Ever read Arthur C. Clarke's book, "1984: Spring"? It was a collection of essays on the future and what he thought it would turn out to be. Some of it was total bollocks, but - in the early eighties, nearly twenty years ago - he predicted the meteoric rise of the cellphone and the way it would revolutionise modern living.
Well, for most of you at least. I ain't got one yet...
Er, the Registry is essentially a glorified out-of-control monster win.ini file. How many variable names did that thing contain in Win 3.1? Bazillions. Why? Because it makes life so much easier to assign to your variable (lets call it md5_hash , for kicks) a sensible variable name and match it to the config file:
if (md5_hash != GetRegKey("path/to/md5_hash") ) throw Exception.badPassword;
Unless you leave the debug info in or whatever the variable name will disappear. It's about making life easier for the programmers so they make less mistakes.
It's a big surprise, isn't it: people refusing to admit that they chose the wrong / a dying / a dead / whatever platform, so clinging on with their fingernails.
What my uni does is this: They ignore everything until you go over an unknown bandwith cap (best estimate's > 10 GB per month). Then they fine you fifty quid (~75USD).
My uni is tiny by UK standards but even so our ITS department is overstretched and underfunded. Fortunately, Congress can't reach us directly... yet.
If this is a hole then so is the fact I can mount your ex2fs/home partition from a boot floppy and ftp all the filez there to whereever I want them to reside. Actually the linux "hole" is worse, as it has infinitely more powerful command-line tools available to a bootflopper.
People fear the Internet and what a hax0r could do to their PC, but (as this article proves) give me physical access to your machine and I could do more damage to you than 99.999% of crackers ever possibly could - and that's only because I'm not enough of a bastard to [root@localhost/]% rm/*/* on my way out. Know your enemy, he's probably a family member.
I'm not sure of the exact implementation, but they must use custom data types to store numbers in, as a) they can store oodles of digits in a single number (e.g. factorial 2000 is well bigger than any int this side of the moon!) and b) they will do as many decimal places as you ask of them.
Put it this way - floating point accuracy is NOT an issue with these programs.
Trying to figure out how to get them to do the differentials, though, can be a bitch...
MathCad is far too limited in power and scope to be of any real use. Maple is my package of choice; admitedly it's hardly the most intuitive or user-friendly software around but hey, neither's Linux. Give it a few weeks of tinkering and you'll learn to love it.
I want to learn how to use Matlab more effectively as it's (apparently) the most effective for physical modelling, but we don't get taught it over here (Mathcad, Maple and Mathematica are all these scuzzers will teach us); anyone know a good intro to it on the web?
They do it in the UK as well. At my uni (after forking out fifty quid for the year) you have to submit your MAC address as well as your student ID to the IT monkeys.
They block all sorts of traffic as well, it appears to be that they've denied *all* traffic unless it's explicitly permitted (e.g. outbound connections over socket 80). They stuffed up the socket number used by MSN Messenger at one point last year and it came close to mutiny.
They usually open ports if you ask them nicely enough and it's not for a dodgy purpose (e.g. they let Jabber connect through its port, but not Kazaa on its preffered one... thank fsck that can use port 80 as well!)
If I have to use a mobile 'phone's keypad to update my blog I think I'd rather not. It's bad enough trying to dial someone, let alone compose a LiveJournal entry.
And mobile 'phones with keyboards just look wrong. Save it for the PDAs.
Yes, so it's the really simple distro for thickies and n00bs. It's also by far and away the easiest Linux distro to set up and use that I've tried (and I'm from the days of Yggdrasil, me) so it's my distro of choice - it has (or is easily made to have) all the power of "proper" distros but isn't as condescending as Lycoris and friends.
Mandrake should be kept alive, it would be a loss to the Linux world if it were to die.
GNU TV, where the scripts are open-sourced before the show airs and you know all the jokes before the intro starts rolling.
Mind you, if you knew when to cringe in Nerds (the competitor to Friends, where housebound geeks spend their days in an eternal LAN party with the occasional visit to the pizza parlour) at the "jokes", it mightn't be so bad...
The apple may be sweet at first, but it will forever be a curse on you and your children, and your children's children... dare you lock them into a computer platform where the owners, creators and maintainers of it have been on the verge of imploding since three months after they started?
I have one and it eats power as if it were popcorn, as it keeps it's CCD in an "always on" state so it can respond instantly to requests for picture takage.
One enhancement I would suggest would be to modify the camera in some way so that its power drain was less, even if only for the engineering challenge (he hooked it up to some great big huge massive LiIon cells that would keep a cyclotron going for a while)...
