Ugh. I'll admit Apple's authentication frameworks aren't the easiest thing to use the first time you hack something together. For crying out loud, though, it's fairly well-documented and they have in-depth sample code on how to use them, including running command-line programs with elevated privileges. If you can't figure it out yourself after that, use the mailing lists or pay for a developer support issue.
That any developer is passing passwords in that manner is completely reprehensible. It's a shame public flogging has gone out of style.
And if you don't have the cash or a need for all the features of the ShuttlePro, there's always the ShuttleXpress. Fewer buttons, but you still have the jog and shuttle. At half the cost of the Pro, it's not a bad deal if your needs are more modest.
The number printed on the card is really irrelevant -- they're read by the mag stripe reader at the POS, both for activation and debit (just clarifying; not discounting your idea). This actually makes production flaws all the more interesting to me. What if the machinery kept printing the right numbers, but every card produced was given the same serial in the stripe?
Walmart's cards are "rechargeable" after all (and anyone can add funds to any card), so the POS system might not find anything wrong with 100 people crediting $20 to card 412345678.
Heck, you could walk out with some gift cards that hadn't been activated yet, reprogram/restripe them to match your card, and stick them back on the shelf. As long as you knew when the balance was increased, you'd have a veritable cornucopia of digital cashflow. Granted, you're limited to spending it at Walmart or Sam's Club, but it's there.
"Talking" is a little generous for the volume level many cell-addicted people believe is necessary to make a cellular phone work.
Especially the ones who use the damn thing like it's a walkie-talkie: Quick, by my ear to listen! Quick, in front of my face to talk! Quick, back to my ear to listen again!
It's not talking on planes that's the problem. I've spent many flights talking to family, friends, or absolute strangers. It's the potential for hundreds of people like that girl in 6C talking about her vaginal pus so loud the back of the plane can hear it that frightens me.
Genesis? Yeah, but heck, you could play games sent from cable TV on the Mattel Intellivision. I think I even recall hearing someone else say another console may have done it before the Intellivision (but I can't substantiate that).
I agree with you on the viability then vs. now, too. Just because I can spend a "long" time downloading a couple gigs over my broadband connection doesn't mean I want to. The current disc-based consoles have that instant gratification: buy (or rent, or borrow) the disc, pop it in, you're done. If I have to wait 8 hours for the game to download, am I really going to be as excited? Will I even care at all by the time it's finished?
Maybe Infinium has some brilliant solution to this, but I doubt it. If you're reading this, Infinium Labs, don't even think of that terrible "episode" approach Freeloader took. Ugh.
You've finished level one. The end. Please download and install level two!
Nah, buyers just need to stop being so loose with their money and start using escrow. If a seller won't agree to escrow, even if you offer to pay all the fees, he's probably a low-life scam artist.
Many people wouldn't buy a laptop sight-unseen by mail from a classified ad, but sell it on eBay and they're tripping all over themselves trying to fork over the cash without a lick of common sense.
Big-ticket items? Escrow, escrow, escrow. And always use Escrow.com -- it's the only escrow service eBay recommends, and you won't get suckered into an escrow scam (barring any future potential for "HACKED BY CHINESE!!!11").
I've seen numerous posts regarding the inaccuracies in Secunia's reporting of Mac OS X and Linux in this report. There's one big point, though, I haven't seen anyone bring up.
Secunia is comparing Linux servers -- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Advanced Server -- to a desktop Windows (XP Pro) and an uncertain Mac OS X (are they counting OS X Server vulnerabilities? It's a mystery!).
Well, no shit you're going to get bigger Linux (and potentially OS X) numbers that way! They're comparing a desktop operating system that ships with minimal (but still too many) services enabled to a Linux distribution made up of dozens of running services and a million optional parts which may or may not be installed on any system.
Other posters can banter all they like about how Secunia isn't taking money from Microsoft, but more than a cursory glance reveals it isn't exactly a level playing field regardless of who's funding them. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Slashdot;)
Apple had no plans to broadcast the keynote this year, so my guess would be it was the same WWDC 2004 link and image everywhere else: it just dumped you here at the ADC site.
Nothing interesting there unless you plan on attending, really.
Of the applications you've mentioned, only compiling things in Xcode would have any benefit. To utilize Xgrid, the application has to be written for it, which most apps simply aren't (and given turnaround issues, it would be suck for things like Quake and MAME).
