The C++ class to discount items on the commerce site was overloaded -- item.discount(number) would accept floats or integers. The problem was they had completely different behaviors; a float would discount as a percentage and an integer would discount in dollars. So when I was told to discount a set of items by five dollars it ended up discounting them to (1.00-5.00)*price. The sanity checking code that made sure all prices were above $1.99 had been commented out because someone had wanted to do a 99 cent sale, so some items ended up being set to -400% of their price. Adding the items to your shopping cart GAVE you money. My boss was paged out of bed when the changes went live at midnight: the system alerted him because daily revenue went to NEGATIVE 50k.
This looks like a research project, and the author looks like a researcher. This will never be production code (unless forked).
The source is very hap hazzard right now,
* no LICENSE or COPYING file
* bizzare directory structure
* no INSTALL, README, HACKING files
* no mailing lists (none!)
The head sf admin is head of a bunch of other projects too. I didn't check all of them, but I'm pretty sure he's a _member_ of no one else's project. So you have a guy supporting 10 projects (and maybe more not on sourceforge) who has only written academic code, probably only by himself resume. He also appears to be gung-ho C++, why not turn the 63k of C++ into 6k of python and worry about features instead of memory management? (bittorrent has proven the bottleneck isn't CPU).
Not a great mix for a successful open source project.
Umm yeah, that is why Al Gore suggested banning the internal combustion engine in "Earth in the Balance." He must have polled tens of tens of "swing voters."
To paraphrase Michael Criton's recent address: If it isn't a religion why do they call themselves environmentalists, and why do they support environmentalism?
Comparing Pol Pot to Hitler is certainly legitimate. How about comparing the rise of the radical right in America, and perhaps even their poster child, Bush, to Hitler? The historical timelines are strikingly similiar, and the rhetoric shockingly so... does pointing that out constitute "running afoul of Godwin's law" merely because a great number of Bush's contemporaries would take exceptions (I suspect a great number of Pol Pot's followers would take exception to his comparison as well)?
There are two problems with comparing these 'details' and especially speeches
1) Chance
People say a lot of things. Politicians say more, and most of it is on the record. There is a CGI out there that takes a name and birthdate and generates a way to produce '666' from any input.
2) The language of freedom & democracy is so universally accepted (and has been for a long time) that dictators use it too.
Most dictators are the "Unamimously elected" heads of their "Republic." Dictator's words ape those of true democracies, making comparisons easy (and irrelevant).
Selectively comparing someone you don't like to Hilter might make you feel better, and you may even be correct about the similarities. But for the charge to stick you need to include things that are only true about that person and Hitler (or the elite group of mega murderers: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc).
I see a lot of empty storefronts and "Space Available" is starting to sound like a new business venture in my town. (Philadelphia, PA). Of course the land-lords don't care if the building is empty or full. And they are perfectly happy to watch entire sections of the city rot away. I've seen it first hand.
They care very much if the buildings are empty or full. They have to pay property tax regardless, but if no one is paying rent they lose money.
Property taxes over time force people who aren't putting land to good use to sell. No one could afford a 3-bedroom ranch on a 3/4 acre lot in downtown manhattan, even if it had been passed down through the generations. The property tax would be unbelievable. Property tax is based on the market price of the land (set by the town appraiser). People have an incentive to sell land if they aren't putting it to profitable use. Before you scream "capitalist pig dog!" consider that a profitable use in the owner's eyes may include living near work, raising a family, maintaining a vacation home, or any number of subjective things that make it "worth" paying the property tax. The overall trend is that land ownership shifts to whoever can put put it to the most profitable use.
Philadelphia has many problems, including a "privellage of working in the City of Philadelphia tax" which drove everyone to the burbs. People in the burbs used to take the train INTO Philly to go to work, now you see people taking the train FROM Philly to work in the burbs.
PHP has nothing to do with text processnig. It is highly specialized as a page-based web language.
That makes it great for small dynamic sites (which it is frequently and effectively used for) and crap for everything else.
