Are you saying that the concept of 'Autism Spectrum Disorder' doesn't exist?
Of course not, the concept of walking through walls exists since there is more empty space in my body and the wall, but in my experience people don't walk through walls.
rocking back and forth in chairs
This is a symptom of a psychological problem, not a neuroligical one. Its very common for humans, especially those when psychologically hurt to rock back and forth. However, most humans grow out of that kind of behavior with socialization by the time they reach 9-10 years old, but some still do this kind of behavior when they are alone. Is there documentation of Bill Gates rocking back and forth in a chair as an adult in public? If so, then he has some pretty strong psychological problems. I've known people with mild terrets syndrome that could control their chirps and whatnot in public, but it wasn't worth their energy to do so with friends.
Oh, and what about Temple Grandin?
She is the poster child for autism, Asperger's, or something. After all, she has a PhD, and people that sell books for a living http://www.fhautism.com/ created a website for her, http://www.templegrandin.com/ so she must have it, or something right?
Here is an interview with her where the editor and interviewer say over and over again she has autism, but the only instance where she says anything remotely that she has autistic-like features is "I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands -- I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now." If I had an child whose only problems in life were picking fuzz off of the rug and eating it, I would be grateful.
Here is another account by her regarding here visualization problems. http://www.autism.org/temple/visual.html In this article she alludes that she has autistic-like features, and to overcome these she says "I describe a squeeze machine I constructed to satisfy my craving for the feeling of being held. The machine was designed so that I could control the amount and duration of the pressure. It was lined with foam rubber and applied pressure over a large area of my body."
Now, I don't know how old she was when she created this squeeze machine, but this puts her in at least a 1 in a million category here. I've known people to make machines like robots and things as adults for intellectually stimulating (again about 1 in a million here, maybe 500,000) but I seriously doubt that any females I know have built a stimulating machine (most likely a vibrator) over buying one.
I will put Temple Grandin in at least a 1 in a million category, but being that nobody of authority, including herself definitively says she has autism, and being that over 99% of those with autism cannot speak, I would say its safer to say she is not autistic.
And the richest man in the world is mildly autistic.
When is the popularity of autism, Asperger's symdrome, etc going to die off?
Its like the depressive/prozac craze of the early 90s.
I've worked in mental hospitals, and have worked with autism back when it was a real disorder and not a fad. To put it bluntly, autistic people are screwed up, and I have not heard of any treatments that significantly add functionality to the person's life beyond being able to do things like simple puzzles or tasks for 10 to 20 minutes. No progress like being able to have a meaningful relationship with someone, hold a job, or anything "normal" like that.
Autism is a congenetal like being born with "mental retardation" or whatever that is called today or being born with certain colored eyes, hair, or skin.
I know that this is troll-food for all of those self-diagnosed Asperger's and autistic people here on slashdot, but if one can cite a _real_ case of "mild autism" with significant change in symptoms through any medical or behavioral treatment, please prove me wrong.
Despite medical "experts" on autism saying that there is no known, long-term, treatment for autism, they recommend at least 25 hours of week in treatment. Logically, this seems to make no sense, if someone knows better than I, please prove me wrong.
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
Well, to make it less-scientific, in my observations, really smart people do tend to live longer than average.
I'm just picking random people here, but Newton lived 84 years back when people were living, what? 40 on average. Darwin lived 73 years. Einstein 76 years (died in 1955, so he his closer to average).
Consider this an investment in science. It's expensive, and rarely pays out immediately.
The thing is that this is a great advertisement or whatever, but its a silly project in terms of being green.
Solar technology simply is not that good for a majority of climates. At most, the panels are not even 20% efficient. They are fragile, and by their nature have to be exposed to the elements. Things like hail, tree limbs, etc screw these things up. Solar simply does not work at night, on cloudy days, etc, and so you then need either. Oh, and for most people, the prime solar time in terms of hours of the day and number of days a week is when the person is at work and using someone elses power.
If you want to interest me about doing something green, then lets talk about geothermal heating and cooling. The earth stays about 55F year-round 24x7 in most climates. Geothermal uses standard, burried pipes like existing pipes that have basically no maintenance and are not exposed to the elements.
No, going geothermal won't get you "off the grid". But neither will powering your 70" plasma screen with solar panels.
Over 99% of the time, all dupes come up as the first google link like this one. I'm a lazy MF, but I don't even see where coding this would add any value because I've seen no interest in the slashdot "editors" to care about doing any editing.
A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:
1. Nature: Men are better at the mental skills that happen to be good for engineering.
2. Entrenched: Because men are so dominant in engineering, men have inadvertently advanced the disciplines in ways that are easier for men to understand, thus unwittingly making it even harder for women to break in.
3. Nurture: The stereotypes of engineering and math as professions for men are self-fulfilling. Although women are just as good, they are subtly discouraged from even trying, and are steered away from it starting at an early age.
4. Discrimination: It's because men discriminate against women.
5. Side effect: It isn't the engineering that puts women off, it's the competitiveness and style of competitiveness of the male engineers. Or it's the lack of socializing-- more so than average, engineers are loners, with neither desire to socialize nor skill in socializing.
For a bunch of science minded, objective, and smart people, it kills me that the average slashdot reader can't realize that there are real and significant differences between men and women.
I mean, how much more data is necessary?
