I was looking at that and thinking the shadow (I assume you refer to the dark area to the left of the white spot) was a bit too large.
Then I looked at all the other features in the area and realized they all have their shadow at the 5 o'clock position relative to the feature, whereas the "lunar module's shadow" is straight to the left at at 9 o'clock.
So, unless the module made a stop-drop-and-roll landing skidding a few hundred feet to the right...
That same doctor probably made a paper printout of the details at some point, and threw them away to be taken out by the trash man the next day, just after the dumpster diver recovered your medical history for his personal amusement. The risk of the keystroke theft occurring are a lot lower than the odds of a traditional dumpster dive which I imagine you hadn't even considered. It does no good to make noise about the cat in the room if you are ignoring the elephant.
It's been awhile since I watched the Nature ep on this but I recall there were actually three stings in all. One to pacify, one to control, (then the antenna clipping and leading it to the burrow like a cow on a rope) and then a final sting to the nervous system in a way that permanently crippled (but not killed) the roach, to insure that when the roach recovered from the mind toxin that it could not escape. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet.
I don't entirely see why the control aspect was strictly necessary, because at least in that show the roach was not all that much bigger than the wasp. This summer I watched a particularly large wasp tag a CICADA in flight, in my back yard while I was picking up sticks. Made a heck of a racket as you might imagine, thrashing around on the ground with the wasp until the poison took effect, but then the wasp was more than happy to fly away with the cicada. Most members of the wasp family are quite capable of flying away with very large prey.
"It is evidence (in my opinion) of very sloppy software release. To crash a system on a known problem with Boot Camp is 100 per cent totally unacceptable. People (like me) have just too much stuff on their systems to be having to start over with hard disk reformat," the analyst told Macworld UK.
since so many windows users have to do that when their OS gets totally owned by a virus. (the odds of a reformat-requiring infection on XP right now is about 1 in 25 from what we see - "you'd better bring your restore disks in...")
My take is that collective sum of knowledge does not change much over time, neither growing nor shrinking. Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow? That was state of the art awhile ago. That knowledge is all but lost now. Now can you find someone that can get you a handgun? The technology does not disappear or spontaneously materialize, it merely changes/evolves collectively over time.
Fifteen years ago I was on top of the world in what I chose to specialize in. How useful is it today to program assembly on a 6502? Did I lose knowledge? I think so - in that respect the knowledge did not evolve and became worthless. Unless I replace it with new knowledge, I am at a net loss. Just because I learned last week how to do Java does not mean I know 2x as much as I did before. I'm just treading water at 1x.
Since I'm fresh out of pts, "mod parent up please". This is bound to happen and you know there wil be some very pissed off parents that wonder why their 7 yr old is getting explicite spam that claims to be "recommended" by an adult friend of theirs.
is confusion among the less experienced. I was just looking at the instructions they provide and I will certainly admit it's less than just a few mouse clicks. Any user guide that is like 12 pages of interaction is probably a bit much to ask of the average user. Looks more like a user manual than a quick set of instructions for a "simple change".
I would not thoroughly enjoy following those instructions, and I'm quite certain it terrifies at least 15% of their customer base.
And to the previous comment of "active x - are you mad?" I would add a "me too", for reasons too numerous to get into here.
This is the kind of thing I'd expect to find on an install CD from an ISP, that configures your computer for their service when you insert the CD. Setups like that are either provided on disc or are a "deliver and setup" option for ISPs when they have this level of setup required. Expecting Joe User to do this is just plain crazy.
I bet their phone support is buried for quite some time to come.
The second video says the best real helicopter can only land to 20 degrees. There are two things I have to ask about that and they both relate to why it works with the model.
(1) how much of that limit has to do with the design of the model helis? I fly model helicopters, and they (tho not I !) are capable of inverted flight by pitching the main blade the other way. I assume the model in this video is using this method to drive the heli down and pressing it against the slope when it has touched down. It's quite possible there's a pressure switch on the bottom of the skids that jacks the pitch the other way when it makes contact with a surface. Not a bad idea really, and this change happens in a VERY short period of time. You don't see any full scale helis capable of inverted flight, no doubt due to the mechanical difficulty in making the main rotor able to support the weight of the craft in the inverted position. The fact that the video does not show the heli taking back off again makes me seriously wonder if there isn't a contact switch at work.
(2) kinda dark in that video, I wonder what sort of surface they were landing on? Surely not velcro. Maybe a rubber mat? Probably a lot easier to do that, especially with a light craft, than on say a steep grassy slope or dirt hill. And what was on the bottom of the skids?
I'd be interested to see some statistics on the power-to-weight-ratio and such comparisons between a model heli and a passenger heli also.
