That being the point of the last paragraph of my post. It's not there yet, and there's a bit of a gap between pre-loading a machine with a cracked LegitCheckControl.dll and running an online update service. But it's the logical next step.
If people can hack away the nagging window that John from the Shady Store can't then it is a Darwin Award to John: he deserves to be out of business. OTOH there's always "Dave's Shady Computer Store" across the street from John.
So, Microsoft just needs to update the tool every few months. Once John and Dave have shipped their machines with pre-loaded pirate copies of Windows, they can't update them - but Microsoft can. Eventually, the users will download the latest version of the validation tool, and they'll start getting the popups.
Perhaps the next innovation in cracking activation will be the Consortium of Shady Stores Automatic Update Service, preloaded on all machines from John, Dave, Berlinda and Barry. That way, the latest cracks can be downloaded along with the latest updates to the validation tool.
The Win32 API (or at least the CreateFile function - I didn't check any others) will cope with both forward and backward slashes fine. It's not a hack in the shell/IE.
(On the other hand, I don't think forward slashes are officially supported, so the Open/Save common dialogs aren't exactly broken, either...)
What exactly is stopping you from passing "structured data" from one app to another under UNIX? Ever hear of YAML or XML?
The existing *nix utilities are generally set up to output text. If you're in full control of the programs at both end of the pipe, fine - but usually you're not.
Besides, what parsing are you doing in a shell script anyway?
The output of "ps" is a common one, and that can be a pain across multiple platforms. "ps" under Slackware supports a different set of options (and a slightly different default output format) to "ps" under Solaris - this has bitten me a few times in the past.
The idea of piping the output of "ps" (or the Monad equivalent) and being handed a set of process objects with standard attributes to iterate over appeals to me. For one thing, attributes can be referred to by name, not column number. For another, additional attributes can be added to the process object at a later time without breaking existing scripts, or requiring additional flags to be passed to "ps". A space-delimited table is a fine way to present information to a user on a text console... but is it really the best way to present information to another program?
Having said all that... I don't know if the Monad way is intrinsicly better. The Unix model of small, independent tools operating in an "everything's a file" environment is a nice ideal, and works well in practice an awful lot of the time. I wouldn't be caught dead without cat, grep and netcat on any system, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
No, the politicians have noticed that "RFID" is a hot-button word with the public. Instead, the cards will be using a "chip with a radio frequency contactless interface". There's no RFID involved with this project, none at all...
(As an aside, I happened to spot it whilst on board a Pendolino, which I thought was quite appropiate - the Pendolinos are also tilting trains, and make use of tilting technology developed for the British Rail APT.)
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer
on
World of Queuecraft
·
· Score: 1
This is already done - in all the MMOs I'm familiar with, a "server" is actually a server cluster.
The problem with simply adding more servers to the cluster is that there's a granularity limit on the load-balancing. In a web cluster, the granularity is either per-connection (it doesn't matter which server in the cluster you hit) or per-session (you're directed to a server the first time you hit the site, and stay with that server until your session expires).
In a MMO, the granularity is normally based on the virtual geography - the world is split into "zones" or "landblocks", and each server is responsible for a group of blocks. There's a reason for this - users need to be able to see and interact with other users near them, so it makes sense to divide the simulation by locality.
Some games will dynamically load-balance these blocks across the server cluster, while others will assign blocks to servers at cluster startup. Either way, once a zone becomes popular enough that one server has difficulty coping, you've got a problem, and simply adding hardware won't help.
Of course, other forms of lag are amenable to simply throwing more hardware at the problem: for example, if the root cause is too many blocks active concurrently, adding more servers to the cluster will probably help. It all depends on the specific situation.
Allowing characters to "float" between world instances (what the players tend to see as servers) brings its own problems - each world has its own community, economy and history. You don't want to forcibly seperate players from their communities in a community-oriented game!
Every lottery terminal I've seen in the UK uses ISDN, I wouldn't be suprised if other "appliance" technology like credit card terminals or alarm systems do as well.
