I am not so sure about that. In 1973, I repeatedly brought down the system by running a Fortran program in which I declared an array names ARRAY. I cant remember whether this was illegal or not, ARRAY may have been a reserved word, but in the context of Fortran 4, that could have depended on where it was used.
I would not have complained if I got a printout with an error message - probably "SYNTAX ERROR AT OR NEAR LINE 1 COLUMN 1". Instead the entire OS would crash! This happened several times a day for several days before anyone realised it was me. It was then possible to figure out what I had done wrong only by deliberately crashing a few more times! I am sure that, over a 6 month period, I had few days without a system crash. I may not have been the cause of most of them.
In mitigation, none of my BASIC programs crashed bringing down the whole system. (But they were only concerned with gathering data from users. The Fortran stuff was solving Maxwell's wave equations).
Yes, I did ask for a PDP8 instead. I don't know how the costs would have compared. What I do know, is my employers made a colossal amount of money from that software, while I was paid £11 per week for 6 months. After it was written, an apprentice could do in 30 minutes what had previously taken a degree level physicist 3 months - and not only get the right answer, but prove that he had, before gold plated parts were manufactured to the resulting spec. Then, if there were manufacturing errors, predict whether the resulting predict would still be in spec over a wide range of parameters, requiring only a single 30 minute lab test to confirm my predictions, rather than 6 months field tests at the top of a 30 metre mast IN A FIELD WITH COWS or on the top of a war ship at sea - and other scenarios where failure was rather expensive.
OK, so computers cost $1M in those days - the payback could be many times that - per month. (But even then, engineers were treated like shit).
The legendary "free" market requires informed users. What we actually have is a whole industry dedicated to using legal deviousness to ensure users have no access to relevant information.
Yes, it is true that cellphone manufacturers love non-removable batteries. Most of my family has not bought a replacement for their old phones because of this. The others made the mistake of buying one.
Mean while, PC manufacturers are whining because no one will buy their new offerings which are not much better than the old ones - my laptop dates from 2010, and performs about the same as my partners from 2015. We are obviously European - we vote for governments to beat the shit out of companies that take the piss. That is what we think the government is there for. And, without having any actual data, I suspect that the European government has engineers in it, and also quite a few engineers that it can ask for advice, unlike the US government - who appear to get most of their advice from financially motivated 4 year olds.
Many Germans died in their extremely prolonged but eventually successful struggle to defeat mass surveillance, and somehow they resent the Americans imposing a considerably worse regime on them.
(The dead are presumably revolving at such high speed in their graves that it is causing a disturbance of the psyche).
I think you will find that quite a lot of the world's population feels much the same, and America's view of the world is not widely shared by others. Most of the world believes that government is a process whereby they collaborate to stop this kind of scummy exploitation by corporations, and not the other way round.
Unless you do not care if people understand what you are trying to say there's no point in checking for anything other than clarity and meaning.
FTFY
I used to run a specialist BBS in the olden days. I got emails explaining that people who don't speak English at all had to look up every single word in the dictionary. If there was a single spelling mistake, they might be unable to decipher the entire message.
So yes, accurate spelling and grammar does matter to effective communication. Of course, if your posts are all drivel, YMMV.
The point of a dictionary is that you can look up words that you find lying about, and find out what they mean. English has a huge vocabulary, and few people know all of it. In fact, "knowing all of it" is not a particularly meaningful concept, as different geographical regions use different words - or use the same words to mean different things.
For example, in Glasgow, if you send someone for a message, you expect them to return with a package. In London, you would expect them to return with information. (Of course if you are from London and say anything to a Glaswegian, you will likely get a punch in the face - no true Scotsman, etc).
The reason English people talk about the weather used to be because as soon as they speak you knew their social status and where they came from. Their vocabulary and accent were certain to reveal it. Now, you just find out whether or not they can speak English.
Here in England, where we speak English, woke has been in everyday use for at least the last 200 years. There is nothing new about it. If it was missing from your dictionary, I should demand your money back.
How the hell does this kind of thing take years to track down?
Because British Telecom has failed to implement a number which you dial immediately after receiving such a call to have the system track down the caller and email his details to the fraud squad.
For the extremely stupid:
I don't expect the victims to do this, but 99% of people called are not victims, and would report the call if provided with a means to do so.