I'm fairly certain the technical reasoning behind it is that the game needs time to load textures, sounds, graphics, and all the other goodies that make the next level different than the last one. Since new data is coming in, it has to GO somewhere, and if you want to still be able to interact where you are instead of waiting, that means the game engine has to still be running. It's not easy to keep the gaming engine running when you are pulling the data out from under it to make room for the new data.
I suppose you could clump things a bit more so that you only removed say, 80% of the stuff and pulled in the new things, but that would get messy making sure that texture IDs did not overlap between sections etc. In most games like that though, there are significant differences in the textures, the encounters, and the sound fx/music, so there's probably not a lot they could reuse between two levels. OK, early halo probably a bad example here. Not much to load between levels there. But I digress.
I am very surprised no one has brought up the idea of things like WOW. When you are changing from server to server sure there's a bit of a load, but the entire contents of a single server can hardly be considered a level, it's most likely many dozens of areas. WOW and other mmorpgs load things in the background in preparation for your crossing into a new area, and can do this on the fly in most cases while you are still interacting with the last of that part of the area you are leaving.
These demonstrate two very different engine data models.
Re:pretty, but the screen is too small
on
Star Trek Home Theater
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Does it come with a tricorder or a trek binoculars to get a better look at the screen? sheesh, for that amount of effort you'd think they'd put in something with a decent size screen. I don't care if it IS plasma, when you're 20 feet away it's gotta be BIGGER. A projection set would have worked much better. Just because it costs more doesn't mean it's a better idea.
Encrypted mail is built into OS X mail. The only annoying part is the hoops necessary to go through at thawte to get a certificate to begin with. Anyone you have the public key for enables a little box in the mail message to either sign it or encrypt it.
I'd have to agree with that. I pondered for a bit and realized I've ran into two other examples in the past. AppleSoft basic, do a gosub within a triple nested for loop and the stack overflows, and zero-page gets "clobbered" as the hint I read put it. Bad Things happen after that, usually requiring a reboot.
Not quite so long ago I wrote a pascal program that was very heavy on the use of pointers, and as a shortcut and to speed it up I was digging very very deep with pointers. I think for one line I had 7 levels of indirection. I was up until 11pm in the lab trying to figure out why it would work when I was tesing the parts of it but not with the command all together. Took it to a prof and we both studied it for about an hour. "This SHOULD work....it's complicated, but it's CORRECT." We then started expermenting, and found that the VMS version of the pascal compiler could not produce correct code with more than 6 levels of pointer indirection in an assignment. No crash, just bad results.
There were no "fixes" for either of these issues. You just had to recognize the limitation of the compiler/interpreter and not do things that you knew it was going to choke on.
Q. Dear Uncle Louie -- I'm having trouble with my checkbook program. It seems that when I do a gosub from within a triple-nested loop, the stack overflows and zero-page gets clobbered. What should I do? A. How should I know?
heh... haven't seen that in YEEEEEARS. The logo says 1980. On a few of their manuals it didn't say "software", it said "indoor sports".
In years gone by, the correct way to deal with compiler bugs is to compile a bit of your code that's known to be buggy (while making it as small as possible) and then examine the assembly it generates for bugs. This approach would have worked for them, but due to the bloated code generated by most compilers, (and sometimes by the very structure/nature of compiled code) this may have been an effective, yet impractical undertaking.
I miss the days of finding bugs in compilers. Many many years ago a compiler named Merlin Pro (points if you have any idea what platform THAT was for) I pulled out my hair for a few hours on why something would not run properly. Turns out one instruction could reference an address by native 16 bit OR 8 bit addressing if the address just happened to resolve (calculated addresses only) in zero-page. (which made for faster access and saved a byte in the instruction) This was obviously a good optimizing step, but sadly the compiler did not take the possible shortening of the instruction after calculation into account when building its label branch table for addresses assigned after that point in the code, making branches across that instruction miss by one byte. Fortunately, in that case, the results were catastrophic and immediate and made for easy analysis once the problem was recognized. Probably not so easy with a memory leak in a variant of C.
But really, any experiencecd programmer should not rule out the compiler "because it's not supposed to DO that". That deserves an "oh, you must be NEW here..."
Why do they even have those things? There has to be a better solution."
first he complains about the battery because he doesn't want it. Then about the power adapter. Would he prefer a wood burning model or is something with a hand crank more his style?
When speaking of kids and laptops, she admits it's taken work to educate them on how to handle their new computing tools. Educate kids? really? What a pain. And at a school of all places. Oh the nerve.
Bob Vesely has a simple reason why he hates laptops: They're easy to lose.
Where did he get this group of people? If it weren't small enough to be "easy to lose" then it'd be "too big to be portable". Looks like they'll complain about any angle.
They're difficult to secure, digitally
And this is different from a desktop computer how?
