I never though I'd be writing to you but the most fantastic thing just happened to me. I work for a small software company, and it's a pretty loose place. The other day I was trying to solve a really nasty bug, and...
... and so that one change fixed 3 bugs at once! I wound up spening the rest of the night knocking off Bugzilla entries, until the sun came up. I'm definitely going back to the office tomorrow night!
Actually, this is not really a bad way to do things. There's a lot to be said for just getting it to work, fixing the immediate problem so you can go on with the rest of it. At least now it doesn't crash every time they move the window off the edge of the screen, so we can finish up the rest of the clipping routines.
Then, when that milestone is done and you're into the bugfix phase, you can sit down and redo the window handling code to fix the original problem and dekludge it. If you think of it as "refactoring", it even fits with popular methodology.
Done right (i.e. not abused or left forever) and assuming a non-deathmarch schedule, this should't make the testing phase any longer, or cost any more, since a single bug is not holding up all the rest of development. The key is to go back and fix it right, later. Not that I've *ever* been involved in a project that shipped with "/* this is an EVIL KLUDGE! */ anywhere in it...
I have not found one single girl capable of writing anything that is maintainable, extendable, efficient, and well thought out. They are simply incapable of being good code designers, but they can be great debuggers.
Yeah, it's their natures. They can't help it, it's that women are physically incapable of thinking logically or clearly. Poor things, they're made for gossip, cooking and sex; we never should have encouraged them to start doing man's work.
Never should have given them the vote in the first place, that started all these problems.
Re:'register_globals' considered evil?
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
I recently took a look through the scripts of the web development company I work for, and discovered that about 1 in 5 scripts had a security hole - including things that would let you, e.g., delete their entire database. All these were down to register_globals.
Unfortunately, that is also precisely the reason they don't want to upgrade. They would have to go through 1000s of scripts replacing all their global variables from POST and GET with secure versions. Hence they stay with nice easy 4.1, and endanger their security.
Sadly, I'm afraid this is not an unusual situation. It's a direct consequence of having a cool feature (CGI variables are automatically made into local vars! Wow!) added by the original developers for no other reason than "it's cool". It's a perfect example of putting things into the language without thinking through their consequenses.
I hate to say it, but the PHP people fucked up. In this day and age, a misfeature like this should never have been allowed to happen. It's like writing an app today that reads user input into a 80 character buffer. Now we're stuck with the consequences.
PHP developers: Bite the bullet! Turn off register_globals and pick up the pieces! The only thing you have to lose is your exploits. Well, that and some time.
What's up with those OO examples??
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
Is it just me, or are a lot of the examples from this page really confusing and unenlightening? I can understand most of it, but the examples for __get(), __set(), and__call() need some work.
__get() makes sense, checking to see if there is a value before returning it, but __set() looks like copy-and-paste of __get() that didn't get finished. It checks to see if the value is already there, then sets it, otherwise -- declares an error? The example usage afterwards refers to non-existent member variables, but not to the things it's supposed to be demonstrating.
The example for __call() is even more confusing. It looks like it's supposed to be a wrapper (for some reason) around a direct method call, but it doesn't refer to to the method that was passed in, and the usage is completely unrelated.
I assume these are just typos made by busy people, but it *is* an official page attempting to derscribe the new features of PHP 5.
I also wonder about the implications of the scoping rules. It looks like references to private or protected members are ignored? return null? That's nice, but is it good language design?
All in all, it looks like there are going to be really good things happening in PHP. I personally wish they weren't going in the Java syntax direction (not only do I not care for Java, but if you're going to borrow syntax from another language, you have to be consistent or you wind up confusing programmers of both languages), but hey, it's not my decision and it seems to work. It's a lot better than before - yay for being able to do func() -> method()!
'register_globals' considered evil?
on
PHP 5 Beta 1
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· Score: 1
The only major compatibility issue that I can think of between, say, the 4.1 branch and the 4.3 branch is that register_globals defaults to 'Off' in newer versions. If you leave it that way after installing, then yes, a lot of older scripts will break. Most of the shared/virtual hosting providers I've had to do script installs on, which have actually upgraded their PHP versions, just installed 4.2x or 4.3x and then manually turned register_globals back to 'On' in the php.ini file.
