Hey, update your knowledge. The government admitted its existance in 1995.
Sure, nothing *really* has changed, because they didn't really say anything else, so most of what we have is rumor and speculation, and it's almost as secretive as it was before (there was some interesting speculation in a Popular Science article that part of the reason they acknowledged Area 51 was because they moved most recent test programs elsewhere; I think namely White Sands and somewhere else), but it DOES exist.
If you dual boot, my understanding is that windows viruses can still clock you (correct me if I'm wrong)
In theory, sure. In practice, it seems very unlikely. Most people who dual boot don't mount the Linux/whatever partitions under Windows (I think I saw an experimental IFS driver for ext3), so there wouldn't be access to it from the filesystem. I have doubts that anything but a "supervirus" (some sort of computer equivalent to Anthrax or SARS or something) would do so.
Mounting the other way (NTFS or FAT under Linux) is a piece of cake. (Though I don't think setting up NTFS write support is a trivial task.)
By contrast, someone suggested this as an alternative to the Dell Axim x51v PDA. I posted another comment with questions for people who have this, including its suitability for this purpose.
Adding functionality to make this a mobile phone itself would, for me, very possibly disqualify it from what I'm looking at. I don't have a cell phone service, and if I did, I would already have a phone. (In fact, I do have a phone from over summer when I had a pay-as-you-go service.) Adding the additional baggage to support cellular service could very easily cause the cost to out of my price range (the 770 and x51v are right at the upper limit), or at the very least shift the greatest-value point to the x51v.
Combine that with the fact that this is MUCH bigger than a cell phone and can already connect via bluetooth, and I think there would be more people turned off than not.
(If you're only considering adding internet connection facilities, and not the ability to use it as a phone, I think that's even sillier, since at that point you'd be 98% of the way toward a phone anyway.)
I'm looking at PDAs now. I posted in another thread that I was looking at the Dell Axim X51V, and someone suggested the 770, so I've looked a little at it. I have a couple questions for you. I haven't done that much research into this yet, so I feel bad asking you these questions when most or all would probably be answered with a bit of Google, but the/. article is up now and if I wait I think people are less likely to respond, so if there's a review that answers some or all of these, feel free to link it. That said, here goes:
1. How well does it (or do you think it would) function as a PDA? Does it have calendaring apps and stuff? How well does it sync that sort of data with a PC? What sort of software will it sync with?
2. I'm still a bit sketchy about what I need to connect to Penn State's Wi-Fi network, but I know that at the very least I will need *some* VPN client. (PSU has downloads for OS X, Linux, and Windows for a Cisco VPN client; I don't know much about VPNs, if clients are interoperable or anything like that, but it seems that at least whatever client comes with the Axim series will connect.) Does the 770 come with such a client?
3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?
4. How's the handwriting analysis? To compare, Windows Mobile gives you a virtual keyboard you can tap on the keys, an entry area that you use like the older Palms and special glyphs, and full screen recognition that tries to do it from your natural writing. It seems from the site that it has something like the first and last modes; is this accurate?
5. It says it's Linux-based... do you have command line access, or just a GUI? If you do have a CLI, is it useful?
I really like the idea of a nice screen like both PDAs have (especially the 770), and the wireless connection is a substantial purpose of why I want it in the first place (about half and half that and I want a PDA, plus the occasional game).
On your media player of choice, there is probably a button with a square on it. There's a good chance that if you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will pop up that says "Stop" or something similar. If you press the left mouse button while the mouse cursor is over it, the video will stop playing. You could also close the player.
You could have done any of this within the first couple minutes of the video, once you realized that it was going to bore you.
...but has anyone used the Axim? I might get an x51v. Any reactions or suggestions for alternate products, either Windows Mobile-based or Palm?
(It needs Wi-Fi, very preferably integrated. I like the idea of a 640x480 screen. The main reason I'm leaning toward Windows Mobile instead of Palm is because from what I can figure out, if I want to write programs for it, that platform will be far easier. The drawback is I don't know how well or if ActiveSync would work with a 3rd party tool.)
But you can't dismiss how pleasant something is either. (And I'd say that Windows does the job fine, and to call pretty much anything in the NT line unstable is, IMO, completely misguided. They do have security issues.)
The point is that I think that it's very very unlikely that this is being done at the expense of anything relating to code. For instance, MS couldn't have just pulled the guy off this and added another programmer for a couple days; that would be nearly useless.
(hopefully this might be a Vista feature, as well?)
I remember seeing really early screenshots of Vista where you could set separate volumes for each program. (In fact I remember someone posting here asking what good that was and wouldn't it make it more complicated, and remember responding with something very much along the lines as what you said.) I'm hoping that this feature really was intended and will stay as well.
