One of my first inheritances at work was about 40k lines of code. One big ass file. Assembly, so I had no chance with Doxygen. Lots of macros to build totally different things depending on definitions and phase of the moon. Half of the comments were in french, which is erm, french to me. And each and every bit of RAM in the target was in use. "You only need to add this little feature." And be quick, because the system is already sold. And it is overdue, too, because someone in sales forgot to place a development job for the "small" change.
And now tell me that 40k lines is small and easy...
Here in Germany there is an "allgemeine Schulpflicht", i.e. children have the obligation to attend school and are (generally) not allowed to be schooled at home. This is German law for about a century, and generally accepted.Exceptions, e.g. for travelling folk are very strictly regulated to ensure that the children get a decent education.
The Romeike family simply refused to obey the law and claimed "religious reasons" for doing so. In the US they (fraudulently, IMHO) claimed being prosecuted for "religious reasons", and were granted asylum. But this "prosecution for religious reasons" is totally bogus - they were simply prosecuted for breaking the law, like every common criminal. And claiming this "prosecution for religious reasons" is not only fraudulent, it is generally considered an insult in the German public, because we take religious freedom really seriously - something caused by our history.
Imagine someone would kill other people and claim religious reasons for doing so ("Kali told me to rip his heart out!"), would you agree that convicting this person for murder would be a "prosecution for religious reasons" and grant him asylum? The example might be a bit extreme, but at the end of the day both is breaking the law, and purporting religion for doing so.
And even in the US the cop would only laugh if you claimed "God told me to put the pedal to the medal!" when he pulled you over for speeding. Well, maybe not if it was a Tennessee cop, though...
As a (low-level) student, the working conditions were horrible: We had a small office for five students with a large window facing south onto a large flat roof covered with white, reflecting gravel. And no AC, of course, there was one for the computer rooms, for the profs and assistants and (later) even one for the room for the higler level students). In summer, our room was unbearable hot, even the fairly robust terminals gave up sometimes.
We tried to cool the room down, but they forbade us to do this after "smoke" billowed from under the rooms door into the hallway, causing someone to start a fire alarm. The "smoke" actually was mist from a bowl of water with dry ice leftovers in it...
Your opinion. My father worked in a steel mill too, and told me of sililar incidents they had over the years. Core message: Instant vaporisation before impact. Keep in mind that even the air in the furnace is way >1000ÂC. The amount of energy involved in melting tons of steel is quite high - we are talking about the energy usage of a small town here, all within a few mÂ.
That suit is only to reduce the heat to survivable levels while staying several meters away (sideways, nobody in his right mind would place himself above(!) the furnace). Where the guys in the suits are normally standing there is an "moderate" environmental temperature of about 100-250ÂC.
The local are mall "HUMA" in St.Augustin uses them for some time, and I am not impressed, to say the least.
Out of curiosity (and because I was shopping), I tried different vegetables and fruits, and about 80% of the time the scale presents a random guess from its database instead of showing that it recognised the item.
I do not expect that it can tell one kind of apple from the other or that it knows the difference between an organic and el-cheapo tomato. But more often than not it even fails to differenciate between basically round and basically long objects (i.e. it took a lime for a cucumber, or presented me everything but potatos for the potato I put under the camera).
And as soon as the fruit or vegetable is inside one of those (transparent) bags they provide, the recognition rate goes terminally downhill. The same problem arises if you put several of one item on the scales (i.e. a handful of potatos). And no, I'm not going to weight and pay my potatos individually;-)
The only positive aspect is that the menu to manually select the item to weigh is up-to-date. In a tree-like structure, you can choose "fruit or vegetable" (with apples and bananas as extra toplevel items, them being the top selections) and travel down the tree until you reach "Apple, Organic, Granny Smith". The downside is that you need this menu most of the time.
No, of course they do not plan to add backdoors. They propably had them already builtin from the very beginning. And they are not going to tell you about this, anyway...
As long as such security relevant code is not available as open source, it will be treated as "tampered with" and "unsafe at any speed".