At the zygote level, there is the X vs Y chromosome thing. Lets, just ignore that little piece of binary data, its not enough.
OK, at birth the sexes are visibly different with the unaided human eye. Lets, ignore that as well.
Developmentally, the two sexes are different. Females develop physically more quickly than males. The human sexes bond differently. Typically, men hang out with men and women hang out with women. Women are more geared towards emotional decisions, and men logical ones (like math, CS, engineering). Well, OK this is develepmental differences, and since the binary physical ones were not good enough, these aren't good enough either because they are tainted by socialization.
OK, back to physical differences.
Women, for much of their life, go through a 28 day cycle that alters their mood and behavior. They also have a time in their lives when they go thorough a major bio-physical change called menopause. Oh, and they also have the ability to have children that the manliest of men cannot do, which feeds back to their personality and decision making. Men can afford and are more rewarded for being risk takers. Women are not.
I mean, what kind of scientific, biological, historical, or pseudoscience is necessary for people to realize that there is a difference between men and women?
Just because in recent western history women have been allowed to do different things that were previously only allowed to be done by males does not mean that they are the same or equal by any other metric. I'm talking about things like voting, owning land, leaving the house, having sex w/o getting pregnant. Sure, these things are historically new, but they are not what defines being male or female.
Gold has no tangible value. It is shiny, thus people want it, but it has no 'inherent' value. Sure, it can be used in a few manufacturing processes, but if that was all it was good for (i.e, not shiny), it wouldn't be worth much.
Not true. This used to be the case where gold was an arbitrary and semi-universal measure for exchange, but money is not backed by gold anymore, and gold does have real tangible value.
Over 85% of all of the gold that has been mined in the world is still used. Its recycled, melted down and reused all the time.
Now, diamonds have no tangible value. Aside from industrial diamonds, diamonds are just shiny, and there is an artificial market for them created by the DeBeers people. Of course there is a lot more to the diamond industry than one sentence or paragraph, but my point is that gold does have real tangible value.
Copyright is supposed to be imperfect and leaky. I do not want a scheme for perfectly enforcing it via architecture.
This goes for most laws. The difficulty of enforcing laws is what keeps a lot of laws from being horribly onerous burdens rather than simply being annoying inconveniences. I'm against any scheme for perfectly enforcing laws. Laws should always be tempered by human understanding.
Well said, and true, but this is the POV from a free thinking intelligent individual. This is not a shared opinion for many of those that are in power like the head of the media corps, government, etc.
The classic and humours take on this is in South Park where the balding, wimpy head of the RIAA repeatedly slicks back his hair over his bald spot with a squeak, and then shouts "I am above the law!"
This is a caricature, but its not complete fiction either.
DRM is an oxymoron, and has no value to the end user whatsoever. My first experience with DRM came when I bought my first DVD player. At the time, my TV was a TV/VCR combo where the output from my DVD player went through something that had Macrovision, and when I played a Macrovision encoded movie the picture faded in and out and looked like crap.
I did an internet search, and found out what was wrong. A USENET post said that what I was experiencing was a silly hack, DRM of sorts (although macrovision is in the analog spectrum), and the solution was that had to walk across the street, pay $20 for a macrovision defeater (which is basically a lowpass filter), and then I was allowed to view the movies on my brand new DVD player.
The thing is that the price/value ratio is wrong for digital media, but it is correct for printed media.
Let me elaborate. Books, magazines, etc are covered by the same copyright laws as CDs and DVDs. Books can be illegally copied just like a CD/DVD. The difference is that its just cheaper and easier to buy printed material or borrow it from someone or do without than to copy it.
Now, video and audio media cannot seem to get it right and provide a product to fill a market. There are tons of options here, but the current one is the sue the customer until they want to buy our product. Or using guilt/shame marketing techniques into that buying products that you don't want is morally superior to acquiring these things another way.
My take on the matter is fuck them. If you refuse to offer me goods or services that fit my lifestyle in 2007 and you have refused to do so for a decade, then you don't deserve my money. So, sue me. I don't care.
How true. A simple single torpedo from a sub on a "training mission" would mean the end of Sealand.
Ah, so if the Pirate Bay becomes their own country, then the RIAA and MPAA must follow suit.
I have friends in pretty high places, but the only people I know of that do training missions with torpedos are national governments.
So, the only course of action that the **AA has is to 1) buy ships with torpedos and/or similar stuff 2) convince people that already own such toys to do the dirty work for them or 3) silently admit defeat.
Since when has international accidental training mission torpedo attacks gone w/o a new chapter in a history book?
Service or information. We are in the service/information age, the last one was industrialization. If you really want to get ahead in the world in the US being a sweatshop worker, be my guest.
Competition makes everyone better off - just look at the progress for the last century and it becomes abundantly clear.
The problem is that for me to be "competative" to a multi-national corporation as a worker I must forgo the progress of the last century and my lifetime.
I'm more "competitive" when I demand lower wages, lower my standard of living, lower my need for healthcare, lower my need for a clean environment, lower my expectations to talk with someone who actually knows english, etc, etc.
Unfortunately, there is no right answer here. Outsourcing looks great on paper for the bottom line. It seems to be failing for customer support, helpdesks, and call centers because even if you get a hold of a person that speaks good english and can help you with your problem, at least here in the USA, I still feel cheated for some reason, and the liklihood that you get a person that can speak good english and help you with your problem is unlikely at best.
