Curved walls may well look pretty, but are a nuisance to work around if you are trying to fit beds, couches, tables against them. One of the bonuses of straight walls iwth square corners.
You completely miss the point of what patents are *supposed* to be for. They encourage the publication of new ideas, so that they'll be available to all (for a licensing fee now, for free when the patent expires in 20 years).
The alternative is trade secrets: inventors keep their inventions secret to protect their financial gain, but lose everything when someone else figures out what they did.
Nowadays the meaning of patents has been distorted badly, but they are a good thing in their original formulation.
The problem with bad GUIs and guides in open source software comes from the fact that creating a good user interface is the most boring and tedious programming task there is.
No, that's not it at all. Programmers are great at creating tools to get rid of boring and tedious tasks. There are some good tools for removing the tedium of user interface design (Delphi, for example), but not open source ones. Even with the tools, it's not at all easy to put together a user interface that looks good, feels right, and works.
The reason there are poor user interfaces for most software is that designing a good one is hard. There aren't many people who are good at it, and they are in high demand.
Partly it's ego, but it's also competence. Designing a good user interface is really hard. There aren't many people who can do it well.
It's really easy to recognize a bad one, but it's really, really hard to put together a good one. My guess would be that you really do point out flaws, but doubt that your suggested fixes would actually be much of an improvement. Even if they were, the original coder probably isn't competent to implement them properly.
I've never used a JetDirect printer, but my experience with HP software in general is that they don't know anything about user interfaces. Don't blame Microsoft for this particular screwup. HP could have set up their printer to look like another Windows machine sharing a printer, but they didn't.
seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make. If you write some software, you know what you wrote, so just write a paragraph for each feature, it only takes like 5 minuets and then your software might acually get used.
That's the sort of documentation you see in man pages, not the
this is what will do, here is an example, here is another example, dont try and use it to do instead should be used.
kind that is actually useful. Writing good documentation is hard. It is so easy to just give a list of a hundred things --- who wants to read that? You need to be a good writer to figure out what the user will want to know, and make it easy to find that.
Writing good documentation is just as hard as other parts of UI design.
Millions of paths implies some sort of jump instruction, whether or not that translates to millions of function calls, i don't know. assume it does. then instead of making millions of function calls, your making billions of function calls.
I think you totally misread this. There are millions of possible paths for execution to follow that all lead to the same result. They're just increasing the number of possibilities, not increasing their length.
IIRC, the law does empower the FCC or FTC to set these standards. It requires spam to have a subject tag, and indicates that the F[TC]C should choose one within a certain number of months.
So it didn't say "all spam must start with [ADV]," but "all spam must start with a tag to be chosen by the FCC within x months of this law going into effect."
You don't quite have it right. All porn spam needs a standard identifier (to be set by "the Commission", not sure which one), not all spam. See the text of the CAN-SPAM act, in particular section 5 (d) (3). This has to be done within 120 days of Jan 7, 2004.
Presumably if you end up with a copy, it'll be because someone you know decided to pass it on. In which case, will it be spam?
Well, yes. According to the article, the campaigns send it out to their "rank and file" (which is presumably not spamming), but they encourage those people to send it out to all of their friends. It's spamming by proxy.
I haven't seen any of it yet, but if I do it will certainly be unsolicited bulk email. It will use my resources without my permission.
Those are the tests that make it spam. I don't really care about the content. It's a property rights issue. Don't use my property without my permission.
What makes you think this is the same vulnerability? You describe yours as a "buffer overflow". This one treats an unsigned value as signed, never failing the test for the end of the buffer, because it's writing before the start of the buffer. You sure it's the same thing?
A fake machine language (called Hypo) was the first computer language I learned in high school (about 30 years ago). It was useful for learning because it introduced the idea of building something complicated out of very simple pieces -- which is the essence of programming.
You're sending out fewer bytes, but just as many messages as the virus. The poor user forged into the "From:" is getting bothered by you just as much as if they got the stupid virus.
Know what I do when I get one of these irritating confirmation messages? I confirm. Then you (or your user) gets the stupid virus, and in future when my name gets forged, I won't get your idiotic confirmation message (but you or your user will get the virus).
If you reconfigure to just dump those suspect messages in the bit bucket, you'll irritate me less, and get less viruses through to your mailbox.
The use of land mines was outlawed in the 1997 Ottawa Convention and more than 90 countries committed themselves last year to cleaning up the debris of war to reduce the number of civilian casualties from munitions left by armed conflicts.
However, the USA was not a signatory to this treaty as of 2002, according to this web page. Apparently there were plans to sign in 2006, but the landmine-lovers were working to change those. Has anything changed?
