as usual, reality is considerably divergent. the 'truthfulness' of an article can be reduced in an instant, and persist in that state for months.
Which is why, according to policy, articles should be verifiable. In fact, the criteria for including information in wikipedia is "verifiability, not truth. Or truthiness." At least according to the version of the policy I saw earlier.
The Elephant page *was* vandalized before it was locked down. So were multiple other pages having to do with Oregon, Colbert, other elephant-related stuff and the like.
And random and arbitrary stuff. I'd been wondering where this edit came from, but it's obviously somebody who'd been watching.
$user=$_GET["u"]; $res=mysql_query("select data from users where userid=$user;");
(It's a SQL injection waiting to happen, what if I load this page with u="0;drop table users;"?)
Err.. nothing. mysql_query() doesn't parse semicolons as statement separators. Not to say that there aren't other potential problems with this code, but that ain't one of them.
Some have referred to PHP as "loose", and I admit sometimes it can be. There is no equivalent to Perl's "use strict", and it's easy to unintentionally leave an opportunity for a user to pass unexpected variables -- but as long as you are able to keep this in mind, it's not difficult to make a relatively secure PHP script. Just make sure any important variables are declared/set/validated at the start of the script.
Err... error_reporting(E_ALL|E_STRICT); is what you're looking for. It warns on uninitialised variable access, unknown array index or object field access, and a few other useful situations along those lines. With a suitable error handler you can redirect the warnings to a file for later examination.
On a separate note: Estimated US casualties for a bird-flu epidemic are between 100-300 people. At least, that's what the government is telling us employees.
That's what they tell you to persuade you not to give up going to work and absconding to some remote area as soon as the first signs of epidemic show up. Seriously: a normal flu can kill a lot more than this. According to CDC figures, there are 36,000 deaths from flu per annum on average. An epidemic ought to double these figures, at least.
...I'm rather fond of the Tough Guide to the Known Galaxy, which is a humuorous look at standard SF tropes, including much of the tech that's common to multiple stories. E.g., the first entry starts:
AI. Artificial intelligence. This was once commonplace in the KNOWN GALAXY, but has been on the decline in more recent times. The reason (as with ROBOTS), is that in the real world AI progress has so far been disappointing, which is why Web browsers turn up a million sites but not the one you're looking for.
You automatically have copyright unless you specify otherwise.
Actually, that's not true. In Berne Convention signatory countries (i.e. most of the civilised world) you automatically have copyright. Specifying otherwise doesn't change a thing: you have copyright.
Your only option for allowing anyone to use your copyright work is to grant a public license to anyone who will take it that includes irrevocable rights to use the work in any way, including sublicensing. While this is what most people mean when they say "public domain" in this context, it is worth noting that it isn't public domain in the legal sense of the word.
No, but prices don't drop overnight. It takes a few weeks for manufacturer price changes to filter through the supply lines to retailers. The chips have already started their way down that path; in fact, they're probably arriving with retailers as I write this. If a price change of motherboards was going to do so to, it would have to have already been announced by the manufacturers.
Wired News is reporting that big-brother license plate tracking systems may soon be available to the average citizen.
I hate to tell you this, but they already are.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that put a bit of time into developing one. We had a working prototype: a cheap CCTV surveillance camera connected through a cheap Hauppauge video capture card to a Linux box running custom software. We could have put them together for around £400 (~$700) per box at the time... no doubt it'd be cheaper now. The software took us only a little over 2 weeks to develop (although admittedly we had a director who had experience of writing OCR systems). On a box with a P-II 350 processor using unoptimized software written in Java we were capturing at 4fps. A modern system could easily cope with the 30 that is the most you'd get off the camera. Probably even multiple cameras.
We dropped the idea because we wouldn't easily have been able to get certification for the system to be installed for use in legal evidence-gathering situations (it was designed as a point-to-point speed tracker, so you could fine people who'd averaged more than the speed limit over a few miles of a given road), but it would have been perfectly adequate for private use. We also considered selling it as an automatic car-park entry system, but we went to a trade show and found there were already several similar systems on the market.
The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants.
Windows' bootloader can boot anything you damn well please. Stick the boot sector in your root drive and add an entry to boot.ini for it. Works pretty much the same way grub does when loading non-multiboot-compliant systems.
The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants.
The Windows boot loader is perfectly capable of booting non-windows operating systems. Put the system's boot sector in a file on your c:\ drive and add this to boot.ini:
I've seen programming paradigms come and go (structured programming)
Structured programming is gone? I hadn't noticed.
