But this method requires a copy of the original -- or failing that, you'd need to already know which of the JPEGs is the highest quality, which defeats the purpose.
They don't need it anymore. Whatever they have earned before they died is inherited by their heirs. Isn't that how the rest of the world works?
It wasn't always. In the old days, people who worked in an office for 30 years expected to get a pension. If that was good enough for Joe Accountant, why should authors have some similar mechanism? Of course, these days no company is expected to have any kind of loyalty to its employees, but that's no reason to get bitter and say "screw everyone."
I don't think it's unreasonable that an author should be able to provide for his family through ongoing income after his death. There's other precedent in society, too: Consider divorce, where one party is typically expected to provide for the other even though they might not even like each other anymore. Consider accidental death. If I die one year after writing the novel that goes on to be recognized as the greatest work of literature ever written, isn't it fair that my family, who supported me during the writing of it, should get something?
It seems to me that we're becoming so used to everybody trying to screw us that when we see an opportunity for someone else to get screwed we automatically say, "That's the way it should be; it's only fair."
If the code is so awful that the bandwidth required for security updates is a problem, the product is defective by design.
You don't understand what the phrase "defective by design" means. It's used by anti-DRM folks to describe "features" that nobody wants and that actually reduce the usefulness of a product, but which are inserted into the product intentionally by the manufacturer out of a misguided desire to support DRM. If a bug/feature is "by design" then you should not expect a patch for it, ever.
A product that needs lots of security patches, on the other hand, is not defective by design; rather, it is simply badly designed.
Don't go out of your way to use catchphrases when simple English will do.
An interesting approach - I wonder if this would also work as well on compiled bytecode like.NET or Java uses?
I suspect that it would. I once heard Manuel De Icaza give a talk in the early days of the Mono project. He said the "bytecode" that came out of the C# compiler was analogous to the output that comes out of the front end of a C compiler. The JIT is the equivalent of the C compiler's back end, only it runs right before execution. I suspect that what Google's decompiler is doing is reverting the binary to something similar to the C compiler's internal representation -- and if so, this method would work pretty much the same for bytecode. But that's just a guess.
But, if the compilers are similar enough to create the same pseudocode/bytecode/ASM, or smart enough to save the source code, and use it for future comparisons, then wouldn't one patch be just as portable as the original source code?
It's a good theory and you're a smart person, but:
The compilers probably wouldn't be similar enough. Even developers who use GCC to compile something for Linux usually use Visual Studio to compile the same code for Windows. (The source code for Chrome, for example, shipped as a Visual Studio project.) Mac OS X likes to have everything written in Objective C, so that output would probably be very different.
Different operating systems rely on different shared libraries to do the same things. So a function call that opens a file in Linux might not look like a function call to do the same thing on Windows -- it might take a different number of arguments, for example, which means it would look rather different in machine language.
Portability doesn't appear to be Google's primary concern, though. They seem to be keen on the idea of delivering binaries over the wire (real binaries, not bytecode) -- see Google Native Client.
Take music, in the past I could sell a CD when I got bored of it. Now that's impossible, I either buy it from iTunes and am unable to sell it in the future, or I just pirate it for free.
It's "impossible" unless you, uh, buy the CD. The record stores where I live are still chock-full of used CDs. Not yours, though, I guess.
Everyone's knocking the poor guy for being an idiot, but give him a break; he's a first-year student. That aside, actually this list seems pretty decent.
Start off learning Java, a mature, object-oriented language that is widely used and is also fairly strict about syntax, structure, etc... a good way to get the foundations.
Once he's got a little more background in programming, he can pick up Python and dick around with new concepts more quickly.
Next comes C... if someone graduated college with a CS degree having never worked in C, I'd think something was wrong. Notice, also, that they're slowly drilling down into lower-level concepts. At this point in the game he might start poking around inside some major OSS packages.
Oracle PL/SQL is obviously not like any of the other languages in this list, and by the time he gets there he should realize why and also appreciate gaining some experience with databases.
Learning Bash says to me that they're introducing him to some basic system operations, which he'll want when he starts hacking away on Linux systems (which is inevitable).
And finally assembly language -- at this point he might be learning the fundamentals of device drivers or embedded systems, and how computers really work.
A student could certainly do worse. If anything, given this whole list, I'd hope that the school is even more focused on concepts than he's complaining about. You shouldn't be learning about embedded systems programming if you don't have a good understanding of data structures, for instance. If they're doing it right, "learning" all these languages will basically mean picking them up on your own, and class time will be devoted to concepts.
Seriously.. what U.S. citizen carries their passport everywhere they go domestically?
