They decided that all future versions will be backwards-compatible and the spec calls for new unsupported features to degrade gracefully, so even if there are new versions of the spec, you're not supposed to worry about it. All browsers will just support everything to the best of their ability anyway, regardless of what version numbers you'd like to define.
But I don't think it was a terribly good idea either.
The goal is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", and patents are one mechanism of doing that (there are others). Patents work by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor and allowing them to control all sales of the invention for a limited time IN EXCHANGE FOR the public getting documentation that shows us how the invention works. For patents like Slide-to-Unlock or One-Click, there is absolutely no value to the public in having that documentation because anyone "skilled in the art" already knows how to implement the idea without seeing the patent. There could be some value in getting access to the source code (maybe), but the patents aren't that detailed.
It definitely sounds like we are pretty much in agreement.:-)
This is stupid. The WHOLE POINT of a patent is that you get to control the use of your invention, for a limited time. That means you can charge a license fee to let others use your invention, you can let others use it for free, or you can just say NO and not allow anyone else to use your invention. The promise of this control is what incentivizes people to invent cool stuff and then show the world how it was done. If your idea becomes wildly popular, you stand to make buckets of money, and that's a GOOD THING for all of us.
The notion that you should lose patent protection if your idea becomes too popular completely ignores the purpose of having patents.
In order to submit your patented idea to a standards body, you have to agree to FRAND licensing as a condition for consideration. That's a good idea. Without it, we couldn't establish standards that people could actually use, and then nobody wins. Participating companies agree to do this because they WANT other companies to use their technology, for a fee. It's voluntary. Don't want competitors using your ideas, don't submit them to a standards body.
The real problem here is NOT that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea has become so popular that they should be forced to allow other companies to license the patent. The real problem here is that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea should not have been patentable in the first place. Apple was the first to implement the idea, so they got a head start in the market, and that should have been enough. Granting Apple exclusive rights to this idea does not benefit society in any way, because Apple still would have come up with the idea even if they knew everybody else could copy it. Patents are supposed to benefit society by documenting how a technology works, to make it easier for people to copy after the patent expires, and the slide-to-unlock patent does not do that: how the technology works is perfectly obvious to anyone skilled in the art, so the patent itself is useless to us. This patent benefits no one but Apple, and that's not fair.
I recommend to all Americans traveling abroad that they try going to McDonald's in whatever country they happen to be traveling to. It's a very different experience - almost always a positive one, but I have heard a couple of horror stories.
The only time I've seen staff use the Start button here is to log off when they're done with the machine. If there was a button on the taskbar to do that, they'd never use the Start menu at all!
Make a shortcut to "shutdown -l", and change the icon (there's a red X that works pretty well, although I believe it's intended to mean delete). Pin the shortcut to your taskbar.
Share with a group? Like the World Wide Web was doing for a decade and a half before Facebook appeared on the scene? Like email was doing for decades before that?
Yes, except that if I post it on the WWW, the people I intend to share it with will never see it (unless maybe I spam them all with email they probably don't want, telling them to go to my web site). I post it to Facebook, and I don't even have to keep track of who I wanted to share it with; all the right people will just see it.
I only meant to show a possible interpretation that is both consistent with the text and mathematically sound. I am not saying that this interpretation is correct; another, as you say, is simply that they took inaccurate measurements and rounded a lot (although the wording of the passage makes me think they were trying to be as accurate as they could). The original assertion was that the Bible says pi=3 and therefore the Bible must be wrong. That conclusion is flawed, because both of these plausible explanations exist. You're welcome to find other things that you believe disprove the Bible, but this should not be one of them.
PHP is well documented. in another reply, I provided a link to the number_format function.
it expects a float, not a null or a string. the documentation is very clear.
Sure, the documentation says you're supposed to pass it a number. It doesn't say what will happen when you pass something that is not a number. The behavior that I would expect is one of two things: 1) the script should crash because I tried to pass the wrong type of data, or 2) whatever crazy thing I tried to pass should be automatically converted into a number
And indeed, the previous behavior was #2. The new behavior is neither of these, and does not appear to be documented.
Well, repeated exposure is dangerous. If they didn't take precautions, the dentist would be exposed to X-rays from all their clients.
Of course - we know this about x-rays. But these new terahertz imaging things are "completely safe", which means there's no reason to take such precautions with them, right?
...and their insistence that the value of PI is an unbiblical irrational number instead of gods written truth of exactly three.
This again?
In case anyone is confused, the Bible does not say pi=3. What it does say is that King Solomon built his palace and was having it decorated, apparently with (among other things) a giant bowl:
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.
- I Kings 7:23-26 (NIV)
This is what everybody freaks out about: 30 cubits / 10 cubits = 3. However, notice the part about the thickness - it turns out that if you measure the INNER circumference but the OUTER diameter, it all works.