I've been looking at jobs listings recently, and curiously they never seem to be looking for charactersistics that would demonstrate that somebody "gets it".
How exactly would you phrase that in a job listing? "Only people who 'get it' need apply"? Determining whether somebody does in fact "get it" is clearly best left for interview.
Is it just me who, if told to do some software projcet "using UML" that really wasn't appropriate for it, who would turn up to a meeting a few weeks later and say "What? You didn't mean User-Mode Linux?"
When the lie is found out, you can claim that you were lied to and can't be blamed for anything.
At which point the CEO looks at you, looks at the marketing material you reported to him as truth, looks back at you, back at the marketing brochures, and fires you for being hopelessly naive.
Find a better provider. Mine (Bulldog Broadband, UK) gives me a theoretical 8Mbit down (although I'm actually too far from the exchange and tend to only get ~4) with an exact 512Kbit upstream. 512 up seems more than adequate for any reasonable purpose. Including P2P.
Approximate translation (my French ain't perfect, but it's pretty good):
From a France Telecom press release, we have learned that the historic operator has launched a pilot experience (program?) in the area of fiber-optic ("Fiber To The Home"). These program is being conducted in some Parisian districts, along with the five towns of Hauts de Seine.
An advanced technology...
The ??? concerns one hundred clients and uses GPON technology, that is to say without any active equipment - like a router, for example. According to France Telecom, this technology will permit (rates?) of the order of 2.5 Gbits/s downstream and 1.2 Gbits/s upstream, around 400 Mb/s and 150Mb/s respectively.
The pilot program costs 70 Euros per month, and is proposed, ???, with unlimited telephone and "numeric" (cable?) television.
But is it useful?
If the (communication rates?) are forcibly (allocated?), they will not stay less useful than today(?); the SATA II standard for hard disks performs up to 3 Gbit/s in best case. It would be necessary to see the results of the pilot program, and the commercial offering which will follow, the major deployment of FTTH infrastructure being previewed by France Telecom in 2007/2008.
Well, yeah, I would, except those cards cost nearly twice as much as the cheap ATI cards I was planning on buying.
Plus no 3D acceleration would be a bit of a downer.
It's looking like I'm going to have to resort to a motherboard with multiple x16 slots instead. I haven't investigated the full details of that, but it'll probably be cheaper anyway, as I get to use low-end mass market video cards, and most of the cost of my system was going to be in video cards.
Just because you have TCPA doesn't mean you have to use it. As soon as you boot an OS that isn't certified for use with it (e.g. any Linux version you compile yourself) it becomes totally useless anyway.
The contact details on the phone line (BT) that my ADSL connection (Demon Internet) was associated with changed. Demon noticed the change & cut off the service, despite previous assurances that this would work flawlessly. They apologised, and a few weeks later reconnected. Six months later, we try to shift the service to Bulldog, but are told that we have six months of a 12 month contract remaining. No, we tell them, the contract expired a while ago. No, they say, it started again when the reconnection occurred.
To cut a long story short: we told BT to force the connection of our line so that Bulldog could take it over. Demon will probably try to recover the remaining 6 months payment from us in a small claims court. Good luck to them, I say. They have no proof of a contract, and we have details of many weeks of service that wasn't supplied but we were still charged for.
Incidentally, does anyone know the deal with returning box sets of DVDs if, several months after buying them, you discover that disc 6 of 7 doesn't play? It seems unreasonable to expect a customer to watch the entire box set within a few days of buying them, but there's also potential for abuse if a retailer must accept the set back several months later when any damage may or may not have had anything to do with the condition of the DVDs when they were sold.
Under the Sale of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002, if you find a defect within 6 months it is assumed to have been present when supplied, unless the supplier can provide evidence that it wasn't. The supplier must replace the discs if you return them within those 6 months. The regulations -- you're looking for section 48A
What if someone came up with an open, client/server oriented application "player" that was cross platform? You know, something that DOESN'T rely on a stateless protocol which was originally designed to deliver documents and maybe process a form or two.
How much space can a statically linked program take? 10MB? 20MB? 30MB? everyone has 10GB of unused space nowadays...
You do realise it also saves RAM as well, if the library is in use in multiple applications? Not everyone has 10GB free RAM. Or even 10MB free RAM.
Besides: my current Linux system is running of a 3.3GB partition on my total 10GB hard disc. Not everyone runs current hardware, and many Linux users consider the fact that it is better at supporting old hardware than current versions of Windows one of its most important benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
as usual, reality is considerably divergent. the 'truthfulness' of an article can be reduced in an instant, and persist in that state for months.
