I went out the other day and bought a new router for home after my WRT54G that had been doing the job for years started to show its age.
I decided to buy a PROPER router, with multiple gigabit, multi-connection failover, IPv6, VLAN, VoIP, VPN, LDAP, QoS, wireless access point management, all the trimmings.
The IPv6 config has a myriad of options. I got bored looking into all of them. 6rd, 6in4, DHCPv6, TSPC, AICCU, RADVD, god knows what.
Fact was, I got bored of trying to figure out which/how to use. Some required sign-ups and were basically IPv6 VPN's with all kinds of monitoring and restrictions, most needed ISP support to provide details, IP ranges, or some catch-all IP, and none were offering anything different to my eyes. In the end, it was all moot - my ISP offered no support for IPv6 at all (probably because of several competing and basically identical-to-the-end-user standards), and the other stuff requires me to sign up with a third party that will then take all my IP traffic and subject it to god-knows-what-jurisdiction.
The problem with IPv6 is not that it doesn't work. It's that it's not plug-and-play for whatever setup you have (transit over IPv4 or IPv6 native, for example).
If I get bored working out what to choose, I'm sure everyone else will not bother to support them until we choose just one either.
Have you been to university? There were entire lectures that I would pay to sit through again. You can't magic up that lightbulb moment just by searching Google for a keyword. You're paying world experts for their time.
Maybe universities are different now but it wasn't that long ago that I was there. You can't self-educate to that level without 8 hours a day of hard work and experts on hand. And that's just a degree. Masters, PhD and beyond are a world apart again.
I can't even get close to understanding my girlfriend's after she's been through years of postdoc published papers. Just Googling something and thinking you then understand everything about it is not an education.
Leap seconds are inserted by pretending that there's a 61st second in a minute. Everything not designed to handle that will fall flat on its face.
It's not a question of not knowing what time it is, it's a question of whether your software was built with certain (I would say not unreasonable at first glance) assumptions, or whether it follows the actual specification of the functions it uses and the data structures it handles.
58, 59, 60, 0, 1 tends to blow a lot of stuff up that was never built to handle such instances.
Some old games just worked better because of their simplicity. Syndicate you could pick up in ten minutes, including completing a couple of missions, riding in vehicles, etc. despite it being almost an entirely new mechanic.
Syndicate Wars, I got bored to trying to get the camera where I needed it to go. The new Syndicate is a heap of junk.
But I would gladly pay for an extension, expansion, a slight enhancement of Syndicate designed for casual play.
Again, just because something is 3D and fancy graphics does not make it better. The games that used to be top-end games are now perfect casual games. I could happily play a game of Masters of Orion on the bus. But the mechanics of the original make it clunky. And modern remakes make it complicated, 3D, fancy and difficult to dip into and out of.
This is why the indie game sector exploded - games you can "just play". This is why I can remember fondly and still play ancient games like JetPac (a version coming to XBox One if the E3 thing is to be believed as part of a retro compilation title), Syndicate, Master of Orion, Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc.
People just think "2D = crap and old" when actually the 2D games are quicker and easier to play. That means they won't be AAA titles, but you could make a lot of money selling them as casuals. Angry Birds basically is this same phenomena. Farmville was this too. People realising that they'd rather play a fun 2D game than some fancy complicated modern title.
Nostalgia tells me which games I will choose to play from a limited set. But when it comes to it, ZX Spectrum games from 30 years ago are just as fun to play - and would be even more so with some tweaking to bring the control systems etc. up to date - as modern casuals. And some of the tactical/strategy games from those eras are still the best ones made.
Nostalgia makes me remember the things I used to have. But my brain is still pleading for something modern that is close to how well those games used to play, or could play with modern interfaces. That's not nostalgia.
And, actually, I'm just returning the favour. Every website I read, including Slashdot, no matter the scope of its international audience just assumes that I'm American and understand what the hell it's talking about.
There is no correct answer. What you are doing is not just "undefined" but impossible.
Even an infinite number of zeroes can't multiply out to be anything but zero.
So if you can get the answers "zero", "one", and "infinity" - all within the space of a few seconds - for the same question, there is no "correct" answer.
It's like asking what the square root of -1 is. There is no answer that's a valid number in any of the sets of real or integer numbers.
Division is only defined for non-zero denominators. It's as simple as that. Because there is no possible answer for a zero denominator.
You want to find out how many Euros in those Zimbabwean dollars you're keeping track of. The exchange rate fluctuates. The web-API you're using goes offline and returns zero, so you divide by zero. Whoops. How do you tell the difference between worthless numbers and just worthless currency?
You want to draw an interlaced gif of some sort, so you do every nth line, then every n-1th line, as you get the interlaced lines and work down towards a full image with every row drawn. And then you cock up at the end, accidentally hit zero and you overwrite the first line thousands of times with garbage rather than spot the mistake.
Zero is so completely the wrong answer, you don't even understand why. The actual real answer shouldn't even be the largest integer you can hold. And if it is, it could also be the smallest (i.e. largest negative). But actually it's none of them.
Division by zero is NOT something that produces a number. It cannot happen. It cannot return zero (which is incredibly wrong), nor can it return any single other consistent constant. It should actually just error, which is why it does. It should produce something that's not a number (NaN). And it does exactly that.
Divide by zero is like a null pointer. On the face of it is appears singularly useless. Why on earth would you want a pointer that you can't dereference? But it's there as an indicator. You cocked up. Majorly. If your maths is at all important at that point (a cell in a spreadsheet), then you're potentially losing billions of digits of accuracy.
You can continue on blindly with your cockup quite easily. Any idiot can overload the divide operator to return zero when the denominator is zero. And you won't get any of those nasty errors. Errors which are indicative of an earlier error that you're just ignoring.
There's a reason that, even back in the days of BASIC and very limited ROM space, you programmed in divide by zero as an error rather than just returning zero and documenting it. It's the same reason that you don't just "ignore" NULL pointer dereferences by saying "Oh, well, we won't call that function and just carry on from where we were then". Any idiot could make some kind of overload to allow that as well if they really wanted.
