If you use any software where you have not had the opportunity to get the Source Code independently audited, then you cannot trust that software. The only way to be truly sure what a piece of software does is to read the source code. There are no exceptions.
Even if anti-virus software were to be distributed under a PGP-like licence -- where you are allowed to audit the source code but not distribute modified versions -- this would be better than the current situation. {Who would dare use a modified version of something security-critical like encryption software anyway, if they really didn't trust the person who modified it?}
Frankly, I think it ought to be enshrined in law that the administrator of a computer has the right to view the Source Code of every piece of software that runs on their computer. If I buy an item of food, it has to have an ingredients list on the packaging. If I buy a bottle of booze, it has to be labelled with its percentage of alcohol. If I buy a packet of fags, it has to say how much tar and nicotine they contain. Why should computer software be any different? If the proprietary software peddlers don't like it, they can always stop peddling proprietary software.
Nobody needs to use non-Free software: everything that there isn't currently a piece of Free software to do either can be done by hand, or omitted altogether without ill effect. Just like it was before computerisation..... sorry, get it right, before Microsoftisation. It might even get a few people off the dole and back to work. Back in the days before Windows, people actually programmed their computers -- nowadays, businesses quietly rearrange their working practices around how Microsoft Office behaves; and the only programs anybody really bothers to write for Windows are viruses, trojans, browser hijackers, adware and spyware.
Re your sig: on my system the binary occupied 13784 bytes, 4296 after stripping, as compared to 16136 for the existing/bin/true. What's wrong with echo -en '\x23\x21/bin/sh\nexit' >/bin/true at 14 bytes? All modern sh implementations have true as a builtin anyway,/bin/true is only good to use as a default shell for users you want to give ftp access but not shell accounts to {you'll need to echo/bin/true >>/etc/shells and send SIGHUP to your FTP daemon}.
They will tell you to upgrade, and you will then have the choice: download and compile the full latest version, or cherry-pick and patch only the bits you really want to patch. Either way, you still need to recompile the app. This will not affect the copy of the application you are already running from memory: only newly-started browser instances will be "secure". I don't think a 10-year uptime is at all unrealistic, especially if you're running FreeBSD.
When you own a house, you pay rates to the local council, to fund essential local services like libraries, the police, street cleaning, leisure facilities, waste disposal, schools, cemeteries &c.
I see the additional tax on copyrights as being used to fund the privileges afforded under copyright: it's a way of paying for the legal processes involved in detecting and dealing with offences, not to mention ensuring that you actually have some right to do this in the first place, none of which would ever have to take place at all had you released your work into the Public Domain.
If you have an expensive car, you get it insured fully comp. If you have a banger, you get third party only. The more expensive policy provides more protection, so it costs more. That is fair, is it not?
If you want special protection -- like nobody being allowed to make a copy of your work without permission from you -- then it is only reasonable that you should be expected to pay more for that extra protection. On the other hand, if you don't want this level of protection, then you should not be made to pay for it -- but that means you get to let people copies as they think fit. Of course, you might want this to happen anyway. Meanwhile, if anybody like Arben Kryzeiu tried to take your original but non-copyright-registered work and copyright it in their name, you would have the ability to prove that they did not create it themself and so stop them. {They would then lose their registration fee, as a warning against trying to misuse the system}.
That is an absolutely blinding idea and has already earned you a blue dot against my username.
I used to favour a system whereby the fee that would be chargeable to renew a copyright beyond five years from the date of your first royalties payment {or five years from the date of publication if no royalties were ever paid} would be doubled with every six-month extension, and it would rapidly become uneconomical to maintain extended copyrights.
But taxing copyrights as an asset..... well, that's just absolute pure genius. After all, if you are earning royalties you can afford to pay the tax -- and if you aren't earning royalties then you have to decide whether to dedicate the material to the public domain or risk going bust. And as you said, as a copyright holder you're expecting the law to go out of its way to protect you, so it's only right that you ought to pay for that privilege!
Precisely. Science is based on the presumption that every observable phenomenon can be understood and explained. This runs very deeply and so tends to be disregarded, as we tend to disregard the very foundations of mathematics: because if the most basic presumptions did not hold, too many other things would also fail. Organised religions -- especially the dogmatic, monotheist ones -- tend to be based on the presumption that some observable phenomena cannot be understood {"it's all part of God's Great Inexorable Plan"}.
