Did you actually read it? I think it was the best troll parody I've seen for a while. I mean, the author clearly understood exactly what he was talking about when discussing C's support for pointers, which means that the way he missed the point and described them as 'inefficient' is marvelous.
Also, in light of recent events concerning the ADTI 'Samizdat' book & the author getting Tanenbaum's nationality wrong, describing Linus Torvalds as a Swede is a masterstroke.
I know this is a cut and paste troll, but for best effect use 'PERL' instead of 'Perl' or 'perl', makes you sound even more like you are talking out of your ass.
Huh? The post was clearly a joke, not a troll. And, as the name in question is acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language I think PERL is a perfectly valid way of writing it, if a little old-fashioned.
mmap shouldn't use any more memory than doing equivalent accesses on the files using read() and write(); it effectively gives you direct access to read and write into the disk cache, thus eliminating some copies and allowing the OS to optimise write-back cacheing more easily.
PHP is just another (interpreted) version of the C language
Huh? PHP is very dissimilar to C. It is weakly typed, has variable substitution into strings, is object oriented, uses garbage collected memory allocation, and has a syntax that is designed to be embedded into webpages. About the only thing they have in common is the syntax of a few basic statements, which is just superficial.
PHP has == and != for simple comparison, and === and !== for enforcing that the comparants (is that a word?) are also of the same type.
Not to mention strcmp() for performing comparisons based on string value, regardless of the types of the variables, which I believe is what PERL does when you use the 'eq' operator mentioned in the GP post. So, far from PERL being superior because it offers two ways to do the comparison, PHP is superior because it offers 3!;)
A regular expression is a mathematical concept. The choice of greedy or non-greedy matching is an implementation level detail which has no effect on the mathematics that define regular expressions, which are based entirely around determining whether or not the string passed matches the expression.
While PCREs are useful, calling them regular expressions is a misnomer, because they are providing features and distinctions that are not part of the formally accepted definition of what a regular expression is.
During the trial of Ian Huntely, the police even admitted they were confused about the DPA! What hope is there for the rest of us?
I've no clue. All I can say on this matter is, it's actually pretty simple. A 4 hour training session ought to be enough to get people to understand it, so if the police, or anyone else, has data-handling employees who don't understand it, then they're not providing enough training.
The UK government uses the electoral register to sell your data (regardless of whether you "opt out") to third party marketing companies to get revenue.
I don't believe this is true. You can pay for an electronic copy of the electoral register, but I believe this has the opt-out parties removed.
You can inspect the official register and your local council office, which doesn't have the opt-out parties removed, but you can't buy a copy of this version, as far as I'm aware.
Besides, it's quite clear why there isn't a decent implementation here: the government don't believe in the legislation, but were required to implement it by the EU, so they implemented it sloppily. Simple enough.
For non-UK./'ers, Page 3 is a page in one of our more popular tabloids, The Sun
Of course, other papers, including The Times and The Guardian, don't have a page 3. They go straight from page 2 to page 4, citeing concerns that The Sun may have received a patent on page 3.
Finally, here is a little tid-bit for you. I define the set of real numbers R to be the set of all numbers than can be described with UNICODE text (a superset of ASCII text). Obviously such a set is countable, and obviously such a set contains the two real numbers you just described. However, using diagonalization, it can be proven that there exists a real number X that is not a member of the set R that I just described.
That's because the set you just defined is the set of rational numbers, not the set of real numbers.
No, he's describing how he can justify the fact that such a number exists. If he can tell you how to actually calculate the number, he deserves to win every award there is for mathematical genius, because Turing proved that to be impossible a long time ago.
Publishing is a slow industry. Publishing companies generally spend several months editing the book, putting together covers, arranging pre-printing reviews to go on the back cover of the first edition. Then they list it in the catalogue that goes out to the bookshops several months before they intend to release it to make sure that the bookshops (which frequently only make purchasing decisions on a quarterly basis) have time to notice and order it before the release date. It can all take a long time.
Unless a book is a "rush" job (e.g. because it discusses something that's in the news), it often does take 6 months to a year to get a book out of the doors after it has been written.
the naive Windows SetPixel() command is slow compared to CreateDIBSection().
Windows functions can behave slow in weird conditions. I was writing a program last week that generated an image in memory one scanline at a time and then stored it into a bitmap using SetDIBitsToDevice(). Let me tell you, that function is horrible, and badly documented. Because I didn't understand (and still don't) the meaning of one of the parameters, I was passing the y position of the scanline I wanted to store to it, rather than zero, resulting in the function taking about 50x as long as it should have done to execute.:(
You generally will not save much time that way; if somebody passes 15 arguments to a function, it is usually because they do something with most of them, and that bounds the potential speedup.