Xgrid's main benefit is in "grunt work" calculations that aren't necessarily needed immediately. Things like SETI@Home or Folding@Home would be the sort of thing Xgrid excels at: throw some data out, have it processed, get it back when it's done.
While Apple has made clustering drop-dead easy, it's really not targeted at the home or small-business user, and the potential uses are pretty limited in that field.
In a nutshell, AutoZone rapidly migrated from an SCO UnixWare solution to a Linux solution, and SCO is convinced that AutoZone couldn't possibly have done so and must be using SCO IP to run their Linux operations.
Don't forget O'Reilly offers upgrades to their books. If you absolutely must have Cocoa in a Nutshell now, snag it from Amazon and then send in your title page and $27.97 when the new edition arrives. Cheaper than buying the old edition at full price and then upgrading to the newer.
If you can wait, of course, you'll get it cheapest of all.
This used to work incredibly well if you had to call one of Microsoft's support numbers that demands a product ID. Enter an ID, you get to sit through the hold queue and then talk to someone who asks you what product you're calling about. Enter 0, the system deems it invalid and directly connects you to a rep.
I'm not sure if it still works, but it was useful in its day. Maybe the call system even does something with a product ID if you enter one now (it's a long shot, I know).
Actually, it will be the latter. Think of a macro more as a search-and-replace. Everywhere I put SOMEMACRO(x), my defined macro will be inserted, with x substituted exactly as given.
Some sample code:
// Quick-and-dirty program to demonstrate macro side-effects
int main(void) {
int i = 5;
printf("Before, i is %d.\r\n", i);
if TEST(i++)
{ // nothing.
}
printf("After, i is %d.\r\n", i);
return 1; }
After a run through the preprocessor, the if statement will be replaced with:
if ((i++ >= 0) && (i++ <= 9))
You can verify this yourself by compiling and running the program or using gcc -E filename.c | more to see the output of the precompiler stage (with macros expanded).
It helps if you're playing with facts rather than a bunch of crap which isn't accurate.
1. No, the battery isn't replacable by the user. But it holds a 10 hour charge quite admirably, and it's a long-life Lithium-based battery. By the tame you would need to replace the battery, you wouldn't be using the iPod you have now anymore.
2. Of course you have to send it to Apple for a battery replacement. It's a special battery built just for Apple. However, it is trivial to dissassemble the pod and remove/replace parts.
3. 90 day warranty is accurate. However, you can obtain a very cheap 2 year warranty from many brick-and-mortars selling it, Apple has been known to support it past the warranty, and many credit cards will double your warranty time.
4. I've dropped my iPod 5 times. It still functions, and it isn't any worse for wear. The things are built to be solid, which is why...
5. Solid state doesn't matter. First of all, 5 or 10 gigs in solid state would be ungodly expensive. Beyond that, though, the iPod *IS* solid state when it's playing! Unless your song exceeds half an hour, the hard drive comes on only long enough to copy it into the iPod's RAM, then shuts back down. There are no "moving parts" to worry about for most songs. On top of that, the drive used in the iPod is one of the smallest and most rugged drives on the market.
Because that's not how the PS2 version works. It runs discless in a HD-equipped system.
You install from the PS2 DVD, and then you pretty much throw the disc away. It lives on the HD without further disc intervention unless you need to reinstall.
To clarify, I haven't had many problems with writing code on tests. However, it's hellishly annoying to have a piece of paper in front of you and not a screen and keyboard -- make a typo, and you'd better pray you have enough eraser left to fix it.
Oops, left out a variable initialization because you were working out logic for a method while writing down the easy stuff? Erase two lines, cram three in using smaller print. And being left-handed, I'm surprised the TAs grading the exams could ever read my code by the time I got done smearing graphite all over with the edge of my hand and inserting comments that shouldn't have been needed but were worth precious points.
Perhaps most annoying of all, though, is when you have a heavily-weighted question about a topic that was barely touched upon in both class and book. It always makes for an interesting final when you're asked something for a decent chunk of your grade that simply wasn't covered in the level of detail it expects in your answer.
You're absolutely right. It's insipid. Especially when they spend a week lecturing on how the waterfall method of development simply doesn't work, but then expect you to essentially use it on a test.
Hello? Why waste your breath saying it's impossible to get a program perfect the first time if you expect us to be perfect?
