Does this mean that every time I get in my car to go somewhere, I should check the undercarriage of my car for bugs? What would the police do if I found one of their bugs, removed it, and smashed it to pieces? Probably arrest me for destruction of public property and obstruction of so-called "justice."
What you should do if you find one attached to the underside of your car is call the emergency services and report a that there is a "suspect device" attached to your car. This will quite possibly result in a bomb disposal team being called out. The expense of this happening every time one of these trackers is found will be significantly more than the cost of the equipment. This should get the practice stopped quite quickly.
Plus, nobody can really argue that you've done anything except what the government is telling you to do - been alert for any possible terrorist activity.
If your students want to examine existing code, AutoDia will generate UML class diagrams from source code in a variety of languages. Output is normally in Dia format but others are supported as well.
It's written as a set of Perl scripts so you'll need a perl installation on the machine.
If you're using firefox/mozilla then: type about:config into the address bar and hit return. set the network.http.sendReferrerHeader property to 0
The link will then work. This functionality is also exposed by the PrefBar plug-in as a checkbox. This is a pretty safe change, I have found exactly one site that got upset if it didn't get a referrer (it wanted to force you through their main page).
If only those engineers and programmers would make use of all that knowledge embodied in the patent databases, we would live in a much better world.
A couple of points to raise with him:
1) Most patents are written in lawyer-ese rather than engineer-speak, so even if you read them you'll probably have very little idea what they actually mean. This problem is exacerbated by the next point...
2) Most software patents are extremely vague. They do not contain enough detail to reproduce a fully working system. They are deliberately vague to try and completely own the problem space rather than a single solution. Compare this with a patent for a physical invention.
"This email looks like it is advertizing something" (+1 to spam) "The URL that they are directing you to does not match the domain the email came from" (+20 to spam)
That's a very bad way of classifying spam. If I find an interesting article on the web, I often send the URL to various friends. The domain will almost never be the same as mine.
If you DONT like WMP, dont use it, its that simple.
Personally, I don't use it. What I'd like to be able to do is uninstall it. And Movie Maker. And Outlook Express. And Internet Explorer. And Frontpage. And MSN Gaming Zone (an empty directory). And Netmeeting. And the Text-to-speech crap.
This is just the stuff in my Program Files directory that I can't get rid of. There's more in the windows and system directories. No option to uninstall it anywhere. And if I delete the files they just re-appear because windows file protection insists they are a vital part of the OS.
Re:I though otherwise, so did my physics teacher.
on
Comic Book Physics
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Better that than Neo breaking the sound barrier (buildings exploding in his wake) and no (additional) damage to Trinity after catching her.
I think that's not a valid comparison. Inside the matrix, Neo does NOT have super powers in the same sense that superman etc. have. Neo's power is basically that he can manipulate "reality". If he can rewrite one law of physics, why should momentum be an issue? Even Trinity (and Morpheus etc.) could rewrite physics to a lesser extent to enable them to jump huge distances and so on.
To be honest, the only real question is why he decided to fly rather than say, teleport. Another option might be turning the floor to sponge like in the training leap. The only answers I can come up with are: "It generates more tension in the film." "Neo is an idiot and never considered the idea."
As an aside, I've always wondered why he bothered with martial arts once he had discovered his powers. Simple tactics like ramming agents at supersonic speeds would be much more effective. He may have had no choice against agent Smith (something of a special case), but normal agents shouldn't even have made him slow down.
I think this all goes to prove that you should never let a gamer near dodgy physics. Or dodgy backgrounds. We'll rapidly find a way to exploit the holes.
just enable digital audio over IDE in the drive properties and you don't need the analogue audio cable.
I thought that was the default setting in XP? I don't know if it's a peculiarity of this machine, but with it enabled, the headphone socket on the front of the CD drive doesn't work.
Rather than try and salvage the metals from the cable, it would almost certainly be better to sell off the old cables as cables. Getting at the metal would involve getting rid of all the insulation etc. Selling them as cables means (at worst) putting new connectors on the ends.
There might be legal issues preventing resale of some cables (toxic materials, fire regs. and so on).
It's not even original... From the current mayor of London: Livingstone, Ken, "If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it", Collins, 1987, ISBN 00 021777 06
In windows, I double-click setup.exe, a GUI pops up, I pick the destination and off it goes.