Supes 2 was the one with the three Krypton criminals introduced at the beginning of Superman I then left -- Ursa, Non, and (General) Zod -- who come to Earth and wreak havoc until Clark restores his Superman superpowers he gave up for Lois and fights them, and was actually pretty good.
3 was with Richard Pryor and the red kryptonite and the self-learning computer and red kryptonite that causes Superman to act evil, and was pretty mediocre.
4 was with the nuclear man dude Luther created, and was an insult to the word "movie" and "Superman".
But it does matter, because if you load a page in IE that has a WMF image in it IE will display it, while FF will not. Hence you can have a problem by simply opening a page if you use IE, but not FF. (Or at least this is my reading.)
But you're right, it's a Windows bug, not an IE bug, and if you were to download a malicious WMF in FF and open it in most any program you'd have a problem.
The foot would be more practical. If it was in your finger, you'd have to hold it up to the USB port the whole time you're using it, which would make it hard to use. But if my computer had front USB ports, I could pretty easily just rest my foot on top of a couple books and let it sit there.
Doing so violates the principle of the secret ballot, but unfortunately that's what must be done in order to verify that a vote was registered correctly, unless you simply run the election over again.
IMO, a non-secret ballot is worse than a system in which direct, vote-manipulating fraud is easier.
I thought from the article that it would have to look like someVector += {5,6}
That's a separate proposal. I don't know about +=, but I know that at least they're looking at ways to initialize vectors with arrays.
The main problem with 'vector' and operators as far as I'm concerned is the name. Absolutely terrible name for "better array". While a (math) vector is an array, an array isn't necessarily a vector. I would expect to be able to do a vector dot product with '*', but of course I can't. And then if you want to make a useful mathematical vector class, the name is already taken.:P
I can't find any information, but it makes me wonder how long the term 'vector' has been used for stuff like that. I know at least Java too has the term, but it could have borrowed it from C++ for all I know.
(As to your last point, that's why the standard committee introduced namespaces!)
I'm not a big fan of plain-ol text serialization of objects though. If the objects are complex, then the format should be structured (like xml or length encoding) such that the program -can- know how much data is intended for each object.
That's true; if you used XML or something you could read out the right amount before calling the object's function. I hadn't thought of that benefit of using that sort of data format.
it could be that my subconscious is rejecting anything related to those long, dark years of GW-BASIC.
Ah, see, most of my basic experience was with QBASIC, which, as much as I could tell with the little GW experience I had, is a whole lot easier to use.
Heh. Remember when/. used to be full of cool geeky coding discussions like this one?
Every now and again they pop up again.
(Now we need someone with an ID of like 17 to pop up and say "do I remember? what do you think?";-))
I'll check it out. I use a dvorak keyboard, but have never had that problem (but I tend to be mouse-driven when using a browser anyway).
Ah. That's a mistake I do incessently. And it's really obnoxious because usually if you're pasting something you're in a nice discussion like this, and often you've typed out quite a bit...
Obviously there is a runtime check that didn't exist before, but in situations where one could actually get a null pointer I don't see how changing to references fixes it at compile time. I can only see it in the sense that you can't use new() to assign to a reference and then forget to check for null like you can with pointers, but that's just avoiding the functionality, not fixing the problem. I'm missing something, so help me out.
I guess it doesn't provide nearly the benefit that I was thinking. The only situation where it might is if you would, with the pointer version, explicitly type NULL as a parameter. You can't say foo(*NULL) so can't call the reference version with a NULL reference explicitly.
(The other time it could help is if you had another static analysis tool that was good enough to detect that at the time of foo(*a) it's possible a was null but either doesn't support annotations that foo can't take a null parameter or don't have the ability to annotate foo.)
Ugh, what's that supposed to mean? Is that something using the sequence constructor?
someVector += 5, 6; would be equivalent to someVector.pushBack(5); someVector.pushBack(6);
I'll agree that writing a bunch of pushBacks or however you do it can get annoying, but the drawbacks of the += greatly outweigh the benefit. (And I'm usually a big fan of both conciseness and syntactic sugar)
[I would like to take a time out of this post and say just how wonderful the UndoCloseTab extension is in Firefox; I had typed out this much and accidentally hit ctrl-w instead of ctrl-v (I use Dvorak layout and W and V are adjacent), but UndoCloseTab keeps any form data you've entered. I just discovered this the other day, and the W thing is something that I've always had problems with (I think I found a way to disable the keyboard shortcut, but I forget how), so I'm still excited about its consequences. We now return you to your regularily scheduled slashdot post.]
