Him: "You need to specify a list of every character that is allowed in the text field, otherwise I cannot program it."
Okay, here's your bloody list of all allowed characters. Assuming you use UTF-8, of course. If you use UTF-16, you'll need to add the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, the Supplementary Ideographic Plane, and the Supplementary Special-Purpose Plane.
Anyone doing a password system is going to take the input string and hash it. Hashes always come out with the same length (for a given algorithm, at least), so there's no reason to have *any* limit on password length. And even if you truncate it on entry, why would you not either warn the user (as Wachovia did back when I used them, with their 9-12 character passwords only), or at least truncate on password check as well.
The only logical explanation is that they're storing passwords as plain text, which I knew not to do before I even graduated high school.
As much as it clashes with both our "Russia is evil" and our "science is right" mindsets, there are some explanations that could justify this. I'm not saying they're actually what happened (indeed, "Russia is evil" is the simplest and most likely explanation), but someone more fluent in Russian than I can look at the actual documents and see.
First, suppose the expert is not actually an expert, just an accomplice of the traffickers posing as one to try to get out of the charges. Rather obvious conspiracy charges there.
But let's suppose the expert scientist is indeed both an expert and a scientist. But let's also suppose that some stronger evidence showed clear drug charges - for instance, finding actual drugs and video evidence of trafficking. This could mean the expert was simply incompetent, or was bought off. Either of those would be grounds for obstruction of justice, although probably not conspiracy (at least according to my limited knowledge of a different country's laws).
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go actually read the article.
Citation: "Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Colbert, Stephen. 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (speech, 2006).
Anyone can code. Likewise, anyone can design a logo, write a novel, record a song or film a movie. However, it's extremely likely you'll end up with a bug-ridden program, and ugly logo, an unreadable novel, a horrible song and a terrible movie. And nobody is expected to be able to do all of those - at most, they should be able to do *one* thing well, and everything else is "possible, but mediocre".
It doesn't help to have, say, your graphic designer or copywriter or marketer actually write code to be released. Their code will be worse than a professional, trained programmer's. But it can help to have them know how to code, in at least two ways:
1) They can write temporary code for something they're working on. You see this flipped a lot in video game companies - "programmer art", when a programmer makes some placeholder textures or models while implementing a feature. It's often extremely crappy, which is why it never gets released - they have an actual artist re-do it all. Same goes for code.
2) They'll know the limits. Imagine a world where marketing/sales people actually knew what code can, and cannot, do, and roughly how difficult a given task is. No more "hey, we told the client you'll have ported the entire app to Java by next Friday", no more "we promised the client that the software will never ever crash, now make it happen", no more "I don't care what big O notation means, just make it faster!".
There's nothing wrong with making all your employees learn how to code, if you're in the coding business. That can help the non-coding guys realize the limitations of code, and let them write quick, dirty code themselves to test something. And if they have a knack for it, maybe they can serve as a coder as well as their old position (assuming your corporate structure is flexible enough for this).
But demanding everyone be putting code into production is wrong. Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production? Would you demand all your employees study law and write contracts?
And? Larry Wall makes most of his money from his books - does that make Perl just some big scheme so he can sell books?
Neil Gaiman charges in the range of $50K to speak - not because he wants to make a lot of money (he donates much of it to charity), but because there's a very limited supply of him and a very high demand for him to speak.
And moreover, what effect do Wales's talks have on Wikipedia? Perhaps some indirect one, in that he could drive people either towards or away from Wikipedia, but he'd be doing that whether he gets paid for it or not.
The question here is whether being paid to edit Wikipedia by an entity with a vested interest in creating bias is ethical. My own stance (detailed below, in "Difference between adding and subtracting") is "sometimes", but I recognize that some will argue either "always" or "never". But the question is definitely not "is making money based off your personal experiences wrt Wikipedia ethical".
There's a difference between "promoting the good" and "hiding the bad".
You want to edit your country's (or corporation's, or religion's, or even your own personal) article to add sections about the lovely lakes, the wonderful telephone system, the many interesting furry animals, including the majestic moose, go right ahead. Obviously, you can't just make shit up (fact: Tuvalu is the world leader in nuclear fusion research[citation needed]), but there's nothing wrong with adding facts to the article. And yes, if you go completely overboard with it, writing a novel's worth of praise for the architecture, the geological features, the thriving and innovative independent film industry, it's going to get trimmed down even if it's completely unbiased (more so if it is).
