You can have SQL injection problems just as easy in stored procedures as you can in plain old code. Look at this example (pardon the probably incorrect syntax):
Create Procedure GetUserTelePhone(@UserName varchar(50)) Begin
Declare @sql varchar(300)
Set @sql = 'SELECT TelePhone From Users where UserName=''' + @UserName + ''''
return exec(@sql)
END
See, there you go, completely open to sql injection, and it's a stored procedure. The problem isn't that people aren't using stored procedures, it's that people are creating queries which result from the concatenation of strings and variables, which invariably leaves them open to attack. A much better way to do things, is to use prepared queries, either in you stored procedures, or just using prepared queries directly in the code.
That's my favourite way to sanitize inputs. Don't even worry about what the inputs are and use PDO with prepared queries. Little Bobby Tables wouldn't cause any trouble. All the mysql_real_escape_string_i_mean_it_this_time is just completely unnecessary, and too open to forgetting to use it in every single place. Expecially in PHP, where variables can change type at any point, so you have to make sure your numeric inputs are sensitized as well. Since I brought up PDO, and mysql_* functions, I have to point out another gripe I have. Having different APIs depending on which database you are connecting to. I do most of my web programming in.Net, and so, I really can't understand why there is a need for mysql_* and pgsql_* function, and not just have one API, and pass different parameters depending on which DB you want to connect to. Which is yet another reason I love PDO so much.
The problem with the US system as I see it, is that even if 25% of the people voted independant, which is a very large percentage of the people, the independents would still have no power, because somebody else would be the winner. In Canada, at least if you can convince enough people in your riding to vote a particular way, then at least you get a seat in parliament, and somebody discussing your views with the rest of the government.
There are still a few issues with hardware support in Linux. The biggest problem with is with wireless cards. There's also quite a few video cards that lose a lot of features or speed when you move to Linux. And then there's software modems. Most other stuff seems to be fine, with some support even being better than Windows. But it's hard to deny that there is quite a bit of hardware that doesn't work under Linux. You can find stuff that works, and it isn't that hard. But it's not like you can go to the store, pick up a new piece of hardware, and know whether it will work or not, without doing your research.
I thought the whole purpose of electing officials was so that you could leave the decision making up to them. Of course, you can still have council meetings and get input from the public on big issues, but I don't really think there's a need for people to vote on things like getting a new firetruck, or who should be the dog catcher. I can't even believe that's an elected position. In Canada, we only vote for who will represent us in the parliament, so there's a different list of people in each of the 302 (?) ridings. But that's the only thing that is different on the ballots. There is a single list of names, usually about 5 or 6 long, and that's it.
Have they fixed the bug where selecting "Plain Old Text" still doesn't format correctly? I'm testing this by putting in a carriage return after every sentence in this post. Let's see how well it works.
If it's a federal election, voting for a federal office, then there should be federal rules as to how the voting is conducted. In Canada, for federal elections, voting is done exactly the same across the entire country. You don't get extra things put on the ballots, because they figured, since everybody is voting anyway, they might as well vote on 1000 different things. Since we have a parliamentary system, the names on the ballots for different ridings, but that's the only thing that is different. The ballots are all printed in the same way, and we all use the same style of voting booths. And everybody votes on exactly 1 thing.
In Ontario, you get an option of giving your refund (assuming you have one) to the "Ontario Opportunities Fund" which is just a fancy term for paying off the provincial debt. I'm not sure how many people actually give any money to that. I would love to see statistics.
I like my code to look like pseudocode. Thank you very much. I also quite enjoy ending my while loops with "wend". I only with VS.Net would quit changing them to "end while".
Well, as a VB developer, you have to remember that when people talk about VB now, they are talking about VB.Net. Which is exactly the same as C#, with a different syntax. Comparing VB.Net to VBScript or even VB6 is like comparing Java with Javascript. VB gets a bad name because it used to be pretty bad, and there's a lot of non-programmers using it to do a lot of stuff they aren't qualified to do, and messing it up royally. But that doesn't mean VB.Net is a terrible language. I wouldn't fault PHP for all the insecure newbie websites created with PHP.
It's done this way with computers all the time. Do normal users really understand the difference between SATA and PATA hard drives? Do you think most people who buy computers look into which technology they are getting? Do they know if their video card is AGP,PCIE 4x, 8x or 16x? Sure some people think it's important, so they put it on the specs for the product you are buying. Those people who don't care can just ignore it.
