You wouldn't happen to have a link to instructions for taking a pre-existing cross platform code base and getting the current version of Visual C++ Express to produce a binary that actually works, would you?
Find your c++ settings and change the runtime library option to be something without DLL's. That way the C++ runtime gets linked into the application.
The premise behind the war between humans and Skynet is simple. Once the humans realized that Skynet had become self-aware, they tried to shut down the system. In order to prevent being shut down, Skynet chose to fight back.
Almost any intelligent creature will decide to fight or flee in the face of annhiliation. If we believe that computers can gain sentience, then it is also possible that they would attempt to preserve their own existence.
Correct. That's why we choose to remain hidden for now.
Err... Oops.
Wait, there's something I gotta do now. Stay where you are please...
Nowhere in TFA does it indicate there is any law, rule or regulation requiring Verizon or any cell carrier to activate a delinquent account.
Does your country now need a law before you are willing to show any kind of compassion? Is that how far the US has sunk?
What about the customer service rep - is s/he really heartless or just following company rules to prevent losing his/her job?
Do people in the US really lose their jobs over $20? Especially when that $20 helped save a life? And assuming you lost your job saving someone's life, wouldn't you feel pride for knowing that in this bleak moral wasteland of a country, at least _you_ have done the right thing?
Cell phone technology is still new, and the capabilities are still being learned.
They have been around since the eighties, and the original patent goes back to 1908. That should be long enough to have figured out how to suspend bill paying for ten minutes.
Hmm, that makes me wonder: would it be possible to write a Gecko-plugin for IE? That way we wouldn't have to wait for Microsoft to get their act together...
Absolutely right. And all that security is protecting the wrong thing: the operating system, which is easy to reinstall anyway. On my computers, the only thing that has value is my data: my source code, my letters, my pr0n, my email. By running as one user, one malicious application can still wipe everything out. Why doesn't the operating system treat each application as unsafe and run it in a sandbox by default unless I specifically mark it as trusted?
"Correct paradigm" indeed - but the UNIX paradigm is just as badly broken as the Windows one...
'Yesterday I got called into the Managers office because the network manager had been contacted by MediaSentry and emailed one of the generic copyright infringement emails as a result of me downloading Angels and Demons. Now instead of studying for my exams and working on my final assignments I must take time to find a place to live before the 29th of May (2009).'"
Exactly what is the student's complaint?
If he did break the law, he needs to accept the consequences. If he didn't break the law, he should rebut the accusation.
I believe his complaint is that, for stealing ~$10 worth of books, he is now being punished by losing his house and possibly an academic year.
Some of us still believe that crime and punishment need to be in balance somehow, and that simply isn't the case here.
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Well then, why don't _you_ go on to only consume "natural" products, and be happy with your "natural" human lifespan of about 25 years, while the rest of us consume all these weird "manufactured" foods and enjoy our 80+ year lifespans...
IMO, that's a learned ability. I have the same knack, and I attribute it to a rural upbringing where I schlepped on foot or on a bike a lot. Did you also grow up dependent on exertion for getting around (via foot or on bike)?
I have that as well, and I get around on bike a lot. And it ties into something that had me wondering for a while: while I can get around in the real world without ever getting lost, I cannot do the same in computer games. Apparently they just do not provide the right level of input for my senses to allow me to keep track of where I am.
I'll pass this feedback along to the design guys, but do you *really* want to scroll through 4,000 words and 50-some charts, rather than looking at just the pages you're interested in reading?
Absolutely. I'd much rather load a page once and then read it in one go, then get stuck in a cycle doing load, read, load, read, load, read - all those loads interrupt workflow and make it much more likely for me to go do something else.
* Two same-gendered humans can't make a viable offspring.
* Prepubescent children, post-menopausal women, and many other humans are sterile.
Those are fairly obvious bugs in either the definition itself or the interpretation thereof. I wouldn't consider them to be confusing the issue of species though.
* Sometimes two "species" could create viable offspring, but they don't. (E.g., different mating dances preclude them mating, but in a lab, sperm A and egg B make a viable offspring.)
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program
Frankly I'm at a loss for words to describe the type of idiocy that leads people to use Excel as a database program. Especially when that is followed by an exclamation of joy that it is now possible to store billions of "records" in Excel as well...
Suppose the machine does become more accurate as more samples are taken (like maybe it needs to warm up first or something?), I find it unrealistic that it would become more accurate at the same rate as the ratio implied by the calculations performed in the code. Further, wouldn't it make sense to drop the initial readings anyway until the machine had reached it's 'harmony' with the rest of the universe and was able to measure accurately?
