Butyrate is the anion/radical of butyric acid. If you attach a hydroxyl radical on the gamma position of that butyrate, you get GHB. Yes, the compounds are somewhat related.
My mom is in her 50's, and for about a decade she wrote COBOL for a book distribution company. So she was barely even middle-aged when this was going on. She definitely didn't start in the 1950's. Some of the guys she worked with were getting up there in years, but definitely not all of them. And she was really at the median -- at least half of the programming force at this company was actually YOUNGER than her. A few were mid-20's.
COBOL is good at hiding in the dark corners of basements and mainframe rooms. It's everywhere, you just don't see it. If you bought something by credit card or checked your bank account balance today, you more than likely caused a few thousand lines of COBOL to execute, probably on more than one system, somewhere.
I'd say a typical C environment is also extremely stable. But C and COBOL both seem to suffer the same sorts of criticisms, so it doesn't surprise me. I guess "modern programmers" just want unstable systems than explode randomly and shift semantics every few years. No thanks.
I'll stick to my "archaic" languages and continue churning out useful code that works properly. If you lack the skills to properly use these languages, that's fine -- you need hand-holding, nothing wrong with that. But don't blame it on the languages.
That worthy aspect would be the particularly application you intend on running. This is also the only relevent benchmark.
But in the real world you don't build a special purpose machine for each job. You end up picking a platform that optimizes the particular thing of importance in your case. So if I understand correctly, your real point is that this new chip does a bad job of making itself useful for any particular task?
So what are you suggesting? That we only optimize the "most important" aspect of a computer system? Please, could you define what that worthy aspect is?
Computing performance is based on many factors. Clock speed is WAY up there on the list of importance. Just because it might not be the most important in an objective sense is no reason to stop trying to improve it.
Jesus, this sounds like just about the most boring thing in the world. I do this every day at work. It's called "my job." Strangely, I already get paid for it.
come to think of it, we already have a name for snippets of genetic code which only exist to damage existing life. We call such a gene-snippet a virus.
Last I understood, the "purpose" of viral DNA was to allow the virus to reproduce itself and continue to exist. Just like every other ORGANISM on the planet. You seem to be trying to put viruses in some special class. We could debate for days about whether a virus is "alive," but there is no question that it is an organism that tends to evolve and reproduce itself.
Assuredly, if the only DNA present in viruses was DNA that was destructive to the host, then viruses would not reproduce and propagate whatsoever and wouldn't even exist.
If there were a possible ice crystal that's stable above the ocean's mean temperature, the random bouncing and quantum fluxuations over 4 billion years would have produced a small crystal at some time, and the oceans would have frozen solid at that point. This hasn't happened, so we have to conclude that no such high-temperature crystalline water form can exist.
But consider the Many-worlds theory of quantum collapse. This theory states that all quantum possibilities exist in parallel as separate universes. Also, consider the anthropic principal, which states that conscious observers can only exist in environments capable of supporting conscious observers (pretty obvious statement). Combine these two ideas and you come to the conclusion that it's possible that in some parallel universe somewhere, the oceans DID freeze up. The reason we see oceans that are not frozen is because we happen to be in one of the parallel universes where it didn't happen. Clearly, in a universe where the oceans froze, humans would not be around to see it, thus, because we ARE here, we see unfrozen oceans.
Of course, Ice-9 is a fictional substance (well, not really, but it doesn't have the properties described in the book), so this isn't really important. But interesting to think about.
At a certain point it becomes more fit for an organism to die. The gene pool and species as a whole evolve, not the individuals.
Maybe it looks this way, but nature certainly isn't "thinking" it. A successful organism is one which passes its genes on to as many offspring as possible. No organism "wants" to die, even those with the brains to think about it.
But a finite life cycle leads to a quick turnover of genetic combinations. This in turn produces a population that is nimble and adaptable to changing environmental pressures. Such a population, as a whole, survives and outcompetes other populations. So, rather tautologically, the only populations which exist in the world are those which are able to continue existing. But this doesn't imply that the death of organisms is any kind of deliberate mechanism. Each organism still strives to outcompete all others and produce as many offspring as possible. Death just isn't in the equation for a single organism.