The optimisation that the assembly language programmer would apply here also results in cleaner code... store the 15 arguments in a structure and pass a pointer to it.
Of course, this is only faster if the function is being called multiple times, but heh, you only optimise your inner loops, right?
License plates can be abused in a very similar way. My company designed a system to regulate access to private car parks based on recognise the number on the car's plates. It was a simple system based on a trivial MLP neural net, and worked reliably on stationary vehicles 98% of the time.
I've visited trade shows looking for people with similar products... they have much better ones if you're willing to pay the price. I saw one which could read the plate of every car travelling at up to 90mph on four lanes of motorway in real time.
The London congestion charge system shows that your movements can be tracked already. And it could be done much more cheaply than the London system -- they needed something that was approved by the Home Office for automatic evidence handling.
The congestion charge is an administrative nightmare.
I work with a guy who sells cars for a living, and he has constant trouble where he acquires a car in a part exchange deal, and then gets landed with congestion charges from before he purchased it. The congestion charging people then require him to go to the local court to _swear an affidavit_ that he didn't own the car at that time... and sometimes they just refuse to believe him, requiring him to attend a hearing in London (about 3 hours drive away from here) in order to defend himself.
The system is the people. [...] To claim that you don't vote because you lost faith in the system is like saying that you dont clean your room becuase it is alwys messy.
A better analogy would be saying that you don't clean your room because the siblings you share it with always make it messy again straight away afterwards.
You can only change something in a democracy if the majority of the people agree with you. And that's _very_ unlikely to happen, what with 50% of people being of below-average intelligence, and all;)
(1) "wild" internet traffic must be present on the network, so it's not some closed, safe, virus-free thing
It would probably be tunneled as far as the router where it leaves BT's private network. I doubt they'd let you route to arbitrary destinations on it.
unless there's some remarkable new QOS stuff handling all of those disparate comms protocols being carried over the grand new TCP/IP network, it simply won't work properly.
QOS works fines for a regulated network where you control all the hardware. Its only when you start talking to other people that it all breaks down.
Note also that BT would be able to sense network load in particular areas and refuse traffic that would overload it (eg by giving an engaged tone).
These people have their own agenda, however they aren't stupid by any stretch (which they would have to be if these interpreted outcomes have any chance of happening; think about it, don't just react).
Have you ever tried drafting a treaty or legislation? It's quite tricky to get the details right. When you think you've got one aspect nailed down, you've totally missed something else.
I don't believe the original draftors of the DMCA _intended_ it to be used to silence people involved in legitimate cryptographic research, but because they failed to ensure it couldn't be, it has been.
I'm sure these people don't intend to outlaw PCs, and I'm equally certain that this particularly outrageous interpretation will be stamped on some time between now and when this treaty actually enters force... but that's not to say that software that performs decryption won't become illegal. A badly drafted law can be used by people as a sneaky attack on something that wasn't originally foreseen by its authors. In this case, I can see that:
1. DeCSS might be covered if the phrasing remains particularly bad. I'm pretty sure it is at the moment. Note that there are no 'significant alternative use' provisions or similar, as exist in the DMCA and EUCD.
2. Video signal synchronizers, used to restore the sync signal between a playback and a recording device, will almost certainly be covered unless a 'significant alternative use' clause is added. This hardware is essential for anyone trying to perform high quality duplication of video signals without spending huge amounts of money on it. Yes there are legitimate reasons you might want to duplicate video tapes.
3. This will probably render it illegal to sell the designs for those cable tv descrambling boxes. I don't know about you, but I strongly believe that no transfer of _information_ should be prohibited, except possibly where that information has come into your hands due to a priveleged position (this would cover the protection of national secrets in a manner similar to the UK official secrets act, among other things). Note that by information I'm talking about distilled facts; this isn't an anti-copyright stance.
4. If future PCs are supplied with some kind of DRM monitor that prevents you from tampering with managed data, this treaty might prevent the sale of kits to remove it, or even the transfer of information on how to remove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you actually read it? I think it was the best troll parody I've seen for a while. I mean, the author clearly understood exactly what he was talking about when discussing C's support for pointers, which means that the way he missed the point and described them as 'inefficient' is marvelous.
Also, in light of recent events concerning the ADTI 'Samizdat' book & the author getting Tanenbaum's nationality wrong, describing Linus Torvalds as a Swede is a masterstroke.
