Not sure about NTL digital, but Sky digital's satellite decoders have a serial connector on the back. I haven't tried this, but I understand that you can send a 'change channel' command through this.
1. I wouldn't say that. He was a very popular author with several major novels and hundreds of short stories under his belt by the time he did that. He must have made some money beforehand.
2. That's beside the point anyway - imagine how much worse it would have been if it had started off better funded?
Oh, god. Somebody had to suggest it didn't they. You mark my words: somebody reading this story is either or will become a multi-millionaire. And they'll be captivated by the idea of out"do"ing L Ron. Who knows where it will all end?
They are not just syntactic niceties. They are abstractions. (So is C for that matter.)
OK, I take your point. That doesn't stop the fact that I can implement code in C that is object oriented. And with a little work, I can also probably do something that is aspect oriented. The point is that when you say "AOP? That's just a fancy way of inserting code into a class" it concentrates on the mechanism of what it does rather than the benefits. Similarly to the fact that OOP is usually implemented (at a basic level) using a table of function pointers associated with each object. Both are things that could be done using a language that doesn't support the paradigm. Both are things that are made easier by tools that do. And both are things that are generally useful to be able to do.
I definitely want a tool to point it out to me and ask me if I'm sure that's really what I want. I can choose to ignore it, just like I ignore deprecation warnings.
Maybe you can. Many companies (and some open source projects) operate 'no warning' policies - no code that produces a compiler warning is allowed to be checked into the official source tree for any product.
Java's deprecation warnings, at least, can be switched off by a directive in the source file (although I must admit I can't remember how to do it now...). Anything else like this must also have a similar way around it. There must be a way of saying to the compiler - yes, I know what I'm doing.
AOP? That's just a fancy way of inserting code into a class.
OOP? That's just a fancy way of calling functions through pointers.
(disclaimer: I've never used any AOP tools, but have read a little about them & think I understand the idea).
Basically, both OOP and AOP are syntactic niceties for something that you could do in C (if you were willing to jump through hoops to do it).
Got a method that is calling myFoo.getList().calculateMarbleSize().insertInto( table )? No problem!
Other than the fact that the variable and method names seem totally irrelevant, what is the problem?
Got a class that's importing classes from two dozen packages? Hey, it compiles, it must be good.
Maybe that's what needs to be done to solve the particular problem that it solves. Sure, I'd say its a prime target for taking a lot at and maybe refactoring if on analysis it seems to be a real problem. But I don't want my compiler to complain about it, because compilers second guessing programmers is a BAD THING.
(as an aside, maybe there is a case for a warning that can be disabled with an option in the source code here, but there are issues: where do you put the limit for maximum usefulness? Too low and people will just get used to switching it off. Too high and almost nobody will ever see it).
Re:May as well be the first to say it
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 1, Funny
Look, if they didn't do this, we'd all have to buy drink coasters, right. And they're normally much bigger & heavier. So they're actually saving resources...
The first amendment might protect your ability to talk about the flaw in general terms.
The first amendment does not protect your ability to instruct people about the precise details of the flaw and how to exploit it.
OK, I must admit I'm not a US citizen and don't know as much about US law as I probably should, however, I don't think you've got that quite right.
I think 1st amendment _does_ protect that ability, as long as the motive behind it isn't to incite people to break the law.
In this specific case, a number of people who run this system have been informed that the security flaw exists. The company that produces the system has denied it. They are, basically, confused. They need to be able to verify for themselves that the problem exists, and would be able to do this if they received instructions on how to break the security. With this information in hand, they would then be able to initiate proceedings against the supplier to force them to either fix the problem or issue refunds (due to the system not performing as advertised) which would allow the users of the system to replace it with one that works. Until they have this information, nothing can be done about the situation.
Years ago, there was the "LIM" (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) for adding more than 640KB of RAM to a PC, by "windowing in" a section of RAM in a certain area.
It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.
No, this system doesn't work like that.
Intel processors since the Pentium have supported a system that allows you to use a larger page size than standard so that you can have more physical address space. You specify the start address of each page as 24 bits which are assumed to align to a 4K boundary which gives you 4M*4K = 16Gb of physical RAM. Each page is 2Mb in length. You can mix 4K and 2Mb pages in the same system, although not in the same quarter of the process adress space. So you get more actual physical memory, although each process is limited to 4G at once (whereas with LIM EMS the entire system was limited to 640K + 64K of 'banked' memory)
that Java is not the fastest language on the planet - windowing, for example, takes up a lot of time
That really is an issue of the AWT, not Java. My company has its own Java GUI class library (a port from an original C++ library that our developers were used to working with) that doesn't use AWT at all, and running stuff that uses that tends to have about 5* faster startup time and drastically improved responsiveness to AWT apps. Plus most of the people exposed to it find it quicker to develop the interfaces in the first place.
