If you're seeing the funny symbols, then your browser is submitting UTF-8, but the application (/.) is expecting ISO-8859-1. Internet Explorer on XP (and maybe other combinations) has an annoying tendency to submit UTF-8 versions of non-ASCII characters even if the page you're entering the data into is not in this encoding.
The solution, of course, is to get with the times and deliver your web app in UTF-8 already. (You reading this Taco?)
The equality issue here is just a petty complaint. I want to drive a Porsche, but I'm stuck driving a Mazda (required car analogy).
No, the car analogy here would be, "I want to drive my Mazda on roads as good as people with Porshes get to drive on."
You mean like how I can pay money to drive from NYC to Chicago on the nice, flat, straight toll road; or I can take the state highways and hit stop lights in every town along the way?
I'd happily pay $10 extra for another few more GB this month, but certainly don't want to lock myself into a higher plan, as most months I won't be using as much. This is moving off-topic, but you should get yourself a better ISP. Exetel charge a flat excess of something like $3/GB (but they seem to be having some problems with over-subcribed bandwidth at the moment). You have to be careful with this though -- since if your box gets owned and ends up hosting warez you might be in for a nasty shock.
Internode allow you to buy "data blocks" at about the same rate, while still protecting you from unexpected excess bills. There's probably other ISPs that work this way too.
The article is looking at a download link that is saturated from P2P transfers from other people. In BitTorrent, the more slowly you upload, the more slowly you download. Actually, this is pretty much nonsense. In a heavily contended torrent, with more requests in the cloud than there is upload bandwidth to serve it, then often priority is given to better uploaders. However, on torrents with a good supply of fast seeds and few leechers (e.g. an old torrent with dedicated seeds provided by the content owner) it is very easy to reach the download cap you've set in your client while uploading next to nothing.
"We know how much damage each class can do and take, plus all the utility each class can provide. So, instead of balancing each ability, we just need to modify the overall damage output and absorption of each career."
Is combat (damage) all there is to the game? Probably. It's because combat is so easy to code. The combat systems of most MMORPGs that I've seen haven't evolved very far from the original MUDs (or since D&D, if you prefer).
Also, combat is easy to balance both in PvP and PvE. A fight that lasts 10 minutes max and involves a number of players from 1 to MAX_RAID_SIZE is easy to test. An economy of crafting, shopkeeping, research and development, brokering, banking, thieving, etc. involving hundreds or thousands of players, with all their idiosyncrasies and exploit attempts is pretty much impossible to predict and test.
(Yes, yes, cue "EVE Online = awesome" comment here, followed by "Star Wars Galaxies = dismal failure" riposte.)
The casual player will have less invested... Actually, I think the casual player has MORE invested.
The "casual player" is generally one who doesn't have a lot of free time to play the game, rather than someone who has a lot of free time and chooses to spend only a little of it playing WoW.
If you can only play a few hours a week, it's going to take months to get a character on a new game into the "end game" level and gear. If you're "hardcore" you can probably be at the cutting edge of a new game within a couple of weeks.
In 1998 I worked with a site that I believe was, at the time, one of the top 5 sites in Australia. We hosted the site internally, and our ISP gave us a rebate on our inbound traffic based on how much outbound we pushed. In other words, they were paying us for providing content that they were then (indirectly) selling to their residential customers.
It used to work a bit like this in Australia - packets from the same ISP were cheap, another domestic ISP a bit more, and international even more (because bandwith on the trans-Pacific cables is expensive). Now, at least at the consumer level, this is no longer the case. Sometimes you get free traffic from the ISP's own FTP, games, and streaming proxy servers but that's about it. Everything else is flat-rate regardless of origin.
I thought some game store was introducing an "over 30" section so that grumpy old men like me could go buy our copies of Brain Age and refurb wood-grain Atari 2600s without having to deal with all those pesky kids. I clicked to find the location this trigenarian utopia but alas it was not to be.
I like to explain this type of paradox with a parallel universe theory. In your story, the universe ceased to exist because of an irresolvable paradox -- a dead-end in the timeline beyond which there was no internally-consistent state for the universe to be in. A little like what happens to the "wrong" answers when doing calculations with a quantum computer.
