I am typing this comment from that keyboard:-P I'm using it as a temporary while I search for a replacement that doesn't suck. All MS wireless keyboards and most Logitech ones I tried suck. The one Logitech one I liked was $200:-/
The biggest problem is not that power key. It does nothing on any OS I use (Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian, WindowsXP).
The 2 biggest issues I have are the backslash and pipe symbol (|) key is in a very uncomfortable place. Also the backspace key is undersized and it's next to the backslash key, so frequently when I'm trying to backspace I end type typing a backslash, and other times when I'm trying to hit backspace, I get a backslash.
That is quite irritating but for the most part the response on this keyboard is nice. All in all, it's $4.99 well spent I'd say;-)
Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this recently. It's was a bit of a shock when I saw the idea here on Slashdot:-)
You could easily make a 2 or 4 wire serial bus out of the 4 feet and reception points of a block, but it might be quite limited in speed. Technically though, this could be pretty simple. Most controller and DSP microcontrollers have support for some type of serial bus, and the whole system can standardize on one.
Something like Microchip's CAN (controller area network) seems ideal - nodes do not need a specific ID to be addressed, rather the whole thing is a message passing system built in hardware. IIRC it uses a 2 wire bus, so it wouldn't even need to use all four contact pads.
But like I said it would be rate limited. The fasted serial buses I've seen are limited to about 1Mbps. Maybe it could use 2 buses to double that speed.
It could be done instead using a parallel bus which would be faster especially if it's a wide bus and can move many bits an one go, but this enlarges the connections between the blocks, microcontrollers don't have direct support (complicating programming) and all of a sudden things don't just "click" like Legos;-)
The solution is to use a higher level framework that will handle most of the security issues for you. My preference is Drupal which formulates db queries like this:
$r = db_query('SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE a=%d AND b="%s"', $a, $b);
In this example, $a is converted to an integer (because of the %d) even if it came through CGI as a user request. $b is sanitized and will not allow the type of SQL injection that this article talks about (because of the %s). No worries about any security issues as long as you use the function as intended.
Not to mention that frameworks like Drupal have lots of other great features to help you build your site quickly.
It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.
the thought of Rob spending his last few weeks in a hole, while this guy lowered a bucket of lotion and water down to him once a day, made me feel bad
See this is where digg clearly has the upper hand. I mean you could take away KR for days and digg would just keep going (and going, and going....) Hell I think he's been in a hole for the past entire year;)
Once the interface becomes hard to use, the ordinary, quiet users turn to other programs, and power users become even more dominating, leading to a vicious circle of program sectarianism.
My god. Someone managed to describe what's wrong with Blender in one sentence! That was amazing perrin, thanks.;-)
I routinely experience Apache crashes while using eAccelerator, APC or Zend Optimizer, even with the latest stable PHP. If you use one of these products, be sure to also run some kind of watchdog that will restart httpd if (when) the stack crashes. They're totally worth running in any case. Zend Optimizer speeds up my Drupal installation by a huge amount because of the time saved parsing code.
You also should of course make sure you've got caching happening at every level of your app. Memcached is a great application level cache. Apache side, make sure you enable and configure the memory cache for static files. (mod_mem_cache) and possibly the file cache (mod_disk_cache). Client side, make sure you're caching static files like images, js, css. Apache's mod_expires gives you good control over this in Apache config.
Of course, all of this could be just spinning your wheels if you have badly optimized sql queries or bad table design to start with. Set mysql's slow query log threshold very low to catch these issues early.
Denial: What global warming? Anger: This could actually be good for us damnit! (where we are now) Bargaining: Please Mrs. Nature, don't kill us all! We'll give you a toupee for the ozone hole! Depression: This is so unfair! (while wiping sweat from underarms with paper towel) Acceptance: People wander the streets naked to escape the heat.
The past couple years have been better than it has been in a long time.
In the past couple years, we've seen some great ones... I'll elaborate.