British Telecom is run by total morons and has lost most of its landline business because people are disconnecting - they can no longer tolerate the massive amount of cold calling. (I get about 2 calls an hour, but do not answer the phone - no one I know would call me on a landline - its only there for the broadband).
How is it then that they pretend to be Out In Front of technology.. and laying out our collective future?
Currently, there would appear to be two alternative answers:
a) Your collective future is Windows 95 with IE6
b) Your collective future involves MS going broke and everyone switching to Linux
The wicked witch of the west currently has my crystal ball, so I cannot supply further details at this particular point in time. You might wish to call back later.
Maybe not, but I suspect you are not Lord Nelson, either.
What's not to love about more and more annoying popups asking uninformed users questions they can't understand, and insisting they answer before they can continue?
How else can we convince people that Ubuntu is actually great, despite systemd, persistent and recurrent network software failure, and the system forgetting your sound card settings if you reboot?
Disclaimer: I use *BSD - but only because Ken Olsen said "Unix is snake oil".
One detail is that there are only three anchor chains. If that is true, these are a disaster waiting to happen. If three are needed (which they are, to guarantee the position), then you should fit at least five, so that, in the event of failure (remember Murphy?) there is still a spare one.
Two chains just won't work in the event of an accident. Just imagine monstrosity like this swinging about on one chain until the second one gets pulled tight! Even a boat in harbour is normally moored with four.
No: Either they are in America, or in Ireland, but not both at the same time. Of course if they are more than 12 miles off shore, they are in neither. Any way you look at it, American law does not apply in Europe, even if the Americans shout till they are blue in the face - which is probably the approach most favoured by Trump.
Alternatively, America could declare war on Europe. It would be interesting to see how the IRA respond to that!
If that's the case, then IMO the stack component of the problem is a great big red herring. If causing a process to wreck its own heap space (by any means) can lead to privilege elevation, then THAT is a huge problem, and it's the problem we should really be talking about.
That is the point I was trying to make earlier on, but put more elegantly.
All I could read seemed to imply this was for Intel and AMD architectures. Do you know if Sparc64 or ARM are susceptible?
I thought stack and heap were mapped to different memory spaces and you could not hop from one to the other - the "same" address would map to different physical memory regions (randomised and non-contiguous in the case of OpenBSD). Logical addresses might appear contiguous, so, theoretically, you could increment (or decrement) a number which is a pointer to Heap and end up in Stack or Vice Versa, but all this would do is let you mess up your data. That is just foolish allocation of the naming of address spaces. There are far more bits of address than the total logical addresses, so there is no reason for you to be able to get from one to another without doing so deliberately.
Obviously, assembly code can write to any address, which may be in either heap or stack, because they both need to be writeable memory, but neither should be executable, so you can't execute code you put in the stack or heap. Nor can YOU (usermode) write to the code page region - only execute it.
Trashing your own data may be unhelpful, but it is hard to see how it could lead to molesting other people's data, let alone executing useful code.
The gaps between heap, stack and code should map to "unassigned" - on 16 bit machines this was often mapped to a page preset to 0xf00l (which was an illegal instruction on the machines I used) and also marked not readable writable, or executable. It would trap for sure.
Molesting function return addresses is easy (in ASM) but you still can't jump to data pages - they are not executable - or outside the code pages. Certainly not out of your program's address space -that is what an MMU enforces - since the 1950's.
In short, I can see how you can trash your own code, but not how you gain anything from doing it.
And I don't see how anyone is going to insert a program they wrote, assembler or not, on my servers. If they can, that IS a problem I want to hear about.
No, what is needed is to understand that you can learn without going to college, but you have to do the learning. Its no help to YOU if someone else does it.
All of what you want to know is on the Internet. And the Internet is on your phone.
There is a bit of a problem that some people's ability to learn is not great.
A somewhat larger problem is the number of people engaged in an active fight against learning (its not just Boko Haram).
The problem with universal basic income is that many of us will become an expense with zero return.
That is not inherently a problem.
The benefits may outweigh it:
a) Some people not having to waste their lives doing pointless jobs better done by a highly skilled robot, will start companies, become talented artists or musicians, or care for others.
b) Others will start new industries employing others and reducing the total number of people who sit around idle.
The 60's music scene in the UK was very much a case of (a). Jobs were hard to get, and benefits much easier.
I should also point out that, here in the UK, the benefits system is so insanely complicated that it (allegedly) costs £30 to manage each £1 paid to benefit claimants. UBI would probably cost about the same, and leave people massively less stressed and fearful, but "moral panic" prevents it.
