Herp derp derp! Union leaders are ELECTED BY THE MEMBERS. BlackTriangle is talking about the BILLION DOLLARS (that's 50,000 workers times $20,000 ea) that Verizon was trying to shift to the executive class. Moron.
Precisely! Let me elaborate a bit on that. Danny Goodman said in his JavaScript book waaaay back before 2000 something like: "Test for features not version numbers."
The way PhrstBrn says it seems more like client side web-page scripting. For instance, peeking at the various members of the `event` object, see what exists.
This can also apply to plug-in type dev though. For example, when doing QueryInterface('ABDSFJSDLFJ234JOI4JF24J'), DO NOT just trust that you got a valid object back, based on the fact that you required a specific version of Firefox and that version declares "ABDSFJSDLFJ234JOI4JF24J". Instead, look at the value returned, see if it conforms to what you expect (without causing JS errors while doing so), and take appropriate steps if not (disable your plugin or just the feature that requires that interface).
Yeah I was going to post something similar. You don't get to just build an MPEG 4 decoder in an FPGA and "voila, instant hardware decoder". The biggest FPGAs only have a few million or so gates, it wouldn't fit and would have to be still mostly driven by software. You'd put the most CPU intensive pieces into the FPGA and do the rest through the step / instruction cycles of a processor.
I'd actually argue that NVidia type coprocessors are much more appropriate for the types of tasks you mention. They have multiple concurrent pipelines, access to hardware multipliers and are readily configurable by shader language, OpenCL, CUDA, etc.
You could of course build something similar inside an FPGA, but on an NV we're talking billions of gates. The FPGA would be much smaller, maybe you'd fit one programmable pipeline.
FPGAs are great for prototyping but nothing compares to what you can lay down manually on silicon.
Love the math curriculum, great fun. I did about 10 years of school math in 2 days. No wonder I hated math in school, it moved glacially slowly! Having so much packed into such a small time frame has been a great refresher course, and Khan rewards me with points and achievements. Holy cow, learning doesn't have to be painful! Who knew!?
... IF Netflix had at least same selection as the old video stores. Their current movie selection is terrible. Battle Los Angeles comes out on DVD, and so Battle of Los Angeles comes out on Netflix. This happens *often*, crappy rip-off D grade movies appear on streaming and the good stuff is available only on useless pieces of plastic.
It makes zero sense to me that the industry is hanging on so tooth-and-nail (vending machines? seriously?!) to the model of renting out physical media. If the movie worth the extra quality of having a good copy (e.g. LoTR), I WILL buy a DVD from amazon.
Renting plastic is an idea whose time has come and gone. The video stores all died but nothing has replaced them. No wonder piracy is reaching record levels...
Oh yeah! The failed economic policies of yesteryear. Great. Thanks.
Need more taxpayers - yeah right. You claim there's no class warfare but then plainly state that you think the middle class should pay.
AND STOP SAYING WE WANT TO INCREASE TAXES. All that needs to happen is that the Bush tax cuts that should have expired long ago, SHOULD ACTUALLY EXPIRE.
We don't want to raise the taxes you twonk, we JUST WANT THEM BACK AT REASONABLE LEVELS.
Heh that's pretty funny but I'd be happy if Hollywood could put out movies with a plot anywhere near that good. Even with Card's freaky stance on copyright and his religious proselytizing, he did manage to write a couple good books there.
Thinking about it though, after the third one in the series though it does start to go downhill fast. I wonder if Card himself has Hollywood-itis, the tendency to beat a dead horse until money stops falling out.
4 regular old marines that have more personality than most military types you meet - the black guy, the hispanic guy, generic WASP white guy and butch (but still cute and wears lipstick) lesbian girl - are sent new orders to show up to a secret base. In the secret base there's fancy new laser beam weapons that the marines are going to have to learn (queue montage).
But wait! Evil Liam Neeson has made a deal with the aliens and sold out our greatest secret! The fact that we start to suck at shooting things when the targets move faster.
Suddenly there's alien spaceships in the sky! Oh no, and they start moving faster and faster! So fast in fact that you can't actually see what's happening on the screen! How did they know our greatest weakness (DAMN YOU LIAM NEESON). The hispanic guy gets wounded, then the black guy dies. The white guy saves the day (by finishing the level) and the lesbian goes straight and marries the white guy. The hispanic guy is the best man at their wedding.
Well, sure, and that's why in more recent Drupal versions they switched to using PHP's PDO, which is much more explicit about what you need to do.