Of course a scientist is exhibiting faith; but the difference is that faith in science is corroborated over and over again by reproducible experiments {and scientists are only too ready to modify their theories when they are contradicted by new observations}, whereas faith in religion is largely uncorroborated except by "holy texts" specific to the religion in question.
This is why science and religion in their purest forms can never be truly reconciled: all hinges on the question "Can everything be understood?".
Who cares? The data on the missing tapes would all have been encrypted, right -- it's a bank we're dealing with here -- and the decryption key would surely have been sent by a separate channel {otherwise what was the freakin' point of encrypting it?!}. And in order even to read the encrypted data off the tapes, you'd need one of the right make and model of tape drive..... So basically, nobody has any way to recover anything that would be useful for naughtiness. And since the tapes were backups, it stands to reason that all the original data must still be kicking around somewhere. This is a non-story. It has value only as a sensationalist piece which might scare the ignorant. Ting! Next, please.
Please, it wasn't Mandrake's fault for using some code SuSE had commissioned, but then rejected before the distribution CDs were burned. It wasn't even SuSE's fault for writing the code that Mandrake used. It was LG's fault for not adhering to the ATAPI specification. And they were read-only CD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
The ATAPI specification says what the command should be to force a writeable device to decache. The code in question worked by issuing a "flush write cache" command, and checking the error response. A writer should say "Cache empty" or maybe "Decached successfully". A read-only drive should say "Command not implemented". This is how one can tell a writer from a reader without requiring long -- and soon outdated -- tables of make and model IDs.
The LG read-only drives which were temporarily damaged by the Mandrake {and, for that matter, pre-release downloaded SuSE} software were designed so that the operation code for the "flush cache" command was used to signal a "start firmware upgrade" operation. This is in direct violation of the ATAPI specification, which prescribes what each operation code should represent so as software developed using any one ATAPI drive can be expected to work with any other ATAPI drive. The result was that the software in question quite reasonably asked the drive to decache; but the drive had of course by this time entered flash upgrade mode, and mis-interpreted the next command -- a "last error report" request -- as the beginning of the new firmware. LG should have been hauled over the coals for selling faulty goods. Instead, Microsoft and their apologists crowed with glee that a piece of open source software, which was doing something quite reasonable, apparently damaged some badly-designed and badly-documented hardware which reacted in a quite unreasonable way.
You're right I don't have direct debits. They are out-and-out evil. If someone wants money out of my bank account, they can ask me to my face; and I'll fetch it and give it to them. But no way are they going to dip their own grubby fingers in. I don't have a savings account: I have a mortgage, and no savings account will pay more interest than that is costing. Not even the endowment policy that was supposed to pay it off; but fortunately the buildings insurance will cover it. If I had any amount of money bigger than loose change, it would come off the mortgage.
If a supermarket cashier fails to check a signature and a fraudulent transaction goes through, then the supermarket is liable for the amount {and the cost probably will come out of that cashier's wage packet, by way of teaching them a lesson}.
Shoulder-surfing for PINs is easier today with the Chip and PIN payment machines in shops everywhere, and people not properly used to the system reading their number out aloud. But if you hold a knife to someone's throat, they will gladly tell you their PIN. And while you continue to hold the knife and look menacing, your accomplice can go back into the store with the card, and a phone -- the victim's own is as good as any -- to tell you whether the PIN is good, or whether you need to increase the pressure a bit. I was almost thinking of patenting this, but the twist is that I would make a claim for a method for being robbed -- so it would be the victim, not the perpetrator, who owed me royalties. After all, you may never catch the perp, but you already have the victim, and they ought to be insured against inadvertent patent violations.
And it's not a waste of time sticking with cash! I have to walk into town at least once a week anyway to do various stuff. I pass several HITWs and a post office. I can pay everything in cash -- you can't buy electricity or gas any other way anyway; after all, they have to have your meter key / quantum card to put the credit onto!
