Product placement is getting silly when you start seeing it in ads for other products. Last time I was at the cinema, I saw a car advert (possibly Toyota, can't really remember), with a ridiculously obvious iPod somewhere in the first few seconds.
So did Apple pay Toyota to place their products in the advert? Or are Toyota just trying to appeal to the Apple fanboys?
Sadly, a native macro on a 4-5mm sensor would require you to hold the camera about 1cm from the subject. While a previous poster suggested he had a camera that could do it, I think that might limit the usefulness of the feature.
To get 1:1 reproduction, the subject needs to be twice the focal length from the lens, and the lens the same distance from the film (sensor, whatever). For 35mm or greater, that gives a usable distance. Otherwise, it's so close that it's of little practical use.
Aside from Knuth, which is more showing off than anything (not that the guy isn't a genius), one of the best algorithms books is Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. I'd generally suggest algorithms over language-specific references, although modern class libraries tend to implement the best ones already.
Other than that, I suppose your favourite collection of O'Reilly titles. I find Java in a Nutshell useful, as I prefer the dead-tree version to the online documentation. Many of the books on the webpage are language or library references, which are good, but very dependent on the programmer's interests.
It's less secure because it never changes. Assume that the password has been stolen, one way or another.
If the password changes every month, there's a window of (on average) two weeks that it can be used before being noticed - obviously if a cracker changes your password, you're going to know about it.
If the password never changes, someone can be reading your email, and any confidential data for years and nobody will ever know about it.
It's not a question of making the password hard to crack in the first place, but of limiting the damage when it is cracked.
Bad form, I know, but before the nit-pickers get to me about being able to identify four processors with two bits, I meant five not four. Don't know how that slipped through.
Classical parallel programming tends to work well on powers of 2. One of the models for (big) parallel systems has the CPUs arranged in a hypercube structure, which works quite well for getting data to and from the processors. There are probably also advantages when it comes to laying out the cores on silicon.
For multitasking, there's really no need for a power of two, except to make the best use of bus lines (three bits to identify the CPU? Better to allow eight of them than four). Expecting two completely different processors to work well on a board designed for two identical ones is daft, though, and it's pretty obvious that the stability problems are due to this and not any inherent problem with having three cores.
Switch statements in particular have exactly the same behaviour as a computed goto: the program flow jumps from the start of the block to some label in the middle, and continues from there. If you look at it that way, fall-through is an obvious consequence, and not just there to trap inexperienced (and some experienced) programmers.
Of course, it's all kept in a single self-contained block, although there's no reason you can't nest them (actually, I'm not certain about that in C. I know I've done it in some other languages). But it's effectively a goto, nonetheless.
OK, so it's an advert, but it's actually (vaguely) interesting, at least to me. And no, I'm not a new dad, nor am I likely to become one anytime soon. Hell, I'm reading Slashdot.
People have been trying to produce educational software for decades, and failing miserably for just as long (largely because teachers expected the computer to do their job for them, but that's another rant altogether). If this is well written, it might actually work, and lead to useful educational software in the future.
Unless the article's a dupe, in which case the editors are on crack, etc.
Sadly, this is standard practice in COBOL. I was taught (but never used) a very long-winded and tedious way of designing COBOL programs, largely designed to overcome the complete lack of structure in the language itself.
The good news: sensible variable names were allowed. The bad news: program labels were all of the form P100, P200, and so on (I can't remember the prefix we actually used). You'd need to go back to the paper design documents to figure out what any of it meant.
Aside from being a truly awful language from a theoretical perspective, COBOL has spawned some horrendous design methodologies.
A few years ago I was decommissioning some machines by a certain other British vendor (who supplied an absolute shitload of PCs to schools and universities). Decommissioning is the normal: remove RAM, processors, cards, etc, and dump everything else in the skip.
A few of them had IBM RAM, complete with original labels. Correct me if I'm wrong, but IBM parts shouldn't be finding their way into third-party machines sold as new, right? Given that this was in two machines out of a few hundred, it seems most likely that they were using second hand components in their new systems.
Not at all. Ridiculous speed was just shown on the console as between light speed and ludicrous speed. From my recollection, the quotation is accurate.
Coffee is bad because it encourages you to consume more calories through milk and sugar, plus it has caffiene and the various crap that goes with it. I think caffeine is more of a addiction - I seen people who never had coffee before turn into caffeine addicts who needed a cup 'to wake up' and then one at lunch and then another at 4pm. I wouldn't care but they actually became cranky if they didn't get their fix.
Why the hell would you want to spoil a good cup of coffee with milk and sugar, anyway?
Actually, I'm more addicted to coffee (the flavour) than the caffeine. I can switch to decaf with no ill effects (have done occasionally, usually around exams - I work better when I'm not twitching all the time), but insist on some kind of coffee in the morning.