Isn't 'registered_globals' a gaping security hole? As I understand it, it automatically turns all incoming page variables into global PHP variables, leaving you open to all kinds of nasty shit. It's not that harder to look in the POST[] and GET[] arrays for your parameters; in fact, it's just good software engineering.
It's like not saying 'use strict' at the top of all your Perl scripts (for different reasons) - you're just asking for trouble in anything like production code. If I don't see attention to details like that, I know I'm dealing with amateur code, or at least someone who hasn't been doing this long enough to get bit yet.
I agree at the surprising number of hosts who simply haven't updated, though. There are a lot of hosts still running 4.1x, and even (yikes) 4.06, who just won't upgrade for whatever reason. I do most of my coding these days on 4.2 or 4.3, and have run into plenty of belligerent hosts who refuse to upgrade from a two-year-old release. Typically I just have my clients move to a better host; the providers who don't stay reasonably with the times will eventually figure out that it's hurting their bottom line.
Like others have mentioned, this is not how the ISP is looking at it. They're not likely to upgrade something that works just fine (aside from security fixes) and breaking it for all their users just so one user can have a useful new function. That's not belligerent, that's just good business. I agree, it can be frustrating, but having seen one too many "simple upgrades" that totally screwed the pooch, I'd rather take the conservative approach.
Now I thought Soundex was supposed to be a way to find similar sounding words with different spellings. This seems to come up with the set of all words that start with the same letter and have more or less the same consonant-vowel ordering.
I agree - this is a ridiculous idea. I can only imagine someone at the FAA or "Homeland Security" office having the brainstorm of "Hey - here's a way to find a bunch of similar names" and the clueless management (who desperately need to be seen to do *something*, no matter how unworkable) jumping on it. To the technically illiterate, it sounds great.
Unfortunately, this isn't going to stop anyone who wants to make up a pseudonym, as long as he isn't stupid or lazy amd makes up one that just starts with the same letters and sounds like his. Besides, that misses the point. You need photo ID to get near a plane in this country, right? A passport or driver's license, something official. So, either people are travelling under their real names, in which case we don't need a scheme at all, or they're professionals and have fake documents, in which case they could have any damn names in the world (with the strong chance that they won't be "Mohhammed al-Hussein Ibrahim" or anything else that will set a detector off).
If you're trying to spot people on a list and they're coming from someplace with laxer security, wouldn't it be a lot easier, not to mention more effective, to hand out a human-generated list of common alternate spellings and having passport control look at that, instead of trying to generate 25 barely-related names for each person you're looking for?
Sigh. I'm so ashamed of my government. For so many reasons.
Aw man, when I read the blurb about a collapsible screen, the first thing I thought of Mr. Whoopie's amazing 3-D blackboard (best link I could find - 2nd image down) from 'Tennessee Tuxedo'. That was the one that opened up from pocket size to full size and came to life with full animations of whatever concept he was trying to demonstrate. Always saved Tennessee and Chumley's asses.
Aww, you would have to mention the 8500, wouldn't you? I distinctly remember adding RAM to my ex-gf's 8500 back when that was high-end. First we had to figure out how to pry it open (not an easy job unless you're a Certified Apple Tech), then we put it back together only to discover that it wouldn't boot. Open up the case, pull out the CPU and motherboard again, pick the first RAM stick and take it out, discover that it wouldn't boot unless it was all put back together, put it all back together, discover that I'd picked the wrong stick. Repeat. Repeat again when the replacement RAM arrived. Ugh.
I fully agree with you that that design sucked. However, I was very positively impressed with the quality of components (including cables and screws) and the essential sturdiness of the thing. The CPU was on an edge connector card and so made for really simple upgrading. It was just - nice - inside. I especially remember comparing it to all the noname clones I'd been working with for the last 5 years or so, and thinking that yeah, it was worth the extra cost for something that wasn't designed for the lowest price point possible.