I haven't lived with my parents {whose house, incidentally, does not have a basement} since before there was any such thing as Internet banking, and I still don't see what good it is. The only benefit I can see is that you can check your bank balance online. But I already know {within a reasonable margin of error} how much money is in my account, by subtracting the amount that I have withdrawn from the amount shown in the "net pay" box on my payslip; and I also know it's not going anywhere unless I make a withdrawal. Which usually requires me to go to the bank -- or a bank, they all accept one another's cards nowadays -- and stand at the HITW machine, so I'm hardly likely to forget I've done it. After which, I can pay all my household bills in real pound notes at a post office -- which I have to walk past anyway on the way back from the bank. Alternatively, I can pay for my shopping by cheque {which, requiring a signature, is more secure than chip and PIN}; but that still requires me to go to the supermarket, so I can actually take my empty bottles and cans to the recycling centre there and bring my full bottles and cans back home.
Because if I did it that way, some smug, flash git would invariably have pointed out that using strstr or strpos is non-extensible, non-scalable, or somesuch. Them's the breaks when you choose a language with at least two ways to do everything {some of which you can't help suspecting might only ever have been put there just for the sake of there being more than one way to do it}. It's like when your mother buys you two sweaters for christmas -- whichever one you wear she will ask you what's wrong with the other one?
Sounds more like Flash being the problem to me..... if it was a problem purely with Firefox then it would have been noticed by now just through analysis of the source code. Flash is closed-source, it could be doing absolutely anything; and I wouldn't exactly trust the game either. Fortunately there is the killall command for just this sort of situation..... if and not unless you have enough resources available to get an xterm to come up at all!
I'm waiting with bated breath for the open-source Flash player clone precisely because of this. We have by popular demand installed Flash player on a few machines in the canteen at work; but not system-wide, so it's at least running non-privileged {not that I would trust Macromedia not to use a kernel exploit}. The general policy here is still very much "no source, no sale".
Just what the hell is it with this whole "online banking" thing? There are exactly two reasons why I ever visit my bank: to draw money out through the hole-in-the-wall machine, and to pay money in through the hole-in-the-wall machine. I know from my payslip how much I get paid each month; and, since the only way any money can come out of my account is if I either sign a cheque or use the HITW, then I also know how much I have left. I'm not really earning enough interest to bother with; but the few pence they pay me appear on my monthly statement, which is usually to be found somewhere in my recyclables box.
Unless and until there is some software that lets me print my own pound notes on my own printer, and upload photographs of cheques and cash from my own digital camera to my bank account, I really see no use for online banking.
Actually, it's very easy to make a site not run on IE; as the following example shows.
<? if (preg_match("/MSIE/i", $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"])) { header("Location: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/"); exit(); }; ?> <html> <head> <title>This site will not display in Internet Explorer</title> . . . </head> <body> . . . </body> </html>
As a Slackware user you'll no doubt appreciate that a single boot CD may contain several different kernels, any of which can be selected from the LILO prompt. The secret of getting Debian to go straight to ext3 is to use the 2.4 kernel for installing Woody -- type "bf24" at the boot prompt. When Woody was created, 2.4 was still not fully tested on all architectures; so 2.2 was used as a default instead, even on AMD/Intel.
Once you are in the installer, then you can format your disks however you like, as long as that means (ext[23]|reiserfs). If you want some other file system, you'll have to set up a small ext2 filesystem, compile a kernel which supports your chosen system and the necessary tools, then boot the new kernel and finish off. That's pretty much how it always has been though.....
And if you think the Debian installer is a little bit manual, then you have obviously never seen the Gentoo one! Not that I'm knocking it..... it really made me appreciate what goes on in the installation process, and I felt like I'd earned a merit badge when I got my desktop and sound working. Now I find it hard to choose between the two; the main difference seems to be apt-get or emerge.
A driver with an Ordnance Survey map and Silva compass finds three destinations quicker than a driver with a GPS.
Even with a simple, manual telegraph key, the odds are in favour of Morse {with its surprisingly-modern idea of assigning the shortest codes to the commonest letters, and the fact that you only need to move in one dimension to work it} over a keypad where multiple functions are assigned to the same key. On Sagem phones {as opposed to Nokia and Samsung}, the matter is further compounded by the fact that the letters change as you hold down the key, and you let go to stop at the desired one. On Nokias and Samsungs, you have to make an additional keystroke {or allow a timeout to elapse} between successive letters on the same key.
