I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing. The machine would turn into a professional folding station that only plays AA, KK, or AK. Guess what? That strategy isn't winning any games or any period of time in a no-limit or pot-limit world.
I'm not sure why you think this. The computer is incapable of "buckling under pressure". It either makes a good play or a bad play.
People assume that the computer is always going to be playing based on pot odds, but a well-designed system will take much more than that into account.
Uh, I work at Microsoft right now, and I can flat out say that there's nothing odd about this.
Active Directory has the ability to expire accounts at a certain date/time. Your account was set to expire when you left the company. One side effect of this is that you can't log in to your notebook.
You could have logged in as local administrator, had you known the password. I don't know the local admin password to my system at Microsoft. This is also not unusual.
When you join your machine to the AD domain, the company gets to take control. That's the way it has been in every company that I've worked for. That's why FTEs at Microsoft get company-provided hardware. I'm not sure what the policy is for contractors.
I had to give back my company-owned notebook at Agilent when I left. God forbid.
Pretty much everyone who posts about this is full of shit.
Vista has had 34 vulnerabilities over the last 1.5 years. That's less than Mac OS X over the same period.
If you want to argue that Mac OS X is "more secure", you need to do it on grounds other than vulnerabilities. At best, Mac OS X and Vista are similar in the number and severity of vulnerabilities.
So the new big thing on Slashdot, since the vulnerability statistics don't back up the "more secure" argument, is to argue that Mac OS is "intrinsically" more secure than Windows.
I have no idea what people are talking about there. Vista has ACLs, just like Mac OS X. Vista has sudo (UAC in Vista), just like Mac OS X. Vista disables network-facing services by default, just like Mac OS X. Vista has a firewall, just like Mac OS X.
So, you can wave your hands and say that Mac OS X is secure because it's "UNIX". But I'm not impressed. There's nothing "intrinsically" secure about UNIX compared to any other modern OS.
What I can say is that Apple doesn't take security bugs seriously. Microsoft acknowledges when there is a reported vulnerability and reports when a fix is delivered. Apple pretends that vulnerabilities don't exist. Apple sometimes stealth-patches vulnerabilities away. And Apple frequently tries to downplay the severity of vulnerabilities.
Take, for example, the root privilege escalation vulnerability reported several days ago in Mac OS X. That kind of bug is extremely serious, yet we had 20 people on Slashdot commenting about how it's not a big deal. Apple hasn't even acknowledged that there's a problem.
You know, It's very, very rare that a religious person (Chrustian, Jew, Hindu, whatever) tries to shove his beliefs down my throat.
Apparently you haven't heard about people trying to get creationism taught in schools. Or trying to outlaw gay marriage. Or forcing liquor stores to close on Sunday.
Apparently you haven't heard of the guy in my neighborhood who went around putting threats on the doors of all the unmarried couples.
Or the science teachers who have been threatened for doing their job and teaching Evolution.
Or all of the people who have been threatened, bullied, and badgered because they want an abortion.
For instance, I don't believe I've ever had a Catholic berate me for using birth control
Do you normally go around and tell people that you're using birth control? How would they even know?
never had a Jew or Muslim tell me I was going to hell for eating a ham sandwich
If you live in the US, Jews and Muslims are in the minority. Maybe if you lived in a predominantly Muslim country, you would see that things don't work the same way.
Kindly STFU, asshole. I'm not interested in your religious beliefs.
Athiesm isn't a religion. And telling people to "STFU" isn't going to bolster your argument. It's also not going to silence them.
These connectors are often referred to as RJ45 plugs and jacks. This is technically incorrect because the RJ45 standard specifies both the mechanical interface and a different wiring scheme than T568A/B, which is often used for Ethernet and telephones.
So, technically, they are 8P8C connectors wired in accordance with T568A/B, connected with Category 5e (or possibly Category 6) twisted pair cabling.
There are lots of reasons why MMOs don't work well on consoles, but the bottom line problem is how people play MMOs.
I always run WoW in windowed mode, and I have friends who do the same. The game is designed and paced so that you don't have to concentrate 100% of the time. In fact, it's more like 50% of the time.
That makes WoW more like a board game than a traditional video game. It's a social thing, in addition to a competitive thing.
