The compiler's job is to turn any syntactically valid source code into executable code. It might warn you about syntactically dubious constructions. But compilers aren't designed to catch logic errors. While the presence of syntax errors tells you that the code is definitely wrong, the absence of syntax errors does not indicate that the code is correct.
An expressive, succinct, high-level language is still the better bet than a verbose language for producing quality code. All the verbose language does is make you type more, and probably increase the total number of typos. Working in Pascal just creates more syntax errors, which doesn't necessarily reduce the number of logic errors. If you insist on being verbose, your effort would be better spent on adding more assertions and comments to your code.
Unfortunately, if the goal is to produce quality code, C is succinct in all the wrong places, with shortcuts like if (a = b), and verbose in all the wrong places, such requiring you to do your own memory management.
Almost everybody goes to work because they need money. Even so, there are some who work just for the money, and others who take pride in doing a good job. Just as no all workers are the same, not all companies are the same. Apple has a track record recently of being an overachiever, and deserves its good reputation.
Apple has a nice solution for the Caps Lock problem. In Mac OS X, password fields have an embedded Caps Lock indicator. It's not a cure for stupidity, but it does help alert the user.
By default Opera identifies itself as "Internet Explorer" and some webmasters incorrectly use this information to determine which web browsers are more commonly used.
That claim is about as false as saying that the web stats are wrong because by default Internet Explorer identifies itself as Mozilla.
Here is an example of a User-Agent string that Opera sends when it "identifies itself as Internet Explorer":
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Mac_PowerPC Mac OS X; en) Opera 8.51
Notice that even though it resembles an IE User-Agent string, it's still obvious that it came from Opera. Every log analyzer is smart enough to interpret the User-Agent string by looking for "Opera" first, then "MSIE", then "Mozilla".
Setting it to "identify as Opera" or "identify as Mozilla" just changes the string to
Opera/8.51 (Macintosh; PPC Mac OS X; U; en)
You can think of it as a protest against the silly mimicry trend that Microsoft started when they made IE's User-Agent string resemble Mozilla's. But pragmatically, letting the User-Agent string be configurable achieves nothing. The stats show that Opera has a small market share, and the stats are correct regardless of how you tell Opera to identify itself. I wish Opera hadn't included this silly feature. Just let this myth die. Put your efforts into converting your friends, not the webmasters.
GarageBand can make a recording from my MIDI piano through a MIDI USB device hooked up to my Mac. It can edit that recording, note by note, changing pitch and duration. It can import MIDI files. Given all those MIDI capabilities, it's entirely reasonable to expect it to also save MIDI files as well.
On the surface, it seems that GarageBand is a nice application for recording and editing digital music. However, there is one gaping feature hole: although GarageBand can import MIDI files, it cannot export MIDI files! This is vendor lock-in of the worst form. Once you work on something in GarageBand, all you can do is export it to AIFF format. It is impossible to turn it your recording into a MIDI cell-phone ringtone or process it further with other software. At least with Microsoft Word, the data format has been mostly reverse engineered. But GarageBand is as worthless as a crippled shareware trial because it can't save MIDI files. What a shame.
Actually, according to Alfred Nobel's will and the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prizes are meant to be awarded rather promptly:
The interest... shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.
Granted, the passage of time is often necessary for the relative importance of a work to become apparent, since bold new ideas tend to be controversial and cannot be appreciated without hindsight.
Let's face it: traditional credit cards suck because they are hampered by concern for backward compatibility with 1970s technology. If one were designing a credit card system today, it wouldn't be based on an embossed number and magnetic stripe. The number is there for remote transactions (using the expiration date and possibly the 3-digit CVV as a plaintext "password"!). With today's technology, remote transactions should be handled using a challenge-response system or one-time-use numbers such that the retailer can authenticate the cardmember without gaining enough information to impersonate the cardmember. The number on the card is embossed for use with the carbon-copy rolling machine. When was the last time a retailer carbon-copied your card, asked for photographic ID, and looked through a blacklist of stolen card numbers? And the magnetic stripe would certainly be replaced by a smart chip, which is much harder to clone because it can do challenge-response.
