There are many things that seem perfectly reasonable in high-level languages that turn out to be a really bad idea once you learn what's going on in the hardware.
Having a basic understanding of the hardware (including the cache) doesn't require understanding of the assembly language itself. All modern CPUs share certain characteristics like finite cache. I have no knowledge of G5 assembly language for instance, but I can still write code that works well with the cache. (In fact, the code I develop commercially is for fast 2D imaging and rendering and cache coherence is an ever-present concern -- still, I never have to delve into assembly language.)
Basically, the AC's script uses a superfluous step to expand the file name list. Instead of
for i in `ls *.jpg`
He could have just used:
for i in *.jpg
As some others have pointed out, running ls in a subshell gets around the problem of what happens if there are no JPG files in the directory, but it also has its own problems, specifically when there are file names present which contain spaces.
Another common goof (harmless, but still superfluous) is to type some complex, piped command which begins with an invocation of 'cat'. For instance:
That behavior can be modified with the "nullglob" setting (in bash, at least). I prefer wildcards to always expand, even if the expansion is empty, for exactly this reason.
At the same time, I couldn't give a rat's ass. Leave your car unlocked, get your radio stolen, see me cry 0 tears.
I'm glad to see cynicism alive and well. So criminals can do no wrong, because it is WE who have failed to protect ourselves? I have, in fact, left my car unlocked and had my radio stolen from it. The idiot who did it is a punk who will receive a particularly bad beating if I ever find him. Could I have prevented the theft? Yes. Was I AT FAULT? No.
Why should you care? I don't know... Maybe because there are people in the world who do harm against others? Where does your argument stop? Do you care about date-rape victims who were dressed provocatively?
In case you get shot walking your dog next week: I don't give a shit. You should have been wearing your bullet-proof vest.
Customers everywhere scratch their heads and wonder why customer service on nearly every level for nearly every industry is absolutely abysmal. Well look no further, there is no driver anywhere in the corprate world that says they need to care.
That's the customers' fault. If customer service was really an important factor, then customers would choose which companies to do business with based on their service, and those companies with poor service would do poorly. A company's money does not appear magically from the air, it comes from the customers.
There's really no problem here at all. Customers are saying, loud and clear, that service doesn't matter. Corporations respond, quite rationally, by not devoting resources to good service. All is as it should be.
If you don't like it, start convincing the millions of consumers that service is something they should care about. Good luck.
So get a biodiesel reactor system, like my friend just did, and start making your own. The upfront costs are moderate (a few grand to start with, about equivalent to the price hike when buying a hybrid vehicle), and you can sell your excess fuel to make your money back over time.
Three days ago I went out to his place and helped him do a batch. 40 gallons at once, and it only took an hour and a half. If he did it continuously he could make hundreds of gallons per day. The oil is readily available from a recycling center nearby.
I'm actually pretty damn excited about it. Why depend on the government or corporations when you can just do the procedure yourself?
HDMI, currently, is basically just a different connector for DVI. At home I use a DVI-to-HDMI cable to plug my Linux box into my LCD screen. No problems.
It's the hardware devices which use ENCRYPTED HDMI that you have to look out for. But there is nothing inherently bad about HDMI itself. Have no fear, buy the HDMI interface. You can still use DVI with it just fine.
The word "resolution" is seriously abused. Resolution really means DPI (dots per inch). Although the TOTAL AREA of the reduced image has 1/4 as many pixels, the resolution in terms of DPI is HALF, not one quarter. They're chopping the resolution in HALF.
Get real. According to this logic, anytime anybody benefits from something you've done, you're "working for them for free." I'm not surprised to see that the "gimme gimme gimme" mentality of GPL proponents remains intact.
My reason if I were them would be...
Apple would use it to increase market share, use my work to make tons of cash, and then not give anything back.
So you're saying, you're a greedy bastard. You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?
This would be bothersome to someone who picked the GPL, because obviously, they would have picked it because they believe this knowlege belongs to mankind, not some rich individual (jobs?).
"This knowledge belongs to mankind." That's great. Now you're making teary-eyed philosophical statements about software which... reads and writes Microsoft's proprietary filesystem. Do you have any sense of proportionality?