Why does it have to be domestically? The person in TFA lived in the U.S., so he tried his experiment in a convenient local tourist area. But if they can read your passport from 20 feet away in San Francisco, they can do the same in Beijing, Moscow, or Caracas, too. And nobody has tried to read a passport that's locked inside a typical hotel safe yet, either -- what if that were possible?
Getting a degree from a theological seminary might be technically be called 'education', but the right term for it is actually 'indoctrination'.
You could say the same of a degree in gender studies, psychology, or economics. It all depends on your personal prejudices. FYI, generally speaking people with advanced degrees in theology did not spend their college years writing papers explaining why evolution isn't real.
Frankly, lately, it strikes me that the most scientific approach might be to vote against the incumbent regardless of party. Incumbency seems to strongly correlate with making decisions based on things other than evidence. Incumbents seem inclined -- increasingly over duration of incumbency -- to base their decisions on favors they owe and promises of future favors they can collect rather than on evidence and deep, objective consideration.
But your approach seems to rely on the assumption that you and your enlightened friends will be the only ones doing so. If everyone voted this way, then the incumbent would always lose. It would be, in effect, like passing a law that limited all candidates to a single term. This would only encourage politicians to grab as much as they can, as quickly as they can, and all the assumptive benefits of the first term (candidates basing their decisions on deep, objective consideration) would get tossed out the window. As such, your attitude seems cynical at best, and at worst, completely self-defeating.
Thanks for the info. I thought Windows CE was something like a streamlined Windows Mobile OS.
Errr, it sort of is, but that's saying it backwards. Windows Mobile is an OS that takes a Windows CE kernel and adds on a bunch of stuff, like a graphical shell and an application suite for smartphones. But there is also Windows CE itself, which can be built for a variety of purposes, like the earlier poster said. You specify the bits that you want and build your own custom kernel (not from source, but with tools from Microsoft). In fact, Windows XP Embedded lets you do something similar, only using the XP kernel. I'm pretty sure you could build an XP Embedded device that didn't offer the full Windows desktop. They may have left that capability on your device for debugging or diagnostic purposes.
Despite the exploit being out there, there is likely only a few malicious people that know about it.
And if those people wanted to get rich off it, which would be easier and safer: to hack a bunch of ATMs themselves, or to sell the secret to organized crime?
Tamiflu isn't exactly easy to come by. If there's not an actual shortage now, there is already a perceived shortage in the minds of some people, and that is causing them to try to hoard it for when they get sick. If you're in the market for many, many doses of an obscure drug, you're probably talking about a decent chunk of change. A spammer who's offering you tamiflu at below market rates starts to look attractive. You convince yourself that it's legit medicine that just "fell off the back of a truck," i.e. someone stole it or embezzled it and that's why it's being offered so cheaply.
This is a good point, but in the U.S. at least, vicodin is still a prescription-only drug. It's not like you can just go to the store and buy a bunch of vicodin and extract the "good stuff" out and sell it on the street. If you can get enough vicodin to do that, then you already have a doctor who's willing to bend the rules to get you high, in which case he'd probably prescribe something that didn't have acetaminophen in it in the first place.
You missed the part where this is America and you have no health insurance with which to combat said cancer. You go bankrupt in the first year and succumb swiftly thereafter.
The update manager... Now that will make Nokia owners proud... It downloads 400+ tiny files over HTTP, realtime (what can go wrong?) and pushes it to device one by one.
No it doesn't. BlackBerry firmware updates are distributed as Zipped installers. The installer places ALL of the necessary files into a directory on your hard drive. The next time you run the BlackBerry Desktop software, it will find those files and inform you that a new update is available for your phone and ask you if you want to install it. During the update process, the files on the BlackBerry are backed up, the flash memory is erased, the new firmware is loaded, the device reboots, and then your custom files/databases are restored. I've never had any kind of problem.
How can Blackberry sell devices?
They accept money. Lots and lots of money from lots and lots of happy customers.
Your comment is sort of like saying "why should I learn about my family medical history if knowing about it can make my insurance premium go up?"
I don't think his comment was "sort of" anything. I think that was exactly what he was asking and I don't think you gave an adequate answer.
So let's see... you find out from your DNA screening not that you actually have any condition, but that you need more tests, more careful screening, regular check-ups, etc, because you're at high risk. Unfortunately, your insurance carrier catches wind of your DNA results and jacks up your premiums so now you can't afford health insurance, and ergo you can't afford to pay for any of these regular tests you've been told you need. And this is a stain on your health record that will last the rest of your life. Nice going.