The fact is that if you're dividing by zero you're doing something that's mathematically impossible. There is no amount of zeroes you can multiply to get anything other than zero. Not even if you multiply infinities of zeroes do you get anything other than zero. Hence division by zero of any non-zero integer is IMPOSSIBLE. It doesn't have an answer.
And, like the square root of -1, if you just ignore it and pretend it exists you will run into all kinds of trouble. If you want to do something with it, in the same way that we use "i" to represent the square root of -1 to get lots of magical maths that actually works, use a language that recognises NaN and test against it.
But I'll tell you now that it's quicker and easier to test if you're dividing by zero BEFORE you do the divide.
I find it quite sad that for a developed country you think that going this far our of your way, and then only getting 1-2 robocalls a month is anywhere near acceptable.
I have a landline. I have not had a phone call to it in 5 years, except for family and friends. We have an answering machine which records the fact someone called, so I know that we haven't (and not just they didn't leave a message).
We just don't get this crap. If we did, I'd complain like fuck because I've asked for my number not to be public - to the point that I would demand a change of number from my provider.
But, in fact, all I did was register with my country's "Telephone Preference Service" - which is free - and that's that. The two mobiles in the house are also registered. Apart from very, very rare (i.e. once a year or less) texts from random spammers, which I then report, we don't get that crap on those either. Generally, they have CLI information, and those phones have a call-blocker feature by default, so they're easily dealt with too.
Even in work, I have several direct lines and the switchboard. What makes it through the switchboard is actually worse than anything that comes direct because - well, they just don't have the number to dial me direct and I would complain if they did.
The switchboard girls, though, aren't as good as distinguishing "Hi, I'm a random joe just after some information, I'd like to speak to... you know... what's his name... the guy in charge of IT... John! That's it, John!" "Hi John, Susan in the office just put me through to you because...."
(P.S. Want to get me to blacklist your company and report your phone number? Do this to me. I've strung one company along for over a year and made them waste inordinate amounts of time setting up appointments, etc. only for me to "have to cancel" at the last moment. And then when they twig and ask why, I tell them it's because of their dirty sales tactics. If they can lie to try to get through to me, I can lie to string them along.)
When it come to scammers, spam, just random harassing phonecalls, unwanted sales pitches from companies you've never heard of, etc. why should it be any different?
I'd just unplug my phone forever if that's really the scale of unwanted calls you get. Or I would make you go through a compulsory automated switchboard - nothing rings in my house until you've passed a phone CAPTCHA, said who you are, why you are calling, and rung from a number that I can block.
1) Cigarettes - I completely agree with. Ban it or don't. Taxing something to oblivion to compensate for the harm being done by it is pure money-making on people's deaths.
2) Aside from the above (because it directly hurts others than the smoker themselves), what you stick in your gob-hole is up to you. Nothing speaks louder than paying a competitor because they have something not offered by others. But people don't. People are choosing to eat this stuff. And despite obesity epidemics, we simultaneously have anorexia epidemics and though - on average - we are getting bigger, that's mostly due to IGNORANCE or APATHY, not whatever is in the food. Anyone who cared would eat other things. Few people do.
4) Margarine's been around for over 150 years. The same 150 years where we've all lived longer than ever before. Note that this is, in general, true of almost all the things that health nuts abhor - salt was a major part of diets going back pre-Roman era. I'm not saying we shouldn't improve (we can't do everything the Romans did because it was "good enough for them"), but it's not the killer you make out unless you seriously abuse it. Or, again, are ignorant or apathetic of it.
3) Celebrity chefs are among the worst: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... In preference to all that "artificial" stuff, they suggest you make meals just as bad, if not worse, than the processed foods you abhor.
Kids should learn to cook because kids should learn to cook. Cooking shouldn't consist of sticking a bag in a microwave. However, if you were to suggest that kids learn to cook by using their smartphone to follow a recipe, there's uproar because it's not how you learned to do it.
Newsflash: People no longer eat up a table, in general. People no longer use napkins on their laps, in general. People no longer sit down for several courses, in general. People no longer eat three square meals a day, in general. Because ALL of those thing are bollocks and unnecessary and the legacy of previous generations that invented them.
However, even back in the 60's / 70's you didn't have the sheer range and volume of food available to you. The cuisines and variety of foodstuffs are unbelievable nowadays. The Mediterranean diet is over in the US, the sushi bar is in London, etc.
But the one factor that's the same in all the above - people. People don't care what they eat. So you can either nanny perfectly competent, intelligent, grown adults (your suggestion), or you can let them kill themselves slowly - when they're going to live far longer than you will anyway.
You, and places like the FDA, etc. are on a loser. The second you ban one thing, the manufacturer's will whack up prices until they find another cheap thing they can get away with. And it'll take decades to ban again. And in the meantime, all you've done is made food more expensive.
There has to be controls, of course, but banning something like salt, sugar or fat is really such a dumb-arse suggestion. Put labels on it. Warn about it. Spread bad press about it. Let economic nature take it's course - when I was a kid, there was no Diet Coke, there was no gluten-free food, there was no "low-fat" yoghurt, there was no allergens clearly marked in bold, there was no nutritional information - those all came about through one manufacturer having to compete for a slightly-more-educated customer base than the others. The fact that 90% of that is absolute bollocks and has actually FUELLED thing like nut allergies is neither here nor there.
Tip: Do not base any security or malware decision on what keywords are contained on a site / URL, what signatures exist (or don't) in a file or anything along similar lines.
It pissed me off when people say "You can tell if you have virus X because it create file Y or registry entry Z". Yes, and it takes a microsecond to produce an identical virus that DOESN'T.
Don't base your decision to visit a website on the keywords or URL. Base it on knowing that your browser will not ever execute any code from there without asking first, will not give out your personal information, and won't let you go to a previously unvisited site without warning you massively about entering your passwords etc. And certainly won't "just go" there by you viewing an email with that URL on it somewhere.
