You would seriously benefit from having a Tivo. We just recorded it as a season pass and watched it whenever we wanted. And zipping through commercials and catching the next start exactly is a fun game.
I don't play games of this type, so I don't know how you possess items in the game, but if this guy is amassing large quantities of virtual goods for real-world sale, what's to keep a bunch of players from robbing his storehouse or killing his character and making off with his loot?
You've just taken a large portion of this guy's real-world income. Can you get arrested for that? Could he sue you and win? It just a game, right?
Why 4 hours of engine telemtry? Because races often last this long. And storing outside the system is not easy. First you can have 2 or more video channels in addition to the data. That a huge amount a bandwidth and teams are not given enough bandwidth to push that much data through. In addition, most race tracks do not have 100% coverage line-of-sight to transmit the data back to the pits.
Television companies get their own bandwith (and a lot of it) but they can't put cameras on every car and often only have one. To get around line-of-sight they often relay the transmission off a helicopter or the Goodyear blimp.
Real enough for you?
So "portable" and "embedded" are mutually exclusive? I've build systems with battery powered 8-bit microcontrollers and 19" racks filled with dozens of transputers and test equipment. Both are embedded systems.
The same thing happens in some Dells that do not use the P4-M (mobility) CPUs. The heat build up causes the CPU to start reducing it's clock speed in an effort to reduce the heat. Some Dells use the M, some do not. Check before you buy (if you even care).
I don't think you really understand Walmart's customer base. I grew up in rural Georgia. Back in the 80s cable was only available in the larger neighborhoods. Those houses that were in the sticks and the trailer parks couldn't get cable. Those people had huge f'ing satelite dishes and big screen TVs. Entertainment is an escape from reality. The harsher the reality the more money that will be spent on the escape.
This is an argument that could easily spiral out of control, but in my opinion sales tax is good and income tax is bad. Why?
Because sales-only tax encourages saving money. Then you make some good things except from sales tax, like food, education, and health care. This encourages people to save their money and spend it on things that are good for them.
In Georgia I pay, right now, $1.30 for a gallon of gas. That's ridiculously low. I'd happily pay five times that amount since it would force me to reduce my wasteful driving habits and the tax would be used to research alternative fuels, etc.
Additionally a flat sales tax would virtually eliminate the IRS, tax attorneys, tax preparers, etc. (not all, but most).
Find a sales tax rate that would support our countries infrastructure and then eliminate the income tax. I'm all for it.
Get a grip. Am I not allowed to complain about an aspect of a technology I don't like? Do I have to be politically correct here? And I have used aspectj and I do consider it a mangler. In my opinion its drawbacks outweights its advantages. I consider javac a "compiler".
I have use Toplink and Cocobase extensively on two very large, commercial projects. I liked Toplink and hated Cocobase. Can I call Cocobase total crap without being blamed for spreading FUD? I can provide numerous details if I need to defend myself.
I am currently using both OJB and Hibernate on a commercial product. I do not develop open-source other than submitting bugs/patches for the tools I use. Neither product requires you extend a base class, neither requires your beans know _anything_ about the persistence mechanism. In my architecture I do have a base class that all persistent objects inherit and that base class holds a handle to a generic ORMManager I wrote that abstracts both OJB and Hibernate so I can switch between the two via a single line in a property file. At the moment I prefer OJB because of its query-by-criteria API which Hibernate is supposed to be getting in the next rev.
For the record, I have no issues with JDO other than the byte code mangler. Call it an "enhancer" if you want, but then you sound like a starry-eyed zeolot as much as I sound like a dissenter. I understand some JDO implementations provide a source-code enhancer as opposed to a byte-code one - this sounds interesting and I may look at it.
I can't believe I even bothered to respond to this. Once you've used these technologies in real projects and not just "on paper", you can tell me if JDO suits you.
Before you commit to JDO or entity beans, do yourself a favor and also look at OJB and Hibernate. Both of these object-relational mapping (ORM) tools offer unintrusive presistence to your existing beans (unlike Toplink and Cocobase which require you use their collection types) and don't require you to run a byte-code mangler like JDO.
It sounds like the RFID technology is similar a famous Russian listening device.
