It may be too late to stuff the genii back in the bottle.
The only thing that can be done now is to find a way of taking advantage of impulse buying - Allow someone to see a video on TV and instantly download it onto their computer. At the moment, there is still the time overhead of opening a web browser, going to a search engine and having to type a keyword search (pop-group, lyrics, title). The only way to get faster than this would be to have a Instant Messanging type service where a user could simply type in the Cable/Satellite/Terrestial channel they are watching and get the download.
For MP3 players, there could be a points loyalty scheme where if someone recommends downloaded tracks to their friends (reference the download site, rather than just transfering the track), they get points or discounts off other stuff like T-shirts and baseball caps.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to have stumbled on to the rare "good" cop. (or their offering price wasn't high enough).
They haven't gained any sympathy from the Police force with their constant stream of political correctness, lax sentencing (offenders normally get half the sentence off for good behaviour due to prison overcrowding - according to the head of the prison service this isn't enough time to rehabilitate repeat offenders). Retirees will be put in jail for refusing to pay rising property taxes, while violent muggers and burglars get off with community service. Even the judges get cheesed off because their sentences aren't being carried out. The latest wheeze is that judges shouldn't determine the duration of prison sentences - this should be left to parole boards. And the Police are wise to their tactics - if anyone ever takes the slight pot-shot close to critizing the government, the whole cabinet comes out with guns blazing. So each time an announcement that there might be evidence that a crime might have occurred, Downing Street goes ballistic, only to go completely silent as soon as the actual evidence is presented.
As one detective on TV put it: "Every dumb criminal is a failure of the education system".
Funny in one sense, but sadly true in another - something like 40% of prison inmates are dsylexic and can't read. So placing large notices with large black and red and warning messages don't really have much effect, even when they aren't high on drugs.
In the past, 3D polygon rendering was implemented as a bolt-on on to the windows system (X-Windows, MS-Windows,...). The server would accelerate basic 2D operations such as block-copying and block-pasting using one set of hardware functions, while 3D operations would be handled by another. Each application would have the standard GUI windows, and a special object to handle 3D graphics acceleration with all the effects like transparency. But since 2D operations are simply a subset of the 3D operations, it would be more efficient to implement the entire windows system using the 3D acceleration.
Combined with the desire of developers to use effects like semi-transparent windows, the only practical way is to implement the windows system using the 3D graphics hardware.
If the soldiers are continuously broadcasting sound and relative position data to a base station, then they may as well paint themselves fluorescent orange and do jumping jacks.
That's why the military developed spread-spectrum radio communications. A radio set converted sound waves into a rapid series of short pulses that jumped from frequency to frequency using a random pattern. The idea was that it would be impossible to triangulate the location of a transmitted because any single pulse would only appear as background noise. This evolved into mobile phone systems.
To launch an projectile into space using this method, requires that the projectile is accelerated from stationary to at least 3 kilometers per second (or 0 to 18,000 kph), all within a few seconds. Probably more to overcome air friction. Gravity provides an acceleration of around 10 metres per second (1 G = 9.8 metres/second per second), so doing this acceleration is equivalent to 300G. To get this acceleration down to the speeds tolerated by electronics, you would have to extend the rail gun all the way out to space.
So the original poster was claiming we can buy DVDs for £0.30; he was quite definitely being tongue-in-cheek, unless he meant blank ones:-)
If you buy a Sunday paper in the UK, you will often get a "free movie" on DVD (in the past these have included titles like Highlander, Chicago, Clockwise, , etc...), or the pilot episode of a series (On the Buses, Carry On...). I've got a whole stack of DVD's/albums/ collected in this way.
I suggest the same, since I've never heard of solder that can stay solid at those temperatures, much less sillicon (or whatever crazy elements are being used nowadays) not turning into the Magical Blue Smoke that makes machines run.
One computer lab I used to work in, was located in an old chemistry room - it had single glazing with continental style slatted windows (a safety feature to stop fumes from building up). Heating in the entire block was on from 8.00am to 5.00pm. In Winter, just about every PC would fail due to the heat stress caused by going from room temperature to below zero and back again every night. The technicians had to run round fixing every machine by checking for any EPROM chips, circuit boards and connectors that might have popped out.
Some inventors have proposed creating communication systems using gravity waves. Such a system only requires a large weight to be shifted according to sound vibrations. Detecting the resulting gravitational wave is the hard part.
Why is it that distros are still so predominantly media-based anyways?
Not everyone has or wants broadband access. While my apartment has combined cable TV/broadband, my parents only have the cheapest AOL monthly subscription available (dialup modem), which is enough for them to book airline flights and read E-mail. Consequently, whenever I go out to visit them, I have to download everything and store it on either on either a USB drive or burn onto read-writable CD's/DVD's just in case of disk failure.
