If you perform any of the following operations after backing up, copyright-protected video files in the backup data may not restore correctly.
- Format the hard disk
- Restore the PS3(tm) system
- Move copyright-protected video
- Download copyright-protected video
- Play copyright-protected video that has a time restriction for the first time
I take that to mean that swapping hard drives or restoring the PS3 after a catastrophic failure does prevent access to the movies. It's also quite clear that if you change PS3s, you can't restore it, period.
In some cases, you may not be able to use the Backup Utility feature to back up or restore the system correctly. It is recommended that you always copy or move important data to storage media in order to independently back up your data.
Great advice, Sony, except for the part where the DRM doesn't allow you to. This also covers "certain save files?!"
The DRM has made me certain I will not be buying this game.
No kidding. I'm going to skip Spore due to the DRM.
Its no loss anyway, there are plenty of games out there, and if the concept is good, someone else will do something similar soon enough.
And this, right here, is really the heart of the matter. It's a freaking game. Entertainment. It's not a necessity. I don't need Spore. I may want to play it, but if they make it painful to use, then forget it. It's not like I really lose anything. I'll just do something else.
When will publishers realize that? It's not like we have to play their game. It's just entertainment, and there are a million other options out there. I'm not going to blow money on something just to be treated like a criminal.
I can understand why BugMeNot would not list Slashdot and (to an extent) Facebook.
You don't need a user account to browse Slashdot or even post on Slashdot. There's only two reasons you'd create an account on Slashdot: to post as a non-AC, and to customize the various tweakable bits.
Facebook I can sort of see. Creating an anonymous profile kind of defeats the purpose and has the potential to be abused by spammers. (Not that forbidding BugMeNot accounts really solves that last one.)
Facebook is an interesting case, though. As much as I can understand why BugMeNot shouldn't create random Facebook accounts, the fact that you can't view any of the content without creating an account is exactly what BugMeNot was created to work around.
Whatever. It's not like it's important: it's Facebook, after all.:)
That's the roaming application directory, versus the local application data directory. They're different, although the difference only matters if you're using roaming profiles.
On XP it's in the %UserProfile% directory called "Local Settings". I can't remember where it is in Vista because they've completely rearranged the profile directory. (On the upside, the profile directory is now much more like $HOME.)
But there's no corresponding %LOCALAPPDATA% (at least on my machine) and, since they're hidden by default, trying to describe where they are is somewhat annoying...
You'll never guess where it did install it, either.
In Program Files? Of course not. It installs into your profile. Thankfully your local profile, so if you're actually using roaming profiles you won't be transferring the entire browser back and forth.
I suppose that's good news if you want to be able to install it locally, but I'd like to have been given the option of at least choosing between "just me" and "all users."
On that note, Google Update is hidden away in the same location, so if you want to uninstall it, you'll need to go there, since it doesn't uninstall with Google Chrome and doesn't contain an uninstaller.
Under XP that's something like C:\Documents and Settings\%User%\Local Settings\Application Data; under Vista it's something different. XP at least doesn't appear to set an environment variable pointing to the local application data directory, but you can easily get the path using SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA, NULL, 0, szPath)...
The missing copyright notice and lack of link to the license, on the other hand, would seem to be in violation...
They're at the end of the video, but my reading of the license and the simplified text seems to suggest they should also be in the page embedding the video, and they're not.
Then again, on rereading the license, I'm not completely sure that's true. Leaving the notices intact in the video may be OK.
In any case, I found this term in the actual license, section somewhere between 3 and 4 but not one of the lettered subsections:
The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Derivative Works.
So, yes, transcoding is explicitly allowed by the license in specific terms.
According to the simplified terms:
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
So I think that means that the YouTube description should include a link to the license. Maybe. I have no idea, I'm not a lawyer.
However, I still think that the person who uploaded to YouTube should have included the link to the license, the copyright notice, and the link back to the original GNU page. Whether they're required to or not, I have no idea.
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
I'd take that to mean that transcoding to place on YouTube is explicitly allowed. In fact, reading the actual license terms, it appears that "webcasting" is explicitly allowed provided the entire clip is included, so I'd take that to mean that transcoding is OK.