As I understand it, that model was still in high demand among people building high-end machines for a long time after it might have been considered obsolete. She still has that machine with no plans to give it up - it runs her scanner, etc.
Aluminum cases? Yeah BABY -- no more cheesy plastic! For years now I've been impressed by Apple's being the only computer shop doing anything whatsoever with industrial design. Ever since I saw the original Mac in the mid-80s I've been impressed by the 'fit and finish', for want of a better term, of Macintoshes versus the basic generic shitbox clone PCs. However, ever since the iMac New Way I've been really, really disappointed by the cheapness of the desktop cases, especially of the high-end towers. If you want me to pay extra, give me something that looks worth the price.
From what I can tell of the WWDC pictures, things have finally changed. These things look sweet, even if they do look just like the last 5 years worth of towers. Plus it sounds like they kick ass performance-wise. All I have to do now is convince myself why I should go and drop 3 grand I can't afford for no other reason than to connect with the iPod I don't have.
Aw man, you're *way* too out of date with this joke. Nobody here even remembers Sidekick, or TSRs, or how incredibly cool they could be.
Of course, the fact that Sidekick will take up lots of your available memory and make your computer periodically crap out or freeze up, and won't play nice with all your other software *does* sort of bring to mind the AOL experience. As I recall.
It looks like they're laying everything out in a single line rather than faithfully reflecting current orbital positions. Which makes sense -- would you like to have the job of moving Mercury? An illusion of collinearity is a good compromise compared to trying to build a 40-mile wide orrery.
All that have to do is say "this is a snapshot of the solar system during the Harmonic Convergence" and it's all taken care of.
11 Fun and Exciting Things To Do In Maine: 1) Eat $5.00 lobster right off the boat 2) Go camping, fishing, etc., without undertaking a major operation or spending hundreds of dollars 3) Swat mosquitoes 4) Swat blackflies 5) Laugh at tourists 6) Go down to Dunkin Donuts, listen to voluble roommate talk at someone for 5 minutes, get 2-syllable reply: "Ayyuh" 7) Go to Moody's Diner, eat walnut pie. Try to remember entire dialogue to Tim Sample's "Baked bean special at Moody's Diner" routine. 8) Go up north, see moose. They're really, really big. 9) Complain about the crayfish logo on the license plates. 10) Make obscene snow sculptures 11) Ah, that first day of spring!
5 Unique Entertaining Features of the University of Maine: 1) North America's largest scale model of the solar system 2) A really ugly hockey arena (Orono camous) 3) Free education for Passamaquody, Micmac and Penobscot Indians 4) Entertainingly eccentric professors (this may not be unique) 5) Has a Sea Grant campus
All right, so these are not the most exciting or leading-edge things you could think of. So what. Maine is a place for people who don't need the more sophisticated features of, say, California. I lived there for about 9 years, and loved it, even the winters (at least the first 5 or 6 months of them).
As for the model, I completely disagree. This is a really cool idea. The planet models are large enough to see and get a feel for, and the fact that they stretch out over 40 miles along Route 1 points out just how far apart everything is. You'd have to be pretty unromantic not to like this. Imagine being a kid and coming across this and being turned on by it and becoming a scientist because of it. That's what it's all about.
Here in Petaluma, CA, someone recently made a planetary model by drawing the planets on the sidewalk with magic markers over a 6 or 7 block distance. It's not really to scale - each planet is a couple inches in diameter - but it's fun to walk downtown following it (it starts right by my house). I wouldn't mind having something like this, hanging from the phone poles, though.
Maybe this wouldn't work for a dog, but it'd be perfect for my cat if it was small enough. If something like this had the smarts to avoid the thing chasing it, it could keep a cat occupied for hours. All it would need would be the ability to roll itself back out from under the couch and it would be the ultimate cat toy.
What do you mean by "fully represent?" Exporting from, say, Word to RTF or HTML preserves every word of the text plus the formatting (admittedly, the HTML is Very Ugly HTML, but Nice data formats aren't the issue here). Exporting to ASCII will lose much of the formatting and all of the visual effects, but all of the data is there.