A 37-year-old spinal cord-injured female patient, transplanted of multipotent stem cells from human UC blood, with improved sensory perception and mobility, both functionally and morphologically: a case study
HLA-matched UC blood-derived multipotent stem cells were directly transplanted into the injured spinal cord site of a 37-year-old female patient suffering from spinal cord injury (SPI). In this case, human cord blood (UCB)-derived multipotent stem cells improved sensory perception and movement in the SPI patient's hips and thighs within 41 days of cell transplantation. CT and MRI results also showed regeneration of the spinal cord at the injured site and some of the cauda equina below it. Therefore, it is suggested that UCB multipotent stem cell transplantation could be a good treatment method for SPI patients.
The "gates" that are being talked about are probably "quality gates", which aren't just about automated testing. There's a brief description of them here.
As for SourceSafe, I've been told that it sucks. Badly. The source control in Visual Studio Team System is meant to be an awful lot better - they're trying to compete with things like Rational ClearCase. That said, it's both pricey and a 1.0 release. It might be worth looking at, though, if you have management insisting on a Microsoft solution.
C# 3.0 also gains anonymous value types. You can do something like:
var c = new {Name = "Fred Bloggs", Age = 12};
Now, what type is c? It's an anonymous struct type, with two members - Name and Age. As it's anonymous, it's obviously not possible to declare it using the standard syntax.
The language is still strongly, statically typed, though - the following would throw a compile-time error:
c.Dept = "CS";
Now, as to why this construct was added to the language in the first place: these anonymous types are useful when using LINQ to query a data source:
var expr = people.Select(p => new { p.Name, BadCoder = p.Age == 11 });
foreach (var item in expr) Console.WriteLine("{0} is a {1} coder", item.Name, item.BadCoder ? "bad" : "good");
expr and item are both given the appropiate type for the data they contain, with no need to explicity define the types. Most of the benefits of strong static typing are retained with this approach, and there's no need to define a type to store data for every weird query you run against the database.
One benefit that is lost is the ability to share these types across assembly boundaries, which might be an issue in real, three-tier applications. On the other hand, if there's a need to pass data directly from the database to the client application, what's the point of having the middle tier in the first place? So, this might turn out to be a non-issue.
(My examples were taken or adapted from this white paper, which is an overview of the LINQ project, including the new syntax added to C# 3.0.)
The.NET Framework attempts to maintain backward and forward compatibility between versions. However, a change to the.NET Framework that improves security, correctness, or functionality might also raise compatibility issues.
Backward compatibility means an application written for the.NET Framework version 1.0 can execute on version 1.1. The.NET Framework provides the highest degree of support for backward compatibility. Most applications that work on the current version of the.NET Framework will work on the next version of the.NET Framework.
Forward compatibility means an application written for the.NET Framework version 1.1 can execute on version 1.0. Although forward compatibility is supported by the.NET Framework, an application that uses a type or member specific to version 1.1 will never run properly on version 1.0. This is not a forward incompatibility because the application can never be expected to work. If you want your application to run properly on both versions of the.NET Framework, then your application should only use types and members in version 1.0.
Now, I'll admit it's not always perfect, but in my experience it works. I work on a large LOB application, which has been developed for the 1.0 framework. It runs fine (in fact, it runs somewhat better) on the 1.1 framework.
The only work we had to do to enable this was add a few lines to the configuration files on the machines which had both 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks installed. This forced the applications to use a specific version (1.1), not the version they were compiled against. I believe the middle-tier components, which are web services hosted in IIS, required a similar tweak to the IIS configuration.
Requiring specific versions of other libraries may well be an issue - I've not had any experience one way or the other. The project I work on deploys all the required dependencies alongside the application files, which I would expect to mitigate most versioning issues with the libraries we use.
First off, that poke at MS Office's loaded DLLs will have to wait for tomorrow sometime. Damn the British train network...
i did not bother to check through that, but there are a lot of components that are very closely tied together.