They don't have the balls to just come out and say "Yes, we banned Allah because we were afraid of terrorists blowing up our office." This line about the word being used abusively is a load of horse shit. Last I checked Jesus Christ was not a banned term. And we all know that "Jesus Christ" is never used as an expletive or in an offensive way. Whatever.
Now they've realized the idiocy of what they did, and again, rather than admit "Wow, we didn't realize how many words contain the letters 'allah'" they put out some garbage about how "Allah is no longer being used abusively on our sites."
The problem pointed out by other Linux-NTFS developers is that the APL is not GPL compatible, and any changes made by Apple to the driver will be unusable in Linux.
This is where I part ways with a lot of open source folks. What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?
Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not? Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS? Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out? And anyway, why would a developer in Apple's position start making wanton changes to the code when they already know that it works? That's the whole point of using it (instead of writing from scratch) in the first place.
I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery. Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness. You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules. And this is said by those who purportedly oppose software patents and intellectual property.
If you've actually got proof that there's a backdoor in PGP, then prove it. I think you're full of shit.
I was in the front row at Phil Zimmerman's presentation at Defcon several years ago. Somebody in the audience asked whether he had ever been asked to insert a backdoor into PGP, and whether he had done so.
Zimmerman immediately became irate, apparently taking the question as a personal attack. He said that thousands of people depend on the security of PGP, including dissident groups and people fighting for human rights throughout the world. People who would be, you know, executed if certain things were discovered. The idea that he might, for any amount of money or in exchange for anything else, insert a backdoor into PGP was morally repugnant to him, and he stormed off the stage at the end of the presentation in disgust.
Nevermind the fact that any back door in PGP would involve changes to the mathematics which would be noticed and questioned almost immediately by thousands of people.
A real antenna is not a point radiator. Furthermore, on the surface of the earth there are many things for the signal to interact with, which weaken it. So any real radio signal will drop off faster than inverse square, and possibly much faster depending on the interactions with the environment.
This is stuff you should know after learning, you know... PHYSICS.
That's what was cool about the MLX tool from Compute!'s Gazette (for Commodore 64). Each 16 byte (or was it 8 byte) line had a CRC code at the end and the program would BZZZT you if you typed in a byte incorrectly.
Typing in 13k of machine code is pretty tedious but I always enjoyed running the programs after entering them in.
Sure! It's great, but... let's say RFID takes over and UPC codes (and other barcodes) are gone within 5 years.
Yeah, but suppose RFID is taken over by... You could follow that argument a long ways. All a barcode requires is paper and ink (hell, you could impact print it on a sheet of soft metal for better longevity) and it can be decoded by hand if necessary.
He was the CEO. What is the ratio of CEO salary to worker salary (50:1?)? He was a highly-paid corporate executive who should be setting an example
To be fair to the guy, the resume was from over a decade ago when he got a job doing sales for Radio Shack. So he made the lie ten years ago, maybe when he was younger and dumber, and probably had totally forgotten about it by now. No sane person would deliberately lie on a resume knowing it would be used as documentation to offer him a position as CEO...
Soemtimes you don't check because you don't want to run the risk of finding something.
For example, in the software world, if you suspect that something you are doing violates a patent somewhere, it's a bad move to actually go check the patent office. Better to work in the dark. If you are, in fact, in violation of the patent, the penalties are much more severe if you knew beforehand that you were in violation. On the other hand, if you do not check, you can claim ignorance and maybe nobody will even find out.
Maybe Radio Shack thought that the value this CEO could bring outweighed any discrepencies on his resume, and so they didn't verify. Honestly, I think the idea of using "resumes" at the corporate CEO level is kind of silly anyway. If somebody is a serious candidate for CEO of Radio Shack, does his undergraduate degree (or lack thereof) really matter?
Nice idea but boiling water (100C/212F) won't kill most bacteria in 5 minutes.
Actually, most bacteria are killed within seconds at any temperature above 160 degrees F. However, bacterial spores (such as those from the botulism organism clostridium botulinum) can survive boiling temperatures and are not easily killed by boiling alone. It is these heat-resistant spores that continue to make boiled water unsafe.