Multiplying rough numbers from different sources accumulates a high amount of error quickly. Also, at least some government funding comes indirectly through non-CPB channels. Does NPR pay for paly rights to programs that CPB funds? Who knows, there is only one way to find out:
If NPR doesn't need any goverment money they shouldn't take any of it. It would shut up their detractors and the much-talked-about liberal private radio station would be born. That is why I said above the only way to really see how much funding they get from goverment entities is to cut them off entirely (or if NPR refused them entirely, same effect).
There are two ways you can approach this problem, legal and practical.
Legally you have been wronged (although to prove it you have to have a record, and have to rebuff her in obvious ways). Practically, you have a dilema. I think the OP was asking about practical solutions.
Practically, don't lead her on and don't spit in her face. Either is disingenuous. Are you doing the job? do your job. Are you looking to cash in on a lawsuit? sue.
Discrimination/harassment/people don't love you is a fact of life. People that can't hide irrational prejudice lose in the long run. On the margins, shit happens. Deal.
IMHO, it won't be secure until they bring back Bastion and Rexec and get them right this time.
read the python mailing lists for a full explanation. They were yanked because they not only didn't do the job right _it is not possible_. Restricting disk/CPU/memory usage is an operating system job. Trying to build it into the language (like java) just makes things really complicated (for both core developers and users) and still doesn't work.
You should change it to Capitalism != Innovation != Democracy != Freedom
The way it is written implies it is against all those things instead of just an independent aspect of a society. I too get pissy when people say "democracy" but mean "everything we have." Democracy is just a good guard against change, which is why the first act of many democracies is to elect a dictator (think Africa) - a dictator is exactly what they had before.
If you aren't simulating something _in real time_ you can also skimp on CPU power.
To put it another way, for those in the simulation a second is defined by fifteen frames. It doesn't matter how many 'real' seconds it takes to calculate those fifteen frames; the sims always see the world in full fidelity.
A simulation of a thousand year period that requires ten thousand years to run doesn't seem terribly useful, however.
The author posted to python-dev (the development list for python) asking for feedback, that feedback was:
the suggested replacement for the hash function is slower for typical uses
the suggested replacement doesn't acutally solve the problem (it just takes longer for the attacker to find DoS-able inputs)
the suggested replacement returns different hash values for the same input for different processes (violating a garuntee in python)
input sets large enough to do damage are large enough to be considered a DoS-by-flooding themselves
And of course it is much easier to exploit poorly designed regular expressions. They are common and a 1k string can tie up a server until the heat death of the universe.
In america, it's uncommon to see public restrooms. A recent bus trip I took between cities, there just wasn't a bathroom available that I could use. The city doesn't provide it for their public transport, store staff glare at you for the request, and it's generally a pain in the butt.
As an American, I can't say I've ever had trouble finding a bathroom when I needed one. Especially on car trips, ever heard of a gas station? I would say this is a cultural thing, if there are lots of clean bathrooms you don't plan ahead. If the public bathrooms are highly variable you do plan ahead. If the phrase in American movies "does anyone have to go before we leave?" seems odd to you, this might be right.
On the other hand, to one up your *cough* suggestion that we have fewer bathrooms because we were founded by religious freaks, perhaps they have to put bathrooms every five feet on the continent because people will piss where they stand regardless if there is a toilet there or not.
What this shows is what any mandatory [web] survey shows...
People will fill out a form if you make them fill out a form. If you want actual demographic info with some relation to reality it must be a voluntary form. [and even then there is a self-selection bias, but at least you drop the folks who say they were born in 1804].
The slashdot crowd might not want to hear it, but not every task is suited to OpenSource. Most open source projects are technical in nature, because the people who work on them are techies. No news here.
There are a number of afforable (< $50 a head a month) online service providers for this stuff. I used to work for one. It is hard to compete with a product that has dozens of man years of engineering time honed by hundred of man years of use and feedback.