Your garbage bags waiting out by the curb are probably full of DNA that you have "discarded" and could in theory be taken by the police. Does this mean the Government should build a DNA database of all citizens -- even those who haven't been convicted of anything?
This happens in the North of England during a crackdown against organized crime. Criminal gangs originally used their own cars to do burglaries on shops. But they were quickly caught by CCTV and DNA analysis. Then they learnt that if they nicked someone's car and household rubbish, they could do the raid, throw the householders rubbish around the car and crime scene, then set fire to the car, and then run to their getaway car. The cops would first look up the number plates and question the home-owners. DNA analysis would again point to the home owners.
And the current UK government still seem determined to have everyone's DNA registered.
Sony do the same, if not all the Windows laptops out there. Some time ago, Microsoft and the hardware vendors announced they were no longer going to give out the Windows installation CD/DVD's with each system, as users would just use these CD's to upgrade all their other computers.
Even more annoying, some vendors have replaced the handful of CD's with a single DVD, but have failed to update the installation software with this knowledge, so the installation remains incomplete because "the second CD has not been inserted".
Of course those subsides come from tax payers, and maybe that's the reason France has a unemployment rate which, last time I checked, was almost double the American.
Agriculture isn't really the main cause of the unemployment. It's more that it is difficult to set up your company. For basic skills such as mechanics or plumbing, there are mandatory 2+ year apprenticeship schemes that have to be completed once the college studies have been completed. That requires any graduate having to find a company willing to train up a competitor to their business. For anyone wanting to set up their own technology company, there is also a need for a large insurance deposit to be made. Similar problems occur in the rest of Europe - many Europeans have resorted to register their company in the UK with the corporate head office in their home country.
If anything, the subsidised agriculture means that food is fresh and of high quality, meaning that diets are far more healthy than other countries and help to lower the costs of health care (In France, hospitals are privately run, while the health insurance company is run by the state).
how on earth can someone code so sloppily that a WORD PROCESSOR has a serious security exploit?!
The usual reason - a local buffer created from the stack set to a fixed size. ie.
char cbuf[MAX_BUFFER];
I would guess that the Microsoft Word document file will be arranged using a chunk data format: file header followed by object headers with type, version, length, followed by binary data for that object In this way, unknown chunks can just be skipped over.
It would be no surprise that each programmer coding a particular object (formula, table) would assume that only they would be theonly one writing read/write routines for their particular object, and choose to use a local stack buffer to store the raw binary data, before converting it to the internal data structure.
When reading the document, they would just read the header as normal (type,version,length), then read the specified amount of object data without checking the validity of the length.
And it only takes one programmer to make this mistake in order to create a security vulnerability that compromises the entire application. Get the right type of data in the Word document, and you could theoretically load and execute some executable code stored the file.
Out of interest, which part of the USA are you located in? Most universities base their course syllabuses on the needs of local industry, or what gives their graduates the best opportunities for employment. For companies based on computer animation, engineering, financial markets, medical imaging and encryption, such mathematics are an essential requirement.
However such courses tend to focus on the use of Matlab, Mathematica and other more theoretical programming languages such as Prolog, Lisp and Haskell.
Some Computer Science courses do have group projects with 3-5 people, and also have internships. The tricky part with group projects is that every student has their own mix of course modules which can make it difficult for people to get together outside regular class hours. Since employers insist that students have "soft skills" some time must be left free for social activities. And employers insist that graduates have experience "writing specifications and designing code", so getting someone to maintain four year old code is next to impossible.
The only way this does happen is by looking for someone who had worked on a PhD project for 3 to 5 years.
I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier today, because that's an interesting post... it would be interesting to set up a programming environment with a binary format and specialized editor, though on second thought it might not work so well.
There's always the APL programming language - just about every mathematical function call is mapped to a single unicode character.
Microsoft do this to file data formats as well. Given a file format with every tag and field specified down to the last bit, it only takes one "reserved for the future" bit and Microsoft will find a purpose for it and patent that purpose, in order to break file portability between file systems. You will be able to transfer files into their format, but not outwards.
Microsoft also did this with their release of Java.
Slashdot Mirror
Most sensible thing to do is wait until two or three minutes before the auction ends, then put in your bid.
The best example of poor quality is watching one of those orange fireball explosions. Then the JPEG compression blocks are clearly visible.
It may be too late to stuff the genii back in the bottle.
The only thing that can be done now is to find a way of taking advantage of impulse buying - Allow someone to see a video on TV and instantly download it onto their computer. At the moment, there is still the time overhead of opening a web browser, going to a search engine and having to type a keyword search (pop-group, lyrics, title). The only way to get faster than this would be to have a Instant Messanging type service where a user could simply type in the Cable/Satellite/Terrestial channel they are watching and get the download.
