I realize asteroids are much more numerous in the inner solar system, but we're getting better at tracking them so we would ideally have a longer lead time to deal with any threat. Comets, on the other hand, tend to come out of nowhere, so the short notice scenario is much more likely.
A C string can be as long as you want and never requires more than length+1 bytes of storage. A length+data scheme would need unlimited lengths to be as flexible with preferably a 1-byte overhead for short strings at least. I guess you could do something UTF-8-ish and add extra length bytes as needed for longer strings, but then you'd need a formula to figure out how much storage the string would require. Sounds a little messy to me.
FTA: By comparison, Mac OS X has limited application-dependent sandboxing and no code signing, and it only partially implements ASLR.
I was under the impression OS X has had code signing since Leopard, though it's voluntary and not heavily adopted by third parties so far from the looks of it. Also, I noticed a slide in the WWDC 2011 keynote where application sandboxing was listed as a feature of Lion.
If you keep removing all the plant waste from a farm and burying it elsewhere, wouldn't this deplete the soil of nutrients? I'm not a farmer, but I have to wonder.
Here in southern California, a mere 5.5 would hardly even arouse anyone's interest. Probably make page 1 of the local section unless the Padres made a big trade; then it would be relegated to page 2.
I was in Kingston, Ont. (about 2 hours drive from the epicentre) eating my lunch on a picnic bench outside when people came rushing out of the office wide-eyed yelling, "Earthquake!" I didn't feel a thing. Honestly. If that was an earthquake, I've had bigger rumblings coming out of my stomach. Then again, I lived in Japan for a time. They know how to do earthquakes over there.
If they are seriously going back to the moon, I hope they take the opportunity to do some astronomy. Wouldn't it be a good place for experiments in higher wavelength interferometry, for example? One thing I have been wondering about is whether you could line one of the smaller craters in a wire mesh and turn it into a radio telescope? A primitive Arecibo, if you will.
I was actually contacted by Apple Canada and received a $25 rebate after having purchased an iPod around the time they became exempt from the blank media tax.
Were the storage capacity of my next iPod to expand by an order of magnitude, I would take that as an opportunity to convert my album collection to a lossless format, rather than hunt around for all this extra content to stick on there. CDs could be re-encoded without any quality loss. DRM could be stripped from iTMS downloads without any quality loss. Granted, uncompressed video is much larger, but again, it may just be a matter of time.
My favourite episode of Max Headroom was the one where Bryce spends all of his time trying to perfect a robotic fly to literally bug an enemy compound. After numerous technical setbacks, they send it off on its debut mission. After bobbing around the room a bit, it abruptly gets swatted out of existence, sending poor Bryce into shock.
Now we fast-forward to 2006, and they're testing a robotic fly in a room where the walls are all painted in stripes. Hmm...
Wow, I had no idea people love Apple for their customer service! To me, the best thing about Apple customer service is that I don't have to rely on it much. Things tend to work on Macs, at least relative to other platforms.
No, for me, the best thing about Apple is that they remain committed to R&D. They're coming out with new ideas all the time. Sure, some of them inevitably flop, but they don't just sit around and copy what other companies are doing. They also keep their development teams fairly small and don't put out a lot of bloatware. They keep their GUI simple and accessible, yet leave the door open for tinkerers.
Any discussion on the long-term viability of a media format will be full of speculation, but he're my take on it.
There will likely come a day when I can cram 10 times the data into a music player of the same size as what I have today, and at no additional cost. At that point, I could convert all my iTMS purchases to a lossless, DRM-free encoding without sacrificing any audio quality. My investment will be preserved indefinitely, as it can be re-encoded to whatever lossless format my next player might support.
There are both official (burn CD) and unofficial (Audio Hijack, etc.) ways to create your lossless recording, and Apple goes so far as to encourage the former for the very sake of long-term backup. I would certainly have been more reluctant to buy tracks from iTMS were this not the case, but I really can't see this becoming a problem for me a decade from now.
For example, the Apple FairPlay technology allows users to make a limited number of copies for personal use. Presumably, consumers concerned with the ability to make back up copies would choose to purchase music from a service that allowed such copying.