Java can be useful as a language separated from the baggage that normally comes with it... although I suspect if C# had been around when we started we'd probably have gone that way instead (my boss likes MS software...).
There's an additional 16 bytes involved in the object class descriptor pointer and the reference to the object's monitor (*2 - one for the String and one for the char[], which is a fully fledged object in its own right), plus probably a couple of bytes overhead for the memory allocator. About 32 bytes seems reasonable. I think the point to make is, though, there is no _sensible_ way of making the string any smaller without sacrificing performance. Plus the objects have the ability to share the array between two strings that have similar data (say one is a substring of another) and that _substantially_ reduces memory requirements. I'd say the Java string implementation is about as good as it gets.
Why can't we just write our Java code as readably as possible, and then go back over it when we're done with an optimization tool looking for bottlenecks?
Because the compiler has to assume that the programmer knows what he is doing. I don't *want* the compiler to substitute my declarations of one data structure for another, even if it is almost equivalent in function. There are possibly reasons why you might not want to use a single StringBuffer for such a loop (for instance, StringBuffers tend to use a bit more memory than their equivalent Strings do... if you have a loop during which a long and complicated operation that uses a lot of memory is taking place you might not want a StringBuffer wasting large amounts of memory that the other calculation would need).
Besides, what's unreadable about:
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer (); while (some_condition) {// do some calculations
buffer.append("some string"); } return buffer.toString();
No, I think you're unlucky. I own 2 domains, one of which has a web site that was linked from slashdot, and have all of the e-mail from those diverted to an e-mail at a third domain. I also have a forwarding address on a fourth domain. As an author of free software, some of my addresses have been widely published. I control every server that my e-mail for three out of four of those domains passes across after it leaves the original sender's control. Other than stuff I've specifically signed up with, I get about 30-40 spams per day. That's up from about 20 this time last year.
Breakdown is about 30% prescription drugs, 20% penis enlargement, 20% 419 scams and 50% other shite, BTW.
Err, sort of. The principle relies on some of the same things happening: In your example, the water is drawn away because it needs some force to push it in towards the centre of the circle. This force is provided by the base of the bucket. In the case of the space elevator, however, its provided by gravity. It is calculated so that it rotates around at exactly the right speed that gravity exactly counteracts its tendency to just fly off in a straight line. That's what being in orbit is about, and the space elevator is no exception...
I think this is a case of a chain being as strong as its weakest link. You can build structures like this, but I don't believe any such structure can give a higher tensile strength/mass unit than just a cable made from the same material could. All you do is spread the material around a bit.
It was highlighted to me very strongly that we have not in truth as yet escaped the van allen belt in manned space travel. I don't know if anyone knows what I am talking about, but outside of the inner margin of the van allen belt it would take 6 inches of lead to make the radiation levels inside a spacecraft safe for a human.
Bullshit. You've been listening to moan conspiracy theorists with only half a brain. Listen instead to somebody who knows what they're talking about. See: http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad19.html
I quote from the summary: "So the effect of such a dose, in the end, would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill."
Hmmm... HTML content served as plain text. How irritating. However, due to Microsoft's violations of the HTTP specification, it will work with Internet Explorer, just not with anything else.
There can never be a 'legitimate' Gnutella2 because there is no 'legitimizer' to bestow legitimacy upon it.
That's not entirely true. "Gnutella" is, by general concensus, now organised by the GDF (Gnutella Developers Forum), and if this protocol were to be accepted by that forum most people would probably consider it a legitimate use of the name.
However, it is true that the name is not a trademark (AFAIK) but has become, due to multiple implementations, a generic term and therefore can be used by anybody legally.
There is a difference between legal and legitimate, though.
Gnutella2, or "Mike's Protocol," has some interesting properties. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Gnutella, however. It's a separate protocol that is bootstrapping off of the Gnutella name to do things like get on Slashdot, and everyone here is falling for it.
Something a lot of people seem to have missed is that there is a close bond between gnutella and G2 (or whatever you want to call it).
