There are rechargeable AA batteries too. Also it's a generally bad idea to use most non-rechargeable batteries in a DSLR as they don't last for very long. The only kind that works very well is the non-rechargeable lithium, but those are so expensive you might as well buy NiMH ones instead.
Because hard disks, even the high end ones, have quite low IOPS. You can attain the same performance level with much fewer SSDs. If what you need is IOPS and not lots of storage that's a good thing even. You reach the required level with much fewer drives, so you need less power, less space and less cooling.
What kind of problems could a DSLR cause in space? If there's potential trouble with the batteries, for instance, there exist DSLRs that use plain AA batteries, and surely somebody already tried to bring into space something that uses those.
Other than that, a DSLR seems like a rather harmless device to me. The good ones are sealed, so they should be unlikely to produce any sort of contamination.
Ig Nobel (note the Ig) prizes are awarded for weird, but actual research. Unless there was some scientific value to your organization of shoes you wouldn't get one. His photographing of his food is at very least interesting for nutrition. It looks like he also did some sort of analysis on it, though I can't find what exactly. So, this is actually a very long running study, and not just an OCD thing.
Is Linux open? NO! They don'y just let anybody add code to the kernel project do they! There are people who look at submitted code and CONTROL what gets in and what doesn't. They must be evil too huh.
Sure they do. They don't have to accept your patches of course, but nobody stops you from changing anything in the kernel. If they don't like it, you can still redistribute it on your own, and even make devices based on it.
Android for instance -- the kernel devs don't like Google's modifications as they currently are, so they're not going in the official kernel just yet. But that isn't stopping Google from maintaining their own version, and from making phones with it.
Also, IMO there's a misunderstanding here in the closed vs OSS development models. In closed development there's an ultimate authority that decides what goes in the code. In OSS anybody can run their fork, and the "kernel project" as in what's hosted on kernel.org is only a de facto standard. It's official only by consensus. Somebody doing a better job could cause the developers to switch over, like what happened with XFree86. Or there may be no single standard at all, forks can exist at the same time, like the different BSDs for instance.
50k? Oh wow. For a "site" that is available around the world, that is pathetic. A dutch only site already does 10k easily. So 50k for the entire world is nothing.
It's up to 57K now. This is not WoW, there are no instances or independent realms. Everybody is in the same world and has their stuff on a central server.
BTW, that seems to be around what Eve Online should have, but nobody seems to be making posts about that Eve is dying.
And how many of the people logged in are bots?
Not a whole lot, they recently clamped down on the useless ones. So there ones that exist should be mostly land management and such, and those exist because there are a lot of people to manage.
Just like Second Life, the 3D web is not something people actually want
The 50K people logged in right now would seem to disagree. Right now it's a fairly low activity time, should go up later. And from the inside it seems to be still getting larger.
They think it sounds great. Looking at pretty things instead of reading boring stuff is in their eyes the ultimate evolution of computing. That's why you keep reading this sort of stuff all the time. But it will never stick, because in reality, it's just not very useful.
I see it in a different way. Not everything has to be a revolution. Back when there was a lot of news about SL there was a lot of hype for sure, but there must be some use to it, since it didn't die when it stopped getting talked about so much. Some people see no point in SL, that's perfectly fine. I see no point WoW either, but that doesn't make it a failure just because it fails to appeal to every person on the planet.
I think this will be in the same way. Uses will be found for it. It won't be a revolution that will change every website everywhere. Not everybody has an espresso machine, and not everybody is going to have 3D on their website, but that doesn't mean those aren't useful things.
I have some news for you: Music is nice to have, but I value my freedom and the Internet more. If you're going to stand between me and that, you're the one I can do without. And if you somehow succeed in instituting draconian laws, I'll make sure that not a cent of my money goes to you, and will simply find some other way to entretain myself.
If you want me to buy your music, make quality, unrestricted music. Drop the awful compression, drop the DRM, and drop the bullshit. Offer FLAC for download with no strings attached, selling individual tracks, and I could be interested. Sell DRMed stuff, and I definitely won't be.
BTW, I'm surprised you complain yet miss such an obvious chance to advertise your work. What do you make?
Standards should be open. Companies then can choose to make their closed implementations, and that is fine, but an open implementation must be possible as well.
