Well, the original idea of owning shares in a company was that your share was bought at the cost of an investment into the company, and a portion of the company's profits would be paid to you as dividends to provide a return on your investment. This is, theoretically, the way it's still supposed to work.
What Icahn wants, however, is not to invest in a business and receive a return on that investment through dividends; instead, he wants to run a fly-by-night scheme where he buys a large amount of stock and then quickly sells it off at a large profit to him, personally, with no regard for the continued viability of the company or for return on the investments of other shareholders. As such, his suggestion is not an appropriate course of action for Yahoo, as a business with responsibilities to its investors, to consider.
Grandparent asked "How complex can Twitter be on the inside?" Parent asserted that there's nothing more to it than a few database tables. Parent is ignorant, a jackass, or possibly an ignorant jackass.
You're obviously underestimating the amount of effort it takes to store usernames, passwords, and phone numbers in a database, then associate them with messages no more than 120 characters in length
Yeah, because message queues and SMS gateways and email-parsing daemons just write themselves, freeing you up to belittle things on Slashdot!
As others have pointed out in reply to similar questions, there probably isn't one single piece of injected exploit code that'll work on any operating system. However, Flash continues running after the injection, and can detect what platform it's running on, so an in-the-wild exploit could simply come with a selection of code to inject and choose what to do based on information Flash hands to it.
Wow, an error in a program. This seems akin to ground-breaking front-page news: a cat stuck in a tree rescued by firemen.
Actually, it is a big deal, as you'd know if you'd read the article(s). But you're too lazy for that, so here's the short summary:
Lots of interesting (and important) security problems revolve around figuring out a way to take an error in a program, and turn it into a way to have that program execute arbitrary code of your choice. Traditionally, NULL pointer exceptions have not been fruitful ground for this because, well, a NULL pointer is NULL -- there's nothing on the other end of the pointer for the unsuspecting program to read or execute, so it simply crashes. And merely crashing the program isn't really all that interesting, since at best it lets you execute a denial-of-service. But this guy (Dowd) found what would have been a run-of-the-mill NULL pointer exception in Flash and parlayed it into full-scale arbitrary code execution through a series of fairly impressive tricks. You really should go read Ptacek's summary, because it has all the gory details and will, if nothing else, make you realize what an amazing hack this is.
What everyone gets in their mailbox are mainly American spam messages intended mainly for Americans,
Actually, in the past year or so I've noticed a trend in my spam toward the CJK section of Unicode... all that newfound Chinese buying power is searching for an outlet.
There is no best set of "colors" for foreground/background, as evidenced by conflicting studies which tried to determine what that set was. Rather, what's important is contrast between the colors so that you can easily distinguish what you're seeing. So long as you maintain contrast, the choice of the specific colors is entirely subjective and up to you.
Some time ago school was a place you went to to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Slowly schools are getting more loaded with stuff that should be taught by parents/community: sex ed, health studies, morals and ethics and now safe browsing.
You mean that it's not like the golden days of the 1950s when the precious little snowflakes were taught how to cook meals for themselves and balance their checkbooks in their home economics classes?
Computers and the logic that runs them is complex and brittle, thus why it is important that developers understand a lower-level language like C++.
...and several previous generations of programmes roll over in their graves at the thought that C++ is a "lower-level language".
The thing is, C++ is huge. Just to have a solid working knowledge of the core language, you need to master whole rafts of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the low-level operation of the machine, because even the core is a labyrinth of obscure corner cases that make language lawyers drool, and which, if expressed in pseudo-code, would be a bunch of gigantic switch statements with a couple dozen levels of ifs nested inside each case. Now, add the STL on top of that, and add common third-party bits like Boost on top of that, and you're left with a monstrosity. To really understand programming at a lower level, you need at best only a small subset of C++, and unfortunately for C++ that subset is properly called "C".
The problem is that unlike Java, you can also write Evil Javascript, and you can also write Broken CPU-sucking Javascript.
I took that as a challenge, and in just under a minute I had an implementation of the naive (exponential performance) Fibonacci algorithm in Java, and told it to spit out the first 1000 Fibonacci numbers. It's sucking CPU like there's no tomorrow. Were you under the impression that Java couldn't do that?
Will they distribute apps for developers who don't want to charge users for the privilege of downloading/using?
I know this is a Slashdot story about Apple, where it's just expected that everyone will spout insane theories without actually reading the article, but... amazingly, an answer to your question is found in TFA.
So being number 2 store in a multi-billion dollar industry can be interpreted as not making money, right?
