This particular example may have been due to misuse of a library function, but eventually every program is going to need something coded that isn't in the standard library. It can't all be glue code.
If you want to see character encoding mess in communications, you want to look at IRC.
- No character encoding specified, because it predates the introduction of such things. - No pre-definition of message length: The line continues until a CRLF appears. - No limits in the specification of maximum message length: It's up to the server operator when to truncate. - Different clients may use different character sets. One may use ASCII, another one of the obscure pre-unicode codepages, another unicode in UTF-8. - Additional control characters may be included to specify text color or font. These are defined not in any specification but by an informal consensus, an agreement that whatever mIRC does the others should probably copy.
Only communications I've seen less character-set-friendly are mucks, and that's because the 'protocol' was originally designed to be accessed via telnet client. Incidentally, you can telnet IRC with a little practice and some fast typing.
It's a language that works very close to the metal. That allows programers to squeeze the most out of the hardware - which matters now, and mattered a lot more 23 years ago. It's fast, it's lean, it'll let you run a fast-paced 3D(ish) FPS like Doom on a 486* with fifty monsters lobbing fireballs at the player. The down-side to this is that it's very easy for a programmer to screw up - you need to be aware of exactly how everything fits together in memory and always be thinking about exceptions and failure scenarios, otherwise this happens.
The exact problem is a buffer overflow: The font loading code allocates n bytes for some information, on the assumption that any sane and standards-compliant font will have at most n bytes there. A maliciously crafted font can have more than that n - and the code, upon reaching that limit, just carries on reading. The extra ends up somewhere, likely in a section of memory that was supposed to contain executable code, resulting in a code execution vulnerability.
A good part of the history of programming languages involves trying to find ways to restrict the capabilities of a language just enough to stop a programmer from making a mistake of that nature, but without restricting them so much that capabilities or performance suffer.
*I understand it could run on a 386, but that was pushing things a bit so you'd have to run it with reduced viewing size.
I would agree with you, if I hadn't just wasted ten minutes standing around waiting for Windows to boot up and get to the login prompt on a computer I was supposed to be fixing. It did get there, eventually.
The tidier solution would be to teach the entire world english, or at least a modified form of their old language that can be properly represented with the latin alphabet alone. Throw in upper-ascii for a few accents.
It came from a TCP connection where users submit comments. Most of them are only a few hundred characters, but occasionally someone will submit an in-depth analysis the size of a book.
A good part of the reason modern video compression is so much better than it used to be is the hardware - algorithms in common use crawl along at a frame every second, but that would have been a frame every minute on old hardware: Half an hour to encode one second of video is not going to be worthwhile.
Even if some states were willing to go that far, that just means the FBI would take over prosecuting people.
If they can take some time away from protecting 'national security,' that is. I'm sure they can reallocate a few agents from investigating murders and such to focus on real crime.
Because the group referred to as 'the right' actually consists of several contradicting ideologies forced together by the nature of the US political system. While they do hold to the principle of small government and individual freedom, these are not their highest priority goals and so will be ignored when a seemingly more important idea is in contradiction. This happens quite often, as the political conservative and social conservative factions are fundamentally conflicted - they'd be at war with each other if they hadn't found a common enemy in the liberals.
You need to look up the definition. A pyramid scheme is one in which early investors are paid back using funds collected from later investors - thus the scheme can provide a return only so long as it maintains exponential growth. As exponential growth isn't sustainable, at some point the scheme must collapse and a lot of people lose their investment. Usually the scheme administrator sees this moment coming, packs up all the money a week before and heads off to some country he can safely disappear in.
Bitcoin has many huge flaws as a currency, as the paper points out. I can see it finding a niche as a payment service for those distrustful of conventional finance. That's quite a lot of people right now.
They are using sexual imagery to attract viewers. The difference between them and any other ad-funded pornography site is one of degree only. It's a very large degree - you could compare it to someone embezzeling a company for thousands of pounds vs someone who pockets the extra coins when given the wrong change - but it's still essentially the same thing.
- Massive increase in consumption to maintain the economy. Everyone lives in luxury. That's how we got past the last industrial revolution. Downside: Environmental disaster, long working hours. - Riotous mobs of unemployed people desperate to survive, in turn leading to possible: ----Police state, in order to contain the riots and keep the poverty-stricken masses from uprising against the rich upper classes. Possibly dystopian outcome. ----Eventual peaceful semi-socialist revolution, involving heavy taxation and generous benefits likely paired with more government control of some industries. Possible utopian outcome, massive cultural shift required. ----Revolution, anarchy, collapse of society.
Replacing the internet is a bit ambitious, but perhaps there is some way to lessen the need for such amounts of data, or to opportunistically transfer it by other means.