The thing is, there were other universes where everything was fine. The scientist put the cube into the machine and everything was okay, or the scientist never put the cube into the machine and the demonstration failed. Nobody died, and the whole of everything didn't suddenly end, they just continued along one of the consistent timelines. The versions of the people in the dead-end timeline didn't know what happened (because they ceased to exist) and the people in the continuing timeline were unaware of the existence of any others (except in a "I wonder what would have happened if..." sense).
I'll concede that this is kind of fatalistic, but if you want to allow time travel, then you really have to give up on the idea that the "forward" direction of time is special. If the second brass cube was on the table then someone must have put it there in exactly the same way that someone must have put the first one there. Cause and effect become indistinguishable because the causal relationship can run in either direction.
How did he unpack the gnu tar distribution? *grin*
As you should know, GNU Tar comes in a gzipped shell archive, so tar is not needed for unpacking it. He had to know how to use gunzip though...
Yeah, I know that (I actually checked on ftp.gnu.org before I posted), I was just yanking your chain. However, if he could unzip the.shar.gz he would have been able to unzip the.tar.gz.
Maybe he just installed gnu tar out of principle. I know when I was adminning digital Unix boxen the first thing I did was install the CD full of gnu tools that digital shipped with thier OS.
Actually, it's a very good and necessary part of a fair democratic system. The truth is that this minority party does not get 100% of the power, but do serve as an effective moderator on the government.
Currently in Australia the Federal government have a majority in both houses of parliament. With no president to veto bills, they can basically force through any legislation they choose (voting against your party or "crossing the floor" gets you booted from you party in most cases, and we have no filibuster rules). Let's say the majority party got 52% of the vote. This means 48% of the population are all but disenfranchised. The minority party does not have 48% of the power, they have no power beyond getting themselves on TV trying to convince people to vote differently at the next election.
However, if, as it has in the past, a small percentage of the votes can give balance-of-power to a minor party then the government have to work for what they want. They have to make compromises and hold meaningful debate. To paraphrase Don Chipp, founder of the Australian Democrats, it "keeps the bastards honest".
I think it is preferable to give a disproportionately large share of power to a minority than to give absolute power to a slim majority.
But seriously, I'm in pretty much the same boat. Epsxe is the benchmark for my MX440 too.
I have actually considered an upgrade, but then looked at the prices and thought about how much RAM I could get for the price and how much more that would improve my computing experience.
If these cards come in under AU$100 I might think about it, just to get second head and DVI capability.
If you pretty much only like classic games (like I do) then budget cards are great value.
Number of cities in USA with population over 4,590,000 == 1
Only if you're counting the official city limits (E.g. the 5 boroughs of New York City). When most people talk about a city, they mean the whole metropolitan area. This is certainly true here in Australia. If you're in a rural area, or another state, and ask someone from Paramatta where they live they will say "Sydney". This is despite the fact that the "City of Paramatta" is about 25km from the "City of Sydney".
Counting by metropolitan area, NYC has about 22 million inhabitants, and LA has over 17 million. Chicago has over 9 million, and Boston has 5.8 million (although only 1/2 million in the city proper).
Each defendant was charged with one count of conspiracy to commit copyright infringement, which carries a five-year maximum prison sentence. Fifteen also were charged with copyright infringement, which carries a three-year maximum.
Anyone care to explain why conspiracy attracts a harsher sentence than the actual crime? I mean, leaving aside the whole moral quagmire surrounding the criminalization of copyright infringement, how can thinking and talking about doing something carry a harsher penalty than actually doing it. Does this type of duality apply in traditional crimes like assault, murder and larceny?
It's not about Open Source, it's about portability and openness in general. If you want to create full-featured Flash movies, you have to fork out the license fee to Adobe because they have the only implementation. If you want to play a full featured Flash movie, you have to have the official plugin. Too bad there's no 64-bit version available. I actually like to see certain Flash content, but I have to look at it at work because at home I only have 64-bit Linux. It's also too bad if the plugin is bugged (there were endian issues in previous versions of the Mac/PPC version).