-Mark
Re:One slow day in the news world...
on
Blizzard Births BBS
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The more people who can look at the source,
The more people who can spot bugs,
The more bugs are found,
The more bugs are fixed.
What I would like to know is whether or not the quality of open code is any better than closed code. Waitasec, RTFA!
Over this side of the pond getting hold of engines bigger than the Estes D-size is a nightmare, you need to have licences to handle explosives, have your address registered as a storage area for explosives etc before you can even think of buying them. Shipping doesn't appear to be a problem - they stick them in a van and have them driven to you, for a princely sum - but it is an utter fucking nightmare to get hold of the big 'uns.
I don't see why they do it either, D-class motors aren't exactly likely to propel a warhead any significant distance. Then again, we have had the IRA and friends (and enemies!) on our doorstep for over twenty-five years now...
and have an even hard time returning it or getting a refund if it was a defective item?
You won't, at least if my experience is anything to go by... I bought some CDs from amazon.co.uk and by accident they sent me a wrong one (a Faithless one instead of a Today Is The Day one - quite a difficult mixup!). What did I have to do?
Simple. Place CD in envelope, fill in return form, send it back. Receive email apologising for the mistake and informing me they'll give me a refund as well as the CD I ordered in the first place within 48 hours. Sorted.
I've heard some horror stories about internet purchasings, but amazon have been exemplary to me and as such I use them for all my online entertainment purchases and I recommend them to people who ask.
In real life I tend to get bad service from shops with bad reputations and good service from ones with good reputations. To this end I am pimping Amazon for all it's worth. If some shops in the real world were as courteous and apologetic as they were they'd be facing less competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Ever read Arthur C. Clarke's book, "1984: Spring"? It was a collection of essays on the future and what he thought it would turn out to be. Some of it was total bollocks, but - in the early eighties, nearly twenty years ago - he predicted the meteoric rise of the cellphone and the way it would revolutionise modern living.
Well, for most of you at least. I ain't got one yet...
-Mark
Er, the Registry is essentially a glorified out-of-control monster win.ini file. How many variable names did that thing contain in Win 3.1? Bazillions. Why? Because it makes life so much easier to assign to your variable (lets call it md5_hash , for kicks) a sensible variable name and match it to the config file:
if (md5_hash != GetRegKey("path/to/md5_hash") )
throw Exception.badPassword;
Unless you leave the debug info in or whatever the variable name will disappear. It's about making life easier for the programmers so they make less mistakes.
-Mark
Most of the spam I get (as a UK resident) comes from the US. Get them to clean up their act and spam would be dead.
-Mark
Anyone who says this growth is logarithmic is wrong. It's exponential. Cue a horde of morons saying otherwise.
-Mark
YHBT fucktards. This was at +3 at one point as well.
-Mark, who still plays Sensi Soccer and Super Skidmarks on his A500
It's a big surprise, isn't it: people refusing to admit that they chose the wrong / a dying / a dead / whatever platform, so clinging on with their fingernails.
Think I'm a troll? One word. Amiga.
-Mark
The lack of orignial material hasn't stopped the flame warriors, though...
What my uni does is this: They ignore everything until you go over an unknown bandwith cap (best estimate's > 10 GB per month). Then they fine you fifty quid (~75USD).
My uni is tiny by UK standards but even so our ITS department is overstretched and underfunded. Fortunately, Congress can't reach us directly... yet.
-Mark
If this is a hole then so is the fact I can mount your ex2fs /home partition from a boot floppy and ftp all the filez there to whereever I want them to reside. Actually the linux "hole" is worse, as it has infinitely more powerful command-line tools available to a bootflopper.
/]% rm /*/* on my way out. Know your enemy, he's probably a family member.
People fear the Internet and what a hax0r could do to their PC, but (as this article proves) give me physical access to your machine and I could do more damage to you than 99.999% of crackers ever possibly could - and that's only because I'm not enough of a bastard to [root@localhost
-Mark
I'm not sure of the exact implementation, but they must use custom data types to store numbers in, as a) they can store oodles of digits in a single number (e.g. factorial 2000 is well bigger than any int this side of the moon!) and b) they will do as many decimal places as you ask of them.
Put it this way - floating point accuracy is NOT an issue with these programs.
Trying to figure out how to get them to do the differentials, though, can be a bitch...