There is some hope that an open source alternative will eventually match the commercial offerings. Many opensource projects just copy features found in closed source products. It takes a long time before the free versions out last and out innovate their monied competition.
My recomendation to small businesses is pay for one of the existing products, they are good.
If enough free software folk scratch their itch there will be an open source product worthy of use. But as Linus has said of using bitkeeper vs cvs, it is stupid to hamstring yourself by using an inferior product merely for ideological reasons. Of course, only the end user can decide if it will benefit your business more to use a for-pay versus open source project. And don't forget to check freshmeat every once in a while to see if the balance has changed.
One of the greatest challenges of Human Interface Design is making a tradeoff between these two. All-GUI windows and a 'nix CLI bash shell could define the two extremes.
The GUI is intuitive because you have to click down tabs or menus to state your intention (setup, network, ethernet card, IP config) so you zero in on your target. Many clicks, but if you have an idea of what you want to do you can get there with a little trial and error.
A bash CLI lets you do it in one step, but heaven help you if you don't know what that step is! (man -k is close to useless).
Linux distros are combating this by adding windows-like GUI tools that are really just wizards for the command line apps (or config files). These give people who don't know what they are doing a fighting chance.
Rumor has it Microsoft is developing a CLI or even a non-GUI install of Windows. These would give people who know what they are doing relief from the monotony of configuring yet another machine. (How many cLicks does it take to get to the center of a windows box?)
People in the US have a basic mistrust of the government that goes way back. This is reinforced by the general ineptitude of beurocracies that every country sees. Add to that the fact that the US is a federation of states and National anything always sounds like a bad idea and a power grab. Hell, we didn't really have a peace time army until after WII.
The pracitcal complaint about national ID cards is that they add very little to security or convenience but have a potential to be abused. It doesn't matter that there is a tiny chance that they will be abused. It does matter that if abused it could lead to great harm. National ID == risk and no reward.
In case the above reasons weren't enough to explain the knee-jerk screams about National IDs there is also the small matter that the Bible says the anti-Christ will force everyone to wear a mark of his choosing to do their day to day business. No need to prove to the world that we really are "The Great Satan" *wink*.
1. Third party tracking 2. ????? 3. EVIL unleashed on the world!
Did someone with a third party tool steal your girlfriend or something? Are they reselling user information? Is it too closely cuppled with your user database? Purchase history?
No? Then there is no big deal. Go with whatever technology works for you.
Typical household income is about $1500/year. So that's like someone in the US paying $500/month for DSL.
It would be better to compare it to the salaries of people in the areas where it is available (I don't have those fig'ers). Western countries have fairly even income distributions. In India you have the non-cash/barter economies in rural areas and the more comparable cash economies in cities. So the subsistance farmers [that don't have access to this service] drive the averages way down.
It would still be expensive compared to the US cost of broadband, but not/as/ bad.
Yes, it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.
As an American worker you are garunteed your job for life. It is the government's job to protect you from competition foreign and domestic. Because we all know that moving jobs to the third world where there weren't any before is just exploitation by the capitalist pig dogs.
Fascism:Extreme right-wing dictatorial government,belligerently nationalist,that merges state and business leadership
1 - You know this is an exciting article when people are replying to sigs
2 - Socialism: Moderate left-wing totalitarian government, usually post-nationalist, where people smarter than you spend your money to save you from yourself. [Usually has much better slogans than the above, although the phenomenon has not been studied]
Slashdot Mirror
from a now defunct dot com
The C++ class to discount items on the commerce site was overloaded -- item.discount(number) would accept floats or integers. The problem was they had completely different behaviors; a float would discount as a percentage and an integer would discount in dollars. So when I was told to discount a set of items by five dollars it ended up discounting them to (1.00-5.00)*price. The sanity checking code that made sure all prices were above $1.99 had been commented out because someone had wanted to do a 99 cent sale, so some items ended up being set to -400% of their price. Adding the items to your shopping cart GAVE you money. My boss was paged out of bed when the changes went live at midnight: the system alerted him because daily revenue went to NEGATIVE 50k.