Voice chat sucks in MMOs. Yeah, most guilds use it for raids, and I use it (Vent) for arena, where quick communication is a necessity.
But here's the thing: in MMOs, you're frequently conversing with people you don't know, sometimes with hundreds of people at a time. Frankly, I don't want to listen to people in the game, because many of them are assholes (it's an Internet rule, remember?).
But it's more fundamental than just the lack of a keyboard. PCs are communication devices. I can look up strategy or statistics on my PC. I can IM with friends.
In addition, I play WoW on the go quite a bit. Some guilds have regular raiding schedules. Mine doesn't, but I still have a regular time when I do arenas. I have a decent notebook, so I can play WoW when I'm away, which works great because game state is stored on the network.
All of this stuff can be done on a console. But all you're doing is turning the console into a glorified PC.
And, FYI, no console has 2560x1600 screen resolution (roughly double 1080p). And no console has a GPU that's even close to my Radeon HD 3850. This hardware isn't even "high end" anymore, it's definitively mainstream.
Polling numbers also show she did better than Obama in Florida and Michigan
Considering that Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan, and that he didn't campaign in Florida, I don't see how you can say that those polling numbers show anything at all.
So in essence, the Democrats picked nearly the worst possible candidate offered
He's so unelectable that his supporters have given him nearly $235 million dollars.
Let's see...I have a choice between an Ivy League lawyer, married to another Ivy League lawyer, who basically thinks I'm a depressed, oppressed, poor, and underprivileged person because I don't live on the east coast or the west coast...
Is that why Obama won overwhelmingly agianst Clinton in states like Colorado?
And, what's wroing with an "Ivy League lawyer". God forbid the person in charge of enforcing the law actually understands how to interpret it. God forbid he or she excelled in school.
And, why does it matter who he's married to?
Or a geniuine war hero
What does that even mean? As opposed to a "non-genuine" war hero? As opposed to someone who doesn't believe in armed conflict? As opposed to someone who was born too late to participate in Vietnam?
The election itself will be about who can hold and mobilize their base support the best
If you think that Obama has a problem with that, I don't think you've been paying attention for the last 5 months.
The republicans chose someone who, compared to the other candidates, is more of a centrist and has more of a reputation for working cross-party to get things done, while the democrats chose the most polarizing, and almost the most liberal (Kucinich was a candidate, remember) of their options.
I'm not sure where you're coming with on this one. McCain is not a "centrist". He may claim to be a "centrist", but he sold out to his conservative base long ago. He sold out on his anti-torture stance. He sold out on campaign finance reform. He sold out on the tax cuts. He sold out on the Iraq war.
McCain may pretend to be a maverick, but his voting record shows otherwise.
Be careful what you wish for. The gradual reduction in US influence that is likely to occur over the next 50 years may be a good thing. But destructive, isolationist tactics will simply create more instability in the world.
Yeah, that whole "not stealing people's work" way of looking at things is so quaint, isn't it?
Oh, give it fucking up. You can't "own" ideas. Copyright gives you a TEMPORARY MONOPOLY on the REPRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION of content that you created. It does not mean that you "own" the work.
Copyright in the US was originally 14 years, with a 14 year extension that you had to file for.
You have no inherent right to restrict how I reproduce and distribute information. Only the law can give you that right. And, yes, when the law stops making sense, we stop obeying it.
The Intel chip promptly throttled itself down to 400MHz or so, and kept running the game (rather slowly). The Athlon crashed, hit something like 200-300 degrees C, and burned a little hole in the motherboard.
After that little stunt, AMD started building overheat sensors into their CPUs quite fast.
AMD had been building thermal protection into their CPUs for months when THG did that test. The problem was that it relied on support from the motherboard.
Apple notebooks are manufactured by Quanta, the same company that makes many Dell boxes. They use the same Intel CPUs, graphics, and chipsets as Dell boxes. They use Seagate and Hitachi hard drives, like many Dell boxes.
The defining characteristic of CISC is that it assumes that the fetch part of the fetch/execute cycle is expensive. Therefore, instructions are designed to do as much as possible so you need to use as few as possible.
The defining characteristic of RISC is pipelining. RISC assumes that fetches are cheap (because of caches) and thus higher instruction throughput is the goal.
The KEY difference between RISC and CISC isn't the number of instructions or how "complex" they are.