As humans observing these events we want to ascribe purpose where there most likely is none.
It sounds funny until you realize that legality and ethics are only loosely related. There are plenty of actions I can take which are legal but unethical, and vice versa. Whether a thing is legal is an objective fact -- either the law allows it or it doesn't. In total contrast, what is ethical is (arguably) subjective.
I view it as a trichotomy (inspired by some random writings on the web years ago -- wish I could give credit, but I can't): some things are ILLEGAL, some things are WRONG, and some things are REPULSIVE. None is really equivalent to the others.
Well, if it works for you. We just vote every three or four years. Maybe you could try democracy rather than code duello?
What if the problems lie in a domain where the democratic process cannot reach them? A schizophrenic cannot "think himself sane" and a sufficiently corrupt government cannot be repaired through the political processes of that self-same government.
I'm not saying this is currently the case in the US, but the general argument that flawed government can always be treated by democratic movement within that government isn't valid.
Dude... You have to LOG OUT and THEN post anonymously.
As for why the points aren't given back to you... It prevents the typical abuse where some idiot moderates a stupid post, then waits a few minutes to let other idiot moderators see it. Moderators typically moderate up posts which have already been modded up. So you wait until everyone else pushes your target post up to '5', then you post a comment which undoes your moderation. So you keep your mod points but you can control which posts get modded up. The solution to the stupidity is to not give you back your mod point.
Did your postman tell you that your mail comes on its own plane and its own truck, just for you?
As if it made a difference. In general, it is more fuel efficient to transport heavy objects than light ones. I assume that a media card is shipped in a fairly small box, but still much bigger than the card itself. That space in the transport could have been taken up by a more massive or more important/valuable item.
Just because the price of transportation can be amortized into a large shipment doesn't mean there is no impact. Imagine a city bus system. One fewer rider makes a small, probably unmeasurable difference in fuel efficiency. But 50 fewer riders might allow the city to take an entire bus off the street, which saves a LOT of fuel.
Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.
And burning who knows how much gasoline in order to physically transport an object across the country that weighs something around 2 grams is not irresponsible?
What would be responsible is giving it to an acquaintance or selling it locally on something like Craigslist. Putting it on eBay and shipping it to somebody who may be thousands of miles away is stupid.
It really depends on the platform I think. The concept of prebinding, which is a fairly simple concept, is quite different from its implementation on a given platform. It should be easier and more transparent, and hopefully things will continue to improve in that direction, on ALL platforms which support it.
It's a valid question as to how much it's really worth it to optimize dynamic binding which really only impacts startup performance. But my point really was that we shouldn't give these sorts of things up in trade for allowing BUGGY programs to function more safely.
So, how do you defend against this? Apparently, newer operating systems, including Vista and XP (I think?) have a randomizing function that changes the virtual addresses around so that they are different every time the program is loaded. This helps make this kind of exploit harder - although I suspect there are still ways to do it.
Randomization works by making it harder to guess the correct address -- 99.9% of the time you'll just crash the program and that's the end of your exploit attempts. But how stupid is that? Now you're saying "the worst a hacker can do is crash my system." As if that's not bad? The real solution is to FIX the buggy program so it's not exploitable anymore.
Also, VM randomization negatively impacts performance. Imagine what the dynamic linker does when a program is loaded -- it has to choose where libraries will be located in virtual memory, and execute all the relocation instructions and address fixups. But this doesn't have to be done every time -- if the libraries always load at the same locations, the relocation processing can happen JUST ONCE and then get cached. Program startup receives a huge performance boost. But none of this is possible if the virtual address space is randomized each time.
Ever see that message on Mac OS X when you install an update, that says "Optimizing your volume" or something like that? It's actually PRELINKING dynamic binaries -- exactly what I described above. And it makes your system a lot snappier and in general is a smart thing to do. VM randomization blows all this out of the water.
