behaviours which could be pretty _devastating_ against human or lesser opponents.
It's fairly trivial to make say Doom3 so much harder that you can't get past the first few levels, just by making the enemies behave more intelligently.
Same for those WoW stuff. If the enemies just ran away from you until they figure they have more than enough allies to overcome your group, you'd either be wiped out, or have an enemy-free (but no xp, no loot) journey to wherever you were heading;).
When I see all this talk about game AI, I figure most people have no idea what they really want.
You want a human like opponent? Play against humans. While some human players are so good the average player would be wiped out, usually the average player is more likely to be playing the average player.
What would be interesting is if you had a game system where you could play against/with your pet or something. Dogs etc understand games. Rats learn...
AFAIK, AI researchers have only come up with AIs that are magnitudes less impressive than what you can get from your local petstore.
I mean these people are already so happy to get something about as smart as a cockroach. So far from being able to understanding stuff like "grass is to cow like plankton is to baleen whale" and then gradually deducing/associating other similar relationships. Most seem to be still stuck at the stage of: "Ah! the word grass tends to appear close to where the word cow does- this means they could be related".
Quite pathetic.
A smart AI would be able to guess some possible "absolutes" or new categories based on a number "relative vectors/relationships". A sudden realisation that a bunch of vectors/relationships can be arranged in a more "compact/efficient" way or even suddenly massively linked, could probably be considered a "flash of insight". An "unusual" but "true" arrangement could be what results from "getting the punchline".
(not sure if lower humidity plays a part - but might do due to dehydration?)
Naturally some people are more susceptible than others.
But seems they've done studies comparing the scenarios - with and without the low pressure etc stuff, and in non-air cabin scenarios most of the volunteers are unlikely to have developed DVT, compared to the air cabin scenarios. I'm wondering if the US lawsuit happy people have started suing airlines etc for that;).
e.g. "The World Health Organisation commissioned researchers from Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam to measure blood-clotting in 71 volunteers before, during and after eight-hour flights.
The same individuals were also monitored in similar seats on the ground for eight hours while they watched films and during normal daily life to see whether the only different factor - the relatively low-pressure, low-oxygen content of air on a passenger jet - made a difference.
Prof Frits Rosendaal, of Leiden University, said the findings indicated that flightassociated factors led to increased generation of thrombin - the blood-clotting marker - after air travel."
"Because the software developers are running on the latest and fastest machines"
"therefore don't notice any slowdown when the eye-candy is enabled."
Uh many of the slowdowns are a fixed hundreds of milliseconds. For example: the pause between your cursor hovering over a submenu item and the submenu item displaying. On those GUIs by default no matter how fast your machine is, it will pause say 400 milliseconds before displaying the stuff. Try it yourself on KDE or Windows.
Same for the stupid animations - once the machine is fast enough to play the animations properly - it still will play the entire thing at the preset rate for the preset time. For the poorer designs you actually have to wait for the animations to finish before you can interact meaningfully with the relevant objects involved.
I think it's just sad that after all these decades most of the proposed GUI "advances" are not much better than "interstitial adverts". No imagination? No useful ideas?
The kernel improvements are fine for servers since the GUI is not really used for most servers.
But for desktop users if the GUI incurs a fixed latency on each mouse-click/human interaction, it really starts to add up.
If most people would rather have speed, why are those flashy GUI animations on by default on many popular systems, and why do most people keep them on?
If you want speed, why should you have to wait for HUNDREDS of milliseconds for menus or submenus to be displayed (and its not because the system isn't fast enough to display it immediately).
Just look at the recent silly eyecandy stuff. 40 years after Doug Englebart invented the mouse and tons of other stuff, 20 years after Apple popularized the GUI, 10 years after MS windows spread it, and this is all we get as a GUI improvement?
More eye-candy, and nothing that makes things substantially easier or faster to do things. In fact its probably slower in most cases.
Would a different designed CPU be better for microkernels?
BTW I've always found it weird that in many systems parameters are passed on the same stack that's used to hold return addresses. This is practically mixing code and data - which makes it more vulnerable to security and reliability issues.
Whereas I'm thinking that if there were separate stacks for code and data that would make things more robust (not sure whether performance would be better or slower), however how many modern CPUs have support for that?
Except that most guys want to do the "same stupid thing" BETTER each time and not worse or just the same as before.
And maybe that's partly why there are more guys at the top of most fields than girls.
F1 racing, tennis, golf, dictatorships, brokers, lawyers etc.
I suppose the more "female" behaviour of wanting more friends is probably saner/less foolish. I mean so what if you can drive 70 times round a track faster than anyone else in the world.