Sorry, but all the DRM in the world wouldn't make HL2 a "crappy game".
Fable an utterly fantastic single player RPG (possibly the best ever made) and we're getting Fable2 early next year. NeverwinterNights from a few years ago was amazing and NeverwinterNights2 is due very soon now.
SpellForce2 and DragonShard are two amazing RTS games from the recent past.
So that's 7 modern games that just rock really hard. I'm sure there are others but I haven't had my coffee yet.
There are great games coming out, you just need to do a bit of homework to figure out which ones they are!
Please, please PC game makers - more like these... console games suck!
Chavs surrounded me. My axe swings and I bring down two in a stroke, only to be replaced by two more of the vile hooded fiends in quick succession. My axe still stuck in the last fellow, I had little recourse but to kick away one of the approaching hoods. I grappled for my knife and managed to stick it in the face of the other.
But then, I turned and saw it. A huge boss hoodie covered in body armor. Fear splashed over me like a tidal wave. I heaved my axe free and headed toward the uber-chav. I swung my axe with all my might and hatred, but the power of the bling could not be undone. It was in this moment that I picked up my father's axe and...
What? What you just described was completely flashy and serves absolutely no functional purpose whatsoever.
Nonono it's not about the asthetic value (although it does look nice). What I mean is simply that flipping a card-like thing over is a concept that anyone can understand. Start talking about preference panels and property sheets and you'll make some peoples eyes cross. Flipping something over is a pretty universally understood concept. That's what makes a great user interface - intuitiveness.
It is highly functional. It serves a purpose beyond the ones you thought to put into your application. The function of it is to make users somewhat familiar with how your application works, before they've even installed or looked at it. That seems highly functional to me.
The best 3d web thing I've ever seen is Apple's dashboard widgets in OSX. Each widget can have a (nicely standardized) button which activates the preferences for the widget. The prefrences are on the back of the widget. Literally when you click the prefs button the widget flips over in 3d animation and you interact with the preference panel.
I find this incredible because a) it's an amazing practical use of 3d and b) it's not at all flashy or trying to create a 'new 3d browsing paradigm' or some such silliness. Instead, Apple has used the graphics tools available to them and once again, made a fantastic advance in user interfaces.
Before you call me an Apple fanboy, you should know that I don't even own a Mac, I just think they're neat is all.
The metrics from Netcraft are hard to read with respect to OS.
I totally agree. I mean the top 3 servers listed in the uptime report are supposedly using a BSD OS running IIS. How likely is that?;) Anyone from NEC want to tell us what the real story is?
[rant]On an unrelated and slightly offtopic note I'd like to just say here that domain parkers suck hard. I mean, if you figure that there are 1,000,000 words in the English language which are common enough to make good domain names (in reality probably far fewer words). If you assume a per-domain price of 19.95 (which is also probably very high considering godaddy buys names in huge blocks for a discount), the entire English language can be had for $19,950,000. Actually, not really 'can be had' but 'is already had'. I know it would never work but I wish there was a way to force domain name owners to actually use the domains they purchased. These unethical fuckers get paid thousands for *not innovating*. You know what I have to say to that? Well I would tell you but freaking pooponastick.com is already taken:( [/rant]
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has wondered why we haven't seen wider circulation of this story and why immigration laws are suddenly the thing to discuss. As one slashdotter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the NSA makes Nixon look like an amateur.
There was a protest today outside the SBC building on Folsom Street here in San Francisco, but it drew hardly any attention and there was no media around.
The building itself is pretty scary looking. It's a huge brown rectangle with tinted windows that also somehow look brown. Compared with the nice architecture of the nearby buildings, it sure is an eyesore.
Anyhow, someone want to offer me any conspiracy theories on why nobody cares?
Slashdot Mirror
If they become illegal, build your own!
Fortunately, all it takes to make an ion-detector chamber is a tin can, some wire, and an NPN transistor!
http://www.techlib.com/science/ion.html
Happy ion counting!
