While I use (and prefer) symmetrical mice, there have been lots of so-called "ergonomic" mice that were contoured to an average person's hand. The fact that they had to decide what size the average hand is says something about how ergonomic they really are, but I digress.
In any case, once a mouse is asymmetrical, it becomes impossible to use in the left hand. A few companies make left-handed versions.
Personally, I just use the mouse in my right hand. In the early days of using one, when the computer was shared between four people, I had to keep switching the keyboard and mouse around, and it was easier just to learn to mouse right-handed.
This was actually set (although I'm not sure it counted towards the grade) on a 1st year maths tutorial sheet here. It was a vaguely silly question related to induction: prove that all natural numbers are interesting.
As far as I'm aware, the lecturer wasn't drunk at the time, but was probably Scottish. Being in Scotland, many of them are.
Indeed. I discovered one of my Acorn machines was riddled with the Extend virus (through no fault of my own - it was about third hand and had obviously been infected at the school it came from). As it happens, !Extend is harmless and later versions of the OS detect it immediately, but still... this is a virus from about 1992 showing up in 2005.
Of course you haven't read any such comparisons. "Cutting board cleaner than toilet seat" isn't going to shock anyone. "Cutting board contains more bacteria than toilet seat" will have the general public up in arms, sell newspapers, and make a whole load of money for the researchers - who presumably have shares in cutting board manufacturing companies.
I believe it was a part that WINE reimplemented, and it's certainly documented. I don't follow WINE that closely, though, so I can't say for sure.
The WMF spec allows a file to define a callback function that is executed in case of an error (it resembles ON ERROR GOTO more than modern exception handling). This was presumably useful for some reason, although I'm not aware it was ever used. The exploit defines a malicious callback function, then deliberately creates an error condition.
Any correct implementation of the spec should have the same vulnerability, whether it's done by Microsoft, WINE, or anyone else.
The WMF vulnerability isn't a programming flaw, it's a problem with the original spec. The code may have been rewritten many times, and the potential for damage never noticed. Indeed, the WINE people did reimplement it, complete with the vulnerability.
While it seems obvious that allowing arbitrary code to execute, it is clearly sufficiently non-obvious that a flaw in a well-documented spec went unnoticed for more than 10 years.
What's most likely is that security wasn't a big thing when the spec was written (this much we know), and the WMF code was never audited because is "obviously" isn't related to security. After all, nobody uses it any more, WMF isn't used much on the web, and it's "just" an image format.
I would be worried about how many similar flaws may exist. I'm willing to forgive them for missing this one (and I'm not a Windows user), but if it doesn't lead to a proper audit of legacy APIs, the next time around they deserve everything they get.
I always thought cricket was a way to work up a thirst before going to the pub, and the statistics were so the maths geeks (who can't bat to save themselves, let alone field) have something to do. A very democratic sport in that respect.
Radio cricket is an excuse for the commentators to discuss random bollocks (um, not literally) between balls, and televised cricket is pointless because they take it too seriously.
Given that the sort of statistics we're talking about here are closer to what statisticians would normally call data (X scored Y runs in game Z), it would seem obvious to me that it's historical fact, and not copyrightable. But then, I'm not American and don't give a toss about baseball.
It is quite normal for the attribution to come after the quoted text, at least if it is clear that the text is quoted (that is, after all, what quotation marks are for).
For the purposes of the example, I would consider it acceptable. In general, I'd agree that there should be some indication that the text is a quotation.
Interestingly, by web conventions, he's claiming that the Wikipedia page is plagiarism, not his own post: if "this" or "here" is used with a link, it's generally assumed that the sentence refers to the linked page.
Sorry, I think you may have that the wrong way round. From recent experience, Slashdot is usually 4-5 days (and often several months) behind the rest of the net. Sometimes it lags behind mass media as well.
The fact that I usually read things on Slashdot first just indicates how little attention I pay to the rest of the world.
The iPod specifically is seen as a status symbol - you have a bunch of people buying them because they're fashionable. These are exactly the sort of people who would want to give the impression they bought all their music, because it shows they can afford it.
I suspect there's some element of this involved, but the ease of use of ITMS is probably a more significant factor.
Option D, by the way, is that rather than being scrupulously honest, they're actually more dishonest than everyone else, and are lying about not downloading music.
I don't think it's very likely (I'm among the iPod owners who don't "steal" music - at least, not any more), but it's always a possibility.
Just because the metal doesn't corrode doesn't mean its presence can't accelerate degradation of the dyes. Since gold is less reactive than the normal metals used in CDs, it's possible that it really can make a difference to longevity.
Or so the manufacturer would like you to think. Personally, I agree that it's a marketing gimmick, and they're relying on the fact that hardly anyone will bother to make a claim under their warranty.
I wonder if their 100 year warranty applies to the original purchaser only?
And expect a brisk trade on eBay the following day as several hundred people, none of which were even remotely near the show, sell that very iPod to rabid Apple fanboys.
It isn't even anything as complex as separate keys for each region.