RISC instructions are fixed-size (usually 32 or 62 bits). CISC instructions tend to vary in size, with added words for immediate data and other trimmings.
CISC has lots of addressing modes, RISC tends to have very few.
CISC allows memory access with most instructions. Most RISC instructions operate only on registers.
CISC has few registers. RISC has many registers.
Arguing about whether CISC or RISC is faster is moot. Core 2 isn't fast because it's "CISC" or "RISC", it's fast because it's a very well designed architecture. The fact is, designing ANY competitive CPU today is extraordinarily difficult. RISC made a difference in the early 90s when CISC designs were microcoded and RISC could be pipelined. But most performance CPUs today are vastly different internally.
Let's be clear: Zeppelins are MUCH safer than airplanes. They float, and are inherently safer by design.
That statement is conjecture. Airplanes have a proven record of extraordinary safety. There are more than 28,000 commercial flights every day in the US, and there have been zero crashes in the US since 2001. Those are odds I'd bet my life on.
Zeppelins are much CHEAPER than airplanes. You only need to blow a fan for propulsion, and can do so at slower (safer) speeds, as the lift is all provided by helium or hydrogen
True. However, zeppelins have a tremendous amount of DRAG.
With the technology we have now, you could have a GPS-guided, radar-auto-avoiding, wifi-other-zeppelin-communicating, self-propelled zeppelin made of carbon fiber, kevlar, and CIGS solar panels which is also a luxurious home complete with hot tub, shower, bed, kitchen, sun deck, and movie theater, able to travel essentially for free, after initial purchase price.
I'm not sure whether you're joking or simply extraordinarily stupid. Zeppelins are NOT "free" to operate; there is ongoing maintenance, helium to replenish what is lost to diffusion or leaks, storage, and quite a bit more.
In fact, with mass production, there is no part of this design that is expensive AT ALL
Well, except for the 200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen/helium. At current prices, that's $400,000 in gas alone. Not to mention the huge expense of all the other exotic materials (carbon fiber, Kevlar) that you proposed.
You can laugh if you want, but we had designs vastly superior to any of our current vehicles in the TWENTIES!!!!
Yes, because a 48 hour trip from London to New York is so much better than a 10 hour flight. And, of course, carrying 85 people (LZ-130) is so much better than carrying 550 (A380).
Zeppelins are dead because the technology doesn't make sense.
Who modded this 'informative'? None of the iPods I have owned (Shuffle, 2G Nano, iPhone) have allowed this. You need to update the track database, which means that you need iTunes.
3. If the RIAA's behavior is so offensive, then what exactly will anyone do about it? You'll keep buying their movies, keep buying their media with rare exceptions, keep watching their entertainment spew on the rented cable/satellite device.
I haven't bought music in 5 years, and I don't pirate music either. Instead I gave $100 to the EFF.
We get one of these stories every month, sometimes more often. There are always the same explanations, some of which are debunked and some of which are not. There's always the same bashing of US ISPs and the US government, and we are told how "great" things supposedly are in countries where people can get "100mbps" internet connectivity.
I don't care anymore.
Yeah, I would like to see more competition in the US. It's coming. Qwest is finally rolling out FTTN and ADSL2+, which will put more pressure on Comcast. Out in Verizon territory, FiOS is doing the same.
But, you know, of all the problems that the US has, the fact that I have to deal with 8mbps Comcast isn't exactly pressing.
Fair enough - my comment wasn't intended as a criticism of PHP or any other web framework. I just wanted to point out that SQL injection attacks are a stupid novice mistake, one that's far too common in "professionally-done" code.
Note, though, that PHP has a number of issues that make SQL injection more likely:
"mysql_escape_string" vs "mysql_real_escape_string"
Documentation that encourages building SQL queries by concatenation
"Magic quotes" which may or may not actually work, and shouldn't be used anyway
No bind parameters in the non-improved MySQL extension
Most of these are legacy issues. Magic quotes is now off by default and the mysqli extension is much, much better than the old stuff. But there are still a LOT of hosts running crappy PHP configurations (magic quotes on, no mysqli, PHP version 4, etc.).
This site makes me sick sometimes. If this were a problem with PHP (which, mind you, it IS), we wouldn't be calling it a "vulnerability".