True - but is there anything stopping other applications from drawing on those components? This is veering towards the "undocumented APIs in Windows" thing - and on that, I have no opinion. I simply don't know enough either way.
usually they deploy one version and stick at it for years - maybe it was older version or first version in a branch ? as i said, 1.1.4 has not failed me from it's release date even once, and i am not the most polite user.
maybe platform oo.org is running matters in this case ? i am running it on linux and have had only very pleasant experience:)
The CS department completely rebuilds the clones every year. They haven't had a major update since the last time I used OO.o on them, and they're currently running Slackware 10.0. The installed OO.o package is openoffice.org-1.1.2-i386-1. Not bang up to date, but only two minor versions behind, I think.
even though it is somewhat too late to make any changes for 2.0 version except serious crashes, you can always aim for 2.0.1 or further. you are welcome:)
If I get time, I will. Now, if you could name a software package (open source or otherwise) that can provide free time in abundance, I'd be eternally in your debt *grin*
I'm not at home right now, but when I get back, I'll check what files Office loads, and which of those were already loaded by something else. I'm interested if they actually are using a pre-loader, even with the startup component disabled or not installed.
Word and Excel, which are the main parts of Office that I use, tend to be very stable for me. They're not perfect, but I've only had a few crashes, and on the occasions it has crashed it's managed to recover my work from the autosave files.
As for OO.o, I've had problems with it randomly segfaulting on me, taking my unsaved work with me. This might be something to do with the way my uni has it set up on their systems as opposed to the applications themselves - I'm not entirely sure. But, the uni support staff are generally competent when setting up apps for us to use.
Missing features: the two off the top of my head are the lack of "normal mode" in the word processor, and the inability to get an equation from a trend line on a graph in the spreadsheet. These may have been added since I last used it, I'm not sure.
Perhaps it's a case of bad luck; perhaps the applications I used were somewhat outdated - I'm not sure. At the end of the day, it's all about picking the right tool for the job. I use F/OSS for a lot of tasks, but in this area, I've found that Microsoft's tools are superior. YMMV, of course, and when OO.o 2.0 comes out of beta, I'll give it another shot.
It's not there on my machine - not in Startup, nor in the registry. I'll admit it may have been there at installation and I've since deleted it, but the lack of it doesn't stop Word/Excel loading quickly.
It's not exactly a solution when all the preloaded bits are swapped out within half an hour anyway - it still takes just as long to load. Besides, what if every program tried that solution? You'd be well into the swap file before you'd finished logging in.
I've looked into OpenOffice a fair bit - I don't exactly want to pay the Office tax, but at the moment, Office best fits my needs. OO.o tends to be slower, more crash-prone and missing some features I use a fair bit - so for the time being, I'm sticking with Office. When OO.o matures a little more, I'll look at it again.
Whatever it's faults, Windows is very well supported by the hardware companies. As a general rule, the FOSS OSes aren't. Unless this changes, doing what you suggest just isn't practical - and even if it does, what happens if your hardware is newer than the driver release on the CD?
One warning - my university claims copyright and intellectual property rights on anything submitted to them for an assessment. Yours might do the same.
If you've been working on this for a class project, you might need to get permission from your university/department to take the code away again.
I've no idea how common this sort of restriction is, or if they're actually enforced - I just know that technically, I'm subject to one.
And for those of us in the UK, we've still got a couple of weeks before exams even start - and a month until the end of term.
If they're trying to organise something like this internationally, getting the timing right is hard.
It's possible to split the read/write parts of a register - you write to it to set certain paramaters, for instance, then read from it to read a completely unrelated set of status bits.
I've got no idea if this is used in current hardware (I'm basing this on hardware devices I've built for very small Z80-based embedded systems for coursework), but it's certainly possible to do this.
On the positive side, you can't skim a C&P card and then use it in a C&P retail outlet.
The technology to clone the IC on a card isn't around yet, as far as I know, and you can't directly read the IC's memory.
If you merely clone the magstripe onto a blank card, both the new C&P terminals and the slightly older ICC terminals without pinpads will refuse to accept it, and insist that the card be plased in the ICC reader.
It's not perfect - but with a requirement for the original card for retail transactions, and the CCV2 number for customer-not-present transactions, it's a lot harder to use someone's card without their knowledge.
If your card is skimmed at a restraunt, you probably won't notice until you get your next statement. If your wallet is swiped, you're much more likely to report and cancel the card quickly, hopefully before the theives get a chance to use it. As they need to have seen your enter your PIN, there's also a fair chance they'll be on CCTV too.
Chip & Pin isn't perfect, by a long way - but it's a fair whack better than magstripes and signature checking.