I am typing this comment from that keyboard :-P I'm using it as a temporary while I search for a replacement that doesn't suck. All MS wireless keyboards and most Logitech ones I tried suck. The one Logitech one I liked was $200 :-/
;-)
The biggest problem is not that power key. It does nothing on any OS I use (Ubuntu, Redhat, Debian, WindowsXP).
The 2 biggest issues I have are the backslash and pipe symbol (|) key is in a very uncomfortable place. Also the backspace key is undersized and it's next to the backslash key, so frequently when I'm trying to backspace I end type typing a backslash, and other times when I'm trying to hit backspace, I get a backslash.
That is quite irritating but for the most part the response on this keyboard is nice. All in all, it's $4.99 well spent I'd say
"Great jerky professor!"
"Damnit Fry I was going to eat that!"
Coincidentally, I've been thinking about this recently. It's was a bit of a shock when I saw the idea here on Slashdot :-)
;-)
You could easily make a 2 or 4 wire serial bus out of the 4 feet and reception points of a block, but it might be quite limited in speed. Technically though, this could be pretty simple. Most controller and DSP microcontrollers have support for some type of serial bus, and the whole system can standardize on one.
Something like Microchip's CAN (controller area network) seems ideal - nodes do not need a specific ID to be addressed, rather the whole thing is a message passing system built in hardware. IIRC it uses a 2 wire bus, so it wouldn't even need to use all four contact pads.
But like I said it would be rate limited. The fasted serial buses I've seen are limited to about 1Mbps. Maybe it could use 2 buses to double that speed.
It could be done instead using a parallel bus which would be faster especially if it's a wide bus and can move many bits an one go, but this enlarges the connections between the blocks, microcontrollers don't have direct support (complicating programming) and all of a sudden things don't just "click" like Legos
The solution is to use a higher level framework that will handle most of the security issues for you. My preference is Drupal which formulates db queries like this:
$r = db_query('SELECT * FROM {foo} WHERE a=%d AND b="%s"', $a, $b);
In this example, $a is converted to an integer (because of the %d) even if it came through CGI as a user request. $b is sanitized and will not allow the type of SQL injection that this article talks about (because of the %s). No worries about any security issues as long as you use the function as intended.
Not to mention that frameworks like Drupal have lots of other great features to help you build your site quickly.
Enjoy!
I thought we were the popular front?
By the way, from now on I want you all to call me "Loretta".
You know that opportunity you just had to get an informative mod point from me?
:-P
Well you just lost it so I can tell you that your site is down
Take a look at this neat paper The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege.
It explains a great detail of the issues surrounding a system like this. The more interesting issues are as others have mentioned are memory and disk i/o management, but also there's another lovely curiosity in there... floating point numbers begin to quantize more and more the further you get away from the origin. It means it's impossible to have a global coordinate system.
Enjoy.
See this is where digg clearly has the upper hand. I mean you could take away KR for days and digg would just keep going (and going, and going....) Hell I think he's been in a hole for the past entire year
Either that, or we're shrinking
My CMS can kick your CMS ass :-P
Wow I guess The Onion, Tim Berners-Lee blog and the little corner of the web where I work don't scale and are horrible messes of spaghetti code.
Oh wait, they're not. Troll.
My god. Someone managed to describe what's wrong with Blender in one sentence! That was amazing perrin, thanks.
I routinely experience Apache crashes while using eAccelerator, APC or Zend Optimizer, even with the latest stable PHP. If you use one of these products, be sure to also run some kind of watchdog that will restart httpd if (when) the stack crashes. They're totally worth running in any case. Zend Optimizer speeds up my Drupal installation by a huge amount because of the time saved parsing code.
You also should of course make sure you've got caching happening at every level of your app. Memcached is a great application level cache. Apache side, make sure you enable and configure the memory cache for static files. (mod_mem_cache) and possibly the file cache (mod_disk_cache). Client side, make sure you're caching static files like images, js, css. Apache's mod_expires gives you good control over this in Apache config.
