Unfortunately short of hanging a satellite dish out your cabin window there really isn't a way for you to get a TCP/IP uplink. RFC 1149 does specify a TCP connection modality which could be suitable to transmission of data over long distances at sea, but it was last implemented in 1991 and the engineers responsible were never able to get it to send more than a few hundred bytes of data. YMMV, but I think it's probably your best shot.
Um, you should probably watch the iPhone Dev Team's recent presentation at CCC if you want to sound like you have any idea what you're talking about. This wasn't some simple privilege escalation coming out of a buffer overflow in the web browser. Apple signs the shit out of every binary on the phone. The kernel won't execute a binary in userland unless it's signed; the firmware loader won't execute the kernel unless it's signed; the low-level bootloader won't execute the firmware loader unless it's signed.
The iPhone 3G is a paragon of embedded device security, at least by way of making sure unapproved code doesn't run on the device, and it's a testament to just how amazing the iPhone Dev Team guys are that they actually found a way to (a) defeat the whole chain of trust in the iPhone firmware in order to jailbreak it. This by the way doesn't even take into account their real genius, the hack into the baseband firmware for the S-Gold radio device, which executes code in its own universe, completely separate from the S5L application processor.
In short, this hack wasn't some bunch of script kiddies having a sleepover and cracking the copy protection on Arkanoid 2 for the C64. This was a brilliant circumvention of some of the tightest security ever found on a PDA or mobile phone. So please don't disrespect the people who made it possible.
Baikonur? I figured he'd blast off from Pirate's Harbor! I hope his Power Armor's in good condition also, or he'll never get the ring from the old man on Planet X.
I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something. That's what they told us in the Army...
I would worry that unscrupulous players will dig through the source code to find exploits, but it's reassuring to find something that will bring them back to the real world...
Yeah, but that doesn't sound like the sort of problem that gets fixed by learning C++, which has a nasty habit of adding loads of complexity in all the wrong places. If you want tight, fast code and your project doesn't need OOP, use C.
As for programming pedagogy, I think we'd do a lot better if the faculty of CS departments would migrate away from using Java/C++ as the introductory programming model because so much of what gets said initially just goes in one ear and out the other. I will admit to not remembering at all how typedefs or templates in C++ work, and I can't say it's harmed me much.
Python would be a much better choice in my view for a variety of reasons (and I say this though I'm a Perl nut!), or hell, if you teach them Lisp they'll be horribly screwed up for the rest of their lives but at least they'll understand how registers and OOP work.
In short, novice programmers are not going to learn anything useful if you use C++ as the prescriptive model for how a well-written computer program should look -- they're just going to hit the bottle earlier in life.
Actually, Plato refers to an apocalyptic war between the Atlanteans and the Athenians of the day. Have you even played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?
Svalbard is not exactly the choicest site in the world for something as important as a doomsday seed vault. The island is run by Panserbjørnen and witches!
Alright, gordonjcp, I call shenanigans. That's just too crazy to let slip by.
The seriously tiny amount of lead carbonate that made its way out into the atmosphere was largely inert in living things. In 1980, the EPA reported that between 1976 and 1980 (phase-in of the Clean Air Act) the use of lead in gasoline decreased by 50%, and in the same period of time blood concentrations of lead in the US population diminished 37%. I don't suppose there were any other sources of environmental lead you can blame that on?
(FYI, lead carbonate wasn't the danger; it was lead chloride and lead bromide. Much nastier, more strongly reactive stuff.)
On the other hand, the nasty cocktail of lethal chemicals used to replace tetraethyl lead cause all kinds of cancers and birth defects. Lovely. Oh yeah, you know, that ethanol is freaking deadly. I mean, I know this guy who inadvertently drank half a bottle of grape juice contaminated with ethanol and he was incomprehensible for the rest of the night.
Are you fscking kidding me? Maybe the best thing about Facebook is that it gives the user zero control over their profile's HTML.
Unless you're a kick-ass programmer _and_ kick-ass designer, the probability that you can produce anything that looks better than Facebook's "lame ass templates" is 1/aleph one.