The point was, the tool works if you use it correctly. Using the car lock analogy from above, the place for the lock was there but the developer failed to put a lock in the hole.
I half agree. Some of the items in the list are indeed design mistakes, but others really are programmer mistakes.
The SQL injection one is the primary one I'm thinking is really a programmer error. Take this case from Drupal/PHP:
db_query("SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar='" . $_GET['bar'] . "'");
That is totally incorrect and SQL can easily be injected into the statement from outside. When the API is used *correctly* this is not an issue:
db_query('SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar="%s"', $_GET['bar']);
The difference is pretty subtle here and can easily be lost on newbies. As parameters to the db_query function, untrusted inputs are cleaned. I have seen the former code on several sites that I took over from a former developer, they are certainly NOT design errors.
We're getting offtopic here, but Bush wining the second time does NOT Prove that elections are rigged. What it actually caused Bush to get re-elected was a swift-boat campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating on John Kerry right before the election.
I'm replying not to just be pedantic and correct you, I just want to raise awareness of the power of lying TV advertisements - if you know what swiftboating is, you will have the mental tools to recognise it when it happens and respond accordingly.
Do democracy a favor and forward that Wiki article around;-)
I could see many games and tools for making games running in a web browser. Having done both - native apps and web dev, I have to disagree.
The text handling capabilities alone put the browser WAY ahead of the alternatives. Not to mention you can make the flat parts of your UI in HTML, SVG, whatever. It's a handy environment with a lot of facilities that make app dev simpler.
The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)
I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).
It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.
I installed MythTV because the interface is designed to be used with just a few keyboard commands. At first, the goal was to replace a dead TiVo with it, but we quickly realized that we had plenty to watch without capturing TV. So now we just use the streaming features of it, and access DVD images and downloads from a closet server.
Streaming in MythTV is a bit weak on this slightly older setup (about a year old) - the flash player loves to steal input focus, so I have to go over and click to get the remote working again. I'm hoping that irritation is fixed now. Browsing for streaming content isn't so great in the MythTV interface, might as well launch a browser really, you need to use a keyboard to accomplish anything - and the OSK is slow and clumsy. Hulu isn't working on this slightly older Ubuntu, though it is fine in my desktop's 11.04 (probably will update the TV box soon). Netflix actively refuses to work in Linux.
Input devices seem to be a weak point to me if you just want to plug in a random PC. Get yourself a remote that works like a keyboard. Personally, being a nerd, I used a micro-controller (Atmel USB capable AVR) and an IR receiver to fake a USB PC keyboard with my Sony TV remote - so everything (volume, TV power, full MythTV control) is available with one simple remote.
So, fair warning, you'll probably have an all around easier experience by buying a PC remote control and installing Windows Media Center on it, if you can stomach running such a thing.
Not long ago (within the past year) I've seen people *strongly* recommend targeting HTML 4.01, the most widely set of tags currently supported.
XHTML never really seemed to live up to the hype for me. Sure, it's easier to parse XHTML than HTML. But who cares? You should not be parsing web pages, it's the road to madness;-) Always look for an API or a feed first.
Last I checked, anyone could submit ideas, corrections, feature requests *RIGHT THERE ON THE HTML5 WORKING DRAFT*. "Feedback Comments" right at the top of http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Now, if they ignore your idea, that's almost certainly because it sucks and is badly written. No really, it does suck. Follow the instructions there *carefully*, really think about this feature or tag or whatever you're requesting, and your ideas will get consideration.
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Herp derp derp! Union leaders are ELECTED BY THE MEMBERS. BlackTriangle is talking about the BILLION DOLLARS (that's 50,000 workers times $20,000 ea) that Verizon was trying to shift to the executive class. Moron.
Precisely! Let me elaborate a bit on that. Danny Goodman said in his JavaScript book waaaay back before 2000 something like: "Test for features not version numbers."
The way PhrstBrn says it seems more like client side web-page scripting. For instance, peeking at the various members of the `event` object, see what exists.
This can also apply to plug-in type dev though. For example, when doing QueryInterface('ABDSFJSDLFJ234JOI4JF24J'), DO NOT just trust that you got a valid object back, based on the fact that you required a specific version of Firefox and that version declares "ABDSFJSDLFJ234JOI4JF24J". Instead, look at the value returned, see if it conforms to what you expect (without causing JS errors while doing so), and take appropriate steps if not (disable your plugin or just the feature that requires that interface).