Indeed. Leave it to the marketing department at Palm to let out a story about something that the Pre cannot do and spin it so that all of a sudden the "underground" that will try to make it do what it cannot do are now some kind of elite hackers. Meanwhile, does anyone actually want one of these phones? If you want to tether your phone, why not buy one that can do that? T-Mobile allows it for BlackBerrys, for example...
Slashdot Mirror
But this method requires a copy of the original -- or failing that, you'd need to already know which of the JPEGs is the highest quality, which defeats the purpose.
They don't need it anymore. Whatever they have earned before they died is inherited by their heirs. Isn't that how the rest of the world works?
It wasn't always. In the old days, people who worked in an office for 30 years expected to get a pension. If that was good enough for Joe Accountant, why should authors have some similar mechanism? Of course, these days no company is expected to have any kind of loyalty to its employees, but that's no reason to get bitter and say "screw everyone."
I don't think it's unreasonable that an author should be able to provide for his family through ongoing income after his death. There's other precedent in society, too: Consider divorce, where one party is typically expected to provide for the other even though they might not even like each other anymore. Consider accidental death. If I die one year after writing the novel that goes on to be recognized as the greatest work of literature ever written, isn't it fair that my family, who supported me during the writing of it, should get something?
It seems to me that we're becoming so used to everybody trying to screw us that when we see an opportunity for someone else to get screwed we automatically say, "That's the way it should be; it's only fair."
If the code is so awful that the bandwidth required for security updates is a problem, the product is defective by design.
You don't understand what the phrase "defective by design" means. It's used by anti-DRM folks to describe "features" that nobody wants and that actually reduce the usefulness of a product, but which are inserted into the product intentionally by the manufacturer out of a misguided desire to support DRM. If a bug/feature is "by design" then you should not expect a patch for it, ever.
A product that needs lots of security patches, on the other hand, is not defective by design; rather, it is simply badly designed.
Don't go out of your way to use catchphrases when simple English will do.
An interesting approach - I wonder if this would also work as well on compiled bytecode like .NET or Java uses?
I suspect that it would. I once heard Manuel De Icaza give a talk in the early days of the Mono project. He said the "bytecode" that came out of the C# compiler was analogous to the output that comes out of the front end of a C compiler. The JIT is the equivalent of the C compiler's back end, only it runs right before execution. I suspect that what Google's decompiler is doing is reverting the binary to something similar to the C compiler's internal representation -- and if so, this method would work pretty much the same for bytecode. But that's just a guess.
But, if the compilers are similar enough to create the same pseudocode/bytecode/ASM, or smart enough to save the source code, and use it for future comparisons, then wouldn't one patch be just as portable as the original source code?
It's a good theory and you're a smart person, but:
Portability doesn't appear to be Google's primary concern, though. They seem to be keen on the idea of delivering binaries over the wire (real binaries, not bytecode) -- see Google Native Client.
Take music, in the past I could sell a CD when I got bored of it. Now that's impossible, I either buy it from iTunes and am unable to sell it in the future, or I just pirate it for free.
It's "impossible" unless you, uh, buy the CD. The record stores where I live are still chock-full of used CDs. Not yours, though, I guess.
Everyone's knocking the poor guy for being an idiot, but give him a break; he's a first-year student. That aside, actually this list seems pretty decent.
A student could certainly do worse. If anything, given this whole list, I'd hope that the school is even more focused on concepts than he's complaining about. You shouldn't be learning about embedded systems programming if you don't have a good understanding of data structures, for instance. If they're doing it right, "learning" all these languages will basically mean picking them up on your own, and class time will be devoted to concepts.
Seriously.. what U.S. citizen carries their passport everywhere they go domestically?
Why does it have to be domestically? The person in TFA lived in the U.S., so he tried his experiment in a convenient local tourist area. But if they can read your passport from 20 feet away in San Francisco, they can do the same in Beijing, Moscow, or Caracas, too. And nobody has tried to read a passport that's locked inside a typical hotel safe yet, either -- what if that were possible?
Getting a degree from a theological seminary might be technically be called 'education', but the right term for it is actually 'indoctrination'.
You could say the same of a degree in gender studies, psychology, or economics. It all depends on your personal prejudices. FYI, generally speaking people with advanced degrees in theology did not spend their college years writing papers explaining why evolution isn't real.
Frankly, lately, it strikes me that the most scientific approach might be to vote against the incumbent regardless of party. Incumbency seems to strongly correlate with making decisions based on things other than evidence. Incumbents seem inclined -- increasingly over duration of incumbency -- to base their decisions on favors they owe and promises of future favors they can collect rather than on evidence and deep, objective consideration.