Wet blanket, HO!
This looks like a research project, and the author looks like a researcher. This will never be production code (unless forked).
The source is very hap hazzard right now,
* no LICENSE or COPYING file
* bizzare directory structure
* no INSTALL, README, HACKING files
* no mailing lists (none!)
The head sf admin is head of a bunch of other projects too. I didn't check all of them, but I'm pretty sure he's a _member_ of no one else's project. So you have a guy supporting 10 projects (and maybe more not on sourceforge) who has only written academic code, probably only by himself resume.
He also appears to be gung-ho C++, why not turn the 63k of C++ into 6k of python and worry about features instead of memory management? (bittorrent has proven the bottleneck isn't CPU).
Not a great mix for a successful open source project.
Umm yeah, that is why Al Gore suggested banning the internal combustion engine in "Earth in the Balance." He must have polled tens of tens of "swing voters."
To paraphrase Michael Criton's recent address:
If it isn't a religion why do they call themselves environmentalists, and why do they support environmentalism?
Comparing Pol Pot to Hitler is certainly legitimate. How about comparing the rise of the radical right in America, and perhaps even their poster child, Bush, to Hitler? The historical timelines are strikingly similiar, and the rhetoric shockingly so ... does pointing that out constitute "running afoul of Godwin's law" merely because a great number of Bush's contemporaries would take exceptions (I suspect a great number of Pol Pot's followers would take exception to his comparison as well)?
There are two problems with comparing these 'details' and especially speeches
1) Chance
People say a lot of things. Politicians say more, and most of it is on the record. There is a CGI out there that takes a name and birthdate and generates a way to produce '666' from any input.
2) The language of freedom & democracy is so universally accepted (and has been for a long time) that dictators use it too.
Most dictators are the "Unamimously elected" heads of their "Republic." Dictator's words ape those of true democracies, making comparisons easy (and irrelevant).
Selectively comparing someone you don't like to Hilter might make you feel better, and you may even be correct about the similarities. But for the charge to stick you need to include things that are only true about that person and Hitler (or the elite group of mega murderers: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc).
I see a lot of empty storefronts and "Space Available" is starting to sound like a new business venture in my town. (Philadelphia, PA). Of course the land-lords don't care if the building is empty or full. And they are perfectly happy to watch entire sections of the city rot away. I've seen it first hand.
They care very much if the buildings are empty or full. They have to pay property tax regardless, but if no one is paying rent they lose money.
Property taxes over time force people who aren't putting land to good use to sell. No one could afford a 3-bedroom ranch on a 3/4 acre lot in downtown manhattan, even if it had been passed down through the generations. The property tax would be unbelievable. Property tax is based on the market price of the land (set by the town appraiser). People have an incentive to sell land if they aren't putting it to profitable use. Before you scream "capitalist pig dog!" consider that a profitable use in the owner's eyes may include living near work, raising a family, maintaining a vacation home, or any number of subjective things that make it "worth" paying the property tax. The overall trend is that land ownership shifts to whoever can put put it to the most profitable use.
Philadelphia has many problems, including a "privellage of working in the City of Philadelphia tax" which drove everyone to the burbs. People in the burbs used to take the train INTO Philly to go to work, now you see people taking the train FROM Philly to work in the burbs.
PHP has nothing to do with text processnig. It is highly specialized as a page-based web language.
That makes it great for small dynamic sites (which it is frequently and effectively used for) and crap for everything else.
"Our supervisors were spending 42 percent of their time giving us inaccurate information,"
As reported by the supervisors?
Multiplying rough numbers from different sources accumulates a high amount of error quickly. Also, at least some government funding comes indirectly through non-CPB channels. Does NPR pay for paly rights to programs that CPB funds? Who knows, there is only one way to find out:
If NPR doesn't need any goverment money they shouldn't take any of it. It would shut up their detractors and the much-talked-about liberal private radio station would be born. That is why I said above the only way to really see how much funding they get from goverment entities is to cut them off entirely (or if NPR refused them entirely, same effect).