It is not necessary that every web browser uses an OSS library for decoding video. It is however necessary that the spec for the video is open and unrestricted, so that anybody can implement without paying for a license. Then if somebody wants to charge money for their implementation, they can, and if they want to release it for everybody's benefit, they also can.
But Flash still uses H.264 too. I don't see too many people, either normal web users, webmasters or those making Flash applets complaining.
For now. Just wait until they decide to start charging for the license, then there will be plenty to complain about, but it'll be hard to avoid paying up, since it will be so widely used.
It's good you reject closed-source products by principles, I wish I would too. But the reality is, people just want the best performing tool for the job and frankly the older I get the more I think so too.
People are short sighted. I think long term.
I had these fundamentalist ideas in late teen years, but then I faced the real world. Now I pick the right tool for the job, be it open source or closed.
I had these ideas in late teen years, but then I faced the real world. I worked with proprietary stuff enough to figure out that indeed I don't like it, so I got a job where I work exclusively with Open Source and release my code under the GPL. It's really awesome, you should try it.
I use Windows on desktop because I game and think the experience is better, while still giving me freedom to mess around with the system.
I use Linux on the desktop because that's what works best for me -- though for me "works" nearly implies "comes with source". Even if it works now, some day it'll do something I don't want it to, or not do something I want it to. That's why I require the source upfront, then I don't have that issue.
I use Linux on servers because they perform a lot better and command line usage with servers is a lot better, and in that case and scriptability Windows doesn't come even close.
I use Linux on servers for the same reason.
But fundamentalism and closed mindset in the end is just stupid.
It's not fundamentalism, it's long term thinking. I don't like exchanging short term convenience for lock-in, licensing payments and major limitations later.
And as the time passes, OSS software improves so things keep getting better. Maybe you should give it another try.
Any format (and its software requirements) can succeed as long as the users will put up with it.
It can, yes. But there's a difference between what can be done, and what should be done.
And of course, there's Adobe Flash.
Actually, as of recently the Flash spec is available without restrictions, and there's gnash, a GNU implementation.
To simply say that "nothing non-free can even enter the conversation" is ridiculous. Are your clothes free or open source? Your car? Your house? Your shampoo, your radio, your computer's processor, your keyboard?
No, but I think they should be, it'd be better if they were, and that it's a goal well worth fighting for.
Especially since we're talking about standards here, and I don't see how something with one possible implementation can be a standard. A standard is a published spec anybody can implement. "Buy from $company" isn't a standard.
Actually, I think you used quite horrible examples as well. Let's see:
Clothes: the "spec" is open. Anybody can make their own pants if they wish to, and nobody is going to come ask for license money. Car: Also open and well documented. House: Built according to code Shampoo: has a very loose open spec Radio: How to receive FM signals is well documented and not restricted AFAIK CPU: some (though not all) are open, with complete specs and source available Keyboard: Either PS/2 or USB, is made to fulfill an open specification.
Every single thing you picked as an example complies with an open standard, can be made by anybody without needing to pay for a license, and is interoperable (any car from any manufacturer works and is legal to drive, so long it complies with the relevant standards for instance)
Companies can make excellent closed-source products. Communities can make excellent open-source products.
It's not about the quality. It's about a principle. I reject a closed "standard" for web video on principle, no matter how well implemented.
I'm kind of disappointed at the "you're-an-idiot-because-hard-drives-aren't-meant-to-do-that" attitude in these posts. Is this really indicative of the level of imagination and curiosity on Slashdot?
Why? Without any additional information it's the right answer.
It's a very unusual thing to do. If the submitter really needs to do this, then an explanation of why is it needed would help with giving an answer relevant to the requirements (is an old MFM drive/floppy a viable option? doesn't say)
In the more likely case that the submitter has the wrong idea I think it's much better to just say that instead of making them get involved in a huge project that they don't need, when a much simpler solution could be used instead.
Pretty much any major scientific endeavor started off with individuals with only a vague clue how to accomplish the task they wanted to complete. While I'm sure sometimes scientists slave away in private, most commonly they collaborate with their peers/co-workers to bounce ideas and seek inspiration. I would say: "If you don't have to ask, you aren't reaching high enough"
Well, this works for when you have a real dedication to something, and are willing to spend years or a lifetime on it. But I doubt that's the case here.