Security by "good boy / naughty boy" lists is not security.
I have a Bluetooth mouse. It loses connection and isn't brilliant but you could use it for casual word-processing or similar use.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard. It works okay.
I work in a school. Put ten of them in a room and it all falls apart. If they aren't directly interfering the hassle of getting one and only one to join on to one and only one computer is a pain in the butt. Windows isn't particularly great at this, even on 8.
But at home I have four wireless XBox 360 controllers on a cheap dongle thing I bought from Amazon. Works perfectly, don't need to set anything up, recognised by all games, if one goes to sleep, you press a button and carry on.
Bluetooth isn't perfect and probably not good for this kind of thing. Wireless is even worse as you then have a controller-over-IP situation. There is no real alternative.
Also, go buy a bluetooth PC keyboard/mouse compared to the cheapest of "other wireless" sets. You'll pay more. I can only presume that this is patent or similar licensing. There are also a lot fewer models of such things because the cheap wireless stuff just works. You don't need to know the ins-and-outs of a protocol like the XBox controllers. You can pick up cheap dongles and controllers that are compatible for next to nothing, so it's not hard to work out and not "secret".
Nope, just never played a Fallout game through choice. Just not my kind of thing. And Dishonored I've literally never heard of until now because I'm just that old-fashioned that I've not looked at it.
The problem is that there are so many games, I won't have heard / care about quite a lot of them, even if my Steam library is brimming over (1000+ at the last count), and I have - I think - literally every online PC games service going.
I just haven't cared about consoles or certain genres entirely and some titles I played once, hated, and never went back.
And, it has to be said, the 90's were the era I loved the most. I have re-bought just about every game I played in that decade at least two-three times over (on Steam, GOG, for friends, etc.). But Fallout? The first two wouldn't have interested me, and 3 onwards looks like a complete genre change. I wouldn't have played 1 and 2, and by the time 3 was out, I'd stopped buying mainstream games except for those that were cheap, demoed well, etc.
That's why I haven't heard of Dishonored, most likely. 2012 release? It's just starting to come into my "look it up, see if it was actually any good, set aside a few quid on Steam" considerations. Wouldn't be able to play it without thinking of Shadow Warrior, most likely, or even Thief.
Games just go in cycles and after a while you've played every genre and spin-off and it gets dull. You know this because you start referring to games in terms of other games: "GTA V? It's like Driver in a more open-world and you can walk about."
Fallout just looks like Ultima-meets-Diablo then turns into something Rage/Skyrimmy later on.
I mean, meh. At least Elite:Dangerous held promise for a long while, going back to something that few others have attempted. I just bought Chaos Reborn instead of any of the above... at least it "feels" a bit like that 1980's Games Workshop game I had on ZX Spectrum.
I don't think I've played a Fallout at all, have never HEARD of Dishonoured and couldn't care less about Doom any more.
All the big-name games I have wanted in the last ten years that were hyping me up - disappointed in them all. Aliens:CM, Elite:Dangerous, you name it. Couldn't care less. GTA 5 was another troll-out of the franchise but was at least worth the money.
Everything else? Indie games and emulation, my friend. I've played more Master of Orion in the last year than I have any game that costs £50 on release.
If you're picking a degree subject because you hope to earn more money later, don't bother. Seriously. That's not the point of a degree at all. It's also seriously crass commercialism of your talent.
Pick a degree in a subject you are GOOD at. You go there to learn, not to make money later. You will enjoy it, you will learn lots (no matter how good you thought you were), and you will want to stay in academia as long as you can.
Academia is for you to create a brain that learns, learns fast, learns lots. That skill is transferrable to any career path. But you don't WANT a career path. If you are at all good enough to not have to have a career outside academia, you are living the dream, my friend. Careers are horrible, boring things that you do for money even if you love the underlying skills (and I guarantee that you won't exercise much of them if you go into a career).
Study what interests you. Prove that you can expand your mind. Then people will give you jobs on that basis. And you'll be bright enough to begin startup, work for yourself, etc. rather than get stuck doing someone else's dog-work that just happens to coincide with one skill you have that they don't.
My degree is in maths (with computer science as a "minor" as it would be called in the US). I work in IT. I don't use any of it unless I'm explaining deep theory to other IT guys that have never needed to know what a spanning-tree is exactly, but are curious.now they have someone who can explain it. But my first client of ten years of self-employment hired me because I had a degree. It proves something about ability to stay, ability to learn, base intellectual level, dedication, etc.
My girlfriend is a PhD. All her friends are PhD's. Most of them didn't get "real" jobs until way into their 30's. And most of those are high-end jobs in labs that you need to have a PhD in order to even be considered for. She's given talks to conferences over all the continent, has published papers with her name on and techniques in, and earns more than I ever could.
Don't base 5-7 years of your life on a bet to win the most money later, based on making your life a misery now. It won't pay off if you do that. Do what you enjoy, then choose a career as a last resort if you really need to and end up in that position. Work is far from everything. And money, though nice, doesn't come automatically just because you have a degree in a related subject. In fact, I'd claim the opposite.
I work in schools. You know what they say about teachers? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Most of the teachers I've worked with my entire life are out-qualified by someone with a master's. The only Dr (PhD) in my latest school was a librarian.
It bears no correlation, you do it for yourself, which makes you a better, happier, more learned self. Then you go into a career you enjoy when you realise you need money.
But I have to say that "can be broken with enough... time" is entirely the point of encryption. The time required is often recommended to be longer than the heat-death of the universe at a given rate for the expected adversary (i.e. lone hacker, or nation state).
There's a reason the spying agencies hate encryption and try to subvert it by other methods (software flaws, stealing keys, downgrading encryption levels, etc.) instead.
I'd rather have a bigger / better screen than a slightly faster processor. I'd rather have more battery life than a slightly faster processor. I'd rather have more storage than a slightly faster processor. I'd rather have more RAM than a slightly faster processor. I'd rather have two slower processors than one fast one.