Manufacturing simply makes sense for many people. It means cheaper goods for us as consumers and it moves a ton of the nastyness of manufacturing out of our back yard. None of the pollution, or any of that jazz.
I personally have more issues with the hiring of illegals here in the us than outsourcing.
Can I see all the crap and bloat of OEM-installed apps (all for the Benjamins, of course) tainting a person's view of the OS (and even the "Dell"/other brand?) - abso-freikin-lootly.
OK, lets look at this from a "normal" person's POV.
"Normal" people buy computers of two types. Macs or PeeCees. Macs come from one manufacturer, with one OS. PeeCees come from various manufacturers with one OS.
If something goes wrong with their computer, it gets slow, it crashes, or any of that they blame the manufacturer or just accept it. Regardless if its user error, an OS error or hardware error.
To "normal" people Microsoft is an abstraction where people really don't know what they do or provide aside from the fact that they do something and provide something that has netted them LOTS of money, so if they are rich, then it must be good, whatever it is or does.
"Normal" people don't know or care about computers that much. I'm a geek, I know that my DVR has a Motorola RISC processor, a 120 Gig harddrive, and some propriatary OS and software installed on it. But even though I know a little more about the inner workings of the thing, I use it as a black box just like everybody else. I smash the buttons on the remote to switch channels, to select recorded material, to set up my favorite channels, etc. Even though I can point out the bugs in the software and hardware in the box, and I know pretty much how it works, I don't address it as a Motorola 6xxx HD DVR. I just say to people I have Cox's digital cable service with Tivo-like abilities. Others reply, wow thats cool. I have DirectTV, or I just have Cox's digital cable, you mean you can skip commercials?
Now, when people find out I'm a computer guy, they think I know about their computers, and if they run a Windows based PeeCee, I just say I don't use those kinds of computers because I don't. If they ask for advice, I tell them to buy a Mac. I then change the subject to something important like the weather or similar.
Technically Canada has been metric for over 20 years. Tho things like construction has remained Imperial as we are next to the US.
Technically, the US has been metric for over 100 years. Google it.
Now, the base 10 stuff is nice, but there actually is, especially in construction where the Imperial usage is superior because everything is divisible by 2 w/o fractions. 1/2 of 1 inch is 1/2 inch. Half of that is 1/4 inch. Half of that is 1/8 inch, etc. One inch is 2.54 cm. OK lets round to 2.5 cm. Half of that is 1.25 cm. Half of that is.625 cm.
Also verbally in noisy environment is easy to yell "I need an 1/8th inch socket!" Which when spoken is clearly different than 1/16th or 1/2.
Actually, all of the seemingly strange measurements make sense in construction. A 4'x8' piece of plywood is divisible evenly for 16" on center studs and 24" on center for roof trusses.
Honestly, like it or not, I don't see the Imperial stuff going away any time soon.
For the last decade Sony's content divisions have been essentially destroying their hardware division from the inside. People once regarded Sony as the default brand to buy when purchasing consumer electronics. Now, anyone who is remotely informed avoids their products like the plague. Sony's insistence on making their hardware and content divisions cooperate has insured that nearly every product they release is crippled right out of the gate with DRM and proprietary formats doomed to obscurity.
What I don't understand is how an orginization the size of Sony behaves like a psychotic genious?
Yes, Sony is on my shitlist as well, mostly due to their usability, DRM and other psychosis ridden behaviors, but from a technical POV their proprietary stuff is actually technically sound, but they simply don't seem to want people to use it.
SDDS is at least as good as DTS for multi-channel sound. Both are better than DD. But Sony doesn't seem to want people to be able to use it, so who cares?
Although the minidisc may of had its issues, ATRAC, especially ATRAC3 is a good lossy encoder. But who cares? My car stereo has a licensed Sony technology where I can record onto a Sony memory stick via ATRAC3 compression. Its been a while since I read the manual, but all I remember was that the rules and regulations for even testing the recording capabilities of the deck just made it not worth the investment in a memory stick or my time to even test it.
SACD. Technically the best audio format one can get in their home. Sony doesn't want you to use it though. I had a SACD capable DVD/CD player and a Sony digital receiver. So, to play audio CDs or DVDs I can just put the disk into the player and use the digital out and the receiver will properly decode the signal and enjoy! Well, to enjoy a SACD from a Sony player on a Sony receiver I have to hook up 6 analog cables and hit a special button on the receiver to select the analog cables over the digital ones to play a SACD. Keep in mind that this is a multi-disk player, so when the player switches to or from a SACD disk everything is different although it is coming from the same player. WTF? So, I erroniously bought a SACD at the same time that I bought the SACD player, and haven't even listened to it all the way though. Try explaining to your wife, friend, babysitter, or whever, that the silver disk that looks just like every other CD or DVD but its "better" has to be played a special way from the same player and receiver even though they are all made by the same people.
WTF?
It simply does not matter how technologically good or even sufficient something is. If it can't be used or at least used the same way as everything else it simply won't be used. SDDS, ATRAC, SACD are basically worthless technology simply because Sony doesn't want people to use the stuff. The most sucessful is SDDS because they allow some movie theaters/producers to use the format, but Sony simply does not want to play nice with the rest of the 5 billion people on this planet.