Sure, now it has history, but at the time
Or even just ~... I can't think of any parsing ambiguities that would create...
If you're using gcc and -Werror, then printf() is actually pretty type safe. Gcc understands printf syntax and can check the arguments (and it is very picky, e.g. it will complain if you reference an unsigned int with %d, or long on a 64-bit machine with %lld) and won't let you pass non-POD types. There's a directive (gcc extension) you can use to tell gcc that a function is printf-like and get the same argument checking on it.
That's true. I was thinking that you'd have to use Lint or some other third party tool to get the checking.
For printing non-POD types, you have basically the same problem with both printf and cout: each class you want to be able to printf/stream needs a function written for it that allows you to do so. For use with printf, you create something like string MyClass::toString(). For cout, you create an operator
There's another, which is that if you're going to write that function in the class, what does it actually do? Call printf directly? Now you're less general than a good ostream operator in C++, because you can't use it for files or standard error. So you have to pass in a file descriptor. But now you're still less general because you can't use it to help construct strings, a la stringstream.
I think pretty much only best way to do it if you want to stick with printf stuff is to make a toString method, and then you can use that as you please. With ostream, you get the ability to make a function that prints to an ostream directly. I don't know if one of these approaches is better than the other; it's possible that you'd usually just want to write toString and have the << operator call that. I've given it some thought and can't come up with a dramatically convincing argument for either method.
(I do think the situation is worse with input though. You can't write a "read from this string" function because then how does the code that ca
Slashdot Mirror
But if a burglar broke into a warehouse and forced the company to conduct an inventory to see what he took, he SHOULD be liable for that.
So the solution is to not get a license.
Okay, so now you aren't allowed to drive.
Good luck with that.
(And if there's a chance at enforcement, I don't think you'll see ANY state resist. People depend too much on air travel.)
Hey, swapping to NFS... now there's an idea...
Hey, update your knowledge. The government admitted its existance in 1995.
Sure, nothing *really* has changed, because they didn't really say anything else, so most of what we have is rumor and speculation, and it's almost as secretive as it was before (there was some interesting speculation in a Popular Science article that part of the reason they acknowledged Area 51 was because they moved most recent test programs elsewhere; I think namely White Sands and somewhere else), but it DOES exist.
Over half of the Dell laptops I've used have had their hard drives die. It's actually really disturbing. If I had one I'd try to Ebay it...
If you dual boot, my understanding is that windows viruses can still clock you (correct me if I'm wrong)
In theory, sure. In practice, it seems very unlikely. Most people who dual boot don't mount the Linux/whatever partitions under Windows (I think I saw an experimental IFS driver for ext3), so there wouldn't be access to it from the filesystem. I have doubts that anything but a "supervirus" (some sort of computer equivalent to Anthrax or SARS or something) would do so.
Mounting the other way (NTFS or FAT under Linux) is a piece of cake. (Though I don't think setting up NTFS write support is a trivial task.)
BTW, if the answer to the question "how good of a PDA would the 770 make" is "it sucks", you can skip the later questions. ;-)
By contrast, someone suggested this as an alternative to the Dell Axim x51v PDA. I posted another comment with questions for people who have this, including its suitability for this purpose.
Adding functionality to make this a mobile phone itself would, for me, very possibly disqualify it from what I'm looking at. I don't have a cell phone service, and if I did, I would already have a phone. (In fact, I do have a phone from over summer when I had a pay-as-you-go service.) Adding the additional baggage to support cellular service could very easily cause the cost to out of my price range (the 770 and x51v are right at the upper limit), or at the very least shift the greatest-value point to the x51v.
Combine that with the fact that this is MUCH bigger than a cell phone and can already connect via bluetooth, and I think there would be more people turned off than not.
(If you're only considering adding internet connection facilities, and not the ability to use it as a phone, I think that's even sillier, since at that point you'd be 98% of the way toward a phone anyway.)
I'm looking at PDAs now. I posted in another thread that I was looking at the Dell Axim X51V, and someone suggested the 770, so I've looked a little at it. I have a couple questions for you. I haven't done that much research into this yet, so I feel bad asking you these questions when most or all would probably be answered with a bit of Google, but the /. article is up now and if I wait I think people are less likely to respond, so if there's a review that answers some or all of these, feel free to link it. That said, here goes:
1. How well does it (or do you think it would) function as a PDA? Does it have calendaring apps and stuff? How well does it sync that sort of data with a PC? What sort of software will it sync with?