Also, capitalism dictates who is qualified to work what jobs. If old McDonald's employees aren't bright enough to see the automation coming and market themselves for something different/better that's on them.
No. That is "traditional, all American, selfishness".
Most people consider civilised behaviour to be "looking after those less fortunate than yourself", and the "traditional European selfish" remember the French Revolution.
Slashdot Mirror
No need for a loop:
should do fine if used sufficiently liberally.
I am not so sure about that. In 1973, I repeatedly brought down the system by running a Fortran program in which I declared an array names ARRAY. I cant remember whether this was illegal or not, ARRAY may have been a reserved word, but in the context of Fortran 4, that could have depended on where it was used.
I would not have complained if I got a printout with an error message - probably "SYNTAX ERROR AT OR NEAR LINE 1 COLUMN 1". Instead the entire OS would crash! This happened several times a day for several days before anyone realised it was me. It was then possible to figure out what I had done wrong only by deliberately crashing a few more times! I am sure that, over a 6 month period, I had few days without a system crash. I may not have been the cause of most of them.
In mitigation, none of my BASIC programs crashed bringing down the whole system. (But they were only concerned with gathering data from users. The Fortran stuff was solving Maxwell's wave equations).
Yes, I did ask for a PDP8 instead. I don't know how the costs would have compared. What I do know, is my employers made a colossal amount of money from that software, while I was paid £11 per week for 6 months. After it was written, an apprentice could do in 30 minutes what had previously taken a degree level physicist 3 months - and not only get the right answer, but prove that he had, before gold plated parts were manufactured to the resulting spec. Then, if there were manufacturing errors, predict whether the resulting predict would still be in spec over a wide range of parameters, requiring only a single 30 minute lab test to confirm my predictions, rather than 6 months field tests at the top of a 30 metre mast IN A FIELD WITH COWS or on the top of a war ship at sea - and other scenarios where failure was rather expensive.
OK, so computers cost $1M in those days - the payback could be many times that - per month. (But even then, engineers were treated like shit).
Yes, it is true that cellphone manufacturers love non-removable batteries. Most of my family has not bought a replacement for their old phones because of this. The others made the mistake of buying one.
Mean while, PC manufacturers are whining because no one will buy their new offerings which are not much better than the old ones - my laptop dates from 2010, and performs about the same as my partners from 2015. We are obviously European - we vote for governments to beat the shit out of companies that take the piss. That is what we think the government is there for. And, without having any actual data, I suspect that the European government has engineers in it, and also quite a few engineers that it can ask for advice, unlike the US government - who appear to get most of their advice from financially motivated 4 year olds.
I think you have lost the plot:
Many Germans died in their extremely prolonged but eventually successful struggle to defeat mass surveillance, and somehow they resent the Americans imposing a considerably worse regime on them.
(The dead are presumably revolving at such high speed in their graves that it is causing a disturbance of the psyche).
I think you will find that quite a lot of the world's population feels much the same, and America's view of the world is not widely shared by others. Most of the world believes that government is a process whereby they collaborate to stop this kind of scummy exploitation by corporations, and not the other way round.
However, this research was not funded by "persons of dubious character".
But all bitcoins are welcome.
50 years ago, that was perfectly normal English, unlike quite a lot of John Lennon's ramblings. Everyone here would have used woke that way.
FTFY
I used to run a specialist BBS in the olden days. I got emails explaining that people who don't speak English at all had to look up every single word in the dictionary. If there was a single spelling mistake, they might be unable to decipher the entire message.
So yes, accurate spelling and grammar does matter to effective communication. Of course, if your posts are all drivel, YMMV.
For example, in Glasgow, if you send someone for a message, you expect them to return with a package. In London, you would expect them to return with information. (Of course if you are from London and say anything to a Glaswegian, you will likely get a punch in the face - no true Scotsman, etc).
The reason English people talk about the weather used to be because as soon as they speak you knew their social status and where they came from. Their vocabulary and accent were certain to reveal it. Now, you just find out whether or not they can speak English.
Here in England, where we speak English, woke has been in everyday use for at least the last 200 years. There is nothing new about it. If it was missing from your dictionary, I should demand your money back.
Because British Telecom has failed to implement a number which you dial immediately after receiving such a call to have the system track down the caller and email his details to the fraud squad.
For the extremely stupid:
I don't expect the victims to do this, but 99% of people called are not victims, and would report the call if provided with a means to do so.