Yup. A rewite by a competant programmer, or at least some kind of code review.
char nm[2];
nm[0] = mission[11]; nm[1] = mission[12];
followed by an atoi(nm) is absolutely silly.
First, if you use strings in C, you MUST null terminate them unless you REALLY know what you are doing. So, nm should be nm[3], and nm[3] should be 0. 99% of the time, I use strtol() or sscanf() instead of atoi() because I can detect errors with those other guys, but not with atoi(). The Linux manpage for atoi says:
The atoi() function converts the initial portion of the string pointed
to by nptr to int. The behaviour is the same as
strtol(nptr, (char **)NULL, 10);
except that atoi() does not detect errors.
In summary, I only use atoi when I'm lazy for test-preproduction code, 99% of the time its for commandline arguments to convert them to ints for testing my code. I don't see a reason to use atoi for any code that is actually expected to work. Especially since over 99% of the time you are using atoi to convert input from an untrusted source.
"How do you go about making sure your code is secure? Especially if you have to write in a language like C or C++?" Don't write in C or C++. Duh. Where is it written that all software must be written in C or C++? Is anyone capable of independent thought? There are plenty of fine languages that are safe. Ada comes to mind. Maybe others will come to your mind (if you have one).
I have a mind, I've heard of Ada, and I've read about it, but I've never touched an Ada compiler.
So, where is it written that all software must be written in C or C++? Its not, but TONS of software and especially existing libraries are written in C/C++.
Can Ada be used for Linux kernel modules or Windows device drivers? I know C and possibly C++ can be used. Does Ada have hooks to common libraries like SSL and zlib?
How proven is the Ada compiler for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and AIX?
I've got years of experience with C/C++, zero with Ada, if you really want that code to be written yesterday, how long will it take me to be as proficient in Ada as I am in C/C++?
I ask people all the time why the still use Windows just like you are asking about why people still use C or C++. The difference in my question is that there is a clear migration from Windows via virtualization and/or using alternatives to Windows specific solutions. The fact of the matter is that change takes time and effort, and people are fundamentally lazy and comfortable with what they are already familiar with. Couple that with ignorance of there being a better way, and your stuck with the lowest common denominator, like it or not.
Just get others to formally review it so if anything is found, there's collective responsibilty
Yes, that is funny, but there is truth to it as well (which is why its funny).
Security, software development, and everything else is a process, not an event. It gets better over time, and basically, the way that issues come out is for them to be found "in the wild". And as these issues are found, better tools and techniques make the process better over time, but I don't envision a world where people just think of bugfree, usable, featureful software that just appears, but all in all it keeps getting better.
The error in question:while(lp != (struct listelem *)0) {
free(lp);
lp = lp->next;
} is pretty silly, and I don't know how it took over a decade to find that. In my experience, code like that crashes pretty regularly, and debugging it will point to the error.
Today, what some programmers do is to do FREE(lp); where FREE() is a macro or something that does if (a) { free(a); a=NULL; }. This prevents double frees, and ensures that future use of the pointer will predictably die with a null pointer exception. In 2006, bugs like this should not find themselves in C code. We now check our stuff, use languates or tools that check for crap like this for us, or whatever. In 1994, I guess it was OK for such a bug to be interoduced into code, but not in 2006.
First, I think that besides country TLDs they are stupid.
Second, being that others think that TLDs are interesting or at least profitable. Why isn't there a XXX TLD?
If there are rediculusly stupid ones like.biz,.name,.info,.museum, why in the world is there not already a.xxx one? At least then I can find some porn, because its next to impossible now with the existing TLDS (/sarcasm for those who have no sense of humor:)
The problem has very little to do with the processors that are used and is entirely related to the software that we run. Even in the 80s/90s it would have been completely possible for Microsoft to support a wide range of processors ( if their OS was designed correctly ) and produce OS related libraries which abstracted software development...
Like any popularity contest, the most popular wins because they are most popular.
x86 is a hack of a hack of a hack from the late 70s, but its "good enough", its known, and its cheap, and there is still competetive development going on with that platform.
Its sad, but there is almost no competition for processors besides the different offerings of the x86. Alpha is dead. SPARC is pretty much dead. PARISC is dead. Itanium is dying. The PowerPC is basically dead.
x86 is like the Ford or Chevy of computing. Not going to turn people's head, but it will get the job done.
Why should an electronic trail have legal protections that a physical trail does not?
Physical trails in the public are not protected. Physical trails in private are.
Its OK for me to watch you in public talking to person X. In theory, one needs a warrant and probable cause of a specific crime to listen to person talking with person X on the telephone.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you saying that the concept of 'Autism Spectrum Disorder' doesn't exist?
Of course not, the concept of walking through walls exists since there is more empty space in my body and the wall, but in my experience people don't walk through walls.
rocking back and forth in chairs
This is a symptom of a psychological problem, not a neuroligical one. Its very common for humans, especially those when psychologically hurt to rock back and forth. However, most humans grow out of that kind of behavior with socialization by the time they reach 9-10 years old, but some still do this kind of behavior when they are alone. Is there documentation of Bill Gates rocking back and forth in a chair as an adult in public? If so, then he has some pretty strong psychological problems. I've known people with mild terrets syndrome that could control their chirps and whatnot in public, but it wasn't worth their energy to do so with friends.
Oh, and what about Temple Grandin?