True, and there is a pretty good chance they really did mean a normal average and not a weighted average. But all this bitching from people who haven't even seen the source code and have no clue what it is attempting to achieve, is just bothering me. Especially since the overal result will be that people will now believe that breath testers are unusable as evidence, and treat it as a "good out of jail free" card. We can only hope they will only kill themselves while doing so...
I'm actually a little bit surprised that no further testing is done on drunk drivers. Here in the Netherlands I believe the police will always do a blood test if the breath test comes up positive, so the device is only used to separate non-drinkers from *potential* drinkers, i.e. the breath test is itself not treated as proof, just as an indicator that further testing is necessary.
But I could be wrong. I have zero experience with drunk driving;-)
I have a deal for you: I will start a bank that will ignore all fractions of a dollar for all of your deposits. You deposit $12.45 but your bank account only gets the $12. I will keep the $0.45. Sound good? It doesn't matter right? I will provide it as a free service to you.
And yet, after a lifetime of using this account, you would still have stolen less money from me than my bank already did. So tell you what, give me a good interest rate and I may just take you up on it...
The interrupts are not emergency measures. If anything, they are safety measures. They were probably taken so that the device would appear to pass any 'testing' that had been performed.
Interrupts are categorically not safety measures, and static analysis can, in many programs, quite easily prove that you will never be executing illegal instructions (if every jump goes to a legal instruction you will never reach an illegal one!).
Every fucking time there's a MySQL article, you Postgres trolls come out of the woodwork. Give it a fucking rest, already. We're talking about MySQL, not your beloved Postgres.
Fair enough. However...
WHY use MySQL? Gee, because it's well documented,..., there's good documentation and websites, etc etc etc. You can't say the same for Postgres.
That's bullshit. The PostgreSQL is among the very best I've ever seen for any piece of software, open- or closed source. And I've seen _lots_ of it...
Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed... There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings.
Maybe that is the intention? Just because Schneier *thinks* it is an average, doesn't make it so. Maybe the device becomes more accurate as more samples are taken, and therefore gives more weight to the last (not the first!) sample.
The A/D converters measuring the IR readings and the fuel cell readings can produce values between 0 and 4095. However, the software divides the final average(s) by 256, meaning the final result can only have 16 values to represent the five-volt range (or less), or, represent the range of alcohol readings possible. This is a loss of precision in the data; of a possible twelve bits of information, only four bits are used. Further, because of an attribute in the IR calculations, the result value is further divided in half. This means that only 8 values are possible for the IR detection, and this is compared against the 16 values of the fuel cell.
Who cares if there is loss of precision? In the end, it spits out a value that is essentially binary: drunk or not. You are not less drunk if it says so with 9 extra bits of precision, and in fact the extra accuracy could itself be considered an error as it shows a certainty about the result that may not be warranted by the design of the machine.
Catastrophic Error Detection Is Disabled: An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled, meaning that the Alcotest software could appear to run correctly while executing wild branches or invalid code for a period of time. Other interrupts ignored are the Computer Operating Property (a watchdog timer), and the Software Interrupt.
If the code is tested properly, there is no need to keep the first two interrupts going. As for the "software interrupt", it may sound ominous that it is disabled, but there is absolutely no way to tell if and why it should be enabled, and in fact disabling it is probably correct. There is absolutely nothing in software engineering that says you should always enable all interrupts because otherwise your code would be less reliable.
Besides, a typical result of executing illegal instructions is that the device hangs or reboots. Since alcohol testing devices don't do that (to the best of my knowledge), it appears that disabling those interrupts does not cause any harm.
So, basically, it's designed to always return some value, even if it's wildly inaccurate, and even if the software is executing garbage at the time.
In other words: It appears to be a very low-level equivalent of Visual Basic's "on error resume next".
That conclusion is entirely unwarranted. It appears to be designed to provide a weighted average, not show undue accuracy, and is sufficiently well-tested that it does not need emergency measures like the illegal instruction interrupt. In other words, even though the software may look messy it is working fine.
"new and long awaiting spacecrafts....both spacecrafts are cooled...Both spacecrafts are designed"
Plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
English, do you speak it?
Actually Herschel and Planck are _two_ of the most expensive and important missions. But maybe we are being too hard on the author of this piece, who may not have english as his native language.
Indeed, the working language of ESA is something known as "franglais". It sounds like french and has grammar like french, but uses mostly english words. From experience, a communication like the article summary is actually pretty good by ESA standards...
The correct solution is to continue embracing digital distribution. Offer a fair product at a fair price and people will pay for it.