The Morse telegraph was designed to be very good at sending dots and dashes. It required a greater mental effort on the part of the human operator; but the user interface was simple, elegant and did not add unnecessary complication of its own, so it was the operator and not the machine that imposed the limitation on working rate. When the words themselves became an obstacle, it became common for telegraph operators to use abbreviations; some of which have carried over to more modern media. C U L8R ME N H R OFF 2 WDS 4 SUM SW17!
And, finally..... whenever an uncustomised Nokia phone receives a text message, it plays a series of three short tones, two long ones and three short ones again. Di-di-dit, da-dah, di-di-dit. Any idea what that could be?
If forcing your operating system ideology on others genuinely were a form of rape, then Ballmer would be as guilty as sin. Remember that. However, I feel that if you, or someone close to you, had actually suffered a serious sexual assault, then you would not be so keen to bandy about the word rape in such a fashion.
Microsoft aren't about doing you any favours: the company typifies the whole souring of the American dream, where a corporation with enough money can always make more money by finding a way to charge ordinary people money for something they already do every day. If somebody invented a garden fence you couldn't talk to your neighbours over, I have no doubt in my mind that an American telephone company would start "giving them away for free" to encourage people to make more phone calls -- and would then begin lobbying to outlaw conventional fences, on the basis that they provided unfair competition.
It'd be funny if my government didn't think that American ideas were worth copying.
If it's just a big variable-reluctance stepper motor {which it sounds like: from my understanding of the article, the magnetic field in the armature is being provided by coils on the stator} then you can simply control the available torque by reducing the duty cycle. If you managed to build the whole thing inside-out, with the stator standing still inside the armature, then you could just slip a tyre over the armature and call that your wheel. However, I don't think that exact construction will work in this situation; I expect there will be a conventional bearings-and-spindle arrangement.
Stuff and nonsense. You cannot patent anything so abstract as a mathematical process, and anyone who tried should be laughed out of the patent office. Otherwise, what is to stop me patenting addition and claiming astronomical royalties anytime anybody tried to multiply, raise to a power or integrate? What if the claim were broad enough potentially to include subtraction {we never said both the addend and the augend had to be positive}? What if the claim covered the whole of mathematics?
At any rate, you can patent a means to an end but you can't patent the end in itself -- in fact, a patent can be rejected on the basis that there isn't another way to do it. So even if I could patent adding one bean to an existing stock of mutually indistinguible beans, it would not cover anyone using a different type of physical object, nor the abstract mathematical concept of addition.
The problem with these people is simply that their heads are in too few pieces.
The dole office on Normanton Road used to have the words "JOBS JOBS JOBS" plastered across the downstairs windows. The upstairs suite was vacant. I wanted to rent the upstairs rooms just so I could have "BLOW BLOW BLOW" written across the windows. And, of course, while I was there, I could sell a bit of blow as well.....
No, although I'd have let you off with 3-2 if you were (a) German and (b) bigger than me!
Extra time was upon us, and Geoff Hurst had brought the scoreline to 3-2 with a controversial shot which hit the bar and bounced down..... but which side of the line did it land? We join Kenneth Wolstenholme now in the closing seconds of extra time:
KW Some people are on the pitch! They think it's all over -
Geoff Hurst finds Bobby Moore's long ball and slams it into the back of the net KW It is now!
Scoring five against the Germans happened this century.
A motor without bulky permanent magnets? Like your car's starter motor, you mean? Like the AC/DC brush motors used in sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, electric drills and so forth? {Clocks obviously use synchronous motors; electric fans and central heating pumps use induction motors, but a lot of appliances still do use brush motors.} None of these motors need permanent magnets, they use an electromagnet polarised by the power source. And since the armature and stator magnets reverse their polarities together with the power supply, the motor will turn the same direction whichever way around you connect the power leads, or even on an alternating current supply.
Or what about like a variable-reluctance stepper motor, where the steel armature lines itself up between the energised coils on the stator? That's the principle I'm betting on it using..... all the electromagnets are standing still, obviating the need for any brushes, you can switch them electronically with great big chunky FETs; the switching rate determines the speed of rotation, and the duty cycle determines the maximum available torque.
Come back when you've invented something that nobody has invented before. Then it'd be news.
Slashdot Mirror
EXACTLY!
