Since the moon is slowly drifting away from the earth (again, to the best of my knowledge), we could take just enough energy from the moon to keep it from drifting away at all.
I wonder why hasn't anyone come up with the idea of taking the energy directly from the moon. We should just, like, attach this big lever to the moon, and the moon going round the Earth would spin this big wheel attached to a power generator. Free energy! Profit!
I've never heard of MVP, but the book makes mention of a very classic pattern: MVC (Model-View-Controller).
My memory must have failed me, I thought MVP is in the book too. To put it short - MVP came into being when people realized that traditional MVC with its unidirectional event flow C -> M -> V does not suit modern GUIs very well. GUI objects tend to blend view functions with controller functions, for example the text box i'm typing this comment into displays the text to me and receives keyboard events. This leaves us with Model and View (which swallowed controller), connected with Observer pattern - View observes the Model to display changes, thus Model can remain View-unaware. This is of course The Good Thing, as it enables decoupling. Unfortunately in this 'pattern' the View must know how to change the Model, which is a Bad Thing, since the View becomes Model-specialized. To get rid of this dependency we introduce Presenter, which acts as a glue between Model and View. It's main role is to intercept control events from the View and execute appropriate methods of the Model.
MVC is actually heavily used in Java web development as an architecture for developing the front tier.
I agree that Java implements MVC, and other patterns too, not only in the web architecture. I don't know about Struts, but this also seems web application-related and my original rant was about the way the popular builders do plain GUIs, forcing you to encode talking to Model in the events of View (To avoid further confusion: talking about Delphi and Visual-everything from MS).
MFC also has some MVC in it, but they call their Model a "Document", and their Controller an "Application." Check out MSDN [microsoft.com].
As to Document-View pattern described in the link you kindly provided, it seems that it is similar to Model-View (without the Presenter). Disclaimer: I don't use MFC, so I might be totally wrong here.
Re:Next Up in the Obvious Category...
on
Design Patterns
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· Score: 1
Sorry, I'd just thought everyone had heard about Design Patterns long ago. Seems a bit like publishing a book review on the KJV Bible or something.
Yeah, this book is a classic, yet I find it hard to believe that it is under every developer's pillow. Take for example the Observer pattern or even better, Model-View-Presenter. Now take a look at any of the popular 'visual programming environments'. Try to find MVP, or even Observer. Separating model from view? The 'model' is scattered through hundreds of event handlers attached to controls (the 'view' part). Ok, if you try hard you can implement these patterns but it's far from natural. So, i'll repeat this: this book might be a classic, but IMHO it is too classic to get into some heads. Perhaps in a few years we'll hear of MVP as the ultra new approach to GUI building in a Slashdot ad.
This book is pretty great. It's also pretty dangerous, I've heard of idiots who rate the quality of any potential design by how many patterns it has in it.
Yeah, keep it out of reach of your Pointy Haired Boss. It hasn't been proven but it's a scientific fact that reading this book was the direct cause of Skinnable Interfaces - the top 20th century misfeature.
Well once again the/. editors messed it up. This is fake news, read the top of the article, and the bottom. Maybe they should clue in and remove this article for starters?
Sure there's dozens of ways to get around their port blocking, but I have a feeling it will have the effect they desire. Only a handful of people will have the knowledge and resources to circumvent their port blocking. In fact, the number is probably small enough that the government won't have to put in any more effort.
Sad... but probably true.
Hm... I don't know how the Panamian VoIP market looks like, but if it's anything similar to what I know about other countries, most users won't even notice. Why? Because they probably even don't know they're using VoIP. They just call a local number, tone-dial their prepaid card number, then the phone number they want to reach, the VoIP company routes the call, and substracts the toll from their pre-paid account. Of course the price is much lower than what the POTS monopoly tries to extort.
Dual feedback loops. Every mail that matches spam gets fed back into the system so both the is-spam wordlist AND the is-good wordlists become more "concentrated" over time.
Ifile does this, bogofilter does this with some wangling in procmail,...
That way, if someone sends something that's still mostly spam (one or two words in common with spam, enough to tip the balance) then all the neutral words will be tarnished as well.
This is clever, but might have some undesirable side effects. Suppose a spammer attaches a long list of neutral words to his e-mail in order to 'dilute' the bad words. This way some innocent words might get assigned positive spam probability thus resulting in false positives later.
Many mail order firms use prisoners to answer phones and take your orders.
An intelligent ISP level spam filter could consist of sending any message that hits multiple subscribers (set some reasonable threshhold) to prison for evaluation.
The prisoner's station would be a screen with one button that approves the message for delivery and one which deletes it.