Once it's on good quality paper, you know you'll be able to OCR it someday. Whether it's tomorrow or 50 years from now, I think we can rest assured there'll still be paper - and therefore scanners.
Actually, I'd print two versions for paper archiving -- one human readable, and the other in some sort of error-correcting barcode format. That way you don't need OCR to get the code back into digital form, just a barcode scanner, which is much more reliable.
STD being lethal is a much more modern thing [Yes syphilis does kill and it's been around for awhile] but I just don't see STD's being pervasive enough for this to occur.
Note that I said I believe this is a social meme, not an evolved trait. STDs do not have to be lethal to be undesirable. Perhaps ancient societies observed that monogamy seemed to reduce the occurrence of these diseases, and therefore changed their social norms to favor monogamy.
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Having a basic understanding of the hardware (including the cache) doesn't require understanding of the assembly language itself. All modern CPUs share certain characteristics like finite cache. I have no knowledge of G5 assembly language for instance, but I can still write code that works well with the cache. (In fact, the code I develop commercially is for fast 2D imaging and rendering and cache coherence is an ever-present concern -- still, I never have to delve into assembly language.)
for i in `ls *.jpg`
He could have just used:
for i in *.jpg
As some others have pointed out, running ls in a subshell gets around the problem of what happens if there are no JPG files in the directory, but it also has its own problems, specifically when there are file names present which contain spaces.
Another common goof (harmless, but still superfluous) is to type some complex, piped command which begins with an invocation of 'cat'. For instance:
cat foo.txt | doohickey
Can always be written as:
doohickey < foo.txt
That behavior can be modified with the "nullglob" setting (in bash, at least). I prefer wildcards to always expand, even if the expansion is empty, for exactly this reason.
What a long, strained, and ultimately pointless defense of an obvious GOOF. Congratulations, you've won the weekly Overthinking Award.
Am I the only person who laughed out loud?
Is it just me, or did you just describe something as "brighter and darker?" Could you rephrase that please, using words that are shorter and longer?
I'm glad to see cynicism alive and well. So criminals can do no wrong, because it is WE who have failed to protect ourselves? I have, in fact, left my car unlocked and had my radio stolen from it. The idiot who did it is a punk who will receive a particularly bad beating if I ever find him. Could I have prevented the theft? Yes. Was I AT FAULT? No.
Why should you care? I don't know... Maybe because there are people in the world who do harm against others? Where does your argument stop? Do you care about date-rape victims who were dressed provocatively?
In case you get shot walking your dog next week: I don't give a shit. You should have been wearing your bullet-proof vest.
That's the customers' fault. If customer service was really an important factor, then customers would choose which companies to do business with based on their service, and those companies with poor service would do poorly. A company's money does not appear magically from the air, it comes from the customers.
There's really no problem here at all. Customers are saying, loud and clear, that service doesn't matter. Corporations respond, quite rationally, by not devoting resources to good service. All is as it should be.
If you don't like it, start convincing the millions of consumers that service is something they should care about. Good luck.
Three days ago I went out to his place and helped him do a batch. 40 gallons at once, and it only took an hour and a half. If he did it continuously he could make hundreds of gallons per day. The oil is readily available from a recycling center nearby.
I'm actually pretty damn excited about it. Why depend on the government or corporations when you can just do the procedure yourself?
If you go to Circuit Ripoff, yes, they're like $130. Look on Ebay. $10 for a 6 footer.
It's the hardware devices which use ENCRYPTED HDMI that you have to look out for. But there is nothing inherently bad about HDMI itself. Have no fear, buy the HDMI interface. You can still use DVI with it just fine.
It still sucks, though.
Get real. According to this logic, anytime anybody benefits from something you've done, you're "working for them for free." I'm not surprised to see that the "gimme gimme gimme" mentality of GPL proponents remains intact.
So you're saying, you're a greedy bastard. You don't want to aid anybody else around you unless they give you something in return. Is that it?
This would be bothersome to someone who picked the GPL, because obviously, they would have picked it because they believe this knowlege belongs to mankind, not some rich individual (jobs?).