Many users don't understand that data in transit needs to be protected
Again, is this any different than losing private information not on a laptop? If you don't have the common sense to be careful with person records it doesn't matter if they're on a laptop, a backup tape, or a box of microfilm. Laptops don't lose data, stupid people lose data.
"Wireless is the biggest nightmare we have right now," he says. "The technology changes all the time and we just can't keep up."
If you're whining about the pace at which computer technology improves as being a problem, you should not be in the IT business. Take your floppy disks, your CRT, 8-tracks, and go find a dark hole to live in.
Laptops are either too large -- which causes users to complain about lugging all that extra weight around -- or they're too small, which means no one can type on them. Finding a happy medium seems to elude many IT organizations.
At least this time they're openly complaining aboiut both sides of the isssue at the same time. I suppose if 5 inches is too short, and at the same time 5 inches is too long, you pretty much have a guaranteed opportunity to whine.
That means IT managers need to equip their road machines with a comprehensive suite of drivers -- after, of course, defining what's "comprehensive" for which users -- and then keeping those drivers up to date.
OR you could deploy an OS that didn't require a driver install every time you plugged in a new flash drive or other common trivial hardware. Again this has nothing to do with laptops, it's a computer issue in general.
The author of this article doesn't have a problem with laptops, he has a problem with computers in general and is clearly fishing for reasons to complain.
I was just thinking of that... around here they place three sets of "rumble strips" ahead of any stopsign on lower traffic roads, to jolt you fully awake when approaching an intersection with a busy road. I remember being able to hear cars and especially trucks when they hit those strips, from a good distance away. Surely that would annoy any locals if you did up a long stretch of road? (long enogh to do any length of music)
is that the lawmakers are not smart enough to word a law specific enough to incriminate most of the guilty while making it impossible to incriminate the innocent. The usual rule is "we'll make a law broad enough to catch most of 'em, and rely on the interpretation of the judge/jury to make sure no innocents get tossed in jail". That NEVER works. The same thing applies here for sentencing - they set an upper limit so high that it no longer serves as anything of a guideline, leaving the sentencing almost entirely up to the court.
An old saying, "what we need today are not MORE laws, but BETTER laws."
right now version 2.6.0 is the only one worth using. It still can't copy pipes, and isn't smart enough to set ownership on symbolic links, but it doesn't mangle anything else.
The "supercaps" are designed on similar principles to batteries but with a very different physical design strategy. Capacitors are built like a roll of paper towel, and have a very large surface area of contact between the plates. (several square feet for a small capacitor in a computer) This allows them to very rapidly charge and discharge because the current is distrpbuted over a large surface area. They store their energy as an electrical charge, and as you draw from it, the "pressure" lowers in relation to how much energy you have removed.
Lead acid and other chemical batteries store their energy as a changed chemical state. The chemicals build and maintain a fixed charge on the plates. This allows a 12 volt battery to hold 12 volts until it is almost discharged, unlike capacitors whose voltage drops as they are discharged. It could be quite a challenge to deal with this change in basic operation. Capacitors have another advantage in that they are able to directly produce a very high voltage, limited only by the quality of the insulating materials they are made with. Capacitors can easily hold hundreds of volts, and there are industrial caps that can hold many thousands of volts.
There's an interesting similarity for those of you familiar with paintball. Capacitors behave almost exactly like high pressure nitrogen tanks - they have very high energy and can have a very high capacity, their "pressure" drops during use, and a regulator is required to output the correct pressure. (voltage) "CA" tanks (Constant Air, CO2) on the other hand rely not on high pressure, but on a supply of liquid CO2 in the tank which changes state as gas is drawn from it, boiling to return the tank to the preset pressure. (voltage) When the supply of liquid CO2 is used, it falls just like a dead battery.
Traditional paintball guns can run on a nitrogen tank if they are equipped with a regulator to knock the pressure down to a level the gun can handle. In the same way, electrically a cap could replace a battery with not a lot of modification, but the design is very different.
Paintball air tanks are roughly the same by volume, but a modern high capacity nitrogen tank can provide more shots than a high capacity CA tank. CA tank capacity is limited by its physical size - like nitro, the more liquid (gas for nitro) you can fit into it the higher the capacity. Nitro tanks have the added advantage of the max pressure the tank can take. Stronger tanks can hold more pressure for the same size, so increases in technology allow for a greater power density in Nitro but not in CA.
I expect the same should be true of caps vs batteries - you can only put so much electrolyte in a battery. You can look for better electrolytes, but you eventually run out of better solutions. Capacitors are limited by their electrolyte and the quality of the insulators. (a bit like the ability to hold pressure in a nitro tank) Assuming technology can continue to improve on that front, capacitors may catch up with or surpass traditional batteries in power density.