For MP3 players, there could be a points loyalty scheme where if someone recommends downloaded tracks to their friends (reference the download site, rather than just transfering the track), they get points or discounts off other stuff like T-shirts and baseball caps.
More likely a smart car. Or even a LEGO model.
Unfortunately for them, they seem to have stumbled on to the rare "good" cop. (or their offering price wasn't high enough).
They haven't gained any sympathy from the Police force with their constant stream of political correctness, lax sentencing (offenders normally get half the sentence off for good behaviour due to prison overcrowding - according to the head of the prison service this isn't enough time to rehabilitate repeat offenders). Retirees
will be put in jail for refusing to pay rising property taxes, while violent muggers and burglars get off with community service.
Even the judges get cheesed off because their sentences aren't being carried out. The latest wheeze is that judges shouldn't determine the duration of prison sentences - this should be left to parole boards. And the Police are wise to their tactics - if anyone ever takes the slight pot-shot close to critizing the government, the whole cabinet comes out with guns blazing. So each time an announcement that there might be evidence that a crime might have occurred, Downing Street goes ballistic, only to go completely silent as soon as the actual evidence is presented.
And then the Police arrested a couple of Oxford students for calling a police horse gay/. The journalists had a field day over that one - calling the decision "Blackadderesque". One could only imagine the script for that.
As one detective on TV put it: "Every dumb criminal is a failure of the education system".
Funny in one sense, but sadly true in another - something like 40% of prison inmates are dsylexic and can't read.
So placing large notices with large black and red and warning messages don't really have much effect, even when
they aren't high on drugs.
In the past, 3D polygon rendering was implemented as a bolt-on on to the windows system (X-Windows, MS-Windows, ...). The server would accelerate basic 2D operations such as block-copying and block-pasting using one set of hardware functions, while 3D operations would be handled by another. Each application would have the standard GUI windows, and a special object to handle 3D graphics acceleration with all the effects like transparency.
But since 2D operations are simply a subset of the 3D operations, it would be more efficient to implement the
entire windows system using the 3D acceleration.
Combined with the desire of developers to use effects like semi-transparent windows, the only practical way
is to implement the windows system using the 3D graphics hardware.
If the soldiers are continuously broadcasting sound and relative position data to a base station, then they may as well paint themselves fluorescent orange and do jumping jacks.
That's why the military developed spread-spectrum radio communications. A radio set converted sound waves into a rapid series of short pulses that jumped from frequency to frequency using a random pattern. The idea was that it would be impossible to triangulate the location of a transmitted because any single pulse would only appear as background noise. This evolved into
mobile phone systems.
To launch an projectile into space using this method, requires that the projectile is accelerated from stationary to at least 3 kilometers per second (or 0 to 18,000 kph), all within a few seconds. Probably more to overcome air friction. Gravity provides an acceleration of around 10 metres per second (1 G = 9.8 metres/second per second), so doing this acceleration is equivalent to 300G. To get this acceleration down to the speeds tolerated by electronics, you would have to extend the rail gun all the way out to space.
The following website has a table of orbital velocities, periods, altitudes and lifetimes for various objects currently orbiting the Earth.
So the original poster was claiming we can buy DVDs for £0.30; he was quite definitely being tongue-in-cheek, unless he meant blank ones :-)
...). I've got a whole stack of DVD's/albums/ collected in this way.
If you buy a Sunday paper in the UK, you will often get a "free movie" on DVD (in the past these have included titles like Highlander, Chicago, Clockwise, , etc...), or the pilot episode of a series (On the Buses, Carry On
In soviet russia the motherboard belongs to the motherland?
I suggest the same, since I've never heard of solder that can stay solid at those temperatures, much less sillicon (or whatever crazy elements are being used nowadays) not turning into the Magical Blue Smoke that makes machines run.
One computer lab I used to work in, was located in an old chemistry room - it had single glazing with continental style slatted windows (a safety feature to stop fumes from building up). Heating in the entire block was on from 8.00am to 5.00pm. In Winter, just about every PC would fail due to the heat stress caused by going from room temperature to below zero and back again every night. The technicians had to run round fixing every machine by checking for any EPROM chips, circuit boards and connectors that might have popped out.
Some inventors have proposed creating communication systems using gravity waves. Such a system only requires a large weight to be shifted according to sound vibrations. Detecting the resulting gravitational wave is the hard part.
Analogue to Digitial circuits were around in the late 1970's - The Atari console system supported paddle controllers.
hat is unacceptible! Unexpectidly unacceptible. As unexpected as...