The question seems to me like the sign of lack of research. Before signing up for a project like that, you should figure out whether it's technically doable, and whether you have at least in theory the knowledge and skills to accomplish it. It looks like the submitter doesn't.
If your life's goal is to write a game, then yeah, you can go to a programmer, ask what is needed to make a game, learn programming, study computer science, learn enough math/physics/etc for the kind of game you want, and get it done, maybe 5-10 years later.
But if you've got a job, you've been given a project to make a game and know so little that you can only make a very general "how do I make a game?" question, then you're completely screwed, as nobody is going to wait for you to figure all that out, and unless you really, really want to do it like above, you won't have the commitment either.
And actually there have been a couple plausible suggestions floated here, so it'd definitely not impossible (RLL/MFM HDD, floppies, custom firmware)
Sure, but if the submitter could actually pull it off they'd be asking a different question. It wouldn't be "how do I write arbitrary bits to a disk platter?", it'd be something a lot more specific, like "I'm using a MFM controller, want to get X done (detailed explanation), do this (detailed explanation), and get this result, which is not what I want. Why is it doing that?"
But with the question being made here it seems very likely that if you gave them a MFM drive and controller they wouldn't know what to do with it.
"I'm working on a project to build a nuclear powerplant. Is there documentation on how to do it? Obviously a free and open source solution would be preferable, but I'm open to anything at this point."
It seems to me that if you're involved in such a project and have to ask how to do it, it's doomed.
Also, the whole idea of it seems rather impossible. Why would you want to do this in the first place? Have in mind that hard disks don't write bits as is, not just because of ECC. They use an encoding to ensure that there are no long strings of 1s or 0s. If you just wrote some data without regards to that you'd run into a sequence you'd be unable to read later, due to not having a clock signal to figure out where a bit ends and the next begins.
Modern hard disks require using special encodings and servo data in order to be readable at those densities. It just makes little sense to me to want to bypass it. Unless you're working for a disk manufacturer this just seems very odd, but in that case you'd have access to the required equipment and information.
You wanted a design that meets your requirements, and when security is part of the design it's an admission of failure?
Yes if it doesn't fulfill the original requirement.
The requirement was "a system that allows building arbitrary SQL queries while being immune by design to SQL injection". The readonly access is good and all from a security perspective, but the reason to bother with that is either the admission or the suspicion that SQL injection could be possible after all, and making it readonly is a way to limit damage.
But, let's do it in SQL. You can use a view to eliminate duplication. You can use Order by case [4guysfromrolla.com] to determine which column to use, no duplication needed.
That's definitely an use of CASE I hadn't thought of, thanks for that. But that's still rather limited.
The main problem here as I see it, is that what I asked for is a general solution that will work in all cases, and gave a few examples of what I might want to use it for. Now the examples of course don't use every possible feature, so by cleverly crafting some SQL you can figure out how to implement the examples I was talking of, without needing a general system. But that kind of misses the point I was trying to make.
All this started from a post of that there should be a database API that guarantees the impossibility of SQL injection by design. I asked what would this API look like. Implementing a set of stored procedures that safely accomplish a specified task completely misses the point, because all the security there hinges on the programmer knowing what she's doing while writing those stored procedures and the code that calls them, and that's not really a "API secure by design" thing.
If this makes it clearer, what I asked for is an example of what an API that would replace a db_handle.Execute(string command) function with a functionally equivalent one guaranteed to be safe, which keeps the ability to make any kind of query to the DB and construct it from pieces, like you can with the string.
Yes, that's why despite the repeal of the prohibition the Mafia is still as strong as ever. Right.
I think that political reasons and economic reasons work differently. Political reasons are easily changeable, especially if they change slowly, by shifting to "new threats" or becoming more radical. The way of running a political organization stays about the same, the funding source doesn't necessarily change, people with experience in some area retain their expertise.
But economical reasons aren't so flexible. If drugs are legalized it'll pull the rug from under a lot of organizations. You don't just switch to say, the weapons black market from one day to the other. The suppliers are different, the places where to get them are different, the way of selling is different. There will be existing competition. And since guns can be had legally there will be much fewer people willing to buy. Drugs are one of the very few things that are outright illegal that large amounts of people want. Any alternative will probably be in much less demand, and just that is going to hurt quite a bit.