* They handshake using the same method and then the protocol is 'upgraded' to G2 when both sides have determined that the other side supports G2.
* The same protocol is used for transferring the files that are shared
* The networks support similar operations in terms of searching for files to share
* Some of the data structures used (eg query routing tables) have the same structure between the protocols
These points mean that:
1. It is easier (and takes less resources) for a servent to support both of these protocols than it is for one to support two unrelated protocols (eg gnutella and ed2k)
2. A hub that implements both protocols can accept leaves of either kind and pass back the query results from both kinds of leaf to the query originator, regardless of which protocol it uses
3. Bridges between the networks can be built
4. Nodes from each network will be referenced in either network's "alternate locations" mesh.
I'm sure there are more reasons than I've just mentioned, but these are the ones that spring to mind. Like it or not, these two networks are closely tied to each other, whether you call the new one Gnutella2 or whatever.
Also, a key point is that the ideological thinking behind each network was the same: to create a highly distributed peer-to-peer network using the most relevant current technology that is extensible and open.
i know huge amount of amount of electricity is required to extract hydrogen. But this can be easily generated using Nuclear Power Plants - a very clean source of electricity.
use hydrogen fuel cells in the cars, and you will take care of the pollution problem.
Actually, the best way of producing hydrogen isn't electrical. You catalyse a hydrocarbon into (usually) hydrogen and CO2. The CO2 production is very small and can be easily captured and recycled in processes that require CO2 as an input (eg photosynthesis).
In fact, that's precisely what this fuel cell does. I think they're calling it a battery because people think fuel cells are like four foot high things that cost thousands....
Slashdot Mirror
... try to ban it, of course...
...
Chandler will have a rich ability to [... create] a context sensitive "view" of many types of data, mixing-and-matching email, [...] MP3's
Chandler will make it extremely easy to share all types of information with others
There you go, its secured its own death sentence.
Hell, the page even has the words 'peer-to-peer' on it, so you can bet they know about it...
Not sure about NTL digital, but Sky digital's satellite decoders have a serial connector on the back. I haven't tried this, but I understand that you can send a 'change channel' command through this.
1. I wouldn't say that. He was a very popular author with several major novels and hundreds of short stories under his belt by the time he did that. He must have made some money beforehand.
2. That's beside the point anyway - imagine how much worse it would have been if it had started off better funded?
At least he's not trying to outdo L. Ron Hubbard.
Oh, god. Somebody had to suggest it didn't they. You mark my words: somebody reading this story is either or will become a multi-millionaire. And they'll be captivated by the idea of out"do"ing L Ron. Who knows where it will all end?
They are not just syntactic niceties. They are abstractions. (So is C for that matter.)
OK, I take your point. That doesn't stop the fact that I can implement code in C that is object oriented. And with a little work, I can also probably do something that is aspect oriented. The point is that when you say "AOP? That's just a fancy way of inserting code into a class" it concentrates on the mechanism of what it does rather than the benefits. Similarly to the fact that OOP is usually implemented (at a basic level) using a table of function pointers associated with each object. Both are things that could be done using a language that doesn't support the paradigm. Both are things that are made easier by tools that do. And both are things that are generally useful to be able to do.
I definitely want a tool to point it out to me and ask me if I'm sure that's really what I want. I can choose to ignore it, just like I ignore deprecation warnings.
Maybe you can. Many companies (and some open source projects) operate 'no warning' policies - no code that produces a compiler warning is allowed to be checked into the official source tree for any product.
Java's deprecation warnings, at least, can be switched off by a directive in the source file (although I must admit I can't remember how to do it now...). Anything else like this must also have a similar way around it. There must be a way of saying to the compiler - yes, I know what I'm doing.
AOP? That's just a fancy way of inserting code into a class.
OOP? That's just a fancy way of calling functions through pointers.
(disclaimer: I've never used any AOP tools, but have read a little about them & think I understand the idea).
Basically, both OOP and AOP are syntactic niceties for something that you could do in C (if you were willing to jump through hoops to do it).
Got a method that is calling myFoo.getList().calculateMarbleSize().insertInto( table )? No problem!
Other than the fact that the variable and method names seem totally irrelevant, what is the problem?
Got a class that's importing classes from two dozen packages? Hey, it compiles, it must be good.