..... sorry, get it right, before Microsoftisation. It might even get a few people off the dole and back to work. Back in the days before Windows, people actually programmed their computers -- nowadays, businesses quietly rearrange their working practices around how Microsoft Office behaves; and the only programs anybody really bothers to write for Windows are viruses, trojans, browser hijackers, adware and spyware.
If you use any software where you have not had the opportunity to get the Source Code independently audited, then you cannot trust that software. The only way to be truly sure what a piece of software does is to read the source code. There are no exceptions.
Even if anti-virus software were to be distributed under a PGP-like licence -- where you are allowed to audit the source code but not distribute modified versions -- this would be better than the current situation. {Who would dare use a modified version of something security-critical like encryption software anyway, if they really didn't trust the person who modified it?}
Frankly, I think it ought to be enshrined in law that the administrator of a computer has the right to view the Source Code of every piece of software that runs on their computer. If I buy an item of food, it has to have an ingredients list on the packaging. If I buy a bottle of booze, it has to be labelled with its percentage of alcohol. If I buy a packet of fags, it has to say how much tar and nicotine they contain. Why should computer software be any different? If the proprietary software peddlers don't like it, they can always stop peddling proprietary software.
Nobody needs to use non-Free software: everything that there isn't currently a piece of Free software to do either can be done by hand, or omitted altogether without ill effect. Just like it was before computerisation
Re your sig: on my system the binary occupied 13784 bytes, 4296 after stripping, as compared to 16136 for the existing /bin/true. What's wrong with /bin/true /bin/true is only good to use as a default shell for users you want to give ftp access but not shell accounts to {you'll need to echo /bin/true >> /etc/shells and send SIGHUP to your FTP daemon}.
echo -en '\x23\x21/bin/sh\nexit' >
at 14 bytes? All modern sh implementations have true as a builtin anyway,
They will tell you to upgrade, and you will then have the choice: download and compile the full latest version, or cherry-pick and patch only the bits you really want to patch. Either way, you still need to recompile the app. This will not affect the copy of the application you are already running from memory: only newly-started browser instances will be "secure". I don't think a 10-year uptime is at all unrealistic, especially if you're running FreeBSD.
When you own a house, you pay rates to the local council, to fund essential local services like libraries, the police, street cleaning, leisure facilities, waste disposal, schools, cemeteries &c.
I see the additional tax on copyrights as being used to fund the privileges afforded under copyright: it's a way of paying for the legal processes involved in detecting and dealing with offences, not to mention ensuring that you actually have some right to do this in the first place, none of which would ever have to take place at all had you released your work into the Public Domain.
If you have an expensive car, you get it insured fully comp. If you have a banger, you get third party only. The more expensive policy provides more protection, so it costs more. That is fair, is it not?
If you want special protection -- like nobody being allowed to make a copy of your work without permission from you -- then it is only reasonable that you should be expected to pay more for that extra protection. On the other hand, if you don't want this level of protection, then you should not be made to pay for it -- but that means you get to let people copies as they think fit. Of course, you might want this to happen anyway. Meanwhile, if anybody like Arben Kryzeiu tried to take your original but non-copyright-registered work and copyright it in their name, you would have the ability to prove that they did not create it themself and so stop them. {They would then lose their registration fee, as a warning against trying to misuse the system}.
That is an absolutely blinding idea and has already earned you a blue dot against my username.
..... well, that's just absolute pure genius. After all, if you are earning royalties you can afford to pay the tax -- and if you aren't earning royalties then you have to decide whether to dedicate the material to the public domain or risk going bust. And as you said, as a copyright holder you're expecting the law to go out of its way to protect you, so it's only right that you ought to pay for that privilege!
I used to favour a system whereby the fee that would be chargeable to renew a copyright beyond five years from the date of your first royalties payment {or five years from the date of publication if no royalties were ever paid} would be doubled with every six-month extension, and it would rapidly become uneconomical to maintain extended copyrights.
But taxing copyrights as an asset
Precisely. Science is based on the presumption that every observable phenomenon can be understood and explained. This runs very deeply and so tends to be disregarded, as we tend to disregard the very foundations of mathematics: because if the most basic presumptions did not hold, too many other things would also fail. Organised religions -- especially the dogmatic, monotheist ones -- tend to be based on the presumption that some observable phenomena cannot be understood {"it's all part of God's Great Inexorable Plan"}.