The infrastructure of the credit card network has improved, slowly. Nearly all point-of-sale equipment now performs real-time authorization. In Europe, the magnetic stripe is being obsoleted by contact smart chips. However, the benefit of the new technology must be significant enough to justify upgrading the huge worldwide network of equipment. So what's in it for each party to adopt RFID for credit cards?
Retailer: The store wants to minimize the likelihood of chargebacks while being quick and friendly to the customer. In addition, the card reader needs to be cheap, since they have to buy or lease the equipment. They have all adopted real-time authorization because it eliminated a lot of fraud. In countries where magnetic stripe cloning is prevalent, they have already acquired contact smart chip readers. The only ones who would be interested in RFID might be the industries clustered around the American car culture, where every second counts: tollbooths, fast food/coffee places, gas stations.
Issuing banks: The bank wants secure cards that can be issued cheaply. Although most of the risk of fraud is borne by the retailers, the banks do assume some liability, not to mention the expense of running the call center and the fraud check departments. Although the RFID signals might be intercepted and cracked, I think that thieves will prefer to steal credit card numbers by other means (the same security holes that are there today will continue to exist for backward compatibility). The RFID chip is relatively cheap, so they might go for the new tech. Or Mastercard could force them to embed RFID in the cards.
Cardmember: The typical cardmember mainly cares about convenience, with security as a secondary concern. Being able to wave your entire purse or hump your butt against the contactless card reader is marginally more convenient, assuming that the signal can overcome shielding and interference problems. If RFID cards become common, you'll have to specify which of the several cards you are carrying you want to charge, or there it's possible that it will read a card other than the one you intended to charge. So I don't think you would really be saving any time. However, cardmembers are not really in any position to promote or protest technological decisions -- you just get to use whatever card comes in the mail.
In short, credit card technology advances slowly, with the retailer network being the bottleneck. Can they be convinced to upgrade? In my opinion, I think not.
I also think that RFID offers practically no advantage over contact smart chips, and that it would be pointless to add yet another standard. Wireless will never be quite as secure as contact. The network needs an overhaul, but this is not it! The credit card companies should be pushing to remove the card number and magnetic stripe in favor of the smart chip, instead of adding RFID.
Under US Federal law, the cardmember is liable for up to $50 (that's 65 Australian dollars) for unauthorized usage of a credit card. In practice, many of the better issuing banks go beyond the requirement and offer zero liability.
element in the <head>. That means that browsers cannot automatically announce the existence of an RSS feed. It would be nice if I could use such a link to get an equivalent RSS/Atom feed that matches my customized news topic selection.
(The RSS/Atom links on the left side of the page don't reflect my customizations.)
I'm a bit surprised at that, since Google has a reputation for making things as standard and user-friendly as possible. Perhaps that's why it's still Beta. (Where do I post feedback? Does Google have a crawler that indexes this gripe and reports it to their developers?)
It seems that VML never became a W3C recommendation, as it was superseded by SVG. MSIE only supports VML because it's a Microsoft Office format. As far as I know, there are no plans to support SVG natively in MSIE.
Perhaps it is possible to get MSIE to support a simple subset of SVG by first transforming it into VML. Since both formats are based on XML, perhaps it could even be done on the client side using XSLT. Has anyone tried this? It could be packaged as part of IE7 (the Dean Edwards hack, not the next version of MSIE)?
If such a hack were accomplished, it could spark the development of some nifty SVG-based applications. With Opera, Mozilla/Firefox and Safari all supporting SVG natively (now or in the near future), and MSIE supporting it via VML, it would be possible to reach a wide audience without any plugins!
Like Visa, American Express has also announced that it will stop working with CardSystems.
"Buy" & "Sell" in Chinese are confusingly simi
on
A $251 Million Typo
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I wonder if the user interface was in Chinese. In Chinese, the characters for buy and sell look similar. Yes, a Chinese person could easily tell them apart, but I can understand that after many hours of staring at a computer screen, one's eyes or brain might get tired and slip up.
To add to the confusion, their pronunciation differs only in tone! When I was younger, I once asked my dad to sell my HP stock. He misheard me and bought some instead. I'm sure that this is not the first such misunderstanding that has occurred in Chinese.
Congress is fighting back against the Supreme Court decision too:
House Votes To Undercut High Court On Property. If the bill passes, then it's not likely that the town will approve the museum/hotel in protest.