Which is why, according to policy, articles should be verifiable. In fact, the criteria for including information in wikipedia is "verifiability, not truth. Or truthiness." At least according to the version of the policy I saw earlier.
The Elephant page *was* vandalized before it was locked down. So were multiple other pages having to do with Oregon, Colbert, other elephant-related stuff and the like.
And random and arbitrary stuff. I'd been wondering where this edit came from, but it's obviously somebody who'd been watching.
$user=$_GET["u"];
$res=mysql_query("select data from users where userid=$user;");
(It's a SQL injection waiting to happen, what if I load this page with u="0;drop table users;"?)
Err.. nothing. mysql_query() doesn't parse semicolons as statement separators. Not to say that there aren't other potential problems with this code, but that ain't one of them.
Some have referred to PHP as "loose", and I admit sometimes it can be. There is no equivalent to Perl's "use strict", and it's easy to unintentionally leave an opportunity for a user to pass unexpected variables -- but as long as you are able to keep this in mind, it's not difficult to make a relatively secure PHP script. Just make sure any important variables are declared/set/validated at the start of the script.
Err... error_reporting(E_ALL|E_STRICT); is what you're looking for. It warns on uninitialised variable access, unknown array index or object field access, and a few other useful situations along those lines. With a suitable error handler you can redirect the warnings to a file for later examination.
On a separate note: Estimated US casualties for a bird-flu epidemic are between 100-300 people. At least, that's what the government is telling us employees.
That's what they tell you to persuade you not to give up going to work and absconding to some remote area as soon as the first signs of epidemic show up. Seriously: a normal flu can kill a lot more than this. According to CDC figures, there are 36,000 deaths from flu per annum on average. An epidemic ought to double these figures, at least.
If you find you can't, you should be able to get at them with the recovery console.
You automatically have copyright unless you specify otherwise.
Actually, that's not true. In Berne Convention signatory countries (i.e. most of the civilised world) you automatically have copyright. Specifying otherwise doesn't change a thing: you have copyright.
Your only option for allowing anyone to use your copyright work is to grant a public license to anyone who will take it that includes irrevocable rights to use the work in any way, including sublicensing. While this is what most people mean when they say "public domain" in this context, it is worth noting that it isn't public domain in the legal sense of the word.
No, but prices don't drop overnight. It takes a few weeks for manufacturer price changes to filter through the supply lines to retailers. The chips have already started their way down that path; in fact, they're probably arriving with retailers as I write this. If a price change of motherboards was going to do so to, it would have to have already been announced by the manufacturers.
Wired News is reporting that big-brother license plate tracking systems may soon be available to the average citizen.
I hate to tell you this, but they already are.
A few years ago, I worked for a company that put a bit of time into developing one. We had a working prototype: a cheap CCTV surveillance camera connected through a cheap Hauppauge video capture card to a Linux box running custom software. We could have put them together for around £400 (~$700) per box at the time... no doubt it'd be cheaper now. The software took us only a little over 2 weeks to develop (although admittedly we had a director who had experience of writing OCR systems). On a box with a P-II 350 processor using unoptimized software written in Java we were capturing at 4fps. A modern system could easily cope with the 30 that is the most you'd get off the camera. Probably even multiple cameras.
We dropped the idea because we wouldn't easily have been able to get certification for the system to be installed for use in legal evidence-gathering situations (it was designed as a point-to-point speed tracker, so you could fine people who'd averaged more than the speed limit over a few miles of a given road), but it would have been perfectly adequate for private use. We also considered selling it as an automatic car-park entry system, but we went to a trade show and found there were already several similar systems on the market.
The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants.
Windows' bootloader can boot anything you damn well please. Stick the boot sector in your root drive and add an entry to boot.ini for it. Works pretty much the same way grub does when loading non-multiboot-compliant systems.
The thing is that unlike the Windows' MBR, grub can actually be configured to run the other OS if the user wants.
The Windows boot loader is perfectly capable of booting non-windows operating systems. Put the system's boot sector in a file on your c:\ drive and add this to boot.ini:
c:\bootsect.bin="My Other Operating System"
I've seen programming paradigms come and go (structured programming)
Structured programming is gone? I hadn't noticed.
I've been looking at jobs listings recently, and curiously they never seem to be looking for charactersistics that would demonstrate that somebody "gets it".
How exactly would you phrase that in a job listing? "Only people who 'get it' need apply"? Determining whether somebody does in fact "get it" is clearly best left for interview.