For what part of human history have we ever learned by reading? Most people couldn't read for most of human history. It has always been much easier to learn something by doing it, rather than just reading a book about it. Don't get me wrong. Reading is important, and is useful for figuring certain things out. It's really good for passing on ideas and information. However, it is not the best way to learn how to do anything. Do you learn how to program by reading about it, or by doing it? Do you learn how to draw a picture by reading about it? Do you learn how to drive by reading about it? If I want to know, for instance, how to change the padding using CSS, I can read about it. If I don't actually go and do it, there's a much smaller chance that I will remember it when I need to do it again. If I go ahead and actually implement it, and type it out, I am much better able to retain the information.
I don't know why people love iTunes so much. Personally I think it's just as bad, if not worse than the CD cartel ever was. At least when I bought a CD, I owned it, and could copy it for personal use however I pleased. With MS shutting down shop for music sales, and cutting access to DRM keys, you would think that people would realize just how bad of a situation DRM music puts us in. Sure iTunes has some stuff that's DRM free, but the vast majority of it still has DRM. Online music sales (like the CD before it) was supposed to make things a lot cheaper. On iTunes, it still costs $10 an album, and you don't even get a physical product. CDs were only moderately more expensive. At least where I live. I like eMusic, because even though I'm bound to paying my $15 every month, I know I'm only paying $0.30 cents per track. Which I think is a much more fair price when you don't receive an actual physical product. And you can also redownload your music in the case where it was lost. I would probably spend $15 anyway on music. Better I get 50 tracks than 15. I have to admit, I do miss some of the bigger name bands, and wish that their music was available through better means, but I just can't justify paying $1.00 for a track. It just seems like a complete ripoff.
Well, that maxtor drive should have been easily replaceable under warranty. I have a 30 GB Maxtor that's been working for 6 years, no problem. A sample size of 1 isn't a very good sample. You can't really say much from buying 1 drive.
Everybody I know has some vendor they swear by, and some vendor they think is just terrible. I know people who think Western Digital is the best, and that Maxtor is crap. I know people who say the exact opposite. None of these people buy enough hard drives to have any real say in which one is better than the other. Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Currently, 1/2 terabyte drives are the norm. I remember buying a computer 10 years ago, and 4 GB was more than enough. Things certainly have changed since the early days.
The question is, what qualifies as an online system. I can set up a server on my computer at home, and access my music that way. It's still an online system. Systems like orb even help you do this.
Yes, you could build a trebuchet in your backyard. However, is it up to the standards of where things would have been when construction of trebuchets was at it's prime. Saying you could build one with power tools just to save time doesn't really hold much water with me. We could build the pyramids with all the modern tools we have at our disposal. The trick is that the Egyptians were able to do it without all those fancy tools. There's still a lot of controversy about how the pyramids were actually accomplished. Because a lot of information used to be kept secret in order to protect the importance of certain trades, a lot of information was lost. There's a lot of things that blacksmiths used to be able to do that we have no idea how to replicate. Things like the Damascus blade, which we just figured out why it was so good, and we still don't know how to reproduce it.
This sets up an interesting precedent though. How good does the experience have to be under minimum requirements? There's no hard metrics to say one way or the other if the minimum requirements are good enough. I remember futzing around for hours with my config.sys and autoexec.bat files just to make sure I could load the sound drivers, and the game at the same time. Even though my computer met the minimum specs. Why has it taken so long to get legal action taken against any company for the minimum specs that aren't really minimum specs. Why have things gotten this far in the first place.
$1.20 a litre here in Canada, and it's only april. The price usually goes up quite a bit in summer. I'm personally predicting $1.50 for the summer, just based on a gut feeling. I may not be right, but I could see the price easily getting that high. That's $5.68 a gallon. Granted, we have much higher taxes on gas than most places in the states, but I still think that will cause quite a few people to rethink how much they are driving.
This is quite common in Canada, at least in the older parts of the city. The newer suburbs seem to be set up a little differently, with more driving required, but I think that's a big mistake. I'm lucky in the fact that I live in an apartment building, and there are 2 stores within 5 minutes walking distance that sell basic groceries. The funny thing is that the corner store and the drug store both sell milk and bread cheaper or at the same price as most grocery stores. I don't drive, so it's nice to not have to carry milk home from the grocery store. It's actually more convenient and cheaper to pick up things at the drug store than it is to actually go to the grocery store.