She is the poster child for autism, Asperger's, or something. After all, she has a PhD, and people that sell books for a living http://www.fhautism.com/ created a website for her, http://www.templegrandin.com/ so she must have it, or something right?
On her own, personal website, http://www.grandin.com/ she says she has a visual thinking problem _like_ some people that were not clinically diagnosed with autism here http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html .
Here is an interview with her where the editor and interviewer say over and over again she has autism, but the only instance where she says anything remotely that she has autistic-like features is "I can remember, after lunch, I had a rest period when I could revert to autism, and I would pick the fuzz off the rug and eat it, and dribble sand through my hands -- I can remember just getting hypnotized doing this. If I had been allowed to do that all day, I wouldn't be here now." If I had an child whose only problems in life were picking fuzz off of the rug and eating it, I would be grateful.
Here is another account by her regarding here visualization problems. http://www.autism.org/temple/visual.html In this article she alludes that she has autistic-like features, and to overcome these she says "I describe a squeeze machine I constructed to satisfy my craving for the feeling of being held. The machine was designed so that I could control the amount and duration of the pressure. It was lined with foam rubber and applied pressure over a large area of my body."
Now, I don't know how old she was when she created this squeeze machine, but this puts her in at least a 1 in a million category here. I've known people to make machines like robots and things as adults for intellectually stimulating (again about 1 in a million here, maybe 500,000) but I seriously doubt that any females I know have built a stimulating machine (most likely a vibrator) over buying one.
I will put Temple Grandin in at least a 1 in a million category, but being that nobody of authority, including herself definitively says she has autism, and being that over 99% of those with autism cannot speak, I would say its safer to say she is not autistic.
Good, that only narrows it down to five billion people. The MPAA will be sure to track down this scoundrel soon.
And how many of those 5 billion people are named muslix64?
And the richest man in the world is mildly autistic.
When is the popularity of autism, Asperger's symdrome, etc going to die off?
Its like the depressive/prozac craze of the early 90s.
I've worked in mental hospitals, and have worked with autism back when it was a real disorder and not a fad. To put it bluntly, autistic people are screwed up, and I have not heard of any treatments that significantly add functionality to the person's life beyond being able to do things like simple puzzles or tasks for 10 to 20 minutes. No progress like being able to have a meaningful relationship with someone, hold a job, or anything "normal" like that.
Autism is a congenetal like being born with "mental retardation" or whatever that is called today or being born with certain colored eyes, hair, or skin.
I know that this is troll-food for all of those self-diagnosed Asperger's and autistic people here on slashdot, but if one can cite a _real_ case of "mild autism" with significant change in symptoms through any medical or behavioral treatment, please prove me wrong.
Despite medical "experts" on autism saying that there is no known, long-term, treatment for autism, they recommend at least 25 hours of week in treatment. Logically, this seems to make no sense, if someone knows better than I, please prove me wrong.
there are so many things wrong with such an analysis. the fact that Nobel prize winners live longer is a correlation, not a cause-and-effect relationship.
g _050506.jpg
Well, to make it less-scientific, in my observations, really smart people do tend to live longer than average.
I'm just picking random people here, but Newton lived 84 years back when people were living, what? 40 on average. Darwin lived 73 years. Einstein 76 years (died in 1955, so he his closer to average).
Heck, look at Stephen Hawking. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Stephen_Hawkin
He's 65 with no ability to move but is still alive. According to the experts, he's lived much longer than expected.
Consider this an investment in science. It's expensive, and rarely pays out immediately.
The thing is that this is a great advertisement or whatever, but its a silly project in terms of being green.
Solar technology simply is not that good for a majority of climates. At most, the panels are not even 20% efficient. They are fragile, and by their nature have to be exposed to the elements. Things like hail, tree limbs, etc screw these things up. Solar simply does not work at night, on cloudy days, etc, and so you then need either. Oh, and for most people, the prime solar time in terms of hours of the day and number of days a week is when the person is at work and using someone elses power.
If you want to interest me about doing something green, then lets talk about geothermal heating and cooling. The earth stays about 55F year-round 24x7 in most climates. Geothermal uses standard, burried pipes like existing pipes that have basically no maintenance and are not exposed to the elements.
No, going geothermal won't get you "off the grid". But neither will powering your 70" plasma screen with solar panels.
So if you really want to complain about it, consider contributing a Slashcode patch to fix it.
& q=site:slashdot.org+single+pixel+camera&ie=UTF-8&o e=UTF-8
I've suggested multiple times for the editors just to copy-n-paste the submitted title into google like this: http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en
Over 99% of the time, all dupes come up as the first google link like this one. I'm a lazy MF, but I don't even see where coding this would add any value because I've seen no interest in the slashdot "editors" to care about doing any editing.
What is the business reason for developing more female engineers?
The potential doubling of your talent pool.
OK, I thought that was the theory behind opening jobs in places like India where they have 1b+ people and we only have 300 mil.
Daycare providers
Construction workers
Flight attendents
Prostitution, drug dealers, politicians, fishermen, firemen, "administrative assistants", hostess, social workers. The list goes on and on...
A variety of reasons have been kicked around. Some off the top of my head:
1. Nature: Men are better at the mental skills that happen to be good for engineering.
2. Entrenched: Because men are so dominant in engineering, men have inadvertently advanced the disciplines in ways that are easier for men to understand, thus unwittingly making it even harder for women to break in.