Why give up good engineering in order to make it harder to exploit bad engineering? Fix the stupid buggy programs and ditch the VM randomization.
From the article (and based on my limited understanding) it relies on the shell and curl being resident in a known memory location? Can someone with deeper OS X internals knowledge explain why the system would always put the shell and curl into the same memory space? This seems to go contrary to what I would expect; that the system allocates memory when a program is executed and that memory can be any from the available pool.
It's called "virtual memory." Where the program and its data physically ARE in RAM doesn't matter, because the system translates addresses so that everything is always at the same VIRTUAL address. Pretty basic stuff really.
Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page
The people who invented the web were scientists. People who understand what plagiarism is. I don't think this kind of thing would have been imaginable to them -- commercial use of the web wasn't even a consideration at the time.
Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU
I know what a referrer is. I use a Firefox plugin to obscure my referrer strings in my requests. Kind of shoots a hole in that defense method. The reality is, there's no easy way to prevent people from pilfering your content like this. I don't like it. But I also do not like a law making it illegal.
Would you still have commented if he got it right?
No. I'm not the PC police. I pointed out that his joke has no factual basis, which makes it even less funny than it already wasn't.
If anything, a politically correct motive just debases the whole issue, reduces it to a matter of propriety and politeness, as if that's all it is.
Your post gave his bigotry more power than ignoring him would have.
Not sure what you mean by this. That all hateful opinions should be met with silence and are best ignored? That we should let hate ferment and breed in the hidden corners of the world until it explodes? I don't want to silence the guy, I'm responding to him.
Too bad she couldn't make her rebuttal a bit more cogent. Jallon was ranting, and Myers' response reads like just more ranting (although this is expected from somebody who isn't a fully mature adult yet, it really does hurt her point). What's worse, she seems to shoot her own mouth off about religion, calling it all "bullshit," as if religion is the only source of homophobic views. She may find that she has shot herself in the foot just as fully as Jallon has.
I consider ridiculing somebody else's perfectly understandable difficulty in speaking English like a native to be bigoted. I guess you could argue that his joke is not ridicule, but that's in the eye of the beholder.
Passive tags (like the one in the passport) can only be read a few inches away and someone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows that the power requirement to maintain an adequate magnetic field increases exponentially with distance.
When are people going to figure out the difference between a POWER LAW and an exponential? The field drops off according to some multipole expansion which is POLYNOMIAL. Exponential dropoff in physics is known as EVANESCENCE. It does not occur in a free field.
Passive tags (like the one in the passport) can only be read a few inches away and someone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows that the power requirement to maintain an adequate magnetic field increases exponentially with distance.
Anybody with a more complete knowledge of physics understands that the field strength is only part of the equation. The rate of change of magnetic flux is also relevant. For RFID this does not apply so much, since the field must oscillate at the resonant frequency or very near to it.
one has to remember that tags operating on the same frequency will tend to interfere with each other, reducing the chance of getting a good read.
All tags operate on essentially the same frequency. The frequency is determined by the geometry of the resonant loop. Trying to operate at any other frequency is going to quickly drain the available power. THIS is the real reason why RFID must be read at a close distance.
Does anyone make a handheld RFID detector? Not something to read the tags, but just to note their presence, kinda like the rudimentary keychain WiFi detectors?
I don't think it would work. The detector would pick up ANY metal object in the vicinity which happened to have an inductive resonance at the RFID frequency. Hell, I bet a big dangly pair of lady's earrings might even register. The only way to tell if what you are detecting is an RFID chip is to try to read the data off of it.
Haha, funny joke. Except in Japanese there is no letter 'L'. The typical speech pattern is to substitute R for L, not the other way around. You can't even get your bigoted jokes right.
Slashdot Mirror
Butyrate is the anion/radical of butyric acid. If you attach a hydroxyl radical on the gamma position of that butyrate, you get GHB. Yes, the compounds are somewhat related.