This is a bad idea. Many people would commit crimes just to get to prison! Man, watching pr0n samples all day long, it's a dream job!
Hm... what about an anti-anti spam filter that mangles the message inserting random misspellings into the spam-identifying words? The bayesian filter would perceive this as a message consisting of many 'unclassified' words, just like a message in some unknown language. Sure, the short words probably haven't got many possible misspellings (cock, c0ck, coock, cokc - hm... starts to look undecipherable ), so they would probably get classified after some time. And this would hopefully lower the spam success ratio. But the possibility still remains...
This is a defensive move by Microsoft/AMD/Intel, because someday somebody was always going to find a way to allow media companies to distribute this content without fear of piracy, and that person is going to make a lot of money.
The hardware required to do this would be very very expensive. Even with encrypted computer-monitor communications, there's still a possibility to rip the monitor open and record RGB signals directly from the tube (should the case be booby trapped?), not to mention videotaping the content off the screen. Of course, an ordinary user would not bother, but as with all content that can be distributed digitally one hacker is enough to cross the barrier from the DRM world to the world of unrestricted copying. This leaves us with another option - destroying the unrestricted copying world. This will not happen until most of the no-mandatory-drm PCs die off due to lack of spare parts. And of course all new PCs would have to be mandatory-drm. But this will not happen, right? Right?
I have also been reading enough to know that most of the information out there about Palladium is untrue.
If they hadn't tried to hoover it all at once they could have kept it going for years... but then, criminals are by definition stupid, so there ya go.
Criminals stupid by definition? So who commits all those unresolved crimes? Or has the crime detection rate jumped up to 100% recently? Maybe the police & FBI & DEA & whatever are just dumb? Unfortunately I think there are smart criminals, you just don't hear about them.
How about this one, then:
http://www.example.com/foo.asp?id=1;DELETE+FROM+St uff
It's just a GET request, but if the site suffers from SQL Injection problems, which many sites do, stuff may be deleted from the database.
This is a good example. How about these:
1. Following a link from the main page.
2. Typing a link that got removed from the main page, but you found in a google cache.
3. Typing in a guessed link that is easy to guess (index.html or similar).
4. Typing a link that is impossible to guess that you got by other means.
5. Using a link generator ( for passwd in dictionary try http://someurl?pwd=passwd)
6. Using a link containing malicious code, that will get executed due to a security hole.
In a perfect world without security holes all these would be equally legit, IMHO. After all you can call people on the phone and ask them to send you all their money, right?
Unfortunately we are living in a world full of unsecure software. Therefore the 'I just typed a link' defense may or may not be right. Moreover, IMHO there is a continuum of actions falling into the 'typed link' category ranging from legit request to a malicious hacking attempt. As to this particular case, this is probably somewhere between 3. and 4. on the above list. If this is 3., then (again IMHO) the company has no case. Point 4. is special - how did they get the link? I don't know, but I think this is crucial, so let's wait and see.
It is funny how the Slashdot crowd can use double-standards. It is ok to get the files that are publically avialable from an internet-site, but it's NOT ok when direct-marketeers get their e-mail-addresses from their public websites.
Funny that is...
Of course... This *IS* slashdot..
What? As far as I remember, the general consensus (If there is such thing on Slashdot) was that if you don't want to be spammed it is your responsibility to protect your webpage from harvesting bots - use a fake e-mail address generator, robots.txt violation detector, whatever. Noone said it is bad to get email addresses from a webpage. Using them to spam is quite a different thing, but comparing spamming to getting an unlinked document is a bit far fetched.
Actually, the point of eyeglasses for chickens is to worsen their vision, not improve it; the purpose being to reduce territorial fighting between roosters in overcrowded coops.
To be really silly, you need to patent contact lenses for chickens: http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/chickens/ [rr.com]
Actually the contact lenses aren't silly - it's the cheapest way to make the chickens see red (literally). Why? As far as I know it's because chickens (not only roosters) have this instinct of pecking at contrasting spots. When they are overcrowded it creates a positive feedback loop - a chicken gets hurt, the other chicken see the blood, peck, more blood -> a dead chicken. This is to prevent it - through red glasses the blood does not stick out this much. Another way is to use red lights.
What software do the folks in the underdeveloped countries really need? I mean what specific software, that is not already written? Perhaps what is already around is sufficient? Just wondering.
Without the likes of Slashdot, whole swathes of youngsters would be unable to comunicate at all, and would be unable to fit in, and would end up jumping off a bridge. So online community saves lives.
Ugh. Increadible. Time to move operations to Monaco. Better yet, lets hope "the big one" (earthquake) hits and takes 'em out (a little harsh, but heck).