Is it just me who, if told to do some software projcet "using UML" that really wasn't appropriate for it, who would turn up to a meeting a few weeks later and say "What? You didn't mean User-Mode Linux?"
When the lie is found out, you can claim that you were lied to and can't be blamed for anything.
At which point the CEO looks at you, looks at the marketing material you reported to him as truth, looks back at you, back at the marketing brochures, and fires you for being hopelessly naive.
Find a better provider. Mine (Bulldog Broadband, UK) gives me a theoretical 8Mbit down (although I'm actually too far from the exchange and tend to only get ~4) with an exact 512Kbit upstream. 512 up seems more than adequate for any reasonable purpose. Including P2P.
Approximate translation (my French ain't perfect, but it's pretty good):
From a France Telecom press release, we have learned that the historic operator has launched a pilot experience (program?) in the area of fiber-optic ("Fiber To The Home"). These program is being conducted in some Parisian districts, along with the five towns of Hauts de Seine.
An advanced technology...
The ??? concerns one hundred clients and uses GPON technology, that is to say without any active equipment - like a router, for example. According to France Telecom, this technology will permit (rates?) of the order of 2.5 Gbits/s downstream and 1.2 Gbits/s upstream, around 400 Mb/s and 150Mb/s respectively.
The pilot program costs 70 Euros per month, and is proposed, ???, with unlimited telephone and "numeric" (cable?) television.
But is it useful?
If the (communication rates?) are forcibly (allocated?), they will not stay less useful than today(?); the SATA II standard for hard disks performs up to 3 Gbit/s in best case. It would be necessary to see the results of the pilot program, and the commercial offering which will follow, the major deployment of FTTH infrastructure being previewed by France Telecom in 2007/2008.
Well, yeah, I would, except those cards cost nearly twice as much as the cheap ATI cards I was planning on buying.
Plus no 3D acceleration would be a bit of a downer.
It's looking like I'm going to have to resort to a motherboard with multiple x16 slots instead. I haven't investigated the full details of that, but it'll probably be cheaper anyway, as I get to use low-end mass market video cards, and most of the cost of my system was going to be in video cards.
Just because you have TCPA doesn't mean you have to use it. As soon as you boot an OS that isn't certified for use with it (e.g. any Linux version you compile yourself) it becomes totally useless anyway.
There is no reason at all to buy a new generation processor outside of extreme gaming or science.
Except these 4 words: Processor support for virtualization.
But Intel hasn't even truly introed Core 2 Duo yet. When the chip is announced and available, prices will drop.
Err... the chip *is* announced, and will apparently be available as of the day after tomorrow.
The contact details on the phone line (BT) that my ADSL connection (Demon Internet) was associated with changed. Demon noticed the change & cut off the service, despite previous assurances that this would work flawlessly. They apologised, and a few weeks later reconnected. Six months later, we try to shift the service to Bulldog, but are told that we have six months of a 12 month contract remaining. No, we tell them, the contract expired a while ago. No, they say, it started again when the reconnection occurred.
To cut a long story short: we told BT to force the connection of our line so that Bulldog could take it over. Demon will probably try to recover the remaining 6 months payment from us in a small claims court. Good luck to them, I say. They have no proof of a contract, and we have details of many weeks of service that wasn't supplied but we were still charged for.
Incidentally, does anyone know the deal with returning box sets of DVDs if, several months after buying them, you discover that disc 6 of 7 doesn't play? It seems unreasonable to expect a customer to watch the entire box set within a few days of buying them, but there's also potential for abuse if a retailer must accept the set back several months later when any damage may or may not have had anything to do with the condition of the DVDs when they were sold.
Under the Sale of Goods to Consumers Regulations 2002, if you find a defect within 6 months it is assumed to have been present when supplied, unless the supplier can provide evidence that it wasn't. The supplier must replace the discs if you return them within those 6 months. The regulations -- you're looking for section 48A
What if someone came up with an open, client/server oriented application "player" that was cross platform? You know, something that DOESN'T rely on a stateless protocol which was originally designed to deliver documents and maybe process a form or two.
You mean something like X11?
How much space can a statically linked program take? 10MB? 20MB? 30MB? everyone has 10GB of unused space nowadays...
You do realise it also saves RAM as well, if the library is in use in multiple applications? Not everyone has 10GB free RAM. Or even 10MB free RAM.
Besides: my current Linux system is running of a 3.3GB partition on my total 10GB hard disc. Not everyone runs current hardware, and many Linux users consider the fact that it is better at supporting old hardware than current versions of Windows one of its most important benefits.