I'm told that in Germany the road bumps are known as "katzenkopf" or "cat heads"---why they would want to think about the sadistic killing of small animals while they drive on the Autobahn I can only guess...
Part of pro-quality tools for any profession is the fact that they can provide results that regular folks can't get. Maybe 10% better, maybe 100% better, but if you as a consumer want it to look good you will hire a pro who uses pro tools.
If you use consumer-grade tools then the only thing a professional can provide is experience.
Course the other bit is that pro tools are often difficult to use for the novice (what the heck is an "F stop" anyway?). So maybe GIMP is pro-quality after all.
I always wonder why anyone worries about the tiny incremental hit of function calls/vtable lookups in C++. If the application is so speed- or realtime-oriented that you can't afford having the compiler do some work for you, then write it in C...maybe throw in some C++-style patterns (typedef'd void pointers, etc) to help the compiler a bit. If the application requirements aren't that stringent, relax, use GC if you can, run the compiler, and think of England.
If you need to know *exactly* what the compiler will do, you might as well have include the compiler code as part of your project. After all, if someone changes the compiler behavior, or if your compiler doesn't implement the spec perfectly, then you are hosed up.
Let's see...ultra-mechanical rhythms, very repetitive, cookie-monster vocals, no dynamics....I bet death metal would be easy. Plus, if it misidentified a song, who would know?
The facts of the case are established by the pedestrian's death and the coroner's report. The black box is just another witness to the crime, or perhaps secondary evidence. Same as a surveillance camera or skid marks on the pavement.
Now if someone was convicted of a DUI where the only evidence was erratic driving as recorded by the box, you could expect the lawyers to have a vigorous debate over the reliability and admissibility of that evidence. For instance, what is the legal standard for "tamper-proof"?
This article is pretty interesting, but it is built on the assumption that vulnerabilities usually don't have exploits in the wild until the patch comes out. Sometimes that is true (as his examples show), sometimes it is not. The problem is showing the difference.
It is very difficult to establish what new exploits are being used in the wild. With the exception of viruses and worms (which have an analyzable payload), most exploits must be caught in the act to understand what they really are.
So if Company X has a vulnerability, they can: a) hold off on a patch since there is no exploit (as the article suggests), or b) patch right away, since there is an exploit in the wild
Option a saves Company X money....how hard will they look for an exploit?
Sure, you get to debug into fopen()....until it hits CreateFileEx(), which is working with a much longer parameter list that contains a bunch of stuff set elsewhere.
Same deal with (Plauger's) STL, same deal with the (shudder) MFC source, etc. It all stops at Win32, which is often more complex than the upper layer that you are developing on, and the real work gets done below that layer.
This fits in just a little too well with some recent "Ask Slashdot" stories.
"I'm a moron. How can I be less of a moron? Should I not be a moron at all? Or should I be even more moronic?" (bitchslapping ensues, mostly by those too bored to restrain themselves)
Normally I wouldn't quit like that but in this case it made a lot of sense, as they were cancelling my project and trying to blame it on me. So I would have had two weeks of desk-cleaning and humiliation, and I had another job lined up, so why not.
I've never had better friends in the workplace than at Keane, but I've never worked anywhere worse. Something about being persecuted brings people together I guess.
I quit Keane without notice and the HR person saw fit to point out that, by Keane policy, I would never be able to work there again. I almost bit my tongue right off.
The story this is all attached to is about the WTO potentially forcing a relaxation of the current "containment" approach we have to gambling in this country.
We have a similar "containment" approach to alcohol (liquor licenses, age limits) and adult content (zoning laws, age limits, etc.). I don't think any of those are inherently evil, but they all can have obviously negative social effects. So let's keep containing them.
I never said anything about abolishing gambling---that was exactly the point of my post! There is a middle ground here, no reason to overlook it.
Your clever substitution of "drinking" for "gambling" makes your version of my statements...uhhh...exactly as valid as the original was.
My point was not that the "common good" should trump everything else; just as you say, we would be living in a PC police state. What I was getting at (and deleted from my original so as not to blather too much) was that public policy is always a balancing act between individual good and common good.
(Some) libertarians and Ayn Rand-types make it easy; they just deny half the equation (common good), which makes all critical thinking unnecessary. Hardcore fundamentalists and communists have it easy by denying the other half (individual rights).
The rest of us have to look at each issue as it comes and sometimes accept that trying to limit the spread of something (drinking, gambling, voting for Nader) is better than either denying or encouraging it.