I don't even look at processor speed any more. I buy hundreds of machines every year and it doesn't even factor any more. Who cares? They all meet what would be my minimum spec anyway, even for the cheapest, and other specs are much more important.
I used to be the geek that people asked what to buy because I was the only one they knew who could understand it.
For the last five years, my recommendation has instead been "Go to a store, pick it up and play with it, check the holes on it (USB, HDMI, etc.), screen size, keyboard type, etc. are what you want, take the model number, buy it online, bring it to me and I'll wipe out the crap antivirus etc. for you and put a proper one on." The specs to an average user just don't matter any more. They barely matter to a business (I specify a minimum RAM and that's about it nowadays). Power user obviously still compare everything but, you know what, my laptop is several years old and eats things like GTA V for breakfast. I can't see that specs on a tablet would matter at all any more. Of course you don't want a 10MHz chip in there, but anything commercially available is just fine.
Again.... what's new here apart from the incredibly ugly and crappy joypad-like controller shoved into the middle? (G27 has D-pad on the wheel on the shifter etc. there too but never mind).
"U.S. officials privately said China was behind it."
Which officials, and why won't they speak on-record? Because they know that, stupidly, they've said that cyber-attacks could be seen as an act of war. And none of them are stupid enough to directly declare war on China on the basis of fuck-all evidence beyond "we got hacked, looked like the last hop had a whois somewhere in China".
This isn't enough to put in the papers, this isn't enough to act upon, but fuck if the US won't let *that* stand in their way.
You have NO WAY of knowing whether China are doing this, officially or not. When you do, you can make news stories and bring it up in international committees. Until then, it's some Chinese kid who's found a good source of credit card data to buy some Steam games for all the fuck you know.
Dickheads like these "officials" are either a) trying to put so much implication into people's heads that people just assume you ARE at war with China or b) have fuck-all to go on and speak carelessly and dangerously.
I'm not American, nor Chinese. But, fuck, this is a slippery slope if every time some hacker in Beijing touches your systems you're going to cry wolf and accuse China of officially stealing sensitive data.
What's the matter? Been too long since you had a decent enemy who could shoot back?
So, not being funny - what the hell does this do that you'd want in a steering wheel? Because it looks like nothing more than the same stuff with a cheap controller slapped on. Trust me, if you can afford one of those - even second-hand - you can buy your own damn controller that'll be better than that junk.
Seriously, the G27 has all that - anti-backlash, helical gearing, etc. and, as pointed out, comes with the six speed shifter as standard too.
Honestly, Logitech, what the fuck do you think you're selling here?
The largest, most complex heating system I've ever seen is a bunch of thermostats, pumps, temperature sensors and boiler start-up times in a piece of crappy HTML running on a boiler control system which costs 1% of what the heating system cost (and most of that shit is software licensing and support, not programming).
Seriously, it gives a nice diagram with all the in and out temperatures for multiple boilers, spread over the entire site, with temperature reading for other places (including external), and a "program" (really just a table of values) for when to start up in the morning depending on what the outside temperature is and/or whether the system's water temperature is ramping up as normal in that area.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
A modern system might run proper cabling to / wireless sensors that don't interfere but would basically be the same thing. More likely, the system is just being replaced completely, including the majority of the HVAC equipment (or at least the centralised units if not the ducts / outlets / radiators / whatever).
In all the schools I've ever worked there are rooms full of boilers all over that cost millions. Usually they are run from a control panel with a tiny microprocessor and - if you're lucky - some kind of serial or Ethernet controller somewhere.
The hard part is not the software, or the schedules, or the algorithms involved, it's keeping the system running and integrating the parts you want to work with the system you want. Boiler manufacturers on that scale tend to want you to buy their controllers, and won't play well with anything else without a huge premium on the hardware.
What you agree to in a contract has to be reasonable, and a court of law decides that, not Paypal or whatever you agreed to.
Automatic inclusion of any and all future clauses is unreasonable.
In the EU, and it appears the US, robocalls are illegal without prior and explicit consent.
Just because a piece of paper, signed by you, with your knowledge, says something does not trump your rights. Statutory rights. Sound familiar?
It's a dirty move, but it's also a stupid - and unenforceable - one. As I said at the time - try it, Paypal - just go for it. See what happen with the backing of EU law, no matter what I agreed to, where you are based or anything else.
Companies do not make the law. The law makes companies.
Google don't need to provide any more than Apple have done. The *capability* to do so.
In fact, they already do that, it's just not made a huge fuss about because - why would you unless you DIDN'T have it? Google don't make their own ad-blocker the same as Apple don't make their own ad-blocker, but now they are just providing the function to allow such things.
This just allows ad-blocking plugins on iOS, basically. Chrome's had plugins on iOS for ages: Safari's had plugins too. But neither were able to have ad-blocking plugins because Apple didn't approve / design for them.
The problem is, in the Apple mono-culture, you have to wait for Apple to add the functionality before you can use it. Try finding an MDM product that can actually do things on managed iPads / iPhones that Apple don't provide an MDM API for. You won't. The MDM API is supplied by Apple and no matter what you use, that's all you can use to modify Apple MDM functions, settings, etc. There is no MDM app that can push an app over-the-air without the user having to sign in to iTunes App Store to authorise it as well. Because Apple just don't provide that functionality, even on "supervised" devices.
As usual, this is an "Apple adds features that everyone else has had for decades" story that somehow turns it into something earth-shattering when, actually, Apple are playing catch-up after years of denial for such features.
Slashdot Mirror
I went out the other day and bought a new router for home after my WRT54G that had been doing the job for years started to show its age.
I decided to buy a PROPER router, with multiple gigabit, multi-connection failover, IPv6, VLAN, VoIP, VPN, LDAP, QoS, wireless access point management, all the trimmings.
The IPv6 config has a myriad of options. I got bored looking into all of them. 6rd, 6in4, DHCPv6, TSPC, AICCU, RADVD, god knows what.