This device was totally passive, but when hit with a specific RF frequency (via a very directional beam) it would reflect the beam back but modulated by the sound in the room. The Russians could demodulate the signal and get the audio back. They hid the device in a carved wooden Seal of the United States that they presented to the US Embassador to Russia who proudly hung it above his desk. The Russian were privy to all conversations that took place in his office.
After a while the American figured his room was bugged so they sent in technicians to find the bug. The Russians weren't stupid - they knew when technicians arrived and simply turned off the directional RF carrier beam. They would turn it back on when the technicians left. Finally the Americans got smarter and all left but one who hid in the office with RF listening gear. When the Russians turned the RF carrier on, he detected it and figured it out it was embedded in the Seal. It was quite a scandal.
In top-fuel the driver doesn't press buttons - he pulls three levers - one for each gear.
Some interesting factoids that are almost 10 years old:
- topfuelers burn 10 gallons of nitro-methane just on the burn out - the engine pumps enough air in the 1/4 mile run to inflate the Goodyear blimp - your cars fuel line is about 3/8" inner diameter and pressurized to about 30 psi (IIRC). A topfueler's fuel line is 1.5" inner diameter and pressured to 170 psi! - a topfuel motor's horsepower is estimated at 5000 hp because no dynomometer can measure that much power (again this was 10 years ago)
I'm not really a fan of drag racing (I prefer road racing myself), but those factoids I've remembered for tens years because they were so impressive.
This post really belongs under some of the other top level posts regarding credit cards, but I wanted it at the top level to get more attention to an issue I think many people are not aware of.
Not all credit card purchases are safe. When a eBay seller asks for _only_ Western Union wire transfer or C2IT, you should be wary. Both of these transactions are billed to your credit card as cash advances and are not subject to credit card fraud protection charge back. YMMV - read your terms and conditions for your credit card.
Another version of this scam which got posted to the escrow boards on eBay scams the seller. It goes like this:
When the escrow site gets the buyers payment, they send an email to the seller saying it is okay to ship. However, we all know how easy it is to fake an email. One buyer faked an email that looked like it came from escrow.com and the seller shipped the item (out of the country). Good bye!
Never, ever, ever trust an email from eBay or escrow.com. They will be the first to tell you this. Both have links on most of their pages alerting you to this. Login into the site manually and confirm status before continuing the transaction.
This message is mostly for the net-clueless and not the typical slashdot reader.
You are right that it is against eBay policy to sell off eBay - it's categorized as Fee Avoidance. This often occurs when you list one item on eBay and in the description you claim to have more that you are willing to sell. You are skirting the Listing Fee which is against eBay rules.
However, you are allowed to cancel an auction at anytime - at _any_ time. It seems a little unfair but it does have legitimate uses. Often sellers will list an item locally (paper,signs,etc) as well as on eBay. If the item sells locally they can cancel the eBay auction by cancelling all bids then cancelling the auction (you must cancel the bids first or else the high bid at the time you cancel the auction does win the item).
Remember - no bidder has won the auction until the auction ends. There is no contract until that time.
Come and visit us on the Trust & Safety (Safe Harbor) boards. These sorts of issues get brought up daily.
For eBay trades, send the thing with some proof that you sent it. USPS Delivery Confirmation if you're cheap...
Note that USPS delivery confirmation isn't good enough any more. You have to use signature confirmation if you want Paypal seller's protection. And if you are sending to an unconfirmed address (which 50% of my sales are), you have no protection whatsoever from paypal.
Personally, I keep my Paypal account empty. It costs nothing to immediately move money that a buyer has deposited there into your backup bank account. Once in the real bank Paypal cannot touch it. It is simply far too easy for a buyer to claim they never received the item and Paypal will immediate reverse the funds back into the buyer's account.
I have yet to see a blog that offers a few security features I'd like to see:
1. A blog that has a challenge/response login page. This would be a blog that for my family that I would post updates and pictures of my kids. I don't want the whole world reading about my kids. The pages would be secured by a set of challenge/responses that I could enter such as: "My mom's maiden name", "My Dad's middle name". My immediate and extended family can answer those questions and get in without the need to remember any kind of userid/password.
2. Blog pages that I can create limited-access URLs to. For example, let's say I have a blog I use to keep design ideas. Only I have access to it. But I create a couple entries that I'd like to share with a couple friends for feedback. I'd like to be able to create a URL with some kind of key that I can email them. They can click on the URL and get to that page and no other. Then they can submit feedback.