A month's supply of fluoxetine in standard dosing costs from $15 to $30. The tricyclics are even cheaper.
And if you only smoke one cigarette a day, you're unlike any other smoker I've met, most of whom do anywhere from half a pack to a pack a day. $5 * 30 = $150/mo. Ouch.
It sounds like I misread you. You're more empirical than I gave you credit for. But that gives you a tendency to trust excessively in the anecdotal. Look at what you said here:
Alcohol and cigarettes are relatively safe -- you see smokers and drinkers who are in their 80s.
If you look at scientifically sound studies of long-term tobacco and alcohol abuse (see here and here to get pointed in the right direction), you'll see that the long-term consequences are clear as day. Sure, you sometimes meet an octogenarian smoker, but you also meet a lot of 50 year-old long-term smokers with emphysema and/or small-cell lung cancer. Show me one example of a person who got cancer from any antidepressant (again, let's talk MAOIs and tricyclics because they've been around a lot longer), let alone a controlled study showing any such trend, and I'll concede the point. Until then let's get back to reality.
You also complain that psychotherapy hasn't been brought under the purview of the scientific process; that depends completely on what kind of psychotherapy you're talking about. Cognitive therapy, for instance, _is_ psychotherapy. It is a subset of psychotherapy. Other subsets include behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and psychoanalysis, which is admittedly unempirical. I'm glad you did get at least some talk therapy in; and from what you say it sounds as though it helped you get a grip on things. Good deal. At least one of the approaches I've mentioned work for most people. I myself am very much about CBT rather than psychoanalysis, but that's just because I'm a skeptical bastard.
You had a rough time because you had to deal with a pill-happy psychiatrist, by far the worst kind. But antidepressants have their place in the treatment of depression for some people, and double-blind studies have proven their effectiveness and safety. Decades of use? We have no idea what that will do because most of the newer stuff hasn't been around for more than 10 years. But tricyclics and MAOIs have, and long-term abusers (I say that because none except the most severely depressed should be on medication for more than 2 years anyway) of those drugs definitely don't suffer anywhere near what smokers or drinkers do except for very occasional cases of hepatic dysplasia, about what light drinking will do to you after a lifetime. Predict away about what will happen to a patient treated with bupropion for 30 years, sir, but it's all Xenu and thetans until you have a rational basis for saying so.
Wow. You knew you had a problem to the extent that you actually went to the trouble of seeing a psychiatrist (not a quick or cheap thing to do in our society, sadly, both in terms of financial and social costs), who recommended drug therapy. I'm assuming s/he also suggested psychotherapy, which any psychiatrist worth beans will recommend way before they get to the point of doling out medication. But you opted for neither of these. Instead, you started self-medicating with St. John's Wort and smoking. Do you think maybe you went wrong somewhere along the line?
Your psychiatrist was in school for years to get their license to practice and prescribe. S/he knew the possible side effects that drug therapy could have. S/he probably weighed that against the risks of leaving your condition untreated, which are, let me tell you, substantial, especially in the long term.
A lot of people self-medicate depression and anxiety with cigarettes and alcohol. It's part of the reason why these two vices are so popular. Unfortunately they're not as well-designed as drugs like fluoxetine and bupropion, and they have massive side effects that double-blind studies have proven the risk of (you know, the same scientifically rigorous protocols that show the minimal adverse effects of prescription antidepressants). It's also helpful to have a trained doctor following the course of your therapy and making adjustments/changes as needed. Of course, if you're one of those wingnuts who thinks that doctors are only after your wallet (a view not even Michael Moore takes), it probably makes more sense for you to booze and smoke your way through your problems yourself. After all, what could possibly go wrong? It's not as though nicotine and alcohol are addictive or anything...
You don't roll your own operating system yourself (at least not completely), so why would you try to muck with your own brain chemistry when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing and you can only use chemicals that have unacceptable side effects? You described St. John's Wort as a "'legal' high" -- do you think your psychiatrist's job is to get you a state-sanctioned buzz?