BUT somehow this sort of stuff does seem to get them girls... so I dunno...
BTW: the diff between guys and girls: if a guy ever had the compulsion to wash his hands 100 times a day he'd probably go figure out what's he thinks is the best soap to use, the best method for full coverage in the shortest time, and maybe even form a group for likeminded guys to compare notes, have lengthy debates and flamewars etc. Whereas a girl who did that would probably either try to hide it from everyone else, or seek treatment.;)
Slashdot Mirror
But is pear:db standard PHP? I thought there was this thing called PDO?
It annoys me that PHP is a newer language but the devs did not learn from the mistakes of the older languages.
PHP seems to be a language that makes it HARD to do the right thing, and easy to do the "nearly-right" (AKA wrong) thing - addslashes, magic quotes.
I have to deal with tons of PHP code written the wrong way (by someone else), because at that point in time there was no real good right way. Even now, it doesn't seem like the official way is to use PEAR.
Sure and music is math too in a way...
;).
Can you point me to somewhere that will make protocol and API/module interface design more formalized and math-ish?
For me most of the common hard software problems aren't to do with finding the best algorithms. They are more to do with architecture and design.
Because if the problem is the "wrong" algorithm you can usually easily change the algorithm to match. They are "small picture stuff". Usually just a google search or two away.
But if the problem is the wrong architecture, it is hard. Changing the design, interfaces or protocols often involves a LOT more work. Same goes for changing the database schema - you may have to rewrite tons of code.
It's trivial for a novice to make software that is wrong in so many ways, while using the best possible algorithms
So any formalized way of getting it right from the start?
Worse: how about determining what is the best possible compatible architecture for an old wrong architecture and the migration plan? Quite subjective what "best" is isn't it?
Is TCP/IP worse or better than the OSI protocol stuff? IPX? Any math for that?
Lastly while playing a bunch of notes is very much like math, coming up with a great symphony that an orchestra made up of real people can play starts to look a fair bit less like math.
Nah just post the vulnerabilities immediately on some high-profile public site/list.
Whether OSS or non OSS I don't see the big deal about not giving any forewarning. Seems most people are used to running unpatched software MONTHS (or even longer) after patches are released anyway.
If companies don't like that, I believe a Mr Guninski at one time was paid to report Netscape problems to Netscape instead of to Bugtraq.
Don't release exploits of course, or test any on systems that aren't yours.
When I last checked palladium was USD338 per ounce.
;).
If the palladium required costs more than the hydrogen it carries then you have one of the following problems:
a) People paying for the hydrogen at the fuel station, but not returning the palladium.
b) People not being able to pay for both the hydrogen and the palladium and thus not using your fancy new fuel.
If it turns out you can squeeze so much hydrogen into your palladium you might end up replicating the cold fusion thing by accident.
Well he did say "astronomical upfront costs" and "astronomical maintenance costs" didn't he? ;)
I think you need to reread what he said.
He said you can't do fission with hydrogen-1.
About the hotel thingy. If the software gives the private IPs and mac-addresses then that's good enough in many places to figure out which room/area that laptop is in.
Of course if it's WiFi the area could be a bit big.
"Who is the government to tell us to be civil?"
;).
What's wrong with that, if it is just "telling"? I'd be happy if that were the only "flaw" in the US gov.
As for enforcing morals, I think parents should "brainwash" their children properly as early as they can, before MTV and the other big Corps do it
Y'know, I think part of the reason why the nordic countries are the way they are nowadays is that the more violent and troublesome genes went elsewhere (like Britain etc) in the form of "vikings", leaving the more reasonable bunch at home...
;).
Anyway, I'm not a US citizen but the US has similar laws. It's just that everything appears to "endanger national security" nowadays
"I don't think the Democrats have room to talk"
Are the US people stupid or what? Always seeing things as if it's "Pro-Wrestling".
Currently things are getting to be US Gov vs the US citizens. Forget the Republican vs Democrat crap.
You guys are getting screwed by the theatre and you're complaining about the characters in the play.
Doh.
What you do is you subvert the upcoming DRM or other "trusted computing" hardware based cryto stuff.
;).
Basically in addition to working as normal, under some scenarios some stuff thats signed by YOUR special key will be considered valid.
And yeah, the hardware can also run arbitrary stuff as "root"/ring0 or in the recently mentioned hardware/system management x86 mode.
Plenty of ways to do sneaky stuff
The porn providers and consumers sure can define it well enough.
.xxx domain would make it easy for them, just like a .junk-food domain would make it easy for people to find new types of junk-food.