The missing copyright notice and lack of link to the license, on the other hand, would seem to be in violation...
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and as with all legal advice on Slashdot, this is just mindless speculation by someone who's never taken a law class. Well, except for that one law class I did take, but I can't remember what it was about, so I guess it doesn't count.)
Many people seem to fancy rolling their own when they need something, without realising that it's already in the standard library. For instance, a couple of years went by before I realised that there's a Logger class to handle all logging needs.
Logging's a bad example. There were a ton of logging libraries around because Sun didn't bother adding logging until Java 1.4, and even then, their logging implementation is subpar compared to some other packages out there.
Speaking of exceptions, do not catch Exception, and do not catch Throwable, unless you know exactly why you should do that.
Oh God yes. I've forgotten the number of times I've seen the anti-pattern:
The great thing about that is that it means that there's no way to tell the difference between "an error occurred" and "the object doesn't exist."
I'd like to say this is less common now, but the last time I ran into it was last Friday, i.e., the last time I was at work. I spent a good chunk of time making methods throw exceptions.
This isn't to say that catching exceptions and ignoring them is never safe, sometimes it is. But unless you can come up with a good justification (and then leave a comment explaining it!), don't do it. It'll just piss off other developers when the applications randomly stops working for no readily apparent reason.
Because clearly this is just more activist judges infringing on a husband's right to murder his wife. Uh, online. Or something.
OK, to be serious, it's because the "Your Rights Online" section has kind of devolved into "Stuff Involving the Legal System." I'm assuming it got placed here because one of its topics is "The Courts" and that anything with that topic automatically gets placed in "Your Rights Online."
Regardless, the whole transition from "Your Rights Online" to "random things involving the legal system" remains true. Whenever you see "your rights online" think "legal stuff."
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
I'll take that to mean "not far enough." Although you can download builds directly from the Moonlight site itself.
These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code.
That would seem to settle it: not quite far enough, unless you're willing to build it from source. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere, will, and let us know how it goes.
I wasn't really expecting my "question" to be posted - I just kind of hoped it might get forwarded along so that someone at NewsTrust can fix the JavaScript issue.
But then, the whole review thing is silly most places. If a game gets less than 9/10 then it's a bad game. 8.5 is a bad score it seems. A game scoring 6-7 is still in the upper half of the quality scale
Personally, I'd give te game an 8.2, or in letter grading terms, a B-.
When you're using that scoring system, 1-5 is an F, 6 is a D, 7 is a C, 8 is a B, and 9-10 are an A. C is defined as "average," so anything less than a 7 is "below average" and 6/10 becomes a bad game.
It seems kind of silly to me. The whole "percent to letter grade" thing makes some amount of sense in school, but when reviewing, it means that you limit yourself to the upper half of the scale, and make anything below a 5 essentially meaningless.
But that's why you see review scores treated the way they do. Everyone treats them as a test grade from school, and a 6/10 is a low grade on a test.
RTFA. I know, I know, what am I suggesting, it's Slashdot.
Here's the quick version: Russell Coker remarked that "a package management system that can solve Sudoku based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having."
Daniel Burrows realized that apt could, in fact, currently be used to solve Sudoku puzzles, and wrote a Python script to automate the process of creating the packages required to do such a thing. That's the linked article, and it gives the background I'm repeating here.
I, personally, think it's pretty damned cool. Useless, but cool.
And, as the article points out, there exist better Sudoku solving algorithms. apt is a rather poor Sudoku solver, mainly because it's designed to come up with the "best" dependency resolution rather than solve Sudoku. It's not to "cheat" at Sudoku, but rather to demonstrate the power of the apt dependency resolver.
You were reading about the CharlieTicket, a paper card with a magnetic stripe. The data on them was found to be unencrypted and "protected" by a 6-bit checksum.
The CharlieCard, on the other hand, is a MIFARE Classic card. It uses a shared secret key which the card and reader use to authenticate each other. This key was discovered to be 48 bits long.