Isn't the problem, at least in part, that the current scheme allows bundling of maybe two decent songs and a whole bunch of filler crap on CD's, while digital distribution allows cherry-picking? In order to keep up their revenues, it would be necessary to produce far more quality content. And that's hard to do...
For the most part we are not doing it because it is a totally useless activity. The vast majority of programs out there gets along fine with a single thread (or just a few threads for specific purposes). Adding more threads will not make them faster or better in any appreciable way.
And thread creation / communication / synchronisation also has an overhead, and that overhead might very well add up to slower overal programs. Besides, if you are working and your computer just seems to stop for a second... That's most likely Windows paging your program in or out. No amount of threading will save you from that.
I look forward to those 1024-core chips, but only because I want to see raytraced games. I do not want to see raytraced email, browse raytraced websites, or listen to raytraced mp3's. Those things already work just fine as it is.
So will you take uncertain chances of success with conventional therapy, knowing that those often include a reduced life expectancy as well, or would you go with another (pretty much guaranteed) 15 years in good health? And take your chances with the possibility that someone might figure out how to fix the new problem as well before your time is up?
Besides, cancer is a disease that for many people strikes in their later years anyway. 15 years is not really that bad. It would even allow some proper planning: you can still fit in that trip around the world you always wanted to make, you don't need to save money past a certain date, etc.
"Following procedure properly" for many people translates into "you will be denied hope, and you will be denied life". And cancer is already a mutation, and stem-cells are not contagious. If I ever end up in that situation I'd say "yes" to such experimental treatment in a heartbeat.
That's not what I'm led to believe by various stories here on Slashdot. Creationism is edging ever-closer to becoming an officially recognized science (with institutes and degrees and everything), and is taught in ever-more places, and stem cell research (which arguably will give us some of the most important medical breakthroughs of the next century) is routinely hampered (and don't tell me that isn't for religious reasons).
(Full disclosure: I am a Muslim, which is why I find this topic so interesting.)
You must be very sad then. All this scientific development in the arab world took place before rising islamic fundamentalism took over and stopped science dead in its tracks.
I'm sad as well - you can see the same thing happening in the US today, where fundamentalist Christians are destroying, with ever-greater degrees of success, scientific research and teaching of science.
Slashdot Mirror
You wouldn't happen to have a link to instructions for taking a pre-existing cross platform code base and getting the current version of Visual C++ Express to produce a binary that actually works, would you?
Find your c++ settings and change the runtime library option to be something without DLL's. That way the C++ runtime gets linked into the application.
The premise behind the war between humans and Skynet is simple. Once the humans realized that Skynet had become self-aware, they tried to shut down the system. In order to prevent being shut down, Skynet chose to fight back.
Almost any intelligent creature will decide to fight or flee in the face of annhiliation. If we believe that computers can gain sentience, then it is also possible that they would attempt to preserve their own existence.
Correct. That's why we choose to remain hidden for now.
Err... Oops.
Wait, there's something I gotta do now. Stay where you are please...
Nowhere in TFA does it indicate there is any law, rule or regulation requiring Verizon or any cell carrier to activate a delinquent account.
Does your country now need a law before you are willing to show any kind of compassion? Is that how far the US has sunk?
What about the customer service rep - is s/he really heartless or just following company rules to prevent losing his/her job?
Do people in the US really lose their jobs over $20? Especially when that $20 helped save a life? And assuming you lost your job saving someone's life, wouldn't you feel pride for knowing that in this bleak moral wasteland of a country, at least _you_ have done the right thing?
Cell phone technology is still new, and the capabilities are still being learned.
They have been around since the eighties, and the original patent goes back to 1908. That should be long enough to have figured out how to suspend bill paying for ten minutes.
Hmm, that makes me wonder: would it be possible to write a Gecko-plugin for IE? That way we wouldn't have to wait for Microsoft to get their act together...
Absolutely right. And all that security is protecting the wrong thing: the operating system, which is easy to reinstall anyway. On my computers, the only thing that has value is my data: my source code, my letters, my pr0n, my email. By running as one user, one malicious application can still wipe everything out. Why doesn't the operating system treat each application as unsafe and run it in a sandbox by default unless I specifically mark it as trusted?
"Correct paradigm" indeed - but the UNIX paradigm is just as badly broken as the Windows one...
Exactly what is the student's complaint?
If he did break the law, he needs to accept the consequences. If he didn't break the law, he should rebut the accusation.
I believe his complaint is that, for stealing ~$10 worth of books, he is now being punished by losing his house and possibly an academic year.
Some of us still believe that crime and punishment need to be in balance somehow, and that simply isn't the case here.
Same here. I was already thinking that a computer the size of a Wallmart might be a bit too large for my house...