Of course a scientist is exhibiting faith; but the difference is that faith in science is corroborated over and over again by reproducible experiments {and scientists are only too ready to modify their theories when they are contradicted by new observations}, whereas faith in religion is largely uncorroborated except by "holy texts" specific to the religion in question.
This is why science and religion in their purest forms can never be truly reconciled: all hinges on the question "Can everything be understood?".
Nah, the Dan Brown one had more, and bigger, holes in it.
Which is why the Russians used chinagraphs, which will have a core of non-conductive, low melting point wax {not graphite} and will write on anything.
Who cares? The data on the missing tapes would all have been encrypted, right -- it's a bank we're dealing with here -- and the decryption key would surely have been sent by a separate channel {otherwise what was the freakin' point of encrypting it?!}. And in order even to read the encrypted data off the tapes, you'd need one of the right make and model of tape drive ..... So basically, nobody has any way to recover anything that would be useful for naughtiness. And since the tapes were backups, it stands to reason that all the original data must still be kicking around somewhere. This is a non-story. It has value only as a sensationalist piece which might scare the ignorant. Ting! Next, please.
Please, it wasn't Mandrake's fault for using some code SuSE had commissioned, but then rejected before the distribution CDs were burned. It wasn't even SuSE's fault for writing the code that Mandrake used. It was LG's fault for not adhering to the ATAPI specification. And they were read-only CD-ROM drives, not CD-RW drives.
The ATAPI specification says what the command should be to force a writeable device to decache. The code in question worked by issuing a "flush write cache" command, and checking the error response. A writer should say "Cache empty" or maybe "Decached successfully". A read-only drive should say "Command not implemented". This is how one can tell a writer from a reader without requiring long -- and soon outdated -- tables of make and model IDs.
The LG read-only drives which were temporarily damaged by the Mandrake {and, for that matter, pre-release downloaded SuSE} software were designed so that the operation code for the "flush cache" command was used to signal a "start firmware upgrade" operation. This is in direct violation of the ATAPI specification, which prescribes what each operation code should represent so as software developed using any one ATAPI drive can be expected to work with any other ATAPI drive. The result was that the software in question quite reasonably asked the drive to decache; but the drive had of course by this time entered flash upgrade mode, and mis-interpreted the next command -- a "last error report" request -- as the beginning of the new firmware. LG should have been hauled over the coals for selling faulty goods. Instead, Microsoft and their apologists crowed with glee that a piece of open source software, which was doing something quite reasonable, apparently damaged some badly-designed and badly-documented hardware which reacted in a quite unreasonable way.
You're right I don't have direct debits. They are out-and-out evil. If someone wants money out of my bank account, they can ask me to my face; and I'll fetch it and give it to them. But no way are they going to dip their own grubby fingers in. I don't have a savings account: I have a mortgage, and no savings account will pay more interest than that is costing. Not even the endowment policy that was supposed to pay it off; but fortunately the buildings insurance will cover it. If I had any amount of money bigger than loose change, it would come off the mortgage.
If a supermarket cashier fails to check a signature and a fraudulent transaction goes through, then the supermarket is liable for the amount {and the cost probably will come out of that cashier's wage packet, by way of teaching them a lesson}.
Shoulder-surfing for PINs is easier today with the Chip and PIN payment machines in shops everywhere, and people not properly used to the system reading their number out aloud. But if you hold a knife to someone's throat, they will gladly tell you their PIN. And while you continue to hold the knife and look menacing, your accomplice can go back into the store with the card, and a phone -- the victim's own is as good as any -- to tell you whether the PIN is good, or whether you need to increase the pressure a bit. I was almost thinking of patenting this, but the twist is that I would make a claim for a method for being robbed -- so it would be the victim, not the perpetrator, who owed me royalties. After all, you may never catch the perp, but you already have the victim, and they ought to be insured against inadvertent patent violations.
And it's not a waste of time sticking with cash! I have to walk into town at least once a week anyway to do various stuff. I pass several HITWs and a post office. I can pay everything in cash -- you can't buy electricity or gas any other way anyway; after all, they have to have your meter key / quantum card to put the credit onto!