I'm not counting on it though. Although capacitor technology is far from reaching its pinacale, most of the major breakthroughs have already been made. The advent of carbon fiber made Nitro tanks the better deal. Unless a new technology of the same magnitude comes up for capacitors, I don't think we'll see them in our laptops anytime soon. There's also a safety factor when you are trying to push any form of pressure really high. Nitro tanks are downright dangerous if mishandled, and must be treated carefully under the best of conditions. Jacking up the voltate on your laptop's supercap to 100kv... even if it becomes practical, I don't know if I want to carry THAT around.
Just thinking about your comment I had an idea I wonder if it's been tried. Lets say you have a phone or pager that you can't silence but you want to watch a movie. Pay the theatre $2 to watch over your noisemaker while you watch the movie. They give you a silent vibrate pager like they pass out at restaraunts for those waiting to be seated. Your phone rings, they page you, you quietly slip out of the theatre to answer it.
They might have to make it a free service though, since by definition most of these people are already inconsiderate SOBs and I doubt many of them (the ones more likely to receive calls even) would be willing to pay a few bucks to be more considerate to their fellow man.
If they made a law against anything that someone could use irresponsibly, doing anything would be illegal, including doing nothing.
Don't tell me I can't do someting just because you managed to find someone that can't do it responsibly.
That's why fireworks are illegal in so many states. Little Timmy's parents can't supervise him well enough to stop him from trying to light a firecracker in his mouth and as a result I can't have any. That's also the brainchild behind prohibition. Great plan that was, eh?
a trojan can be written for any platform where the user is:
(1) able to receive an executable (be it binary, script, or whatever) from an untrusted source, and
(2) able to launch an executable that either runs with elevated privileges by default, or can request privilege elevation from the user
(this is an "AND" - both conditions must be met) OS X is certainly no exception to that, only a fool would claim (or assume) so. Nothing new here. If I send you a script that says "click OK to format your hard drive" and you click OK, don't go blaming the computer. PEBKAC
Less secure operating systems have other qualifications. Here are the key ones:
(A) able to automatically run an executable received from an untrusted source (usually over a network) without user interaction
(B) execute a script with restricted privileges that can elevate its priveleges without user interaction or authorization
(C) ship with bundled software that performs (1), (2), or both
This is an "OR". Any system that meets any of the above requirements is inherently less secure. Windows being the notorious example, which has proven to consistently meet ALL THREE of the above. OS X does not meet any of these requirements.
It's somewhat counterintuitive what happens when you try to go from being less secure to more secure. Vista has done the best job by far of any Windows release to curb A/B/C, but unfortunately the authorization model is set up in such a way as to require user authorization to access many common system features. This leads to conditioning of the user to smash the OK button every time they see an authorization dialog displayed by the OS, (or any popup with an "Allow" button in it) which in effect provides (B). Thus a secure OS must both provide manditory user authorization for privileged actions, and also be able to function to an acceptable and convenient level without requiring authorization.
Vista, for example, has a LONG way to go before it has that conquered. Many actions require you to log in as an administrator to perform the action, (and some software won't even run for standard users) and as a result, most users run as administrator all the time to avoid the inconvenience of logging out and in and out and back in again to do something, effectively providing a degree of implied authorization for any action they perform, (B). I won't even bother bringing up Explorer and (C), we all know how that goes. So for windows to become as secure as OS X it will need to conquer the problem of requiring authorization to play checkers, without allowing scripted attacks. OS X has done this since its inception and as a result it has the best of both worlds, resistant to (1) without yielding (A), (B), or (C) in the process.
It's easier to see if you ask a few simple questions to a mac user and a windows user. Give them both a new computer that's set up for them to use, and come back a month later and ask them how many times they have needed to authorize an action, or if they have had to have an administrator login to perform an action. The mac user will most likely say "once or twice the first few days, and never". The windows user will likely say "severeal times a day every day, and two or three times". (if you include having to dismiss annoying popups in the first question, the numbers go waaay up for Vista users) Solve THAT and you might put Vista on level ground with OS X, from a security standpoint.
Windows machines traditionally need the firewall to keep the nasties out because of all the open services, the insecure services, and the holes in the network stack. Mac OS X has really none of these. So this is like comparing an unlocked front door on a bank (with a closed vault) with a grocery store with same unlocked front door. Yes, it does lower the security, but amplifying a 1 in a million security problem by a factor of say 10, is not nearly as severe as amplifying a 1 in 100 security hole by 10.
Still no excuse though. I'm sure we'll see many things fixed in 10.5.1, and unlike the usual suspects, they won't immediately be replaced by another dozen holes found the following morning.
They're doing it so they can cap you if you try to buy 2 ipods in every store that sells them in your city, every day, using the same credit card number. I'm sure there were a few going around doing just that.
Slashdot Mirror
I was looking at that and thinking the shadow (I assume you refer to the dark area to the left of the white spot) was a bit too large.