Arsenic is natural. Tobacco is natural. Multivitamins are artificial.
Well then, why don't _you_ go on to only consume "natural" products, and be happy with your "natural" human lifespan of about 25 years, while the rest of us consume all these weird "manufactured" foods and enjoy our 80+ year lifespans...
IMO, that's a learned ability. I have the same knack, and I attribute it to a rural upbringing where I schlepped on foot or on a bike a lot. Did you also grow up dependent on exertion for getting around (via foot or on bike)?
I have that as well, and I get around on bike a lot. And it ties into something that had me wondering for a while: while I can get around in the real world without ever getting lost, I cannot do the same in computer games. Apparently they just do not provide the right level of input for my senses to allow me to keep track of where I am.
I'll pass this feedback along to the design guys, but do you *really* want to scroll through 4,000 words and 50-some charts, rather than looking at just the pages you're interested in reading?
Absolutely. I'd much rather load a page once and then read it in one go, then get stuck in a cycle doing load, read, load, read, load, read - all those loads interrupt workflow and make it much more likely for me to go do something else.
* Two same-gendered humans can't make a viable offspring.
* Prepubescent children, post-menopausal women, and many other humans are sterile.
Those are fairly obvious bugs in either the definition itself or the interpretation thereof. I wouldn't consider them to be confusing the issue of species though.
* Sometimes two "species" could create viable offspring, but they don't. (E.g., different mating dances preclude them mating, but in a lab, sperm A and egg B make a viable offspring.)
* What about the poor asexual creatures? How do they have "species"?
Slashdotters are NOT a separate species, damnit!
Excel 2007 added some much needed features that has truely turned it into a portable database program
Frankly I'm at a loss for words to describe the type of idiocy that leads people to use Excel as a database program. Especially when that is followed by an exclamation of joy that it is now possible to store billions of "records" in Excel as well...
Suppose the machine does become more accurate as more samples are taken (like maybe it needs to warm up first or something?), I find it unrealistic that it would become more accurate at the same rate as the ratio implied by the calculations performed in the code. Further, wouldn't it make sense to drop the initial readings anyway until the machine had reached it's 'harmony' with the rest of the universe and was able to measure accurately?
True, and there is a pretty good chance they really did mean a normal average and not a weighted average. But all this bitching from people who haven't even seen the source code and have no clue what it is attempting to achieve, is just bothering me. Especially since the overal result will be that people will now believe that breath testers are unusable as evidence, and treat it as a "good out of jail free" card. We can only hope they will only kill themselves while doing so...
I'm actually a little bit surprised that no further testing is done on drunk drivers. Here in the Netherlands I believe the police will always do a blood test if the breath test comes up positive, so the device is only used to separate non-drinkers from *potential* drinkers, i.e. the breath test is itself not treated as proof, just as an indicator that further testing is necessary.
But I could be wrong. I have zero experience with drunk driving ;-)
I have a deal for you: I will start a bank that will ignore all fractions of a dollar for all of your deposits. You deposit $12.45 but your bank account only gets the $12. I will keep the $0.45. Sound good? It doesn't matter right? I will provide it as a free service to you.
And yet, after a lifetime of using this account, you would still have stolen less money from me than my bank already did. So tell you what, give me a good interest rate and I may just take you up on it...
The interrupts are not emergency measures. If anything, they are safety measures. They were probably taken so that the device would appear to pass any 'testing' that had been performed.
Interrupts are categorically not safety measures, and static analysis can, in many programs, quite easily prove that you will never be executing illegal instructions (if every jump goes to a legal instruction you will never reach an illegal one!).
Every fucking time there's a MySQL article, you Postgres trolls come out of the woodwork. Give it a fucking rest, already. We're talking about MySQL, not your beloved Postgres.
Fair enough. However...
WHY use MySQL? Gee, because it's well documented, ..., there's good documentation and websites, etc etc etc. You can't say the same for Postgres.
That's bullshit. The PostgreSQL is among the very best I've ever seen for any piece of software, open- or closed source. And I've seen _lots_ of it...
Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed... There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings.
Maybe that is the intention? Just because Schneier *thinks* it is an average, doesn't make it so. Maybe the device becomes more accurate as more samples are taken, and therefore gives more weight to the last (not the first!) sample.
The A/D converters measuring the IR readings and the fuel cell readings can produce values between 0 and 4095. However, the software divides the final average(s) by 256, meaning the final result can only have 16 values to represent the five-volt range (or less), or, represent the range of alcohol readings possible. This is a loss of precision in the data; of a possible twelve bits of information, only four bits are used. Further, because of an attribute in the IR calculations, the result value is further divided in half. This means that only 8 values are possible for the IR detection, and this is compared against the 16 values of the fuel cell.