Fact was, I got bored of trying to figure out which/how to use. Some required sign-ups and were basically IPv6 VPN's with all kinds of monitoring and restrictions, most needed ISP support to provide details, IP ranges, or some catch-all IP, and none were offering anything different to my eyes. In the end, it was all moot - my ISP offered no support for IPv6 at all (probably because of several competing and basically identical-to-the-end-user standards), and the other stuff requires me to sign up with a third party that will then take all my IP traffic and subject it to god-knows-what-jurisdiction.
The problem with IPv6 is not that it doesn't work. It's that it's not plug-and-play for whatever setup you have (transit over IPv4 or IPv6 native, for example).
If I get bored working out what to choose, I'm sure everyone else will not bother to support them until we choose just one either.
Have you been to university? There were entire lectures that I would pay to sit through again. You can't magic up that lightbulb moment just by searching Google for a keyword. You're paying world experts for their time.
Maybe universities are different now but it wasn't that long ago that I was there. You can't self-educate to that level without 8 hours a day of hard work and experts on hand. And that's just a degree. Masters, PhD and beyond are a world apart again.
I can't even get close to understanding my girlfriend's after she's been through years of postdoc published papers. Just Googling something and thinking you then understand everything about it is not an education.
That's not the problem.
Leap seconds are inserted by pretending that there's a 61st second in a minute. Everything not designed to handle that will fall flat on its face.
It's not a question of not knowing what time it is, it's a question of whether your software was built with certain (I would say not unreasonable at first glance) assumptions, or whether it follows the actual specification of the functions it uses and the data structures it handles.
58, 59, 60, 0, 1 tends to blow a lot of stuff up that was never built to handle such instances.
"I should be able to have a howitzer or a bazooka if I want one"
And I should be able to not have such things next door to me.
I'll continue to happily live at least one continent away from this kind of attitude, thanks.
I don't even think that it's that difficult.
Some old games just worked better because of their simplicity. Syndicate you could pick up in ten minutes, including completing a couple of missions, riding in vehicles, etc. despite it being almost an entirely new mechanic.
Syndicate Wars, I got bored to trying to get the camera where I needed it to go. The new Syndicate is a heap of junk.
But I would gladly pay for an extension, expansion, a slight enhancement of Syndicate designed for casual play.
Again, just because something is 3D and fancy graphics does not make it better. The games that used to be top-end games are now perfect casual games. I could happily play a game of Masters of Orion on the bus. But the mechanics of the original make it clunky. And modern remakes make it complicated, 3D, fancy and difficult to dip into and out of.
This is why the indie game sector exploded - games you can "just play". This is why I can remember fondly and still play ancient games like JetPac (a version coming to XBox One if the E3 thing is to be believed as part of a retro compilation title), Syndicate, Master of Orion, Theme Hospital, Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc.
People just think "2D = crap and old" when actually the 2D games are quicker and easier to play. That means they won't be AAA titles, but you could make a lot of money selling them as casuals. Angry Birds basically is this same phenomena. Farmville was this too. People realising that they'd rather play a fun 2D game than some fancy complicated modern title.
Nostalgia tells me which games I will choose to play from a limited set. But when it comes to it, ZX Spectrum games from 30 years ago are just as fun to play - and would be even more so with some tweaking to bring the control systems etc. up to date - as modern casuals. And some of the tactical/strategy games from those eras are still the best ones made.
Nostalgia makes me remember the things I used to have. But my brain is still pleading for something modern that is close to how well those games used to play, or could play with modern interfaces. That's not nostalgia.
Google Telephone Preference Service.
Top hit: UK.
And, actually, I'm just returning the favour. Every website I read, including Slashdot, no matter the scope of its international audience just assumes that I'm American and understand what the hell it's talking about.
There is no correct answer. What you are doing is not just "undefined" but impossible.
Even an infinite number of zeroes can't multiply out to be anything but zero.
So if you can get the answers "zero", "one", and "infinity" - all within the space of a few seconds - for the same question, there is no "correct" answer.
It's like asking what the square root of -1 is. There is no answer that's a valid number in any of the sets of real or integer numbers.
Division is only defined for non-zero denominators. It's as simple as that. Because there is no possible answer for a zero denominator.
You want to find out how many Euros in those Zimbabwean dollars you're keeping track of. The exchange rate fluctuates. The web-API you're using goes offline and returns zero, so you divide by zero. Whoops. How do you tell the difference between worthless numbers and just worthless currency?
You want to draw an interlaced gif of some sort, so you do every nth line, then every n-1th line, as you get the interlaced lines and work down towards a full image with every row drawn. And then you cock up at the end, accidentally hit zero and you overwrite the first line thousands of times with garbage rather than spot the mistake.
Zero is so completely the wrong answer, you don't even understand why. The actual real answer shouldn't even be the largest integer you can hold. And if it is, it could also be the smallest (i.e. largest negative). But actually it's none of them.
Division by zero is NOT something that produces a number. It cannot happen. It cannot return zero (which is incredibly wrong), nor can it return any single other consistent constant. It should actually just error, which is why it does. It should produce something that's not a number (NaN). And it does exactly that.
Divide by zero is like a null pointer. On the face of it is appears singularly useless. Why on earth would you want a pointer that you can't dereference? But it's there as an indicator. You cocked up. Majorly. If your maths is at all important at that point (a cell in a spreadsheet), then you're potentially losing billions of digits of accuracy.
You can continue on blindly with your cockup quite easily. Any idiot can overload the divide operator to return zero when the denominator is zero. And you won't get any of those nasty errors. Errors which are indicative of an earlier error that you're just ignoring.
There's a reason that, even back in the days of BASIC and very limited ROM space, you programmed in divide by zero as an error rather than just returning zero and documenting it. It's the same reason that you don't just "ignore" NULL pointer dereferences by saying "Oh, well, we won't call that function and just carry on from where we were then". Any idiot could make some kind of overload to allow that as well if they really wanted.