Leonard Nimoy sings the "Ballad of Bilbo Baggins">?
Why is it that distros are still so predominantly media-based anyways?
Not everyone has or wants broadband access. While my apartment has combined cable TV/broadband, my parents only have the cheapest AOL monthly subscription available (dialup modem), which is enough for them to book airline flights and read E-mail. Consequently, whenever I go out to visit them, I have to download everything and store it on either on either a USB drive or burn onto read-writable CD's/DVD's just in case of disk failure.
Your garbage bags waiting out by the curb are probably full of DNA that you have "discarded" and could in theory be taken by the police. Does this mean the Government should build a DNA database of all citizens -- even those who haven't been convicted of anything?
This happens in the North of England during a crackdown against organized crime. Criminal gangs originally used their own cars to do burglaries on shops. But they were quickly caught by CCTV and DNA analysis. Then they learnt that if they nicked someone's car and household rubbish, they could do the raid, throw the householders rubbish around the car and crime scene, then set fire to the car, and then run to their getaway car. The cops would first look up the number plates and question the home-owners. DNA analysis would again point to the home owners.
And the current UK government still seem determined to have everyone's DNA registered.
Sony do the same, if not all the Windows laptops out there. Some time ago, Microsoft and the hardware vendors announced they were no longer going to give out the Windows installation CD/DVD's with each system, as users would just use these CD's to upgrade all their other computers.
Even more annoying, some vendors have replaced the handful of CD's with a single DVD, but have failed to update the installation software with this knowledge, so the installation remains incomplete because "the second CD has not been inserted".
Of course those subsides come from tax payers, and maybe that's the reason France has a unemployment rate which, last time I checked, was almost double the American.
Agriculture isn't really the main cause of the unemployment. It's more that it is difficult to set up your company. For basic skills such as mechanics or plumbing, there are mandatory 2+ year apprenticeship schemes that have to be completed once the college studies have been completed. That requires any graduate having to find a company willing to train up a competitor to their business. For anyone wanting to set up their own technology company, there is also a need for a large insurance deposit to be made. Similar problems occur in the rest of Europe - many Europeans have resorted to register their company in the UK with the corporate head office in their home country.
If anything, the subsidised agriculture means that food is fresh and of high quality, meaning that diets are far more
healthy than other countries and help to lower the costs of health care (In France, hospitals are privately run, while the health insurance company is run by the state).
how on earth can someone code so sloppily that a WORD PROCESSOR has a serious security exploit?!
The usual reason - a local buffer created from the stack set to a fixed size. ie.
char cbuf[MAX_BUFFER];
I would guess that the Microsoft Word document file will be arranged using a chunk data format:
file header followed by object headers with type, version, length, followed by binary data for that object
In this way, unknown chunks can just be skipped over.
It would be no surprise that each programmer coding a particular object (formula, table) would assume that only
they would be theonly one writing read/write routines for their particular object, and choose to use a local stack
buffer to store the raw binary data, before converting it to the internal data structure.
When reading the document, they would just read the header as normal (type,version,length), then read the specified
amount of object data without checking the validity of the length.
And it only takes one programmer to make this mistake in order to create a security vulnerability that compromises
the entire application. Get the right type of data in the Word document, and you could theoretically load and execute
some executable code stored the file.
Out of interest, which part of the USA are you located in? Most universities base their course syllabuses on the needs of local industry, or what gives their graduates the best opportunities for employment. For companies based on computer animation, engineering, financial markets, medical imaging and encryption, such mathematics are an essential requirement.
However such courses tend to focus on the use of Matlab, Mathematica and other more theoretical programming languages such as Prolog, Lisp and Haskell.
Some Computer Science courses do have group projects with 3-5 people, and also have internships. The tricky part with group projects is that every student has
their own mix of course modules which can make it difficult for people to get together outside regular class hours. Since employers insist that students have
"soft skills" some time must be left free for social activities. And employers insist that graduates have experience "writing specifications and designing code",
so getting someone to maintain four year old code is next to impossible.
The only way this does happen is by looking for someone who had worked on a PhD project for 3 to 5 years.
I wish I hadn't used all my mod points earlier today, because that's an interesting post... it would be interesting to set up a programming environment with a binary format and specialized editor, though on second thought it might not work so well.
There's always the APL programming language - just about every mathematical function call is mapped to a single unicode character.
Microsoft do this to file data formats as well. Given a file format with every tag and field specified down to the last bit, it only takes one "reserved for the future" bit and Microsoft will find a purpose for it and patent that purpose, in order to break file portability between file systems. You will be able to transfer files into their format, but not outwards.
Microsoft also did this with their release of Java.