I really think it would be worth your while to give the medical solution another try. If you think your old psychiatrist was too prescription-happy, fine, get a second opinion. But if you try to manage your problem yourself (I did), you're only going to end up in a world of hurt. Otherwise, well, good luck, and I hope you don't think the same about cancer therapy as you do about psychotherapy.
PS. Wellbutrin isn't an SSRI. It's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor.
It's hard for me to understand why anyone would actually shell out the ridiculously high sticker price for this thing considering that you can have a really excellent 103" front projection apparatus for no more than $20,000, and if you shop right or are willing to forego 1080p you can do it for under $10,000. Sure, you have to design the room it's placed in such that you reduce or even eliminate ambient light for optimum viewing contrast, but given how much you save from not getting the "My God, It's Full of Stars" plasma screen you can probably hire professionals to do it for you and pocket the difference.
Perhaps the base is weighted with $10 bills (£5 notes?). That would explain the price to me more effectively.
I mean, I know there are people who extoll the virtues of plasma over all other display types, but seriously.
People have been complaining of low bitrate on iTMS video. The thing is that H.264 includes a lot of really neat kit that MPEG-2 can only dream of:
Quarter-pixel motion compensation (computationally expensive, but it dramatically improves picture quality and reduces macroblocking)
Multiple bidirectional frames (up to 32 as opposed to the previous 2)
better quantization
And much, much more!
Getting the picture yet? Yuk yuk. The bottom line is that you get radically better performance out of H.264 than MPEG-2 at similar bitrates. So a ~45 minute TV episode weighing in at 400MB for a total combined audio/video bitrate of around 1250 kbps gets nearly identical quality to a 2500 kbps MPEG-2 bitstream. Of course on DVD you get goodies like the 5.1 surround audio track, so it's still a better deal, but Apple's done a lot to close the gap.
The REAL problem with iTMS video has absolutely nothing to do with bitrate. No, it's the shitty masters that the TV producers are provisioning Apple with. The people who do Monk, for instance, don't even bother supplying the 16:9 master -- instead they give Apple a crappy 4:3 version. The BSG people have more than once given Apple 480i broadcast masters instead of the HD masters or at least a 480p source, and you get deinterlace artifacting on some episodes as a result. Garbage in, garbage out.
Start an email campaign to the TV execs demanding that they give Apple the same stuff they give to the HD networks and you'll see an improvement in quality. Until then, you'll get the same old crap.
"You made the hard choice, boy. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it. Congratulations. You beat them, and it's all over."
All over. Beat them. "I beat you, Mazer Rackham."
Mazer laughed, a loud laugh that filled the room. "Ender Wiggin, you never played me. You never played a game since I was your teacher."
Ender didn't get the joke. He had played a great many games, at a terrible cost to himself. He began to get angry.
Mazer reached out and touched his shoulder. Ender shrugged him off. Mazer then grew serious and said, "Ender Wiggin, for the last months you have been the commander of our fleets. There were no games. The battles were real. Your only enemy was the enemy. You won every battle. Ate every pellet. And finally today you fought them at their little box in the middle of the screen, and you destroyed them completely and even got all the little fruits, and they'll never come against us again. You did it. You."
A Google search confirms that Mr. Stern is a prolific writer for the Rock All Times, http://www.therockalltimes.co.uk/information/, which the BBC describes as "An anarchic and hilarious website featuring highly satirical articles on the world's current affairs." The Register calls it "our new, new favourite site...", which is a dead giveaway.
Mr. Stern has also commented that:
Hilary Rosen is a lesbian.
Carli Fiorina is a man.
Only a sniping blogger militia can protect us from exploding Chinamen.
This article reminds me of a fake letter in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Anyone with a good knowledge of politics in the UK at the time should get a kick out of how its tenor is very close to this article.
Dear David Jacobs, East Grinstead, Friday. Why should I have to pay sixty-four guineas each year for my television licence when I can buy one for six. Yours sincerely, Captain R. H. Pretty. PS Support Rhodesia, cut motor taxes, save the Argylls, running-in please pass.
Guys, it really shouldn't surprise you to learn that our friend Mr. Dvorak has a long, tired tradition of bashing Apple whenever the opportunity arises.
A brief history:
He predicted that the iMac (the original!) would be an utter flop.