Once decrypted, the stream just contains the equivalent of a bitfield indicating which regions are allowed to play the disc. The difference between RPC1 and RPC2 is that the RPC2 drive decodes and checks this bitfield itself.
The disk actually contains the (unique) key to decrypt each file, but encrypted with about 200 "player keys". The player asks the drive for its key, decrypts it, and uses that to decrypt the stream. An RPC2 drive simply won't give the player the key if the regions don't match.
Originally, the MPAA planned to revoke player keys as players were cracked. As it happens, CSS was so spectacularly insecure that every single key was cracked, and this never happened. Instead, RPC2 drives were introduced to maintain region locking, since they could no longer rely on software players to do it.
Very true, at university/college level, but note I said high school. I also spent a lot of time in my final year at university trying to cut my project report down a few pages.
It's really a question of being able to lengthen or shorten an essay to fit the amount of information - which you need to do depends on the level, and how interested you are in the topic.
Sadly, words and (useful) information are very different things. In high school, I spent a lot of time learning how to boost the word count of an essay with the bare minimum of actual content. Of your 900,000 words a minute, I'd expect an average of about two sentences of useful content, and a whole load of digression (much like my Slashdot posts). The remaining 899,800 or so words consist of "hey, look at me, I've got a video camera and no sense of shame". Or, indeed, any sense at all.
From my perspective, (personal) blogs, photoblogs, audioblogs and video blogs are in roughly increasing order of pretentiousness.
Given that it's possible to boot from a DVD-R, I would fully expect the system to be as follows:
The 360 checks the media type (hard drive, DVD, whatever), and also the executable. The executable contains bits specifying what types of media it can run from. Since it's signed, it isn't feasible to modify those bits - until someone cracks the DRM scheme, of course.
This allows companies to release freely distributable (but still signed) demos, while the full game can still only be run from the original disk.
I believe the point is that most comparisons compare the names of the Windows apps in menus with the command-line filenames of the Linux binaries. It's just as fair: neither side is making a truly fair comparison.
Most distros provide more descriptive names for applications, just as Windows does. Linux suffers a little because the application author gives the binary an obscure name, even if the big distributions make it clear what the app is for.
Slashdot Mirror
While I use (and prefer) symmetrical mice, there have been lots of so-called "ergonomic" mice that were contoured to an average person's hand. The fact that they had to decide what size the average hand is says something about how ergonomic they really are, but I digress.
In any case, once a mouse is asymmetrical, it becomes impossible to use in the left hand. A few companies make left-handed versions.
Personally, I just use the mouse in my right hand. In the early days of using one, when the computer was shared between four people, I had to keep switching the keyboard and mouse around, and it was easier just to learn to mouse right-handed.
This was actually set (although I'm not sure it counted towards the grade) on a 1st year maths tutorial sheet here. It was a vaguely silly question related to induction: prove that all natural numbers are interesting.
As far as I'm aware, the lecturer wasn't drunk at the time, but was probably Scottish. Being in Scotland, many of them are.
Indeed. I discovered one of my Acorn machines was riddled with the Extend virus (through no fault of my own - it was about third hand and had obviously been infected at the school it came from). As it happens, !Extend is harmless and later versions of the OS detect it immediately, but still ... this is a virus from about 1992 showing up in 2005.
Of course you haven't read any such comparisons. "Cutting board cleaner than toilet seat" isn't going to shock anyone. "Cutting board contains more bacteria than toilet seat" will have the general public up in arms, sell newspapers, and make a whole load of money for the researchers - who presumably have shares in cutting board manufacturing companies.
Having got into that argument before (with a female flatmate, not an SO), I've figured out how to win it.
She'll have a very hard time convincing you you're wrong if your opening argument is "down".
I believe it was a part that WINE reimplemented, and it's certainly documented. I don't follow WINE that closely, though, so I can't say for sure.
The WMF spec allows a file to define a callback function that is executed in case of an error (it resembles ON ERROR GOTO more than modern exception handling). This was presumably useful for some reason, although I'm not aware it was ever used. The exploit defines a malicious callback function, then deliberately creates an error condition.
Any correct implementation of the spec should have the same vulnerability, whether it's done by Microsoft, WINE, or anyone else.
The WMF vulnerability isn't a programming flaw, it's a problem with the original spec. The code may have been rewritten many times, and the potential for damage never noticed. Indeed, the WINE people did reimplement it, complete with the vulnerability.
While it seems obvious that allowing arbitrary code to execute, it is clearly sufficiently non-obvious that a flaw in a well-documented spec went unnoticed for more than 10 years.
What's most likely is that security wasn't a big thing when the spec was written (this much we know), and the WMF code was never audited because is "obviously" isn't related to security. After all, nobody uses it any more, WMF isn't used much on the web, and it's "just" an image format.
I would be worried about how many similar flaws may exist. I'm willing to forgive them for missing this one (and I'm not a Windows user), but if it doesn't lead to a proper audit of legacy APIs, the next time around they deserve everything they get.
