For the same reason that if(strcmp(foo,bar)==0) is better than if(!strcmp(foo,bar)) at testing two strings for equality.
Somewhat OT but a neat trick I learned several years ago is to put the constant first in a comparison. This helps to eliminate one common C typo, that of using a single "=" (assignment) when you meant "==" (compare).
So the code would look like this:
if(0==strcmp(foo,bar))
It's a bit awkward to read but if there was a single "=" there the compiler would complain.
I saw a show on the History Channel the other day about advanced gun locks, and there's one where the user wears a watch which communicates with the gun. If someone else tries to fire it without the watch on, it won't work.
Years ago I had heard of other gun locks which require the user to hit a combination, but those are much less useful in an immediate threat.
Mating the gun to the user's DNA/fingerprints/blood type (etc.) would go a long way toward preventing misuse. And as devices get smaller, it could have GPS and a satellite phone embedded, so that Central Command could turn it off at will. And perhaps detonate it.
My parents had a black and white TV which was on when they came home from dinner one night (don't know if I was born yet, definitely before I was sentient).
They couldn't turn it off. They had to unplug it to turn it off. Apparently lightning struck and melted the switch just enough for it to be in the "on" position, and not just the little bit more which would have fried it. Neat bit of nature, that.
They still have it. They're packrats. And cheap, too -- they never even had it looked at, just accepted the new behavior and continued on living. Even though it takes a couple minutes to warm up, it wasn't annoying enough to them to want to fix it.
One thing I hate.. but I can't all it a bug is that when I open a link in a new window or tab and it fails to connect, the browser shows a stupid dialog box and the URL of that page is about:blank.
You have studied the laws much more than I have. One issue that I have is that the "protection" on my DVDs will never wear out. In other words, once the movies pass into the public domain, I will still be unable to de-encrypt them without breaking the law.
Do you know of (or would you consider starting?) a campaign to force hardware manufacturers to check the datestamp of the media being played, and if it falls outside the limited protection time granted by the government, "open up" the content?
Thanks for your support -- I realize how difficult it was for you, politically and otherwise, to take the stand you took and we are all grateful for your continued help in fighting this war.
Maybe the same way copyright inspired copyleft, the DMCA is a form for companies to protect their products, and stop other people from profiting on those products (god forbid!), but since this really throws onto the pile, and adds hardware materials in to the copyright bin, maybe it will inspire some hardware enthousiasts to create copylefted hardware?
There's already a couple projects with exactly that in mind:
From experience, it's pretty difficult to explain exactly why the DMCA is so awful to the average person--it's very hard, for me at least, to provide a 60-second explanation of why I should be able to open up my digital VCR and find out how the software controlling it works, or why it's so bad that there's copy protection on a CD, rendering it useless for playing in a computer?
I have two answers.
1. The car analogy: these laws are like laws which would require manufacturer to weld the hood of your car shut. You wouldn't be able to "look under the hood" for any reason -- not even changing the oil yourself, adding wiper fluid yourself, or rebuilding a carbueretor yourself. Granted, not everyone would do the latter but I think most people would "get it" with the wiper fluid -- having to pay $50/hour for a mechanic shop to "break the seal" of your hood, add some water, then weld it back shut again.
2. The computer industry analogy. As another poster stated, if we had had the DMCA back in 1984 when Compaq was cloning the original IBM PC, IBM could have sued and we would not have the breadth and depth of computer industry which we currently have.
it's not about good timing. read their product road map and end-of-life cycle plans here
Well it appears from that page that they have agreed to support Windows NT 4.0 until June 30, 2003.
So something still seems fishy. Not trying to broadcast conspiracy theories but on the other hand the evidence you pointed to seems to support the theory.
OT: just so you know, you did get the quote exactly right (I remember reading it back in High School and thinking that he misspoke). My beef is with Asimov, not you.;-)
But only in this specific case. He was a prolific writer and I learned a lot from him growing up. I can't think of anything else I disagree with from him, just this one thing. Enjoy!
It's interesting the kinds of cultural differences that exist. My wife's from Brazil, and has taught me a ton about lying. I was raised never to lie; that it's better to hurt someone's feelings by telling the truth than to "offend God" by lying.
Now, she's not a dishonest person; she differentiates between types of lies -- there are lies that hurt someone, and lies that don't (i.e. what we call "little white lies").
Thinking further I guess all diplomacy is lying; it's like the quote "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while searching for a rock."
OT: I've always disagreed with your.sig. Violence is actually the first refuge of the incompentent; the compentent try all other means available before resorting to violence, so violence is actually the last refuge of the compentent.