"This knowledge belongs to mankind." That's great. Now you're making teary-eyed philosophical statements about software which... reads and writes Microsoft's proprietary filesystem. Do you have any sense of proportionality?
Now they've realized the idiocy of what they did, and again, rather than admit "Wow, we didn't realize how many words contain the letters 'allah'" they put out some garbage about how "Allah is no longer being used abusively on our sites."
This is where I part ways with a lot of open source folks. What exactly does it HURT to let Apple use this code? The code is for reading/writing NTFS, a specification which isn't officially available anyway and Apple has no control over. There is no risk of "embrace and extend" here. So what's the motivation for denying them?
Who cares whether Apple gives you back their changes or not? Could they actually make a significant improvement to Linux-NTFS? Are the Linux-NTFS developers admitting that Apple can do things that they themselves are too dumb to figure out? And anyway, why would a developer in Apple's position start making wanton changes to the code when they already know that it works? That's the whole point of using it (instead of writing from scratch) in the first place.
I'm not saying this as an Apple fan-boy, this is a free software issue. How can software truly be free (as in speech) when you place these sorts of restrictions on people who want to use it? Make whatever philosophical and ethical arguments you wish -- it's just wankery. Ultimately it boils down to pure selfishness. You don't want anybody to play your game unless they play by your rules. And this is said by those who purportedly oppose software patents and intellectual property.
Feh. Long live the BSD license.
I was in the front row at Phil Zimmerman's presentation at Defcon several years ago. Somebody in the audience asked whether he had ever been asked to insert a backdoor into PGP, and whether he had done so. Zimmerman immediately became irate, apparently taking the question as a personal attack. He said that thousands of people depend on the security of PGP, including dissident groups and people fighting for human rights throughout the world. People who would be, you know, executed if certain things were discovered. The idea that he might, for any amount of money or in exchange for anything else, insert a backdoor into PGP was morally repugnant to him, and he stormed off the stage at the end of the presentation in disgust.
Nevermind the fact that any back door in PGP would involve changes to the mathematics which would be noticed and questioned almost immediately by thousands of people.
Yes, the GP poster is full of shit.
This is stuff you should know after learning, you know... PHYSICS.
Typing in 13k of machine code is pretty tedious but I always enjoyed running the programs after entering them in.
Yeah, but suppose RFID is taken over by... You could follow that argument a long ways. All a barcode requires is paper and ink (hell, you could impact print it on a sheet of soft metal for better longevity) and it can be decoded by hand if necessary.
To be fair to the guy, the resume was from over a decade ago when he got a job doing sales for Radio Shack. So he made the lie ten years ago, maybe when he was younger and dumber, and probably had totally forgotten about it by now. No sane person would deliberately lie on a resume knowing it would be used as documentation to offer him a position as CEO...
For example, in the software world, if you suspect that something you are doing violates a patent somewhere, it's a bad move to actually go check the patent office. Better to work in the dark. If you are, in fact, in violation of the patent, the penalties are much more severe if you knew beforehand that you were in violation. On the other hand, if you do not check, you can claim ignorance and maybe nobody will even find out.
Maybe Radio Shack thought that the value this CEO could bring outweighed any discrepencies on his resume, and so they didn't verify. Honestly, I think the idea of using "resumes" at the corporate CEO level is kind of silly anyway. If somebody is a serious candidate for CEO of Radio Shack, does his undergraduate degree (or lack thereof) really matter?
Actually, most bacteria are killed within seconds at any temperature above 160 degrees F. However, bacterial spores (such as those from the botulism organism clostridium botulinum) can survive boiling temperatures and are not easily killed by boiling alone. It is these heat-resistant spores that continue to make boiled water unsafe.
Actually, I'd print two versions for paper archiving -- one human readable, and the other in some sort of error-correcting barcode format. That way you don't need OCR to get the code back into digital form, just a barcode scanner, which is much more reliable.
Note that I said I believe this is a social meme, not an evolved trait. STDs do not have to be lethal to be undesirable. Perhaps ancient societies observed that monogamy seemed to reduce the occurrence of these diseases, and therefore changed their social norms to favor monogamy.
I'm not an expert, just putting out my ideas.