I agree completely. The only excuse for using such lame abbreviations should be when you're running up to the 160-character limit for SMS. Everywhere else, it just makes your writing look stupid and unreadable.
Selecting packages is not selecting packages but you select functionalities - like "Web Server" instead of "httpd, php-foo..." package names - it is for sure less confising for newbies, but somebody who wishes to have more custom package setup needs to remaster instalation media...
I just installed FC4 using the Custom option. For each category, such as GNOME or Web Server, some packages are required and some are optional. If you click on the Details link, you can choose to include or exclude individual optional RPMs.
Slashdot Mirror
The compiler's job is to turn any syntactically valid source code into executable code. It might warn you about syntactically dubious constructions. But compilers aren't designed to catch logic errors. While the presence of syntax errors tells you that the code is definitely wrong, the absence of syntax errors does not indicate that the code is correct.
An expressive, succinct, high-level language is still the better bet than a verbose language for producing quality code. All the verbose language does is make you type more, and probably increase the total number of typos. Working in Pascal just creates more syntax errors, which doesn't necessarily reduce the number of logic errors. If you insist on being verbose, your effort would be better spent on adding more assertions and comments to your code.
Unfortunately, if the goal is to produce quality code, C is succinct in all the wrong places, with shortcuts like if (a = b), and verbose in all the wrong places, such requiring you to do your own memory management.
This may be neat, but it's nothing compared to the kind of tiny flying bug that the US Department of Defense wants to develop!
Almost everybody goes to work because they need money. Even so, there are some who work just for the money, and others who take pride in doing a good job. Just as no all workers are the same, not all companies are the same. Apple has a track record recently of being an overachiever, and deserves its good reputation.
Apple has a nice solution for the Caps Lock problem. In Mac OS X, password fields have an embedded Caps Lock indicator. It's not a cure for stupidity, but it does help alert the user.
Telus charges extortionate rates if you don't pay them 7 Canadian dollars per month to subscribe to a long distance plan.
Relax! To issue a refund to your credit card, the merchant only needs to store the last 4 digits of your credit card number.
The latest reports saying that the leaked data did not come from iBill.
I don't think it wil ever be ready for the desktop -- it seems to be vaporware!
HURD is just the next generation of EMACS.
That claim is about as false as saying that the web stats are wrong because by default Internet Explorer identifies itself as Mozilla.
Here is an example of a User-Agent string that Opera sends when it "identifies itself as Internet Explorer":
Notice that even though it resembles an IE User-Agent string, it's still obvious that it came from Opera. Every log analyzer is smart enough to interpret the User-Agent string by looking for "Opera" first, then "MSIE", then "Mozilla".
Setting it to "identify as Opera" or "identify as Mozilla" just changes the string to
You can think of it as a protest against the silly mimicry trend that Microsoft started when they made IE's User-Agent string resemble Mozilla's. But pragmatically, letting the User-Agent string be configurable achieves nothing. The stats show that Opera has a small market share, and the stats are correct regardless of how you tell Opera to identify itself. I wish Opera hadn't included this silly feature. Just let this myth die. Put your efforts into converting your friends, not the webmasters.
No, no! The real question that everyone has on their minds is... "Does it run Linux?"
GarageBand can make a recording from my MIDI piano through a MIDI USB device hooked up to my Mac. It can edit that recording, note by note, changing pitch and duration. It can import MIDI files. Given all those MIDI capabilities, it's entirely reasonable to expect it to also save MIDI files as well.
On the surface, it seems that GarageBand is a nice application for recording and editing digital music. However, there is one gaping feature hole: although GarageBand can import MIDI files, it cannot export MIDI files ! This is vendor lock-in of the worst form. Once you work on something in GarageBand, all you can do is export it to AIFF format. It is impossible to turn it your recording into a MIDI cell-phone ringtone or process it further with other software. At least with Microsoft Word, the data format has been mostly reverse engineered. But GarageBand is as worthless as a crippled shareware trial because it can't save MIDI files. What a shame.
Dude, this is Britain we're talking about. You don't even need a jacket to get shot by the police.