I don't begrudge Adobe their development environment, or their plugin, but I do think they should open the file format. Distiller is a powerful package for creating PDF files, and Adobe Reader has great market penetration for viewing them. However, becuase the format is open I can generate and render PDF with GhostScript and other tools. I can also use PDFlib in PHP or purchase a cheap.NET component and do advanced server-side processing. This diversity is what makes a file format great. If the SWF spec were fully open, and a fully compliant Open Source plugin were developed, it would do almost nothing to the market share of the official plugin or the Flash development tools. It would just open the technology up to new horizons. Flash for mobile devices, Flash in desktop applications (an area where HTML has already made a huge impact).
There's a time and a place for security testing other people's systems. If you're playing around, and notice something that might be a security hole, correct solution is to find an admin that knows what they're talking about, and say "Hey, I see your system does , isn't that a problem?".
Hear, hear.
This kid has learned the same lesson that I did when I was at Uni (=college). Twice I got a slap on the wrist and a thread of Academic Misconduct hearing for "hacking". The first time, a friend left himself logged in to a public terminal. I put in a.rhosts allowing me to log in to his account from one of my accounts, and set up a cron job for him to mail the sysadmin every day with some uncomplimentary messages. The second time, I noticed that a mistake in the profile scripts for the main undergraduate CS system had put . in the path before/bin for all users. I created/tmp/ls as a shell script which echoed a warning about checking you $PATH and how I could have done very nasty things with their account. Of course, both of these were very traceable and I got into trouble.
The point of this story is not what I did, but what I learned. I didn't learn much about computer security -- I already knew about the weaknesses I'd exploited. What I learned was the correct way to deal with them. In the first case, I should have logged the friend out and then has a private word with him about his carelessness. In the second case, I should have promptly brought the flaw to the attention of the sysadmin and not attracted the attention of any malicious individuals who might have been inspired to create/tmp/rm as something really nasty. (Actually, when he called me in to his office, he let me help dig through the various scripts to find the source of the problem which was a great piece of practical experience for me.)
This kid has learned his lesson too. If you want practical experience in breaking computer security then you should set up a sandbox. Hell, grab yourself some virtualization software and set yourself up a whole virtual network.
Gah! Why is it that people insist on benchmarking dual-core and dual-processor systems with single instances of single-threaded applications and then bitch about the lack of multi-threaded software to take advantage of the extra processing power. Does nobody out there actually use their computer to do more than one thing at a time?
If the apps you are using are single-threaded, run TWO OF THEM AT ONCE! See how fast the machine can play Quake while encoding an MPEG4 video stream. See if you can play a full-screen h264 video while you have a kerel compile running. If there is a long-running compute-intensive task going on in my workstation, I still need to do work. If my home machine is doing some crunching I don't want to have to do something radical like go outside.
Actually, the latest comprehensive browser stats that I saw show 30% of Mac users still using Internet Explorer (link). My anecdotal personal evidence backs this up -- many Mac users I know still don't use Safari.
I think the reason has to do with the whole OS X upgrade thing. A new version of the OS costs $130, and the only way to upgrade Safari is to upgrade the OS. A lot of OS X users never bother to upgrade from the version that came with their Mac. Consequently, they're stuck on versions that either never came with Safari installed, didn't have it as the default browser, or can't run anything better than 1.0 even if they it wanted to.
As a web developer, I have to say that the standards-compliance of 1.0 is pretty poor and a lot of site layouts will break when using it. For instance, an absolutely positioned element will always take its position from the document origin, rather than that of the parent (relatively positioned) container. This is a huge deal that will cause all manner of breakage on most sites using CSS positioning.
If Apple really want to wean people off their Microsoft dependency, and do the right thing by their users, then they should back-port Safari 2.0 to older versions of OS X and release it as an automatic update. If I.E. 6 for Windows is a 5-year-old browser that runs on 10-year-old operating systems, why can't Apple's 6-month-old browser run on a 5-year-old operating system?
And now, to the point: NTFS does have an "x" flag (called "Read & Execute" in the GUI - and yes, there is a separate one called "Read"). But I think it's ignored if you're logged in as Administrator, which most Windows users are. (Not sure about that though)
A quick check here shows that removing the execute permission actually does prevent an admin from running the file. However, the "Traverse directories" permission is the same as the "execute" permission (same as on POSIX systems), which means you'd have to do some fiddling about if you wanted to remove it globally. Basically, you need to change the applicability of all execute flags at the root of the drive from "This folder, subfolders and files" to "This folder and subfolders".