I've been developing an embedded system with eCos for only a couple months, but the general feeling on the eCos developer and user lists with respect to Redhat dropping eCos is "who cares?". Apparently Redhat's support for the product wasn't stellar which is really the only value-add you are paying for (except perhaps for the gnupro toolchain). eCos 2.x in cvs is gpl'd with one exception to allow some embedded software not be be gpl'd itself. Redhat says that eCos will continue to be hosted at sources.redhat.com. Should that not happen, there is always sourceforge. The eCos developers, however, are out of work and updates to the source tree will probably be slower since they all have to find new jobs now. Patches seem to be submitted by everyone and they seem to have slowed down the review and acceptance of patches.
None of this is not a problem for me. I will continue using eCos.
I suppose you could buy Thinking in Java, but I'd prefer to download it for free
-tim
Re:This is even more useless than a salad shooter
on
IMSAI Series Two
·
· Score: 2
Maybe its just me, but computers have lost virtually all their facination for me. I grew up programming a TI99/4a first via basic, then forth, then assembly language. Getting the machine to do anything was so much fun, I'd forget to sleep at night. Now, some *cough* 20 years later, the facination is completely gone.
Lately I've been thinking getting a vintage computer might restore some of the wonder in programming. Personally, I'd never pay $1K for one. Instead, I'd find something on ebay for under $100.
Now, as a hobby, I build embedded systems. Lately, I've been using the arm core (Atmel AT91 and StrongArm), but debugging the hardware for one of these requires a very expensive logic analyser.
This is interesting because of (oddly enough) a statement I read in this month's Kiplinger magazine. In a sidebar, it was noted the that US Treasury dept. was looking at adding some color tones to the background of US notes to foil counterfeiters. The interesting quote was to the effect, "these modifications are part of the Treasury's plan to modify US bank notes every 7 years in an effort to make counterfeiting harder." My immediate thought was "wow! here is a US goverment department that sees how they have to change their business practices to compete with constantly changing technology" such as hi-res color laser printers and such. So why the hell can't the RIAA and MPAA do the same?
The US currently has laws against counterfeiting. Creating new laws to, for example, require all scanners to detect image signatures within US bank notes, would be completely possible yet plain silly since it could probably be easily defeated and would raise the cost of scanners. Yet this is exactly what the RIAA/MPAA wants with respect to copyrighted audio and video.
The parallels between the two situations were interesting to me. The irony that the government is more competitive than a private industry is not lost on me.
Another one that was good for a laugh was the ``Damn Fast Op-Amp'' that appeared in a normal device catalog...
That actually was not a joke. Those op-amp were damn fast. Seriously. They were an extension to the line of fast op-amps from (I believe) National Semiconductor.
If I'm a U.S. citizen, can I sue the government for not allowing me full access to the source code of the programs that handle all my data?
It depends. The vast majority of software I wrote was for the DoD. Even though we used no classified data in our software, releasing the source code for, say, how a radar jammer hops from technique to technique would be a very bad thing. Obviously, the software that we wrote that did use classified data would not be released either for much more obvious reasons.
JUnit is amazing. It's incredibly easy after you've written your first unit test. Here is a prime example of its use: I had about 50 classes spread out over a couple packages one of which is "core" to all the others. I had unit tests for all the code. I wanted to totally redesign how I implemented one of the core classes which is inherited by a number of other classes. I think people that don't have unit tests would shy away from such a large change. I simply backed up the old source file, put in the new file, and ran my ant script which builds, deploys (on appserver) and runs junit. After about 20 minutes of cranking through the unit tests, it finished with no failures. At that point I was 100% confident that my change worked and I wouldn't be surprised by a suble bug later. That is what junit is good for - peace of mind and confidence. You'll allow yourself to make changes to code (for the better) that you may otherwise have though too complex to attempt.
As for your first unit test, it isn't that hard. Use a standard naming schema like "FooTest.java" or "FooJUnit.java" for your test cases - this way ant can filter on those name and run junit against them while keeping your unit tests out of your distribution jars. Extend TestCase and overload setUp() and tearDown() - often you won't need those. Name your methods testXYZ() and junit will run them. Inside your test methods call Assert.xxx() on the things you want to test. You can test for null, compare to known values, etc. You can test to make sure exceptions should be thrown or not. Sprinkle in a little log4j and you can get more detailed progress of the tests.