Maybe, maybe not. Apple's net profit -- the amount of actual money they make -- depends on the cost of operating the iTunes store infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, personnel, etc.) and on the fees they pay to the record labels for access to the music catalogs. From what I can find after some quick Googling, it appears that Apple pays 70 cents to the labels for each 99-cent download, which means that in order to turn a profit it needs to cost less than 29 cents per song to run the store. It almost certainly does, and the actual numbers almost certainly represent serious money, but suddenly it's a bit more debatable as to whether iTunes is a major cash cow in and of itself, or whether it drives hardware sales while happily turning a profit of its own.
To be fair, EU nations are also known to have laws censoring things their governments are uneasy about; see, for example, prosecutions of online auction sites by France and Germany, on grounds that those sites did not comply with laws banning the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
Earlier this year, there was an interesting paper which tried to take things like aisle size into consideration, and devise an optimal algorithm for seating people in a staggered arrangement, on the assumption that maximizing the number of people who can simultaneously be stowing their luggage and taking their seats is the key to minimizing the time to board.
While ohloh metrics can be useful, they also need to be taken with a grain of salt, particularly the contributor metric.
Particularly all of their metrics. Another example: one metric is the ratio of code to comments. This is debatable enough in and of itself (there are an awful lot of people who think code should never be commented, on grounds that code which requires comments must not be written clearly), but on top of that it takes a very narrow view of what constitutes a "comment". For example, a Python docstring doesn't count, which means that Python programmers who do the right thing will be penalized by the comment metrics.
Except... the problem with themes which try to emulate the native look and feel of the platform is that it has to be all or nothing; getting even a minor detail wrong can throw off the whole theme. This is even worse on the Mac, where there are a lot of users who are much pickier than average about the look and feel of the UI -- it has to match the native interface, because if it doesn't they're going to notice. And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
Yeah, if only the US would adopt a sensible policy, like confiscating non-metric measuring equipment and levying huge fines on people who still sell fruit in obsolete "pounds", we'd be able to catch up to the high standards set by other, more enlightened countries.
The lack of a firewire port make me wonder if this is a pro or consumer product. The price is pro, but the features is a consumer machine.
After much analysis, reading of entrails and consultation with otherworldly forces, I believe I have identified the portions of Apple's product line which are intended to be "pro"-level offerings. They are:
MacBook Pro
Mac Pro
Admittedly, they made it much harder than necessary to guess which products, exactly, were in the "pro" lineup (I was not able to discern any pattern or signifier; only brute-force methods finally yielded up the answers), so I can understand that some folks would have trouble figuring out where the new notebook fits in; perhaps this is Apple's famous culture of secrecy at work.
One question: statistical methods to predict the outcome of elections, have worked pretty well, especially exit polls. Why do those methods suddenly stop working as soon as voting computers are introduced?
Well, in this case they didn't; the publicly-available pre-election polls people are screaming about, which are subject to such a large litany of potential errors that they're only useful as a means of giving TV pundits something to talk about during the eight-hundred-and-forty-seven-day pre-election round-table discussion, blew it, albeit not by too much: they predicted a narrow win for Obama. In reality it was a narrow second-place finish for Obama. The exit polls, however, matched up pretty well with the reported results of the election, which immediately throws a wrench into "OMG DIEBOLD" theories. And thrown on top of that, the Diebold machines were simply tabulators which scanned and counted paper ballots, not the touch-screen voting machines that people are (rightfully) afraid of. And thrown on top of that, the reported results match up pretty closely with what you'd expect if you make some assumptions about the candidates' support based on past performance (e.g., Obama does better in rural areas and in the midwest, Clinton does better in urban areas and in the northeast).
Which leaves us with... well, a bunch of people crying wolf and, in so doing, discrediting the research that's gone into the actual problems which have taken place in elections which actually used Diebold touch-screen voting machines.
Election of the executive in the German system is still FPTP, it's simply at a different level: the Chancellor is elected by a majority vote of the Bundestag. So while the legislative branch of government is proportionally elected, the executive branch is not. And the same is true in all of the European parliamentary republics: the eventual government is not formed proportionally, but by FPTP majority among, typically, the national legislature, such that the first party or coalition of parties to achieve a majority "wins".
Compared with the system used in the US to choose the executive -- FPTP majority of members of the Electoral College -- it's hard to spot a difference, other than the fact that in the US the body responsible for the choice of executive is distinct from the federal legislature (for historical reasons having to do with separation of powers: the fact that the executive in European parliamentary systems is directly dependent on the continuing support of the legislature for his/her position is, in the eyes of some critics, a flaw which undermines an otherwise-useful check on legislative power).
Scoble is a somewhat-famous blogger. He became known in that community a few years back when he was working for Microsoft; he was considered unusual in that he was a "company spokesman" who didn't speak in press releases, and openly criticized Microsoft from time to time. He's since moved on to starting his own company which does some sort of video podcasting thing.