But if you try to hide the undesirable things that are true, you can fuck right the hell off. If there's something about you that you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it (doesn't apply *as* much to personal articles - it still applies in many cases, but not in many others). If you don't want people to find out about your ruthless secret police, or your massive sex trafficking biz, or your widespread pollution, you should try stopping those things rather than pay someone to edit Wikipedia to hide those facts. Because not only will editing Wikipedia *not* *work* (people will revert it right back), but it will add "tried to hide the truth from the Internet" to your list of crimes. Which is a pretty shameful, both in "you did something bad" and in "you did something bad that was petty and ultimately meaningless" - it makes you both evil, and a pretty low class of evil at that.
The key to ME1 is that it's not supposed to be a precise, actiony shooter. Think of it like Star Trek - just point the phaser/rifle at the bad guys, hold trigger until it's dead. The go bang a chick with a weird skin color, tell the admiralty where they can shove their regulations, and punch a reporter.
Mass Effect 2 definitely made the gameplay much more of an action shooter, but it also did quite a bit worse at the storytelling and setting. Plotlines started in ME1 are ignored, new species just pop into existence, and the art department discovered color correction filters can make everything dark and gloomy.
It's a bit like, and a bit unlike, Mass Effect's RPG elements.
Neither are really RPGs, but both take large RPG elements. They differ in which elements they take. Mass Effect steals the branching storylines (OK, Mass Effect 1 did), and the character attributes, and the lengthy dialog, and small amounts of other RPG trimmings. Borderlands focuses much more on the gun stats than the character stats, and has much more emphasis on sidequests and random loot. It also has the whole "elemental rock-paper-scissors" that's common to RPGs - guns that shoot incendiary rounds work better against some enemies but terribly against others, for example. So it is a shooter with a marginal amount of thinking involved, compared to Call of Duty.
If anything, I would classify Borderlands as an FPS mixed with a Diablo clone. It's literally billions of potential weapons, large crowds of enemies, repeatable quests, and small online co-op.
It's "UnrealEngine 3", not "the Unreal Tournament 3 engine". The former refers to the more generic engine; the latter refers to the specific version of UE3 that was used for Unreal Tournament 3.
Yes, it's a pedantic distinction, but a significant one. Between UT3 and now, Epic has added quite a number of new features - tessellation, deferred rendering, bokeh DoF, and so on. I don't know how many of those features Borderlands 2 uses, but it's definitely a far newer UE3 than UT3 used.
Translation to/.-speak: Calling it "the UT3 engine" is like calling Linux "the Android kernel". Technically correct, in that it is the kernel used by Android, but it completely misses the point.
Of course there's no poison in the coffee. A real pro would put the poison on the rim of the cup.
Then again, a REAL real pro wouldn't even use poisons - too hard to make it look like an accident, and it's rather uncommon for police to hunt for an assassin when they don't think it was even a homicide.
It's an Asus G75, and unfortunately I cannot recommend it. While it's certainly powerful enough, it's extremely bulky and heavy (9+lbs/4+kg), and extremely unreliable - it died literally three hours after I got it, and it's beginning to develop yet more problems (the subwoofer keeps flickering on and off). And their tech support is absolute shit - I waited four months to get this laptop, then waited another month for them to repair it. They offered no ETA, they refused to just ship me a new one instead of repairing an obviously-toasted one, and ultimately didn't even return it in the original packaging and forgot to include part of the power adapter.
So unfortunately, at this point I can't even recommend *any* Asus laptop. Quite a shame, as they used to be quite good. I've been told Sager is the new "good but not expensive" brand, and I believe they have dual-drive laptops as well, but I have yet to use one myself.
I can't hear my laptop's hard drive, but I can definitely feel it. It's positioned right where my left hand rests when gaming, and when it spins all the way up to 7200RPM, you can feel quite a rumble.
Especially when the "subwoofer" kicks in, positioned right next to it (I'm actually slightly concerned the magnet will damage the hard drive, but it hasn't happened yet).