I'm not sure what critical elements these "unethical companies" would leave out, but the discussion on the table at the moment is not about interoperability, but ensuring that a government can retrieve their original data without having to rely on a (possibly nonexistent) third-party entity.
I'm not familiar with Microsoft's XML flavor, so I have no idea of its usefulness for anything, but it's irrelevant. If a ordinance requires that, to be used by a government, software provide an open export format, that software will do so. Even if it is from Microsoft.
All these problems could be solved by simply having an "Export" feature, that spits out all the relevant data, relevant being defined as whatever the user has typed or otherwise entered. The major examples are going to be text documents, databases, and spreadsheets. This would also work for all the one-off homegrown apps that store whatever in some binary format.
Following this idea, the proposed bill could just list the benefits of open formats and mandate the ability to export to something like ASCII, RTF, CSV or XML.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised, myself. I don't know what the hell happened. I just got a package one day. My last name starts with "C", so maybe they only had so many to go around and went through the list in alphabetical order.
You know, I've thought for a while now that if you could come up with a simple, sealed box that could browse the web, read email, play audio and video, keep track of appointments and todos, and maybe do simple spreadsheets, word processing, and sell it to first-time consumers, you'd make a fortune. Imagine a ~1Ghz CPU with onboard video and sound, a modem and NIC, and a couple of USB ports, nailed up tight like the original Macintosh. It's not upgradeable, and you can't play games on it, but that's okay, because it costs 500 bucks and your market doesn't care about games. They take it home, plug in the monitor and keyboard, turn it on and go. They can't really install anything, so they don't have to worry about viruses or spyware. It doesn't run Outlook or IE, so they're pretty safe online.
It wouldn't be for everyone, but my dad would want one, and so would a whole lot of other people who didn't ever want to hassle with their computer. If you think about it, this is the direction that handhelds and cell phones are going, but who really wants to use a 2 inch screen for that? If the price was low enough, and the design was cool enough, it could be a hit.
Of course, now I've mentioned it on Slashdot, so there goes another business opportunity. Oh well, back to thinking up cool new porn site themes.
Sometimes these things do pan out for us the consumers. When Iomega got class-actioned back in 1995 or '96 for supposedly selling faulty Zip drives, I got either a pack of Zip disks or a whole new drive (it was a while back, my memory is leaky) out of it. The kicker is, I never even signed up for membership in the class, because my unit was working just fine (still would be, probably, if I had it hooked up to anything). I was happily impressed.
Usually, though, you're right; the consumers get cheaped off with a $5.00 check or a coupon for more defective crap. I suppose the idea is to spank the offending company hard enough that they'll think twice about cutting corners the next time. I wonder if that tactic ever works?
Re:Ah, the good old days
on
Gentoo Games
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· Score: 1
Weeeeellll, it was 10 years ago. The memory does get a bit hazy, but...
The Netware drivers could load themselves into EMS/XMS, and as I recall MSCDEX could put its buffers up there as well. QEMM was pretty spooky about being able to use the 640k - 1M area. DOS 5 could put a lot of things up high as well, and with judicious BUFFERS= and STACKS= settings in CONFIG.SYS, you could reduce DOS' memory needs a lot. COMMAND.COM could also reload the transient part of itself when it needed to.
Perhaps I'm romanticizing things a bit, and the actual amount was more like 605k. I know it was over 600k.
Now that I look at my original post, I see I claimed 620 meg free. I swear, that was just a typo!
I always appreciate a good flame. Yours was excellent - short, to the point. Pithy, even.
That fork has taken on a life of its own since the initial release. It may not be officially recognized or supported, but it has an active community that keeps developing and supporting it, and a helpful group of support people who are glad to point out problems and suggest fixes. It also has a much more viral license, and so is spreading to other languages a lot faster than the official version.
Unfortunately, the maintainers have a publically-writable CVS repository, so any ignorant fool who wants to can fork his own, incompatible version, and usually does. The viral aspect ensures that it infects everyone, everywhere.