Off-hand, I can think of three ways to obtain music:
Purchase and download it from an online store.
Buy the CD, either from your local store or through online mail order.
Copy it from someone else, be it a friend or an anonymous contributor on a P2P network.
In my experience, method 1 works best when you are browsing around and find something you like. If, however, you go there with a particular album in mind and your tastes are not exactly mainstream, you are likely to be disappointed. Even though I have submitted requests for particular artists and albums, I have yet to see a single one fulfilled.
That leaves methods 2 and 3. To date, I have been going with 2, but the RIAA now says it is illegal to fill up my iPod with CD tracks. I suppose this doesn't apply to me directly here in Canada, but were I American, I think I might be re-evaluating my options right now...
Maybe it's time to start calling some of my files "Tiananmen Square", "Falun Gong", or "Dalai Lama". That should keep at least one quarter of the world's population out of my hard drive...
That the most costly virus I have ever encountered on the Mac. At the time, I was working furiously on my Mac SE, writing a primitive GIS (geographic information system) as an alternative to the usual, mundane term paper. I couldn't get the thing to stop crashing and wound up submitting the program a week late. I had to settle for a B instead of an A, and it turned out the crashing was caused, not by bad coding or Think C bugs as I had assumed, but by the nVIR virus. A quick run of Disinfectant and all was well, except for my marks...
Actually, though, this raises an interesting point. Macs have always had a lesser market share than PCs; yet there were a number virii for the Mac back then. I remember another one (WDEF?) which kept bouncing around from machine to machine via infected floppies. While the virus problem seemed to get steadily worse on the PC, however, it got better on the Mac to the point that they seemed to vanish altogether by the time OS X was rolled out. Hmm...
I wonder how many people reading this thread are working on software that could potentially cause bodily injury? I unfortunately have to count myself in that category, as I am coding for a new geophysical transmitter which handles a considerable amount of current, and there are both software and hardware fail-safes that need to work. Some of the key electronics are fibre-optically isolated, but you can only go so far...
When there is excess wind energy, why can't they shut down some hydroelectric turbines and allow reservoir levels to recover? I remember reading that hydroelectric power here in Ontario had fallen 15% over the past summer, thanks to a combination of high energy demand and low precipitation. Any new energy source--even a highly variable one--could, in theory, help keep hydroelectric running at its peak, so there's an energy buffer or sorts. I'm just not convinced that saving electricity in giant floating batteries is the way to go...
I have long since disabled password logins in favour of public key, due to all the scripting probing going on these days...or at least I thought I had. I had set PasswordAuthentication in/etc/sshd_config to no, but was alarmed to discover a coworker logging in with his password the other day.
Knowing that this was a new development in Tiger, I compared the new config file with an older one from Panther and noticed the line #UsePAM no. Uncommenting this finally disabled passwords, which implies that the default must not be no as indicated. Very odd...
In theory, extending DST to cover a greater proportion of the year would work best at lower latitudes, where the winter time drop in day length is less severe. Otherwise, your kids may wind up walking to school in the pitch dark. Then again, I imagine Scandinavian kids are quite used to that already and think we Canadians are wimps. I'll never forget those videos of businessmen skiing to work wearing headlamps during the Lillehammer Olympic coverage.
At higher latitudes, it might actually make more sense to move back a second hour during the height of summer to take advantage of the very long days. Anyway, I don't think Canadians or Alaskans should be forced to follow along, and the potential confusion over having two systems is probably overblown. It can't be worse than the metric/non-metric schism, yet life has gone on since then...
The downside is that you'll likely never hear back from them. Even if the bug is solved, you'll never know until they release a new version. They may decide that the behavior is "works as intended" and ignore you. There is no way to follow the progress of your bug.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but every single bug I have ever reported has eventually been addressed. I'll admit that instant gratification is rare. I had waited the better part of a year on a few of them, but they get around to them eventually. The last bug I reported was a problem with Shark not recognizing the function names from older apps. They nailed that one in under a month, so maybe things are beginning to improve? Anyway, filing a bug is almost certainly a better use of your time than whining about it here...