Then I looked at all the other features in the area and realized they all have their shadow at the 5 o'clock position relative to the feature, whereas the "lunar module's shadow" is straight to the left at at 9 o'clock.
So, unless the module made a stop-drop-and-roll landing skidding a few hundred feet to the right...
That same doctor probably made a paper printout of the details at some point, and threw them away to be taken out by the trash man the next day, just after the dumpster diver recovered your medical history for his personal amusement. The risk of the keystroke theft occurring are a lot lower than the odds of a traditional dumpster dive which I imagine you hadn't even considered. It does no good to make noise about the cat in the room if you are ignoring the elephant.
It's been awhile since I watched the Nature ep on this but I recall there were actually three stings in all. One to pacify, one to control, (then the antenna clipping and leading it to the burrow like a cow on a rope) and then a final sting to the nervous system in a way that permanently crippled (but not killed) the roach, to insure that when the roach recovered from the mind toxin that it could not escape. I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet.
I don't entirely see why the control aspect was strictly necessary, because at least in that show the roach was not all that much bigger than the wasp. This summer I watched a particularly large wasp tag a CICADA in flight, in my back yard while I was picking up sticks. Made a heck of a racket as you might imagine, thrashing around on the ground with the wasp until the poison took effect, but then the wasp was more than happy to fly away with the cicada. Most members of the wasp family are quite capable of flying away with very large prey.
"It is evidence (in my opinion) of very sloppy software release. To crash a system on a known problem with Boot Camp is 100 per cent totally unacceptable. People (like me) have just too much stuff on their systems to be having to start over with hard disk reformat," the analyst told Macworld UK.
since so many windows users have to do that when their OS gets totally owned by a virus. (the odds of a reformat-requiring infection on XP right now is about 1 in 25 from what we see - "you'd better bring your restore disks in...")
My take is that collective sum of knowledge does not change much over time, neither growing nor shrinking. Could you build a crossbow? How hard would it be for you to even FIND a person that could buid you a crossbow? That was state of the art awhile ago. That knowledge is all but lost now. Now can you find someone that can get you a handgun? The technology does not disappear or spontaneously materialize, it merely changes/evolves collectively over time.
Fifteen years ago I was on top of the world in what I chose to specialize in. How useful is it today to program assembly on a 6502? Did I lose knowledge? I think so - in that respect the knowledge did not evolve and became worthless. Unless I replace it with new knowledge, I am at a net loss. Just because I learned last week how to do Java does not mean I know 2x as much as I did before. I'm just treading water at 1x.
Since I'm fresh out of pts, "mod parent up please". This is bound to happen and you know there wil be some very pissed off parents that wonder why their 7 yr old is getting explicite spam that claims to be "recommended" by an adult friend of theirs.
is confusion among the less experienced. I was just looking at the instructions they provide and I will certainly admit it's less than just a few mouse clicks. Any user guide that is like 12 pages of interaction is probably a bit much to ask of the average user. Looks more like a user manual than a quick set of instructions for a "simple change".
I would not thoroughly enjoy following those instructions, and I'm quite certain it terrifies at least 15% of their customer base.
And to the previous comment of "active x - are you mad?" I would add a "me too", for reasons too numerous to get into here.
This is the kind of thing I'd expect to find on an install CD from an ISP, that configures your computer for their service when you insert the CD. Setups like that are either provided on disc or are a "deliver and setup" option for ISPs when they have this level of setup required. Expecting Joe User to do this is just plain crazy.
I bet their phone support is buried for quite some time to come.
The second video says the best real helicopter can only land to 20 degrees. There are two things I have to ask about that and they both relate to why it works with the model.
(1) how much of that limit has to do with the design of the model helis? I fly model helicopters, and they (tho not I !) are capable of inverted flight by pitching the main blade the other way. I assume the model in this video is using this method to drive the heli down and pressing it against the slope when it has touched down. It's quite possible there's a pressure switch on the bottom of the skids that jacks the pitch the other way when it makes contact with a surface. Not a bad idea really, and this change happens in a VERY short period of time. You don't see any full scale helis capable of inverted flight, no doubt due to the mechanical difficulty in making the main rotor able to support the weight of the craft in the inverted position. The fact that the video does not show the heli taking back off again makes me seriously wonder if there isn't a contact switch at work.
(2) kinda dark in that video, I wonder what sort of surface they were landing on? Surely not velcro. Maybe a rubber mat? Probably a lot easier to do that, especially with a light craft, than on say a steep grassy slope or dirt hill. And what was on the bottom of the skids?
I'd be interested to see some statistics on the power-to-weight-ratio and such comparisons between a model heli and a passenger heli also.