Since there is money involved, the cheaters will have a new reason to play, and that is for money. This will be a greater drive for people to implement more complex hacks
Remember the/. story a little while ago about the guy who wrote an AI for Tetris? It used machine vision and a separate computer to "press" the keys to move the pieces.
Do the same for Quake. How in the world would that be detected? It naturally won't be as efficient as a programmed hack (it has to move the mouse, instead of instantly jumping to the head shot) but it would appear as a human at the controls.
It contains a lot of commentary on the politics of filmmaking ("you need a permit!" and unions), in addition to being a great love story and containing some cool stop-action animation.
Also he wrote "Merry Birthday" in order to avoid the copyright fees.
Totally OT, but... I metamoderated this comment about 5 minutes before the story appeared on the front page. So it appears the "priority queue for subscribers" is working.
bpfinn you must be a subscriber, no?
And something very odd just appeared... "It's been -23 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment" when I tried to submit this! It detected that I posted something in the future and prevented me from posting right now. Neat.
I just looked in BugZilla and doing a query on all the UNCONFIRMED, NEW, NEEDINFO, ASSIGNED, and REOPENED (ignoring the RESOLVED, VERIFIED and CLOSED bugs), there are 1459 bugs.
Now, I haven't followed this closely so I don't know if that's a little or a lot. I do remember that one version of Windows (2000? XP?) had over 64K bugs when it was released, so compared to that it's an order of magnitude and a half better. But I don't know how bad each bug is in either case, either, so this isn't much of a comparison.
(Btw, the total of the three I ignored is 1848, so about half the reported bugs have been fixed. Again, no data on the severity of the fixed vs. open bugs...)
ObSimpsons: police mailed out flyers saying "You have won a
free motor boat!"
Wiggum: I mailed these bogus prize certificates to every scofflaw in Springfield. When they show up for their free motor boats we arrest them and beat them to the full extent of the law.
Eddie: So the hook is baited.
Lou: Nice metaphore Eddie!
Wiggum: Yeah, good work, Eddie!
This (I think) is sort of similar to the problems that were raised with using cameras to spot traffic violations. Early on, the cameras would record the license number of a violator (who had, for example, run a red light) and the send the registered owner of the car a ticket. The problem is/was that the violation was commited by a driver who wasn't necessarily the owner of the car.
I remember when they first started doing this, there was a story about a guy who got a ticket in the mail with a photo of his license plate.
So he sent it back to the police with a picture of a hundred dollar bill.
The police then mailed him a picture of handcuffs. He paid the fine.
Don't know how true it was but I got a good laugh out of it.;-)
Re:How long will it take for hard drives to catch
on
8.6 GB Internet?
·
· Score: 1
Why would anybody want to watch an entire movie in 5 seconds, certainly my ability to absorb information is not as good as that and I regard it to be rather high(Toung in cheek).
One of the features I love about BSplayer is the ability to increase/decrease playback speed by 10%.
Recently I downloaded all the Family Guy episodes, and watching them at 20% faster makes them sound more like SouthPark than Family Guy, but it saves me something like 5 minutes per 21 minute episode. And it's mostly intelligible.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
One has only to look at our recent past, to the McCarthy era, to see the lies behind her statements.
Somewhat OT but a neat trick I learned several years ago is to put the constant first in a comparison. This helps to eliminate one common C typo, that of using a single "=" (assignment) when you meant "==" (compare).
So the code would look like this:
if(0==strcmp(foo,bar))
It's a bit awkward to read but if there was a single "=" there the compiler would complain.
Translated from Portuguese (or possibly Spanish which is similar) this is "little meat."
I figured it was a backhanded reference to "Microsoft."
I read the headline as above, and thought, "Man the kid can't be even 18 now, and he gets retirement? Life's not fair."
I saw a show on the History Channel the other day about advanced gun locks, and there's one where the user wears a watch which communicates with the gun. If someone else tries to fire it without the watch on, it won't work.
Years ago I had heard of other gun locks which require the user to hit a combination, but those are much less useful in an immediate threat.
Mating the gun to the user's DNA/fingerprints/blood type (etc.) would go a long way toward preventing misuse. And as devices get smaller, it could have GPS and a satellite phone embedded, so that Central Command could turn it off at will. And perhaps detonate it.
Does anyone have a mirror? I must have missed it...
They couldn't turn it off. They had to unplug it to turn it off. Apparently lightning struck and melted the switch just enough for it to be in the "on" position, and not just the little bit more which would have fried it. Neat bit of nature, that.