In 1999, he decried the original iBook (remember the clamshell thingy?) as being effeminate and that no "real man would use one.
In 2001, he wrote that the decline in overall computer sales was because they weren't "fun" anymore, and that Apple was responsible. He had a really skewed line of logic that went something like this: DOS is fun (yay disk compression corruption!), Apple killed DOS, and therefore Apple killed the fun in computers.
He has been predicting an Apple switch to x86 since the early 90s. Granted, this is now happening, but it wasn't even planned in 1996 when he first suggested it. Oh, and for a while he thought Apple would switch to Itanium. Yeah, we all know how well that worked out.
Anyway, you really ought to take anything the guy says with a saltshaker.
"Original music download heavyweight Napster is considering remaking itself as a movie download site too."
So let's see... no business plan, no decisions on DRM or encoding format or anything remotely technical, just the statement that it's being "considered..."
Should this really be considered news? I mean, a lot of groups are looking at doing movie downloads...
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately short of hanging a satellite dish out your cabin window there really isn't a way for you to get a TCP/IP uplink. RFC 1149 does specify a TCP connection modality which could be suitable to transmission of data over long distances at sea, but it was last implemented in 1991 and the engineers responsible were never able to get it to send more than a few hundred bytes of data. YMMV, but I think it's probably your best shot.
Your proposal must be submitted in the form of a self-aware regular expression with at least 200 backreferences.
Um, you should probably watch the iPhone Dev Team's recent presentation at CCC if you want to sound like you have any idea what you're talking about. This wasn't some simple privilege escalation coming out of a buffer overflow in the web browser. Apple signs the shit out of every binary on the phone. The kernel won't execute a binary in userland unless it's signed; the firmware loader won't execute the kernel unless it's signed; the low-level bootloader won't execute the firmware loader unless it's signed.
The iPhone 3G is a paragon of embedded device security, at least by way of making sure unapproved code doesn't run on the device, and it's a testament to just how amazing the iPhone Dev Team guys are that they actually found a way to (a) defeat the whole chain of trust in the iPhone firmware in order to jailbreak it. This by the way doesn't even take into account their real genius, the hack into the baseband firmware for the S-Gold radio device, which executes code in its own universe, completely separate from the S5L application processor.
In short, this hack wasn't some bunch of script kiddies having a sleepover and cracking the copy protection on Arkanoid 2 for the C64. This was a brilliant circumvention of some of the tightest security ever found on a PDA or mobile phone. So please don't disrespect the people who made it possible.
Baikonur? I figured he'd blast off from Pirate's Harbor! I hope his Power Armor's in good condition also, or he'll never get the ring from the old man on Planet X.
I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something. That's what they told us in the Army...
The next revision of SquirrelFish, said to make Javascript not suck anymore, is due to be released in 2048.
I would worry that unscrupulous players will dig through the source code to find exploits, but it's reassuring to find something that will bring them back to the real world...
Yeah, but that doesn't sound like the sort of problem that gets fixed by learning C++, which has a nasty habit of adding loads of complexity in all the wrong places. If you want tight, fast code and your project doesn't need OOP, use C.
As for programming pedagogy, I think we'd do a lot better if the faculty of CS departments would migrate away from using Java/C++ as the introductory programming model because so much of what gets said initially just goes in one ear and out the other. I will admit to not remembering at all how typedefs or templates in C++ work, and I can't say it's harmed me much.
Python would be a much better choice in my view for a variety of reasons (and I say this though I'm a Perl nut!), or hell, if you teach them Lisp they'll be horribly screwed up for the rest of their lives but at least they'll understand how registers and OOP work.
In short, novice programmers are not going to learn anything useful if you use C++ as the prescriptive model for how a well-written computer program should look -- they're just going to hit the bottle earlier in life.
The MBA is at no point 1.08 inches thick, so sorry, you're wrong. Thanks for playing The Flame Game!
Actually, Plato refers to an apocalyptic war between the Atlanteans and the Athenians of the day. Have you even played Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis?
Svalbard is not exactly the choicest site in the world for something as important as a doomsday seed vault. The island is run by Panserbjørnen and witches!