I know this is a cut and paste troll, but for best effect use 'PERL' instead of 'Perl' or 'perl', makes you sound even more like you are talking out of your ass.
Huh? The post was clearly a joke, not a troll. And, as the name in question is acronym for Practical Extraction and Report Language I think PERL is a perfectly valid way of writing it, if a little old-fashioned.
I haven't tried this, but given the description of the bug found above, I would guess it would take the entire system down.
mmap shouldn't use any more memory than doing equivalent accesses on the files using read() and write(); it effectively gives you direct access to read and write into the disk cache, thus eliminating some copies and allowing the OS to optimise write-back cacheing more easily.
No, but due to the lack of process-tree based control, it is much more difficult to deal with in windows than in posix-style systems.
Valid according to the java language spec, too.
:)
Well done
I've been able to script Java via JavaScript via LiveConnect, which was part of Netscape 4, and was implemented in Internet Explorer 4 also.
It also allows you to execute JavaScript from Java, which is tricky, but allows for very cool control of the browser.
PHP is just another (interpreted) version of the C language
Huh? PHP is very dissimilar to C. It is weakly typed, has variable substitution into strings, is object oriented, uses garbage collected memory allocation, and has a syntax that is designed to be embedded into webpages. About the only thing they have in common is the syntax of a few basic statements, which is just superficial.
PHP has == and != for simple comparison, and === and !== for enforcing that the comparants (is that a word?) are also of the same type.
;)
Not to mention strcmp() for performing comparisons based on string value, regardless of the types of the variables, which I believe is what PERL does when you use the 'eq' operator mentioned in the GP post. So, far from PERL being superior because it offers two ways to do the comparison, PHP is superior because it offers 3!
A regular expression is a mathematical concept. The choice of greedy or non-greedy matching is an implementation level detail which has no effect on the mathematics that define regular expressions, which are based entirely around determining whether or not the string passed matches the expression.
While PCREs are useful, calling them regular expressions is a misnomer, because they are providing features and distinctions that are not part of the formally accepted definition of what a regular expression is.
During the trial of Ian Huntely, the police even admitted they were confused about the DPA! What hope is there for the rest of us?
I've no clue. All I can say on this matter is, it's actually pretty simple. A 4 hour training session ought to be enough to get people to understand it, so if the police, or anyone else, has data-handling employees who don't understand it, then they're not providing enough training.
Ticketweb.co.uk (claim that every time you buy from them they have thr right to start samming you again)
They do. IIRC, the law excludes e-mails sent to prior customers.
The UK government uses the electoral register to sell your data (regardless of whether you "opt out") to third party marketing companies to get revenue.
I don't believe this is true. You can pay for an electronic copy of the electoral register, but I believe this has the opt-out parties removed.
You can inspect the official register and your local council office, which doesn't have the opt-out parties removed, but you can't buy a copy of this version, as far as I'm aware.
Besides, it's quite clear why there isn't a decent implementation here: the government don't believe in the legislation, but were required to implement it by the EU, so they implemented it sloppily. Simple enough.
Err.. the census is _not_ the electoral register, which is what the GGP and GP articles were talking about. Sorry.
For non-UK ./'ers, Page 3 is a page in one of our more popular tabloids, The Sun
Of course, other papers, including The Times and The Guardian, don't have a page 3. They go straight from page 2 to page 4, citeing concerns that The Sun may have received a patent on page 3.
Finally, here is a little tid-bit for you. I define the set of real numbers R to be the set of all numbers than can be described with UNICODE text (a superset of ASCII text). Obviously such a set is countable, and obviously such a set contains the two real numbers you just described. However, using diagonalization, it can be proven that there exists a real number X that is not a member of the set R that I just described.
That's because the set you just defined is the set of rational numbers, not the set of real numbers.
No, he's describing how he can justify the fact that such a number exists. If he can tell you how to actually calculate the number, he deserves to win every award there is for mathematical genius, because Turing proved that to be impossible a long time ago.
Publishing is a slow industry. Publishing companies generally spend several months editing the book, putting together covers, arranging pre-printing reviews to go on the back cover of the first edition. Then they list it in the catalogue that goes out to the bookshops several months before they intend to release it to make sure that the bookshops (which frequently only make purchasing decisions on a quarterly basis) have time to notice and order it before the release date. It can all take a long time.
Unless a book is a "rush" job (e.g. because it discusses something that's in the news), it often does take 6 months to a year to get a book out of the doors after it has been written.
the naive Windows SetPixel() command is slow compared to CreateDIBSection().