;).
Same goes for "junk-food¨, even if it's not that clearly defined, the people producing and consuming it know what it is.
So a
Whilst junk food is unhealthy, what's wrong with making it easier for people to find new varieties of it. Not quite natural selection, but similar
It makes it easier to search for in google?
.xxx TLD, such a query could in theory provide qualitatively better results, than a similar query without the site:.xxx
;).
From your example, someone could do a search for:
site:.xxx hot lesbians
And given the polarizing nature of the
The people who don't want to see porn that are being forced to see porn should take it up with the authorities in charge of preventing unauthorized modification to computer systems (I don't see why they should spend so much effort trying to extradite that UK guy to the US, they should go round up all the trojan and spyware people who have broken computer crime laws in practically every country with a computer crime law).
It's more probably that the spyware and trojans cause the little innocent kiddies to see porn (the not-so-innocent kiddies will find it themselves, and I doubt anything will stop them[1]).
[1] I'm not a parent but kids not smart enough to bypass filtering software shouldn't be allowed to see porn
Perhaps parents should gradually increase the technical barriers to seeing porn as a part of training their children. That way kids could learn more and more about networking, transparent proxying, bypassing firewalls etc. sex being one of the significant motivators.
And in the future when the kids inherit a Gov like the current Chinese Gov (or the future US Gov?) they might stand a better chance of survival.
Then again, maybe they should be brought up to just consume, produce and conform, much like egg laying chickens.
I wasn't affected by McAfee either, but I sure won't recommend McAfee to anyone.
;).
The fact is that McAfee allowed that to happen. For something like that to pass their internal (nonexistent?) testing procedures means their processes are really _crap_.
Sure most companies have crap processes, but when it comes to mass deletion of files crap, it's time to walk away and not look back (unless you're going to sue them).
A few other AV companies also have had similar problems: Sophos had a false positive for Mac OSX system files and seems Trend was quarantining all emails containing the letter P at one point
And Norton is pretty crap too: the email scanner used to crash pretty often - to me crashing indicates poor quality software - probably has buffer overflows etc. Such problems are not acceptable in AV software since they usually run with higher privileges.
I installed AVG for a few of my relatives because its free, and I don't see it as being much worse than McAfee or Norton (heck seems a lot less of a resource hog than those two). It's not that great, but oh well... If you are going to get crap, its better not to have to pay for it AND not get any compensation when they screw up.
Hmmm, why don't you go swallow a tapeworm egg or something ;).
Many parasites would have had many generations of "fine tuning" in weakening the host's immune system (and possibly actively adjusting it). Too much the host dies and so does the parasite. Too little and the parasite dies.
Uh never forget: the games have to at least be somewhat _enjoyable_.
;).
Enjoyable != super opponent.
If you really have a "smart" computer opponent, it will make many popular genres (FPS, hack and slash RPGs, RTS) much harder. It would be hard for most human players to defeat many computer opponents.
Making a really "smart" game opponent does not need major advances in AI (IMO the AI field has not made significant progress anyway - rather dismal lot). Given the narrow boundaries of most games, game makers can "hard code" in various assumptions, heuristics and behaviours which could be pretty _devastating_ against human or lesser opponents.
It's fairly trivial to make say Doom3 so much harder that you can't get past the first few levels, just by making the enemies behave more intelligently.
Same for those WoW stuff. If the enemies just ran away from you until they figure they have more than enough allies to overcome your group, you'd either be wiped out, or have an enemy-free (but no xp, no loot) journey to wherever you were heading
When I see all this talk about game AI, I figure most people have no idea what they really want.
You want a human like opponent? Play against humans. While some human players are so good the average player would be wiped out, usually the average player is more likely to be playing the average player.
What would be interesting is if you had a game system where you could play against/with your pet or something. Dogs etc understand games. Rats learn...
AFAIK, AI researchers have only come up with AIs that are magnitudes less impressive than what you can get from your local petstore.
I mean these people are already so happy to get something about as smart as a cockroach. So far from being able to understanding stuff like "grass is to cow like plankton is to baleen whale" and then gradually deducing/associating other similar relationships. Most seem to be still stuck at the stage of: "Ah! the word grass tends to appear close to where the word cow does- this means they could be related".
Quite pathetic.
A smart AI would be able to guess some possible "absolutes" or new categories based on a number "relative vectors/relationships". A sudden realisation that a bunch of vectors/relationships can be arranged in a more "compact/efficient" way or even suddenly massively linked, could probably be considered a "flash of insight". An "unusual" but "true" arrangement could be what results from "getting the punchline".