There aren't many other countries that were both democratic and non-signatories: Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Russia, Turkey (but the democracy of some of those might be questionable). The entire "Axis of Evil" made the list, though.
It also assumes that users of such ISPs are not allowed to run their own mail (or other servers)
No, that's not it at all. The blocklists exist to label particular IP addresses as likely sources of unwanted mail. They don't really care whether what you're doing violates your ISP's AUP or not.
The fact is that the vast majority of email that originates at residential IP addresses is viruses or spam.
Some people receive valid email from sites like yours, but most don't. Those people shouldn't use that kind of blocklist, but for most people, it's a good filter to use.
I don't know more than a couple of words of Dutch, but I don't see what that has to do with the fact that you cheated in a course that was trying to teach you to write well in Dutch.
Even developers and system administrators look stupid if they can't write well, and looking stupid limits your chances to advance.
And I am a student. And you guys wouldn't believe the crap people try to force down our throaths. Persoanlly, among the worst atrocities college forced upon me is an essay about...
I imagine the purpose of that essay was to teach you writing skills such as correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and logical presentation of ideas.
Not "no", "yes". If p=1, then -log(p) is zero. We agree in that case.
Where we disagree is the case of rare events, where the standard formula gives very large numbers for the occurence of rare events, but the difference in probabilities is bounded above by 1.
Since the probability of SCO not producing evidence is 1 for all practical purposes, the message "SCO has not produced evidence" has an information content of zero.
Uhhh, 1/1 = 1, not zero. The information content of "SCO has not produced evidence" would be one, if the information content of an event is inversely proportional to the probability of that event occuring.
Slashdot Mirror
...If you don't like it, why are you still working there?
I know it's a Slashdot tradition not to RTFA, but I don't think you even read the post you replied to!
Curved walls may well look pretty, but are a nuisance to work around if you are trying to fit beds, couches, tables against them. One of the bonuses of straight walls iwth square corners.
Just extrude a bed, couch and table too!
You completely miss the point of what patents are *supposed* to be for. They encourage the publication of new ideas, so that they'll be available to all (for a licensing fee now, for free when the patent expires in 20 years).
The alternative is trade secrets: inventors keep their inventions secret to protect their financial gain, but lose everything when someone else figures out what they did.
Nowadays the meaning of patents has been distorted badly, but they are a good thing in their original formulation.
I'd cut a hatch and add a latch and some hinges so I could access the engine compartment.
Why not just buy the wrench the Volvo mechanic would have used?
The problem with bad GUIs and guides in open source software comes from the fact that creating a good user interface is the most boring and tedious programming task there is.
No, that's not it at all. Programmers are great at creating tools to get rid of boring and tedious tasks. There are some good tools for removing the tedium of user interface design (Delphi, for example), but not open source ones. Even with the tools, it's not at all easy to put together a user interface that looks good, feels right, and works.
The reason there are poor user interfaces for most software is that designing a good one is hard. There aren't many people who are good at it, and they are in high demand.
Partly it's ego, but it's also competence. Designing a good user interface is really hard. There aren't many people who can do it well.
It's really easy to recognize a bad one, but it's really, really hard to put together a good one. My guess would be that you really do point out flaws, but doubt that your suggested fixes would actually be much of an improvement. Even if they were, the original coder probably isn't competent to implement them properly.
I've never used a JetDirect printer, but my experience with HP software in general is that they don't know anything about user interfaces. Don't blame Microsoft for this particular screwup. HP could have set up their printer to look like another Windows machine sharing a printer, but they didn't.
seriously documentation is so damn important, and so easy to make. If you write some software, you know what you wrote, so just write a paragraph for each feature, it only takes like 5 minuets and then your software might acually get used.
That's the sort of documentation you see in man pages, not the
this is what will do, here is an example, here is another example, dont try and use it to do instead should be used.
kind that is actually useful. Writing good documentation is hard. It is so easy to just give a list of a hundred things --- who wants to read that? You need to be a good writer to figure out what the user will want to know, and make it easy to find that.
Writing good documentation is just as hard as other parts of UI design.
Millions of paths implies some sort of jump instruction, whether or not that translates to millions of function calls, i don't know. assume it does. then instead of making millions of function calls, your making billions of function calls.
I think you totally misread this. There are millions of possible paths for execution to follow that all lead to the same result. They're just increasing the number of possibilities, not increasing their length.
How easy will it be to force people to do things against their will when we have no guns to defend ourselves?
You think if Hiibel had defended his rights with a gun he'd still be alive?