I generally follow -AMERICAN_ENGLISH_STABLE, but I run -RELEASE_ENG for more formal situations.
Slashdot Mirror
I never though I'd be writing to you but the most fantastic thing just happened to me. I work for a small software company, and it's a pretty loose place. The other day I was trying to solve a really nasty bug, and...
Actually, this is not really a bad way to do things. There's a lot to be said for just getting it to work, fixing the immediate problem so you can go on with the rest of it. At least now it doesn't crash every time they move the window off the edge of the screen, so we can finish up the rest of the clipping routines.
Then, when that milestone is done and you're into the bugfix phase, you can sit down and redo the window handling code to fix the original problem and dekludge it. If you think of it as "refactoring", it even fits with popular methodology.
Done right (i.e. not abused or left forever) and assuming a non-deathmarch schedule, this should't make the testing phase any longer, or cost any more, since a single bug is not holding up all the rest of development. The key is to go back and fix it right, later. Not that I've *ever* been involved in a project that shipped with "/* this is an EVIL KLUDGE! */ anywhere in it...
I have not found one single girl capable of writing anything that is maintainable, extendable, efficient, and well thought out. They are simply incapable of being good code designers, but they can be great debuggers.
Yeah, it's their natures. They can't help it, it's that women are physically incapable of thinking logically or clearly. Poor things, they're made for gossip, cooking and sex; we never should have encouraged them to start doing man's work.
Never should have given them the vote in the first place, that started all these problems.
I recently took a look through the scripts of the web development company I work for, and discovered that about 1 in 5 scripts had a security hole - including things that would let you, e.g., delete their entire database. All these were down to register_globals.
Unfortunately, that is also precisely the reason they don't want to upgrade. They would have to go through 1000s of scripts replacing all their global variables from POST and GET with secure versions. Hence they stay with nice easy 4.1, and endanger their security.
Sadly, I'm afraid this is not an unusual situation. It's a direct consequence of having a cool feature (CGI variables are automatically made into local vars! Wow!) added by the original developers for no other reason than "it's cool". It's a perfect example of putting things into the language without thinking through their consequenses.
I hate to say it, but the PHP people fucked up. In this day and age, a misfeature like this should never have been allowed to happen. It's like writing an app today that reads user input into a 80 character buffer. Now we're stuck with the consequences.
PHP developers: Bite the bullet! Turn off register_globals and pick up the pieces! The only thing you have to lose is your exploits. Well, that and some time.
Is it just me, or are a lot of the examples from this page really confusing and unenlightening? I can understand most of it, but the examples for __get(), __set(), and__call() need some work.
__get() makes sense, checking to see if there is a value before returning it, but __set() looks like copy-and-paste of __get() that didn't get finished. It checks to see if the value is already there, then sets it, otherwise -- declares an error? The example usage afterwards refers to non-existent member variables, but not to the things it's supposed to be demonstrating.
The example for __call() is even more confusing. It looks like it's supposed to be a wrapper (for some reason) around a direct method call, but it doesn't refer to to the method that was passed in, and the usage is completely unrelated.
I assume these are just typos made by busy people, but it *is* an official page attempting to derscribe the new features of PHP 5.
I also wonder about the implications of the scoping rules. It looks like references to private or protected members are ignored? return null? That's nice, but is it good language design?
All in all, it looks like there are going to be really good things happening in PHP. I personally wish they weren't going in the Java syntax direction (not only do I not care for Java, but if you're going to borrow syntax from another language, you have to be consistent or you wind up confusing programmers of both languages), but hey, it's not my decision and it seems to work. It's a lot better than before - yay for being able to do func() -> method()!
The only major compatibility issue that I can think of between, say, the 4.1 branch and the 4.3 branch is that register_globals defaults to 'Off' in newer versions. If you leave it that way after installing, then yes, a lot of older scripts will break. Most of the shared/virtual hosting providers I've had to do script installs on, which have actually upgraded their PHP versions, just installed 4.2x or 4.3x and then manually turned register_globals back to 'On' in the php.ini file.