Let's assume that a cubit is 18" and a handbreadth is 4". If the outer diameter is 180", then that would make the inner diameter only 172", and 540"/172"=3.1395 which is reasonably close to 3.14 when your units of measurement are cubits and handbreadths and you round everything to the nearest whole number anyway.
Now, does the Bible say they were measuring the inner circumference? No, but it doesn't specify that they were measuring the outer circumference either, and this explanation makes a hell of a lot more sense than "God has declared that pi is exactly 3.00!"
When the dentist takes x-rays, they first cover me with a lead blanket from neck to knee and then they leave the room while the pictures are being taken. That's because we know that x-rays are dangerous, and we understand how they're dangerous and what steps should be taken to minimize the risk while still taking advantage of the technology.
If it's "perfectly safe", no such precautions will be taken. Decades from now, we'll know whether they should have been.
When you use sed and awk you're beyond the reach of basic use of software and are really starting to head down the programming route. I guarantee there is no normal end user in the world, even linux users who even know what sed or awk is let alone can figure out the arcane (to the novice) syntax.
Guess what? Whenever you use formulas in Microsoft Excel, you're starting to head down the programming route. People do this all the time.
I've got a Slackware 12.0 box running 2.6.21.5 that crashed. Slackware 12.1 (2.6.24.5) and 12.2 (2.6.27.31) did not crash, but it sounds like these versions are vulnerable as well, I just got lucky.
This is what happens when you start with a sloppy language. People depend on the sloppy behavior, and if you then decide to become more strict, you break people's code.
Precisely.
It's OK to take some shortcuts in your implementation and reserve the right to change the behavior later. Other languages do this all the time. The documentation will explicitly say something like "number_format expects to be passed a numeric value; if you pass it something that is not a number, the results are undefined." This is a clear signal that, even though the behavior may be consistent and predictable today, the behavior could change in a different implementation tomorrow and the onus is on you to make sure you're not doing whatever stupid thing they said you shouldn't do. PHP didn't do that.
Go ahead and send the link. They'll read that bug report and say to themselves "Why was he sending an empty string to number_format? What did he expect?"
Considering the lack of any documentation to the contrary, what he expected was the same behavior he'd been getting with previous versions of PHP.
No, 0 is not NULL. But "" cast as an INT could be considered NULL.
NULL is not an INT!
"" cast as an INT should be treated as 0, that's the behavior I would expect from every other language I've ever worked with. If you have a string (empty or not) that does not look like a valid number, and you turn it into a number anyway, you get 0.
nVidia is violating somebody's patents. I don't know which ones. They don't know which ones. It's really not possible for them to know which patents they're violating, and it could be that they're actually not violating anything, but it's probably a safe bet that they are. That's how broken our patent system is.
The flip side of this is, whoever holds those patents that nVidia is violating also doesn't know that nVidia is violating their patents. However, if nVidia were to release the specifications and source code that we all want them to, it might become easier for somebody to recognize that nVidia has unknowingly violated their patent, at which point nVidia might be very screwed. Or maybe not, who the hell knows? In any case, a series of patent infringement lawsuits could be very very bad, and could potentially destroy the company. The only defense nVidia has against this is 1) building up a patent warchest of their own, so that if somebody sues them, nVidia can look for patents they own that the other company is violating and work out a trade, and 2) shrouding their hardware in mystery, so nobody knows how it works and therefore nobody can figure out if it's infringing on someone's patent or not. Note that #1 is not possible against a patent troll that doesn't actually produce anything, so #2 is really all they've got.
If everybody used public transportation, how would anyone get to or from work for a night or Sunday shift, when buses don't run? If everybody used public transportation, how would people haul home groceries for the whole family?
If everybody used public transportation, buses would run 24/7. The only reason they don't is because there aren't enough passengers to justify it.
Yep. The root servers point the zone to whichever nameservers are authoritative for that ccTLD, and those nameservers are free to serve up whatever they like, including A records for the uz domain itself.
However, since it is generally expected that nobody does this, you can't expect all clients to do what you want them to. For example, when you type "uz" into Safari's address bar, it doesn't recognize this pattern as an FQDN so it tries a couple of other behaviors - first appending your search domain, then if that doesn't resolve, appending the.com TLD and taking you to http://www.uz.com/ which is not the same site at all. You can override this behavior by adding a dot at the end of the FQDN.
Slashdot Mirror
They decided that all future versions will be backwards-compatible and the spec calls for new unsupported features to degrade gracefully, so even if there are new versions of the spec, you're not supposed to worry about it. All browsers will just support everything to the best of their ability anyway, regardless of what version numbers you'd like to define.