I'm fairly certain the technical reasoning behind it is that the game needs time to load textures, sounds, graphics, and all the other goodies that make the next level different than the last one. Since new data is coming in, it has to GO somewhere, and if you want to still be able to interact where you are instead of waiting, that means the game engine has to still be running. It's not easy to keep the gaming engine running when you are pulling the data out from under it to make room for the new data.
I suppose you could clump things a bit more so that you only removed say, 80% of the stuff and pulled in the new things, but that would get messy making sure that texture IDs did not overlap between sections etc. In most games like that though, there are significant differences in the textures, the encounters, and the sound fx/music, so there's probably not a lot they could reuse between two levels. OK, early halo probably a bad example here. Not much to load between levels there. But I digress.
I am very surprised no one has brought up the idea of things like WOW. When you are changing from server to server sure there's a bit of a load, but the entire contents of a single server can hardly be considered a level, it's most likely many dozens of areas. WOW and other mmorpgs load things in the background in preparation for your crossing into a new area, and can do this on the fly in most cases while you are still interacting with the last of that part of the area you are leaving.
These demonstrate two very different engine data models.
Does it come with a tricorder or a trek binoculars to get a better look at the screen? sheesh, for that amount of effort you'd think they'd put in something with a decent size screen. I don't care if it IS plasma, when you're 20 feet away it's gotta be BIGGER. A projection set would have worked much better. Just because it costs more doesn't mean it's a better idea.
Encrypted mail is built into OS X mail. The only annoying part is the hoops necessary to go through at thawte to get a certificate to begin with. Anyone you have the public key for enables a little box in the mail message to either sign it or encrypt it.
I'd have to agree with that. I pondered for a bit and realized I've ran into two other examples in the past. AppleSoft basic, do a gosub within a triple nested for loop and the stack overflows, and zero-page gets "clobbered" as the hint I read put it. Bad Things happen after that, usually requiring a reboot.
Not quite so long ago I wrote a pascal program that was very heavy on the use of pointers, and as a shortcut and to speed it up I was digging very very deep with pointers. I think for one line I had 7 levels of indirection. I was up until 11pm in the lab trying to figure out why it would work when I was tesing the parts of it but not with the command all together. Took it to a prof and we both studied it for about an hour. "This SHOULD work....it's complicated, but it's CORRECT." We then started expermenting, and found that the VMS version of the pascal compiler could not produce correct code with more than 6 levels of pointer indirection in an assignment. No crash, just bad results.
There were no "fixes" for either of these issues. You just had to recognize the limitation of the compiler/interpreter and not do things that you knew it was going to choke on.
Good lord look what google found... http://users.rowan.edu/~johnsonk/KHJcomputers.html
Q. Dear Uncle Louie -- I'm having trouble with my checkbook program. It seems that when I do a gosub from within a triple-nested loop, the stack overflows and zero-page gets clobbered. What should I do?
A. How should I know?
heh... haven't seen that in YEEEEEARS. The logo says 1980. On a few of their manuals it didn't say "software", it said "indoor sports".
In years gone by, the correct way to deal with compiler bugs is to compile a bit of your code that's known to be buggy (while making it as small as possible) and then examine the assembly it generates for bugs. This approach would have worked for them, but due to the bloated code generated by most compilers, (and sometimes by the very structure/nature of compiled code) this may have been an effective, yet impractical undertaking.
I miss the days of finding bugs in compilers. Many many years ago a compiler named Merlin Pro (points if you have any idea what platform THAT was for) I pulled out my hair for a few hours on why something would not run properly. Turns out one instruction could reference an address by native 16 bit OR 8 bit addressing if the address just happened to resolve (calculated addresses only) in zero-page. (which made for faster access and saved a byte in the instruction) This was obviously a good optimizing step, but sadly the compiler did not take the possible shortening of the instruction after calculation into account when building its label branch table for addresses assigned after that point in the code, making branches across that instruction miss by one byte. Fortunately, in that case, the results were catastrophic and immediate and made for easy analysis once the problem was recognized. Probably not so easy with a memory leak in a variant of C.
But really, any experiencecd programmer should not rule out the compiler "because it's not supposed to DO that". That deserves an "oh, you must be NEW here..."
Why do they even have those things? There has to be a better solution."
first he complains about the battery because he doesn't want it. Then about the power adapter. Would he prefer a wood burning model or is something with a hand crank more his style?
When speaking of kids and laptops, she admits it's taken work to educate them on how to handle their new computing tools. Educate kids? really? What a pain. And at a school of all places. Oh the nerve.
Bob Vesely has a simple reason why he hates laptops: They're easy to lose.
Where did he get this group of people? If it weren't small enough to be "easy to lose" then it'd be "too big to be portable". Looks like they'll complain about any angle.
They're difficult to secure, digitally
And this is different from a desktop computer how?