From the Corp for Public Broadcasting about page http://www.cpb.org/about/
- "[CPB] receives an annual appropriation from Congress, representing 12% of public broadcasting's revenues"
- "[CPB] provides the largest source of funds for radio programming and television programming for broadcast on NPR and PBS"
So NPR receives a portion of its money indirectly from the Govt. They quickest way to find out how much is to cut them off and see if they can swim.There are two ways you can approach this problem, legal and practical.
Legally you have been wronged (although to prove it you have to have a record, and have to rebuff her in obvious ways). Practically, you have a dilema. I think the OP was asking about practical solutions.
Practically, don't lead her on and don't spit in her face. Either is disingenuous. Are you doing the job? do your job. Are you looking to cash in on a lawsuit? sue.
Discrimination/harassment/people don't love you is a fact of life. People that can't hide irrational prejudice lose in the long run. On the margins, shit happens. Deal.
IMHO, it won't be secure until they bring back Bastion and Rexec and get them right this time.
read the python mailing lists for a full explanation. They were yanked because they not only didn't do the job right _it is not possible_. Restricting disk/CPU/memory usage is an operating system job. Trying to build it into the language (like java) just makes things really complicated (for both core developers and users) and still doesn't work.
[Off Topic sig post]
Capitalism != (innovation|democracy|freedom)
You should change it to
Capitalism != Innovation != Democracy != Freedom
The way it is written implies it is against all those things instead of just an independent aspect of a society. I too get pissy when people say "democracy" but mean "everything we have." Democracy is just a good guard against change, which is why the first act of many democracies is to elect a dictator (think Africa) - a dictator is exactly what they had before.
If you aren't simulating something _in real time_ you can also skimp on CPU power.
To put it another way, for those in the simulation a second is defined by fifteen frames. It doesn't matter how many 'real' seconds it takes to calculate those fifteen frames; the sims always see the world in full fidelity.
A simulation of a thousand year period that requires ten thousand years to run doesn't seem terribly useful, however.
- the suggested replacement for the hash function is slower for typical uses
- the suggested replacement doesn't acutally solve the problem (it just takes longer for the attacker to find DoS-able inputs)
- the suggested replacement returns different hash values for the same input for different processes (violating a garuntee in python)
- input sets large enough to do damage are large enough to be considered a DoS-by-flooding themselves
And of course it is much easier to exploit poorly designed regular expressions. They are common and a 1k string can tie up a server until the heat death of the universe.In america, it's uncommon to see public restrooms. A recent bus trip I took between cities, there just wasn't a bathroom available that I could use. The city doesn't provide it for their public transport, store staff glare at you for the request, and it's generally a pain in the butt.
As an American, I can't say I've ever had trouble finding a bathroom when I needed one. Especially on car trips, ever heard of a gas station? I would say this is a cultural thing, if there are lots of clean bathrooms you don't plan ahead. If the public bathrooms are highly variable you do plan ahead. If the phrase in American movies "does anyone have to go before we leave?" seems odd to you, this might be right.
On the other hand, to one up your *cough* suggestion that we have fewer bathrooms because we were founded by religious freaks, perhaps they have to put bathrooms every five feet on the continent because people will piss where they stand regardless if there is a toilet there or not.
I personally can't wait .. this will require Mac zealots to up the ante on the rhetoric.
If you've been saying a dual G4 currently beats anything Intel/AMD hands down, what do you say when PPC970 arrives?
"My PPC970 Mac is fully sentient. He's talking about running for president in 2008."
What this shows is what any mandatory [web] survey shows...
People will fill out a form if you make them fill out a form. If you want actual demographic info with some relation to reality it must be a voluntary form. [and even then there is a self-selection bias, but at least you drop the folks who say they were born in 1804].
