eBay? Since they do? Of course, having top engineers optimize everything out helps, which is more what the poster of the article needs rather than a rewrite.
My friend did this to his mom several years ago, but instead used Active Desktop to have her desktop be a flash movie. When she moved her mouse over the icons they grew legs and arms and yipped and ran over to the other side of the screen. Took her about a minutes before we heard her yelling for him.
The question I have - since H1Bs are supposed to be for skills that couldn't be found in the US - if I can prove that I have the skills an H1B has,c an I file a lawsuit to claim that position.
>Most of the exploits are simple SQL injection >exploits, which affect all PHP/SQL code and not >just Nuke
Actually, that affect just about any web language where developers trust inputted code.
I personally think that is one of the biggest challenges with the web. You have people who have had no formal training in programming, design, etc being able to build these complex applications. Often times the test cases don't take into effect anything other than the user doing what she is supposed to.
For example, we recently had to have quite a lengthy discussion at work about why Javascript should *not* be relied on to format user input code, nor can just Javascript and HTTP_REFERER. On the web, there is no such thing as client side validation, except as a nicety. If you aren't doing proper server-side validation, you're dead in the water.
One further note: if you are checking user authentication by the SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = $username and password = $password be sure to check that the password returned from the query matches that which was submitted. That foils quite a few injection attacks very simply.
How funny that this should come up. I was just in a meeting last week talking about this very thing.
I am the Assistant Chief of a volunteer department north of Tampa, Florida. We operate off of the 800mhz radio system, and for all of the money we spent on it, you would think it would work better. Instead, we have spots where we can hear but not transmit, or just plain not get reception at all.
While we were talking about this one of the Hillsborough County chiefs brought up the fact that when he is at headquarters (where our central towers and dispatch are) he can't use his little car-alarm-door-unlock-gadget-thingy unless he is almost touching his vehicle. When he is at home, he can activate it from 200-300 yards away.
We have always blamed it on the hardware and crappy company, but now I think I might have to look a little more into what other kinds of interference would cause transmission and reception problems in the areas where we are having difficuly.
Don't feel bad. Here in Florida the only thing you could put in your basement would be an aquarium because, for a majority of the state, digging down just puts you into water.
I mentioned this early, but want to bring it up again. The parent post is absolutley correct about Halon, water, etc. Residential sprinklers are not there to put out the fire, but to contain it from spreading. They only dump about 15 gallons a minute per head. And contrary to popular belief only one head goes off at a time. If one goes off the rest do not.
Now, about Halon. First, you have to seal the room before it is released. Otherwise more Oxygen is going to come into the room. Secondly, keeping several good fire extinguishers and having a good alarm system will do just as good of a job, unless you are running tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
Also, find out how far the nearest fire department and hydrant are. Most fire trucks carry between 750 and 1250 gallons of water on them (not counting tanker trucks), so you want to make sure that they aren't that far away and have the water supply to get the fire out.
As a side note, I am the Assistant Chief for a fire department, and have seen my share of fires. *Don't* try to put a big fire out yourself, and if you do, be sure you have already called 911, or whatever the emergency number is for your area.
And IIRC, sprinklers add about $10,000 - $15,000 to the cost of a house. If you have an $80,000 house it probably isn't worth it. But we regularly respond to houses worth 1- 5 million that *don't* have sprinklers. In fact, we ran a house fire several years ago where someone had a 2 million dollar house, with things like Thomas Jefferson's desk, a fire safe with $300,000 cash, etc, but no sprinklers. Sprinklers would have saved a *lot* more of the house then what we were able to.
Here is what you want to remember. The primary responsibility of the sprinklers is to *contain* the fire, not necessarily extinguish it. Generally one of the first things the fire department does when they get on scene of a house fire is pull the meter. This turns most Electrical Fires into something a little easier to deal with.
On the development machines we run, we have no less then 1 GB of RAM. We are compiling various apps, and though it would work with 256 or 512 of RAM, cutting 5 minutes off the compilation time is worth it.
Also, though I don't do graphics, I have several friends that do, and they regularly work with *huge* graphics files.
I think that for most end users and casual users 256 and 512 is enough for now. It is when you start pushing the bounds that the extra memory really helps.
I am the Assistant Chief for a 40-member volunteer fire department. I also play music, but I almost consider that tech because of the midi, electronics and such involved.
And really, the issue being addressed here is one that the government has been dealing with. We have to block all IMing because we are under state and federal laws to record all electronic communications because it is considered public record. Not only to we have to record it, but we have to make it available to anyone making a public records request for the information.