But you can run 2 or 3 applications just fine on Vista with minimum requirements. Nothing will refuse to run. You may have to wait around for a while for things to load, but everything will show up eventually. You won't be able to run big apps that require tons of memory, but most of those apps have requirements above and beyond the base of what windows needs. And most of those requirements are higher specifically for Vista, because Vista requires a higher base amount of memory. However, I have no problem opening up a web browser, MSN, OpenOffice, and GIMP all at the same time on Vista, with only 512 MB of RAM. It's pretty slow switching between apps, and it's not the optimal experience, but it gets done.
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You can have SQL injection problems just as easy in stored procedures as you can in plain old code. Look at this example (pardon the probably incorrect syntax):
Create Procedure GetUserTelePhone(@UserName varchar(50))
Begin
Declare @sql varchar(300)
Set @sql = 'SELECT TelePhone From Users where UserName=''' + @UserName + ''''
return exec(@sql)
END
See, there you go, completely open to sql injection, and it's a stored procedure. The problem isn't that people aren't using stored procedures, it's that people are creating queries which result from the concatenation of strings and variables, which invariably leaves them open to attack. A much better way to do things, is to use prepared queries, either in you stored procedures, or just using prepared queries directly in the code.
That's my favourite way to sanitize inputs. Don't even worry about what the inputs are and use PDO with prepared queries. Little Bobby Tables wouldn't cause any trouble. All the mysql_real_escape_string_i_mean_it_this_time is just completely unnecessary, and too open to forgetting to use it in every single place. Expecially in PHP, where variables can change type at any point, so you have to make sure your numeric inputs are sensitized as well. Since I brought up PDO, and mysql_* functions, I have to point out another gripe I have. Having different APIs depending on which database you are connecting to. I do most of my web programming in .Net, and so, I really can't understand why there is a need for mysql_* and pgsql_* function, and not just have one API, and pass different parameters depending on which DB you want to connect to. Which is yet another reason I love PDO so much.
The problem with the US system as I see it, is that even if 25% of the people voted independant, which is a very large percentage of the people, the independents would still have no power, because somebody else would be the winner. In Canada, at least if you can convince enough people in your riding to vote a particular way, then at least you get a seat in parliament, and somebody discussing your views with the rest of the government.
There are still a few issues with hardware support in Linux. The biggest problem with is with wireless cards. There's also quite a few video cards that lose a lot of features or speed when you move to Linux. And then there's software modems. Most other stuff seems to be fine, with some support even being better than Windows. But it's hard to deny that there is quite a bit of hardware that doesn't work under Linux. You can find stuff that works, and it isn't that hard. But it's not like you can go to the store, pick up a new piece of hardware, and know whether it will work or not, without doing your research.
I thought the whole purpose of electing officials was so that you could leave the decision making up to them. Of course, you can still have council meetings and get input from the public on big issues, but I don't really think there's a need for people to vote on things like getting a new firetruck, or who should be the dog catcher. I can't even believe that's an elected position. In Canada, we only vote for who will represent us in the parliament, so there's a different list of people in each of the 302 (?) ridings. But that's the only thing that is different on the ballots. There is a single list of names, usually about 5 or 6 long, and that's it.
Have they fixed the bug where selecting "Plain Old Text" still doesn't format correctly?
I'm testing this by putting in a carriage return after every sentence in this post.
Let's see how well it works.
How does paper voting counted by humans with observers from multiple parties watching the election and the counting process not meet those criteria?
If it's a federal election, voting for a federal office, then there should be federal rules as to how the voting is conducted. In Canada, for federal elections, voting is done exactly the same across the entire country. You don't get extra things put on the ballots, because they figured, since everybody is voting anyway, they might as well vote on 1000 different things. Since we have a parliamentary system, the names on the ballots for different ridings, but that's the only thing that is different. The ballots are all printed in the same way, and we all use the same style of voting booths. And everybody votes on exactly 1 thing.
In Ontario, you get an option of giving your refund (assuming you have one) to the "Ontario Opportunities Fund" which is just a fancy term for paying off the provincial debt. I'm not sure how many people actually give any money to that. I would love to see statistics.
I like my code to look like pseudocode. Thank you very much. I also quite enjoy ending my while loops with "wend". I only with VS.Net would quit changing them to "end while".
Well, as a VB developer, you have to remember that when people talk about VB now, they are talking about VB.Net. Which is exactly the same as C#, with a different syntax. Comparing VB.Net to VBScript or even VB6 is like comparing Java with Javascript. VB gets a bad name because it used to be pretty bad, and there's a lot of non-programmers using it to do a lot of stuff they aren't qualified to do, and messing it up royally. But that doesn't mean VB.Net is a terrible language. I wouldn't fault PHP for all the insecure newbie websites created with PHP.