With the iPad, I thought the stories were mostly "IT SUX!111!!!!", because it wasnt as great as the incredible hype, or jokes about the name.
The backlash was mostly in the comments though, the news sites were all concentrating on describing how awesome it was. One even insulted its readers for not getting it.
I think the Kindle deserved/deserves news, dont you? I always enjoy hearing about it, and I considered buying one
It is noteworthy, but as far as "always" wanting to hear about it, definitely not. I don't want a "kindle news daily" section. Release news with specs, sure. Breaking news if they start exploding too. Weekly discussions about what an awesome thing it is and how it's going to change everything, that I do not need.
I see the iPad as deserving lots of coverage, as its going to be a real product, from an amazingly hot company, and it could truly be a "-killer" product.
See, this is just the sort of thing I do not like. I don't care it's an "amazingly hot company", or that it could be a "killer". All that is hype bullshit. Just tell me what it does, give me some specs, and I'll decide for myself if it's a "killer" product or not. I have my needs, if something satisfies them I buy it, and if it doesn't I don't. I don't buy things just because they're the hot thing to have, or as a fashion accessory.
What you're describing is basically an adhoc query environment, which should not be allowed. That's the point. Figure out what your database needs to serve up, and have a parameterized query ready for it. Pass all variables through as parameters.
It's not practical in all cases. Take for instance an interface that displays a list of songs, and allows sorting by name, artist, genre, duration or size. Repeating the same query with minor variations 5 times is ugly, and leads to maintenance problems.
What you're describing is basically an adhoc query environment, which should not be allowed. That's the point. Figure out what your database needs to serve up, and have a parameterized query ready for it. Pass all variables through as parameters.
But this kind of thing isn't unusual at all. Look at any bug tracker. You can search by any field, using any condition, sorting by any column. It's not completely unrestricted, but the number of permutations is still very large.
The list of things I'd like to do wouldn't necessarily happen all at once of course. Sometimes I want to vary the columns I get, sometimes the joins, sometimes the sorting, and sometimes there's a combination of all those. But for me at least it's not an unrestricted SQL command line, it's a flexible query with many possible permutations.
If you want to provide arbitrary queries with arbitrary joins and whatever else that is not a good idea, you're going to have to authenticate a user first to ensure they have rights to do arbitrary stuff - usually on a read-only replicated database copy. But that's not the system that was described.
This is an admission of failure -- you can't do what's needed, so you opt to limit damage. But it's not going to work perfectly. Even with readonly access SQL injection allows things like creating a query with 20 joins that will DoS the server.
So to answer your question, the system would not allow SQL string concatenation - only calling stored procs and passing variables.
This is also not very practical. I have an application that consists almost entirely of stored procedure calls. But still, there are limits to that approach.
For instance, this DB can be used by two applications. One talks to humans directly, so it outputs text. The other interacts with another system, so it needs identifiers. The easiest and cleanest way to do this for me was:
my $cmd = "SELECT stats.*"; $cmd.= ",users.name" if ($want_names); $cmd.= " FROM get_user_stats() stats"; $cmd.= " INNER JOIN users ON stats.user_id = users.user_id" if ($want_names);
If the stored proc always returned the names it'd be wasting time on an extra join that's not needed in many cases. The other alternative is to duplicate something, but duplication often leads to problems, and is ugly.
I think you didn't understand my question. The grandparent said: "That is, the only possible way to get or insert data from a database should be the correct one". That excludes any kind of "habit you need to learn and stick to", it must simply be impossible to do otherwise.
My question is, how do you actually implement a system like that? I'd like an example code of a hypothetical system that would allow me to compose an arbitrary SQL query with variable amounts of selected columns, JOIN and WHERE clauses, etc, while guaranteeing that it won't be vulnerable to SQL injection.
To make the above more challenging, my code also constructs queries that sometimes include calls to stored procedures inside them.
But, without the iPhone, and Apple in general, what would the "mainstream tech news" be about? "oooh, facebook changed its privacy settings again"...? Tivo? Dell has a sale on, and you can save $5 bucks on a netbook? These are not very exciting topics, probably wouldnt get much traffic:)
I'd like more things like the cyborg composer and laser mosquito zapper. Generally I have very little interest in products news unless it's something with a significant improvement.