Yeah I was going to post something similar. You don't get to just build an MPEG 4 decoder in an FPGA and "voila, instant hardware decoder". The biggest FPGAs only have a few million or so gates, it wouldn't fit and would have to be still mostly driven by software. You'd put the most CPU intensive pieces into the FPGA and do the rest through the step / instruction cycles of a processor.
I'd actually argue that NVidia type coprocessors are much more appropriate for the types of tasks you mention. They have multiple concurrent pipelines, access to hardware multipliers and are readily configurable by shader language, OpenCL, CUDA, etc.
You could of course build something similar inside an FPGA, but on an NV we're talking billions of gates. The FPGA would be much smaller, maybe you'd fit one programmable pipeline.
FPGAs are great for prototyping but nothing compares to what you can lay down manually on silicon.
So, I went through and installed all the software, click add project, LHC@home. Lo and behold:
"This project is not currently accepting new accounts. You can add it only if you have an account."
I feel alienated. How does this help ... anyone? Weird. Uninstalled.
Mobile chip maker ARM sees mobile devices as the future of gaming! News at eleven. I'll stick with my PC for serious gaming, thanks.
Well, our spirit is gone but at least we've got some opportunity left! :-)
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/
http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/
Startswithabang especially goes into some very nice details about astrophysics topics and has some smart people commenting.
I'm picturing "Devil Went Down To Georgia". Good vs evil violins. Epic.
Love the math curriculum, great fun. I did about 10 years of school math in 2 days. No wonder I hated math in school, it moved glacially slowly! Having so much packed into such a small time frame has been a great refresher course, and Khan rewards me with points and achievements. Holy cow, learning doesn't have to be painful! Who knew!?
... IF Netflix had at least same selection as the old video stores. Their current movie selection is terrible. Battle Los Angeles comes out on DVD, and so Battle of Los Angeles comes out on Netflix. This happens *often*, crappy rip-off D grade movies appear on streaming and the good stuff is available only on useless pieces of plastic.
It makes zero sense to me that the industry is hanging on so tooth-and-nail (vending machines? seriously?!) to the model of renting out physical media. If the movie worth the extra quality of having a good copy (e.g. LoTR), I WILL buy a DVD from amazon.
Renting plastic is an idea whose time has come and gone. The video stores all died but nothing has replaced them. No wonder piracy is reaching record levels...
Oh yeah! The failed economic policies of yesteryear. Great. Thanks.
Need more taxpayers - yeah right. You claim there's no class warfare but then plainly state that you think the middle class should pay.
AND STOP SAYING WE WANT TO INCREASE TAXES. All that needs to happen is that the Bush tax cuts that should have expired long ago, SHOULD ACTUALLY EXPIRE.
We don't want to raise the taxes you twonk, we JUST WANT THEM BACK AT REASONABLE LEVELS.
Heh that's pretty funny but I'd be happy if Hollywood could put out movies with a plot anywhere near that good. Even with Card's freaky stance on copyright and his religious proselytizing, he did manage to write a couple good books there.
Thinking about it though, after the third one in the series though it does start to go downhill fast. I wonder if Card himself has Hollywood-itis, the tendency to beat a dead horse until money stops falling out.
4 regular old marines that have more personality than most military types you meet - the black guy, the hispanic guy, generic WASP white guy and butch (but still cute and wears lipstick) lesbian girl - are sent new orders to show up to a secret base. In the secret base there's fancy new laser beam weapons that the marines are going to have to learn (queue montage).
But wait! Evil Liam Neeson has made a deal with the aliens and sold out our greatest secret! The fact that we start to suck at shooting things when the targets move faster.
Suddenly there's alien spaceships in the sky! Oh no, and they start moving faster and faster! So fast in fact that you can't actually see what's happening on the screen! How did they know our greatest weakness (DAMN YOU LIAM NEESON). The hispanic guy gets wounded, then the black guy dies. The white guy saves the day (by finishing the level) and the lesbian goes straight and marries the white guy. The hispanic guy is the best man at their wedding.
The end.
I think that's overly simplistic
Pussies think everyone can get along and dicks just wanna fuck all the time without thinking it through.
But then you got your assholes, Chuck. And all the assholes want is to shit all over everything.
So pussies may get mad at dicks once in a while because pussies get fucked by dicks.
But dicks also fuck assholes, Chuck.
And if they didn't fuck the assholes, you know what you'd get?
You'd get your dick and your pussy all covered in shit!