I think this all goes back to the "Academia vs. Real World" argument so many people get into about Comp Sci education.
I don't know if X11 is designed to be robust in the case of unreasonable demands from the clients.
Apparently it's not.
X11 is a standard, XFree86 is but one implementation of it. Maybe the standard addresses this issue, maybe it doesn't, maybe it says "do whatever". At any rate, XFree86 != X Window System, and one bug in XFree86 doesn't mean every implementation of X11 suffers the same flaw.
Qualcomm's phone manuals never took themselves too seriously. They presented the material you needed, but threw in humor the whole way. It got the point across quickly without being so dry.
Hard telling if they're still amusing or not after the Kyocera purchase...
I paid for a 20 hour PVR, and I got a 20 hour PVR. I have 20 hours to record, which is what I paid for, and an additional portion of the drive is dedicated to holding the operating system and any special content.
I haven't given up any freedom since outlaying the cash for the unit. It does exactly what was advertised, and I get exactly what I expected as per the manual, the ads, and the packaging.
If I wanted to, I could wipe the hard drive and load my own PVR software on it. There's nothing stopping me. But what's the point when the TiVo software and service are already there and do exactly what I was told they would?
My personal opinions about Stallman aside, the software's not deciding anything for me. If I expect it to run, it's unreasonable to expect it to not have someplace for the OS to live. I assume you must run LFS and code all your own programs, if you believe this nonsense -- after all, distributions decide for themselves how the directory structure is laid out, what cron jobs to install, what depends on what else, and how you manage your software. Even if you run Apache, you're forced to administer it in its own specific way -- it's telling you how to run it, how to code modules for it, and how to arrange your content. They're deciding what you do.
You could certainly say that my looking at it that way is unreasonable. After all, how else would it be expected to understand configuration directives? And that's exactly the issue with the TiVo. There are expectations and sensibilities we make on a case-by-case basis. If you can't see that, you've fallen headfirst into the cesspool and ill-thought ideas that is Stallman.
A TiVo runs the hard drive 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's recording 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes no more electricity to grab a promo than it does for it to sit there on the last channel your watched and waste time.
If you're concerned about electricity loss, then you'd better unplug your PVR when it's not scheduled to be recording something.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh. I'll admit Apple's authentication frameworks aren't the easiest thing to use the first time you hack something together. For crying out loud, though, it's fairly well-documented and they have in-depth sample code on how to use them, including running command-line programs with elevated privileges. If you can't figure it out yourself after that, use the mailing lists or pay for a developer support issue.
That any developer is passing passwords in that manner is completely reprehensible. It's a shame public flogging has gone out of style.
And if you don't have the cash or a need for all the features of the ShuttlePro, there's always the ShuttleXpress. Fewer buttons, but you still have the jog and shuttle. At half the cost of the Pro, it's not a bad deal if your needs are more modest.
The iBook does not come with an S-Video adapter, only VGA. TV output, both S-Video and standard RCA, is added with a $19 adapter.
The number printed on the card is really irrelevant -- they're read by the mag stripe reader at the POS, both for activation and debit (just clarifying; not discounting your idea). This actually makes production flaws all the more interesting to me. What if the machinery kept printing the right numbers, but every card produced was given the same serial in the stripe?
Walmart's cards are "rechargeable" after all (and anyone can add funds to any card), so the POS system might not find anything wrong with 100 people crediting $20 to card 412345678.
Heck, you could walk out with some gift cards that hadn't been activated yet, reprogram/restripe them to match your card, and stick them back on the shelf. As long as you knew when the balance was increased, you'd have a veritable cornucopia of digital cashflow. Granted, you're limited to spending it at Walmart or Sam's Club, but it's there.
It's Fryolator, you insensitive clod!
I know you're being funny, but holy crap...
"Talking" is a little generous for the volume level many cell-addicted people believe is necessary to make a cellular phone work.
Especially the ones who use the damn thing like it's a walkie-talkie: Quick, by my ear to listen! Quick, in front of my face to talk! Quick, back to my ear to listen again!
It's not talking on planes that's the problem. I've spent many flights talking to family, friends, or absolute strangers. It's the potential for hundreds of people like that girl in 6C talking about her vaginal pus so loud the back of the plane can hear it that frightens me.