ASP.net has lots of built-in features to prevent SQL injection attacks (like bind parameters) and the ASP.net DB documentation specifically warns about this type of attack.
Anyone still getting hit with this in 2008 needs to be whacked on the head.
When will they get it? I'm typing this in class right now.
Am I missing anything? No. I already know this material, because I read the text like I was supposed to. And I'm going to do an assignment on it next week. And the prof posts the lecture notes online.
So why am I in class? Because sometimes professors drop hints in class, talk about assignments (that don't get posted until much later), or provide other useful information. And sometimes the professor provides a much better explanation than the text.
But that's the 10%. What am I to do with the other 90%?
It's not really the professor's fault, and it's not really the student's fault. If I miss critical information, it will be reflected in my exam scores.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care how well such a program is coded... it will absolutely buckle under the pressure of a professional who constantly bets half his stack on nothing. The machine would turn into a professional folding station that only plays AA, KK, or AK. Guess what? That strategy isn't winning any games or any period of time in a no-limit or pot-limit world.
I'm not sure why you think this. The computer is incapable of "buckling under pressure". It either makes a good play or a bad play.
People assume that the computer is always going to be playing based on pot odds, but a well-designed system will take much more than that into account.
Uh, I work at Microsoft right now, and I can flat out say that there's nothing odd about this.
Active Directory has the ability to expire accounts at a certain date/time. Your account was set to expire when you left the company. One side effect of this is that you can't log in to your notebook.
You could have logged in as local administrator, had you known the password. I don't know the local admin password to my system at Microsoft. This is also not unusual.
When you join your machine to the AD domain, the company gets to take control. That's the way it has been in every company that I've worked for. That's why FTEs at Microsoft get company-provided hardware. I'm not sure what the policy is for contractors.
I had to give back my company-owned notebook at Agilent when I left. God forbid.
Tell that to Apple with iTunes. Destroyed indeed.
DISCLAIMER: I work at Microsoft.
Pretty much everyone who posts about this is full of shit.
Vista has had 34 vulnerabilities over the last 1.5 years. That's less than Mac OS X over the same period.
If you want to argue that Mac OS X is "more secure", you need to do it on grounds other than vulnerabilities. At best, Mac OS X and Vista are similar in the number and severity of vulnerabilities.
So the new big thing on Slashdot, since the vulnerability statistics don't back up the "more secure" argument, is to argue that Mac OS is "intrinsically" more secure than Windows.
I have no idea what people are talking about there. Vista has ACLs, just like Mac OS X. Vista has sudo (UAC in Vista), just like Mac OS X. Vista disables network-facing services by default, just like Mac OS X. Vista has a firewall, just like Mac OS X.
So, you can wave your hands and say that Mac OS X is secure because it's "UNIX". But I'm not impressed. There's nothing "intrinsically" secure about UNIX compared to any other modern OS.
What I can say is that Apple doesn't take security bugs seriously. Microsoft acknowledges when there is a reported vulnerability and reports when a fix is delivered. Apple pretends that vulnerabilities don't exist. Apple sometimes stealth-patches vulnerabilities away. And Apple frequently tries to downplay the severity of vulnerabilities.
Take, for example, the root privilege escalation vulnerability reported several days ago in Mac OS X. That kind of bug is extremely serious, yet we had 20 people on Slashdot commenting about how it's not a big deal. Apple hasn't even acknowledged that there's a problem.
Calling him "son" is a derogatory ad-hominem attack.
I argue about freedom of the press all the time, regardless of whether or not those seeking to limit publication are "provoking" me.
Are you suggesting that I need to be attacked before I have the right to criticize?
Apparently you haven't heard about people trying to get creationism taught in schools. Or trying to outlaw gay marriage. Or forcing liquor stores to close on Sunday.
Apparently you haven't heard of the guy in my neighborhood who went around putting threats on the doors of all the unmarried couples.
Or the science teachers who have been threatened for doing their job and teaching Evolution.
Or all of the people who have been threatened, bullied, and badgered because they want an abortion.
Do you normally go around and tell people that you're using birth control? How would they even know?
If you live in the US, Jews and Muslims are in the minority. Maybe if you lived in a predominantly Muslim country, you would see that things don't work the same way.