However, this kind of a strategy would probably break a number of things, even if you ran a script to re-apply the permission to all existing exe (and dll?) files. For instance, many installers are self-extracting archives that then run an installer from the unpacked files. I doubt that the correct execute permission would be set during the extraction process, since the default on almost all (guessing > 99.9%) of Windows machines is to execute anything.
Re:My favourite learning song
on
Singing Science
·
· Score: 1
I always sing it as: 100 buckets of bits on the bus, 100 buckets of bits. Take one down, short it to ground. ff buckets of bits on the bus.
I spend too much time reading the fortune cookies.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're seeing the funny symbols, then your browser is submitting UTF-8, but the application (/.) is expecting ISO-8859-1. Internet Explorer on XP (and maybe other combinations) has an annoying tendency to submit UTF-8 versions of non-ASCII characters even if the page you're entering the data into is not in this encoding.
The solution, of course, is to get with the times and deliver your web app in UTF-8 already. (You reading this Taco?)
No, the car analogy here would be, "I want to drive my Mazda on roads as good as people with Porshes get to drive on."
You mean like how I can pay money to drive from NYC to Chicago on the nice, flat, straight toll road; or I can take the state highways and hit stop lights in every town along the way?Internode allow you to buy "data blocks" at about the same rate, while still protecting you from unexpected excess bills. There's probably other ISPs that work this way too.
Is combat (damage) all there is to the game? Probably. It's because combat is so easy to code. The combat systems of most MMORPGs that I've seen haven't evolved very far from the original MUDs (or since D&D, if you prefer).
Also, combat is easy to balance both in PvP and PvE. A fight that lasts 10 minutes max and involves a number of players from 1 to MAX_RAID_SIZE is easy to test. An economy of crafting, shopkeeping, research and development, brokering, banking, thieving, etc. involving hundreds or thousands of players, with all their idiosyncrasies and exploit attempts is pretty much impossible to predict and test.
(Yes, yes, cue "EVE Online = awesome" comment here, followed by "Star Wars Galaxies = dismal failure" riposte.)
The "casual player" is generally one who doesn't have a lot of free time to play the game, rather than someone who has a lot of free time and chooses to spend only a little of it playing WoW.
If you can only play a few hours a week, it's going to take months to get a character on a new game into the "end game" level and gear. If you're "hardcore" you can probably be at the cutting edge of a new game within a couple of weeks.
In 1998 I worked with a site that I believe was, at the time, one of the top 5 sites in Australia. We hosted the site internally, and our ISP gave us a rebate on our inbound traffic based on how much outbound we pushed. In other words, they were paying us for providing content that they were then (indirectly) selling to their residential customers.
Oh, how times have changed.
It used to work a bit like this in Australia - packets from the same ISP were cheap, another domestic ISP a bit more, and international even more (because bandwith on the trans-Pacific cables is expensive). Now, at least at the consumer level, this is no longer the case. Sometimes you get free traffic from the ISP's own FTP, games, and streaming proxy servers but that's about it. Everything else is flat-rate regardless of origin.
I thought some game store was introducing an "over 30" section so that grumpy old men like me could go buy our copies of Brain Age and refurb wood-grain Atari 2600s without having to deal with all those pesky kids. I clicked to find the location this trigenarian utopia but alas it was not to be.
I like to explain this type of paradox with a parallel universe theory. In your story, the universe ceased to exist because of an irresolvable paradox -- a dead-end in the timeline beyond which there was no internally-consistent state for the universe to be in. A little like what happens to the "wrong" answers when doing calculations with a quantum computer.
The thing is, there were other universes where everything was fine. The scientist put the cube into the machine and everything was okay, or the scientist never put the cube into the machine and the demonstration failed. Nobody died, and the whole of everything didn't suddenly end, they just continued along one of the consistent timelines. The versions of the people in the dead-end timeline didn't know what happened (because they ceased to exist) and the people in the continuing timeline were unaware of the existence of any others (except in a "I wonder what would have happened if..." sense).