Slashdot Mirror
and your labor to put it all together, install the OS and software, and ensure that it works was $31? Want a job?
You would seriously benefit from having a Tivo. We just recorded it as a season pass and watched it whenever we wanted. And zipping through commercials and catching the next start exactly is a fun game.
I don't play games of this type, so I don't know how you possess items in the game, but if this guy is amassing large quantities of virtual goods for real-world sale, what's to keep a bunch of players from robbing his storehouse or killing his character and making off with his loot?
You've just taken a large portion of this guy's real-world income. Can you get arrested for that? Could he sue you and win? It just a game, right?
Why 4 hours of engine telemtry? Because races often last this long. And storing outside the system is not easy. First you can have 2 or more video channels in addition to the data. That a huge amount a bandwidth and teams are not given enough bandwidth to push that much data through. In addition, most race tracks do not have 100% coverage line-of-sight to transmit the data back to the pits.
Television companies get their own bandwith (and a lot of it) but they can't put cameras on every car and often only have one. To get around line-of-sight they often relay the transmission off a helicopter or the Goodyear blimp.
Real enough for you?
So "portable" and "embedded" are mutually exclusive? I've build systems with battery powered 8-bit microcontrollers and 19" racks filled with dozens of transputers and test equipment. Both are embedded systems.
I've never used apt-get. Does it compile from sources like emerge?
How about 4 hours of engine telemetry - most of which is high bandwidth? How about video? I'm putting a hell of a lot more than 2GB in there.
Not all embedded systems are toasters.
The same thing happens in some Dells that do not use the P4-M (mobility) CPUs. The heat build up causes the CPU to start reducing it's clock speed in an effort to reduce the heat. Some Dells use the M, some do not. Check before you buy (if you even care).
I don't think you really understand Walmart's customer base. I grew up in rural Georgia. Back in the 80s cable was only available in the larger neighborhoods. Those houses that were in the sticks and the trailer parks couldn't get cable. Those people had huge f'ing satelite dishes and big screen TVs. Entertainment is an escape from reality. The harsher the reality the more money that will be spent on the escape.
This is an argument that could easily spiral out of control, but in my opinion sales tax is good and income tax is bad. Why?
Because sales-only tax encourages saving money. Then you make some good things except from sales tax, like food, education, and health care. This encourages people to save their money and spend it on things that are good for them.
In Georgia I pay, right now, $1.30 for a gallon of gas. That's ridiculously low. I'd happily pay five times that amount since it would force me to reduce my wasteful driving habits and the tax would be used to research alternative fuels, etc.
Additionally a flat sales tax would virtually eliminate the IRS, tax attorneys, tax preparers, etc. (not all, but most).
Find a sales tax rate that would support our countries infrastructure and then eliminate the income tax. I'm all for it.
Get a grip. Am I not allowed to complain about an aspect of a technology I don't like? Do I have to be politically correct here? And I have used aspectj and I do consider it a mangler. In my opinion its drawbacks outweights its advantages. I consider javac a "compiler".
I have use Toplink and Cocobase extensively on two very large, commercial projects. I liked Toplink and hated Cocobase. Can I call Cocobase total crap without being blamed for spreading FUD? I can provide numerous details if I need to defend myself.
I am currently using both OJB and Hibernate on a commercial product. I do not develop open-source other than submitting bugs/patches for the tools I use. Neither product requires you extend a base class, neither requires your beans know _anything_ about the persistence mechanism. In my architecture I do have a base class that all persistent objects inherit and that base class holds a handle to a generic ORMManager I wrote that abstracts both OJB and Hibernate so I can switch between the two via a single line in a property file. At the moment I prefer OJB because of its query-by-criteria API which Hibernate is supposed to be getting in the next rev.
For the record, I have no issues with JDO other than the byte code mangler. Call it an "enhancer" if you want, but then you sound like a starry-eyed zeolot as much as I sound like a dissenter. I understand some JDO implementations provide a source-code enhancer as opposed to a byte-code one - this sounds interesting and I may look at it.