Genesis? Yeah, but heck, you could play games sent from cable TV on the Mattel Intellivision. I think I even recall hearing someone else say another console may have done it before the Intellivision (but I can't substantiate that).
I agree with you on the viability then vs. now, too. Just because I can spend a "long" time downloading a couple gigs over my broadband connection doesn't mean I want to. The current disc-based consoles have that instant gratification: buy (or rent, or borrow) the disc, pop it in, you're done. If I have to wait 8 hours for the game to download, am I really going to be as excited? Will I even care at all by the time it's finished?
Maybe Infinium has some brilliant solution to this, but I doubt it. If you're reading this, Infinium Labs, don't even think of that terrible "episode" approach Freeloader took. Ugh.
You've finished level one. The end. Please download and install level two!
Nah, buyers just need to stop being so loose with their money and start using escrow. If a seller won't agree to escrow, even if you offer to pay all the fees, he's probably a low-life scam artist.
Many people wouldn't buy a laptop sight-unseen by mail from a classified ad, but sell it on eBay and they're tripping all over themselves trying to fork over the cash without a lick of common sense.
Big-ticket items? Escrow, escrow, escrow. And always use Escrow.com -- it's the only escrow service eBay recommends, and you won't get suckered into an escrow scam (barring any future potential for "HACKED BY CHINESE!!!11").
I've seen numerous posts regarding the inaccuracies in Secunia's reporting of Mac OS X and Linux in this report. There's one big point, though, I haven't seen anyone bring up.
;)
Secunia is comparing Linux servers -- SuSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Advanced Server -- to a desktop Windows (XP Pro) and an uncertain Mac OS X (are they counting OS X Server vulnerabilities? It's a mystery!).
Well, no shit you're going to get bigger Linux (and potentially OS X) numbers that way! They're comparing a desktop operating system that ships with minimal (but still too many) services enabled to a Linux distribution made up of dozens of running services and a million optional parts which may or may not be installed on any system.
Other posters can banter all they like about how Secunia isn't taking money from Microsoft, but more than a cursory glance reveals it isn't exactly a level playing field regardless of who's funding them. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's Slashdot
Apple had no plans to broadcast the keynote this year, so my guess would be it was the same WWDC 2004 link and image everywhere else: it just dumped you here at the ADC site.
Nothing interesting there unless you plan on attending, really.
Of the applications you've mentioned, only compiling things in Xcode would have any benefit. To utilize Xgrid, the application has to be written for it, which most apps simply aren't (and given turnaround issues, it would be suck for things like Quake and MAME).
Xgrid's main benefit is in "grunt work" calculations that aren't necessarily needed immediately. Things like SETI@Home or Folding@Home would be the sort of thing Xgrid excels at: throw some data out, have it processed, get it back when it's done.
While Apple has made clustering drop-dead easy, it's really not targeted at the home or small-business user, and the potential uses are pretty limited in that field.
It's been on Slashdot before.
In a nutshell, AutoZone rapidly migrated from an SCO UnixWare solution to a Linux solution, and SCO is convinced that AutoZone couldn't possibly have done so and must be using SCO IP to run their Linux operations.
Don't forget O'Reilly offers upgrades to their books. If you absolutely must have Cocoa in a Nutshell now, snag it from Amazon and then send in your title page and $27.97 when the new edition arrives. Cheaper than buying the old edition at full price and then upgrading to the newer.
If you can wait, of course, you'll get it cheapest of all.
This used to work incredibly well if you had to call one of Microsoft's support numbers that demands a product ID. Enter an ID, you get to sit through the hold queue and then talk to someone who asks you what product you're calling about. Enter 0, the system deems it invalid and directly connects you to a rep.
I'm not sure if it still works, but it was useful in its day. Maybe the call system even does something with a product ID if you enter one now (it's a long shot, I know).
Some sample code:After a run through the preprocessor, the if statement will be replaced with: You can verify this yourself by compiling and running the program or using gcc -E filename.c | more to see the output of the precompiler stage (with macros expanded).
It helps if you're playing with facts rather than a bunch of crap which isn't accurate.
1. No, the battery isn't replacable by the user. But it holds a 10 hour charge quite admirably, and it's a long-life Lithium-based battery. By the tame you would need to replace the battery, you wouldn't be using the iPod you have now anymore.
2. Of course you have to send it to Apple for a battery replacement. It's a special battery built just for Apple. However, it is trivial to dissassemble the pod and remove/replace parts.