I'll concede that this is kind of fatalistic, but if you want to allow time travel, then you really have to give up on the idea that the "forward" direction of time is special. If the second brass cube was on the table then someone must have put it there in exactly the same way that someone must have put the first one there. Cause and effect become indistinguishable because the causal relationship can run in either direction.
Yeah, I know that (I actually checked on ftp.gnu.org before I posted), I was just yanking your chain. However, if he could unzip the
Maybe he just installed gnu tar out of principle. I know when I was adminning digital Unix boxen the first thing I did was install the CD full of gnu tools that digital shipped with thier OS.
How did he unpack the gnu tar distribution? *grin*
"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom." - Gandalf the Grey
Actually, it's a very good and necessary part of a fair democratic system. The truth is that this minority party does not get 100% of the power, but do serve as an effective moderator on the government.
Currently in Australia the Federal government have a majority in both houses of parliament. With no president to veto bills, they can basically force through any legislation they choose (voting against your party or "crossing the floor" gets you booted from you party in most cases, and we have no filibuster rules). Let's say the majority party got 52% of the vote. This means 48% of the population are all but disenfranchised. The minority party does not have 48% of the power, they have no power beyond getting themselves on TV trying to convince people to vote differently at the next election.
However, if, as it has in the past, a small percentage of the votes can give balance-of-power to a minor party then the government have to work for what they want. They have to make compromises and hold meaningful debate. To paraphrase Don Chipp, founder of the Australian Democrats, it "keeps the bastards honest".
I think it is preferable to give a disproportionately large share of power to a minority than to give absolute power to a slim majority.
Me too!
But seriously, I'm in pretty much the same boat. Epsxe is the benchmark for my MX440 too.
I have actually considered an upgrade, but then looked at the prices and thought about how much RAM I could get for the price and how much more that would improve my computing experience.
If these cards come in under AU$100 I might think about it, just to get second head and DVI capability.
If you pretty much only like classic games (like I do) then budget cards are great value.
v = 11000 m/s (escape velocity, more or less)
a = 500 m/s^2 (a bit more than 5 gs)
Unfortunately, 1G is about 10 m/s^2, not 100 m/s^2, so ShavenYak is correct.
Or to misquote Andy Tannenbaum: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a city bus full of iPods hurtling down town.
Number of cities in USA with population over 4,590,000 == 1
Only if you're counting the official city limits (E.g. the 5 boroughs of New York City). When most people talk about a city, they mean the whole metropolitan area. This is certainly true here in Australia. If you're in a rural area, or another state, and ask someone from Paramatta where they live they will say "Sydney". This is despite the fact that the "City of Paramatta" is about 25km from the "City of Sydney".
Counting by metropolitan area, NYC has about 22 million inhabitants, and LA has over 17 million. Chicago has over 9 million, and Boston has 5.8 million (although only 1/2 million in the city proper).
Anyone care to explain why conspiracy attracts a harsher sentence than the actual crime? I mean, leaving aside the whole moral quagmire surrounding the criminalization of copyright infringement, how can thinking and talking about doing something carry a harsher penalty than actually doing it. Does this type of duality apply in traditional crimes like assault, murder and larceny?
It's not about Open Source, it's about portability and openness in general. If you want to create full-featured Flash movies, you have to fork out the license fee to Adobe because they have the only implementation. If you want to play a full featured Flash movie, you have to have the official plugin. Too bad there's no 64-bit version available. I actually like to see certain Flash content, but I have to look at it at work because at home I only have 64-bit Linux. It's also too bad if the plugin is bugged (there were endian issues in previous versions of the Mac/PPC version).
.NET component and do advanced server-side processing. This diversity is what makes a file format great. If the SWF spec were fully open, and a fully compliant Open Source plugin were developed, it would do almost nothing to the market share of the official plugin or the Flash development tools. It would just open the technology up to new horizons. Flash for mobile devices, Flash in desktop applications (an area where HTML has already made a huge impact).
I don't begrudge Adobe their development environment, or their plugin, but I do think they should open the file format. Distiller is a powerful package for creating PDF files, and Adobe Reader has great market penetration for viewing them. However, becuase the format is open I can generate and render PDF with GhostScript and other tools. I can also use PDFlib in PHP or purchase a cheap
Free the SWFs!
Hear, hear.