Several people have mentioned about installing IM servers, client logs, etc, but you have to remember when it comes down to it certain things are fine until they start costing the business money at which point they become an expense and a hassle.
We use a 5500 that sees quite a bit of use. It is 10 times better then the 4550 we have. I print out a lot of PDF documents, and it handles them almost as fast as a standard text file. The color quality on it is amazing.
Chewing through cords
on
Easter Humor
·
· Score: 1
and we here at Slashdot would like to make a public service announcement that humans have a responsibility to care for their pets even if they chew through computer cords
Funny this should be brought up. Last night my fiancee called me and while we were talking she noticed the light was out in her refrigerator. I asked her if the fan was running which she said it wasn't. So I said it could only be three things - 1) The plug was unplugged, 2) her rabbit chewed through the cord, or 3) the breaker tripped. Turns out it was number 2 - her rabbit had chewed through the 120v AC cord without being electricuted. Lucky rabbit!
i really expect to see more computer-related things at slashdot
Really, why?
If you look at the phrase right under the Slashdot logo it says, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Note that doest not say "News for Nerds about stuff that matters." This means that anything for nerds is fair game, and anything that matters. And sense this is Rob's site, what matters is completely up to him. If you don't like it, you are more than welcome to start your own site.
I, for one, enjoyed the article. I thought it was hilarious, and showed good engineering concepts about what you can and can't do to a vehicle and keep it running. I saw parallels between the story and things I run into everyday in the computer world. You get people who think they know what they are talking about who demand impossible things for free. Well, these guys showed that. so what if it was on a car instead of a computer program.
Well great. I am glad your job is as easy as that. Hope it stays that way.
We are dealing with pulling data from disparate data sources such as HP3000 and HP9000 mainframes, state-mandated databases, Oracle, Informix, SQL, DB2, etc. Often we need to combine information from two or more of these datasources into a common interface so that the people who are making the decisions can see what they need to see.
XML for us is a great benefit in that we can write programs based on XML information, then have specialists write separate programs to pull the information out of those datasources and parse them into the expected format.
In addition, sometimes you don't have a choice but to use what is presented for you. For example, over at Everything2 they provide XML tickers that you can create programs for. It allows developers to write interfaces into the site without the site having to give up DB access.
Generally speaking, if you are pulling your data from one database, and generally have control over the programming environment, XML probably won't make a lot of sense. But for situations outside of that it can be a very useful tool in pulling together information.
>How do they think it's possible that, one way or >another, the people who want unauthorized copies >of multimedia won't be able to make it?
By controlling everything from the bit to the out. It is the only way possible. You have a CD that is digitally encrypted, which plays through a special device that knows you have the license to play it, which encrypts it again and sends it through special wiring to your speakers which also know you have a license for it and allows the sound to pass through. All of your input devices would listen for a watermark that would be embedded in the system and stop recording if they heard it.
Now, is any of that possible? Sure. But how long will it take for all of that to come to pass? Pretty much never.
if I cannot rip or burn a CD due to "crippling" I just pop that CD into the Sony player and rip it from there. It works great and has not flawed yet.
You don't understand what their ultimate goal is. Yes, right now you can make a digital copy from the output, but let's share their vision for a moment:
You come home with your latest O-Town recording on a CD-looking thing. You pop it into your RIAA-approved player which scans the disk and checks your license to make sure that you can play it. You can, so it sends a signal over your RIAA-approved encrypted speaker wires to a set of RIAA-approved speakers that check again the digital stream and license. Upon approving that, they then play the music.
But, because you know that you might damage your CD's, and want to use the fair use clause that you are entitled to, you decide to make a copy. So you plug in a cord to the digital output of your player. However, because the CD-thing you chose doesn't allow copying, it sends a special scrambled stream through the output. Your RIAA-approved recording device will then see this stream and refuse to record it. So, frustrated you grab your RIAA-aproved microphone and hold it up to the speakers. However, upong recgonizing the watermark in the music, the microphone shuts down and sends a signal to the RIAA-approved agents that are now at your door.
So yes, for now you can do that, but that's not what they care about. They want to control all parts of the stream so that they can determine *exactly* what you do with it. However, as long as consumers rebel against it, that won't ever come into play.
'I'm crushing your head!' error appears after leaving open a pop-up slider
Product: Flash
Platform: All
Versions: 5.0
ID: 15438
Issue
After leaving a slider pop-up open, the user switches to another functio] such as accessing a menu or testing a movie. Flash then behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes an error message appears which states:
"I'm crushing your head!" "Crashing at gPopupDail should be new!. Yes = go to debugger, No = keep running, Cancel = terminate."