Isn't 'registered_globals' a gaping security hole? As I understand it, it automatically turns all incoming page variables into global PHP variables, leaving you open to all kinds of nasty shit. It's not that harder to look in the POST[] and GET[] arrays for your parameters; in fact, it's just good software engineering.
It's like not saying 'use strict' at the top of all your Perl scripts (for different reasons) - you're just asking for trouble in anything like production code. If I don't see attention to details like that, I know I'm dealing with amateur code, or at least someone who hasn't been doing this long enough to get bit yet.
I agree at the surprising number of hosts who simply haven't updated, though. There are a lot of hosts still running 4.1x, and even (yikes) 4.06, who just won't upgrade for whatever reason. I do most of my coding these days on 4.2 or 4.3, and have run into plenty of belligerent hosts who refuse to upgrade from a two-year-old release. Typically I just have my clients move to a better host; the providers who don't stay reasonably with the times will eventually figure out that it's hurting their bottom line.
Like others have mentioned, this is not how the ISP is looking at it. They're not likely to upgrade something that works just fine (aside from security fixes) and breaking it for all their users just so one user can have a useful new function. That's not belligerent, that's just good business. I agree, it can be frustrating, but having seen one too many "simple upgrades" that totally screwed the pooch, I'd rather take the conservative approach.
Now I thought Soundex was supposed to be a way to find similar sounding words with different spellings. This seems to come up with the set of all words that start with the same letter and have more or less the same consonant-vowel ordering.
I agree - this is a ridiculous idea. I can only imagine someone at the FAA or "Homeland Security" office having the brainstorm of "Hey - here's a way to find a bunch of similar names" and the clueless management (who desperately need to be seen to do *something*, no matter how unworkable) jumping on it. To the technically illiterate, it sounds great.
Unfortunately, this isn't going to stop anyone who wants to make up a pseudonym, as long as he isn't stupid or lazy amd makes up one that just starts with the same letters and sounds like his. Besides, that misses the point. You need photo ID to get near a plane in this country, right? A passport or driver's license, something official. So, either people are travelling under their real names, in which case we don't need a scheme at all, or they're professionals and have fake documents, in which case they could have any damn names in the world (with the strong chance that they won't be "Mohhammed al-Hussein Ibrahim" or anything else that will set a detector off).
If you're trying to spot people on a list and they're coming from someplace with laxer security, wouldn't it be a lot easier, not to mention more effective, to hand out a human-generated list of common alternate spellings and having passport control look at that, instead of trying to generate 25 barely-related names for each person you're looking for?
Sigh. I'm so ashamed of my government. For so many reasons.
Man, I really want a 3-D blackboard. Life sucks.
Aww, you would have to mention the 8500, wouldn't you? I distinctly remember adding RAM to my ex-gf's 8500 back when that was high-end. First we had to figure out how to pry it open (not an easy job unless you're a Certified Apple Tech), then we put it back together only to discover that it wouldn't boot. Open up the case, pull out the CPU and motherboard again, pick the first RAM stick and take it out, discover that it wouldn't boot unless it was all put back together, put it all back together, discover that I'd picked the wrong stick. Repeat. Repeat again when the replacement RAM arrived. Ugh.
I fully agree with you that that design sucked. However, I was very positively impressed with the quality of components (including cables and screws) and the essential sturdiness of the thing. The CPU was on an edge connector card and so made for really simple upgrading. It was just - nice - inside. I especially remember comparing it to all the noname clones I'd been working with for the last 5 years or so, and thinking that yeah, it was worth the extra cost for something that wasn't designed for the lowest price point possible.
As I understand it, that model was still in high demand among people building high-end machines for a long time after it might have been considered obsolete. She still has that machine with no plans to give it up - it runs her scanner, etc.
Aluminum cases? Yeah BABY -- no more cheesy plastic! For years now I've been impressed by Apple's being the only computer shop doing anything whatsoever with industrial design. Ever since I saw the original Mac in the mid-80s I've been impressed by the 'fit and finish', for want of a better term, of Macintoshes versus the basic generic shitbox clone PCs. However, ever since the iMac New Way I've been really, really disappointed by the cheapness of the desktop cases, especially of the high-end towers. If you want me to pay extra, give me something that looks worth the price.