The fact is that if you're dividing by zero you're doing something that's mathematically impossible. There is no amount of zeroes you can multiply to get anything other than zero. Not even if you multiply infinities of zeroes do you get anything other than zero. Hence division by zero of any non-zero integer is IMPOSSIBLE. It doesn't have an answer.
And, like the square root of -1, if you just ignore it and pretend it exists you will run into all kinds of trouble. If you want to do something with it, in the same way that we use "i" to represent the square root of -1 to get lots of magical maths that actually works, use a language that recognises NaN and test against it.
But I'll tell you now that it's quicker and easier to test if you're dividing by zero BEFORE you do the divide.
I find it quite sad that for a developed country you think that going this far our of your way, and then only getting 1-2 robocalls a month is anywhere near acceptable.
I have a landline. I have not had a phone call to it in 5 years, except for family and friends. We have an answering machine which records the fact someone called, so I know that we haven't (and not just they didn't leave a message).
We just don't get this crap. If we did, I'd complain like fuck because I've asked for my number not to be public - to the point that I would demand a change of number from my provider.
But, in fact, all I did was register with my country's "Telephone Preference Service" - which is free - and that's that. The two mobiles in the house are also registered. Apart from very, very rare (i.e. once a year or less) texts from random spammers, which I then report, we don't get that crap on those either. Generally, they have CLI information, and those phones have a call-blocker feature by default, so they're easily dealt with too.
Even in work, I have several direct lines and the switchboard. What makes it through the switchboard is actually worse than anything that comes direct because - well, they just don't have the number to dial me direct and I would complain if they did.
The switchboard girls, though, aren't as good as distinguishing "Hi, I'm a random joe just after some information, I'd like to speak to... you know... what's his name... the guy in charge of IT... John! That's it, John!" "Hi John, Susan in the office just put me through to you because...."
(P.S. Want to get me to blacklist your company and report your phone number? Do this to me. I've strung one company along for over a year and made them waste inordinate amounts of time setting up appointments, etc. only for me to "have to cancel" at the last moment. And then when they twig and ask why, I tell them it's because of their dirty sales tactics. If they can lie to try to get through to me, I can lie to string them along.)
When it come to scammers, spam, just random harassing phonecalls, unwanted sales pitches from companies you've never heard of, etc. why should it be any different?
I'd just unplug my phone forever if that's really the scale of unwanted calls you get. Or I would make you go through a compulsory automated switchboard - nothing rings in my house until you've passed a phone CAPTCHA, said who you are, why you are calling, and rung from a number that I can block.
1) Cigarettes - I completely agree with. Ban it or don't. Taxing something to oblivion to compensate for the harm being done by it is pure money-making on people's deaths.
2) Aside from the above (because it directly hurts others than the smoker themselves), what you stick in your gob-hole is up to you. Nothing speaks louder than paying a competitor because they have something not offered by others. But people don't. People are choosing to eat this stuff. And despite obesity epidemics, we simultaneously have anorexia epidemics and though - on average - we are getting bigger, that's mostly due to IGNORANCE or APATHY, not whatever is in the food. Anyone who cared would eat other things. Few people do.
4) Margarine's been around for over 150 years. The same 150 years where we've all lived longer than ever before. Note that this is, in general, true of almost all the things that health nuts abhor - salt was a major part of diets going back pre-Roman era. I'm not saying we shouldn't improve (we can't do everything the Romans did because it was "good enough for them"), but it's not the killer you make out unless you seriously abuse it. Or, again, are ignorant or apathetic of it.
3) Celebrity chefs are among the worst: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... In preference to all that "artificial" stuff, they suggest you make meals just as bad, if not worse, than the processed foods you abhor.
Kids should learn to cook because kids should learn to cook. Cooking shouldn't consist of sticking a bag in a microwave. However, if you were to suggest that kids learn to cook by using their smartphone to follow a recipe, there's uproar because it's not how you learned to do it.
Newsflash: People no longer eat up a table, in general. People no longer use napkins on their laps, in general. People no longer sit down for several courses, in general. People no longer eat three square meals a day, in general. Because ALL of those thing are bollocks and unnecessary and the legacy of previous generations that invented them.
However, even back in the 60's / 70's you didn't have the sheer range and volume of food available to you. The cuisines and variety of foodstuffs are unbelievable nowadays. The Mediterranean diet is over in the US, the sushi bar is in London, etc.
But the one factor that's the same in all the above - people. People don't care what they eat. So you can either nanny perfectly competent, intelligent, grown adults (your suggestion), or you can let them kill themselves slowly - when they're going to live far longer than you will anyway.
You, and places like the FDA, etc. are on a loser. The second you ban one thing, the manufacturer's will whack up prices until they find another cheap thing they can get away with. And it'll take decades to ban again. And in the meantime, all you've done is made food more expensive.
There has to be controls, of course, but banning something like salt, sugar or fat is really such a dumb-arse suggestion. Put labels on it. Warn about it. Spread bad press about it. Let economic nature take it's course - when I was a kid, there was no Diet Coke, there was no gluten-free food, there was no "low-fat" yoghurt, there was no allergens clearly marked in bold, there was no nutritional information - those all came about through one manufacturer having to compete for a slightly-more-educated customer base than the others. The fact that 90% of that is absolute bollocks and has actually FUELLED thing like nut allergies is neither here nor there.
Tip: Do not base any security or malware decision on what keywords are contained on a site / URL, what signatures exist (or don't) in a file or anything along similar lines.
It pissed me off when people say "You can tell if you have virus X because it create file Y or registry entry Z". Yes, and it takes a microsecond to produce an identical virus that DOESN'T.
Don't base your decision to visit a website on the keywords or URL. Base it on knowing that your browser will not ever execute any code from there without asking first, will not give out your personal information, and won't let you go to a previously unvisited site without warning you massively about entering your passwords etc. And certainly won't "just go" there by you viewing an email with that URL on it somewhere.
Security by "good boy / naughty boy" lists is not security.
national-lottery.co.uk
(No, seriously... try the alternatives without the hyphen and it redirects to the hyphened domain).