In Mandrake, I single-click an RPM and the package manager start installing it. Is that easy enough?
Some notes on Windows and Linux package/program installation:
1) Windows setups handle dependancies by basically not handling them. They almost always include a bunch of system DLLs and OCXs that might not be on a user's system or which might be outdated. This obviously leads to much larger packages which for a large part contain stuff that is already on the system. It would be relatively easy on Linux to make every package include every package it depends on. These don't have to be statically linked, you could include the packages for the shared libraries within the main package and have these install automatically. I think the bloat problem would be worse on Linux than Windows, because my feeling is that open source programs tend to use a much wider variety of shared libraries than their proprietary equivalents (where everybody re-invents the wheel on a daily basis because they can't use somebody else's design).
2) Different languages are handled in many cases on Windows by having several setup programs. The main setup.exe in these cases is just a shell that selects which one to run. This adds to package bloat. Linux fares slightly better on this, because (IMHO) i18n is easier on the programmer here.
3) Windows only needs to consider one architecture. If it had several to worry about, we'd probably see a situation much like we have with languages.
4) Configuration at install time on Windows is mostly just choosing which optional extras to install. Most configuration is done within the program itself. This is more-or-less true on Linux as well (for desktop programs at least).
To get close to the Windows installation experience under Linux, what we need to do would be to make every package include every sub-package it depends on and sub-packages for every architecture, disro and langauge. Then you could just download the single file, click it and get everything installed. That package would be enormous however.
Tools like apt-get and urpmi give a very similar experience without the overhead of downloading a bunch of stuff you already have. So long as you stick with stuff that is packaged for you distro, they are painless.
Anyone who claims that Europe is a better place to work isn't telling the whole story.
As with anywhere else, it depends on the company. A friend of mine recently changed jobs to a company that is very anti-overtime except when a deadline is near. Apparantly, anybody who is consistently working longer than normal hours gets called into their manager's office and asked why they can't manage their time effectively. Note that this is for salaried staff who don't get overtime pay.
1) Put "email address" box on the registration screen. 2) Put "spam opt-out" box on a screen that can only be accessed after registering. Default it to on. 3) Sell email address in the gap between registering and first accessing that page. 4) PROFIT!
IIRC, most of this was already filmed with Tom Baker as the doctor. If you remember "The 5 Doctors" (where they get transported to Gallifrey to loot Rasilons tomb), Tom Baker's doctor is grabbed from a punt in Cambridge. I believe that was part of Shada.
From the article: > Produced by the Big Finish company, it stars Fox in the role > of Professor Chronotis, with Sachs as the evil Skagra. > Gordon is behind the silky voice of Skagra's spaceship, and > Hayes makes a cameo performance as college porter Wilkin.
I think Douglas Adams eventually re-wrote this as one of the Dirk Gently books. One of them definitely includes a Professor Chronotis and lots of time travel. I think that bits of the same book came from another Doctor Who story as well (the one with all the extra Mona Lisas).
A good programmer knows that a floating point division by 2 is much slower that a shift right by two and will use that knowledge.
Warning to any inexperienced programmers: A bit shift on a floating point number is really going to mess you up. Don't do it. The poster obviously meant "use an integer implementation and bit shift".
I like to consider myself a good programmer, and I say: use a divide if you mean a divide and a bit shift if you mean a bit shift. So much easier for somebody else to see what you meant. You don't need to know which is faster because you can reasonably expect the compiler to optimise an integer divide by two into a bit shift anyway.
Nobody holds a gun to your head and says "You must buy Windows or we'll kill you" do they?
No. But if you're an OEM, Microsoft do hold a pretty outrageous contract at your head and say basically "You must sell Windows (and only windows) or we'll kill your business".
This is known as abuse of monopoly power and is illegal in the USA (IAASENAL - I am a software engineer, not a lawyer).
> Can I get a list of the ActiveX controls installed on my machine??!?
Yep. Just look for all the.OCX files (usually in the System or System32 directories). Note that if you delete all of these, Windows will almost certainly stop working. After deleteing, run Regclean twice to clean up any hanging references in the registry.
Hardware based solutions may not be appropriate for use on a satellite.