And trying to stand in front of an US agency saying "over my dead body" is a good way to win you a Darwin Award, boy...
"If the number of heads poses a problem, decapitation can be arranged.";-)
Years ago, I ripped my collection of ~250 audio CDs. I used cdparanoia as software, and a little script I wrote, which made a directory on the server based on the ID of the CD (so the directories are unique), and asked me for a title. Everything as automated as possible. After ripping, the CD would automatically eject.
Then, I gathered each and every PC in my home that still run, booted it into linux (even the windoze boxes have a minimum of linux on them just in case win f***ks up again), installed the script, and kept changing CDs for about half a day on a whole bank of machines.
Hunting for a teen that I could trust with my collection would have taken longer, I guess;-)
> As long as they keep the whole sex bit out of the series As this series is produced in the US, they'll just replace the sexual "stuff" with pure violence, i.e. being "hit" with the TASP will turn the receiver into a bloodthirsty killing machine, and thats it.
This will also save the "Suitable for all ages" rating in the US.
Well, such modern systems exist, and they exist in good old Europe!
in February, a millionaire in Finland named Jussi Salonoja was fined EUR170,000 (About USD 220,000) for speeding, thus beating the previous record of EUR80,000 from 2000.
Well, as blocking email at the server level may cause legal problems (withholding mail!), we took a different route - we forward all the mail, but the mail clients cannot open or even preview any mail containing one of the following file extensions:.reg,.vbe,.vbs,.pif,.scr,.bat,.eml,.com,.js,.jse,.shs,.swf,.ceo,.cmd and.exe
This saved us from getting problems in the past (e.g. when the Mgmt. Assistent complained that she couldn't open a mail "from her boss" - try axplain sender forging and header reading skills to a secretary;-) ), and has saved us on many similar occasions.
Thank god for the stupidity of M$! If I had to analyse each and every file instead of just blocking by filename extension, it would be a much heavier burden...
Well, the good thing about LEGO is that you can build things on your own.
Some things won't come, though. As a company deep rooted (mostly) in positive values > A: Lego Army men are simply a no-no. No current-century military stuff. An I think that is one of the best ideas a toymaker can adhere to. There are more then 11000 killings by shotguns in the US per year. Kids should not learn about shooting other people in their home.
> B: Lego Star trek (yeah, ok, they'd need copyright stuff, but I know that there'd be a proliferation of lego comic things... And I'd buy them just to take pictures of the red shirted ensign pieces getting killed in various ways.) This won't come, too. LEGO has a Space series (currently sleeping), an NASA/Planetary Society educational series (with nice sets with spirit landers and space shuttles, too!), and Star Wars. The last one costs an arm and a leg with respect to licensing, and they won't tie another brick to their legs right now...
> C: Lego Warhammer 40k (finally, a cheap and fun way to play warhammer! Of course this would be directed at the younger crowd...) Another licensing iron ball.
> D: Lego D&D (Miniatures take too damn long to paint.) Again. Build it yourself. I did: This is an AD&D scenario for a module I wrote (at least ist's the front half, the rear is in production right now...).
Wizards, priest, fighters are easily assembled out of various sets (I've got a whole bucket of minifig parts from several boot sales, and I can always find a suitable leg/torso/face/headgear combination). The Harry Potter and Star Wars sets deliver a range of foes, and anything else can be build from normal bricks (I can't find it right now, bur I saw a red dinosaur recently which would make a bad ass red dragon if I ever saw one...)
> E: Lego Half life What for?
> F: Lego programming department (so the/. people are appeased.) Google for Mindstorms and/or RCX and look at what people did. Like fully automated rubics cube solver and such.
Tad Williams "Otherland" series: - City of Golden Shadow - River of Blue Fire - Mountain of Black Glass - Sea of Silver Light Beware, this is not a classical "series" with four separate books, but one book in four volumes, about 3500 pages total, and has to be read in order to make sense (of course). Very good cyberspace SciFi, many strange, twisted plotlines, which ultimately meet in a fascinating setting.