It's done this way with computers all the time. Do normal users really understand the difference between SATA and PATA hard drives? Do you think most people who buy computers look into which technology they are getting? Do they know if their video card is AGP,PCIE 4x, 8x or 16x? Sure some people think it's important, so they put it on the specs for the product you are buying. Those people who don't care can just ignore it.
For what part of human history have we ever learned by reading? Most people couldn't read for most of human history. It has always been much easier to learn something by doing it, rather than just reading a book about it. Don't get me wrong. Reading is important, and is useful for figuring certain things out. It's really good for passing on ideas and information. However, it is not the best way to learn how to do anything. Do you learn how to program by reading about it, or by doing it? Do you learn how to draw a picture by reading about it? Do you learn how to drive by reading about it? If I want to know, for instance, how to change the padding using CSS, I can read about it. If I don't actually go and do it, there's a much smaller chance that I will remember it when I need to do it again. If I go ahead and actually implement it, and type it out, I am much better able to retain the information.
You can't use ASCII tables, it's just a giant image.
Well, that maxtor drive should have been easily replaceable under warranty. I have a 30 GB Maxtor that's been working for 6 years, no problem. A sample size of 1 isn't a very good sample. You can't really say much from buying 1 drive.
Everybody I know has some vendor they swear by, and some vendor they think is just terrible. I know people who think Western Digital is the best, and that Maxtor is crap. I know people who say the exact opposite. None of these people buy enough hard drives to have any real say in which one is better than the other. Google probably buys enough drives, but they don't buy the consumer level desktop drives either, so I don't know if I'd trust their opinion much either.
Which is pretty amazing when you think about it. Currently, 1/2 terabyte drives are the norm. I remember buying a computer 10 years ago, and 4 GB was more than enough. Things certainly have changed since the early days.
The question is, what qualifies as an online system. I can set up a server on my computer at home, and access my music that way. It's still an online system. Systems like orb even help you do this.
Yes, you could build a trebuchet in your backyard. However, is it up to the standards of where things would have been when construction of trebuchets was at it's prime. Saying you could build one with power tools just to save time doesn't really hold much water with me. We could build the pyramids with all the modern tools we have at our disposal. The trick is that the Egyptians were able to do it without all those fancy tools. There's still a lot of controversy about how the pyramids were actually accomplished. Because a lot of information used to be kept secret in order to protect the importance of certain trades, a lot of information was lost. There's a lot of things that blacksmiths used to be able to do that we have no idea how to replicate. Things like the Damascus blade, which we just figured out why it was so good, and we still don't know how to reproduce it.
This sets up an interesting precedent though. How good does the experience have to be under minimum requirements? There's no hard metrics to say one way or the other if the minimum requirements are good enough. I remember futzing around for hours with my config.sys and autoexec.bat files just to make sure I could load the sound drivers, and the game at the same time. Even though my computer met the minimum specs. Why has it taken so long to get legal action taken against any company for the minimum specs that aren't really minimum specs. Why have things gotten this far in the first place.
$1.20 a litre here in Canada, and it's only april. The price usually goes up quite a bit in summer. I'm personally predicting $1.50 for the summer, just based on a gut feeling. I may not be right, but I could see the price easily getting that high. That's $5.68 a gallon. Granted, we have much higher taxes on gas than most places in the states, but I still think that will cause quite a few people to rethink how much they are driving.
This is quite common in Canada, at least in the older parts of the city. The newer suburbs seem to be set up a little differently, with more driving required, but I think that's a big mistake. I'm lucky in the fact that I live in an apartment building, and there are 2 stores within 5 minutes walking distance that sell basic groceries. The funny thing is that the corner store and the drug store both sell milk and bread cheaper or at the same price as most grocery stores. I don't drive, so it's nice to not have to carry milk home from the grocery store. It's actually more convenient and cheaper to pick up things at the drug store than it is to actually go to the grocery store.
But you can run 2 or 3 applications just fine on Vista with minimum requirements. Nothing will refuse to run. You may have to wait around for a while for things to load, but everything will show up eventually. You won't be able to run big apps that require tons of memory, but most of those apps have requirements above and beyond the base of what windows needs. And most of those requirements are higher specifically for Vista, because Vista requires a higher base amount of memory. However, I have no problem opening up a web browser, MSN, OpenOffice, and GIMP all at the same time on Vista, with only 512 MB of RAM. It's pretty slow switching between apps, and it's not the optimal experience, but it gets done.
You're right. But they are both computer programs.