But I'm no AI researcher so what do I know...
It's probably more common in air travel because of the following:
;).
1) low cabin pressure
2) lower oxygen concentrations
(not sure if lower humidity plays a part - but might do due to dehydration?)
Naturally some people are more susceptible than others.
But seems they've done studies comparing the scenarios - with and without the low pressure etc stuff, and in non-air cabin scenarios most of the volunteers are unlikely to have developed DVT, compared to the air cabin scenarios. I'm wondering if the US lawsuit happy people have started suing airlines etc for that
e.g.
"The World Health Organisation commissioned researchers from Leiden University Medical Centre in the Netherlands and the Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam to measure blood-clotting in 71 volunteers before, during and after eight-hour flights.
The same individuals were also monitored in similar seats on the ground for eight hours while they watched films and during normal daily life to see whether the only different factor - the relatively low-pressure, low-oxygen content of air on a passenger jet - made a difference.
Prof Frits Rosendaal, of Leiden University, said the findings indicated that flightassociated factors led to increased generation of thrombin - the blood-clotting marker - after air travel."
"Because the software developers are running on the latest and fastest machines"
"therefore don't notice any slowdown when the eye-candy is enabled."
Uh many of the slowdowns are a fixed hundreds of milliseconds. For example: the pause between your cursor hovering over a submenu item and the submenu item displaying. On those GUIs by default no matter how fast your machine is, it will pause say 400 milliseconds before displaying the stuff. Try it yourself on KDE or Windows.
Same for the stupid animations - once the machine is fast enough to play the animations properly - it still will play the entire thing at the preset rate for the preset time. For the poorer designs you actually have to wait for the animations to finish before you can interact meaningfully with the relevant objects involved.
I think it's just sad that after all these decades most of the proposed GUI "advances" are not much better than "interstitial adverts". No imagination? No useful ideas?
The kernel improvements are fine for servers since the GUI is not really used for most servers.
But for desktop users if the GUI incurs a fixed latency on each mouse-click/human interaction, it really starts to add up.
Just means Apple has outsourced evil to Microsoft?
AFAIK, the problem with Communism is that the official implementation plan encourages violence.
To me that is a major design flaw. Just that alone makes it more likely that the one capable of the greatest violence would end up in power.
Basically it makes it easy for any "trips to the Communism Dream" to be hijacked by dictators.
Be very wary of any belief system that encourages violence.
"Do not hate the companies that use the laws in their favor, hate the government that enforces the laws."
In all countries I know of, the law allows people to be assholes.
BUT someone being an asshole is not a problem with the law, but a problem with that someone.
That said, the leaders of a company hold the greatest responsibility for its behaviour.
If most people would rather have speed, why are those flashy GUI animations on by default on many popular systems, and why do most people keep them on?
If you want speed, why should you have to wait for HUNDREDS of milliseconds for menus or submenus to be displayed (and its not because the system isn't fast enough to display it immediately).
Just look at the recent silly eyecandy stuff. 40 years after Doug Englebart invented the mouse and tons of other stuff, 20 years after Apple popularized the GUI, 10 years after MS windows spread it, and this is all we get as a GUI improvement?
More eye-candy, and nothing that makes things substantially easier or faster to do things. In fact its probably slower in most cases.
Could things be improved if CPUs were different? Special features to make message passing more efficient?
Would a different designed CPU be better for microkernels?
BTW I've always found it weird that in many systems parameters are passed on the same stack that's used to hold return addresses. This is practically mixing code and data - which makes it more vulnerable to security and reliability issues.
Whereas I'm thinking that if there were separate stacks for code and data that would make things more robust (not sure whether performance would be better or slower), however how many modern CPUs have support for that?
Because there is some truth in it.
;)
Except that most guys want to do the "same stupid thing" BETTER each time and not worse or just the same as before.
And maybe that's partly why there are more guys at the top of most fields than girls.
F1 racing, tennis, golf, dictatorships, brokers, lawyers etc.
I suppose the more "female" behaviour of wanting more friends is probably saner/less foolish. I mean so what if you can drive 70 times round a track faster than anyone else in the world.
BUT somehow this sort of stuff does seem to get them girls... so I dunno...
BTW: the diff between guys and girls: if a guy ever had the compulsion to wash his hands 100 times a day he'd probably go figure out what's he thinks is the best soap to use, the best method for full coverage in the shortest time, and maybe even form a group for likeminded guys to compare notes, have lengthy debates and flamewars etc. Whereas a girl who did that would probably either try to hide it from everyone else, or seek treatment.