My mom is in her 50's, and for about a decade she wrote COBOL for a book distribution company. So she was barely even middle-aged when this was going on. She definitely didn't start in the 1950's. Some of the guys she worked with were getting up there in years, but definitely not all of them. And she was really at the median -- at least half of the programming force at this company was actually YOUNGER than her. A few were mid-20's.
COBOL is good at hiding in the dark corners of basements and mainframe rooms. It's everywhere, you just don't see it. If you bought something by credit card or checked your bank account balance today, you more than likely caused a few thousand lines of COBOL to execute, probably on more than one system, somewhere.
If a code has to be re-written (or in this case the own language COBOL) it is time to switch it by another and modern language.
Says Mister "extern void"...
(Nothing against C, I love it, but I enjoy the irony of your comment)
I'd say a typical C environment is also extremely stable. But C and COBOL both seem to suffer the same sorts of criticisms, so it doesn't surprise me. I guess "modern programmers" just want unstable systems than explode randomly and shift semantics every few years. No thanks.
I'll stick to my "archaic" languages and continue churning out useful code that works properly. If you lack the skills to properly use these languages, that's fine -- you need hand-holding, nothing wrong with that. But don't blame it on the languages.
That worthy aspect would be the particularly application you intend on running. This is also the only relevent benchmark.
But in the real world you don't build a special purpose machine for each job. You end up picking a platform that optimizes the particular thing of importance in your case. So if I understand correctly, your real point is that this new chip does a bad job of making itself useful for any particular task?
So what are you suggesting? That we only optimize the "most important" aspect of a computer system? Please, could you define what that worthy aspect is?
Computing performance is based on many factors. Clock speed is WAY up there on the list of importance. Just because it might not be the most important in an objective sense is no reason to stop trying to improve it.
Jesus, this sounds like just about the most boring thing in the world. I do this every day at work. It's called "my job." Strangely, I already get paid for it.
come to think of it, we already have a name for snippets of genetic code which only exist to damage existing life. We call such a gene-snippet a virus.
Last I understood, the "purpose" of viral DNA was to allow the virus to reproduce itself and continue to exist. Just like every other ORGANISM on the planet. You seem to be trying to put viruses in some special class. We could debate for days about whether a virus is "alive," but there is no question that it is an organism that tends to evolve and reproduce itself.
Assuredly, if the only DNA present in viruses was DNA that was destructive to the host, then viruses would not reproduce and propagate whatsoever and wouldn't even exist.
If there were a possible ice crystal that's stable above the ocean's mean temperature, the random bouncing and quantum fluxuations over 4 billion years would have produced a small crystal at some time, and the oceans would have frozen solid at that point. This hasn't happened, so we have to conclude that no such high-temperature crystalline water form can exist.
But consider the Many-worlds theory of quantum collapse. This theory states that all quantum possibilities exist in parallel as separate universes. Also, consider the anthropic principal, which states that conscious observers can only exist in environments capable of supporting conscious observers (pretty obvious statement). Combine these two ideas and you come to the conclusion that it's possible that in some parallel universe somewhere, the oceans DID freeze up. The reason we see oceans that are not frozen is because we happen to be in one of the parallel universes where it didn't happen. Clearly, in a universe where the oceans froze, humans would not be around to see it, thus, because we ARE here, we see unfrozen oceans.
Of course, Ice-9 is a fictional substance (well, not really, but it doesn't have the properties described in the book), so this isn't really important. But interesting to think about.
At a certain point it becomes more fit for an organism to die. The gene pool and species as a whole evolve, not the individuals.
Maybe it looks this way, but nature certainly isn't "thinking" it. A successful organism is one which passes its genes on to as many offspring as possible. No organism "wants" to die, even those with the brains to think about it.
But a finite life cycle leads to a quick turnover of genetic combinations. This in turn produces a population that is nimble and adaptable to changing environmental pressures. Such a population, as a whole, survives and outcompetes other populations. So, rather tautologically, the only populations which exist in the world are those which are able to continue existing. But this doesn't imply that the death of organisms is any kind of deliberate mechanism. Each organism still strives to outcompete all others and produce as many offspring as possible. Death just isn't in the equation for a single organism.