Kim Stanley Robinson "Mars" series: - Red Mars - Green Mars - Blue Mars Very good techno/political/social SciFi. Very realistic ideas about seetling/inhabiting mars.
Basically, American copyright law is a temporary excemption of the right of the public for the promotion of culture and science.
How about a law that would basically protect DRM systems, but *only* if these systems are designed to release their contents without further limits once the copyright of the work has expired (with an emphasis on the release part, i.e. if in doubt, release, because it finally belongs to the public domain, and to keep the information locked is only a temporary exception)?
This would all be right- and lawful to both sides of the copyright, but I consider an acceptable technical implementation of such a system is not feasible, therefor it would be impossible to protect a DRM system by law, because it cannot fulfil the demand of releasing the work once the copyright has expired.
Having the advantage of being non-US-based, I only know ZDs website. Any decent computer magazine (like the german c't magazine) would put ZDs "articles" in the advertising part only, if not directly in the bin.
Well, seeing how Jesse Berst crawled far into BillGs ass it is not at all surprising that the odeur drove the customers away.
Good Riddance! And (no) good look for Berst at the employment agency...
Slashdot Mirror
One of my first inheritances at work was about 40k lines of code. One big ass file. Assembly, so I had no chance with Doxygen. Lots of macros to build totally different things depending on definitions and phase of the moon. Half of the comments were in french, which is erm, french to me. And each and every bit of RAM in the target was in use. "You only need to add this little feature." And be quick, because the system is already sold. And it is overdue, too, because someone in sales forgot to place a development job for the "small" change.
And now tell me that 40k lines is small and easy...
Here in Germany there is an "allgemeine Schulpflicht", i.e. children have the obligation to attend school and are (generally) not allowed to be schooled at home. This is German law for about a century, and generally accepted.Exceptions, e.g. for travelling folk are very strictly regulated to ensure that the children get a decent education.
The Romeike family simply refused to obey the law and claimed "religious reasons" for doing so. In the US they (fraudulently, IMHO) claimed being prosecuted for "religious reasons", and were granted asylum. But this "prosecution for religious reasons" is totally bogus - they were simply prosecuted for breaking the law, like every common criminal. And claiming this "prosecution for religious reasons" is not only fraudulent, it is generally considered an insult in the German public, because we take religious freedom really seriously - something caused by our history.
Imagine someone would kill other people and claim religious reasons for doing so ("Kali told me to rip his heart out!"), would you agree that convicting this person for murder would be a "prosecution for religious reasons" and grant him asylum? The example might be a bit extreme, but at the end of the day both is breaking the law, and purporting religion for doing so.
And even in the US the cop would only laugh if you claimed "God told me to put the pedal to the medal!" when he pulled you over for speeding. Well, maybe not if it was a Tennessee cop, though...
"Flowers for Algernon" was the first association that popped up from the depths of my mind...
You want to be elected? Ok, provide a notarized report on your brain status for the public to see!
As a (low-level) student, the working conditions were horrible: We had a small office for five students with a large window facing south onto a large flat roof covered with white, reflecting gravel. And no AC, of course, there was one for the computer rooms, for the profs and assistants and (later) even one for the room for the higler level students). In summer, our room was unbearable hot, even the fairly robust terminals gave up sometimes.
We tried to cool the room down, but they forbade us to do this after "smoke" billowed from under the rooms door into the hallway, causing someone to start a fire alarm. The "smoke" actually was mist from a bowl of water with dry ice leftovers in it...
Sounds quite unbelievable to me.
Your opinion. My father worked in a steel mill too, and told me of sililar incidents they had over the years. Core message: Instant vaporisation before impact. Keep in mind that even the air in the furnace is way >1000ÂC. The amount of energy involved in melting tons of steel is quite high - we are talking about the energy usage of a small town here, all within a few mÂ.
That suit is only to reduce the heat to survivable levels while staying several meters away (sideways, nobody in his right mind would place himself above(!) the furnace). Where the guys in the suits are normally standing there is an "moderate" environmental temperature of about 100-250ÂC.
This is what struck me as totally crasy in these books: Sheldon was using a slide rule to make his predictions. Will they use them in the movie, too?