(FYI, lead carbonate wasn't the danger; it was lead chloride and lead bromide. Much nastier, more strongly reactive stuff.)
On the other hand, the nasty cocktail of lethal chemicals used to replace tetraethyl lead cause all kinds of cancers and birth defects. Lovely. Oh yeah, you know, that ethanol is freaking deadly. I mean, I know this guy who inadvertently drank half a bottle of grape juice contaminated with ethanol and he was incomprehensible for the rest of the night.Are you fscking kidding me? Maybe the best thing about Facebook is that it gives the user zero control over their profile's HTML.
Unless you're a kick-ass programmer _and_ kick-ass designer, the probability that you can produce anything that looks better than Facebook's "lame ass templates" is 1/aleph one.
A month's supply of fluoxetine in standard dosing costs from $15 to $30. The tricyclics are even cheaper.
And if you only smoke one cigarette a day, you're unlike any other smoker I've met, most of whom do anywhere from half a pack to a pack a day. $5 * 30 = $150/mo. Ouch.
If you look at scientifically sound studies of long-term tobacco and alcohol abuse (see here and here to get pointed in the right direction), you'll see that the long-term consequences are clear as day. Sure, you sometimes meet an octogenarian smoker, but you also meet a lot of 50 year-old long-term smokers with emphysema and/or small-cell lung cancer. Show me one example of a person who got cancer from any antidepressant (again, let's talk MAOIs and tricyclics because they've been around a lot longer), let alone a controlled study showing any such trend, and I'll concede the point. Until then let's get back to reality.
You also complain that psychotherapy hasn't been brought under the purview of the scientific process; that depends completely on what kind of psychotherapy you're talking about. Cognitive therapy, for instance, _is_ psychotherapy. It is a subset of psychotherapy. Other subsets include behavioral therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and psychoanalysis, which is admittedly unempirical. I'm glad you did get at least some talk therapy in; and from what you say it sounds as though it helped you get a grip on things. Good deal. At least one of the approaches I've mentioned work for most people. I myself am very much about CBT rather than psychoanalysis, but that's just because I'm a skeptical bastard.
You had a rough time because you had to deal with a pill-happy psychiatrist, by far the worst kind. But antidepressants have their place in the treatment of depression for some people, and double-blind studies have proven their effectiveness and safety. Decades of use? We have no idea what that will do because most of the newer stuff hasn't been around for more than 10 years. But tricyclics and MAOIs have, and long-term abusers (I say that because none except the most severely depressed should be on medication for more than 2 years anyway) of those drugs definitely don't suffer anywhere near what smokers or drinkers do except for very occasional cases of hepatic dysplasia, about what light drinking will do to you after a lifetime. Predict away about what will happen to a patient treated with bupropion for 30 years, sir, but it's all Xenu and thetans until you have a rational basis for saying so.
Wow. You knew you had a problem to the extent that you actually went to the trouble of seeing a psychiatrist (not a quick or cheap thing to do in our society, sadly, both in terms of financial and social costs), who recommended drug therapy. I'm assuming s/he also suggested psychotherapy, which any psychiatrist worth beans will recommend way before they get to the point of doling out medication. But you opted for neither of these. Instead, you started self-medicating with St. John's Wort and smoking. Do you think maybe you went wrong somewhere along the line?
Your psychiatrist was in school for years to get their license to practice and prescribe. S/he knew the possible side effects that drug therapy could have. S/he probably weighed that against the risks of leaving your condition untreated, which are, let me tell you, substantial, especially in the long term.
A lot of people self-medicate depression and anxiety with cigarettes and alcohol. It's part of the reason why these two vices are so popular. Unfortunately they're not as well-designed as drugs like fluoxetine and bupropion, and they have massive side effects that double-blind studies have proven the risk of (you know, the same scientifically rigorous protocols that show the minimal adverse effects of prescription antidepressants). It's also helpful to have a trained doctor following the course of your therapy and making adjustments/changes as needed. Of course, if you're one of those wingnuts who thinks that doctors are only after your wallet (a view not even Michael Moore takes), it probably makes more sense for you to booze and smoke your way through your problems yourself. After all, what could possibly go wrong? It's not as though nicotine and alcohol are addictive or anything...