As humans observing these events we want to ascribe purpose where there most likely is none.
It sounds funny until you realize that legality and ethics are only loosely related. There are plenty of actions I can take which are legal but unethical, and vice versa. Whether a thing is legal is an objective fact -- either the law allows it or it doesn't. In total contrast, what is ethical is (arguably) subjective.
I view it as a trichotomy (inspired by some random writings on the web years ago -- wish I could give credit, but I can't): some things are ILLEGAL, some things are WRONG, and some things are REPULSIVE. None is really equivalent to the others.
Well, if it works for you. We just vote every three or four years. Maybe you could try democracy rather than code duello?
What if the problems lie in a domain where the democratic process cannot reach them? A schizophrenic cannot "think himself sane" and a sufficiently corrupt government cannot be repaired through the political processes of that self-same government.
I'm not saying this is currently the case in the US, but the general argument that flawed government can always be treated by democratic movement within that government isn't valid.
Dude... You have to LOG OUT and THEN post anonymously.
As for why the points aren't given back to you... It prevents the typical abuse where some idiot moderates a stupid post, then waits a few minutes to let other idiot moderators see it. Moderators typically moderate up posts which have already been modded up. So you wait until everyone else pushes your target post up to '5', then you post a comment which undoes your moderation. So you keep your mod points but you can control which posts get modded up. The solution to the stupidity is to not give you back your mod point.
Did your postman tell you that your mail comes on its own plane and its own truck, just for you?
As if it made a difference. In general, it is more fuel efficient to transport heavy objects than light ones. I assume that a media card is shipped in a fairly small box, but still much bigger than the card itself. That space in the transport could have been taken up by a more massive or more important/valuable item.
Just because the price of transportation can be amortized into a large shipment doesn't mean there is no impact. Imagine a city bus system. One fewer rider makes a small, probably unmeasurable difference in fuel efficiency. But 50 fewer riders might allow the city to take an entire bus off the street, which saves a LOT of fuel.
Throwing away or destroying manufactured items when they are working and reusable is irresponsible, because it does not attempt to minimize environmental impact.
And burning who knows how much gasoline in order to physically transport an object across the country that weighs something around 2 grams is not irresponsible?
What would be responsible is giving it to an acquaintance or selling it locally on something like Craigslist. Putting it on eBay and shipping it to somebody who may be thousands of miles away is stupid.
It really depends on the platform I think. The concept of prebinding, which is a fairly simple concept, is quite different from its implementation on a given platform. It should be easier and more transparent, and hopefully things will continue to improve in that direction, on ALL platforms which support it.
It's a valid question as to how much it's really worth it to optimize dynamic binding which really only impacts startup performance. But my point really was that we shouldn't give these sorts of things up in trade for allowing BUGGY programs to function more safely.
So, how do you defend against this? Apparently, newer operating systems, including Vista and XP (I think?) have a randomizing function that changes the virtual addresses around so that they are different every time the program is loaded. This helps make this kind of exploit harder - although I suspect there are still ways to do it.
Randomization works by making it harder to guess the correct address -- 99.9% of the time you'll just crash the program and that's the end of your exploit attempts. But how stupid is that? Now you're saying "the worst a hacker can do is crash my system." As if that's not bad? The real solution is to FIX the buggy program so it's not exploitable anymore.
Also, VM randomization negatively impacts performance. Imagine what the dynamic linker does when a program is loaded -- it has to choose where libraries will be located in virtual memory, and execute all the relocation instructions and address fixups. But this doesn't have to be done every time -- if the libraries always load at the same locations, the relocation processing can happen JUST ONCE and then get cached. Program startup receives a huge performance boost. But none of this is possible if the virtual address space is randomized each time.
Ever see that message on Mac OS X when you install an update, that says "Optimizing your volume" or something like that? It's actually PRELINKING dynamic binaries -- exactly what I described above. And it makes your system a lot snappier and in general is a smart thing to do. VM randomization blows all this out of the water.