Many users don't understand that data in transit needs to be protected
Again, is this any different than losing private information not on a laptop? If you don't have the common sense to be careful with person records it doesn't matter if they're on a laptop, a backup tape, or a box of microfilm. Laptops don't lose data, stupid people lose data.
"Wireless is the biggest nightmare we have right now," he says. "The technology changes all the time and we just can't keep up."
If you're whining about the pace at which computer technology improves as being a problem, you should not be in the IT business. Take your floppy disks, your CRT, 8-tracks, and go find a dark hole to live in.
Laptops are either too large -- which causes users to complain about lugging all that extra weight around -- or they're too small, which means no one can type on them. Finding a happy medium seems to elude many IT organizations.
At least this time they're openly complaining aboiut both sides of the isssue at the same time. I suppose if 5 inches is too short, and at the same time 5 inches is too long, you pretty much have a guaranteed opportunity to whine.
That means IT managers need to equip their road machines with a comprehensive suite of drivers -- after, of course, defining what's "comprehensive" for which users -- and then keeping those drivers up to date.
OR you could deploy an OS that didn't require a driver install every time you plugged in a new flash drive or other common trivial hardware. Again this has nothing to do with laptops, it's a computer issue in general.
The author of this article doesn't have a problem with laptops, he has a problem with computers in general and is clearly fishing for reasons to complain.
I was just thinking of that... around here they place three sets of "rumble strips" ahead of any stopsign on lower traffic roads, to jolt you fully awake when approaching an intersection with a busy road. I remember being able to hear cars and especially trucks when they hit those strips, from a good distance away. Surely that would annoy any locals if you did up a long stretch of road? (long enogh to do any length of music)
Apple didn't write Rsync. You must be new.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rsync
is that the lawmakers are not smart enough to word a law specific enough to incriminate most of the guilty while making it impossible to incriminate the innocent. The usual rule is "we'll make a law broad enough to catch most of 'em, and rely on the interpretation of the judge/jury to make sure no innocents get tossed in jail". That NEVER works. The same thing applies here for sentencing - they set an upper limit so high that it no longer serves as anything of a guideline, leaving the sentencing almost entirely up to the court.
An old saying, "what we need today are not MORE laws, but BETTER laws."
right now version 2.6.0 is the only one worth using. It still can't copy pipes, and isn't smart enough to set ownership on symbolic links, but it doesn't mangle anything else.
You have to be using 2.6.0 on both ends too.
The "supercaps" are designed on similar principles to batteries but with a very different physical design strategy. Capacitors are built like a roll of paper towel, and have a very large surface area of contact between the plates. (several square feet for a small capacitor in a computer) This allows them to very rapidly charge and discharge because the current is distrpbuted over a large surface area. They store their energy as an electrical charge, and as you draw from it, the "pressure" lowers in relation to how much energy you have removed.
Lead acid and other chemical batteries store their energy as a changed chemical state. The chemicals build and maintain a fixed charge on the plates. This allows a 12 volt battery to hold 12 volts until it is almost discharged, unlike capacitors whose voltage drops as they are discharged. It could be quite a challenge to deal with this change in basic operation. Capacitors have another advantage in that they are able to directly produce a very high voltage, limited only by the quality of the insulating materials they are made with. Capacitors can easily hold hundreds of volts, and there are industrial caps that can hold many thousands of volts.
There's an interesting similarity for those of you familiar with paintball. Capacitors behave almost exactly like high pressure nitrogen tanks - they have very high energy and can have a very high capacity, their "pressure" drops during use, and a regulator is required to output the correct pressure. (voltage) "CA" tanks (Constant Air, CO2) on the other hand rely not on high pressure, but on a supply of liquid CO2 in the tank which changes state as gas is drawn from it, boiling to return the tank to the preset pressure. (voltage) When the supply of liquid CO2 is used, it falls just like a dead battery.
Traditional paintball guns can run on a nitrogen tank if they are equipped with a regulator to knock the pressure down to a level the gun can handle. In the same way, electrically a cap could replace a battery with not a lot of modification, but the design is very different.
Paintball air tanks are roughly the same by volume, but a modern high capacity nitrogen tank can provide more shots than a high capacity CA tank. CA tank capacity is limited by its physical size - like nitro, the more liquid (gas for nitro) you can fit into it the higher the capacity. Nitro tanks have the added advantage of the max pressure the tank can take. Stronger tanks can hold more pressure for the same size, so increases in technology allow for a greater power density in Nitro but not in CA.
I expect the same should be true of caps vs batteries - you can only put so much electrolyte in a battery. You can look for better electrolytes, but you eventually run out of better solutions. Capacitors are limited by their electrolyte and the quality of the insulators. (a bit like the ability to hold pressure in a nitro tank) Assuming technology can continue to improve on that front, capacitors may catch up with or surpass traditional batteries in power density.