Better yet, they screwed up the first test, he never had HIV to begin with, and they reckon they can avoid a malpractice suit and get lots of juicy research money by claiming the tests were accurate.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age. Working in a university will do that to you.
There's no way a device can magically know what the current rating of the power supply is - unless it's trying to exceed it. The mA rating is just the maximum the supply can provide without overheating or cutting out.
It is possible that those devices that stop working have occasional peaks that draw more current than the supply is supposed to be rated for, in which case they could trip the cutout on another adaptor, but that's not really a good design.
What may be a problem is that many supplies (PC ones are a good example) have both a minimum and a maximum current rating: in order to improve performance and efficiency, they assume the load will be greater than some amount. If you draw less than this, the output may be unstable. A big supply that can work over a wide range of loads may turn out to be less efficient than several small ones.
Slander only applies if the statements made are false. Given that the EULA specifically disallows anti-spyware research, it is reasonable to believe that RetroCoder themselves consider their program to be spyware - if not, then why is the clause there?
In which case, slander cannot possibly apply. This is a purely contractual issue, and centres on whether a) the clause in the EULA is valid, or b) on whether this EULA is a valid contract at all.
IANAL, but in general, contracts can legally include whatever terms you like. Whether they are enforceable is a different question altogether.
Most real contracts (and a lot of EULAs) have a clause stating that if any part of the contract is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remainder of the contract still stands. This is legal, and standard practice.
The downside is that companies tend to put in all the terms they can legally enforce, and anything else they think they might get away with if not challenged. So we end up with these long, tedious contracts that are perfectly legal, but mostly not actually applicable.
Yeah, except if they can arrest you and try you and convict you for this, they will have longer than the 90 days to try and decrypt your data, and then convict you for the first offence.
And good luck to them cracking 256-bit encryption in any amount of time.
This is about suspected terrorists. It has nothing to do with child porn.
I was specifically replying to a post referencing the RIP, where this is a very real concern. It applies equally to suspected terrorism: better to keep the key secret and serve two years than to reveal it and serve life. Child porn is just the usual example when pointing out this flaw.
Slashdot Mirror
That's easy. I assume he isn't going to replace all the PCs with Macs, so you still need Ctrl, Alt and Del.
Product placement is getting silly when you start seeing it in ads for other products. Last time I was at the cinema, I saw a car advert (possibly Toyota, can't really remember), with a ridiculously obvious iPod somewhere in the first few seconds.
So did Apple pay Toyota to place their products in the advert? Or are Toyota just trying to appeal to the Apple fanboys?
And it's not even a new idea. There's a long tradition of photographers using drain pipe and similar to construct cheap extension tubes.
Sadly, a native macro on a 4-5mm sensor would require you to hold the camera about 1cm from the subject. While a previous poster suggested he had a camera that could do it, I think that might limit the usefulness of the feature.
To get 1:1 reproduction, the subject needs to be twice the focal length from the lens, and the lens the same distance from the film (sensor, whatever). For 35mm or greater, that gives a usable distance. Otherwise, it's so close that it's of little practical use.
Aside from Knuth, which is more showing off than anything (not that the guy isn't a genius), one of the best algorithms books is Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein. I'd generally suggest algorithms over language-specific references, although modern class libraries tend to implement the best ones already.
Other than that, I suppose your favourite collection of O'Reilly titles. I find Java in a Nutshell useful, as I prefer the dead-tree version to the online documentation. Many of the books on the webpage are language or library references, which are good, but very dependent on the programmer's interests.
Dilbert books are always good, of course.
It's less secure because it never changes. Assume that the password has been stolen, one way or another.
If the password changes every month, there's a window of (on average) two weeks that it can be used before being noticed - obviously if a cracker changes your password, you're going to know about it.
If the password never changes, someone can be reading your email, and any confidential data for years and nobody will ever know about it.
It's not a question of making the password hard to crack in the first place, but of limiting the damage when it is cracked.
Only member of the Simpsons family with a name long enough for most password schemes (at least 6 characters)?
Seems reasonable enough to me.
Bad form, I know, but before the nit-pickers get to me about being able to identify four processors with two bits, I meant five not four. Don't know how that slipped through.
Classical parallel programming tends to work well on powers of 2. One of the models for (big) parallel systems has the CPUs arranged in a hypercube structure, which works quite well for getting data to and from the processors. There are probably also advantages when it comes to laying out the cores on silicon.
For multitasking, there's really no need for a power of two, except to make the best use of bus lines (three bits to identify the CPU? Better to allow eight of them than four). Expecting two completely different processors to work well on a board designed for two identical ones is daft, though, and it's pretty obvious that the stability problems are due to this and not any inherent problem with having three cores.
Damn, first we had duplicate stories, now we have duplicate comments.
Honestly, what's Slashdot coming to?
Switch statements in particular have exactly the same behaviour as a computed goto: the program flow jumps from the start of the block to some label in the middle, and continues from there. If you look at it that way, fall-through is an obvious consequence, and not just there to trap inexperienced (and some experienced) programmers.