Athiesm isn't a religion. And telling people to "STFU" isn't going to bolster your argument. It's also not going to silence them.
If you're gonna be pedantic, at least get it right. Ethernet cables are not terminated with RJ45 connectors.
From the Wikipedia 8P8C article:
So, technically, they are 8P8C connectors wired in accordance with T568A/B, connected with Category 5e (or possibly Category 6) twisted pair cabling.
There are lots of reasons why MMOs don't work well on consoles, but the bottom line problem is how people play MMOs.
I always run WoW in windowed mode, and I have friends who do the same. The game is designed and paced so that you don't have to concentrate 100% of the time. In fact, it's more like 50% of the time.
That makes WoW more like a board game than a traditional video game. It's a social thing, in addition to a competitive thing.
Voice chat sucks in MMOs. Yeah, most guilds use it for raids, and I use it (Vent) for arena, where quick communication is a necessity.
But here's the thing: in MMOs, you're frequently conversing with people you don't know, sometimes with hundreds of people at a time. Frankly, I don't want to listen to people in the game, because many of them are assholes (it's an Internet rule, remember?).
But it's more fundamental than just the lack of a keyboard. PCs are communication devices. I can look up strategy or statistics on my PC. I can IM with friends.
In addition, I play WoW on the go quite a bit. Some guilds have regular raiding schedules. Mine doesn't, but I still have a regular time when I do arenas. I have a decent notebook, so I can play WoW when I'm away, which works great because game state is stored on the network.
All of this stuff can be done on a console. But all you're doing is turning the console into a glorified PC.
And, FYI, no console has 2560x1600 screen resolution (roughly double 1080p). And no console has a GPU that's even close to my Radeon HD 3850. This hardware isn't even "high end" anymore, it's definitively mainstream.
Considering that Obama wasn't even on the ballot in Michigan, and that he didn't campaign in Florida, I don't see how you can say that those polling numbers show anything at all.
He's so unelectable that his supporters have given him nearly $235 million dollars.
Is that why Obama won overwhelmingly agianst Clinton in states like Colorado?
And, what's wroing with an "Ivy League lawyer". God forbid the person in charge of enforcing the law actually understands how to interpret it. God forbid he or she excelled in school.
And, why does it matter who he's married to?
What does that even mean? As opposed to a "non-genuine" war hero? As opposed to someone who doesn't believe in armed conflict? As opposed to someone who was born too late to participate in Vietnam?
If you think that Obama has a problem with that, I don't think you've been paying attention for the last 5 months.
I'm not sure where you're coming with on this one. McCain is not a "centrist". He may claim to be a "centrist", but he sold out to his conservative base long ago. He sold out on his anti-torture stance. He sold out on campaign finance reform. He sold out on the tax cuts. He sold out on the Iraq war.
McCain may pretend to be a maverick, but his voting record shows otherwise.
Be careful what you wish for. The gradual reduction in US influence that is likely to occur over the next 50 years may be a good thing. But destructive, isolationist tactics will simply create more instability in the world.
Maybe that's why Apache has far more known vulnerabilities than IIS.
The vast majority of Vista users have UAC on.
Well, it's "copyrighted", not "copywritten", which isn't even a word.
And, no, some of us don't like to pay these bastards anything at all. I don't download illegally. I don't download legally. I don't buy CDs.
Instead I gave $100 to the EFF. I'll probably give them more.
Oh, give it fucking up. You can't "own" ideas. Copyright gives you a TEMPORARY MONOPOLY on the REPRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION of content that you created. It does not mean that you "own" the work.
Copyright in the US was originally 14 years, with a 14 year extension that you had to file for.
You have no inherent right to restrict how I reproduce and distribute information. Only the law can give you that right. And, yes, when the law stops making sense, we stop obeying it.
Uh, you mean like $15 per month for unlimited EDGE/HSDPA for AT&T's MEdia Net?
AT&T and Verizon's coverage quite good. Even T-Mobile works really well 95% of the time.
Quadband, you mean like nearly every decent GSM handset released in the last 5 years?
AMD had been building thermal protection into their CPUs for months when THG did that test. The problem was that it relied on support from the motherboard.
Apple notebooks are manufactured by Quanta, the same company that makes many Dell boxes. They use the same Intel CPUs, graphics, and chipsets as Dell boxes. They use Seagate and Hitachi hard drives, like many Dell boxes.