Why give up good engineering in order to make it harder to exploit bad engineering? Fix the stupid buggy programs and ditch the VM randomization.
From the article (and based on my limited understanding) it relies on the shell and curl being resident in a known memory location? Can someone with deeper OS X internals knowledge explain why the system would always put the shell and curl into the same memory space? This seems to go contrary to what I would expect; that the system allocates memory when a program is executed and that memory can be any from the available pool.
It's called "virtual memory." Where the program and its data physically ARE in RAM doesn't matter, because the system translates addresses so that everything is always at the same VIRTUAL address. Pretty basic stuff really.
Well, actually, (A) the protocol was designed with that sort of thing in mind -- specifically, including other peoples' scientific illustrations in your own web page
The people who invented the web were scientists. People who understand what plagiarism is. I don't think this kind of thing would have been imaginable to them -- commercial use of the web wasn't even a consideration at the time.
Walmart has an easy way of preventing you from doing that. That easy way is called the "referrer" tag: when you ask for a piece of data, your browser TELLS WALMART WHO SENT YOU
I know what a referrer is. I use a Firefox plugin to obscure my referrer strings in my requests. Kind of shoots a hole in that defense method. The reality is, there's no easy way to prevent people from pilfering your content like this. I don't like it. But I also do not like a law making it illegal.
Would you still have commented if he got it right?
No. I'm not the PC police. I pointed out that his joke has no factual basis, which makes it even less funny than it already wasn't.
If anything, a politically correct motive just debases the whole issue, reduces it to a matter of propriety and politeness, as if that's all it is.
Your post gave his bigotry more power than ignoring him would have.
Not sure what you mean by this. That all hateful opinions should be met with silence and are best ignored? That we should let hate ferment and breed in the hidden corners of the world until it explodes? I don't want to silence the guy, I'm responding to him.
Too bad she couldn't make her rebuttal a bit more cogent. Jallon was ranting, and Myers' response reads like just more ranting (although this is expected from somebody who isn't a fully mature adult yet, it really does hurt her point). What's worse, she seems to shoot her own mouth off about religion, calling it all "bullshit," as if religion is the only source of homophobic views. She may find that she has shot herself in the foot just as fully as Jallon has.
'bigoted'? How so?
I consider ridiculing somebody else's perfectly understandable difficulty in speaking English like a native to be bigoted. I guess you could argue that his joke is not ridicule, but that's in the eye of the beholder.
Passive tags (like the one in the passport) can only be read a few inches away and someone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows that the power requirement to maintain an adequate magnetic field increases exponentially with distance.
When are people going to figure out the difference between a POWER LAW and an exponential? The field drops off according to some multipole expansion which is POLYNOMIAL. Exponential dropoff in physics is known as EVANESCENCE. It does not occur in a free field.
Passive tags (like the one in the passport) can only be read a few inches away and someone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows that the power requirement to maintain an adequate magnetic field increases exponentially with distance.
Anybody with a more complete knowledge of physics understands that the field strength is only part of the equation. The rate of change of magnetic flux is also relevant. For RFID this does not apply so much, since the field must oscillate at the resonant frequency or very near to it.
one has to remember that tags operating on the same frequency will tend to interfere with each other, reducing the chance of getting a good read.
All tags operate on essentially the same frequency. The frequency is determined by the geometry of the resonant loop. Trying to operate at any other frequency is going to quickly drain the available power. THIS is the real reason why RFID must be read at a close distance.
Does anyone make a handheld RFID detector? Not something to read the tags, but just to note their presence, kinda like the rudimentary keychain WiFi detectors?
I don't think it would work. The detector would pick up ANY metal object in the vicinity which happened to have an inductive resonance at the RFID frequency. Hell, I bet a big dangly pair of lady's earrings might even register. The only way to tell if what you are detecting is an RFID chip is to try to read the data off of it.
Haha, funny joke. Except in Japanese there is no letter 'L'. The typical speech pattern is to substitute R for L, not the other way around. You can't even get your bigoted jokes right.