From what I can tell of the WWDC pictures, things have finally changed. These things look sweet, even if they do look just like the last 5 years worth of towers. Plus it sounds like they kick ass performance-wise. All I have to do now is convince myself why I should go and drop 3 grand I can't afford for no other reason than to connect with the iPod I don't have.
Aw man, you're *way* too out of date with this joke. Nobody here even remembers Sidekick, or TSRs, or how incredibly cool they could be.
Of course, the fact that Sidekick will take up lots of your available memory and make your computer periodically crap out or freeze up, and won't play nice with all your other software *does* sort of bring to mind the AOL experience. As I recall.
It looks like they're laying everything out in a single line rather than faithfully reflecting current orbital positions. Which makes sense -- would you like to have the job of moving Mercury? An illusion of collinearity is a good compromise compared to trying to build a 40-mile wide orrery.
All that have to do is say "this is a snapshot of the solar system during the Harmonic Convergence" and it's all taken care of.
11 Fun and Exciting Things To Do In Maine:
1) Eat $5.00 lobster right off the boat
2) Go camping, fishing, etc., without undertaking a major operation or spending hundreds of dollars
3) Swat mosquitoes
4) Swat blackflies
5) Laugh at tourists
6) Go down to Dunkin Donuts, listen to voluble roommate talk at someone for 5 minutes, get 2-syllable reply: "Ayyuh"
7) Go to Moody's Diner, eat walnut pie. Try to remember entire dialogue to Tim Sample's "Baked bean special at Moody's Diner" routine.
8) Go up north, see moose. They're really, really big.
9) Complain about the crayfish logo on the license plates.
10) Make obscene snow sculptures
11) Ah, that first day of spring!
5 Unique Entertaining Features of the University of Maine:
1) North America's largest scale model of the solar system
2) A really ugly hockey arena (Orono camous)
3) Free education for Passamaquody, Micmac and Penobscot Indians
4) Entertainingly eccentric professors (this may not be unique)
5) Has a Sea Grant campus
All right, so these are not the most exciting or leading-edge things you could think of. So what. Maine is a place for people who don't need the more sophisticated features of, say, California. I lived there for about 9 years, and loved it, even the winters (at least the first 5 or 6 months of them).
As for the model, I completely disagree. This is a really cool idea. The planet models are large enough to see and get a feel for, and the fact that they stretch out over 40 miles along Route 1 points out just how far apart everything is. You'd have to be pretty unromantic not to like this. Imagine being a kid and coming across this and being turned on by it and becoming a scientist because of it. That's what it's all about.
Here in Petaluma, CA, someone recently made a planetary model by drawing the planets on the sidewalk with magic markers over a 6 or 7 block distance. It's not really to scale - each planet is a couple inches in diameter - but it's fun to walk downtown following it (it starts right by my house). I wouldn't mind having something like this, hanging from the phone poles, though.
Maybe this wouldn't work for a dog, but it'd be perfect for my cat if it was small enough. If something like this had the smarts to avoid the thing chasing it, it could keep a cat occupied for hours. All it would need would be the ability to roll itself back out from under the couch and it would be the ultimate cat toy.
The doll is connected via an ethernet cable (up to 100') to your PC
You know, I can't imagine a situation more suited to wireless...
What do you mean by "fully represent?" Exporting from, say, Word to RTF or HTML preserves every word of the text plus the formatting (admittedly, the HTML is Very Ugly HTML, but Nice data formats aren't the issue here). Exporting to ASCII will lose much of the formatting and all of the visual effects, but all of the data is there.
I'm not sure what critical elements these "unethical companies" would leave out, but the discussion on the table at the moment is not about interoperability, but ensuring that a government can retrieve their original data without having to rely on a (possibly nonexistent) third-party entity.
I'm not familiar with Microsoft's XML flavor, so I have no idea of its usefulness for anything, but it's irrelevant. If a ordinance requires that, to be used by a government, software provide an open export format, that software will do so. Even if it is from Microsoft.