Take a look at the Daily Mail's site. For all their talk of the evils of porn, it's usually got more than a few celebrity women in bikinis in it. And today, photos of some topless celebrity men.
The individual republicans know what works: Act as teapartyish as they can when they are courting votes within the party to get nominated to an election, but then quickly reject that image and run screaming leftwards when the general population is voting. Different approaches for different electorates.
A little googling says it uses solid fuel boosters, plus a non-cryogenic second stage powered by a Vikas engine running off dinitrogen tetroxide as an oxidiser for an unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine fuel. The cryogenic part though is the third stage powered by a new engine, the CE-7.5, which runs off good old liquid hydrogen and oxygen. About as simple a fuel as you can get, chemically. They are already working on the CE-20, which packs a much higher thrust albeit at a slightly lower specific impulse.
Or, in internet terms: It's powered by the Rockomac Skipper, but they're saving up science points for the Mainsail.
The US toy safety regulations are a commonly cited example. Following the scandal involving lead paint being used on toys imported from China, the US passed strict safety regulations for toys in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Well-intentioned, but they also cost a fair bit to follow - every new model of every toy needs to be sent to an independant inspector to run everything from mechanical tests to chemical analysis of the plastic. This is small change to a toy manufacturing giant, but a crippling expense to a small business. There's an exception to some of the regulations for those manufacturers who register as a 'small batch manufacturer,' but it's still more paoerwork overhead.
There's also some speculation about very small scale - there's no exception for nonprofits. If you were to knit some toys to sell at a charity event, that's now a felony - you can't see toys that havn't been subjected to the required safety testing. Up to a five year jail term. In practice regulatory generally know that this is one of the cases where actually enforcing the law would be silly, but such 'informal exemptions' are not good legal practice.
This isn't for general-purpose use. See those floating-point specs? Those tell you exactly where this is going, because there is one class of user that just can't get enough floating point performance. Scientific HPC. Protein folding, molecular biology modeling, cosmological simulations, higher resolution seismic analysis, neural network simulation, quantum system modeling. All things that thrive on processing power. A chip like this could have a lot of scientific applications.
Slashdot Mirror
This particular example may have been due to misuse of a library function, but eventually every program is going to need something coded that isn't in the standard library. It can't all be glue code.
Either legalise pot or ban tobacco. I don't much care which, but the contradiction is untidy.
I wasn't talking about HTTP specifically.
If you want to see character encoding mess in communications, you want to look at IRC.
- No character encoding specified, because it predates the introduction of such things.
- No pre-definition of message length: The line continues until a CRLF appears.
- No limits in the specification of maximum message length: It's up to the server operator when to truncate.
- Different clients may use different character sets. One may use ASCII, another one of the obscure pre-unicode codepages, another unicode in UTF-8.
- Additional control characters may be included to specify text color or font. These are defined not in any specification but by an informal consensus, an agreement that whatever mIRC does the others should probably copy.
Only communications I've seen less character-set-friendly are mucks, and that's because the 'protocol' was originally designed to be accessed via telnet client. Incidentally, you can telnet IRC with a little practice and some fast typing.
In a letter: C.
It's a language that works very close to the metal. That allows programers to squeeze the most out of the hardware - which matters now, and mattered a lot more 23 years ago. It's fast, it's lean, it'll let you run a fast-paced 3D(ish) FPS like Doom on a 486* with fifty monsters lobbing fireballs at the player. The down-side to this is that it's very easy for a programmer to screw up - you need to be aware of exactly how everything fits together in memory and always be thinking about exceptions and failure scenarios, otherwise this happens.
The exact problem is a buffer overflow: The font loading code allocates n bytes for some information, on the assumption that any sane and standards-compliant font will have at most n bytes there. A maliciously crafted font can have more than that n - and the code, upon reaching that limit, just carries on reading. The extra ends up somewhere, likely in a section of memory that was supposed to contain executable code, resulting in a code execution vulnerability.
A good part of the history of programming languages involves trying to find ways to restrict the capabilities of a language just enough to stop a programmer from making a mistake of that nature, but without restricting them so much that capabilities or performance suffer.
*I understand it could run on a 386, but that was pushing things a bit so you'd have to run it with reduced viewing size.
Mostly. For now. They have advanced rapidly.
I would agree with you, if I hadn't just wasted ten minutes standing around waiting for Windows to boot up and get to the login prompt on a computer I was supposed to be fixing. It did get there, eventually.
I wrote that in c#. It took about five lines of code.
And twenty megabytes of RAM to execute. Mostly, I assume, used to hold the .net libraries and garbage collector.
The tidier solution would be to teach the entire world english, or at least a modified form of their old language that can be properly represented with the latin alphabet alone. Throw in upper-ascii for a few accents.
It came from a TCP connection where users submit comments. Most of them are only a few hundred characters, but occasionally someone will submit an in-depth analysis the size of a book.