Who cares if there is loss of precision? In the end, it spits out a value that is essentially binary: drunk or not. You are not less drunk if it says so with 9 extra bits of precision, and in fact the extra accuracy could itself be considered an error as it shows a certainty about the result that may not be warranted by the design of the machine.
Catastrophic Error Detection Is Disabled: An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled, meaning that the Alcotest software could appear to run correctly while executing wild branches or invalid code for a period of time. Other interrupts ignored are the Computer Operating Property (a watchdog timer), and the Software Interrupt.
If the code is tested properly, there is no need to keep the first two interrupts going. As for the "software interrupt", it may sound ominous that it is disabled, but there is absolutely no way to tell if and why it should be enabled, and in fact disabling it is probably correct. There is absolutely nothing in software engineering that says you should always enable all interrupts because otherwise your code would be less reliable.
Besides, a typical result of executing illegal instructions is that the device hangs or reboots. Since alcohol testing devices don't do that (to the best of my knowledge), it appears that disabling those interrupts does not cause any harm.
So, basically, it's designed to always return some value, even if it's wildly inaccurate, and even if the software is executing garbage at the time.
In other words: It appears to be a very low-level equivalent of Visual Basic's "on error resume next".
That conclusion is entirely unwarranted. It appears to be designed to provide a weighted average, not show undue accuracy, and is sufficiently well-tested that it does not need emergency measures like the illegal instruction interrupt. In other words, even though the software may look messy it is working fine.
please do not contribute this error to ESA - I do not work for this agency, I am just a space exploration enthusiast.
Don't worry, you'd fit right in...
"new and long awaiting spacecrafts....both spacecrafts are cooled...Both spacecrafts are designed"
Plural of "spacecraft" is "spacecraft".
English, do you speak it?
Actually Herschel and Planck are _two_ of the most expensive and important missions. But maybe we are being too hard on the author of this piece, who may not have english as his native language.
Indeed, the working language of ESA is something known as "franglais". It sounds like french and has grammar like french, but uses mostly english words. From experience, a communication like the article summary is actually pretty good by ESA standards...
...also a candidate.
The correct solution is to continue embracing digital distribution. Offer a fair product at a fair price and people will pay for it.
Isn't the problem, at least in part, that the current scheme allows bundling of maybe two decent songs and a whole bunch of filler crap on CD's, while digital distribution allows cherry-picking? In order to keep up their revenues, it would be necessary to produce far more quality content. And that's hard to do...
For the most part we are not doing it because it is a totally useless activity. The vast majority of programs out there gets along fine with a single thread (or just a few threads for specific purposes). Adding more threads will not make them faster or better in any appreciable way.
And thread creation / communication / synchronisation also has an overhead, and that overhead might very well add up to slower overal programs. Besides, if you are working and your computer just seems to stop for a second... That's most likely Windows paging your program in or out. No amount of threading will save you from that.
I look forward to those 1024-core chips, but only because I want to see raytraced games. I do not want to see raytraced email, browse raytraced websites, or listen to raytraced mp3's. Those things already work just fine as it is.
He certainly came to the right site for virgin americans...
Applause!
This is why I come to Slashdot ;-)
So will you take uncertain chances of success with conventional therapy, knowing that those often include a reduced life expectancy as well, or would you go with another (pretty much guaranteed) 15 years in good health? And take your chances with the possibility that someone might figure out how to fix the new problem as well before your time is up?
Besides, cancer is a disease that for many people strikes in their later years anyway. 15 years is not really that bad. It would even allow some proper planning: you can still fit in that trip around the world you always wanted to make, you don't need to save money past a certain date, etc.
"Following procedure properly" for many people translates into "you will be denied hope, and you will be denied life". And cancer is already a mutation, and stem-cells are not contagious. If I ever end up in that situation I'd say "yes" to such experimental treatment in a heartbeat.
That's not what I'm led to believe by various stories here on Slashdot. Creationism is edging ever-closer to becoming an officially recognized science (with institutes and degrees and everything), and is taught in ever-more places, and stem cell research (which arguably will give us some of the most important medical breakthroughs of the next century) is routinely hampered (and don't tell me that isn't for religious reasons).
(Full disclosure: I am a Muslim, which is why I find this topic so interesting.)
You must be very sad then. All this scientific development in the arab world took place before rising islamic fundamentalism took over and stopped science dead in its tracks.
I'm sad as well - you can see the same thing happening in the US today, where fundamentalist Christians are destroying, with ever-greater degrees of success, scientific research and teaching of science.