The story in question here is that he got himself banned from Facebook by using a beta version of a program which was designed to log into your account and start screen-scraping out your friends' info, theoretically for purposes of slurping it into an email addressbook or whatever. Facebook indicated that this violated their terms of service and gave him the boot. He proceeded to raise a stink about how he couldn't get "his" data out of Facebook. He was alternately the subject of sympathy (from people who like him and/or dislike Facebook) and scorn (from people who wondered how exactly someone else's personal info was "his").
No, that's the most uncharitable explanation. Sensible explanations when it comes to DRM must be based on paranoia, and in this case Apple not trusting anyone fits the bill.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the original idea of owning shares in a company was that your share was bought at the cost of an investment into the company, and a portion of the company's profits would be paid to you as dividends to provide a return on your investment. This is, theoretically, the way it's still supposed to work.
What Icahn wants, however, is not to invest in a business and receive a return on that investment through dividends; instead, he wants to run a fly-by-night scheme where he buys a large amount of stock and then quickly sells it off at a large profit to him, personally, with no regard for the continued viability of the company or for return on the investments of other shareholders. As such, his suggestion is not an appropriate course of action for Yahoo, as a business with responsibilities to its investors, to consider.
Make sense now?
Grandparent asked "How complex can Twitter be on the inside?" Parent asserted that there's nothing more to it than a few database tables. Parent is ignorant, a jackass, or possibly an ignorant jackass.
Yeah, because message queues and SMS gateways and email-parsing daemons just write themselves, freeing you up to belittle things on Slashdot!
As others have pointed out in reply to similar questions, there probably isn't one single piece of injected exploit code that'll work on any operating system. However, Flash continues running after the injection, and can detect what platform it's running on, so an in-the-wild exploit could simply come with a selection of code to inject and choose what to do based on information Flash hands to it.
Actually, it is a big deal, as you'd know if you'd read the article(s). But you're too lazy for that, so here's the short summary:
Lots of interesting (and important) security problems revolve around figuring out a way to take an error in a program, and turn it into a way to have that program execute arbitrary code of your choice. Traditionally, NULL pointer exceptions have not been fruitful ground for this because, well, a NULL pointer is NULL -- there's nothing on the other end of the pointer for the unsuspecting program to read or execute, so it simply crashes. And merely crashing the program isn't really all that interesting, since at best it lets you execute a denial-of-service. But this guy (Dowd) found what would have been a run-of-the-mill NULL pointer exception in Flash and parlayed it into full-scale arbitrary code execution through a series of fairly impressive tricks. You really should go read Ptacek's summary, because it has all the gory details and will, if nothing else, make you realize what an amazing hack this is.
Actually, in the past year or so I've noticed a trend in my spam toward the CJK section of Unicode... all that newfound Chinese buying power is searching for an outlet.
The fancy interface largely came from Measure Map, another acquisition.
No, the key is to evaluate the potential benefits and the potential costs, and make a choice based on what's best for your business.
There is no best set of "colors" for foreground/background, as evidenced by conflicting studies which tried to determine what that set was. Rather, what's important is contrast between the colors so that you can easily distinguish what you're seeing. So long as you maintain contrast, the choice of the specific colors is entirely subjective and up to you.
You mean that it's not like the golden days of the 1950s when the precious little snowflakes were taught how to cook meals for themselves and balance their checkbooks in their home economics classes?
Good thing I'm not advocating Java, then.
...and several previous generations of programmes roll over in their graves at the thought that C++ is a "lower-level language".
The thing is, C++ is huge. Just to have a solid working knowledge of the core language, you need to master whole rafts of things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the low-level operation of the machine, because even the core is a labyrinth of obscure corner cases that make language lawyers drool, and which, if expressed in pseudo-code, would be a bunch of gigantic switch statements with a couple dozen levels of ifs nested inside each case. Now, add the STL on top of that, and add common third-party bits like Boost on top of that, and you're left with a monstrosity. To really understand programming at a lower level, you need at best only a small subset of C++, and unfortunately for C++ that subset is properly called "C".
I took that as a challenge, and in just under a minute I had an implementation of the naive (exponential performance) Fibonacci algorithm in Java, and told it to spit out the first 1000 Fibonacci numbers. It's sucking CPU like there's no tomorrow. Were you under the impression that Java couldn't do that?
Maybe, maybe not. Apple's net profit -- the amount of actual money they make -- depends on the cost of operating the iTunes store infrastructure (servers, bandwidth, personnel, etc.) and on the fees they pay to the record labels for access to the music catalogs. From what I can find after some quick Googling, it appears that Apple pays 70 cents to the labels for each 99-cent download, which means that in order to turn a profit it needs to cost less than 29 cents per song to run the store. It almost certainly does, and the actual numbers almost certainly represent serious money, but suddenly it's a bit more debatable as to whether iTunes is a major cash cow in and of itself, or whether it drives hardware sales while happily turning a profit of its own.