-Mark
MathCad is far too limited in power and scope to be of any real use. Maple is my package of choice; admitedly it's hardly the most intuitive or user-friendly software around but hey, neither's Linux. Give it a few weeks of tinkering and you'll learn to love it.
I want to learn how to use Matlab more effectively as it's (apparently) the most effective for physical modelling, but we don't get taught it over here (Mathcad, Maple and Mathematica are all these scuzzers will teach us); anyone know a good intro to it on the web?
-Mark
They do it in the UK as well. At my uni (after forking out fifty quid for the year) you have to submit your MAC address as well as your student ID to the IT monkeys.
They block all sorts of traffic as well, it appears to be that they've denied *all* traffic unless it's explicitly permitted (e.g. outbound connections over socket 80). They stuffed up the socket number used by MSN Messenger at one point last year and it came close to mutiny.
They usually open ports if you ask them nicely enough and it's not for a dodgy purpose (e.g. they let Jabber connect through its port, but not Kazaa on its preffered one... thank fsck that can use port 80 as well!)
-Mark
http://www.ssc.com/lj/linuxsay.html
If I have to use a mobile 'phone's keypad to update my blog I think I'd rather not. It's bad enough trying to dial someone, let alone compose a LiveJournal entry.
And mobile 'phones with keyboards just look wrong. Save it for the PDAs.
-Mark
Yes, so it's the really simple distro for thickies and n00bs. It's also by far and away the easiest Linux distro to set up and use that I've tried (and I'm from the days of Yggdrasil, me) so it's my distro of choice - it has (or is easily made to have) all the power of "proper" distros but isn't as condescending as Lycoris and friends.
Mandrake should be kept alive, it would be a loss to the Linux world if it were to die.
-Mark
#include <stdio.h>
/* nothing like some K&R C of a Sunday morning, is there? */
main()
{
int n1, n2, n3;
n1 = 370;
n2 = 100;
n3 = n1 * n2;
printf("The answer is %d.\n", n3);
printf("\n-Mark\n");
}
GNU TV, where the scripts are open-sourced before the show airs and you know all the jokes before the intro starts rolling.
Mind you, if you knew when to cringe in Nerds (the competitor to Friends, where housebound geeks spend their days in an eternal LAN party with the occasional visit to the pizza parlour) at the "jokes", it mightn't be so bad...
-Mark
The apple may be sweet at first, but it will forever be a curse on you and your children, and your children's children... dare you lock them into a computer platform where the owners, creators and maintainers of it have been on the verge of imploding since three months after they started?
Damn that iMac for being so irresistable!
-Mark
I have one and it eats power as if it were popcorn, as it keeps it's CCD in an "always on" state so it can respond instantly to requests for picture takage.
One enhancement I would suggest would be to modify the camera in some way so that its power drain was less, even if only for the engineering challenge (he hooked it up to some great big huge massive LiIon cells that would keep a cyclotron going for a while)...
-Mark
-Mark
Give him last week's Lottery numbers.
Why stop there? Give him all of last month's as well!
-Mark
Heat is (mostly) IR radiation. As long as there is space, there will be radiation, so as long as a place exists, it will have heat.
There are other things like thermal neutrons and all that, but we're looking at IR here.
Only not really, IR isn't visible to the human eye...
-Mark
The more people who can look at the source,
The more people who can spot bugs,
The more bugs are found,
The more bugs are fixed.
What I would like to know is whether or not the quality of open code is any better than closed code. Waitasec, RTFA!
-Mark
Over this side of the pond getting hold of engines bigger than the Estes D-size is a nightmare, you need to have licences to handle explosives, have your address registered as a storage area for explosives etc before you can even think of buying them. Shipping doesn't appear to be a problem - they stick them in a van and have them driven to you, for a princely sum - but it is an utter fucking nightmare to get hold of the big 'uns.
I don't see why they do it either, D-class motors aren't exactly likely to propel a warhead any significant distance. Then again, we have had the IRA and friends (and enemies!) on our doorstep for over twenty-five years now...
-Mark
Simple. Place CD in envelope, fill in return form, send it back. Receive email apologising for the mistake and informing me they'll give me a refund as well as the CD I ordered in the first place within 48 hours. Sorted.
I've heard some horror stories about internet purchasings, but amazon have been exemplary to me and as such I use them for all my online entertainment purchases and I recommend them to people who ask.
In real life I tend to get bad service from shops with bad reputations and good service from ones with good reputations. To this end I am pimping Amazon for all it's worth. If some shops in the real world were as courteous and apologetic as they were they'd be facing less competition.
-Mark