Indeed. 128GB drive for OS/apps (a 96GB Windows partition and a 32GB one I swear I'll install Linux on eventually) and a 750GB drive for docs and my Steam library (with the exception of Rage, no game I know of really benefits from faster data access except for reducing loading times, and as games are routinely in the 20GB+ range now, they would occupy far too much of my SSD).
And this is in a laptop, by the way. Yes, they make laptops with two hard drive bays (plus an optical drive).
I'd really like to see someone hack my home server. Not just because it runs OpenBSD with some rather paranoid pf rules (I use OS fingerprinting to refuse connections from any known-insecure or evil OS).
Mainly because since Verizon is taking literal *weeks* to even acknowledge my purchase order, I'm forced to leech off a neighbor's Wifi, and my home server has no wireless capabilities.
Considering how hard it is to convince some developers to "port" their PS3/360 games to Windows when their engine already supports it, somehow I doubt many developers are going to release a Linux port just because the engine supports it.
Intel already used the Hondo name - for an Itanium chip, the Itanium 2 MX2, in 2004. A rather interesting one at that - the only processor I know of to use an L4 cache. Now granted, it's a Multi-Chip Module - two processor dies and an L4 die - so the L4 cache was basically just there to make the hastily glued-together processors work together faster.
I know, it's not exactly going to cause confusion for anybody, but it still irritates me when this happens.
Valve hasn't made the Source SDK work on Mac yet. So it's not Black Mesa's fault that it can't run on Mac.
I find it likely that, even if Valve mysteriously doesn't want to make the actual SDK work on OS X (including porting over their toolchains), they'll give the BM:S guys enough access to compile it, much like how Epic ported a few fan-made UT3 mods over to PS3 before the PS3 mod SDK was released. Valve is going to be pushing BM out over Steam soon (see Greenlight); this might actually be why it isn't already up.
Slashdot Mirror
Him: "You need to specify a list of every character that is allowed in the text field, otherwise I cannot program it."
Okay, here's your bloody list of all allowed characters. Assuming you use UTF-8, of course. If you use UTF-16, you'll need to add the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, the Supplementary Ideographic Plane, and the Supplementary Special-Purpose Plane.
How do they even do that?
Anyone doing a password system is going to take the input string and hash it. Hashes always come out with the same length (for a given algorithm, at least), so there's no reason to have *any* limit on password length. And even if you truncate it on entry, why would you not either warn the user (as Wachovia did back when I used them, with their 9-12 character passwords only), or at least truncate on password check as well.
The only logical explanation is that they're storing passwords as plain text, which I knew not to do before I even graduated high school.
As much as it clashes with both our "Russia is evil" and our "science is right" mindsets, there are some explanations that could justify this. I'm not saying they're actually what happened (indeed, "Russia is evil" is the simplest and most likely explanation), but someone more fluent in Russian than I can look at the actual documents and see.
First, suppose the expert is not actually an expert, just an accomplice of the traffickers posing as one to try to get out of the charges. Rather obvious conspiracy charges there.
But let's suppose the expert scientist is indeed both an expert and a scientist. But let's also suppose that some stronger evidence showed clear drug charges - for instance, finding actual drugs and video evidence of trafficking. This could mean the expert was simply incompetent, or was bought off. Either of those would be grounds for obstruction of justice, although probably not conspiracy (at least according to my limited knowledge of a different country's laws).
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go actually read the article.
Citation:
"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in reality. And reality has a well-known liberal bias."
Colbert, Stephen. 2006 White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (speech, 2006).
Anyone can code. Likewise, anyone can design a logo, write a novel, record a song or film a movie. However, it's extremely likely you'll end up with a bug-ridden program, and ugly logo, an unreadable novel, a horrible song and a terrible movie. And nobody is expected to be able to do all of those - at most, they should be able to do *one* thing well, and everything else is "possible, but mediocre".
It doesn't help to have, say, your graphic designer or copywriter or marketer actually write code to be released. Their code will be worse than a professional, trained programmer's. But it can help to have them know how to code, in at least two ways:
1) They can write temporary code for something they're working on. You see this flipped a lot in video game companies - "programmer art", when a programmer makes some placeholder textures or models while implementing a feature. It's often extremely crappy, which is why it never gets released - they have an actual
artist re-do it all. Same goes for code.