Don't count on a little earthquake fixing a system error. Other patent-sue-profit companies would take their place - the more the better! Stupid system must get a lot of bad press before it gets fixed. The worst outcome of this mess would be them 'innovators' losing a lawsuit. Why? Because the general public would get the impression that the system works. It does not. It needs to be fixed. I would really be happy seeing them go after some big guys.
But those areas are not very productive ecologically/economically- not much potential for farms at the south pole.
You have your data wrong. Penguin farming has a scientifically proven 57.13% return on investment within the first year and is generally regarded (87% professional business consultants attest to that) 'the next big thing' in world economy.
A few years ago, I read an article that you can fit every person/family in the world with their own house, and the area it would take would be able the size of Texas.
Overpopulation? Never! Unless you define overpopulation as 1%-Greedy Land Owners, 20%-Damn GOlfers, 79%-Everyone stuffed in a trailer park.
Overpopulation isn't about housing. You aren't suggesting that a family can live off solely on what grows in their backyard? Think of fields, roads, railroads, mines, airports, there goes the 83 percent.
The article isn't very specific on the kind of problems they will try to solve. The 'search' problems, where you have a big search space than can be easily divided into smaller chunks are easy. Unfortunately some problems cannot be easily split into many independent parts - simulations generally fall into this category. Weather simulations, nuclear explosion simulations, well, simulations in general:-). You can just assign each computer a square mile of terrain, do the computations for the whole simulations, then merge the results - the neighboring squares interact, so computers have to communicate after each time slice. This is where communication will probably slow your 'network supercomputer' down. No matter how fat the pipes are, they will be several orders of magnitude slower than an internal supercomputer bus in terms of latency. To put it short: this might be of some use, but they better start gathering money for a real supercomputer.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that Java implements MVC, and other patterns too, not only in the web architecture. I don't know about Struts, but this also seems web application-related and my original rant was about the way the popular builders do plain GUIs, forcing you to encode talking to Model in the events of View (To avoid further confusion: talking about Delphi and Visual-everything from MS).
As to Document-View pattern described in the link you kindly provided, it seems that it is similar to Model-View (without the Presenter). Disclaimer: I don't use MFC, so I might be totally wrong here.
http://shadycorp.com
By the way, by reading this post you agree to mod it up as Insightful.
Hm... what about an anti-anti spam filter that mangles the message inserting random misspellings into the spam-identifying words? The bayesian filter would perceive this as a message consisting of many 'unclassified' words, just like a message in some unknown language. Sure, the short words probably haven't got many possible misspellings (cock, c0ck, coock, cokc - hm... starts to look undecipherable ), so they would probably get classified after some time. And this would hopefully lower the spam success ratio. But the possibility still remains...
1. Following a link from the main page.
2. Typing a link that got removed from the main page, but you found in a google cache.
3. Typing in a guessed link that is easy to guess (index.html or similar).
4. Typing a link that is impossible to guess that you got by other means.
5. Using a link generator ( for passwd in dictionary try http://someurl?pwd=passwd)
6. Using a link containing malicious code, that will get executed due to a security hole.
In a perfect world without security holes all these would be equally legit, IMHO. After all you can call people on the phone and ask them to send you all their money, right? Unfortunately we are living in a world full of unsecure software. Therefore the 'I just typed a link' defense may or may not be right. Moreover, IMHO there is a continuum of actions falling into the 'typed link' category ranging from legit request to a malicious hacking attempt. As to this particular case, this is probably somewhere between 3. and 4. on the above list. If this is 3., then (again IMHO) the company has no case. Point 4. is special - how did they get the link? I don't know, but I think this is crucial, so let's wait and see.
2. Distribute among a bazillion of geeks.
3. ?
4. Profit!!!
What software do the folks in the underdeveloped countries really need? I mean what specific software, that is not already written? Perhaps what is already around is sufficient? Just wondering.
The article isn't very specific on the kind of problems they will try to solve. The 'search' problems, where you have a big search space than can be easily divided into smaller chunks are easy. Unfortunately some problems cannot be easily split into many independent parts - simulations generally fall into this category. Weather simulations, nuclear explosion simulations, well, simulations in general :-). You can just assign each computer a square mile of terrain, do the computations for the whole simulations, then merge the results - the neighboring squares interact, so computers have to communicate after each time slice. This is where communication will probably slow your 'network supercomputer' down. No matter how fat the pipes are, they will be several orders of magnitude slower than an internal supercomputer bus in terms of latency. To put it short: this might be of some use, but they better start gathering money for a real supercomputer.