Actually, according to Alfred Nobel's will and the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, the prizes are meant to be awarded rather promptly:
Granted, the passage of time is often necessary for the relative importance of a work to become apparent, since bold new ideas tend to be controversial and cannot be appreciated without hindsight.
Let's face it: traditional credit cards suck because they are hampered by concern for backward compatibility with 1970s technology. If one were designing a credit card system today, it wouldn't be based on an embossed number and magnetic stripe. The number is there for remote transactions (using the expiration date and possibly the 3-digit CVV as a plaintext "password"!). With today's technology, remote transactions should be handled using a challenge-response system or one-time-use numbers such that the retailer can authenticate the cardmember without gaining enough information to impersonate the cardmember. The number on the card is embossed for use with the carbon-copy rolling machine. When was the last time a retailer carbon-copied your card, asked for photographic ID, and looked through a blacklist of stolen card numbers? And the magnetic stripe would certainly be replaced by a smart chip, which is much harder to clone because it can do challenge-response.
The infrastructure of the credit card network has improved, slowly. Nearly all point-of-sale equipment now performs real-time authorization. In Europe, the magnetic stripe is being obsoleted by contact smart chips. However, the benefit of the new technology must be significant enough to justify upgrading the huge worldwide network of equipment. So what's in it for each party to adopt RFID for credit cards?
In short, credit card technology advances slowly, with the retailer network being the bottleneck. Can they be convinced to upgrade? In my opinion, I think not.
I also think that RFID offers practically no advantage over contact smart chips, and that it would be pointless to add yet another standard. Wireless will never be quite as secure as contact. The network needs an overhaul, but this is not it! The credit card companies should be pushing to remove the card number and magnetic stripe in favor of the smart chip, instead of adding RFID.
Under US Federal law, the cardmember is liable for up to $50 (that's 65 Australian dollars) for unauthorized usage of a credit card. In practice, many of the better issuing banks go beyond the requirement and offer zero liability.
When I go to news.google.com, the page doesn't have a
element in the <head>. That means that browsers cannot automatically announce the existence of an RSS feed. It would be nice if I could use such a link to get an equivalent RSS/Atom feed that matches my customized news topic selection. (The RSS/Atom links on the left side of the page don't reflect my customizations.)
I'm a bit surprised at that, since Google has a reputation for making things as standard and user-friendly as possible. Perhaps that's why it's still Beta. (Where do I post feedback? Does Google have a crawler that indexes this gripe and reports it to their developers?)
It seems that VML never became a W3C recommendation, as it was superseded by SVG. MSIE only supports VML because it's a Microsoft Office format. As far as I know, there are no plans to support SVG natively in MSIE.
Perhaps it is possible to get MSIE to support a simple subset of SVG by first transforming it into VML. Since both formats are based on XML, perhaps it could even be done on the client side using XSLT. Has anyone tried this? It could be packaged as part of IE7 (the Dean Edwards hack, not the next version of MSIE)?
If such a hack were accomplished, it could spark the development of some nifty SVG-based applications. With Opera, Mozilla/Firefox and Safari all supporting SVG natively (now or in the near future), and MSIE supporting it via VML, it would be possible to reach a wide audience without any plugins!
Like Visa, American Express has also announced that it will stop working with CardSystems.
I wonder if the user interface was in Chinese. In Chinese, the characters for buy and sell look similar. Yes, a Chinese person could easily tell them apart, but I can understand that after many hours of staring at a computer screen, one's eyes or brain might get tired and slip up.
To add to the confusion, their pronunciation differs only in tone! When I was younger, I once asked my dad to sell my HP stock. He misheard me and bought some instead. I'm sure that this is not the first such misunderstanding that has occurred in Chinese.
Congress is fighting back against the Supreme Court decision too: House Votes To Undercut High Court On Property. If the bill passes, then it's not likely that the town will approve the museum/hotel in protest.
I agree completely. The only excuse for using such lame abbreviations should be when you're running up to the 160-character limit for SMS. Everywhere else, it just makes your writing look stupid and unreadable.
I just installed FC4 using the Custom option. For each category, such as GNOME or Web Server, some packages are required and some are optional. If you click on the Details link, you can choose to include or exclude individual optional RPMs.
So, what you're suggesting is that IBM should ramp up production of punch card machines again!