Maybe that's what needs to be done to solve the particular problem that it solves. Sure, I'd say its a prime target for taking a lot at and maybe refactoring if on analysis it seems to be a real problem. But I don't want my compiler to complain about it, because compilers second guessing programmers is a BAD THING.
(as an aside, maybe there is a case for a warning that can be disabled with an option in the source code here, but there are issues: where do you put the limit for maximum usefulness? Too low and people will just get used to switching it off. Too high and almost nobody will ever see it).
Look, if they didn't do this, we'd all have to buy drink coasters, right. And they're normally much bigger & heavier. So they're actually saving resources...
The first amendment might protect your ability to talk about the flaw in general terms.
The first amendment does not protect your ability to instruct people about the precise details of the flaw and how to exploit it.
OK, I must admit I'm not a US citizen and don't know as much about US law as I probably should, however, I don't think you've got that quite right.
I think 1st amendment _does_ protect that ability, as long as the motive behind it isn't to incite people to break the law.
In this specific case, a number of people who run this system have been informed that the security flaw exists. The company that produces the system has denied it. They are, basically, confused. They need to be able to verify for themselves that the problem exists, and would be able to do this if they received instructions on how to break the security. With this information in hand, they would then be able to initiate proceedings against the supplier to force them to either fix the problem or issue refunds (due to the system not performing as advertised) which would allow the users of the system to replace it with one that works. Until they have this information, nothing can be done about the situation.
Because manned missions are only popular when somebody else is sending them out.
"The Chinese are sending people into space, why aren't we?"
"Oh. Erm. Let's send a team to Mars."
And how many pencils have you come across that have dual nationality?
Years ago, there was the "LIM" (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft) for adding more than 640KB of RAM to a PC, by "windowing in" a section of RAM in a certain area.
It seems that, 20 years later, we're back to doing essentially the same thing.
No, this system doesn't work like that.
Intel processors since the Pentium have supported a system that allows you to use a larger page size than standard so that you can have more physical address space. You specify the start address of each page as 24 bits which are assumed to align to a 4K boundary which gives you 4M*4K = 16Gb of physical RAM. Each page is 2Mb in length. You can mix 4K and 2Mb pages in the same system, although not in the same quarter of the process adress space. So you get more actual physical memory, although each process is limited to 4G at once (whereas with LIM EMS the entire system was limited to 640K + 64K of 'banked' memory)
You'd need this extension to be enabled to take advantage of any memory whose address is > 4Gb. So if this is you, yeah, I guess you can help them :-)
(I think they can map out bad ram. If not, it shouldn't be too hard to add it...)
that Java is not the fastest language on the planet - windowing, for example, takes up a lot of time
That really is an issue of the AWT, not Java. My company has its own Java GUI class library (a port from an original C++ library that our developers were used to working with) that doesn't use AWT at all, and running stuff that uses that tends to have about 5* faster startup time and drastically improved responsiveness to AWT apps. Plus most of the people exposed to it find it quicker to develop the interfaces in the first place.
Java can be useful as a language separated from the baggage that normally comes with it...
although I suspect if C# had been around when we started we'd probably have gone that way instead (my boss likes MS software...).
There's an additional 16 bytes involved in the object class descriptor pointer and the reference to the object's monitor (*2 - one for the String and one for the char[], which is a fully fledged object in its own right), plus probably a couple of bytes overhead for the memory allocator. About 32 bytes seems reasonable. I think the point to make is, though, there is no _sensible_ way of making the string any smaller without sacrificing performance. Plus the objects have the ability to share the array between two strings that have similar data (say one is a substring of another) and that _substantially_ reduces memory requirements. I'd say the Java string implementation is about as good as it gets.
Why can't we just write our Java code as readably as possible, and then go back over it when we're done with an optimization tool looking for bottlenecks?
// do some calculations
Because the compiler has to assume that the programmer knows what he is doing. I don't *want* the compiler to substitute my declarations of one data structure for another, even if it is almost equivalent in function. There are possibly reasons why you might not want to use a single StringBuffer for such a loop (for instance, StringBuffers tend to use a bit more memory than their equivalent Strings do... if you have a loop during which a long and complicated operation that uses a lot of memory is taking place you might not want a StringBuffer wasting large amounts of memory that the other calculation would need).
Besides, what's unreadable about:
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer ();
while (some_condition)
{
buffer.append("some string");
}
return buffer.toString();
?
I have no idea if any other OSes out there support preemtion of kernel threads running on multiple cpus. Anyone care to enlighten me?