MBTA said in documents filed with the court said that fixing the security flaws would take five months.
I'd love to know how they plan on fixing it. The problem is that, rather than paying for the MIFARE cards with working encryption (3DES or AES) they went with the cheapest system which uses custom 48-bit encryption.
Short of replacing every single CharlieCard in existence, there is no fix.
What the MIT students did that went beyond cracking the MIFARE encryption was to reverse engineer what data was stored on the card.
Which means, knowing the T, that the "solution" will likely be to rearrange the data and continue using the same weak encryption, while lobbying for a new state law that makes reverse engineering illegal.
It would be nice if there was actually content displayed without turning on javascript.
It's especially retarded because if you view the source, the content is all already there. The reason it doesn't show up is because of the little tab thingies. Rather than have a single tab already visible, it has all the tabs initially unselected and then selects one of the tabs when the page loads, thereby making a single tab visible.
There are several ways to solve this. Method A is to have a tab selected in the HTML and just accept that the tabs will be broken if JavaScript is broken (the easy way). Method B would be to have JavaScript create the tabs, and default to having all content displayed in a list. This is arguably "the right way" unless NewsTrust really has to have those tabs. Then they could use Method C, which is to allow the generating page to display different tab content based on query strings and linking the tabs appropriately as a fallback when JavaScript is not available.
But displaying nothing by default is kind of silly. The content is already in the page, it just needs to be made visible.
And I disagree that the parent is offtopic. It's a legitimate complaint, and the article is about the website. There are a ton of ways to browse the web these days, and not all of them fully support JavaScript if they support it at all. For example, if I pull the page up on my cellphone, which supports enough CSS to hide the stories but not enough JavaScript to support the tab JavaScript, I get an effectively contentless page.
Since this is an interview, I'll make this a simple question: why don't you add "sel" CSS class to the first tab? That should fix the problem without breaking the JavaScript tab system. (It's Method A above.) Note that, as with all Slashdot advice, I haven't actually tested that.
Yeah, but Japan has a much higher population density than the US. It's easier to wire things up when everyone is closer.
Which is why I, living in an area of the US with population density figures similar to Japan, have a crappy 6Mbps connection.
Really, the north east of the US has a population density that compares to that of Europe and Japan, and yet has crappy broadband options anyway. The fastest DSL option remains 3Mbps down/0.75Mbsp up. So the "population density" argument is complete bull.
Verizon FiOS actually is available in this area and can apparently get "speeds of up to 50Mbps" (which means "50Mbps down/20Mbps up") although that's $140/month. The basic plan, however, is 10Mbps down/2Mbps up.
And while it's available "in this area" it's not available where I live. Apparently at least 60% of an apartment building has to "express interest" before they'll actually run the lines. Despite the fiber running right past the building.
Mr. Certified.NET Developer who knows.NET but has now clue on how the web works so he assumes that if he puts a size limit on that textbox or make important fields hidden he is safe.
That reminds me of a time when I was asked to help someone add a new feature to a set of reports generated on an internal web app. I take a look, and discover that this system works by generating SQL statements based on the form fields in client-side JavaScript before loading them in a new window via window.open. So you had ?sql=SELECT+*+FROM+TABLE sitting there for all to see.
Checking the JSP (it's not just.NET devs) confirmed that it was just blindly passing whatever it got to the database and essentially dumping the resulting data as an HTML table.
I tried to explain why this is a bad thing, that anyone can run any SQL statement the want through the address bar. And he agrees, that's a bad thing. Fortunately, he immediately saw the solution:
Pass the SQL statements with a POST.
Eventually I was able to convince him that, no, POST requests aren't magic and yes, people can, in fact, create arbitrary POST requests.
And that's it. Nothing about them owning the card, although that very vague "subject to... conditions of use" does seem to imply that they think they do. (What are the "conditions of use?" Who knows!)
But whatever you do, do not punch holes in this card. To understand why, you can read this presentation by MIT students that shows what the inside of the card looks like...
I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi.
No, but he does mention that he used to bullseye womp rats, so apparently at some point in his life he did spend time grinding womp rats to up his aiming skills...