Well said. As they say, "NIMBY" ("Not In My Back Yard"). Everyone loves getting stuff for free, and they hate it when someone else gets free stuff on their dime.
I'm not religious and I don't see that more gambling is a good thing. It may be an individual choice to gamble, but if 100% of people chose to gamble heavily we would have massive social disruption. As it is every idiot who blows their nest egg due to a gambling habit is another idiot that you and I get to finance the retirement of via Social Security and Medicare (aka welfare for old folks).
There *is* such a thing as the common good, seperate and distinct from what is good for each individual. Deny this and you can have lots of confident-sounding black and white opinions that would destroy any society you applied them to.
Take it from someone who got on that track only to get off again (after getting my MA in history)...the folks who stick with the low-paying humanities track literally *can't* do anything else.
That might be because they love it so much, or it might be because they have such raging personality defects that they realize tenure is the only way for them to survive. There's a lot of dysfunctional people in academia, and not just cute eccentricity either. Narcissism and backstabbing the likes of which corporate America rarely sees....
"...the likely attitude that Orson Welles might have had...can only be a matter of conjecture."
If the author thinks Welles would have hated it, why doesn't he or she say so?
That's a perfect example of the kind of idiotic innuendo that pervades journalism these days. This article isn't controversial, but the same device---an open-ended statement that implies a viewpoint but won't actually state it---seems to be extremely common in political journalism. Reminds me of the Mindcraft troll.
Like a sparse array? If done right it should only need extra memory for an intermediate hash table. If someone wants a superfast array it might be truly sparse.
Sure, where speed is critical I could see this. But most of the time the apps that I have seen that do this are newbies trying out their CS homework.
Given a choice I try to use the stack wherever possible (but not alloca(); I've been burned). This can increase the image size at runtime and effectively preallocates a bunch of space in a more structured way. But it's not a replacement for truly dynamic allocation.
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I'm told that in Germany the road bumps are known as "katzenkopf" or "cat heads"---why they would want to think about the sadistic killing of small animals while they drive on the Autobahn I can only guess...
From the top of the pass down to the E. Washington flatlands you turned off your engine and coasted, right?
No, because they couldn't justify their fee.
Part of pro-quality tools for any profession is the fact that they can provide results that regular folks can't get. Maybe 10% better, maybe 100% better, but if you as a consumer want it to look good you will hire a pro who uses pro tools.
If you use consumer-grade tools then the only thing a professional can provide is experience.
Course the other bit is that pro tools are often difficult to use for the novice (what the heck is an "F stop" anyway?). So maybe GIMP is pro-quality after all.
Okay, sure...*you* get a pass. :)
I always wonder why anyone worries about the tiny incremental hit of function calls/vtable lookups in C++. If the application is so speed- or realtime-oriented that you can't afford having the compiler do some work for you, then write it in C...maybe throw in some C++-style patterns (typedef'd void pointers, etc) to help the compiler a bit. If the application requirements aren't that stringent, relax, use GC if you can, run the compiler, and think of England.
If you need to know *exactly* what the compiler will do, you might as well have include the compiler code as part of your project. After all, if someone changes the compiler behavior, or if your compiler doesn't implement the spec perfectly, then you are hosed up.
Let's see...ultra-mechanical rhythms, very repetitive, cookie-monster vocals, no dynamics....I bet death metal would be easy. Plus, if it misidentified a song, who would know?
IANAL but...
The facts of the case are established by the pedestrian's death and the coroner's report. The black box is just another witness to the crime, or perhaps secondary evidence. Same as a surveillance camera or skid marks on the pavement.
Now if someone was convicted of a DUI where the only evidence was erratic driving as recorded by the box, you could expect the lawyers to have a vigorous debate over the reliability and admissibility of that evidence. For instance, what is the legal standard for "tamper-proof"?
Love your sig..."if you want to age 20 years in a blink, think conservative!" Does it still apply to liberal 70-year olds?
This article is pretty interesting, but it is built on the assumption that vulnerabilities usually don't have exploits in the wild until the patch comes out. Sometimes that is true (as his examples show), sometimes it is not. The problem is showing the difference.
It is very difficult to establish what new exploits are being used in the wild. With the exception of viruses and worms (which have an analyzable payload), most exploits must be caught in the act to understand what they really are.