2) They'll know the limits. Imagine a world where marketing/sales people actually knew what code can, and cannot, do, and roughly how difficult a given task is. No more "hey, we told the client you'll have ported the entire app to Java by next Friday", no more "we promised the client that the software will never ever crash, now make it happen", no more "I don't care what big O notation means, just make it faster!".
There's nothing wrong with making all your employees learn how to code, if you're in the coding business. That can help the non-coding guys realize the limitations of code, and let them write quick, dirty code themselves to test something. And if they have a knack for it, maybe they can serve as a coder as well as their old position (assuming your corporate structure is flexible enough for this).
But demanding everyone be putting code into production is wrong. Would you demand all your employees learn graphic design and have them all create graphics to be used in production? Would you demand all your employees study law and write contracts?
No, because that's stupid.
Someone finally got the joke. Faith in /. restored.
And? Larry Wall makes most of his money from his books - does that make Perl just some big scheme so he can sell books?
Neil Gaiman charges in the range of $50K to speak - not because he wants to make a lot of money (he donates much of it to charity), but because there's a very limited supply of him and a very high demand for him to speak.
And moreover, what effect do Wales's talks have on Wikipedia? Perhaps some indirect one, in that he could drive people either towards or away from Wikipedia, but he'd be doing that whether he gets paid for it or not.
The question here is whether being paid to edit Wikipedia by an entity with a vested interest in creating bias is ethical. My own stance (detailed below, in "Difference between adding and subtracting") is "sometimes", but I recognize that some will argue either "always" or "never". But the question is definitely not "is making money based off your personal experiences wrt Wikipedia ethical".
There's a difference between "promoting the good" and "hiding the bad".
You want to edit your country's (or corporation's, or religion's, or even your own personal) article to add sections about the lovely lakes, the wonderful telephone system, the many interesting furry animals, including the majestic moose, go right ahead. Obviously, you can't just make shit up (fact: Tuvalu is the world leader in nuclear fusion research[citation needed]), but there's nothing wrong with adding facts to the article. And yes, if you go completely overboard with it, writing a novel's worth of praise for the architecture, the geological features, the thriving and innovative independent film industry, it's going to get trimmed down even if it's completely unbiased (more so if it is).
But if you try to hide the undesirable things that are true, you can fuck right the hell off. If there's something about you that you don't want people to know, you probably shouldn't be doing it (doesn't apply *as* much to personal articles - it still applies in many cases, but not in many others). If you don't want people to find out about your ruthless secret police, or your massive sex trafficking biz, or your widespread pollution, you should try stopping those things rather than pay someone to edit Wikipedia to hide those facts. Because not only will editing Wikipedia *not* *work* (people will revert it right back), but it will add "tried to hide the truth from the Internet" to your list of crimes. Which is a pretty shameful, both in "you did something bad" and in "you did something bad that was petty and ultimately meaningless" - it makes you both evil, and a pretty low class of evil at that.
The key to ME1 is that it's not supposed to be a precise, actiony shooter. Think of it like Star Trek - just point the phaser/rifle at the bad guys, hold trigger until it's dead. The go bang a chick with a weird skin color, tell the admiralty where they can shove their regulations, and punch a reporter.
Mass Effect 2 definitely made the gameplay much more of an action shooter, but it also did quite a bit worse at the storytelling and setting. Plotlines started in ME1 are ignored, new species just pop into existence, and the art department discovered color correction filters can make everything dark and gloomy.
It's a bit like, and a bit unlike, Mass Effect's RPG elements.
Neither are really RPGs, but both take large RPG elements. They differ in which elements they take. Mass Effect steals the branching storylines (OK, Mass Effect 1 did), and the character attributes, and the lengthy dialog, and small amounts of other RPG trimmings. Borderlands focuses much more on the gun stats than the character stats, and has much more emphasis on sidequests and random loot. It also has the whole "elemental rock-paper-scissors" that's common to RPGs - guns that shoot incendiary rounds work better against some enemies but terribly against others, for example. So it is a shooter with a marginal amount of thinking involved, compared to Call of Duty.
If anything, I would classify Borderlands as an FPS mixed with a Diablo clone. It's literally billions of potential weapons, large crowds of enemies, repeatable quests, and small online co-op.