I haven't lived with my parents {whose house, incidentally, does not have a basement} since before there was any such thing as Internet banking, and I still don't see what good it is. The only benefit I can see is that you can check your bank balance online. But I already know {within a reasonable margin of error} how much money is in my account, by subtracting the amount that I have withdrawn from the amount shown in the "net pay" box on my payslip; and I also know it's not going anywhere unless I make a withdrawal. Which usually requires me to go to the bank -- or a bank, they all accept one another's cards nowadays -- and stand at the HITW machine, so I'm hardly likely to forget I've done it. After which, I can pay all my household bills in real pound notes at a post office -- which I have to walk past anyway on the way back from the bank. Alternatively, I can pay for my shopping by cheque {which, requiring a signature, is more secure than chip and PIN}; but that still requires me to go to the supermarket, so I can actually take my empty bottles and cans to the recycling centre there and bring my full bottles and cans back home.
Because if I did it that way, some smug, flash git would invariably have pointed out that using strstr or strpos is non-extensible, non-scalable, or somesuch. Them's the breaks when you choose a language with at least two ways to do everything {some of which you can't help suspecting might only ever have been put there just for the sake of there being more than one way to do it}. It's like when your mother buys you two sweaters for christmas -- whichever one you wear she will ask you what's wrong with the other one?
Sounds more like Flash being the problem to me ..... if it was a problem purely with Firefox then it would have been noticed by now just through analysis of the source code. Flash is closed-source, it could be doing absolutely anything; and I wouldn't exactly trust the game either. Fortunately there is the killall command for just this sort of situation ..... if and not unless you have enough resources available to get an xterm to come up at all!
I'm waiting with bated breath for the open-source Flash player clone precisely because of this. We have by popular demand installed Flash player on a few machines in the canteen at work; but not system-wide, so it's at least running non-privileged {not that I would trust Macromedia not to use a kernel exploit}. The general policy here is still very much "no source, no sale".
Just what the hell is it with this whole "online banking" thing? There are exactly two reasons why I ever visit my bank: to draw money out through the hole-in-the-wall machine, and to pay money in through the hole-in-the-wall machine. I know from my payslip how much I get paid each month; and, since the only way any money can come out of my account is if I either sign a cheque or use the HITW, then I also know how much I have left. I'm not really earning enough interest to bother with; but the few pence they pay me appear on my monthly statement, which is usually to be found somewhere in my recyclables box.
Unless and until there is some software that lets me print my own pound notes on my own printer, and upload photographs of cheques and cash from my own digital camera to my bank account, I really see no use for online banking.
Actually, it's very easy to make a site not run on IE; as the following example shows.
.
<?
if (preg_match("/MSIE/i", $_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"])) {
header("Location: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/");
exit();
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One molecule on its own, eh?
So was it a solid, a liquid or a gas?
As a Slackware user you'll no doubt appreciate that a single boot CD may contain several different kernels, any of which can be selected from the LILO prompt. The secret of getting Debian to go straight to ext3 is to use the 2.4 kernel for installing Woody -- type "bf24" at the boot prompt. When Woody was created, 2.4 was still not fully tested on all architectures; so 2.2 was used as a default instead, even on AMD/Intel.
.....
..... it really made me appreciate what goes on in the installation process, and I felt like I'd earned a merit badge when I got my desktop and sound working. Now I find it hard to choose between the two; the main difference seems to be apt-get or emerge.
Once you are in the installer, then you can format your disks however you like, as long as that means (ext[23]|reiserfs). If you want some other file system, you'll have to set up a small ext2 filesystem, compile a kernel which supports your chosen system and the necessary tools, then boot the new kernel and finish off. That's pretty much how it always has been though
And if you think the Debian installer is a little bit manual, then you have obviously never seen the Gentoo one! Not that I'm knocking it
A driver with an Ordnance Survey map and Silva compass finds three destinations quicker than a driver with a GPS.
..... whenever an uncustomised Nokia phone receives a text message, it plays a series of three short tones, two long ones and three short ones again. Di-di-dit, da-dah, di-di-dit. Any idea what that could be?
Even with a simple, manual telegraph key, the odds are in favour of Morse {with its surprisingly-modern idea of assigning the shortest codes to the commonest letters, and the fact that you only need to move in one dimension to work it} over a keypad where multiple functions are assigned to the same key. On Sagem phones {as opposed to Nokia and Samsung}, the matter is further compounded by the fact that the letters change as you hold down the key, and you let go to stop at the desired one. On Nokias and Samsungs, you have to make an additional keystroke {or allow a timeout to elapse} between successive letters on the same key.