So if Company X has a vulnerability, they can:
a) hold off on a patch since there is no exploit (as the article suggests), or
b) patch right away, since there is an exploit in the wild
Option a saves Company X money....how hard will they look for an exploit?
Sure, you get to debug into fopen()....until it hits CreateFileEx(), which is working with a much longer parameter list that contains a bunch of stuff set elsewhere.
Same deal with (Plauger's) STL, same deal with the (shudder) MFC source, etc. It all stops at Win32, which is often more complex than the upper layer that you are developing on, and the real work gets done below that layer.
No, just some of them lately.
Satriani fan?
This fits in just a little too well with some recent "Ask Slashdot" stories.
"I'm a moron. How can I be less of a moron? Should I not be a moron at all? Or should I be even more moronic?" (bitchslapping ensues, mostly by those too bored to restrain themselves)
Normally I wouldn't quit like that but in this case it made a lot of sense, as they were cancelling my project and trying to blame it on me. So I would have had two weeks of desk-cleaning and humiliation, and I had another job lined up, so why not.
I've never had better friends in the workplace than at Keane, but I've never worked anywhere worse. Something about being persecuted brings people together I guess.
I quit Keane without notice and the HR person saw fit to point out that, by Keane policy, I would never be able to work there again. I almost bit my tongue right off.
The story this is all attached to is about the WTO potentially forcing a relaxation of the current "containment" approach we have to gambling in this country.
We have a similar "containment" approach to alcohol (liquor licenses, age limits) and adult content (zoning laws, age limits, etc.). I don't think any of those are inherently evil, but they all can have obviously negative social effects. So let's keep containing them.
I never said anything about abolishing gambling---that was exactly the point of my post! There is a middle ground here, no reason to overlook it.
Your clever substitution of "drinking" for "gambling" makes your version of my statements...uhhh...exactly as valid as the original was.
My point was not that the "common good" should trump everything else; just as you say, we would be living in a PC police state. What I was getting at (and deleted from my original so as not to blather too much) was that public policy is always a balancing act between individual good and common good.
(Some) libertarians and Ayn Rand-types make it easy; they just deny half the equation (common good), which makes all critical thinking unnecessary. Hardcore fundamentalists and communists have it easy by denying the other half (individual rights).
The rest of us have to look at each issue as it comes and sometimes accept that trying to limit the spread of something (drinking, gambling, voting for Nader) is better than either denying or encouraging it.
Well said. As they say, "NIMBY" ("Not In My Back Yard"). Everyone loves getting stuff for free, and they hate it when someone else gets free stuff on their dime.
I'm not religious and I don't see that more gambling is a good thing. It may be an individual choice to gamble, but if 100% of people chose to gamble heavily we would have massive social disruption. As it is every idiot who blows their nest egg due to a gambling habit is another idiot that you and I get to finance the retirement of via Social Security and Medicare (aka welfare for old folks).
There *is* such a thing as the common good, seperate and distinct from what is good for each individual. Deny this and you can have lots of confident-sounding black and white opinions that would destroy any society you applied them to.
Grover (from Sesame Street, natch) does an absolutely killer version of this song...
I fold.
Take it from someone who got on that track only to get off again (after getting my MA in history)...the folks who stick with the low-paying humanities track literally *can't* do anything else.
That might be because they love it so much, or it might be because they have such raging personality defects that they realize tenure is the only way for them to survive. There's a lot of dysfunctional people in academia, and not just cute eccentricity either. Narcissism and backstabbing the likes of which corporate America rarely sees....
And when your boss asks why that line the RFP seems to drive up the cost/exclude the preferred providers, what will your business justification be?
"Ipv6 is cool?"
"...the likely attitude that Orson Welles might have had...can only be a matter of conjecture."
If the author thinks Welles would have hated it, why doesn't he or she say so?
That's a perfect example of the kind of idiotic innuendo that pervades journalism these days. This article isn't controversial, but the same device---an open-ended statement that implies a viewpoint but won't actually state it---seems to be extremely common in political journalism. Reminds me of the Mindcraft troll.
Like a sparse array? If done right it should only need extra memory for an intermediate hash table. If someone wants a superfast array it might be truly sparse.
Sure, where speed is critical I could see this. But most of the time the apps that I have seen that do this are newbies trying out their CS homework.
Given a choice I try to use the stack wherever possible (but not alloca(); I've been burned). This can increase the image size at runtime and effectively preallocates a bunch of space in a more structured way. But it's not a replacement for truly dynamic allocation.