3. Nurture: The stereotypes of engineering and math as professions for men are self-fulfilling. Although women are just as good, they are subtly discouraged from even trying, and are steered away from it starting at an early age.
4. Discrimination: It's because men discriminate against women.
5. Side effect: It isn't the engineering that puts women off, it's the competitiveness and style of competitiveness of the male engineers. Or it's the lack of socializing-- more so than average, engineers are loners, with neither desire to socialize nor skill in socializing.
For a bunch of science minded, objective, and smart people, it kills me that the average slashdot reader can't realize that there are real and significant differences between men and women.
I mean, how much more data is necessary?
At the zygote level, there is the X vs Y chromosome thing. Lets, just ignore that little piece of binary data, its not enough.
OK, at birth the sexes are visibly different with the unaided human eye. Lets, ignore that as well.
Developmentally, the two sexes are different. Females develop physically more quickly than males. The human sexes bond differently. Typically, men hang out with men and women hang out with women. Women are more geared towards emotional decisions, and men logical ones (like math, CS, engineering). Well, OK this is develepmental differences, and since the binary physical ones were not good enough, these aren't good enough either because they are tainted by socialization.
OK, back to physical differences.
Women, for much of their life, go through a 28 day cycle that alters their mood and behavior. They also have a time in their lives when they go thorough a major bio-physical change called menopause. Oh, and they also have the ability to have children that the manliest of men cannot do, which feeds back to their personality and decision making. Men can afford and are more rewarded for being risk takers. Women are not.
I mean, what kind of scientific, biological, historical, or pseudoscience is necessary for people to realize that there is a difference between men and women?
Just because in recent western history women have been allowed to do different things that were previously only allowed to be done by males does not mean that they are the same or equal by any other metric. I'm talking about things like voting, owning land, leaving the house, having sex w/o getting pregnant. Sure, these things are historically new, but they are not what defines being male or female.
Gold has no tangible value. It is shiny, thus people want it, but it has no 'inherent' value. Sure, it can be used in a few manufacturing processes, but if that was all it was good for (i.e, not shiny), it wouldn't be worth much.
Not true. This used to be the case where gold was an arbitrary and semi-universal measure for exchange, but money is not backed by gold anymore, and gold does have real tangible value.
Over 85% of all of the gold that has been mined in the world is still used. Its recycled, melted down and reused all the time.
Now, diamonds have no tangible value. Aside from industrial diamonds, diamonds are just shiny, and there is an artificial market for them created by the DeBeers people. Of course there is a lot more to the diamond industry than one sentence or paragraph, but my point is that gold does have real tangible value.
Copyright is supposed to be imperfect and leaky. I do not want a scheme for perfectly enforcing it via architecture.
This goes for most laws. The difficulty of enforcing laws is what keeps a lot of laws from being horribly onerous burdens rather than simply being annoying inconveniences. I'm against any scheme for perfectly enforcing laws. Laws should always be tempered by human understanding.
Well said, and true, but this is the POV from a free thinking intelligent individual. This is not a shared opinion for many of those that are in power like the head of the media corps, government, etc.
The classic and humours take on this is in South Park where the balding, wimpy head of the RIAA repeatedly slicks back his hair over his bald spot with a squeak, and then shouts "I am above the law!"
This is a caricature, but its not complete fiction either.
DRM is an oxymoron, and has no value to the end user whatsoever. My first experience with DRM came when I bought my first DVD player. At the time, my TV was a TV/VCR combo where the output from my DVD player went through something that had Macrovision, and when I played a Macrovision encoded movie the picture faded in and out and looked like crap.
I did an internet search, and found out what was wrong. A USENET post said that what I was experiencing was a silly hack, DRM of sorts (although macrovision is in the analog spectrum), and the solution was that had to walk across the street, pay $20 for a macrovision defeater (which is basically a lowpass filter), and then I was allowed to view the movies on my brand new DVD player.
The thing is that the price/value ratio is wrong for digital media, but it is correct for printed media.
Let me elaborate. Books, magazines, etc are covered by the same copyright laws as CDs and DVDs. Books can be illegally copied just like a CD/DVD. The difference is that its just cheaper and easier to buy printed material or borrow it from someone or do without than to copy it.
Now, video and audio media cannot seem to get it right and provide a product to fill a market. There are tons of options here, but the current one is the sue the customer until they want to buy our product. Or using guilt/shame marketing techniques into that buying products that you don't want is morally superior to acquiring these things another way.
My take on the matter is fuck them. If you refuse to offer me goods or services that fit my lifestyle in 2007 and you have refused to do so for a decade, then you don't deserve my money. So, sue me. I don't care.
How true. A simple single torpedo from a sub on a "training mission" would mean the end of Sealand.
Ah, so if the Pirate Bay becomes their own country, then the RIAA and MPAA must follow suit.
I have friends in pretty high places, but the only people I know of that do training missions with torpedos are national governments.
So, the only course of action that the **AA has is to 1) buy ships with torpedos and/or similar stuff 2) convince people that already own such toys to do the dirty work for them or 3) silently admit defeat.
Since when has international accidental training mission torpedo attacks gone w/o a new chapter in a history book?
Expansion to where?
Service or information. We are in the service/information age, the last one was industrialization. If you really want to get ahead in the world in the US being a sweatshop worker, be my guest.