Well, this is the State of Massachusetts, not Congress...
Note the part where it says "federal judge" in the summary? And if you followed the link to the article, you'd see that this is taking place in Los Vegas, which I'm pretty sure isn't in Massachusetts.
On a side note, when they first rolled out the CharlieCard system, I remember asking a coworker "I wonder how long it will take for someone to figure out how to hack the cards to get free rides?" The answer is "a little over a year and a half" - they were rolled out in December 2006.
Sure, how about the given example? One second is really all you need.
In the heavily compressed one, you hear an annoying hiss and the sound of the microphone being moved for the first few seconds.
In the non-heavily compressed one, you don't.
That's really the complete example without having to listen to the song. Really, the first few seconds are the best example, because Google is apparently amplifying almost complete silence to noise. The song part really doesn't help much. (Or at least, as much as I was willing to listen to it, which was only a few seconds.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not according to TFA which links to the PS3 manual as its source, so I'd tend to believe Sony.
From the manual:
If you perform any of the following operations after backing up, copyright-protected video files in the backup data may not restore correctly.
- Format the hard disk
- Restore the PS3(tm) system
- Move copyright-protected video
- Download copyright-protected video
- Play copyright-protected video that has a time restriction for the first time
I take that to mean that swapping hard drives or restoring the PS3 after a catastrophic failure does prevent access to the movies. It's also quite clear that if you change PS3s, you can't restore it, period.
In some cases, you may not be able to use the Backup Utility feature to back up or restore the system correctly. It is recommended that you always copy or move important data to storage media in order to independently back up your data.
Great advice, Sony, except for the part where the DRM doesn't allow you to. This also covers "certain save files?!"
Except that would violate someone's intellectual property, so they'd have to go after themselves first.
The second round they'd probably come up with something better. Maybe just your typical government Men in Black suits deal.
By the third round, they'll probably just pony up the money for the licensing rights.
The DRM has made me certain I will not be buying this game.
No kidding. I'm going to skip Spore due to the DRM.
Its no loss anyway, there are plenty of games out there, and if the concept is good, someone else will do something similar soon enough.
And this, right here, is really the heart of the matter. It's a freaking game. Entertainment. It's not a necessity. I don't need Spore. I may want to play it, but if they make it painful to use, then forget it. It's not like I really lose anything. I'll just do something else.
When will publishers realize that? It's not like we have to play their game. It's just entertainment, and there are a million other options out there. I'm not going to blow money on something just to be treated like a criminal.
I can understand why BugMeNot would not list Slashdot and (to an extent) Facebook.
You don't need a user account to browse Slashdot or even post on Slashdot. There's only two reasons you'd create an account on Slashdot: to post as a non-AC, and to customize the various tweakable bits.
Facebook I can sort of see. Creating an anonymous profile kind of defeats the purpose and has the potential to be abused by spammers. (Not that forbidding BugMeNot accounts really solves that last one.)
Facebook is an interesting case, though. As much as I can understand why BugMeNot shouldn't create random Facebook accounts, the fact that you can't view any of the content without creating an account is exactly what BugMeNot was created to work around.
Whatever. It's not like it's important: it's Facebook, after all. :)
Sadly you can't view other people's status without an account (I guess). I guess I'll just pop over to BugMeNot and...
Facebook isn't even listed on BugMeNot, as they requested that logins for Facebook be blocked.
DAMMIT!
Seems a bit ironic, I can't verify that Facebook isn't blocking BugMeNot because they requested BugMeNot block them...
That's the roaming application directory, versus the local application data directory. They're different, although the difference only matters if you're using roaming profiles.
On XP it's in the %UserProfile% directory called "Local Settings". I can't remember where it is in Vista because they've completely rearranged the profile directory. (On the upside, the profile directory is now much more like $HOME.)
But there's no corresponding %LOCALAPPDATA% (at least on my machine) and, since they're hidden by default, trying to describe where they are is somewhat annoying...
Didn't ask where I wanted to install it.
You'll never guess where it did install it, either.