I'm not counting on it though. Although capacitor technology is far from reaching its pinacale, most of the major breakthroughs have already been made. The advent of carbon fiber made Nitro tanks the better deal. Unless a new technology of the same magnitude comes up for capacitors, I don't think we'll see them in our laptops anytime soon. There's also a safety factor when you are trying to push any form of pressure really high. Nitro tanks are downright dangerous if mishandled, and must be treated carefully under the best of conditions. Jacking up the voltate on your laptop's supercap to 100kv... even if it becomes practical, I don't know if I want to carry THAT around.
Just thinking about your comment I had an idea I wonder if it's been tried. Lets say you have a phone or pager that you can't silence but you want to watch a movie. Pay the theatre $2 to watch over your noisemaker while you watch the movie. They give you a silent vibrate pager like they pass out at restaraunts for those waiting to be seated. Your phone rings, they page you, you quietly slip out of the theatre to answer it.
They might have to make it a free service though, since by definition most of these people are already inconsiderate SOBs and I doubt many of them (the ones more likely to receive calls even) would be willing to pay a few bucks to be more considerate to their fellow man.
If they made a law against anything that someone could use irresponsibly, doing anything would be illegal, including doing nothing.
Don't tell me I can't do someting just because you managed to find someone that can't do it responsibly.
That's why fireworks are illegal in so many states. Little Timmy's parents can't supervise him well enough to stop him from trying to light a firecracker in his mouth and as a result I can't have any. That's also the brainchild behind prohibition. Great plan that was, eh?
Law enfarcement has to ask permission now to break the law? I thought they'd been doig that for ages?
a trojan can be written for any platform where the user is:
(1) able to receive an executable (be it binary, script, or whatever) from an untrusted source, and
(2) able to launch an executable that either runs with elevated privileges by default, or can request privilege elevation from the user
(this is an "AND" - both conditions must be met) OS X is certainly no exception to that, only a fool would claim (or assume) so. Nothing new here. If I send you a script that says "click OK to format your hard drive" and you click OK, don't go blaming the computer. PEBKAC
Less secure operating systems have other qualifications. Here are the key ones:
(A) able to automatically run an executable received from an untrusted source (usually over a network) without user interaction
(B) execute a script with restricted privileges that can elevate its priveleges without user interaction or authorization
(C) ship with bundled software that performs (1), (2), or both
This is an "OR". Any system that meets any of the above requirements is inherently less secure. Windows being the notorious example, which has proven to consistently meet ALL THREE of the above. OS X does not meet any of these requirements.
It's somewhat counterintuitive what happens when you try to go from being less secure to more secure. Vista has done the best job by far of any Windows release to curb A/B/C, but unfortunately the authorization model is set up in such a way as to require user authorization to access many common system features. This leads to conditioning of the user to smash the OK button every time they see an authorization dialog displayed by the OS, (or any popup with an "Allow" button in it) which in effect provides (B). Thus a secure OS must both provide manditory user authorization for privileged actions, and also be able to function to an acceptable and convenient level without requiring authorization.
Vista, for example, has a LONG way to go before it has that conquered. Many actions require you to log in as an administrator to perform the action, (and some software won't even run for standard users) and as a result, most users run as administrator all the time to avoid the inconvenience of logging out and in and out and back in again to do something, effectively providing a degree of implied authorization for any action they perform, (B). I won't even bother bringing up Explorer and (C), we all know how that goes. So for windows to become as secure as OS X it will need to conquer the problem of requiring authorization to play checkers, without allowing scripted attacks. OS X has done this since its inception and as a result it has the best of both worlds, resistant to (1) without yielding (A), (B), or (C) in the process.
It's easier to see if you ask a few simple questions to a mac user and a windows user. Give them both a new computer that's set up for them to use, and come back a month later and ask them how many times they have needed to authorize an action, or if they have had to have an administrator login to perform an action. The mac user will most likely say "once or twice the first few days, and never". The windows user will likely say "severeal times a day every day, and two or three times". (if you include having to dismiss annoying popups in the first question, the numbers go waaay up for Vista users) Solve THAT and you might put Vista on level ground with OS X, from a security standpoint.
Windows machines traditionally need the firewall to keep the nasties out because of all the open services, the insecure services, and the holes in the network stack. Mac OS X has really none of these. So this is like comparing an unlocked front door on a bank (with a closed vault) with a grocery store with same unlocked front door. Yes, it does lower the security, but amplifying a 1 in a million security problem by a factor of say 10, is not nearly as severe as amplifying a 1 in 100 security hole by 10.
Still no excuse though. I'm sure we'll see many things fixed in 10.5.1, and unlike the usual suspects, they won't immediately be replaced by another dozen holes found the following morning.
They're doing it so they can cap you if you try to buy 2 ipods in every store that sells them in your city, every day, using the same credit card number. I'm sure there were a few going around doing just that.