But I don't think it was a terribly good idea either.
The goal is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", and patents are one mechanism of doing that (there are others). Patents work by granting a temporary monopoly to an inventor and allowing them to control all sales of the invention for a limited time IN EXCHANGE FOR the public getting documentation that shows us how the invention works. For patents like Slide-to-Unlock or One-Click, there is absolutely no value to the public in having that documentation because anyone "skilled in the art" already knows how to implement the idea without seeing the patent. There could be some value in getting access to the source code (maybe), but the patents aren't that detailed.
It definitely sounds like we are pretty much in agreement. :-)
This is stupid. The WHOLE POINT of a patent is that you get to control the use of your invention, for a limited time. That means you can charge a license fee to let others use your invention, you can let others use it for free, or you can just say NO and not allow anyone else to use your invention. The promise of this control is what incentivizes people to invent cool stuff and then show the world how it was done. If your idea becomes wildly popular, you stand to make buckets of money, and that's a GOOD THING for all of us.
The notion that you should lose patent protection if your idea becomes too popular completely ignores the purpose of having patents.
In order to submit your patented idea to a standards body, you have to agree to FRAND licensing as a condition for consideration. That's a good idea. Without it, we couldn't establish standards that people could actually use, and then nobody wins. Participating companies agree to do this because they WANT other companies to use their technology, for a fee. It's voluntary. Don't want competitors using your ideas, don't submit them to a standards body.
The real problem here is NOT that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea has become so popular that they should be forced to allow other companies to license the patent. The real problem here is that Apple's slide-to-unlock idea should not have been patentable in the first place. Apple was the first to implement the idea, so they got a head start in the market, and that should have been enough. Granting Apple exclusive rights to this idea does not benefit society in any way, because Apple still would have come up with the idea even if they knew everybody else could copy it. Patents are supposed to benefit society by documenting how a technology works, to make it easier for people to copy after the patent expires, and the slide-to-unlock patent does not do that: how the technology works is perfectly obvious to anyone skilled in the art, so the patent itself is useless to us. This patent benefits no one but Apple, and that's not fair.
You never touch the other elves like that.
I recommend to all Americans traveling abroad that they try going to McDonald's in whatever country they happen to be traveling to. It's a very different experience - almost always a positive one, but I have heard a couple of horror stories.
Does Ctrl-Esc work, in lieu of a Windows key?
The only time I've seen staff use the Start button here is to log off when they're done with the machine. If there was a button on the taskbar to do that, they'd never use the Start menu at all!
Make a shortcut to "shutdown -l", and change the icon (there's a red X that works pretty well, although I believe it's intended to mean delete). Pin the shortcut to your taskbar.
Redundant articles are still OK, though, right? ;-)
Share with a group? Like the World Wide Web was doing for a decade and a half before Facebook appeared on the scene? Like email was doing for decades before that?
Yes, except that if I post it on the WWW, the people I intend to share it with will never see it (unless maybe I spam them all with email they probably don't want, telling them to go to my web site). I post it to Facebook, and I don't even have to keep track of who I wanted to share it with; all the right people will just see it.
I only meant to show a possible interpretation that is both consistent with the text and mathematically sound. I am not saying that this interpretation is correct; another, as you say, is simply that they took inaccurate measurements and rounded a lot (although the wording of the passage makes me think they were trying to be as accurate as they could). The original assertion was that the Bible says pi=3 and therefore the Bible must be wrong. That conclusion is flawed, because both of these plausible explanations exist. You're welcome to find other things that you believe disprove the Bible, but this should not be one of them.
PHP is well documented. in another reply, I provided a link to the number_format function.
it expects a float, not a null or a string. the documentation is very clear.
Sure, the documentation says you're supposed to pass it a number. It doesn't say what will happen when you pass something that is not a number. The behavior that I would expect is one of two things:
1) the script should crash because I tried to pass the wrong type of data, or
2) whatever crazy thing I tried to pass should be automatically converted into a number
And indeed, the previous behavior was #2. The new behavior is neither of these, and does not appear to be documented.
Well, repeated exposure is dangerous. If they didn't take precautions, the dentist would be exposed to X-rays from all their clients.
Of course - we know this about x-rays. But these new terahertz imaging things are "completely safe", which means there's no reason to take such precautions with them, right?
...and their insistence that the value of PI is an unbiblical irrational number instead of gods written truth of exactly three.
This again?
In case anyone is confused, the Bible does not say pi=3. What it does say is that King Solomon built his palace and was having it decorated, apparently with (among other things) a giant bowl:
He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.
- I Kings 7:23-26 (NIV)
This is what everybody freaks out about: 30 cubits / 10 cubits = 3. However, notice the part about the thickness - it turns out that if you measure the INNER circumference but the OUTER diameter, it all works.