You don't roll your own operating system yourself (at least not completely), so why would you try to muck with your own brain chemistry when you have absolutely no idea what you're doing and you can only use chemicals that have unacceptable side effects? You described St. John's Wort as a "'legal' high" -- do you think your psychiatrist's job is to get you a state-sanctioned buzz?
I really think it would be worth your while to give the medical solution another try. If you think your old psychiatrist was too prescription-happy, fine, get a second opinion. But if you try to manage your problem yourself (I did), you're only going to end up in a world of hurt. Otherwise, well, good luck, and I hope you don't think the same about cancer therapy as you do about psychotherapy.
PS. Wellbutrin isn't an SSRI. It's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor.
So they won't mind if I start encrypting everything then.
It's hard for me to understand why anyone would actually shell out the ridiculously high sticker price for this thing considering that you can have a really excellent 103" front projection apparatus for no more than $20,000, and if you shop right or are willing to forego 1080p you can do it for under $10,000. Sure, you have to design the room it's placed in such that you reduce or even eliminate ambient light for optimum viewing contrast, but given how much you save from not getting the "My God, It's Full of Stars" plasma screen you can probably hire professionals to do it for you and pocket the difference.
Perhaps the base is weighted with $10 bills (£5 notes?). That would explain the price to me more effectively.
I mean, I know there are people who extoll the virtues of plasma over all other display types, but seriously.
Getting the picture yet? Yuk yuk. The bottom line is that you get radically better performance out of H.264 than MPEG-2 at similar bitrates. So a ~45 minute TV episode weighing in at 400MB for a total combined audio/video bitrate of around 1250 kbps gets nearly identical quality to a 2500 kbps MPEG-2 bitstream. Of course on DVD you get goodies like the 5.1 surround audio track, so it's still a better deal, but Apple's done a lot to close the gap.
The REAL problem with iTMS video has absolutely nothing to do with bitrate. No, it's the shitty masters that the TV producers are provisioning Apple with. The people who do Monk, for instance, don't even bother supplying the 16:9 master -- instead they give Apple a crappy 4:3 version. The BSG people have more than once given Apple 480i broadcast masters instead of the HD masters or at least a 480p source, and you get deinterlace artifacting on some episodes as a result. Garbage in, garbage out.
Start an email campaign to the TV execs demanding that they give Apple the same stuff they give to the HD networks and you'll see an improvement in quality. Until then, you'll get the same old crap.
"You made the hard choice, boy. But heaven knows there was no other way you could have done it. Congratulations. You beat them, and it's all over."
All over. Beat them. "I beat you, Mazer Rackham."
Mazer laughed, a loud laugh that filled the room. "Ender Wiggin, you never played me. You never played a game since I was your teacher."
Ender didn't get the joke. He had played a great many games, at a terrible cost to himself. He began to get angry.
Mazer reached out and touched his shoulder. Ender shrugged him off. Mazer then grew serious and said, "Ender Wiggin, for the last months you have been the commander of our fleets. There were no games. The battles were real. Your only enemy was the enemy. You won every battle. Ate every pellet. And finally today you fought them at their little box in the middle of the screen, and you destroyed them completely and even got all the little fruits, and they'll never come against us again. You did it. You."
- Hilary Rosen is a lesbian.
- Carli Fiorina is a man.
- Only a sniping blogger militia can protect us from exploding Chinamen.
I rest my case.Guys, it really shouldn't surprise you to learn that our friend Mr. Dvorak has a long, tired tradition of bashing Apple whenever the opportunity arises. A brief history:
Anyway, you really ought to take anything the guy says with a saltshaker.
Wouldn't a FUDCon be more up SCO's alley?
"Original music download heavyweight Napster is considering remaking itself as a movie download site too."
So let's see... no business plan, no decisions on DRM or encoding format or anything remotely technical, just the statement that it's being "considered..."
Should this really be considered news? I mean, a lot of groups are looking at doing movie downloads...