So, where's the difference?
People don't get RISC, and they don't get CISC.
The defining characteristic of CISC is that it assumes that the fetch part of the fetch/execute cycle is expensive. Therefore, instructions are designed to do as much as possible so you need to use as few as possible.
The defining characteristic of RISC is pipelining. RISC assumes that fetches are cheap (because of caches) and thus higher instruction throughput is the goal.
The KEY difference between RISC and CISC isn't the number of instructions or how "complex" they are.
RISC instructions are fixed-size (usually 32 or 62 bits). CISC instructions tend to vary in size, with added words for immediate data and other trimmings.
CISC has lots of addressing modes, RISC tends to have very few.
CISC allows memory access with most instructions. Most RISC instructions operate only on registers.
CISC has few registers. RISC has many registers.
Arguing about whether CISC or RISC is faster is moot. Core 2 isn't fast because it's "CISC" or "RISC", it's fast because it's a very well designed architecture. The fact is, designing ANY competitive CPU today is extraordinarily difficult. RISC made a difference in the early 90s when CISC designs were microcoded and RISC could be pipelined. But most performance CPUs today are vastly different internally.
That statement is conjecture. Airplanes have a proven record of extraordinary safety. There are more than 28,000 commercial flights every day in the US, and there have been zero crashes in the US since 2001. Those are odds I'd bet my life on.
True. However, zeppelins have a tremendous amount of DRAG.
I'm not sure whether you're joking or simply extraordinarily stupid. Zeppelins are NOT "free" to operate; there is ongoing maintenance, helium to replenish what is lost to diffusion or leaks, storage, and quite a bit more.
Well, except for the 200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen/helium. At current prices, that's $400,000 in gas alone. Not to mention the huge expense of all the other exotic materials (carbon fiber, Kevlar) that you proposed.
Yes, because a 48 hour trip from London to New York is so much better than a 10 hour flight. And, of course, carrying 85 people (LZ-130) is so much better than carrying 550 (A380).
Zeppelins are dead because the technology doesn't make sense.
Who modded this 'informative'? None of the iPods I have owned (Shuffle, 2G Nano, iPhone) have allowed this. You need to update the track database, which means that you need iTunes.
I haven't bought music in 5 years, and I don't pirate music either. Instead I gave $100 to the EFF.
We get one of these stories every month, sometimes more often. There are always the same explanations, some of which are debunked and some of which are not. There's always the same bashing of US ISPs and the US government, and we are told how "great" things supposedly are in countries where people can get "100mbps" internet connectivity.
I don't care anymore.
Yeah, I would like to see more competition in the US. It's coming. Qwest is finally rolling out FTTN and ADSL2+, which will put more pressure on Comcast. Out in Verizon territory, FiOS is doing the same.
But, you know, of all the problems that the US has, the fact that I have to deal with 8mbps Comcast isn't exactly pressing.
I owned an iPhone for 4 months, and typing on it is not "extremely easy". Not unless you consider punching in URLs "easy".
Note, though, that PHP has a number of issues that make SQL injection more likely:
Most of these are legacy issues. Magic quotes is now off by default and the mysqli extension is much, much better than the old stuff. But there are still a LOT of hosts running crappy PHP configurations (magic quotes on, no mysqli, PHP version 4, etc.).
This site makes me sick sometimes. If this were a problem with PHP (which, mind you, it IS), we wouldn't be calling it a "vulnerability".
ASP.net has lots of built-in features to prevent SQL injection attacks (like bind parameters) and the ASP.net DB documentation specifically warns about this type of attack.
Anyone still getting hit with this in 2008 needs to be whacked on the head.
When will they get it? I'm typing this in class right now.
Am I missing anything? No. I already know this material, because I read the text like I was supposed to. And I'm going to do an assignment on it next week. And the prof posts the lecture notes online.
So why am I in class? Because sometimes professors drop hints in class, talk about assignments (that don't get posted until much later), or provide other useful information. And sometimes the professor provides a much better explanation than the text.
But that's the 10%. What am I to do with the other 90%?
It's not really the professor's fault, and it's not really the student's fault. If I miss critical information, it will be reflected in my exam scores.