Big product launches, such as new cellphones, deserve at least some major attention. I'm an iPhone user, but I enjoy reading Android coverage, and I read what I can about the Palm Pre. Although, Android OS phones and the Pre are not really on sale here in NZ, its not much fun reading about things we cant really buy!
The thing is unlike all the others Apple gets really insane and annoying levels of reporting. The ipad had 3 stories at least posted about it, and I had people telling me they were sure it'd make the phone I had just bought obsolete, all before anybody even knew what it looked like. I consider this not only to be annoying but completely useless as far as news go. When people are convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread even without knowing what it is, I know it's impossible to get any reliable information about it.
Personally, this is the complete antithesis of the way I evaluate things. It makes it impossible to make a good rational decision based on its actual worth. In cases like this of collective insanity I can only conclude that all online coverage of it is useless, ignore it, and when looking for something to buy exclude Apple products outright unless I have personal experience with the item.
I agree, my point is, theres all this raw HATE for the iPhone, much of it from bitter people who for whatever reason cannot have an iPhone, and "the coverage sucks" is a very common complaint I hear.
It's not as much hate as annoyance over all this horrible hype it constantly gets. Yes, we get it, you like it. But couldn't you just shut up about it? It's not new, I know it exist so no need to tell me, and there are more interesting things to talk about.
Making a computer that can write lyrics as good as And One can manage can't be very difficult.
A growing pain within my pop divine Will I ever regret the line Switching on the light I will not reassign Girlfriend's girlfriends never could be mine
And at least those tried to say something meaningful. Vengaboys released a song with lyrics consisting of repetitions of "Up and down", and Daft Punk one of repetitions of "around the world". People still buy that stuff, so it looks like it's good enough for many people's standards.
Slashdot Mirror
There are rechargeable AA batteries too. Also it's a generally bad idea to use most non-rechargeable batteries in a DSLR as they don't last for very long. The only kind that works very well is the non-rechargeable lithium, but those are so expensive you might as well buy NiMH ones instead.
Sure, but why do you put 60 drives in a RAID?
Because hard disks, even the high end ones, have quite low IOPS. You can attain the same performance level with much fewer SSDs. If what you need is IOPS and not lots of storage that's a good thing even. You reach the required level with much fewer drives, so you need less power, less space and less cooling.
Can you elaborate more on that?
What kind of problems could a DSLR cause in space? If there's potential trouble with the batteries, for instance, there exist DSLRs that use plain AA batteries, and surely somebody already tried to bring into space something that uses those.
Other than that, a DSLR seems like a rather harmless device to me. The good ones are sealed, so they should be unlikely to produce any sort of contamination.
Ig Nobel (note the Ig) prizes are awarded for weird, but actual research. Unless there was some scientific value to your organization of shoes you wouldn't get one. His photographing of his food is at very least interesting for nutrition. It looks like he also did some sort of analysis on it, though I can't find what exactly. So, this is actually a very long running study, and not just an OCD thing.
Sure they do. They don't have to accept your patches of course, but nobody stops you from changing anything in the kernel. If they don't like it, you can still redistribute it on your own, and even make devices based on it.
Android for instance -- the kernel devs don't like Google's modifications as they currently are, so they're not going in the official kernel just yet. But that isn't stopping Google from maintaining their own version, and from making phones with it.
Also, IMO there's a misunderstanding here in the closed vs OSS development models. In closed development there's an ultimate authority that decides what goes in the code. In OSS anybody can run their fork, and the "kernel project" as in what's hosted on kernel.org is only a de facto standard. It's official only by consensus. Somebody doing a better job could cause the developers to switch over, like what happened with XFree86. Or there may be no single standard at all, forks can exist at the same time, like the different BSDs for instance.
It's up to 57K now. This is not WoW, there are no instances or independent realms. Everybody is in the same world and has their stuff on a central server.
BTW, that seems to be around what Eve Online should have, but nobody seems to be making posts about that Eve is dying.
Not a whole lot, they recently clamped down on the useless ones. So there ones that exist should be mostly land management and such, and those exist because there are a lot of people to manage.