Of course, all of this could be just spinning your wheels if you have badly optimized sql queries or bad table design to start with. Set mysql's slow query log threshold very low to catch these issues early.
Denial: What global warming?
:-)
Anger: This could actually be good for us damnit! (where we are now)
Bargaining: Please Mrs. Nature, don't kill us all! We'll give you a toupee for the ozone hole!
Depression: This is so unfair! (while wiping sweat from underarms with paper towel)
Acceptance: People wander the streets naked to escape the heat.
Call me when we get to step five
Wow what a short memory slashdot has. Perhaps you've forgotten or you're young, but remember Ed Felton?
Getting in the dicussion a bit late but oh well.
:-P
This is clearly their way to infiltrate the open source LAMP stack:
* W indows
* I nternet Information Server
* M S SQL
* P HP
Clearly, the acronym of the future
The past couple years have been better than it has been in a long time.
In the past couple years, we've seen some great ones... I'll elaborate.
Sorry, but all the DRM in the world wouldn't make HL2 a "crappy game".
Fable an utterly fantastic single player RPG (possibly the best ever made) and we're getting Fable2 early next year. NeverwinterNights from a few years ago was amazing and NeverwinterNights2 is due very soon now.
SpellForce2 and DragonShard are two amazing RTS games from the recent past.
So that's 7 modern games that just rock really hard. I'm sure there are others but I haven't had my coffee yet.
There are great games coming out, you just need to do a bit of homework to figure out which ones they are!
Please, please PC game makers - more like these... console games suck!
But then, I turned and saw it. A huge boss hoodie covered in body armor. Fear splashed over me like a tidal wave. I heaved my axe free and headed toward the uber-chav. I swung my axe with all my might and hatred, but the power of the bling could not be undone. It was in this moment that I picked up my father's axe and...
OK sorry I'll stop now
It is highly functional. It serves a purpose beyond the ones you thought to put into your application. The function of it is to make users somewhat familiar with how your application works, before they've even installed or looked at it. That seems highly functional to me.
The best 3d web thing I've ever seen is Apple's dashboard widgets in OSX. Each widget can have a (nicely standardized) button which activates the preferences for the widget. The prefrences are on the back of the widget. Literally when you click the prefs button the widget flips over in 3d animation and you interact with the preference panel.
I find this incredible because a) it's an amazing practical use of 3d and b) it's not at all flashy or trying to create a 'new 3d browsing paradigm' or some such silliness. Instead, Apple has used the graphics tools available to them and once again, made a fantastic advance in user interfaces.
Before you call me an Apple fanboy, you should know that I don't even own a Mac, I just think they're neat is all.
[rant]On an unrelated and slightly offtopic note I'd like to just say here that domain parkers suck hard. I mean, if you figure that there are 1,000,000 words in the English language which are common enough to make good domain names (in reality probably far fewer words). If you assume a per-domain price of 19.95 (which is also probably very high considering godaddy buys names in huge blocks for a discount), the entire English language can be had for $19,950,000. Actually, not really 'can be had' but 'is already had'. I know it would never work but I wish there was a way to force domain name owners to actually use the domains they purchased. These unethical fuckers get paid thousands for *not innovating*. You know what I have to say to that? Well I would tell you but freaking pooponastick.com is already taken
I'm sure I'm not the only one here who has wondered why we haven't seen wider circulation of this story and why immigration laws are suddenly the thing to discuss. As one slashdotter pointed out a couple weeks ago, the NSA makes Nixon look like an amateur.
There was a protest today outside the SBC building on Folsom Street here in San Francisco, but it drew hardly any attention and there was no media around.
The building itself is pretty scary looking. It's a huge brown rectangle with tinted windows that also somehow look brown. Compared with the nice architecture of the nearby buildings, it sure is an eyesore.
Anyhow, someone want to offer me any conspiracy theories on why nobody cares?