No Text.
The local are mall "HUMA" in St.Augustin uses them for some time, and I am not impressed, to say the least.
Out of curiosity (and because I was shopping), I tried different vegetables and fruits, and about 80% of the time the scale presents a random guess from its database instead of showing that it recognised the item.
I do not expect that it can tell one kind of apple from the other or that it knows the difference between an organic and el-cheapo tomato. But more often than not it even fails to differenciate between basically round and basically long objects (i.e. it took a lime for a cucumber, or presented me everything but potatos for the potato I put under the camera).
And as soon as the fruit or vegetable is inside one of those (transparent) bags they provide, the recognition rate goes terminally downhill. The same problem arises if you put several of one item on the scales (i.e. a handful of potatos). And no, I'm not going to weight and pay my potatos individually ;-)
The only positive aspect is that the menu to manually select the item to weigh is up-to-date. In a tree-like structure, you can choose "fruit or vegetable" (with apples and bananas as extra toplevel items, them being the top selections) and travel down the tree until you reach "Apple, Organic, Granny Smith". The downside is that you need this menu most of the time.
About the same as the "Classification" of people by "psychologists" in Nazi Germany back in 1933-45.
Sad, but true. An obvious case of history repeating itself.
The requirement to do something related to logic and common sense would have an additional benefit: No posts by politicians!
Yours, Christian
No, of course they do not plan to add backdoors. They propably had them already builtin from the very beginning. And they are not going to tell you about this, anyway...
;-)
As long as such security relevant code is not available as open source, it will be treated as "tampered with" and "unsafe at any speed".
And trying to stand in front of an US agency saying "over my dead body" is a good way to win you a Darwin Award, boy...
"If the number of heads poses a problem, decapitation can be arranged."
Yours, Christian
Years ago, I ripped my collection of ~250 audio CDs. I used cdparanoia as software, and a little script I wrote, which made a directory on the server based on the ID of the CD (so the directories are unique), and asked me for a title. Everything as automated as possible. After ripping, the CD would automatically eject.
;-)
Then, I gathered each and every PC in my home that still run, booted it into linux (even the windoze boxes have a minimum of linux on them just in case win f***ks up again), installed the script, and kept changing CDs for about half a day on a whole bank of machines.
Hunting for a teen that I could trust with my collection would have taken longer, I guess
and the walking flowers are soooo beautiful!
Well, whatever a bureaucrap calls "success". Propably more like "We successfully pretended to be working" than any other definitions for "success".
Here, the number of spams per day went up from 100000 to 150000 over the last year, with a constant 200-300 legitimate mails dropped in for good.
Thank heavens for a good spam filter...
Some spammers have enough brain left to filter aginst "127.0.0.1" or even "127.0.0". Remember, loopback is 127.0.0.0/8 - and be creative...
I emailed my representative, but they propably don't care anyway. The next election is still too far away.
> As long as they keep the whole sex bit out of the series
As this series is produced in the US, they'll just replace the sexual "stuff" with pure violence, i.e. being "hit" with the TASP will turn the receiver into a bloodthirsty killing machine, and thats it.
This will also save the "Suitable for all ages" rating in the US.
Well, such modern systems exist, and they exist in good old Europe!
in February, a millionaire in Finland named Jussi Salonoja was fined EUR170,000 (About USD 220,000) for speeding, thus beating the previous record of EUR80,000 from 2000.
A BBC article
Well, as blocking email at the server level may cause legal problems (withholding mail!), we took a different route - we forward all the mail, but the mail clients cannot open or even preview any mail containing one of the following file extensions: .reg, .vbe, .vbs, .pif, .scr, .bat, .eml, .com, .js, .jse, .shs, .swf, .ceo, .cmd and .exe
;-) ), and has saved us on many similar occasions.
This saved us from getting problems in the past (e.g. when the Mgmt. Assistent complained that she couldn't open a mail "from her boss" - try axplain sender forging and header reading skills to a secretary
Thank god for the stupidity of M$! If I had to analyse each and every file instead of just blocking by filename extension, it would be a much heavier burden...