Slashdot Mirror
I realize asteroids are much more numerous in the inner solar system, but we're getting better at tracking them so we would ideally have a longer lead time to deal with any threat. Comets, on the other hand, tend to come out of nowhere, so the short notice scenario is much more likely.
Oh wait...
Where is the best place to send feedback to Blizzard about this?
A C string can be as long as you want and never requires more than length+1 bytes of storage. A length+data scheme would need unlimited lengths to be as flexible with preferably a 1-byte overhead for short strings at least. I guess you could do something UTF-8-ish and add extra length bytes as needed for longer strings, but then you'd need a formula to figure out how much storage the string would require. Sounds a little messy to me.
...is that the vast majority of them are written for flash. It remains to be seen if an iOS store will get developers to redo them all.
FTA: By comparison, Mac OS X has limited application-dependent sandboxing and no code signing, and it only partially implements ASLR.
I was under the impression OS X has had code signing since Leopard, though it's voluntary and not heavily adopted by third parties so far from the looks of it. Also, I noticed a slide in the WWDC 2011 keynote where application sandboxing was listed as a feature of Lion.
Greg "The Easter Egg" Chamitoff?
Could someone explain to me why people always speak of the kilogram as the standard unit of mass and not the gram?
Maybe it's so we'll be able to enjoy future Steven Seagal flicks?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d82j_Qfp_VA
If you keep removing all the plant waste from a farm and burying it elsewhere, wouldn't this deplete the soil of nutrients? I'm not a farmer, but I have to wonder.
What a bunch of wimps.
Here in southern California, a mere 5.5 would hardly even arouse anyone's interest. Probably make page 1 of the local section unless the Padres made a big trade; then it would be relegated to page 2.
I was in Kingston, Ont. (about 2 hours drive from the epicentre) eating my lunch on a picnic bench outside when people came rushing out of the office wide-eyed yelling, "Earthquake!" I didn't feel a thing. Honestly. If that was an earthquake, I've had bigger rumblings coming out of my stomach. Then again, I lived in Japan for a time. They know how to do earthquakes over there.
If they are seriously going back to the moon, I hope they take the opportunity to do some astronomy. Wouldn't it be a good place for experiments in higher wavelength interferometry, for example? One thing I have been wondering about is whether you could line one of the smaller craters in a wire mesh and turn it into a radio telescope? A primitive Arecibo, if you will.
I was actually contacted by Apple Canada and received a $25 rebate after having purchased an iPod around the time they became exempt from the blank media tax.
Were the storage capacity of my next iPod to expand by an order of magnitude, I would take that as an opportunity to convert my album collection to a lossless format, rather than hunt around for all this extra content to stick on there. CDs could be re-encoded without any quality loss. DRM could be stripped from iTMS downloads without any quality loss. Granted, uncompressed video is much larger, but again, it may just be a matter of time.
My favourite episode of Max Headroom was the one where Bryce spends all of his time trying to perfect a robotic fly to literally bug an enemy compound. After numerous technical setbacks, they send it off on its debut mission. After bobbing around the room a bit, it abruptly gets swatted out of existence, sending poor Bryce into shock.
Now we fast-forward to 2006, and they're testing a robotic fly in a room where the walls are all painted in stripes. Hmm...
Wow, I had no idea people love Apple for their customer service! To me, the best thing about Apple customer service is that I don't have to rely on it much. Things tend to work on Macs, at least relative to other platforms.
No, for me, the best thing about Apple is that they remain committed to R&D. They're coming out with new ideas all the time. Sure, some of them inevitably flop, but they don't just sit around and copy what other companies are doing. They also keep their development teams fairly small and don't put out a lot of bloatware. They keep their GUI simple and accessible, yet leave the door open for tinkerers.
Any discussion on the long-term viability of a media format will be full of speculation, but he're my take on it.
There will likely come a day when I can cram 10 times the data into a music player of the same size as what I have today, and at no additional cost. At that point, I could convert all my iTMS purchases to a lossless, DRM-free encoding without sacrificing any audio quality. My investment will be preserved indefinitely, as it can be re-encoded to whatever lossless format my next player might support.