British Telecom is run by total morons and has lost most of its landline business because people are disconnecting - they can no longer tolerate the massive amount of cold calling. (I get about 2 calls an hour, but do not answer the phone - no one I know would call me on a landline - its only there for the broadband).
Currently, there would appear to be two alternative answers:
a) Your collective future is Windows 95 with IE6
b) Your collective future involves MS going broke and everyone switching to Linux
The wicked witch of the west currently has my crystal ball, so I cannot supply further details at this particular point in time. You might wish to call back later.
FTFY
Maybe not, but I suspect you are not Lord Nelson, either.
What's not to love about more and more annoying popups asking uninformed users questions they can't understand, and insisting they answer before they can continue?
How else can we convince people that Ubuntu is actually great, despite systemd, persistent and recurrent network software failure, and the system forgetting your sound card settings if you reboot?
Disclaimer: I use *BSD - but only because Ken Olsen said "Unix is snake oil".
Two chains just won't work in the event of an accident. Just imagine monstrosity like this swinging about on one chain until the second one gets pulled tight! Even a boat in harbour is normally moored with four.
I would rather deal with a leopard than with Bing.
No: Either they are in America, or in Ireland, but not both at the same time. Of course if they are more than 12 miles off shore, they are in neither. Any way you look at it, American law does not apply in Europe, even if the Americans shout till they are blue in the face - which is probably the approach most favoured by Trump.
Alternatively, America could declare war on Europe. It would be interesting to see how the IRA respond to that!
That is the point I was trying to make earlier on, but put more elegantly.
Real men use tape. (So do real and virtual women, AFAICT).
Or not: You can always download that tool that allows you to write PHP by throwing cow-pats at the screen with your Wii-mote.
(There must be one: its the only way to explain the quality of most PHP code).
I thought stack and heap were mapped to different memory spaces and you could not hop from one to the other - the "same" address would map to different physical memory regions (randomised and non-contiguous in the case of OpenBSD). Logical addresses might appear contiguous, so, theoretically, you could increment (or decrement) a number which is a pointer to Heap and end up in Stack or Vice Versa, but all this would do is let you mess up your data. That is just foolish allocation of the naming of address spaces. There are far more bits of address than the total logical addresses, so there is no reason for you to be able to get from one to another without doing so deliberately.
Obviously, assembly code can write to any address, which may be in either heap or stack, because they both need to be writeable memory, but neither should be executable, so you can't execute code you put in the stack or heap. Nor can YOU (usermode) write to the code page region - only execute it.
Trashing your own data may be unhelpful, but it is hard to see how it could lead to molesting other people's data, let alone executing useful code.
The gaps between heap, stack and code should map to "unassigned" - on 16 bit machines this was often mapped to a page preset to 0xf00l (which was an illegal instruction on the machines I used) and also marked not readable writable, or executable. It would trap for sure.
Molesting function return addresses is easy (in ASM) but you still can't jump to data pages - they are not executable - or outside the code pages. Certainly not out of your program's address space -that is what an MMU enforces - since the 1950's.
In short, I can see how you can trash your own code, but not how you gain anything from doing it.
And I don't see how anyone is going to insert a program they wrote, assembler or not, on my servers. If they can, that IS a problem I want to hear about.
All of what you want to know is on the Internet. And the Internet is on your phone.
There is a bit of a problem that some people's ability to learn is not great.
A somewhat larger problem is the number of people engaged in an active fight against learning (its not just Boko Haram).
What you need is not a college, it is a "Tea Party".
That is not inherently a problem.
The benefits may outweigh it:
a) Some people not having to waste their lives doing pointless jobs better done by a highly skilled robot, will start companies, become talented artists or musicians, or care for others.
b) Others will start new industries employing others and reducing the total number of people who sit around idle.
The 60's music scene in the UK was very much a case of (a). Jobs were hard to get, and benefits much easier.
I should also point out that, here in the UK, the benefits system is so insanely complicated that it (allegedly) costs £30 to manage each £1 paid to benefit claimants. UBI would probably cost about the same, and leave people massively less stressed and fearful, but "moral panic" prevents it.
Obviously, Wall Street and the City of London are categorically opposed to it.
No. That is "traditional, all American, selfishness".
Most people consider civilised behaviour to be "looking after those less fortunate than yourself", and the "traditional European selfish" remember the French Revolution.