The 50K people logged in right now would seem to disagree. Right now it's a fairly low activity time, should go up later. And from the inside it seems to be still getting larger.
I see it in a different way. Not everything has to be a revolution. Back when there was a lot of news about SL there was a lot of hype for sure, but there must be some use to it, since it didn't die when it stopped getting talked about so much. Some people see no point in SL, that's perfectly fine. I see no point WoW either, but that doesn't make it a failure just because it fails to appeal to every person on the planet.
I think this will be in the same way. Uses will be found for it. It won't be a revolution that will change every website everywhere. Not everybody has an espresso machine, and not everybody is going to have 3D on their website, but that doesn't mean those aren't useful things.
I have some news for you: Music is nice to have, but I value my freedom and the Internet more. If you're going to stand between me and that, you're the one I can do without. And if you somehow succeed in instituting draconian laws, I'll make sure that not a cent of my money goes to you, and will simply find some other way to entretain myself.
If you want me to buy your music, make quality, unrestricted music. Drop the awful compression, drop the DRM, and drop the bullshit. Offer FLAC for download with no strings attached, selling individual tracks, and I could be interested. Sell DRMed stuff, and I definitely won't be.
BTW, I'm surprised you complain yet miss such an obvious chance to advertise your work. What do you make?
Standards should be open. Companies then can choose to make their closed implementations, and that is fine, but an open implementation must be possible as well.
It is not necessary that every web browser uses an OSS library for decoding video. It is however necessary that the spec for the video is open and unrestricted, so that anybody can implement without paying for a license. Then if somebody wants to charge money for their implementation, they can, and if they want to release it for everybody's benefit, they also can.
For now. Just wait until they decide to start charging for the license, then there will be plenty to complain about, but it'll be hard to avoid paying up, since it will be so widely used.
People are short sighted. I think long term.
I had these ideas in late teen years, but then I faced the real world. I worked with proprietary stuff enough to figure out that indeed I don't like it, so I got a job where I work exclusively with Open Source and release my code under the GPL. It's really awesome, you should try it.
I use Linux on the desktop because that's what works best for me -- though for me "works" nearly implies "comes with source". Even if it works now, some day it'll do something I don't want it to, or not do something I want it to. That's why I require the source upfront, then I don't have that issue.
I use Linux on servers for the same reason.
It's not fundamentalism, it's long term thinking. I don't like exchanging short term convenience for lock-in, licensing payments and major limitations later.
And as the time passes, OSS software improves so things keep getting better. Maybe you should give it another try.
Fine, if we're going to do it this way:
I disagree, and:
What the reply to the post you linked said
This looks like it's going to be a really exciting conversation.
Add me to that list
It can, yes. But there's a difference between what can be done, and what should be done.
Actually, as of recently the Flash spec is available without restrictions, and there's gnash, a GNU implementation.
No, but I think they should be, it'd be better if they were, and that it's a goal well worth fighting for.
Especially since we're talking about standards here, and I don't see how something with one possible implementation can be a standard. A standard is a published spec anybody can implement. "Buy from $company" isn't a standard.
Actually, I think you used quite horrible examples as well. Let's see:
Clothes: the "spec" is open. Anybody can make their own pants if they wish to, and nobody is going to come ask for license money.
Car: Also open and well documented.
House: Built according to code
Shampoo: has a very loose open spec
Radio: How to receive FM signals is well documented and not restricted AFAIK
CPU: some (though not all) are open, with complete specs and source available
Keyboard: Either PS/2 or USB, is made to fulfill an open specification.
Every single thing you picked as an example complies with an open standard, can be made by anybody without needing to pay for a license, and is interoperable (any car from any manufacturer works and is legal to drive, so long it complies with the relevant standards for instance)
It's not about the quality. It's about a principle. I reject a closed "standard" for web video on principle, no matter how well implemented.
Why? Without any additional information it's the right answer.
It's a very unusual thing to do. If the submitter really needs to do this, then an explanation of why is it needed would help with giving an answer relevant to the requirements (is an old MFM drive/floppy a viable option? doesn't say)
In the more likely case that the submitter has the wrong idea I think it's much better to just say that instead of making them get involved in a huge project that they don't need, when a much simpler solution could be used instead.