In Program Files? Of course not. It installs into your profile. Thankfully your local profile, so if you're actually using roaming profiles you won't be transferring the entire browser back and forth.
I suppose that's good news if you want to be able to install it locally, but I'd like to have been given the option of at least choosing between "just me" and "all users."
On that note, Google Update is hidden away in the same location, so if you want to uninstall it, you'll need to go there, since it doesn't uninstall with Google Chrome and doesn't contain an uninstaller.
Under XP that's something like C:\Documents and Settings\%User%\Local Settings\Application Data; under Vista it's something different. XP at least doesn't appear to set an environment variable pointing to the local application data directory, but you can easily get the path using SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_LOCAL_APPDATA, NULL, 0, szPath)...
I really should clarify my post.
The missing copyright notice and lack of link to the license, on the other hand, would seem to be in violation...
They're at the end of the video, but my reading of the license and the simplified text seems to suggest they should also be in the page embedding the video, and they're not.
Then again, on rereading the license, I'm not completely sure that's true. Leaving the notices intact in the video may be OK.
In any case, I found this term in the actual license, section somewhere between 3 and 4 but not one of the lettered subsections:
The above rights may be exercised in all media and formats whether now known or hereafter devised. The above rights include the right to make such modifications as are technically necessary to exercise the rights in other media and formats, but otherwise you have no rights to make Derivative Works.
So, yes, transcoding is explicitly allowed by the license in specific terms.
According to the simplified terms:
For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
So I think that means that the YouTube description should include a link to the license. Maybe. I have no idea, I'm not a lawyer.
However, I still think that the person who uploaded to YouTube should have included the link to the license, the copyright notice, and the link back to the original GNU page. Whether they're required to or not, I have no idea.
From the Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 license page:
Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.
I'd take that to mean that transcoding to place on YouTube is explicitly allowed. In fact, reading the actual license terms, it appears that "webcasting" is explicitly allowed provided the entire clip is included, so I'd take that to mean that transcoding is OK.
The missing copyright notice and lack of link to the license, on the other hand, would seem to be in violation...
(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and as with all legal advice on Slashdot, this is just mindless speculation by someone who's never taken a law class. Well, except for that one law class I did take, but I can't remember what it was about, so I guess it doesn't count.)
Many people seem to fancy rolling their own when they need something, without realising that it's already in the standard library. For instance, a couple of years went by before I realised that there's a Logger class to handle all logging needs.
Logging's a bad example. There were a ton of logging libraries around because Sun didn't bother adding logging until Java 1.4, and even then, their logging implementation is subpar compared to some other packages out there.
Speaking of exceptions, do not catch Exception, and do not catch Throwable, unless you know exactly why you should do that.
Oh God yes. I've forgotten the number of times I've seen the anti-pattern:
The great thing about that is that it means that there's no way to tell the difference between "an error occurred" and "the object doesn't exist."
I'd like to say this is less common now, but the last time I ran into it was last Friday, i.e., the last time I was at work. I spent a good chunk of time making methods throw exceptions.
This isn't to say that catching exceptions and ignoring them is never safe, sometimes it is. But unless you can come up with a good justification (and then leave a comment explaining it!), don't do it. It'll just piss off other developers when the applications randomly stops working for no readily apparent reason.
Because clearly this is just more activist judges infringing on a husband's right to murder his wife. Uh, online. Or something.
OK, to be serious, it's because the "Your Rights Online" section has kind of devolved into "Stuff Involving the Legal System." I'm assuming it got placed here because one of its topics is "The Courts" and that anything with that topic automatically gets placed in "Your Rights Online."
Although the search of "The Courts" stories seems to disprove that theory.
Regardless, the whole transition from "Your Rights Online" to "random things involving the legal system" remains true. Whenever you see "your rights online" think "legal stuff."
Comcast hasn't used the word "unlimited" in ages. They don't have to, almost no one thinks in terms of "how much can I download," they just look at the speed numbers.
Instead they just refer to their service as something vague like "always-on, high speed Internet access."
Which is still a complete lie, based on how often my connection goes down. Sure, my modem is always-on, but whatever's at the other end sure doesn't seem to be.