Solaris. I believe Mach does as well. There are probably others that aren't as well known.
No, I think you're unlucky. I own 2 domains, one of which has a web site that was linked from slashdot, and have all of the e-mail from those diverted to an e-mail at a third domain. I also have a forwarding address on a fourth domain. As an author of free software, some of my addresses have been widely published. I control every server that my e-mail for three out of four of those domains passes across after it leaves the original sender's control. Other than stuff I've specifically signed up with, I get about 30-40 spams per day. That's up from about 20 this time last year.
Breakdown is about 30% prescription drugs, 20% penis enlargement, 20% 419 scams and 50% other shite, BTW.
Err, sort of. The principle relies on some of the same things happening: In your example, the water is drawn away because it needs some force to push it in towards the centre of the circle. This force is provided by the base of the bucket. In the case of the space elevator, however, its provided by gravity. It is calculated so that it rotates around at exactly the right speed that gravity exactly counteracts its tendency to just fly off in a straight line. That's what being in orbit is about, and the space elevator is no exception...
I think this is a case of a chain being as strong as its weakest link. You can build structures like this, but I don't believe any such structure can give a higher tensile strength/mass unit than just a cable made from the same material could. All you do is spread the material around a bit.
listening to moan conspiracy theorists
Ooops. That's moon, of course...
It was highlighted to me very strongly that we have not in truth as yet escaped the van allen belt in manned space travel. I don't know if anyone knows what I am talking about, but outside of the inner margin of the van allen belt it would take 6 inches of lead to make the radiation levels inside a spacecraft safe for a human.
9 .html
Bullshit. You've been listening to moan conspiracy theorists with only half a brain. Listen instead to somebody who knows what they're talking about. See: http://spider.ipac.caltech.edu/staff/waw/mad/mad1
I quote from the summary: "So the effect of such a dose, in the end, would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill."
Hmmm... HTML content served as plain text. How irritating. However, due to Microsoft's violations of the HTTP specification, it will work with Internet Explorer, just not with anything else.
There can never be a 'legitimate' Gnutella2 because there is no 'legitimizer' to bestow legitimacy upon it.
That's not entirely true. "Gnutella" is, by general concensus, now organised by the GDF (Gnutella Developers Forum), and if this protocol were to be accepted by that forum most people would probably consider it a legitimate use of the name.
However, it is true that the name is not a trademark (AFAIK) but has become, due to multiple implementations, a generic term and therefore can be used by anybody legally.
There is a difference between legal and legitimate, though.
Gnutella2, or "Mike's Protocol," has some interesting properties. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Gnutella, however. It's a separate protocol that is bootstrapping off of the Gnutella name to do things like get on Slashdot, and everyone here is falling for it.
Something a lot of people seem to have missed is that there is a close bond between gnutella and G2 (or whatever you want to call it).
* They handshake using the same method and then the protocol is 'upgraded' to G2 when both sides have determined that the other side supports G2.
* The same protocol is used for transferring the files that are shared
* The networks support similar operations in terms of searching for files to share
* Some of the data structures used (eg query routing tables) have the same structure between the protocols
These points mean that:
1. It is easier (and takes less resources) for a servent to support both of these protocols than it is for one to support two unrelated protocols (eg gnutella and ed2k)
2. A hub that implements both protocols can accept leaves of either kind and pass back the
query results from both kinds of leaf to the
query originator, regardless of which protocol it uses
3. Bridges between the networks can be built
4. Nodes from each network will be referenced in either network's "alternate locations" mesh.
I'm sure there are more reasons than I've just mentioned, but these are the ones that spring to mind. Like it or not, these two networks are closely tied to each other, whether you call the new one Gnutella2 or whatever.
Also, a key point is that the ideological thinking behind each network was the same: to create a highly distributed peer-to-peer network using the most relevant current technology that is extensible and open.
i know huge amount of amount of electricity is required to extract hydrogen. But this can be easily generated using Nuclear Power Plants - a very clean source of electricity.
use hydrogen fuel cells in the cars, and you will take care of the pollution problem.
Actually, the best way of producing hydrogen isn't electrical. You catalyse a hydrocarbon into (usually) hydrogen and CO2. The CO2 production is very small and can be easily captured and recycled in processes that require CO2 as an input (eg photosynthesis).
In fact, that's precisely what this fuel cell does. I think they're calling it a battery because people think fuel cells are like four foot high things that cost thousands....