2. I'm still a bit sketchy about what I need to connect to Penn State's Wi-Fi network, but I know that at the very least I will need *some* VPN client. (PSU has downloads for OS X, Linux, and Windows for a Cisco VPN client; I don't know much about VPNs, if clients are interoperable or anything like that, but it seems that at least whatever client comes with the Axim series will connect.) Does the 770 come with such a client?
3. From the Maemo tutorials, it looks like it uses some mix of a special API (the Hildon stuff) and GTK. How difficult is this to learn (I've done GUI programming with the Win32 APIs and have a very rudimentary knowledge of Qt, but almost no GTK knowledge) and how much knowledge is transferrable to making desktop GTK apps? Is it possible to use something like Qt on it?
4. How's the handwriting analysis? To compare, Windows Mobile gives you a virtual keyboard you can tap on the keys, an entry area that you use like the older Palms and special glyphs, and full screen recognition that tries to do it from your natural writing. It seems from the site that it has something like the first and last modes; is this accurate?
5. It says it's Linux-based... do you have command line access, or just a GUI? If you do have a CLI, is it useful?
I really like the idea of a nice screen like both PDAs have (especially the 770), and the wireless connection is a substantial purpose of why I want it in the first place (about half and half that and I want a PDA, plus the occasional game).
Bb is another favorite; to wit, ET, I believe the Star Wars theme (though I don't have that piece in front of me)...
On your media player of choice, there is probably a button with a square on it. There's a good chance that if you hover your mouse over it, a tooltip will pop up that says "Stop" or something similar. If you press the left mouse button while the mouse cursor is over it, the video will stop playing. You could also close the player.
You could have done any of this within the first couple minutes of the video, once you realized that it was going to bore you.
...but has anyone used the Axim? I might get an x51v. Any reactions or suggestions for alternate products, either Windows Mobile-based or Palm?
(It needs Wi-Fi, very preferably integrated. I like the idea of a 640x480 screen. The main reason I'm leaning toward Windows Mobile instead of Palm is because from what I can figure out, if I want to write programs for it, that platform will be far easier. The drawback is I don't know how well or if ActiveSync would work with a 3rd party tool.)
But you can't dismiss how pleasant something is either. (And I'd say that Windows does the job fine, and to call pretty much anything in the NT line unstable is, IMO, completely misguided. They do have security issues.)
The point is that I think that it's very very unlikely that this is being done at the expense of anything relating to code. For instance, MS couldn't have just pulled the guy off this and added another programmer for a couple days; that would be nearly useless.
(hopefully this might be a Vista feature, as well?)
I remember seeing really early screenshots of Vista where you could set separate volumes for each program. (In fact I remember someone posting here asking what good that was and wouldn't it make it more complicated, and remember responding with something very much along the lines as what you said.) I'm hoping that this feature really was intended and will stay as well.
I know. 'cause anyone knows that:
1) Microsoft doesn't have enough money to do both development and create sounds at the same time, and
2) Nobody cares if something is plesant to use
Superman III, not II.
Supes 2 was the one with the three Krypton criminals introduced at the beginning of Superman I then left -- Ursa, Non, and (General) Zod -- who come to Earth and wreak havoc until Clark restores his Superman superpowers he gave up for Lois and fights them, and was actually pretty good.
3 was with Richard Pryor and the red kryptonite and the self-learning computer and red kryptonite that causes Superman to act evil, and was pretty mediocre.
4 was with the nuclear man dude Luther created, and was an insult to the word "movie" and "Superman".
is actually the public embarassment of a third party releasing a patch quicker even without the source code of the libraries?
If by "patch" you mean "untested workaround that disables other functionality" then you might have a point.
The unofficial patch isn't really comparable.
But it does matter, because if you load a page in IE that has a WMF image in it IE will display it, while FF will not. Hence you can have a problem by simply opening a page if you use IE, but not FF. (Or at least this is my reading.)
But you're right, it's a Windows bug, not an IE bug, and if you were to download a malicious WMF in FF and open it in most any program you'd have a problem.
The foot would be more practical. If it was in your finger, you'd have to hold it up to the USB port the whole time you're using it, which would make it hard to use. But if my computer had front USB ports, I could pretty easily just rest my foot on top of a couple books and let it sit there.
Doing so violates the principle of the secret ballot, but unfortunately that's what must be done in order to verify that a vote was registered correctly, unless you simply run the election over again.
IMO, a non-secret ballot is worse than a system in which direct, vote-manipulating fraud is easier.
Just because cheddar is the most popular choice...
Not around here, sir. We don't get much call for it. Ilchester, however, is staggeringly popular in this manor.
I thought from the article that it would have to look like someVector += {5,6}
:P
/. used to be full of cool geeky coding discussions like this one?