Would it function well enough, or is their notice legitimate?
It wouldn't work: this is Silverlight rearing its ugly head again.
You might be able to get away with user-agent spoofing and Moonlight, but I don't know how far along Moonlight actually is.
$ apt-cache search moonlight
mono-smcs - Mono C# 3.0 compiler for CLI 2.1 (Moonlight / Silverlight)
I'll take that to mean "not far enough." Although you can download builds directly from the Moonlight site itself.
These builds do not include media codecs (video or audio), for that, you must currently build Moonlight from source code.
That would seem to settle it: not quite far enough, unless you're willing to build it from source. Which I'm sure someone, somewhere, will, and let us know how it goes.
I wasn't really expecting my "question" to be posted - I just kind of hoped it might get forwarded along so that someone at NewsTrust can fix the JavaScript issue.
But then, the whole review thing is silly most places. If a game gets less than 9/10 then it's a bad game. 8.5 is a bad score it seems. A game scoring 6-7 is still in the upper half of the quality scale
Another poster below reveals the reason for the upper-half-only review thing you get with 10-point scales:
Personally, I'd give te game an 8.2, or in letter grading terms, a B-.
When you're using that scoring system, 1-5 is an F, 6 is a D, 7 is a C, 8 is a B, and 9-10 are an A. C is defined as "average," so anything less than a 7 is "below average" and 6/10 becomes a bad game.
It seems kind of silly to me. The whole "percent to letter grade" thing makes some amount of sense in school, but when reviewing, it means that you limit yourself to the upper half of the scale, and make anything below a 5 essentially meaningless.
But that's why you see review scores treated the way they do. Everyone treats them as a test grade from school, and a 6/10 is a low grade on a test.
RTFA. I know, I know, what am I suggesting, it's Slashdot.
Here's the quick version: Russell Coker remarked that "a package management system that can solve Sudoku based on package dependency rules is not something that I think would be useful or worth having."
Daniel Burrows realized that apt could, in fact, currently be used to solve Sudoku puzzles, and wrote a Python script to automate the process of creating the packages required to do such a thing. That's the linked article, and it gives the background I'm repeating here.
I, personally, think it's pretty damned cool. Useless, but cool.
And, as the article points out, there exist better Sudoku solving algorithms. apt is a rather poor Sudoku solver, mainly because it's designed to come up with the "best" dependency resolution rather than solve Sudoku. It's not to "cheat" at Sudoku, but rather to demonstrate the power of the apt dependency resolver.
You were reading about the CharlieTicket, a paper card with a magnetic stripe. The data on them was found to be unencrypted and "protected" by a 6-bit checksum.
The CharlieCard, on the other hand, is a MIFARE Classic card. It uses a shared secret key which the card and reader use to authenticate each other. This key was discovered to be 48 bits long.
MBTA said in documents filed with the court said that fixing the security flaws would take five months.
I'd love to know how they plan on fixing it. The problem is that, rather than paying for the MIFARE cards with working encryption (3DES or AES) they went with the cheapest system which uses custom 48-bit encryption.
Short of replacing every single CharlieCard in existence, there is no fix.
What the MIT students did that went beyond cracking the MIFARE encryption was to reverse engineer what data was stored on the card.
Which means, knowing the T, that the "solution" will likely be to rearrange the data and continue using the same weak encryption, while lobbying for a new state law that makes reverse engineering illegal.
It would be nice if there was actually content displayed without turning on javascript.
It's especially retarded because if you view the source, the content is all already there. The reason it doesn't show up is because of the little tab thingies. Rather than have a single tab already visible, it has all the tabs initially unselected and then selects one of the tabs when the page loads, thereby making a single tab visible.
There are several ways to solve this. Method A is to have a tab selected in the HTML and just accept that the tabs will be broken if JavaScript is broken (the easy way). Method B would be to have JavaScript create the tabs, and default to having all content displayed in a list. This is arguably "the right way" unless NewsTrust really has to have those tabs. Then they could use Method C, which is to allow the generating page to display different tab content based on query strings and linking the tabs appropriately as a fallback when JavaScript is not available.