To be fair, EU nations are also known to have laws censoring things their governments are uneasy about; see, for example, prosecutions of online auction sites by France and Germany, on grounds that those sites did not comply with laws banning the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
Earlier this year, there was an interesting paper which tried to take things like aisle size into consideration, and devise an optimal algorithm for seating people in a staggered arrangement, on the assumption that maximizing the number of people who can simultaneously be stowing their luggage and taking their seats is the key to minimizing the time to board.
Particularly all of their metrics. Another example: one metric is the ratio of code to comments. This is debatable enough in and of itself (there are an awful lot of people who think code should never be commented, on grounds that code which requires comments must not be written clearly), but on top of that it takes a very narrow view of what constitutes a "comment". For example, a Python docstring doesn't count, which means that Python programmers who do the right thing will be penalized by the comment metrics.
Except... the problem with themes which try to emulate the native look and feel of the platform is that it has to be all or nothing; getting even a minor detail wrong can throw off the whole theme. This is even worse on the Mac, where there are a lot of users who are much pickier than average about the look and feel of the UI -- it has to match the native interface, because if it doesn't they're going to notice. And in the provided screenshots, I can already spot ways that the "native" OS X theme doesn't cut it. For example, the screenshot which proudly shows off an Aqua-style select control and button next to a search box also shows those controls using the wrong font and with the text incorrectly placed. If they can't get those details right, they might as well not try to do a "native" theme at all.
Yeah, if only the US would adopt a sensible policy, like confiscating non-metric measuring equipment and levying huge fines on people who still sell fruit in obsolete "pounds", we'd be able to catch up to the high standards set by other, more enlightened countries.
After much analysis, reading of entrails and consultation with otherworldly forces, I believe I have identified the portions of Apple's product line which are intended to be "pro"-level offerings. They are:
Admittedly, they made it much harder than necessary to guess which products, exactly, were in the "pro" lineup (I was not able to discern any pattern or signifier; only brute-force methods finally yielded up the answers), so I can understand that some folks would have trouble figuring out where the new notebook fits in; perhaps this is Apple's famous culture of secrecy at work.
Well, in this case they didn't; the publicly-available pre-election polls people are screaming about, which are subject to such a large litany of potential errors that they're only useful as a means of giving TV pundits something to talk about during the eight-hundred-and-forty-seven-day pre-election round-table discussion, blew it, albeit not by too much: they predicted a narrow win for Obama. In reality it was a narrow second-place finish for Obama. The exit polls, however, matched up pretty well with the reported results of the election, which immediately throws a wrench into "OMG DIEBOLD" theories. And thrown on top of that, the Diebold machines were simply tabulators which scanned and counted paper ballots, not the touch-screen voting machines that people are (rightfully) afraid of. And thrown on top of that, the reported results match up pretty closely with what you'd expect if you make some assumptions about the candidates' support based on past performance (e.g., Obama does better in rural areas and in the midwest, Clinton does better in urban areas and in the northeast).
Which leaves us with... well, a bunch of people crying wolf and, in so doing, discrediting the research that's gone into the actual problems which have taken place in elections which actually used Diebold touch-screen voting machines.
Except... not entirely.
Election of the executive in the German system is still FPTP, it's simply at a different level: the Chancellor is elected by a majority vote of the Bundestag. So while the legislative branch of government is proportionally elected, the executive branch is not. And the same is true in all of the European parliamentary republics: the eventual government is not formed proportionally, but by FPTP majority among, typically, the national legislature, such that the first party or coalition of parties to achieve a majority "wins".
Compared with the system used in the US to choose the executive -- FPTP majority of members of the Electoral College -- it's hard to spot a difference, other than the fact that in the US the body responsible for the choice of executive is distinct from the federal legislature (for historical reasons having to do with separation of powers: the fact that the executive in European parliamentary systems is directly dependent on the continuing support of the legislature for his/her position is, in the eyes of some critics, a flaw which undermines an otherwise-useful check on legislative power).
Scoble is a somewhat-famous blogger. He became known in that community a few years back when he was working for Microsoft; he was considered unusual in that he was a "company spokesman" who didn't speak in press releases, and openly criticized Microsoft from time to time. He's since moved on to starting his own company which does some sort of video podcasting thing.
The story in question here is that he got himself banned from Facebook by using a beta version of a program which was designed to log into your account and start screen-scraping out your friends' info, theoretically for purposes of slurping it into an email addressbook or whatever. Facebook indicated that this violated their terms of service and gave him the boot. He proceeded to raise a stink about how he couldn't get "his" data out of Facebook. He was alternately the subject of sympathy (from people who like him and/or dislike Facebook) and scorn (from people who wondered how exactly someone else's personal info was "his").
No, that's the most uncharitable explanation. Sensible explanations when it comes to DRM must be based on paranoia, and in this case Apple not trusting anyone fits the bill.