Well, the good thing about LEGO is that you can build things on your own.
/. people are appeased.)
Some things won't come, though. As a company deep rooted (mostly) in positive values
> A: Lego Army men
are simply a no-no. No current-century military stuff. An I think that is one of the best ideas a toymaker can adhere to. There are more then 11000 killings by shotguns in the US per year. Kids should not learn about shooting other people in their home.
> B: Lego Star trek (yeah, ok, they'd need copyright stuff, but I know that there'd be a proliferation of lego comic things... And I'd buy them just to take pictures of the red shirted ensign pieces getting killed in various ways.)
This won't come, too. LEGO has a Space series (currently sleeping), an NASA/Planetary Society educational series (with nice sets with spirit landers and space shuttles, too!), and Star Wars. The last one costs an arm and a leg with respect to licensing, and they won't tie another brick to their legs right now...
> C: Lego Warhammer 40k (finally, a cheap and fun way to play warhammer! Of course this would be directed at the younger crowd...)
Another licensing iron ball.
> D: Lego D&D (Miniatures take too damn long to paint.)
Again. Build it yourself. I did: This is an AD&D scenario for a module I wrote (at least ist's the front half, the rear is in production right now...).
Wizards, priest, fighters are easily assembled out of various sets (I've got a whole bucket of minifig parts from several boot sales, and I can always find a suitable leg/torso/face/headgear combination). The Harry Potter and Star Wars sets deliver a range of foes, and anything else can be build from normal bricks (I can't find it right now, bur I saw a red dinosaur recently which would make a bad ass red dragon if I ever saw one...)
> E: Lego Half life
What for?
> F: Lego programming department (so the
Google for Mindstorms and/or RCX and look at what people did. Like fully automated rubics cube solver and such.
If you really want a theme, go build it yourself.
Tad Williams "Otherland" series:
- City of Golden Shadow
- River of Blue Fire
- Mountain of Black Glass
- Sea of Silver Light
Beware, this is not a classical "series" with four separate books, but one book in four volumes, about 3500 pages total, and has to be read in order to make sense (of course). Very good cyberspace SciFi, many strange, twisted plotlines, which ultimately meet in a fascinating setting.
Kim Stanley Robinson "Mars" series:
- Red Mars
- Green Mars
- Blue Mars
Very good techno/political/social SciFi. Very realistic ideas about seetling/inhabiting mars.
Even better:
Imagine: A gang of bikers is harassing a geek/tinkerer (the classical one with cokebottle-glasses).
Imagine: The geek draws a little gadget with blinkenlights, an antenna (or a small dish) and a BIG red button.
Imagine: Click! *POPP!* *POPP!* *POPP!* *FLUPP!*
Imagine: A grinning geek, and a bunch of ballons with arms and legs bouncing around him...
Ahh, Wireless!
Basically, American copyright law is a temporary excemption of the right of the public for the promotion of culture and science.
How about a law that would basically protect DRM systems, but *only* if these systems are designed to release their contents without further limits once the copyright of the work has expired (with an emphasis on the release part, i.e. if in doubt, release, because it finally belongs to the public domain, and to keep the information locked is only a temporary exception)?
This would all be right- and lawful to both sides of the copyright, but I consider an acceptable technical implementation of such a system is not feasible, therefor it would be impossible to protect a DRM system by law, because it cannot fulfil the demand of releasing the work once the copyright has expired.
Having the advantage of being non-US-based, I only know ZDs website. Any decent computer magazine (like the german c't magazine) would put ZDs "articles" in the advertising part only, if not directly in the bin.
Well, seeing how Jesse Berst crawled far into BillGs ass it is not at all surprising that the odeur drove the customers away.
Good Riddance! And (no) good look for Berst at the employment agency...
The Good, in my opinion:
AVM (Active and passive ISDN cards)
Digital Equipment (DE4x5 drivers)
The Bad:
Canon ("We will not support Linux, we will not give specs for writing drivers")
UMAX (Cheap scanners)