Competition makes everyone better off - just look at the progress for the last century and it becomes abundantly clear.
The problem is that for me to be "competative" to a multi-national corporation as a worker I must forgo the progress of the last century and my lifetime.
I'm more "competitive" when I demand lower wages, lower my standard of living, lower my need for healthcare, lower my need for a clean environment, lower my expectations to talk with someone who actually knows english, etc, etc.
Unfortunately, there is no right answer here. Outsourcing looks great on paper for the bottom line. It seems to be failing for customer support, helpdesks, and call centers because even if you get a hold of a person that speaks good english and can help you with your problem, at least here in the USA, I still feel cheated for some reason, and the liklihood that you get a person that can speak good english and help you with your problem is unlikely at best.
Manufacturing simply makes sense for many people. It means cheaper goods for us as consumers and it moves a ton of the nastyness of manufacturing out of our back yard. None of the pollution, or any of that jazz.
I personally have more issues with the hiring of illegals here in the us than outsourcing.
Can I see all the crap and bloat of OEM-installed apps (all for the Benjamins, of course) tainting a person's view of the OS (and even the "Dell"/other brand?) - abso-freikin-lootly.
OK, lets look at this from a "normal" person's POV.
"Normal" people buy computers of two types. Macs or PeeCees. Macs come from one manufacturer, with one OS. PeeCees come from various manufacturers with one OS.
If something goes wrong with their computer, it gets slow, it crashes, or any of that they blame the manufacturer or just accept it. Regardless if its user error, an OS error or hardware error.
To "normal" people Microsoft is an abstraction where people really don't know what they do or provide aside from the fact that they do something and provide something that has netted them LOTS of money, so if they are rich, then it must be good, whatever it is or does.
"Normal" people don't know or care about computers that much. I'm a geek, I know that my DVR has a Motorola RISC processor, a 120 Gig harddrive, and some propriatary OS and software installed on it. But even though I know a little more about the inner workings of the thing, I use it as a black box just like everybody else. I smash the buttons on the remote to switch channels, to select recorded material, to set up my favorite channels, etc. Even though I can point out the bugs in the software and hardware in the box, and I know pretty much how it works, I don't address it as a Motorola 6xxx HD DVR. I just say to people I have Cox's digital cable service with Tivo-like abilities. Others reply, wow thats cool. I have DirectTV, or I just have Cox's digital cable, you mean you can skip commercials?
Now, when people find out I'm a computer guy, they think I know about their computers, and if they run a Windows based PeeCee, I just say I don't use those kinds of computers because I don't. If they ask for advice, I tell them to buy a Mac. I then change the subject to something important like the weather or similar.
Technically Canada has been metric for over 20 years. Tho things like construction has remained Imperial as we are next to the US.
.625 cm.
Technically, the US has been metric for over 100 years. Google it.
Now, the base 10 stuff is nice, but there actually is, especially in construction where the Imperial usage is superior because everything is divisible by 2 w/o fractions. 1/2 of 1 inch is 1/2 inch. Half of that is 1/4 inch. Half of that is 1/8 inch, etc. One inch is 2.54 cm. OK lets round to 2.5 cm. Half of that is 1.25 cm. Half of that is
Also verbally in noisy environment is easy to yell "I need an 1/8th inch socket!" Which when spoken is clearly different than 1/16th or 1/2.
Actually, all of the seemingly strange measurements make sense in construction. A 4'x8' piece of plywood is divisible evenly for 16" on center studs and 24" on center for roof trusses.
Honestly, like it or not, I don't see the Imperial stuff going away any time soon.
For the last decade Sony's content divisions have been essentially destroying their hardware division from the inside. People once regarded Sony as the default brand to buy when purchasing consumer electronics. Now, anyone who is remotely informed avoids their products like the plague. Sony's insistence on making their hardware and content divisions cooperate has insured that nearly every product they release is crippled right out of the gate with DRM and proprietary formats doomed to obscurity.
What I don't understand is how an orginization the size of Sony behaves like a psychotic genious?
Yes, Sony is on my shitlist as well, mostly due to their usability, DRM and other psychosis ridden behaviors, but from a technical POV their proprietary stuff is actually technically sound, but they simply don't seem to want people to use it.
SDDS is at least as good as DTS for multi-channel sound. Both are better than DD. But Sony doesn't seem to want people to be able to use it, so who cares?
Although the minidisc may of had its issues, ATRAC, especially ATRAC3 is a good lossy encoder. But who cares? My car stereo has a licensed Sony technology where I can record onto a Sony memory stick via ATRAC3 compression. Its been a while since I read the manual, but all I remember was that the rules and regulations for even testing the recording capabilities of the deck just made it not worth the investment in a memory stick or my time to even test it.
SACD. Technically the best audio format one can get in their home. Sony doesn't want you to use it though. I had a SACD capable DVD/CD player and a Sony digital receiver. So, to play audio CDs or DVDs I can just put the disk into the player and use the digital out and the receiver will properly decode the signal and enjoy! Well, to enjoy a SACD from a Sony player on a Sony receiver I have to hook up 6 analog cables and hit a special button on the receiver to select the analog cables over the digital ones to play a SACD. Keep in mind that this is a multi-disk player, so when the player switches to or from a SACD disk everything is different although it is coming from the same player. WTF? So, I erroniously bought a SACD at the same time that I bought the SACD player, and haven't even listened to it all the way though. Try explaining to your wife, friend, babysitter, or whever, that the silver disk that looks just like every other CD or DVD but its "better" has to be played a special way from the same player and receiver even though they are all made by the same people.