IIRC, the law does empower the FCC or FTC to set these standards. It requires spam to have a subject tag, and indicates that the F[TC]C should choose one within a certain number of months.
So it didn't say "all spam must start with [ADV]," but "all spam must start with a tag to be chosen by the FCC within x months of this law going into effect."
You don't quite have it right. All porn spam needs a standard identifier (to be set by "the Commission", not sure which one), not all spam. See the text of the CAN-SPAM act, in particular section 5 (d) (3). This has to be done within 120 days of Jan 7, 2004.
Presumably if you end up with a copy, it'll be because someone you know decided to pass it on. In which case, will it be spam?
Well, yes. According to the article, the campaigns send it out to their "rank and file" (which is presumably not spamming), but they encourage those people to send it out to all of their friends. It's spamming by proxy.
Seriously, how could you argue that this is spam?
I haven't seen any of it yet, but if I do it will certainly be unsolicited bulk email. It will use my resources without my permission.
Those are the tests that make it spam. I don't really care about the content. It's a property rights issue. Don't use my property without my permission.
What makes you think this is the same vulnerability? You describe yours as a "buffer overflow". This one treats an unsigned value as signed, never failing the test for the end of the buffer, because it's writing before the start of the buffer. You sure it's the same thing?
Friend 3: You want to go to (theatre that has done this) for a movie?
Friend 4: How about (other theatre that's just as good and equally close)?
Friend 3: No, I can't put my finger on it, but there's something about that place that I just hate.
Friend 4: Yeah, I've noticed there's a lot of rude assholes there. Okay, let's go to (theatre that has done this).
And this is how both groups end up happy.
What exactly do you think your C compiler is written in?
Most likely it's written in C.
Some compilers have been written in assembler (e.g. early versions of Turbo Pascal), but most are written in high level languages.
A fake machine language (called Hypo) was the first computer language I learned in high school (about 30 years ago). It was useful for learning because it introduced the idea of building something complicated out of very simple pieces -- which is the essence of programming.
Okay, so only spam and new viruses will make it through to your users because of your antisocial auto-confirmation system.
You're sending out fewer bytes, but just as many messages as the virus. The poor user forged into the "From:" is getting bothered by you just as much as if they got the stupid virus.
Know what I do when I get one of these irritating confirmation messages? I confirm. Then you (or your user) gets the stupid virus, and in future when my name gets forged, I won't get your idiotic confirmation message (but you or your user will get the virus).
If you reconfigure to just dump those suspect messages in the bit bucket, you'll irritate me less, and get less viruses through to your mailbox.
The article states
The use of land mines was outlawed in the 1997 Ottawa Convention and more than 90 countries committed themselves last year to cleaning up the debris of war to reduce the number of civilian casualties from munitions left by armed conflicts.
However, the USA was not a signatory to this treaty as of 2002, according to this web page. Apparently there were plans to sign in 2006, but the landmine-lovers were working to change those. Has anything changed?
There aren't many other countries that were both democratic and non-signatories: Finland, India, Israel, Korea, Russia, Turkey (but the democracy of some of those might be questionable). The entire "Axis of Evil" made the list, though.
It also assumes that users of such ISPs are not allowed to run their own mail (or other servers)
No, that's not it at all. The blocklists exist to label particular IP addresses as likely sources of unwanted mail. They don't really care whether what you're doing violates your ISP's AUP or not.
The fact is that the vast majority of email that originates at residential IP addresses is viruses or spam.
Some people receive valid email from sites like yours, but most don't. Those people shouldn't use that kind of blocklist, but for most people, it's a good filter to use.
I don't know more than a couple of words of Dutch, but I don't see what that has to do with the fact that you cheated in a course that was trying to teach you to write well in Dutch.
Even developers and system administrators look stupid if they can't write well, and looking stupid limits your chances to advance.
And I am a student. And you guys wouldn't believe the crap people try to force down our throaths. Persoanlly, among the worst atrocities college forced upon me is an essay about...
I imagine the purpose of that essay was to teach you writing skills such as correct spelling, grammar, punctuation, and logical presentation of ideas.
Too bad you cheated.
Not "no", "yes". If p=1, then -log(p) is zero. We agree in that case.
Where we disagree is the case of rare events, where the standard formula gives very large numbers for the occurence of rare events, but the difference in probabilities is bounded above by 1.
Since the probability of SCO not producing evidence is 1 for all practical purposes, the message "SCO has not produced evidence" has an information content of zero.
Uhhh, 1/1 = 1, not zero. The information content of "SCO has not produced evidence" would be one, if the information content of an event is inversely proportional to the probability of that event occuring.
You want -log(p), not 1/p.