A good part of the reason modern video compression is so much better than it used to be is the hardware - algorithms in common use crawl along at a frame every second, but that would have been a frame every minute on old hardware: Half an hour to encode one second of video is not going to be worthwhile.
Even if some states were willing to go that far, that just means the FBI would take over prosecuting people.
If they can take some time away from protecting 'national security,' that is. I'm sure they can reallocate a few agents from investigating murders and such to focus on real crime.
Depends how you define 'high quality.' Moonshine is a long-established tradition.
Because the group referred to as 'the right' actually consists of several contradicting ideologies forced together by the nature of the US political system. While they do hold to the principle of small government and individual freedom, these are not their highest priority goals and so will be ignored when a seemingly more important idea is in contradiction. This happens quite often, as the political conservative and social conservative factions are fundamentally conflicted - they'd be at war with each other if they hadn't found a common enemy in the liberals.
It has to be a function which can be verified in much less time than it can be computed. That limits the selection of potentially useful functions.
You need to look up the definition. A pyramid scheme is one in which early investors are paid back using funds collected from later investors - thus the scheme can provide a return only so long as it maintains exponential growth. As exponential growth isn't sustainable, at some point the scheme must collapse and a lot of people lose their investment. Usually the scheme administrator sees this moment coming, packs up all the money a week before and heads off to some country he can safely disappear in.
Bitcoin has many huge flaws as a currency, as the paper points out. I can see it finding a niche as a payment service for those distrustful of conventional finance. That's quite a lot of people right now.
They are using sexual imagery to attract viewers. The difference between them and any other ad-funded pornography site is one of degree only. It's a very large degree - you could compare it to someone embezzeling a company for thousands of pounds vs someone who pockets the extra coins when given the wrong change - but it's still essentially the same thing.
I can see a few possible outcomes:
- Massive increase in consumption to maintain the economy. Everyone lives in luxury. That's how we got past the last industrial revolution. Downside: Environmental disaster, long working hours.
- Riotous mobs of unemployed people desperate to survive, in turn leading to possible:
----Police state, in order to contain the riots and keep the poverty-stricken masses from uprising against the rich upper classes. Possibly dystopian outcome.
----Eventual peaceful semi-socialist revolution, involving heavy taxation and generous benefits likely paired with more government control of some industries. Possible utopian outcome, massive cultural shift required.
----Revolution, anarchy, collapse of society.
Improved compression? Distributed, longer-term caching? Dynamic mesh networking?
Replacing the internet is a bit ambitious, but perhaps there is some way to lessen the need for such amounts of data, or to opportunistically transfer it by other means.
Take a look at the Daily Mail's site. For all their talk of the evils of porn, it's usually got more than a few celebrity women in bikinis in it. And today, photos of some topless celebrity men.
The Democrats are not socialist.
- Europe.
The individual republicans know what works: Act as teapartyish as they can when they are courting votes within the party to get nominated to an election, but then quickly reject that image and run screaming leftwards when the general population is voting. Different approaches for different electorates.
A little googling says it uses solid fuel boosters, plus a non-cryogenic second stage powered by a Vikas engine running off dinitrogen tetroxide as an oxidiser for an unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine fuel. The cryogenic part though is the third stage powered by a new engine, the CE-7.5, which runs off good old liquid hydrogen and oxygen. About as simple a fuel as you can get, chemically. They are already working on the CE-20, which packs a much higher thrust albeit at a slightly lower specific impulse.
Or, in internet terms: It's powered by the Rockomac Skipper, but they're saving up science points for the Mainsail.
The US toy safety regulations are a commonly cited example. Following the scandal involving lead paint being used on toys imported from China, the US passed strict safety regulations for toys in the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Well-intentioned, but they also cost a fair bit to follow - every new model of every toy needs to be sent to an independant inspector to run everything from mechanical tests to chemical analysis of the plastic. This is small change to a toy manufacturing giant, but a crippling expense to a small business. There's an exception to some of the regulations for those manufacturers who register as a 'small batch manufacturer,' but it's still more paoerwork overhead.
There's also some speculation about very small scale - there's no exception for nonprofits. If you were to knit some toys to sell at a charity event, that's now a felony - you can't see toys that havn't been subjected to the required safety testing. Up to a five year jail term. In practice regulatory generally know that this is one of the cases where actually enforcing the law would be silly, but such 'informal exemptions' are not good legal practice.
This isn't for general-purpose use. See those floating-point specs? Those tell you exactly where this is going, because there is one class of user that just can't get enough floating point performance. Scientific HPC. Protein folding, molecular biology modeling, cosmological simulations, higher resolution seismic analysis, neural network simulation, quantum system modeling. All things that thrive on processing power. A chip like this could have a lot of scientific applications.