Aside from the obvious size/weight/power considerations, you have some reliability concerns that you don't get on much Earth-based equipment:
It's got to survive launch.
It might have to stand high radiation levels.
You can't replace it if it fails.
Time based keys may present their own problems if there is a potentially long time between sending and receiving data. You'd need to be able to calculate what the key would be when the command arrives. Relativistic time dilation effects might also be an issue at some point in the future, but they aren't likely to be a problem over the expected lifespan of any satellite we build today.
The entire DVD industry, through the DVDCCA, have devised a set of mutual licensing handcuffs that they are all to wear -- DVD player manufacturers may not manufacture DVD players with unencrypted digital outputs. They may not manufacture and sell region-free players. This keeps the ability to make fair use of DVDs out of the hands of consumers.
Well, over here in the UK, it's getting quite difficult to buy a DVD player which doesn't have a region-free mode. The models that don't allow it just didn't sell as well. So the stores tend not to stock them. So the region-free models sell even better. Etc. Etc.
America might be a special case, but from over here, it looks like the market will kill region coding far faster than any court.
Hmmm,
I checked the list and Discordianism isn't on it. So obviously the government consider it less real than "Jedi Knight".
Or they're all Illuminati and just want to keep the name out of the public eye.
Or maybe we all put down "Jedi" because it would be more amusing.
Or maybe we all just wrote in the names of our cats. I mean most cats seem to believe they're god and who are we to say their belief structure is less valid than ours.
Yes, the intake rate will exceed the loss by Hawking radiation in a lot of cases. There are a couple of cases where this won't happen:
1) If there isn't much matter around. Say, after it's eaten everything nearby or if it drifts into inter-galactic space.
2) It's a small black hole. These won't eat as fast, and energy densities are larger around smaller black holes. This leads to higher rates of particle/anti-particle generation and increased Hawking radiation. Small black holes should evaporate much faster than large ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean that every time I get in my car to go somewhere, I should check the undercarriage of my car for bugs? What would the police do if I found one of their bugs, removed it, and smashed it to pieces? Probably arrest me for destruction of public property and obstruction of so-called "justice."
What you should do if you find one attached to the underside of your car is call the emergency services and report a that there is a "suspect device" attached to your car. This will quite possibly result in a bomb disposal team being called out. The expense of this happening every time one of these trackers is found will be significantly more than the cost of the equipment. This should get the practice stopped quite quickly.
Plus, nobody can really argue that you've done anything except what the government is telling you to do - been alert for any possible terrorist activity.
If your students want to examine existing code, AutoDia will generate UML class diagrams from source code in a variety of languages. Output is normally in Dia format but others are supported as well.
It's written as a set of Perl scripts so you'll need a perl installation on the machine.
just that it is blocked when coming from slashdot
If you're using firefox/mozilla then:
type about:config into the address bar and hit return.
set the network.http.sendReferrerHeader property to 0
The link will then work. This functionality is also exposed by the PrefBar plug-in as a checkbox. This is a pretty safe change, I have found exactly one site that got upset if it didn't get a referrer (it wanted to force you through their main page).
If only those engineers and programmers would make use of all that knowledge embodied in the patent databases, we would live in a much better world.
A couple of points to raise with him:
1) Most patents are written in lawyer-ese rather than engineer-speak, so even if you read them you'll probably have very little idea what they actually mean. This problem is exacerbated by the next point...
2) Most software patents are extremely vague. They do not contain enough detail to reproduce a fully working system. They are deliberately vague to try and completely own the problem space rather than a single solution. Compare this with a patent for a physical invention.
"This email looks like it is advertizing something" (+1 to spam)
"The URL that they are directing you to does not match the domain the email came from" (+20 to spam)
That's a very bad way of classifying spam. If I find an interesting article on the web, I often send the URL to various friends. The domain will almost never be the same as mine.
If you DONT like WMP, dont use it, its that simple.
Personally, I don't use it. What I'd like to be able to do is uninstall it.
And Movie Maker.
And Outlook Express.
And Internet Explorer.
And Frontpage.
And MSN Gaming Zone (an empty directory).
And Netmeeting.
And the Text-to-speech crap.