Of course, it's all kept in a single self-contained block, although there's no reason you can't nest them (actually, I'm not certain about that in C. I know I've done it in some other languages). But it's effectively a goto, nonetheless.
OK, so it's an advert, but it's actually (vaguely) interesting, at least to me. And no, I'm not a new dad, nor am I likely to become one anytime soon. Hell, I'm reading Slashdot.
People have been trying to produce educational software for decades, and failing miserably for just as long (largely because teachers expected the computer to do their job for them, but that's another rant altogether). If this is well written, it might actually work, and lead to useful educational software in the future.
Unless the article's a dupe, in which case the editors are on crack, etc.
Sadly, this is standard practice in COBOL. I was taught (but never used) a very long-winded and tedious way of designing COBOL programs, largely designed to overcome the complete lack of structure in the language itself.
The good news: sensible variable names were allowed. The bad news: program labels were all of the form P100, P200, and so on (I can't remember the prefix we actually used). You'd need to go back to the paper design documents to figure out what any of it meant.
Aside from being a truly awful language from a theoretical perspective, COBOL has spawned some horrendous design methodologies.
A few years ago I was decommissioning some machines by a certain other British vendor (who supplied an absolute shitload of PCs to schools and universities). Decommissioning is the normal: remove RAM, processors, cards, etc, and dump everything else in the skip.
A few of them had IBM RAM, complete with original labels. Correct me if I'm wrong, but IBM parts shouldn't be finding their way into third-party machines sold as new, right? Given that this was in two machines out of a few hundred, it seems most likely that they were using second hand components in their new systems.
Not at all. Ridiculous speed was just shown on the console as between light speed and ludicrous speed. From my recollection, the quotation is accurate.
</nitpick>
Last I heard, they were pretty ineffective against tin poisoning.
The only trouble with splicing mouse genes is that they start trying to take over the world.
Every bloody night.
Too much vitamin C can cause diarrhoea. You really need to overdose on it to have an effect, though. Or drink nothing but lemon juice.
Coffee is bad because it encourages you to consume more calories through milk and sugar, plus it has caffiene and the various crap that goes with it. I think caffeine is more of a addiction - I seen people who never had coffee before turn into caffeine addicts who needed a cup 'to wake up' and then one at lunch and then another at 4pm. I wouldn't care but they actually became cranky if they didn't get their fix.
Why the hell would you want to spoil a good cup of coffee with milk and sugar, anyway?
Actually, I'm more addicted to coffee (the flavour) than the caffeine. I can switch to decaf with no ill effects (have done occasionally, usually around exams - I work better when I'm not twitching all the time), but insist on some kind of coffee in the morning.
Better yet, they screwed up the first test, he never had HIV to begin with, and they reckon they can avoid a malpractice suit and get lots of juicy research money by claiming the tests were accurate.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age. Working in a university will do that to you.
Murder : 3 years and get out after 6 months for good behavior.
Copyright infringement : ????????????
Looking at the judge in a funny way: profit?
There's no way a device can magically know what the current rating of the power supply is - unless it's trying to exceed it. The mA rating is just the maximum the supply can provide without overheating or cutting out.
It is possible that those devices that stop working have occasional peaks that draw more current than the supply is supposed to be rated for, in which case they could trip the cutout on another adaptor, but that's not really a good design.
What may be a problem is that many supplies (PC ones are a good example) have both a minimum and a maximum current rating: in order to improve performance and efficiency, they assume the load will be greater than some amount. If you draw less than this, the output may be unstable. A big supply that can work over a wide range of loads may turn out to be less efficient than several small ones.
Slander only applies if the statements made are false. Given that the EULA specifically disallows anti-spyware research, it is reasonable to believe that RetroCoder themselves consider their program to be spyware - if not, then why is the clause there?
In which case, slander cannot possibly apply. This is a purely contractual issue, and centres on whether a) the clause in the EULA is valid, or b) on whether this EULA is a valid contract at all.
IANAL, but in general, contracts can legally include whatever terms you like. Whether they are enforceable is a different question altogether.
Most real contracts (and a lot of EULAs) have a clause stating that if any part of the contract is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remainder of the contract still stands. This is legal, and standard practice.
The downside is that companies tend to put in all the terms they can legally enforce, and anything else they think they might get away with if not challenged. So we end up with these long, tedious contracts that are perfectly legal, but mostly not actually applicable.
Yeah, except if they can arrest you and try you and convict you for this, they will have longer than the 90 days to try and decrypt your data, and then convict you for the first offence.
And good luck to them cracking 256-bit encryption in any amount of time.
This is about suspected terrorists. It has nothing to do with child porn.
I was specifically replying to a post referencing the RIP, where this is a very real concern. It applies equally to suspected terrorism: better to keep the key secret and serve two years than to reveal it and serve life. Child porn is just the usual example when pointing out this flaw.