Quite, yeah.
Well, this works for when you have a real dedication to something, and are willing to spend years or a lifetime on it. But I doubt that's the case here.
The question seems to me like the sign of lack of research. Before signing up for a project like that, you should figure out whether it's technically doable, and whether you have at least in theory the knowledge and skills to accomplish it. It looks like the submitter doesn't.
If your life's goal is to write a game, then yeah, you can go to a programmer, ask what is needed to make a game, learn programming, study computer science, learn enough math/physics/etc for the kind of game you want, and get it done, maybe 5-10 years later.
But if you've got a job, you've been given a project to make a game and know so little that you can only make a very general "how do I make a game?" question, then you're completely screwed, as nobody is going to wait for you to figure all that out, and unless you really, really want to do it like above, you won't have the commitment either.
Sure, but if the submitter could actually pull it off they'd be asking a different question. It wouldn't be "how do I write arbitrary bits to a disk platter?", it'd be something a lot more specific, like "I'm using a MFM controller, want to get X done (detailed explanation), do this (detailed explanation), and get this result, which is not what I want. Why is it doing that?"
But with the question being made here it seems very likely that if you gave them a MFM drive and controller they wouldn't know what to do with it.
"I'm working on a project to build a nuclear powerplant. Is there documentation on how to do it? Obviously a free and open source solution would be preferable, but I'm open to anything at this point."
It seems to me that if you're involved in such a project and have to ask how to do it, it's doomed.
Also, the whole idea of it seems rather impossible. Why would you want to do this in the first place? Have in mind that hard disks don't write bits as is, not just because of ECC. They use an encoding to ensure that there are no long strings of 1s or 0s. If you just wrote some data without regards to that you'd run into a sequence you'd be unable to read later, due to not having a clock signal to figure out where a bit ends and the next begins.
Modern hard disks require using special encodings and servo data in order to be readable at those densities. It just makes little sense to me to want to bypass it. Unless you're working for a disk manufacturer this just seems very odd, but in that case you'd have access to the required equipment and information.
Yes if it doesn't fulfill the original requirement.
The requirement was "a system that allows building arbitrary SQL queries while being immune by design to SQL injection". The readonly access is good and all from a security perspective, but the reason to bother with that is either the admission or the suspicion that SQL injection could be possible after all, and making it readonly is a way to limit damage.
That's definitely an use of CASE I hadn't thought of, thanks for that. But that's still rather limited.
The main problem here as I see it, is that what I asked for is a general solution that will work in all cases, and gave a few examples of what I might want to use it for. Now the examples of course don't use every possible feature, so by cleverly crafting some SQL you can figure out how to implement the examples I was talking of, without needing a general system. But that kind of misses the point I was trying to make.
All this started from a post of that there should be a database API that guarantees the impossibility of SQL injection by design. I asked what would this API look like. Implementing a set of stored procedures that safely accomplish a specified task completely misses the point, because all the security there hinges on the programmer knowing what she's doing while writing those stored procedures and the code that calls them, and that's not really a "API secure by design" thing.
If this makes it clearer, what I asked for is an example of what an API that would replace a db_handle.Execute(string command) function with a functionally equivalent one guaranteed to be safe, which keeps the ability to make any kind of query to the DB and construct it from pieces, like you can with the string.
Yes, that's why despite the repeal of the prohibition the Mafia is still as strong as ever. Right.
I think that political reasons and economic reasons work differently. Political reasons are easily changeable, especially if they change slowly, by shifting to "new threats" or becoming more radical. The way of running a political organization stays about the same, the funding source doesn't necessarily change, people with experience in some area retain their expertise.
But economical reasons aren't so flexible. If drugs are legalized it'll pull the rug from under a lot of organizations. You don't just switch to say, the weapons black market from one day to the other. The suppliers are different, the places where to get them are different, the way of selling is different. There will be existing competition. And since guns can be had legally there will be much fewer people willing to buy. Drugs are one of the very few things that are outright illegal that large amounts of people want. Any alternative will probably be in much less demand, and just that is going to hurt quite a bit.
The backlash was mostly in the comments though, the news sites were all concentrating on describing how awesome it was. One even insulted its readers for not getting it.