There are both official (burn CD) and unofficial (Audio Hijack, etc.) ways to create your lossless recording, and Apple goes so far as to encourage the former for the very sake of long-term backup. I would certainly have been more reluctant to buy tracks from iTMS were this not the case, but I really can't see this becoming a problem for me a decade from now.
For example, the Apple FairPlay technology allows users to make a limited number of copies for personal use. Presumably, consumers concerned with the ability to make back up copies would choose to purchase music from a service that allowed such copying.
Off-hand, I can think of three ways to obtain music:
In my experience, method 1 works best when you are browsing around and find something you like. If, however, you go there with a particular album in mind and your tastes are not exactly mainstream, you are likely to be disappointed. Even though I have submitted requests for particular artists and albums, I have yet to see a single one fulfilled.
That leaves methods 2 and 3. To date, I have been going with 2, but the RIAA now says it is illegal to fill up my iPod with CD tracks. I suppose this doesn't apply to me directly here in Canada, but were I American, I think I might be re-evaluating my options right now...
Maybe it's time to start calling some of my files "Tiananmen Square", "Falun Gong", or "Dalai Lama". That should keep at least one quarter of the world's population out of my hard drive...
Grr...nVIR.
That the most costly virus I have ever encountered on the Mac. At the time, I was working furiously on my Mac SE, writing a primitive GIS (geographic information system) as an alternative to the usual, mundane term paper. I couldn't get the thing to stop crashing and wound up submitting the program a week late. I had to settle for a B instead of an A, and it turned out the crashing was caused, not by bad coding or Think C bugs as I had assumed, but by the nVIR virus. A quick run of Disinfectant and all was well, except for my marks...
Actually, though, this raises an interesting point. Macs have always had a lesser market share than PCs; yet there were a number virii for the Mac back then. I remember another one (WDEF?) which kept bouncing around from machine to machine via infected floppies. While the virus problem seemed to get steadily worse on the PC, however, it got better on the Mac to the point that they seemed to vanish altogether by the time OS X was rolled out. Hmm...
I wonder how many people reading this thread are working on software that could potentially cause bodily injury? I unfortunately have to count myself in that category, as I am coding for a new geophysical transmitter which handles a considerable amount of current, and there are both software and hardware fail-safes that need to work. Some of the key electronics are fibre-optically isolated, but you can only go so far...
When there is excess wind energy, why can't they shut down some hydroelectric turbines and allow reservoir levels to recover? I remember reading that hydroelectric power here in Ontario had fallen 15% over the past summer, thanks to a combination of high energy demand and low precipitation. Any new energy source--even a highly variable one--could, in theory, help keep hydroelectric running at its peak, so there's an energy buffer or sorts. I'm just not convinced that saving electricity in giant floating batteries is the way to go...
Knowing that this was a new development in Tiger, I compared the new config file with an older one from Panther and noticed the line #UsePAM no. Uncommenting this finally disabled passwords, which implies that the default must not be no as indicated. Very odd...
In theory, extending DST to cover a greater proportion of the year would work best at lower latitudes, where the winter time drop in day length is less severe. Otherwise, your kids may wind up walking to school in the pitch dark. Then again, I imagine Scandinavian kids are quite used to that already and think we Canadians are wimps. I'll never forget those videos of businessmen skiing to work wearing headlamps during the Lillehammer Olympic coverage.
At higher latitudes, it might actually make more sense to move back a second hour during the height of summer to take advantage of the very long days. Anyway, I don't think Canadians or Alaskans should be forced to follow along, and the potential confusion over having two systems is probably overblown. It can't be worse than the metric/non-metric schism, yet life has gone on since then...
Maybe I'm just lucky, but every single bug I have ever reported has eventually been addressed. I'll admit that instant gratification is rare. I had waited the better part of a year on a few of them, but they get around to them eventually. The last bug I reported was a problem with Shark not recognizing the function names from older apps. They nailed that one in under a month, so maybe things are beginning to improve? Anyway, filing a bug is almost certainly a better use of your time than whining about it here...