Let's assume that a cubit is 18" and a handbreadth is 4". If the outer diameter is 180", then that would make the inner diameter only 172", and 540"/172"=3.1395 which is reasonably close to 3.14 when your units of measurement are cubits and handbreadths and you round everything to the nearest whole number anyway.
Now, does the Bible say they were measuring the inner circumference? No, but it doesn't specify that they were measuring the outer circumference either, and this explanation makes a hell of a lot more sense than "God has declared that pi is exactly 3.00!"
When the dentist takes x-rays, they first cover me with a lead blanket from neck to knee and then they leave the room while the pictures are being taken. That's because we know that x-rays are dangerous, and we understand how they're dangerous and what steps should be taken to minimize the risk while still taking advantage of the technology.
If it's "perfectly safe", no such precautions will be taken. Decades from now, we'll know whether they should have been.
When you use sed and awk you're beyond the reach of basic use of software and are really starting to head down the programming route. I guarantee there is no normal end user in the world, even linux users who even know what sed or awk is let alone can figure out the arcane (to the novice) syntax.
Guess what? Whenever you use formulas in Microsoft Excel, you're starting to head down the programming route. People do this all the time.
I've got a Slackware 12.0 box running 2.6.21.5 that crashed. Slackware 12.1 (2.6.24.5) and 12.2 (2.6.27.31) did not crash, but it sounds like these versions are vulnerable as well, I just got lucky.
This is what happens when you start with a sloppy language. People depend on the sloppy behavior, and if you then decide to become more strict, you break people's code.
Precisely.
It's OK to take some shortcuts in your implementation and reserve the right to change the behavior later. Other languages do this all the time. The documentation will explicitly say something like "number_format expects to be passed a numeric value; if you pass it something that is not a number, the results are undefined." This is a clear signal that, even though the behavior may be consistent and predictable today, the behavior could change in a different implementation tomorrow and the onus is on you to make sure you're not doing whatever stupid thing they said you shouldn't do. PHP didn't do that.
Go ahead and send the link. They'll read that bug report and say to themselves "Why was he sending an empty string to number_format? What did he expect?"
Considering the lack of any documentation to the contrary, what he expected was the same behavior he'd been getting with previous versions of PHP.
No, 0 is not NULL. But "" cast as an INT could be considered NULL.
NULL is not an INT!
"" cast as an INT should be treated as 0, that's the behavior I would expect from every other language I've ever worked with. If you have a string (empty or not) that does not look like a valid number, and you turn it into a number anyway, you get 0.
The phone company, which is the phones owner
What? Is it normal in america to have the phone company actually own your mobile phone?
No, it just feels that way sometimes.
People walk into the store ready to buy a computer.
And if the salesman isn't very good, all they walk out with is just a computer.
nVidia is violating somebody's patents. I don't know which ones. They don't know which ones. It's really not possible for them to know which patents they're violating, and it could be that they're actually not violating anything, but it's probably a safe bet that they are. That's how broken our patent system is.
The flip side of this is, whoever holds those patents that nVidia is violating also doesn't know that nVidia is violating their patents. However, if nVidia were to release the specifications and source code that we all want them to, it might become easier for somebody to recognize that nVidia has unknowingly violated their patent, at which point nVidia might be very screwed. Or maybe not, who the hell knows? In any case, a series of patent infringement lawsuits could be very very bad, and could potentially destroy the company. The only defense nVidia has against this is 1) building up a patent warchest of their own, so that if somebody sues them, nVidia can look for patents they own that the other company is violating and work out a trade, and 2) shrouding their hardware in mystery, so nobody knows how it works and therefore nobody can figure out if it's infringing on someone's patent or not. Note that #1 is not possible against a patent troll that doesn't actually produce anything, so #2 is really all they've got.
If everybody used public transportation, how would anyone get to or from work for a night or Sunday shift, when buses don't run? If everybody used public transportation, how would people haul home groceries for the whole family?
If everybody used public transportation, buses would run 24/7. The only reason they don't is because there aren't enough passengers to justify it.
Apparently in New York City, this is now required.
Wow, you can actually do this?
Yep. The root servers point the zone to whichever nameservers are authoritative for that ccTLD, and those nameservers are free to serve up whatever they like, including A records for the uz domain itself.
However, since it is generally expected that nobody does this, you can't expect all clients to do what you want them to. For example, when you type "uz" into Safari's address bar, it doesn't recognize this pattern as an FQDN so it tries a couple of other behaviors - first appending your search domain, then if that doesn't resolve, appending the .com TLD and taking you to http://www.uz.com/ which is not the same site at all. You can override this behavior by adding a dot at the end of the FQDN.