I have a Bluetooth mouse. It loses connection and isn't brilliant but you could use it for casual word-processing or similar use.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard. It works okay.
I work in a school. Put ten of them in a room and it all falls apart. If they aren't directly interfering the hassle of getting one and only one to join on to one and only one computer is a pain in the butt. Windows isn't particularly great at this, even on 8.
But at home I have four wireless XBox 360 controllers on a cheap dongle thing I bought from Amazon. Works perfectly, don't need to set anything up, recognised by all games, if one goes to sleep, you press a button and carry on.
Bluetooth isn't perfect and probably not good for this kind of thing. Wireless is even worse as you then have a controller-over-IP situation. There is no real alternative.
Also, go buy a bluetooth PC keyboard/mouse compared to the cheapest of "other wireless" sets. You'll pay more. I can only presume that this is patent or similar licensing. There are also a lot fewer models of such things because the cheap wireless stuff just works. You don't need to know the ins-and-outs of a protocol like the XBox controllers. You can pick up cheap dongles and controllers that are compatible for next to nothing, so it's not hard to work out and not "secret".
Nope, just never played a Fallout game through choice. Just not my kind of thing. And Dishonored I've literally never heard of until now because I'm just that old-fashioned that I've not looked at it.
The problem is that there are so many games, I won't have heard / care about quite a lot of them, even if my Steam library is brimming over (1000+ at the last count), and I have - I think - literally every online PC games service going.
I just haven't cared about consoles or certain genres entirely and some titles I played once, hated, and never went back.
And, it has to be said, the 90's were the era I loved the most. I have re-bought just about every game I played in that decade at least two-three times over (on Steam, GOG, for friends, etc.). But Fallout? The first two wouldn't have interested me, and 3 onwards looks like a complete genre change. I wouldn't have played 1 and 2, and by the time 3 was out, I'd stopped buying mainstream games except for those that were cheap, demoed well, etc.
That's why I haven't heard of Dishonored, most likely. 2012 release? It's just starting to come into my "look it up, see if it was actually any good, set aside a few quid on Steam" considerations. Wouldn't be able to play it without thinking of Shadow Warrior, most likely, or even Thief.
Games just go in cycles and after a while you've played every genre and spin-off and it gets dull. You know this because you start referring to games in terms of other games: "GTA V? It's like Driver in a more open-world and you can walk about."
Fallout just looks like Ultima-meets-Diablo then turns into something Rage/Skyrimmy later on.
I mean, meh. At least Elite:Dangerous held promise for a long while, going back to something that few others have attempted. I just bought Chaos Reborn instead of any of the above... at least it "feels" a bit like that 1980's Games Workshop game I had on ZX Spectrum.
I'm getting old too.
I don't think I've played a Fallout at all, have never HEARD of Dishonoured and couldn't care less about Doom any more.
All the big-name games I have wanted in the last ten years that were hyping me up - disappointed in them all. Aliens:CM, Elite:Dangerous, you name it. Couldn't care less. GTA 5 was another troll-out of the franchise but was at least worth the money.
Everything else? Indie games and emulation, my friend. I've played more Master of Orion in the last year than I have any game that costs £50 on release.
If you're picking a degree subject because you hope to earn more money later, don't bother. Seriously. That's not the point of a degree at all. It's also seriously crass commercialism of your talent.
Pick a degree in a subject you are GOOD at. You go there to learn, not to make money later. You will enjoy it, you will learn lots (no matter how good you thought you were), and you will want to stay in academia as long as you can.
Academia is for you to create a brain that learns, learns fast, learns lots. That skill is transferrable to any career path. But you don't WANT a career path. If you are at all good enough to not have to have a career outside academia, you are living the dream, my friend. Careers are horrible, boring things that you do for money even if you love the underlying skills (and I guarantee that you won't exercise much of them if you go into a career).
Study what interests you. Prove that you can expand your mind. Then people will give you jobs on that basis. And you'll be bright enough to begin startup, work for yourself, etc. rather than get stuck doing someone else's dog-work that just happens to coincide with one skill you have that they don't.
My degree is in maths (with computer science as a "minor" as it would be called in the US). I work in IT. I don't use any of it unless I'm explaining deep theory to other IT guys that have never needed to know what a spanning-tree is exactly, but are curious.now they have someone who can explain it. But my first client of ten years of self-employment hired me because I had a degree. It proves something about ability to stay, ability to learn, base intellectual level, dedication, etc.
My girlfriend is a PhD. All her friends are PhD's. Most of them didn't get "real" jobs until way into their 30's. And most of those are high-end jobs in labs that you need to have a PhD in order to even be considered for. She's given talks to conferences over all the continent, has published papers with her name on and techniques in, and earns more than I ever could.
Don't base 5-7 years of your life on a bet to win the most money later, based on making your life a misery now. It won't pay off if you do that. Do what you enjoy, then choose a career as a last resort if you really need to and end up in that position. Work is far from everything. And money, though nice, doesn't come automatically just because you have a degree in a related subject. In fact, I'd claim the opposite.
I work in schools. You know what they say about teachers? Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Most of the teachers I've worked with my entire life are out-qualified by someone with a master's. The only Dr (PhD) in my latest school was a librarian.
It bears no correlation, you do it for yourself, which makes you a better, happier, more learned self. Then you go into a career you enjoy when you realise you need money.
Fuck people who work just for money.
I agree.
But I have to say that "can be broken with enough... time" is entirely the point of encryption. The time required is often recommended to be longer than the heat-death of the universe at a given rate for the expected adversary (i.e. lone hacker, or nation state).
There's a reason the spying agencies hate encryption and try to subvert it by other methods (software flaws, stealing keys, downgrading encryption levels, etc.) instead.
I have to agree.
I'd rather have a bigger / better screen than a slightly faster processor.
I'd rather have more battery life than a slightly faster processor.
I'd rather have more storage than a slightly faster processor.
I'd rather have more RAM than a slightly faster processor.
I'd rather have two slower processors than one fast one.