Well, sure, and that's why in more recent Drupal versions they switched to using PHP's PDO, which is much more explicit about what you need to do.
The point was, the tool works if you use it correctly. Using the car lock analogy from above, the place for the lock was there but the developer failed to put a lock in the hole.
I half agree. Some of the items in the list are indeed design mistakes, but others really are programmer mistakes.
The SQL injection one is the primary one I'm thinking is really a programmer error. Take this case from Drupal/PHP:
db_query("SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar='" . $_GET['bar'] . "'");
That is totally incorrect and SQL can easily be injected into the statement from outside. When the API is used *correctly* this is not an issue:
db_query('SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE bar="%s"', $_GET['bar']);
The difference is pretty subtle here and can easily be lost on newbies. As parameters to the db_query function, untrusted inputs are cleaned. I have seen the former code on several sites that I took over from a former developer, they are certainly NOT design errors.
We're getting offtopic here, but Bush wining the second time does NOT Prove that elections are rigged. What it actually caused Bush to get re-elected was a swift-boat campaign http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftboating on John Kerry right before the election.
I'm replying not to just be pedantic and correct you, I just want to raise awareness of the power of lying TV advertisements - if you know what swiftboating is, you will have the mental tools to recognise it when it happens and respond accordingly.
Do democracy a favor and forward that Wiki article around ;-)
I could see many games and tools for making games running in a web browser. Having done both - native apps and web dev, I have to disagree.
The text handling capabilities alone put the browser WAY ahead of the alternatives. Not to mention you can make the flat parts of your UI in HTML, SVG, whatever. It's a handy environment with a lot of facilities that make app dev simpler.
The WebGL news is pretty depressing. Found this recently (explained here)
I'm still very excited about having a real drawing API in the browser to work with that's not tied to MS or Adobe. Guess it'll still be a while until this tech is ready for prime time (sigh, been waiting YEARS already).
It's not helping that MS is slinging as much FUD as possible. Claiming that IE is "more secure than Chrome or Firefox" is laughable, but crap like this is not helping our case to the casual observer.
Oh wow it would be so great if Netflix drops Silverlight. The DRM all tied up in it stops me using my paid Netflix account on Linux. Grr.
... we put that trust to the test. BAM, Robots gave us 6 extra seconds of cooperationGood job robots. I'm Cave Johnson, we're done here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZMSAzZ76EU
I installed MythTV because the interface is designed to be used with just a few keyboard commands. At first, the goal was to replace a dead TiVo with it, but we quickly realized that we had plenty to watch without capturing TV. So now we just use the streaming features of it, and access DVD images and downloads from a closet server.
Streaming in MythTV is a bit weak on this slightly older setup (about a year old) - the flash player loves to steal input focus, so I have to go over and click to get the remote working again. I'm hoping that irritation is fixed now. Browsing for streaming content isn't so great in the MythTV interface, might as well launch a browser really, you need to use a keyboard to accomplish anything - and the OSK is slow and clumsy. Hulu isn't working on this slightly older Ubuntu, though it is fine in my desktop's 11.04 (probably will update the TV box soon). Netflix actively refuses to work in Linux.
Input devices seem to be a weak point to me if you just want to plug in a random PC. Get yourself a remote that works like a keyboard. Personally, being a nerd, I used a micro-controller (Atmel USB capable AVR) and an IR receiver to fake a USB PC keyboard with my Sony TV remote - so everything (volume, TV power, full MythTV control) is available with one simple remote.
So, fair warning, you'll probably have an all around easier experience by buying a PC remote control and installing Windows Media Center on it, if you can stomach running such a thing.
Hey look, Mozilla re-invented http://www.ohloh.net/ and it only works for Mozilla. How useful.
Hah yeah except for the huge stupid hack you have to use for IE ;-)
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#ie
Not long ago (within the past year) I've seen people *strongly* recommend targeting HTML 4.01, the most widely set of tags currently supported.
XHTML never really seemed to live up to the hype for me. Sure, it's easier to parse XHTML than HTML. But who cares? You should not be parsing web pages, it's the road to madness ;-) Always look for an API or a feed first.
Last I checked, anyone could submit ideas, corrections, feature requests *RIGHT THERE ON THE HTML5 WORKING DRAFT*. "Feedback Comments" right at the top of http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/
Now, if they ignore your idea, that's almost certainly because it sucks and is badly written. No really, it does suck. Follow the instructions there *carefully*, really think about this feature or tag or whatever you're requesting, and your ideas will get consideration.