I dunno, Rage managed a worse ending. And the "quality" of the ending to Mass Effect 3 is the stuff of legends.
It's "UnrealEngine 3", not "the Unreal Tournament 3 engine". The former refers to the more generic engine; the latter refers to the specific version of UE3 that was used for Unreal Tournament 3.
Yes, it's a pedantic distinction, but a significant one. Between UT3 and now, Epic has added quite a number of new features - tessellation, deferred rendering, bokeh DoF, and so on. I don't know how many of those features Borderlands 2 uses, but it's definitely a far newer UE3 than UT3 used.
Translation to /.-speak:
Calling it "the UT3 engine" is like calling Linux "the Android kernel". Technically correct, in that it is the kernel used by Android, but it completely misses the point.
I had, but I thought it was a Linux distro...
So at least you outnumber the remaining OS/2 users.
Yes, and I'm sure *both* Windows Phone users are enjoying that.
Hey! I use Opera, you ignorant twat!
Of course there's no poison in the coffee. A real pro would put the poison on the rim of the cup.
Then again, a REAL real pro wouldn't even use poisons - too hard to make it look like an accident, and it's rather uncommon for police to hunt for an assassin when they don't think it was even a homicide.
It's an Asus G75, and unfortunately I cannot recommend it. While it's certainly powerful enough, it's extremely bulky and heavy (9+lbs/4+kg), and extremely unreliable - it died literally three hours after I got it, and it's beginning to develop yet more problems (the subwoofer keeps flickering on and off). And their tech support is absolute shit - I waited four months to get this laptop, then waited another month for them to repair it. They offered no ETA, they refused to just ship me a new one instead of repairing an obviously-toasted one, and ultimately didn't even return it in the original packaging and forgot to include part of the power adapter.
So unfortunately, at this point I can't even recommend *any* Asus laptop. Quite a shame, as they used to be quite good. I've been told Sager is the new "good but not expensive" brand, and I believe they have dual-drive laptops as well, but I have yet to use one myself.
I can't hear my laptop's hard drive, but I can definitely feel it. It's positioned right where my left hand rests when gaming, and when it spins all the way up to 7200RPM, you can feel quite a rumble.
Especially when the "subwoofer" kicks in, positioned right next to it (I'm actually slightly concerned the magnet will damage the hard drive, but it hasn't happened yet).
Indeed. 128GB drive for OS/apps (a 96GB Windows partition and a 32GB one I swear I'll install Linux on eventually) and a 750GB drive for docs and my Steam library (with the exception of Rage, no game I know of really benefits from faster data access except for reducing loading times, and as games are routinely in the 20GB+ range now, they would occupy far too much of my SSD).
And this is in a laptop, by the way. Yes, they make laptops with two hard drive bays (plus an optical drive).
I'd really like to see someone hack my home server. Not just because it runs OpenBSD with some rather paranoid pf rules (I use OS fingerprinting to refuse connections from any known-insecure or evil OS).
Mainly because since Verizon is taking literal *weeks* to even acknowledge my purchase order, I'm forced to leech off a neighbor's Wifi, and my home server has no wireless capabilities.
Considering how hard it is to convince some developers to "port" their PS3/360 games to Windows when their engine already supports it, somehow I doubt many developers are going to release a Linux port just because the engine supports it.
Intel already used the Hondo name - for an Itanium chip, the Itanium 2 MX2, in 2004. A rather interesting one at that - the only processor I know of to use an L4 cache. Now granted, it's a Multi-Chip Module - two processor dies and an L4 die - so the L4 cache was basically just there to make the hastily glued-together processors work together faster.
I know, it's not exactly going to cause confusion for anybody, but it still irritates me when this happens.
Valve hasn't made the Source SDK work on Mac yet. So it's not Black Mesa's fault that it can't run on Mac.
I find it likely that, even if Valve mysteriously doesn't want to make the actual SDK work on OS X (including porting over their toolchains), they'll give the BM:S guys enough access to compile it, much like how Epic ported a few fan-made UT3 mods over to PS3 before the PS3 mod SDK was released. Valve is going to be pushing BM out over Steam soon (see Greenlight); this might actually be why it isn't already up.