I don't even look at processor speed any more. I buy hundreds of machines every year and it doesn't even factor any more. Who cares? They all meet what would be my minimum spec anyway, even for the cheapest, and other specs are much more important.
I used to be the geek that people asked what to buy because I was the only one they knew who could understand it.
For the last five years, my recommendation has instead been "Go to a store, pick it up and play with it, check the holes on it (USB, HDMI, etc.), screen size, keyboard type, etc. are what you want, take the model number, buy it online, bring it to me and I'll wipe out the crap antivirus etc. for you and put a proper one on." The specs to an average user just don't matter any more. They barely matter to a business (I specify a minimum RAM and that's about it nowadays). Power user obviously still compare everything but, you know what, my laptop is several years old and eats things like GTA V for breakfast. I can't see that specs on a tablet would matter at all any more. Of course you don't want a 10MHz chip in there, but anything commercially available is just fine.
My G27 has...
Improved bearings and gears.
Steel shift paddles.
Leather-covered wheel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Again.... what's new here apart from the incredibly ugly and crappy joypad-like controller shoved into the middle? (G27 has D-pad on the wheel on the shifter etc. there too but never mind).
"U.S. officials privately said China was behind it."
Which officials, and why won't they speak on-record? Because they know that, stupidly, they've said that cyber-attacks could be seen as an act of war. And none of them are stupid enough to directly declare war on China on the basis of fuck-all evidence beyond "we got hacked, looked like the last hop had a whois somewhere in China".
This isn't enough to put in the papers, this isn't enough to act upon, but fuck if the US won't let *that* stand in their way.
You have NO WAY of knowing whether China are doing this, officially or not. When you do, you can make news stories and bring it up in international committees. Until then, it's some Chinese kid who's found a good source of credit card data to buy some Steam games for all the fuck you know.
Dickheads like these "officials" are either a) trying to put so much implication into people's heads that people just assume you ARE at war with China or b) have fuck-all to go on and speak carelessly and dangerously.
I'm not American, nor Chinese. But, fuck, this is a slippery slope if every time some hacker in Beijing touches your systems you're going to cry wolf and accuse China of officially stealing sensitive data.
What's the matter? Been too long since you had a decent enemy who could shoot back?
So, not being funny - what the hell does this do that you'd want in a steering wheel? Because it looks like nothing more than the same stuff with a cheap controller slapped on. Trust me, if you can afford one of those - even second-hand - you can buy your own damn controller that'll be better than that junk.
Seriously, the G27 has all that - anti-backlash, helical gearing, etc. and, as pointed out, comes with the six speed shifter as standard too.
Honestly, Logitech, what the fuck do you think you're selling here?
I do the IT for schools.
The largest, most complex heating system I've ever seen is a bunch of thermostats, pumps, temperature sensors and boiler start-up times in a piece of crappy HTML running on a boiler control system which costs 1% of what the heating system cost (and most of that shit is software licensing and support, not programming).
Seriously, it gives a nice diagram with all the in and out temperatures for multiple boilers, spread over the entire site, with temperature reading for other places (including external), and a "program" (really just a table of values) for when to start up in the morning depending on what the outside temperature is and/or whether the system's water temperature is ramping up as normal in that area.
Honestly, the control part is fucking simple. It's not so simple to have something controlling 30-year-old systems that still running on a 30-year-old system, but the actual job it's doing is pretty minimal.
A modern system might run proper cabling to / wireless sensors that don't interfere but would basically be the same thing. More likely, the system is just being replaced completely, including the majority of the HVAC equipment (or at least the centralised units if not the ducts / outlets / radiators / whatever).
In all the schools I've ever worked there are rooms full of boilers all over that cost millions. Usually they are run from a control panel with a tiny microprocessor and - if you're lucky - some kind of serial or Ethernet controller somewhere.
The hard part is not the software, or the schedules, or the algorithms involved, it's keeping the system running and integrating the parts you want to work with the system you want. Boiler manufacturers on that scale tend to want you to buy their controllers, and won't play well with anything else without a huge premium on the hardware.
Dabs.com used to run all their systems from a DEC Alpha with software that the owner created.
When it was time to replace it, they cocked up the site royally for months even with masses of hardware.
http://www.channelregister.co....
They can't legally do so.
What you agree to in a contract has to be reasonable, and a court of law decides that, not Paypal or whatever you agreed to.
Automatic inclusion of any and all future clauses is unreasonable.
In the EU, and it appears the US, robocalls are illegal without prior and explicit consent.
Just because a piece of paper, signed by you, with your knowledge, says something does not trump your rights. Statutory rights. Sound familiar?
It's a dirty move, but it's also a stupid - and unenforceable - one. As I said at the time - try it, Paypal - just go for it. See what happen with the backing of EU law, no matter what I agreed to, where you are based or anything else.
Companies do not make the law. The law makes companies.
Google don't need to provide any more than Apple have done. The *capability* to do so.
In fact, they already do that, it's just not made a huge fuss about because - why would you unless you DIDN'T have it? Google don't make their own ad-blocker the same as Apple don't make their own ad-blocker, but now they are just providing the function to allow such things.
This just allows ad-blocking plugins on iOS, basically. Chrome's had plugins on iOS for ages: Safari's had plugins too. But neither were able to have ad-blocking plugins because Apple didn't approve / design for them.
http://lifehacker.com/chrome-f...
The problem is, in the Apple mono-culture, you have to wait for Apple to add the functionality before you can use it. Try finding an MDM product that can actually do things on managed iPads / iPhones that Apple don't provide an MDM API for. You won't. The MDM API is supplied by Apple and no matter what you use, that's all you can use to modify Apple MDM functions, settings, etc. There is no MDM app that can push an app over-the-air without the user having to sign in to iTunes App Store to authorise it as well. Because Apple just don't provide that functionality, even on "supervised" devices.
As usual, this is an "Apple adds features that everyone else has had for decades" story that somehow turns it into something earth-shattering when, actually, Apple are playing catch-up after years of denial for such features.