I can't believe I even bothered to respond to this. Once you've used these technologies in real projects and not just "on paper", you can tell me if JDO suits you.
Before you commit to JDO or entity beans, do yourself a favor and also look at OJB and Hibernate. Both of these object-relational mapping (ORM) tools offer unintrusive presistence to your existing beans (unlike Toplink and Cocobase which require you use their collection types) and don't require you to run a byte-code mangler like JDO.
It sounds like the RFID technology is similar a
famous Russian listening device.
This device was totally passive, but when hit with a specific RF frequency (via a very directional beam) it would reflect the beam back but modulated by the sound in the room. The Russians could demodulate the signal and get the audio back. They hid the device in a carved wooden Seal of the United States that they presented to the US Embassador to Russia who proudly hung it above his desk. The Russian were privy to all conversations that took place in his office.
After a while the American figured his room was bugged so they sent in technicians to find the bug. The Russians weren't stupid - they knew when technicians arrived and simply turned off the directional RF carrier beam. They would turn it back on when the technicians left. Finally the Americans got smarter and all left but one who hid in the office with RF listening gear. When the Russians turned the RF carrier on, he detected it and figured it out it was embedded in the Seal. It was quite a scandal.
In top-fuel the driver doesn't press buttons - he pulls three levers - one for each gear.
Some interesting factoids that are almost 10 years old:
- topfuelers burn 10 gallons of nitro-methane just on the burn out
- the engine pumps enough air in the 1/4 mile run to inflate the Goodyear blimp
- your cars fuel line is about 3/8" inner diameter and pressurized to about 30 psi (IIRC). A topfueler's fuel line is 1.5" inner diameter and pressured to 170 psi!
- a topfuel motor's horsepower is estimated at 5000 hp because no dynomometer can measure that much power (again this was 10 years ago)
I'm not really a fan of drag racing (I prefer road racing myself), but those factoids I've remembered for tens years because they were so impressive.
-tim
This post really belongs under some of the other top level posts regarding credit cards, but I wanted it at the top level to get more attention to an issue I think many people are not aware of.
Not all credit card purchases are safe. When a eBay seller asks for _only_ Western Union wire transfer or C2IT, you should be wary. Both of these transactions are billed to your credit card as cash advances and are not subject to credit card fraud protection charge back. YMMV - read your terms and conditions for your credit card.
I maintain a page of scam auction red flags here:
Scam Auction Red Flags
Another version of this scam which got posted to the escrow boards on eBay scams the seller. It goes like this:
When the escrow site gets the buyers payment, they send an email to the seller saying it is okay to ship. However, we all know how easy it is to fake an email. One buyer faked an email that looked like it came from escrow.com and the seller shipped the item (out of the country). Good bye!
Never, ever, ever trust an email from eBay or escrow.com. They will be the first to tell you this. Both have links on most of their pages alerting you to this. Login into the site manually and confirm status before continuing the transaction.
This message is mostly for the net-clueless and not the typical slashdot reader.
You are right that it is against eBay policy to sell off eBay - it's categorized as Fee Avoidance.
This often occurs when you list one item on eBay and in the description you claim to have more that you are willing to sell. You are skirting the Listing Fee which is against eBay rules.
However, you are allowed to cancel an auction at anytime - at _any_ time. It seems a little unfair but it does have legitimate uses. Often sellers will list an item locally (paper,signs,etc) as well as on eBay. If the item sells locally they can cancel the eBay auction by cancelling all bids then cancelling the auction (you must cancel the bids first or else the high bid at the time you cancel the auction does win the item).
Remember - no bidder has won the auction until the auction ends. There is no contract until that time.
Come and visit us on the Trust & Safety (Safe Harbor) boards. These sorts of issues get brought up daily.
I am an eBay junkie.
Personally, I keep my Paypal account empty. It costs nothing to immediately move money that a buyer has deposited there into your backup bank account. Once in the real bank Paypal cannot touch it. It is simply far too easy for a buyer to claim they never received the item and Paypal will immediate reverse the funds back into the buyer's account.
I have yet to see a blog that offers a few security features I'd like to see:
1. A blog that has a challenge/response login page. This would be a blog that for my family that I would post updates and pictures of my kids. I don't want the whole world reading about my kids. The pages would be secured by a set of challenge/responses that I could enter such as: "My mom's maiden name", "My Dad's middle name". My immediate and extended family can answer those questions and get in without the need to remember any kind of userid/password.