But your approach seems to rely on the assumption that you and your enlightened friends will be the only ones doing so. If everyone voted this way, then the incumbent would always lose. It would be, in effect, like passing a law that limited all candidates to a single term. This would only encourage politicians to grab as much as they can, as quickly as they can, and all the assumptive benefits of the first term (candidates basing their decisions on deep, objective consideration) would get tossed out the window. As such, your attitude seems cynical at best, and at worst, completely self-defeating.
Thanks for the info. I thought Windows CE was something like a streamlined Windows Mobile OS.
Errr, it sort of is, but that's saying it backwards. Windows Mobile is an OS that takes a Windows CE kernel and adds on a bunch of stuff, like a graphical shell and an application suite for smartphones. But there is also Windows CE itself, which can be built for a variety of purposes, like the earlier poster said. You specify the bits that you want and build your own custom kernel (not from source, but with tools from Microsoft). In fact, Windows XP Embedded lets you do something similar, only using the XP kernel. I'm pretty sure you could build an XP Embedded device that didn't offer the full Windows desktop. They may have left that capability on your device for debugging or diagnostic purposes.
Despite the exploit being out there, there is likely only a few malicious people that know about it.
And if those people wanted to get rich off it, which would be easier and safer: to hack a bunch of ATMs themselves, or to sell the secret to organized crime?
Tamiflu isn't exactly easy to come by. If there's not an actual shortage now, there is already a perceived shortage in the minds of some people, and that is causing them to try to hoard it for when they get sick. If you're in the market for many, many doses of an obscure drug, you're probably talking about a decent chunk of change. A spammer who's offering you tamiflu at below market rates starts to look attractive. You convince yourself that it's legit medicine that just "fell off the back of a truck," i.e. someone stole it or embezzled it and that's why it's being offered so cheaply.
Hell, anyone who has played Pac-Man on an Atari 2600 could have told you this much.
It looks like Hattrick is written mostly in Forth btw. I personally didn't know they wrote games in that language!
There aren't many, but the poster children are Starflight and Starflight II -- great games, btw.
I never thought about it. I think $00 is BRK on the 6502 -- that part seemed logical enough to me. Dunno why NOP would be such an odd value. Anyone?
Things/answers/analysis/even jokes which would have come to me in a flash actually took mental work.
Funny, that's something that's happened to me when I've smoked weed. No joke, it scared the hell out of me.
This is a good point, but in the U.S. at least, vicodin is still a prescription-only drug. It's not like you can just go to the store and buy a bunch of vicodin and extract the "good stuff" out and sell it on the street. If you can get enough vicodin to do that, then you already have a doctor who's willing to bend the rules to get you high, in which case he'd probably prescribe something that didn't have acetaminophen in it in the first place.
You missed the part where this is America and you have no health insurance with which to combat said cancer. You go bankrupt in the first year and succumb swiftly thereafter.
The update manager... Now that will make Nokia owners proud... It downloads 400+ tiny files over HTTP, realtime (what can go wrong?) and pushes it to device one by one.
No it doesn't. BlackBerry firmware updates are distributed as Zipped installers. The installer places ALL of the necessary files into a directory on your hard drive. The next time you run the BlackBerry Desktop software, it will find those files and inform you that a new update is available for your phone and ask you if you want to install it. During the update process, the files on the BlackBerry are backed up, the flash memory is erased, the new firmware is loaded, the device reboots, and then your custom files/databases are restored. I've never had any kind of problem.
How can Blackberry sell devices?
They accept money. Lots and lots of money from lots and lots of happy customers.
Seems like ambiguity is a problem. Is this:
The same as this?
Your comment is sort of like saying "why should I learn about my family medical history if knowing about it can make my insurance premium go up?"
I don't think his comment was "sort of" anything. I think that was exactly what he was asking and I don't think you gave an adequate answer.
So let's see... you find out from your DNA screening not that you actually have any condition, but that you need more tests, more careful screening, regular check-ups, etc, because you're at high risk. Unfortunately, your insurance carrier catches wind of your DNA results and jacks up your premiums so now you can't afford health insurance, and ergo you can't afford to pay for any of these regular tests you've been told you need. And this is a stain on your health record that will last the rest of your life. Nice going.
I'm posting this from Opera 10 ... Slashdot looks very, very good.
And you started out so well. You almost had me believing you.
Indeed. Leave it to the marketing department at Palm to let out a story about something that the Pre cannot do and spin it so that all of a sudden the "underground" that will try to make it do what it cannot do are now some kind of elite hackers. Meanwhile, does anyone actually want one of these phones? If you want to tether your phone, why not buy one that can do that? T-Mobile allows it for BlackBerrys, for example...
You're being funny, but Wolfram|Alpha (correctly) interprets the question as "the average length of an erect human penis (age > 17 years)".