The Morse telegraph was designed to be very good at sending dots and dashes. It required a greater mental effort on the part of the human operator; but the user interface was simple, elegant and did not add unnecessary complication of its own, so it was the operator and not the machine that imposed the limitation on working rate. When the words themselves became an obstacle, it became common for telegraph operators to use abbreviations; some of which have carried over to more modern media. C U L8R ME N H R OFF 2 WDS 4 SUM SW17!
And, finally
If forcing your operating system ideology on others genuinely were a form of rape, then Ballmer would be as guilty as sin. Remember that. However, I feel that if you, or someone close to you, had actually suffered a serious sexual assault, then you would not be so keen to bandy about the word rape in such a fashion.
Microsoft aren't about doing you any favours: the company typifies the whole souring of the American dream, where a corporation with enough money can always make more money by finding a way to charge ordinary people money for something they already do every day. If somebody invented a garden fence you couldn't talk to your neighbours over, I have no doubt in my mind that an American telephone company would start "giving them away for free" to encourage people to make more phone calls -- and would then begin lobbying to outlaw conventional fences, on the basis that they provided unfair competition.
It'd be funny if my government didn't think that American ideas were worth copying.
If it's just a big variable-reluctance stepper motor {which it sounds like: from my understanding of the article, the magnetic field in the armature is being provided by coils on the stator} then you can simply control the available torque by reducing the duty cycle. If you managed to build the whole thing inside-out, with the stator standing still inside the armature, then you could just slip a tyre over the armature and call that your wheel. However, I don't think that exact construction will work in this situation; I expect there will be a conventional bearings-and-spindle arrangement.
Stuff and nonsense. You cannot patent anything so abstract as a mathematical process, and anyone who tried should be laughed out of the patent office. Otherwise, what is to stop me patenting addition and claiming astronomical royalties anytime anybody tried to multiply, raise to a power or integrate? What if the claim were broad enough potentially to include subtraction {we never said both the addend and the augend had to be positive}? What if the claim covered the whole of mathematics?
At any rate, you can patent a means to an end but you can't patent the end in itself -- in fact, a patent can be rejected on the basis that there isn't another way to do it. So even if I could patent adding one bean to an existing stock of mutually indistinguible beans, it would not cover anyone using a different type of physical object, nor the abstract mathematical concept of addition.
The problem with these people is simply that their heads are in too few pieces.
The dole office on Normanton Road used to have the words "JOBS JOBS JOBS" plastered across the downstairs windows. The upstairs suite was vacant. I wanted to rent the upstairs rooms just so I could have "BLOW BLOW BLOW" written across the windows. And, of course, while I was there, I could sell a bit of blow as well .....
No, although I'd have let you off with 3-2 if you were (a) German and (b) bigger than me!
..... but which side of the line did it land? We join Kenneth Wolstenholme now in the closing seconds of extra time:
Extra time was upon us, and Geoff Hurst had brought the scoreline to 3-2 with a controversial shot which hit the bar and bounced down
KW Some people are on the pitch! They think it's all over -
Geoff Hurst finds Bobby Moore's long ball and slams it into the back of the net
KW It is now!
Scoring five against the Germans happened this century.
A motor without bulky permanent magnets? Like your car's starter motor, you mean? Like the AC/DC brush motors used in sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, electric drills and so forth? {Clocks obviously use synchronous motors; electric fans and central heating pumps use induction motors, but a lot of appliances still do use brush motors.} None of these motors need permanent magnets, they use an electromagnet polarised by the power source. And since the armature and stator magnets reverse their polarities together with the power supply, the motor will turn the same direction whichever way around you connect the power leads, or even on an alternating current supply.
..... all the electromagnets are standing still, obviating the need for any brushes, you can switch them electronically with great big chunky FETs; the switching rate determines the speed of rotation, and the duty cycle determines the maximum available torque.
Or what about like a variable-reluctance stepper motor, where the steel armature lines itself up between the energised coils on the stator? That's the principle I'm betting on it using
Come back when you've invented something that nobody has invented before. Then it'd be news.