At other times the slider may continue to appear independently of the panel.
Reason
This error is caused by leaving the a pop-up slider open while attempting to perform another function.
Solution
Click out of the slider area to close the pop-up slider before testing the movie or accessing another menu.
Asking Slashdot will certainly give you a wide variety of unfounded opinions, and baseless conclusions, but it won't actually be useful. At all.
Normally I would agree wholeheartedly with this statement. However, I have already seen a comment from a person who is going through the same thing and had a bang-up answer that made since. I have seen a lot of crap, but I don't think that the author is intending on using Slashdot in court ("Your honor, but L0053c4nn0n on Slashdot said it was right!") but simply not wanting to duplicate steps that others have already taken.
This is a fascinating turn to several technologies we have been looking at here. I am a firefighter, but I also work for IT for the county. One of the systems we were looking at was for location-based dispatching which would involve us putting a transmitter in a vehicle. Since all of the vehicles carry Cell Phones anyway, this may be an easier method, since we do not need pin-point accuracy.
The other application for this technology would be the tracking of personnel on the fire ground. Currently we do that with PAR cards, which is a laminated card you give to whoever is watching an "area" before you enter it. However, in this case we DO need pinpoint accuracy. So what we have thought about is on major incidents setting up two or three mini-towers around the building and tracking off of the radio that the firefighter carry.
All in all, I think this has some very good applications in the real world. Let's just hope the bad ones don't squash them.
When I first came on board, I had to learn Cold Fusion. The tools that we use for it are Dreamweaver(evil, evil) and Cold Fusion studio. CF Studio is just incredible, allowing coding and syntax highlighting in not just CF, but ASP, Perl, PHP and others. It can be extended using custom tags, and I love the keyboard shortcuts and custom shortcuts (click a button and it will surround whatever you have highlighted with whatever you want). While you can download a 30-day trial from Macromedia for free, the application itself costs money. But after trying homesite, GoLive, TextPad, Notepad and all the others, I love it.
I am on the net every day. I watch TV a bit, but most of my info comes from news sites and the paper. And as much as I have been on it in the past month, I had no idea who Alexis Patterson was.
His point was not that there was no media coverage, but that for Alexis it was very localized, while for Elizabeth Smart it was highly covered nationally.
Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story
You make a valid point, but if you go over to CNN.com, and look on the front page, I can find all of the info I want for the Smart kidnapping. That is the coverage issues he is referring to.
Slashdot Mirror
eBay? Since they do? Of course, having top engineers optimize everything out helps, which is more what the poster of the article needs rather than a rewrite.
My friend did this to his mom several years ago, but instead used Active Desktop to have her desktop be a flash movie. When she moved her mouse over the icons they grew legs and arms and yipped and ran over to the other side of the screen. Took her about a minutes before we heard her yelling for him.
The question I have - since H1Bs are supposed to be for skills that couldn't be found in the US - if I can prove that I have the skills an H1B has,c an I file a lawsuit to claim that position.
>Most of the exploits are simple SQL injection
>exploits, which affect all PHP/SQL code and not
>just Nuke
Actually, that affect just about any web language where developers trust inputted code.
I personally think that is one of the biggest challenges with the web. You have people who have had no formal training in programming, design, etc being able to build these complex applications. Often times the test cases don't take into effect anything other than the user doing what she is supposed to.
For example, we recently had to have quite a lengthy discussion at work about why Javascript should *not* be relied on to format user input code, nor can just Javascript and HTTP_REFERER. On the web, there is no such thing as client side validation, except as a nicety. If you aren't doing proper server-side validation, you're dead in the water.
One further note: if you are checking user authentication by the SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = $username and password = $password be sure to check that the password returned from the query matches that which was submitted. That foils quite a few injection attacks very simply.
How funny that this should come up. I was just in a meeting last week talking about this very thing.
I am the Assistant Chief of a volunteer department north of Tampa, Florida. We operate off of the 800mhz radio system, and for all of the money we spent on it, you would think it would work better. Instead, we have spots where we can hear but not transmit, or just plain not get reception at all.
While we were talking about this one of the Hillsborough County chiefs brought up the fact that when he is at headquarters (where our central towers and dispatch are) he can't use his little car-alarm-door-unlock-gadget-thingy unless he is almost touching his vehicle. When he is at home, he can activate it from 200-300 yards away.
We have always blamed it on the hardware and crappy company, but now I think I might have to look a little more into what other kinds of interference would cause transmission and reception problems in the areas where we are having difficuly.