They still have it. They're packrats. And cheap, too -- they never even had it looked at, just accepted the new behavior and continued on living. Even though it takes a couple minutes to warm up, it wasn't annoying enough to them to want to fix it.
Anybody else read that as "rolling on the ... king?"
This bug has already been reported .
Note that you'll have to cut-and-paste the URL; Mozilla doesn't allow links into Bugzilla from Slashdot.
You have studied the laws much more than I have. One issue that I have is that the "protection" on my DVDs will never wear out. In other words, once the movies pass into the public domain, I will still be unable to de-encrypt them without breaking the law.
Do you know of (or would you consider starting?) a campaign to force hardware manufacturers to check the datestamp of the media being played, and if it falls outside the limited protection time granted by the government, "open up" the content?
Thanks for your support -- I realize how difficult it was for you, politically and otherwise, to take the stand you took and we are all grateful for your continued help in fighting this war.
There's already a couple projects with exactly that in mind:
It's interesting to note that the OpenBIOS project was a recipient of funding from LinuxFund .
I have two answers.
1. The car analogy: these laws are like laws which would require manufacturer to weld the hood of your car shut. You wouldn't be able to "look under the hood" for any reason -- not even changing the oil yourself, adding wiper fluid yourself, or rebuilding a carbueretor yourself. Granted, not everyone would do the latter but I think most people would "get it" with the wiper fluid -- having to pay $50/hour for a mechanic shop to "break the seal" of your hood, add some water, then weld it back shut again.
2. The computer industry analogy. As another poster stated, if we had had the DMCA back in 1984 when Compaq was cloning the original IBM PC, IBM could have sued and we would not have the breadth and depth of computer industry which we currently have.
I came here to say that BitTorrent blue-screens my machine (W2K), and am happy to find the fix for it.
As the AC said, mod parent up.
Well it appears from that page that they have agreed to support Windows NT 4.0 until June 30, 2003.
So something still seems fishy. Not trying to broadcast conspiracy theories but on the other hand the evidence you pointed to seems to support the theory.
But only in this specific case. He was a prolific writer and I learned a lot from him growing up. I can't think of anything else I disagree with from him, just this one thing. Enjoy!
Now, she's not a dishonest person; she differentiates between types of lies -- there are lies that hurt someone, and lies that don't (i.e. what we call "little white lies").
Thinking further I guess all diplomacy is lying; it's like the quote "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggie' while searching for a rock."
OT: I've always disagreed with your
Remember the /. story a little while ago about the guy who wrote an AI for Tetris? It used machine vision and a separate computer to "press" the keys to move the pieces.
Do the same for Quake. How in the world would that be detected? It naturally won't be as efficient as a programmed hack (it has to move the mouse, instead of instantly jumping to the head shot) but it would appear as a human at the controls.
Ask and ye shall receive .
It contains a lot of commentary on the politics of filmmaking ("you need a permit!" and unions), in addition to being a great love story and containing some cool stop-action animation.
Also he wrote "Merry Birthday" in order to avoid the copyright fees.
The owners and readers of this site, for the first two. Obviously not you, for the latter.
And that's why I posted with "No Karma Bonus" because it's not important but was an interesting (to me) observation.
Course, I shouldn't be feeding trolls so if you have any moderation points to spare, mod this comment down and not the grandparent.
bpfinn you must be a subscriber, no?
And something very odd just appeared... "It's been -23 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment" when I tried to submit this! It detected that I posted something in the future and prevented me from posting right now. Neat.
Now, I haven't followed this closely so I don't know if that's a little or a lot. I do remember that one version of Windows (2000? XP?) had over 64K bugs when it was released, so compared to that it's an order of magnitude and a half better. But I don't know how bad each bug is in either case, either, so this isn't much of a comparison.
(Btw, the total of the three I ignored is 1848, so about half the reported bugs have been fixed. Again, no data on the severity of the fixed vs. open bugs...)
I remember when they first started doing this, there was a story about a guy who got a ticket in the mail with a photo of his license plate.
So he sent it back to the police with a picture of a hundred dollar bill.
The police then mailed him a picture of handcuffs. He paid the fine.
Don't know how true it was but I got a good laugh out of it. ;-)
One of the features I love about BSplayer is the ability to increase/decrease playback speed by 10%.
Recently I downloaded all the Family Guy episodes, and watching them at 20% faster makes them sound more like SouthPark than Family Guy, but it saves me something like 5 minutes per 21 minute episode. And it's mostly intelligible. ;-)