I always thought cricket was a way to work up a thirst before going to the pub, and the statistics were so the maths geeks (who can't bat to save themselves, let alone field) have something to do. A very democratic sport in that respect.
Radio cricket is an excuse for the commentators to discuss random bollocks (um, not literally) between balls, and televised cricket is pointless because they take it too seriously.
Given that the sort of statistics we're talking about here are closer to what statisticians would normally call data (X scored Y runs in game Z), it would seem obvious to me that it's historical fact, and not copyrightable. But then, I'm not American and don't give a toss about baseball.
It is quite normal for the attribution to come after the quoted text, at least if it is clear that the text is quoted (that is, after all, what quotation marks are for).
For the purposes of the example, I would consider it acceptable. In general, I'd agree that there should be some indication that the text is a quotation.
Interestingly, by web conventions, he's claiming that the Wikipedia page is plagiarism, not his own post: if "this" or "here" is used with a link, it's generally assumed that the sentence refers to the linked page.
Sorry, I think you may have that the wrong way round. From recent experience, Slashdot is usually 4-5 days (and often several months) behind the rest of the net. Sometimes it lags behind mass media as well.
The fact that I usually read things on Slashdot first just indicates how little attention I pay to the rest of the world.
The iPod specifically is seen as a status symbol - you have a bunch of people buying them because they're fashionable. These are exactly the sort of people who would want to give the impression they bought all their music, because it shows they can afford it.
I suspect there's some element of this involved, but the ease of use of ITMS is probably a more significant factor.
Sounds fine to me. I'd suggest the question:
Did you steal your operating system?
Good fair survey, I think.
Option D, by the way, is that rather than being scrupulously honest, they're actually more dishonest than everyone else, and are lying about not downloading music.
I don't think it's very likely (I'm among the iPod owners who don't "steal" music - at least, not any more), but it's always a possibility.
That would be a first for many Slashdotters regardless of the location of the iPod.
Just because the metal doesn't corrode doesn't mean its presence can't accelerate degradation of the dyes. Since gold is less reactive than the normal metals used in CDs, it's possible that it really can make a difference to longevity.
Or so the manufacturer would like you to think. Personally, I agree that it's a marketing gimmick, and they're relying on the fact that hardly anyone will bother to make a claim under their warranty.
I wonder if their 100 year warranty applies to the original purchaser only?
And expect a brisk trade on eBay the following day as several hundred people, none of which were even remotely near the show, sell that very iPod to rabid Apple fanboys.
I'd be much more concerned about his girlfriend's post. I suspect "she" might not be telling him something.
It isn't even anything as complex as separate keys for each region.
Once decrypted, the stream just contains the equivalent of a bitfield indicating which regions are allowed to play the disc. The difference between RPC1 and RPC2 is that the RPC2 drive decodes and checks this bitfield itself.
The disk actually contains the (unique) key to decrypt each file, but encrypted with about 200 "player keys". The player asks the drive for its key, decrypts it, and uses that to decrypt the stream. An RPC2 drive simply won't give the player the key if the regions don't match.
Originally, the MPAA planned to revoke player keys as players were cracked. As it happens, CSS was so spectacularly insecure that every single key was cracked, and this never happened. Instead, RPC2 drives were introduced to maintain region locking, since they could no longer rely on software players to do it.
Very true, at university/college level, but note I said high school. I also spent a lot of time in my final year at university trying to cut my project report down a few pages.
It's really a question of being able to lengthen or shorten an essay to fit the amount of information - which you need to do depends on the level, and how interested you are in the topic.
Sadly, words and (useful) information are very different things. In high school, I spent a lot of time learning how to boost the word count of an essay with the bare minimum of actual content. Of your 900,000 words a minute, I'd expect an average of about two sentences of useful content, and a whole load of digression (much like my Slashdot posts). The remaining 899,800 or so words consist of "hey, look at me, I've got a video camera and no sense of shame". Or, indeed, any sense at all.
From my perspective, (personal) blogs, photoblogs, audioblogs and video blogs are in roughly increasing order of pretentiousness.
Given that it's possible to boot from a DVD-R, I would fully expect the system to be as follows:
The 360 checks the media type (hard drive, DVD, whatever), and also the executable. The executable contains bits specifying what types of media it can run from. Since it's signed, it isn't feasible to modify those bits - until someone cracks the DRM scheme, of course.
This allows companies to release freely distributable (but still signed) demos, while the full game can still only be run from the original disk.
I believe the point is that most comparisons compare the names of the Windows apps in menus with the command-line filenames of the Linux binaries. It's just as fair: neither side is making a truly fair comparison.
Most distros provide more descriptive names for applications, just as Windows does. Linux suffers a little because the application author gives the binary an obscure name, even if the big distributions make it clear what the app is for.
Not to mention a fair amount of inorganic flesh, if it's anything like the hotdogs I've had.
Not at all, they'll just record the car as travelling several times the speed of light, and issue a speeding fine accordingly.
Rest assured, the authorities are well aware of this. The general public, however, aren't.
Which is why the government can get away with all this surveillance under the banner of "preventing terrorism".