Don't feel bad. Here in Florida the only thing you could put in your basement would be an aquarium because, for a majority of the state, digging down just puts you into water.
I mentioned this early, but want to bring it up again. The parent post is absolutley correct about Halon, water, etc. Residential sprinklers are not there to put out the fire, but to contain it from spreading. They only dump about 15 gallons a minute per head. And contrary to popular belief only one head goes off at a time. If one goes off the rest do not.
Now, about Halon. First, you have to seal the room before it is released. Otherwise more Oxygen is going to come into the room. Secondly, keeping several good fire extinguishers and having a good alarm system will do just as good of a job, unless you are running tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment.
Also, find out how far the nearest fire department and hydrant are. Most fire trucks carry between 750 and 1250 gallons of water on them (not counting tanker trucks), so you want to make sure that they aren't that far away and have the water supply to get the fire out.
As a side note, I am the Assistant Chief for a fire department, and have seen my share of fires. *Don't* try to put a big fire out yourself, and if you do, be sure you have already called 911, or whatever the emergency number is for your area.
And IIRC, sprinklers add about $10,000 - $15,000 to the cost of a house. If you have an $80,000 house it probably isn't worth it. But we regularly respond to houses worth 1- 5 million that *don't* have sprinklers. In fact, we ran a house fire several years ago where someone had a 2 million dollar house, with things like Thomas Jefferson's desk, a fire safe with $300,000 cash, etc, but no sprinklers. Sprinklers would have saved a *lot* more of the house then what we were able to.
Here is what you want to remember. The primary responsibility of the sprinklers is to *contain* the fire, not necessarily extinguish it. Generally one of the first things the fire department does when they get on scene of a house fire is pull the meter. This turns most Electrical Fires into something a little easier to deal with.
On the development machines we run, we have no less then 1 GB of RAM. We are compiling various apps, and though it would work with 256 or 512 of RAM, cutting 5 minutes off the compilation time is worth it.
Also, though I don't do graphics, I have several friends that do, and they regularly work with *huge* graphics files.
I think that for most end users and casual users 256 and 512 is enough for now. It is when you start pushing the bounds that the extra memory really helps.
I am the Assistant Chief for a 40-member volunteer fire department. I also play music, but I almost consider that tech because of the midi, electronics and such involved.
And really, the issue being addressed here is one that the government has been dealing with. We have to block all IMing because we are under state and federal laws to record all electronic communications because it is considered public record. Not only to we have to record it, but we have to make it available to anyone making a public records request for the information.
Several people have mentioned about installing IM servers, client logs, etc, but you have to remember when it comes down to it certain things are fine until they start costing the business money at which point they become an expense and a hassle.
We use a 5500 that sees quite a bit of use. It is 10 times better then the 4550 we have. I print out a lot of PDF documents, and it handles them almost as fast as a standard text file. The color quality on it is amazing.
Funny this should be brought up. Last night my fiancee called me and while we were talking she noticed the light was out in her refrigerator. I asked her if the fan was running which she said it wasn't. So I said it could only be three things - 1) The plug was unplugged, 2) her rabbit chewed through the cord, or 3) the breaker tripped. Turns out it was number 2 - her rabbit had chewed through the 120v AC cord without being electricuted. Lucky rabbit!
If you look at the phrase right under the Slashdot logo it says, "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Note that doest not say "News for Nerds about stuff that matters." This means that anything for nerds is fair game, and anything that matters. And sense this is Rob's site, what matters is completely up to him. If you don't like it, you are more than welcome to start your own site.
I, for one, enjoyed the article. I thought it was hilarious, and showed good engineering concepts about what you can and can't do to a vehicle and keep it running. I saw parallels between the story and things I run into everyday in the computer world. You get people who think they know what they are talking about who demand impossible things for free. Well, these guys showed that. so what if it was on a car instead of a computer program.
Check out Everything2.com. Not only is it just a cool site, they have several things going on with this (see here
and here.)
Hmm, Since our wonderful filtering software here at work blocks that site for "Profanity" I guess I'll have to wait till I get home.
Well great. I am glad your job is as easy as that. Hope it stays that way.
We are dealing with pulling data from disparate data sources such as HP3000 and HP9000 mainframes, state-mandated databases, Oracle, Informix, SQL, DB2, etc. Often we need to combine information from two or more of these datasources into a common interface so that the people who are making the decisions can see what they need to see.
XML for us is a great benefit in that we can write programs based on XML information, then have specialists write separate programs to pull the information out of those datasources and parse them into the expected format.