But displaying nothing by default is kind of silly. The content is already in the page, it just needs to be made visible.
And I disagree that the parent is offtopic. It's a legitimate complaint, and the article is about the website. There are a ton of ways to browse the web these days, and not all of them fully support JavaScript if they support it at all. For example, if I pull the page up on my cellphone, which supports enough CSS to hide the stories but not enough JavaScript to support the tab JavaScript, I get an effectively contentless page.
Since this is an interview, I'll make this a simple question: why don't you add "sel" CSS class to the first tab? That should fix the problem without breaking the JavaScript tab system. (It's Method A above.) Note that, as with all Slashdot advice, I haven't actually tested that.
Yeah, but Japan has a much higher population density than the US. It's easier to wire things up when everyone is closer.
Which is why I, living in an area of the US with population density figures similar to Japan, have a crappy 6Mbps connection.
Really, the north east of the US has a population density that compares to that of Europe and Japan, and yet has crappy broadband options anyway. The fastest DSL option remains 3Mbps down/0.75Mbsp up. So the "population density" argument is complete bull.
Verizon FiOS actually is available in this area and can apparently get "speeds of up to 50Mbps" (which means "50Mbps down/20Mbps up") although that's $140/month. The basic plan, however, is 10Mbps down/2Mbps up.
And while it's available "in this area" it's not available where I live. Apparently at least 60% of an apartment building has to "express interest" before they'll actually run the lines. Despite the fiber running right past the building.
Mr. Certified .NET Developer who knows .NET but has now clue on how the web works so he assumes that if he puts a size limit on that textbox or make important fields hidden he is safe.
That reminds me of a time when I was asked to help someone add a new feature to a set of reports generated on an internal web app. I take a look, and discover that this system works by generating SQL statements based on the form fields in client-side JavaScript before loading them in a new window via window.open. So you had ?sql=SELECT+*+FROM+TABLE sitting there for all to see.
Checking the JSP (it's not just .NET devs) confirmed that it was just blindly passing whatever it got to the database and essentially dumping the resulting data as an HTML table.
I tried to explain why this is a bad thing, that anyone can run any SQL statement the want through the address bar. And he agrees, that's a bad thing. Fortunately, he immediately saw the solution:
Pass the SQL statements with a POST.
Eventually I was able to convince him that, no, POST requests aren't magic and yes, people can, in fact, create arbitrary POST requests.
The CharlieCard (other poster is talking about the paper mag-stripe CharlieTicket) says on the back, and I'll quote:
Schedule & Fare Information: 617-222-3200 www.mbta.com ©MBTA
And that's it. Nothing about them owning the card, although that very vague "subject to ... conditions of use" does seem to imply that they think they do. (What are the "conditions of use?" Who knows!)
But whatever you do, do not punch holes in this card. To understand why, you can read this presentation by MIT students that shows what the inside of the card looks like...
I am also fairly sure Luke Skywalker never spend time beating up bunnies to get his knife skill up to scratch or mastered a dozen proffesions before becoming a Jedi.
No, but he does mention that he used to bullseye womp rats, so apparently at some point in his life he did spend time grinding womp rats to up his aiming skills...
Well, this is the State of Massachusetts, not Congress...
Note the part where it says "federal judge" in the summary? And if you followed the link to the article, you'd see that this is taking place in Los Vegas, which I'm pretty sure isn't in Massachusetts.
On a side note, when they first rolled out the CharlieCard system, I remember asking a coworker "I wonder how long it will take for someone to figure out how to hack the cards to get free rides?" The answer is "a little over a year and a half" - they were rolled out in December 2006.
Sure, how about the given example? One second is really all you need.
In the heavily compressed one, you hear an annoying hiss and the sound of the microphone being moved for the first few seconds.
In the non-heavily compressed one, you don't.
That's really the complete example without having to listen to the song. Really, the first few seconds are the best example, because Google is apparently amplifying almost complete silence to noise. The song part really doesn't help much. (Or at least, as much as I was willing to listen to it, which was only a few seconds.)