;-))
That's a separate proposal. I don't know about +=, but I know that at least they're looking at ways to initialize vectors with arrays.
The main problem with 'vector' and operators as far as I'm concerned is the name. Absolutely terrible name for "better array". While a (math) vector is an array, an array isn't necessarily a vector. I would expect to be able to do a vector dot product with '*', but of course I can't. And then if you want to make a useful mathematical vector class, the name is already taken.
I can't find any information, but it makes me wonder how long the term 'vector' has been used for stuff like that. I know at least Java too has the term, but it could have borrowed it from C++ for all I know.
(As to your last point, that's why the standard committee introduced namespaces!)
I'm not a big fan of plain-ol text serialization of objects though. If the objects are complex, then the format should be structured (like xml or length encoding) such that the program -can- know how much data is intended for each object.
That's true; if you used XML or something you could read out the right amount before calling the object's function. I hadn't thought of that benefit of using that sort of data format.
it could be that my subconscious is rejecting anything related to those long, dark years of GW-BASIC.
Ah, see, most of my basic experience was with QBASIC, which, as much as I could tell with the little GW experience I had, is a whole lot easier to use.
Heh. Remember when
Every now and again they pop up again.
(Now we need someone with an ID of like 17 to pop up and say "do I remember? what do you think?"
I'll check it out. I use a dvorak keyboard, but have never had that problem (but I tend to be mouse-driven when using a browser anyway).
Ah. That's a mistake I do incessently. And it's really obnoxious because usually if you're pasting something you're in a nice discussion like this, and often you've typed out quite a bit...
You should confer with this guy
LaTeX + Beamer
Obviously there is a runtime check that didn't exist before, but in situations where one could actually get a null pointer I don't see how changing to references fixes it at compile time. I can only see it in the sense that you can't use new() to assign to a reference and then forget to check for null like you can with pointers, but that's just avoiding the functionality, not fixing the problem. I'm missing something, so help me out.
I guess it doesn't provide nearly the benefit that I was thinking. The only situation where it might is if you would, with the pointer version, explicitly type NULL as a parameter. You can't say foo(*NULL) so can't call the reference version with a NULL reference explicitly.
(The other time it could help is if you had another static analysis tool that was good enough to detect that at the time of foo(*a) it's possible a was null but either doesn't support annotations that foo can't take a null parameter or don't have the ability to annotate foo.)
Ugh, what's that supposed to mean? Is that something using the sequence constructor?
someVector += 5, 6; would be equivalent to someVector.pushBack(5); someVector.pushBack(6);
I'll agree that writing a bunch of pushBacks or however you do it can get annoying, but the drawbacks of the += greatly outweigh the benefit. (And I'm usually a big fan of both conciseness and syntactic sugar)
[I would like to take a time out of this post and say just how wonderful the UndoCloseTab extension is in Firefox; I had typed out this much and accidentally hit ctrl-w instead of ctrl-v (I use Dvorak layout and W and V are adjacent), but UndoCloseTab keeps any form data you've entered. I just discovered this the other day, and the W thing is something that I've always had problems with (I think I found a way to disable the keyboard shortcut, but I forget how), so I'm still excited about its consequences. We now return you to your regularily scheduled slashdot post.]
Sure, now it has history, but at the time
Or even just ~... I can't think of any parsing ambiguities that would create...
If you're using gcc and -Werror, then printf() is actually pretty type safe. Gcc understands printf syntax and can check the arguments (and it is very picky, e.g. it will complain if you reference an unsigned int with %d, or long on a 64-bit machine with %lld) and won't let you pass non-POD types. There's a directive (gcc extension) you can use to tell gcc that a function is printf-like and get the same argument checking on it.
That's true. I was thinking that you'd have to use Lint or some other third party tool to get the checking.
For printing non-POD types, you have basically the same problem with both printf and cout: each class you want to be able to printf/stream needs a function written for it that allows you to do so. For use with printf, you create something like string MyClass::toString(). For cout, you create an operator
There's another, which is that if you're going to write that function in the class, what does it actually do? Call printf directly? Now you're less general than a good ostream operator in C++, because you can't use it for files or standard error. So you have to pass in a file descriptor. But now you're still less general because you can't use it to help construct strings, a la stringstream.
I think pretty much only best way to do it if you want to stick with printf stuff is to make a toString method, and then you can use that as you please. With ostream, you get the ability to make a function that prints to an ostream directly. I don't know if one of these approaches is better than the other; it's possible that you'd usually just want to write toString and have the << operator call that. I've given it some thought and can't come up with a dramatically convincing argument for either method.
(I do think the situation is worse with input though. You can't write a "read from this string" function because then how does the code that ca