2. Blog pages that I can create limited-access URLs to. For example, let's say I have a blog I use to keep design ideas. Only I have access to it. But I create a couple entries that I'd like to share with a couple friends for feedback. I'd like to be able to create a URL with some kind of key that I can email them. They can click on the URL and get to that page and no other. Then they can submit feedback.
Is this available?
-tim
I've been developing an embedded system with eCos for only a couple months, but the general feeling on the eCos developer and user lists with respect to Redhat dropping eCos is "who cares?". Apparently Redhat's support for the product wasn't stellar which is really the only value-add you are paying for (except perhaps for the gnupro toolchain). eCos 2.x in cvs is gpl'd with one exception to allow some embedded software not be be gpl'd itself. Redhat says that eCos will continue to be hosted at sources.redhat.com. Should that not happen, there is always sourceforge. The eCos developers, however, are out of work and updates to the source tree will probably be slower since they all have to find new jobs now. Patches seem to be submitted by everyone and they seem to have slowed down the review and acceptance of patches.
None of this is not a problem for me. I will continue using eCos.
-tim
I suppose you could buy Thinking in Java, but I'd prefer to download it for free
-tim
Maybe its just me, but computers have lost virtually all their facination for me. I grew up programming a TI99/4a first via basic, then forth, then assembly language. Getting the machine to do anything was so much fun, I'd forget to sleep at night. Now, some *cough* 20 years later, the facination is completely gone.
Lately I've been thinking getting a vintage computer might restore some of the wonder in programming. Personally, I'd never pay $1K for one. Instead, I'd find something on ebay for under $100.
Now, as a hobby, I build embedded systems. Lately, I've been using the arm core (Atmel AT91 and StrongArm), but debugging the hardware for one of these requires a very expensive logic analyser.
Where has the childhood fascination gone?
-tim
This is interesting because of (oddly enough) a statement I read in this month's Kiplinger magazine. In a sidebar, it was noted the that US Treasury dept. was looking at adding some color tones to the background of US notes to foil counterfeiters. The interesting quote was to the effect, "these modifications are part of the Treasury's plan to modify US bank notes every 7 years in an effort to make counterfeiting harder." My immediate thought was "wow! here is a US goverment department that sees how they have to change their business practices to compete with constantly changing technology" such as hi-res color laser printers and such. So why the hell can't the RIAA and MPAA do the same?
The US currently has laws against counterfeiting. Creating new laws to, for example, require all scanners to detect image signatures within US bank notes, would be completely possible yet plain silly since it could probably be easily defeated and would raise the cost of scanners. Yet this is exactly what the RIAA/MPAA wants with respect to copyrighted audio and video.
The parallels between the two situations were interesting to me. The irony that the government is more competitive than a private industry is not lost on me.
-tim
-tim
-tim
JUnit is amazing. It's incredibly easy after you've written your first unit test. Here is a prime example of its use: I had about 50 classes spread out over a couple packages one of which is "core" to all the others. I had unit tests for all the code. I wanted to totally redesign how I implemented one of the core classes which is inherited by a number of other classes. I think people that don't have unit tests would shy away from such a large change. I simply backed up the old source file, put in the new file, and ran my ant script which builds, deploys (on appserver) and runs junit. After about 20 minutes of cranking through the unit tests, it finished with no failures. At that point I was 100% confident that my change worked and I wouldn't be surprised by a suble bug later. That is what junit is good for - peace of mind and confidence. You'll allow yourself to make changes to code (for the better) that you may otherwise have though too complex to attempt.
As for your first unit test, it isn't that hard. Use a standard naming schema like "FooTest.java" or "FooJUnit.java" for your test cases - this way ant can filter on those name and run junit against them while keeping your unit tests out of your distribution jars. Extend TestCase and overload setUp() and tearDown() - often you won't need those. Name your methods testXYZ() and junit will run them. Inside your test methods call Assert.xxx() on the things you want to test. You can test for null, compare to known values, etc. You can test to make sure exceptions should be thrown or not. Sprinkle in a little log4j and you can get more detailed progress of the tests.
-tim