This kid has learned the same lesson that I did when I was at Uni (=college). Twice I got a slap on the wrist and a thread of Academic Misconduct hearing for "hacking". The first time, a friend left himself logged in to a public terminal. I put in a .rhosts allowing me to log in to his account from one of my accounts, and set up a cron job for him to mail the sysadmin every day with some uncomplimentary messages. The second time, I noticed that a mistake in the profile scripts for the main undergraduate CS system had put . in the path before /bin for all users. I created /tmp/ls as a shell script which echoed a warning about checking you $PATH and how I could have done very nasty things with their account. Of course, both of these were very traceable and I got into trouble.
The point of this story is not what I did, but what I learned. I didn't learn much about computer security -- I already knew about the weaknesses I'd exploited. What I learned was the correct way to deal with them. In the first case, I should have logged the friend out and then has a private word with him about his carelessness. In the second case, I should have promptly brought the flaw to the attention of the sysadmin and not attracted the attention of any malicious individuals who might have been inspired to create /tmp/rm as something really nasty. (Actually, when he called me in to his office, he let me help dig through the various scripts to find the source of the problem which was a great piece of practical experience for me.)
This kid has learned his lesson too. If you want practical experience in breaking computer security then you should set up a sandbox. Hell, grab yourself some virtualization software and set yourself up a whole virtual network.
Gah! Why is it that people insist on benchmarking dual-core and dual-processor systems with single instances of single-threaded applications and then bitch about the lack of multi-threaded software to take advantage of the extra processing power. Does nobody out there actually use their computer to do more than one thing at a time?
If the apps you are using are single-threaded, run TWO OF THEM AT ONCE! See how fast the machine can play Quake while encoding an MPEG4 video stream. See if you can play a full-screen h264 video while you have a kerel compile running. If there is a long-running compute-intensive task going on in my workstation, I still need to do work. If my home machine is doing some crunching I don't want to have to do something radical like go outside.
Here endeth rant.
Actually, the latest comprehensive browser stats that I saw show 30% of Mac users still using Internet Explorer (link). My anecdotal personal evidence backs this up -- many Mac users I know still don't use Safari.
I think the reason has to do with the whole OS X upgrade thing. A new version of the OS costs $130, and the only way to upgrade Safari is to upgrade the OS. A lot of OS X users never bother to upgrade from the version that came with their Mac. Consequently, they're stuck on versions that either never came with Safari installed, didn't have it as the default browser, or can't run anything better than 1.0 even if they it wanted to.
As a web developer, I have to say that the standards-compliance of 1.0 is pretty poor and a lot of site layouts will break when using it. For instance, an absolutely positioned element will always take its position from the document origin, rather than that of the parent (relatively positioned) container. This is a huge deal that will cause all manner of breakage on most sites using CSS positioning.
If Apple really want to wean people off their Microsoft dependency, and do the right thing by their users, then they should back-port Safari 2.0 to older versions of OS X and release it as an automatic update. If I.E. 6 for Windows is a 5-year-old browser that runs on 10-year-old operating systems, why can't Apple's 6-month-old browser run on a 5-year-old operating system?
And now, to the point: NTFS does have an "x" flag (called "Read & Execute" in the GUI - and yes, there is a separate one called "Read"). But I think it's ignored if you're logged in as Administrator, which most Windows users are. (Not sure about that though)
A quick check here shows that removing the execute permission actually does prevent an admin from running the file. However, the "Traverse directories" permission is the same as the "execute" permission (same as on POSIX systems), which means you'd have to do some fiddling about if you wanted to remove it globally. Basically, you need to change the applicability of all execute flags at the root of the drive from "This folder, subfolders and files" to "This folder and subfolders".
However, this kind of a strategy would probably break a number of things, even if you ran a script to re-apply the permission to all existing exe (and dll?) files. For instance, many installers are self-extracting archives that then run an installer from the unpacked files. I doubt that the correct execute permission would be set during the extraction process, since the default on almost all (guessing > 99.9%) of Windows machines is to execute anything.
I always sing it as:
100 buckets of bits on the bus,
100 buckets of bits.
Take one down, short it to ground.
ff buckets of bits on the bus.
I spend too much time reading the fortune cookies.