This is just the stuff in my Program Files directory that I can't get rid of. There's more in the windows and system directories. No option to uninstall it anywhere. And if I delete the files they just re-appear because windows file protection insists they are a vital part of the OS.
Better that than Neo breaking the sound barrier (buildings exploding in his wake) and no (additional) damage to Trinity after catching her.
I think that's not a valid comparison. Inside the matrix, Neo does NOT have super powers in the same sense that superman etc. have. Neo's power is basically that he can manipulate "reality". If he can rewrite one law of physics, why should momentum be an issue? Even Trinity (and Morpheus etc.) could rewrite physics to a lesser extent to enable them to jump huge distances and so on.
To be honest, the only real question is why he decided to fly rather than say, teleport. Another option might be turning the floor to sponge like in the training leap. The only answers I can come up with are:
"It generates more tension in the film."
"Neo is an idiot and never considered the idea."
As an aside, I've always wondered why he bothered with martial arts once he had discovered his powers. Simple tactics like ramming agents at supersonic speeds would be much more effective. He may have had no choice against agent Smith (something of a special case), but normal agents shouldn't even have made him slow down.
I think this all goes to prove that you should never let a gamer near dodgy physics. Or dodgy backgrounds. We'll rapidly find a way to exploit the holes.
just enable digital audio over IDE in the drive properties and you don't need the analogue audio cable. I thought that was the default setting in XP? I don't know if it's a peculiarity of this machine, but with it enabled, the headphone socket on the front of the CD drive doesn't work.
Rather than try and salvage the metals from the cable, it would almost certainly be better to sell off the old cables as cables. Getting at the metal would involve getting rid of all the insulation etc. Selling them as cables means (at worst) putting new connectors on the ends.
There might be legal issues preventing resale of some cables (toxic materials, fire regs. and so on).
It's not even original...
From the current mayor of London:
Livingstone, Ken, "If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it", Collins, 1987, ISBN 00 021777 06
Hey, another reason NOT to upgrade to the new version!
Personally, I intend to upgrade to the new version as soon as the 1.1 final is released.
You did mean the new version of OpenOffice.org, didn't you?
Mozilla 1.3 on WinXP...
Left clicking the link does open the window, but middle clicking it doesn't.
In windows, I double-click setup.exe, a GUI pops up, I pick the destination and off it goes.
In Mandrake, I single-click an RPM and the package manager start installing it. Is that easy enough?
Some notes on Windows and Linux package/program installation:
1) Windows setups handle dependancies by basically not handling them. They almost always include a bunch of system DLLs and OCXs that might not be on a user's system or which might be outdated. This obviously leads to much larger packages which for a large part contain stuff that is already on the system. It would be relatively easy on Linux to make every package include every package it depends on. These don't have to be statically linked, you could include the packages for the shared libraries within the main package and have these install automatically. I think the bloat problem would be worse on Linux than Windows, because my feeling is that open source programs tend to use a much wider variety of shared libraries than their proprietary equivalents (where everybody re-invents the wheel on a daily basis because they can't use somebody else's design).
2) Different languages are handled in many cases on Windows by having several setup programs. The main setup.exe in these cases is just a shell that selects which one to run. This adds to package bloat. Linux fares slightly better on this, because (IMHO) i18n is easier on the programmer here.
3) Windows only needs to consider one architecture. If it had several to worry about, we'd probably see a situation much like we have with languages.
4) Configuration at install time on Windows is mostly just choosing which optional extras to install. Most configuration is done within the program itself. This is more-or-less true on Linux as well (for desktop programs at least).
To get close to the Windows installation experience under Linux, what we need to do would be to make every package include every sub-package it depends on and sub-packages for every architecture, disro and langauge. Then you could just download the single file, click it and get everything installed. That package would be enormous however.
Tools like apt-get and urpmi give a very similar experience without the overhead of downloading a bunch of stuff you already have. So long as you stick with stuff that is packaged for you distro, they are painless.
Anyone who claims that Europe is a better place to work isn't telling the whole story.
As with anywhere else, it depends on the company. A friend of mine recently changed jobs to a company that is very anti-overtime except when a deadline is near. Apparantly, anybody who is consistently working longer than normal hours gets called into their manager's office and asked why they can't manage their time effectively. Note that this is for salaried staff who don't get overtime pay.