3. 90 day warranty is accurate. However, you can obtain a very cheap 2 year warranty from many brick-and-mortars selling it, Apple has been known to support it past the warranty, and many credit cards will double your warranty time.
4. I've dropped my iPod 5 times. It still functions, and it isn't any worse for wear. The things are built to be solid, which is why...
5. Solid state doesn't matter. First of all, 5 or 10 gigs in solid state would be ungodly expensive. Beyond that, though, the iPod *IS* solid state when it's playing! Unless your song exceeds half an hour, the hard drive comes on only long enough to copy it into the iPod's RAM, then shuts back down. There are no "moving parts" to worry about for most songs. On top of that, the drive used in the iPod is one of the smallest and most rugged drives on the market.
You install from the PS2 DVD, and then you pretty much throw the disc away. It lives on the HD without further disc intervention unless you need to reinstall.
To clarify, I haven't had many problems with writing code on tests. However, it's hellishly annoying to have a piece of paper in front of you and not a screen and keyboard -- make a typo, and you'd better pray you have enough eraser left to fix it.
Oops, left out a variable initialization because you were working out logic for a method while writing down the easy stuff? Erase two lines, cram three in using smaller print. And being left-handed, I'm surprised the TAs grading the exams could ever read my code by the time I got done smearing graphite all over with the edge of my hand and inserting comments that shouldn't have been needed but were worth precious points.
Perhaps most annoying of all, though, is when you have a heavily-weighted question about a topic that was barely touched upon in both class and book. It always makes for an interesting final when you're asked something for a decent chunk of your grade that simply wasn't covered in the level of detail it expects in your answer.
You're absolutely right. It's insipid. Especially when they spend a week lecturing on how the waterfall method of development simply doesn't work, but then expect you to essentially use it on a test.
Hello? Why waste your breath saying it's impossible to get a program perfect the first time if you expect us to be perfect?
I think this all goes back to the "Academia vs. Real World" argument so many people get into about Comp Sci education.
Hooray, let's all go 500kph to cover a whopping two-thirds of a mile!
Apparently it's not.
X11 is a standard, XFree86 is but one implementation of it. Maybe the standard addresses this issue, maybe it doesn't, maybe it says "do whatever". At any rate, XFree86 != X Window System, and one bug in XFree86 doesn't mean every implementation of X11 suffers the same flaw.
Qualcomm's phone manuals never took themselves too seriously. They presented the material you needed, but threw in humor the whole way. It got the point across quickly without being so dry.
Hard telling if they're still amusing or not after the Kyocera purchase...
You know that's what's coming next. Giant killer mecha that will be hijacked by terrorists for their own evil uses.
And only Hideo Kojima will be able to save us.
There's no contradiction there.
I paid for a 20 hour PVR, and I got a 20 hour PVR. I have 20 hours to record, which is what I paid for, and an additional portion of the drive is dedicated to holding the operating system and any special content.
I haven't given up any freedom since outlaying the cash for the unit. It does exactly what was advertised, and I get exactly what I expected as per the manual, the ads, and the packaging.
If I wanted to, I could wipe the hard drive and load my own PVR software on it. There's nothing stopping me. But what's the point when the TiVo software and service are already there and do exactly what I was told they would?
My personal opinions about Stallman aside, the software's not deciding anything for me. If I expect it to run, it's unreasonable to expect it to not have someplace for the OS to live. I assume you must run LFS and code all your own programs, if you believe this nonsense -- after all, distributions decide for themselves how the directory structure is laid out, what cron jobs to install, what depends on what else, and how you manage your software. Even if you run Apache, you're forced to administer it in its own specific way -- it's telling you how to run it, how to code modules for it, and how to arrange your content. They're deciding what you do.
You could certainly say that my looking at it that way is unreasonable. After all, how else would it be expected to understand configuration directives? And that's exactly the issue with the TiVo. There are expectations and sensibilities we make on a case-by-case basis. If you can't see that, you've fallen headfirst into the cesspool and ill-thought ideas that is Stallman.
Bzzt, but thanks for playing our game.
A TiVo runs the hard drive 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's recording 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It takes no more electricity to grab a promo than it does for it to sit there on the last channel your watched and waste time.
If you're concerned about electricity loss, then you'd better unplug your PVR when it's not scheduled to be recording something.