:(
Windows functions can behave slow in weird conditions. I was writing a program last week that generated an image in memory one scanline at a time and then stored it into a bitmap using SetDIBitsToDevice(). Let me tell you, that function is horrible, and badly documented. Because I didn't understand (and still don't) the meaning of one of the parameters, I was passing the y position of the scanline I wanted to store to it, rather than zero, resulting in the function taking about 50x as long as it should have done to execute.
You generally will not save much time that way; if somebody passes 15 arguments to a function, it is usually because they do something with most of them, and that bounds the potential speedup.
The optimisation that the assembly language programmer would apply here also results in cleaner code... store the 15 arguments in a structure and pass a pointer to it.
Of course, this is only faster if the function is being called multiple times, but heh, you only optimise your inner loops, right?
License plates can be abused in a very similar way. My company designed a system to regulate access to private car parks based on recognise the number on the car's plates. It was a simple system based on a trivial MLP neural net, and worked reliably on stationary vehicles 98% of the time.
I've visited trade shows looking for people with similar products... they have much better ones if you're willing to pay the price. I saw one which could read the plate of every car travelling at up to 90mph on four lanes of motorway in real time.
The London congestion charge system shows that your movements can be tracked already. And it could be done much more cheaply than the London system -- they needed something that was approved by the Home Office for automatic evidence handling.
The congestion charge is an administrative nightmare.
I work with a guy who sells cars for a living, and he has constant trouble where he acquires a car in a part exchange deal, and then gets landed with congestion charges from before he purchased it. The congestion charging people then require him to go to the local court to _swear an affidavit_ that he didn't own the car at that time... and sometimes they just refuse to believe him, requiring him to attend a hearing in London (about 3 hours drive away from here) in order to defend himself.
Not that RFIDs would help...
The system is the people. [...] To claim that you don't vote because you lost faith in the system is like saying that you dont clean your room becuase it is alwys messy.
;)
A better analogy would be saying that you don't clean your room because the siblings you share it with always make it messy again straight away afterwards.
You can only change something in a democracy if the majority of the people agree with you. And that's _very_ unlikely to happen, what with 50% of people being of below-average intelligence, and all
(1) "wild" internet traffic must be present on the network, so it's not some closed, safe, virus-free thing
It would probably be tunneled as far as the router where it leaves BT's private network. I doubt they'd let you route to arbitrary destinations on it.
unless there's some remarkable new QOS stuff handling all of those disparate comms protocols being carried over the grand new TCP/IP network, it simply won't work properly.
QOS works fines for a regulated network where you control all the hardware. Its only when you start talking to other people that it all breaks down.
Note also that BT would be able to sense network load in particular areas and refuse traffic that would overload it (eg by giving an engaged tone).
These people have their own agenda, however they aren't stupid by any stretch (which they would have to be if these interpreted outcomes have any chance of happening; think about it, don't just react).
Have you ever tried drafting a treaty or legislation? It's quite tricky to get the details right. When you think you've got one aspect nailed down, you've totally missed something else.
I don't believe the original draftors of the DMCA _intended_ it to be used to silence people involved in legitimate cryptographic research, but because they failed to ensure it couldn't be, it has been.
I'm sure these people don't intend to outlaw PCs, and I'm equally certain that this particularly outrageous interpretation will be stamped on some time between now and when this treaty actually enters force... but that's not to say that software that performs decryption won't become illegal. A badly drafted law can be used by people as a sneaky attack on something that wasn't originally foreseen by its authors. In this case, I can see that:
1. DeCSS might be covered if the phrasing remains particularly bad. I'm pretty sure it is at the moment. Note that there are no 'significant alternative use' provisions or similar, as exist in the DMCA and EUCD.
2. Video signal synchronizers, used to restore the sync signal between a playback and a recording device, will almost certainly be covered unless a 'significant alternative use' clause is added. This hardware is essential for anyone trying to perform high quality duplication of video signals without spending huge amounts of money on it. Yes there are legitimate reasons you might want to duplicate video tapes.
3. This will probably render it illegal to sell the designs for those cable tv descrambling boxes. I don't know about you, but I strongly believe that no transfer of _information_ should be prohibited, except possibly where that information has come into your hands due to a priveleged position (this would cover the protection of national secrets in a manner similar to the UK official secrets act, among other things). Note that by information I'm
talking about distilled facts; this isn't an anti-copyright stance.
4. If future PCs are supplied with some kind of DRM monitor that prevents you from tampering with managed data, this treaty might prevent the sale of kits to remove it, or even the transfer of information on how to remove it.