In addition, sometimes you don't have a choice but to use what is presented for you. For example, over at Everything2 they provide XML tickers that you can create programs for. It allows developers to write interfaces into the site without the site having to give up DB access.
Generally speaking, if you are pulling your data from one database, and generally have control over the programming environment, XML probably won't make a lot of sense. But for situations outside of that it can be a very useful tool in pulling together information.
>How do they think it's possible that, one way or
>another, the people who want unauthorized copies
>of multimedia won't be able to make it?
By controlling everything from the bit to the out. It is the only way possible. You have a CD that is digitally encrypted, which plays through a special device that knows you have the license to play it, which encrypts it again and sends it through special wiring to your speakers which also know you have a license for it and allows the sound to pass through. All of your input devices would listen for a watermark that would be embedded in the system and stop recording if they heard it.
Now, is any of that possible? Sure. But how long will it take for all of that to come to pass? Pretty much never.
You don't understand what their ultimate goal is. Yes, right now you can make a digital copy from the output, but let's share their vision for a moment:
You come home with your latest O-Town recording on a CD-looking thing. You pop it into your RIAA-approved player which scans the disk and checks your license to make sure that you can play it. You can, so it sends a signal over your RIAA-approved encrypted speaker wires to a set of RIAA-approved speakers that check again the digital stream and license. Upon approving that, they then play the music.
But, because you know that you might damage your CD's, and want to use the fair use clause that you are entitled to, you decide to make a copy. So you plug in a cord to the digital output of your player. However, because the CD-thing you chose doesn't allow copying, it sends a special scrambled stream through the output. Your RIAA-approved recording device will then see this stream and refuse to record it. So, frustrated you grab your RIAA-aproved microphone and hold it up to the speakers. However, upong recgonizing the watermark in the music, the microphone shuts down and sends a signal to the RIAA-approved agents that are now at your door.
So yes, for now you can do that, but that's not what they care about. They want to control all parts of the stream so that they can determine *exactly* what you do with it. However, as long as consumers rebel against it, that won't ever come into play.
'I'm crushing your head!' error appears after leaving open a pop-up slider
Product: Flash
Platform: All
Versions: 5.0
ID: 15438
Issue
After leaving a slider pop-up open, the user switches to another functio] such as accessing a menu or testing a movie. Flash then behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes an error message appears which states:
"I'm crushing your head!" "Crashing at gPopupDail should be new!. Yes = go to debugger, No = keep running, Cancel = terminate."
At other times the slider may continue to appear independently of the panel.Reason
This error is caused by leaving the a pop-up slider open while attempting to perform another function.
Solution
Click out of the slider area to close the pop-up slider before testing the movie or accessing another menu.
Normally I would agree wholeheartedly with this statement. However, I have already seen a comment from a person who is going through the same thing and had a bang-up answer that made since. I have seen a lot of crap, but I don't think that the author is intending on using Slashdot in court ("Your honor, but L0053c4nn0n on Slashdot said it was right!") but simply not wanting to duplicate steps that others have already taken.
I saw a funny item in a newsletter I got regarding the 218 bits Microsoft is going to be releasing for windows. The bits Microsoft is releasing are:
01101001010110100101011010010101101001010110100
01101001010110100101011010010101101001010110100
01101001
The other application for this technology would be the tracking of personnel on the fire ground. Currently we do that with PAR cards, which is a laminated card you give to whoever is watching an "area" before you enter it. However, in this case we DO need pinpoint accuracy. So what we have thought about is on major incidents setting up two or three mini-towers around the building and tracking off of the radio that the firefighter carry.
All in all, I think this has some very good applications in the real world. Let's just hope the bad ones don't squash them.
When I first came on board, I had to learn Cold Fusion. The tools that we use for it are Dreamweaver(evil, evil) and Cold Fusion studio. CF Studio is just incredible, allowing coding and syntax highlighting in not just CF, but ASP, Perl, PHP and others. It can be extended using custom tags, and I love the keyboard shortcuts and custom shortcuts (click a button and it will surround whatever you have highlighted with whatever you want). While you can download a 30-day trial from Macromedia for free, the application itself costs money. But after trying homesite, GoLive, TextPad, Notepad and all the others, I love it.
His point was not that there was no media coverage, but that for Alexis it was very localized, while for Elizabeth Smart it was highly covered nationally.
Oh, and by the way, how did you find out about Alexis Patterson? Doing an internet search about missing kids in the recent past and running across some media coverage of the story
You make a valid point, but if you go over to CNN.com, and look on the front page, I can find all of the info I want for the Smart kidnapping. That is the coverage issues he is referring to.