There is a TROGDOR flash game on the homestarrunner site. You eat villagers and burninate the village while avoiding the knights and archers.
The slashdot crowd might not want to hear it, but not every task is suited to OpenSource. Most open source projects are technical in nature, because the people who work on them are techies. No news here.
There are a number of afforable (< $50 a head a month) online service providers for this stuff. I used to work for one. It is hard to compete with a product that has dozens of man years of engineering time honed by hundred of man years of use and feedback.
There is some hope that an open source alternative will eventually match the commercial offerings. Many opensource projects just copy features found in closed source products. It takes a long time before the free versions out last and out innovate their monied competition.
My recomendation to small businesses is pay for one of the existing products, they are good.
If enough free software folk scratch their itch there will be an open source product worthy of use. But as Linus has said of using bitkeeper vs cvs, it is stupid to hamstring yourself by using an inferior product merely for ideological reasons. Of course, only the end user can decide if it will benefit your business more to use a for-pay versus open source project. And don't forget to check freshmeat every once in a while to see if the balance has changed.
easy to use != intuitive
One of the greatest challenges of Human Interface Design is making a tradeoff between these two. All-GUI windows and a 'nix CLI bash shell could define the two extremes.
The GUI is intuitive because you have to click down tabs or menus to state your intention (setup, network, ethernet card, IP config) so you zero in on your target. Many clicks, but if you have an idea of what you want to do you can get there with a little trial and error.
A bash CLI lets you do it in one step, but heaven help you if you don't know what that step is! (man -k is close to useless).
Linux distros are combating this by adding windows-like GUI tools that are really just wizards for the command line apps (or config files). These give people who don't know what they are doing a fighting chance.
Rumor has it Microsoft is developing a CLI or even a non-GUI install of Windows. These would give people who know what they are doing relief from the monotony of configuring yet another machine. (How many cLicks does it take to get to the center of a windows box?)
People in the US have a basic mistrust of the government that goes way back. This is reinforced by the general ineptitude of beurocracies that every country sees. Add to that the fact that the US is a federation of states and National anything always sounds like a bad idea and a power grab. Hell, we didn't really have a peace time army until after WII.
The pracitcal complaint about national ID cards is that they add very little to security or convenience but have a potential to be abused. It doesn't matter that there is a tiny chance that they will be abused. It does matter that if abused it could lead to great harm. National ID == risk and no reward.
In case the above reasons weren't enough to explain the knee-jerk screams about National IDs there is also the small matter that the Bible says the anti-Christ will force everyone to wear a mark of his choosing to do their day to day business. No need to prove to the world that we really are "The Great Satan" *wink*.
1. Third party tracking
2. ?????
3. EVIL unleashed on the world!
Did someone with a third party tool steal your girlfriend or something? Are they reselling user information? Is it too closely cuppled with your user database? Purchase history?
No? Then there is no big deal. Go with whatever technology works for you.
Typical household income is about $1500/year. So that's like someone in the US paying $500/month for DSL.
/as/ bad.
It would be better to compare it to the salaries of people in the areas where it is available (I don't have those fig'ers). Western countries have fairly even income distributions. In India you have the non-cash/barter economies in rural areas and the more comparable cash economies in cities. So the subsistance farmers [that don't have access to this service] drive the averages way down.
It would still be expensive compared to the US cost of broadband, but not
Yes, it's always a good thing for american workers when 3rd world countries learn how to telecommute.
As an American worker you are garunteed your job for life. It is the government's job to protect you from competition foreign and domestic. Because we all know that moving jobs to the third world where there weren't any before is just exploitation by the capitalist pig dogs.
Is that what you meant, or just what you said?
Fascism:Extreme right-wing dictatorial government,belligerently nationalist,that merges state and business leadership
1 - You know this is an exciting article when people are replying to sigs
2 - Socialism: Moderate left-wing totalitarian government, usually post-nationalist, where people smarter than you spend your money to save you from yourself. [Usually has much better slogans than the above, although the phenomenon has not been studied]