WTF?
It simply does not matter how technologically good or even sufficient something is. If it can't be used or at least used the same way as everything else it simply won't be used. SDDS, ATRAC, SACD are basically worthless technology simply because Sony doesn't want people to use the stuff. The most sucessful is SDDS because they allow some movie theaters/producers to use the format, but Sony simply does not want to play nice with the rest of the 5 billion people on this planet.
Yup. A rewite by a competant programmer, or at least some kind of code review.
char nm[2];
nm[0] = mission[11];
nm[1] = mission[12];
followed by an atoi(nm) is absolutely silly.
First, if you use strings in C, you MUST null terminate them unless you REALLY know what you are doing. So, nm should be nm[3], and nm[3] should be 0. 99% of the time, I use strtol() or sscanf() instead of atoi() because I can detect errors with those other guys, but not with atoi(). The Linux manpage for atoi says:
In summary, I only use atoi when I'm lazy for test-preproduction code, 99% of the time its for commandline arguments to convert them to ints for testing my code. I don't see a reason to use atoi for any code that is actually expected to work. Especially since over 99% of the time you are using atoi to convert input from an untrusted source.
This is why we have discussions like this.
"How do you go about making sure your code is secure? Especially if you have to write in a language like C or C++?" Don't write in C or C++. Duh. Where is it written that all software must be written in C or C++? Is anyone capable of independent thought? There are plenty of fine languages that are safe. Ada comes to mind. Maybe others will come to your mind (if you have one).
I have a mind, I've heard of Ada, and I've read about it, but I've never touched an Ada compiler.
So, where is it written that all software must be written in C or C++? Its not, but TONS of software and especially existing libraries are written in C/C++.
Can Ada be used for Linux kernel modules or Windows device drivers? I know C and possibly C++ can be used. Does Ada have hooks to common libraries like SSL and zlib?
How proven is the Ada compiler for Solaris, Linux, Windows, and AIX?
I've got years of experience with C/C++, zero with Ada, if you really want that code to be written yesterday, how long will it take me to be as proficient in Ada as I am in C/C++?
I ask people all the time why the still use Windows just like you are asking about why people still use C or C++. The difference in my question is that there is a clear migration from Windows via virtualization and/or using alternatives to Windows specific solutions. The fact of the matter is that change takes time and effort, and people are fundamentally lazy and comfortable with what they are already familiar with. Couple that with ignorance of there being a better way, and your stuck with the lowest common denominator, like it or not.
Just get others to formally review it so if anything is found, there's collective responsibilty
Yes, that is funny, but there is truth to it as well (which is why its funny).
Security, software development, and everything else is a process, not an event. It gets better over time, and basically, the way that issues come out is for them to be found "in the wild". And as these issues are found, better tools and techniques make the process better over time, but I don't envision a world where people just think of bugfree, usable, featureful software that just appears, but all in all it keeps getting better.
The error in question:while(lp != (struct listelem *)0) {
free(lp);
lp = lp->next;
} is pretty silly, and I don't know how it took over a decade to find that. In my experience, code like that crashes pretty regularly, and debugging it will point to the error.
Today, what some programmers do is to do FREE(lp); where FREE() is a macro or something that does if (a) { free(a); a=NULL; }. This prevents double frees, and ensures that future use of the pointer will predictably die with a null pointer exception. In 2006, bugs like this should not find themselves in C code. We now check our stuff, use languates or tools that check for crap like this for us, or whatever. In 1994, I guess it was OK for such a bug to be interoduced into code, but not in 2006.
First, I think that besides country TLDs they are stupid.
.biz, .name, .info, .museum, why in the world is there not already a .xxx one? At least then I can find some porn, because its next to impossible now with the existing TLDS (/sarcasm for those who have no sense of humor :)
Second, being that others think that TLDs are interesting or at least profitable. Why isn't there a XXX TLD?
If there are rediculusly stupid ones like
The problem has very little to do with the processors that are used and is entirely related to the software that we run. Even in the 80s/90s it would have been completely possible for Microsoft to support a wide range of processors ( if their OS was designed correctly ) and produce OS related libraries which abstracted software development...
Like any popularity contest, the most popular wins because they are most popular.
x86 is a hack of a hack of a hack from the late 70s, but its "good enough", its known, and its cheap, and there is still competetive development going on with that platform.
Its sad, but there is almost no competition for processors besides the different offerings of the x86. Alpha is dead. SPARC is pretty much dead. PARISC is dead. Itanium is dying. The PowerPC is basically dead.
x86 is like the Ford or Chevy of computing. Not going to turn people's head, but it will get the job done.
It's like they are setting out to create a contest that is unclear and needlessly difficult to understand.
Specifically, what part of obfuscation is unclear an needlessly difficult for you to understand?
In my day email was dashes and dots, and we liked it that way.
Youngster -- we used to multicast via smoke signals.
Why should an electronic trail have legal protections that a physical trail does not?
Physical trails in the public are not protected. Physical trails in private are.
Its OK for me to watch you in public talking to person X. In theory, one needs a warrant and probable cause of a specific crime to listen to person talking with person X on the telephone.