It is noteworthy, but as far as "always" wanting to hear about it, definitely not. I don't want a "kindle news daily" section. Release news with specs, sure. Breaking news if they start exploding too. Weekly discussions about what an awesome thing it is and how it's going to change everything, that I do not need.
See, this is just the sort of thing I do not like. I don't care it's an "amazingly hot company", or that it could be a "killer". All that is hype bullshit. Just tell me what it does, give me some specs, and I'll decide for myself if it's a "killer" product or not. I have my needs, if something satisfies them I buy it, and if it doesn't I don't. I don't buy things just because they're the hot thing to have, or as a fashion accessory.
It's not practical in all cases. Take for instance an interface that displays a list of songs, and allows sorting by name, artist, genre, duration or size. Repeating the same query with minor variations 5 times is ugly, and leads to maintenance problems.
But this kind of thing isn't unusual at all. Look at any bug tracker. You can search by any field, using any condition, sorting by any column. It's not completely unrestricted, but the number of permutations is still very large.
The list of things I'd like to do wouldn't necessarily happen all at once of course. Sometimes I want to vary the columns I get, sometimes the joins, sometimes the sorting, and sometimes there's a combination of all those. But for me at least it's not an unrestricted SQL command line, it's a flexible query with many possible permutations.
This is an admission of failure -- you can't do what's needed, so you opt to limit damage. But it's not going to work perfectly. Even with readonly access SQL injection allows things like creating a query with 20 joins that will DoS the server.
This is also not very practical. I have an application that consists almost entirely of stored procedure calls. But still, there are limits to that approach.
For instance, this DB can be used by two applications. One talks to humans directly, so it outputs text. The other interacts with another system, so it needs identifiers. The easiest and cleanest way to do this for me was:
If the stored proc always returned the names it'd be wasting time on an extra join that's not needed in many cases. The other alternative is to duplicate something, but duplication often leads to problems, and is ugly.
I think you didn't understand my question. The grandparent said: "That is, the only possible way to get or insert data from a database should be the correct one". That excludes any kind of "habit you need to learn and stick to", it must simply be impossible to do otherwise.
My question is, how do you actually implement a system like that? I'd like an example code of a hypothetical system that would allow me to compose an arbitrary SQL query with variable amounts of selected columns, JOIN and WHERE clauses, etc, while guaranteeing that it won't be vulnerable to SQL injection.
To make the above more challenging, my code also constructs queries that sometimes include calls to stored procedures inside them.
Please provide an example of how would it work.
For instance, in Perl I can do a query safely like this:
But, I also have a bit like this:
The second bit is also safe, but it creates a query by concatenation which could be used unsafely.
I'd like more things like the cyborg composer and laser mosquito zapper. Generally I have very little interest in products news unless it's something with a significant improvement.
The thing is unlike all the others Apple gets really insane and annoying levels of reporting. The ipad had 3 stories at least posted about it, and I had people telling me they were sure it'd make the phone I had just bought obsolete, all before anybody even knew what it looked like. I consider this not only to be annoying but completely useless as far as news go. When people are convinced it's the best thing since sliced bread even without knowing what it is, I know it's impossible to get any reliable information about it.
Personally, this is the complete antithesis of the way I evaluate things. It makes it impossible to make a good rational decision based on its actual worth. In cases like this of collective insanity I can only conclude that all online coverage of it is useless, ignore it, and when looking for something to buy exclude Apple products outright unless I have personal experience with the item.
It's not as much hate as annoyance over all this horrible hype it constantly gets. Yes, we get it, you like it. But couldn't you just shut up about it? It's not new, I know it exist so no need to tell me, and there are more interesting things to talk about.
Making a computer that can write lyrics as good as And One can manage can't be very difficult.
And at least those tried to say something meaningful. Vengaboys released a song with lyrics consisting of repetitions of "Up and down", and Daft Punk one of repetitions of "around the world". People still buy that stuff, so it looks like it's good enough for many people's standards.
The copyright laws are a tool that can be used to different ends.
Think a hammer. When you use it to build a house, that's good. When you use it to bash somebody's head in, that's bad.
Similarly with copyright. When you use it to help spread knowledge, it's good. When you use it to stiffle expression, that's bad.
Hope this helps.