Doesn't work at all...
1) Put "email address" box on the registration screen.
2) Put "spam opt-out" box on a screen that can only be accessed after registering. Default it to on.
3) Sell email address in the gap between registering and first accessing that page.
4) PROFIT!
IIRC, most of this was already filmed with Tom Baker as the doctor. If you remember "The 5 Doctors" (where they get transported to Gallifrey to loot Rasilons tomb), Tom Baker's doctor is grabbed from a punt in Cambridge. I believe that was part of Shada.
From the article:
> Produced by the Big Finish company, it stars Fox in the role
> of Professor Chronotis, with Sachs as the evil Skagra.
> Gordon is behind the silky voice of Skagra's spaceship, and
> Hayes makes a cameo performance as college porter Wilkin.
I think Douglas Adams eventually re-wrote this as one of the Dirk Gently books. One of them definitely includes a Professor Chronotis and lots of time travel. I think that bits of the same book came from another Doctor Who story as well (the one with all the extra Mona Lisas).
A good programmer knows that a floating point division by 2 is much slower that a shift right by two and will use that knowledge.
Warning to any inexperienced programmers: A bit shift on a floating point number is really going to mess you up. Don't do it. The poster obviously meant "use an integer implementation and bit shift".
I like to consider myself a good programmer, and I say: use a divide if you mean a divide and a bit shift if you mean a bit shift. So much easier for somebody else to see what you meant. You don't need to know which is faster because you can reasonably expect the compiler to optimise an integer divide by two into a bit shift anyway.
Nobody holds a gun to your head and says "You must buy Windows or we'll kill you" do they?
No. But if you're an OEM, Microsoft do hold a pretty outrageous contract at your head and say basically "You must sell Windows (and only windows) or we'll kill your business".
This is known as abuse of monopoly power and is illegal in the USA (IAASENAL - I am a software engineer, not a lawyer).
Easy. just delete the
> Can I get a list of the ActiveX controls installed on my machine??!?
Yep. Just look for all the
Or for a link that works...
Hardware based solutions may not be appropriate for use on a satellite.
Aside from the obvious size/weight/power considerations, you have some reliability concerns that you don't get on much Earth-based equipment:
It's got to survive launch.
It might have to stand high radiation levels.
You can't replace it if it fails.
Time based keys may present their own problems if there is a potentially long time between sending and receiving data. You'd need to be able to calculate what the key would be when the command arrives. Relativistic time dilation effects might also be an issue at some point in the future, but they aren't likely to be a problem over the expected lifespan of any satellite we build today.
The entire DVD industry, through the DVDCCA, have devised a set of mutual licensing handcuffs that they are all to wear -- DVD player manufacturers may not manufacture DVD players with unencrypted digital outputs. They may not manufacture and sell region-free players. This keeps the ability to make fair use of DVDs out of the hands of consumers.
Well, over here in the UK, it's getting quite difficult to buy a DVD player which doesn't have a region-free mode. The models that don't allow it just didn't sell as well. So the stores tend not to stock them. So the region-free models sell even better. Etc. Etc.
America might be a special case, but from over here, it looks like the market will kill region coding far faster than any court.
Hmmm,
I checked the list and Discordianism isn't on it. So obviously the government consider it less real than "Jedi Knight".
Or they're all Illuminati and just want to keep the name out of the public eye.
Or maybe we all put down "Jedi" because it would be more amusing.
Or maybe we all just wrote in the names of our cats. I mean most cats seem to believe they're god and who are we to say their belief structure is less valid than ours.
If you (an individual) are going to go bankrupt anyway under the current situation, does if matter if you go bankrupt for a hundred times more money?
Such a rule might deter corporations from lawsuits though since they can usually afford the costs. But probably not 100x the costs.
Yes, the intake rate will exceed the loss by Hawking radiation in a lot of cases. There are a couple of cases where this won't happen:
1) If there isn't much matter around. Say, after it's eaten everything nearby or if it drifts into inter-galactic space.
2) It's a small black hole. These won't eat as fast, and energy densities are larger around smaller black holes. This leads to higher rates of particle/anti-particle generation and increased Hawking radiation. Small black holes should evaporate much faster than large ones.