All these problems could be solved by simply having an "Export" feature, that spits out all the relevant data, relevant being defined as whatever the user has typed or otherwise entered. The major examples are going to be text documents, databases, and spreadsheets. This would also work for all the one-off homegrown apps that store whatever in some binary format.
Following this idea, the proposed bill could just list the benefits of open formats and mandate the ability to export to something like ASCII, RTF, CSV or XML.
Yeah, I was pretty surprised, myself. I don't know what the hell happened. I just got a package one day. My last name starts with "C", so maybe they only had so many to go around and went through the list in alphabetical order.
Jack is about what I would have expected, though.
Funny? How'd this get "Funny?" WasterDave's reply was funny. I was actually being serious.
Oh well, I'll take Funny. Any positive moderation is good moderation, right?
You know, I've thought for a while now that if you could come up with a simple, sealed box that could browse the web, read email, play audio and video, keep track of appointments and todos, and maybe do simple spreadsheets, word processing, and sell it to first-time consumers, you'd make a fortune. Imagine a ~1Ghz CPU with onboard video and sound, a modem and NIC, and a couple of USB ports, nailed up tight like the original Macintosh. It's not upgradeable, and you can't play games on it, but that's okay, because it costs 500 bucks and your market doesn't care about games. They take it home, plug in the monitor and keyboard, turn it on and go. They can't really install anything, so they don't have to worry about viruses or spyware. It doesn't run Outlook or IE, so they're pretty safe online.
It wouldn't be for everyone, but my dad would want one, and so would a whole lot of other people who didn't ever want to hassle with their computer. If you think about it, this is the direction that handhelds and cell phones are going, but who really wants to use a 2 inch screen for that? If the price was low enough, and the design was cool enough, it could be a hit.
Of course, now I've mentioned it on Slashdot, so there goes another business opportunity. Oh well, back to thinking up cool new porn site themes.
Ooh, that's nasty. You, my friend, have an evil mind. I admire that.
Sometimes these things do pan out for us the consumers. When Iomega got class-actioned back in 1995 or '96 for supposedly selling faulty Zip drives, I got either a pack of Zip disks or a whole new drive (it was a while back, my memory is leaky) out of it. The kicker is, I never even signed up for membership in the class, because my unit was working just fine (still would be, probably, if I had it hooked up to anything). I was happily impressed.
Usually, though, you're right; the consumers get cheaped off with a $5.00 check or a coupon for more defective crap. I suppose the idea is to spank the offending company hard enough that they'll think twice about cutting corners the next time. I wonder if that tactic ever works?
Weeeeellll, it was 10 years ago. The memory does get a bit hazy, but...
The Netware drivers could load themselves into EMS/XMS, and as I recall MSCDEX could put its buffers up there as well. QEMM was pretty spooky about being able to use the 640k - 1M area. DOS 5 could put a lot of things up high as well, and with judicious BUFFERS= and STACKS= settings in CONFIG.SYS, you could reduce DOS' memory needs a lot. COMMAND.COM could also reload the transient part of itself when it needed to.
Perhaps I'm romanticizing things a bit, and the actual amount was more like 605k. I know it was over 600k.
Now that I look at my original post, I see I claimed 620 meg free. I swear, that was just a typo!
I always appreciate a good flame. Yours was excellent - short, to the point. Pithy, even.
That fork has taken on a life of its own since the initial release. It may not be officially recognized or supported, but it has an active community that keeps developing and supporting it, and a helpful group of support people who are glad to point out problems and suggest fixes. It also has a much more viral license, and so is spreading to other languages a lot faster than the official version.
Unfortunately, the maintainers have a publically-writable CVS repository, so any ignorant fool who wants to can fork his own, incompatible version, and usually does. The viral aspect ensures that it infects everyone, everywhere.
I generally follow -AMERICAN_ENGLISH_STABLE, but I run -RELEASE_ENG for more formal situations.
Or, I *could* have been making a joke. Not a very good one, mind you, but a joke nonetheless.