Jacksons (now part of Sainsbury's) pay the bounty to the cashier - or at least they did around six months ago when I did my last stint of till-monkeying.
Didn't make much difference to me - I always checked the signatures, and have refused purchases on those that don't match.
Slashdot Mirror
"Page 3" doesn't have the same connotations everywhere around the world...
That being the point of the last paragraph of my post. It's not there yet, and there's a bit of a gap between pre-loading a machine with a cracked LegitCheckControl.dll and running an online update service. But it's the logical next step.
Perhaps the next innovation in cracking activation will be the Consortium of Shady Stores Automatic Update Service, preloaded on all machines from John, Dave, Berlinda and Barry. That way, the latest cracks can be downloaded along with the latest updates to the validation tool.
The Win32 API (or at least the CreateFile function - I didn't check any others) will cope with both forward and backward slashes fine. It's not a hack in the shell/IE.
(On the other hand, I don't think forward slashes are officially supported, so the Open/Save common dialogs aren't exactly broken, either...)
The idea of piping the output of "ps" (or the Monad equivalent) and being handed a set of process objects with standard attributes to iterate over appeals to me. For one thing, attributes can be referred to by name, not column number. For another, additional attributes can be added to the process object at a later time without breaking existing scripts, or requiring additional flags to be passed to "ps". A space-delimited table is a fine way to present information to a user on a text console... but is it really the best way to present information to another program?
Having said all that... I don't know if the Monad way is intrinsicly better. The Unix model of small, independent tools operating in an "everything's a file" environment is a nice ideal, and works well in practice an awful lot of the time. I wouldn't be caught dead without cat, grep and netcat on any system, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
No, the politicians have noticed that "RFID" is a hot-button word with the public. Instead, the cards will be using a "chip with a radio frequency contactless interface". There's no RFID involved with this project, none at all...
f id_evasions/
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/30/burnham_r
There was one there as of July last year.
(As an aside, I happened to spot it whilst on board a Pendolino, which I thought was quite appropiate - the Pendolinos are also tilting trains, and make use of tilting technology developed for the British Rail APT.)
This is already done - in all the MMOs I'm familiar with, a "server" is actually a server cluster.
The problem with simply adding more servers to the cluster is that there's a granularity limit on the load-balancing. In a web cluster, the granularity is either per-connection (it doesn't matter which server in the cluster you hit) or per-session (you're directed to a server the first time you hit the site, and stay with that server until your session expires).
In a MMO, the granularity is normally based on the virtual geography - the world is split into "zones" or "landblocks", and each server is responsible for a group of blocks. There's a reason for this - users need to be able to see and interact with other users near them, so it makes sense to divide the simulation by locality.
Some games will dynamically load-balance these blocks across the server cluster, while others will assign blocks to servers at cluster startup. Either way, once a zone becomes popular enough that one server has difficulty coping, you've got a problem, and simply adding hardware won't help.
Of course, other forms of lag are amenable to simply throwing more hardware at the problem: for example, if the root cause is too many blocks active concurrently, adding more servers to the cluster will probably help. It all depends on the specific situation.
Allowing characters to "float" between world instances (what the players tend to see as servers) brings its own problems - each world has its own community, economy and history. You don't want to forcibly seperate players from their communities in a community-oriented game!
Every lottery terminal I've seen in the UK uses ISDN, I wouldn't be suprised if other "appliance" technology like credit card terminals or alarm systems do as well.
As for SourceSafe, I've been told that it sucks. Badly. The source control in Visual Studio Team System is meant to be an awful lot better - they're trying to compete with things like Rational ClearCase. That said, it's both pricey and a 1.0 release. It might be worth looking at, though, if you have management insisting on a Microsoft solution.
The language is still strongly, statically typed, though - the following would throw a compile-time error:
Now, as to why this construct was added to the language in the first place: these anonymous types are useful when using LINQ to query a data source: expr and item are both given the appropiate type for the data they contain, with no need to explicity define the types. Most of the benefits of strong static typing are retained with this approach, and there's no need to define a type to store data for every weird query you run against the database.One benefit that is lost is the ability to share these types across assembly boundaries, which might be an issue in real, three-tier applications. On the other hand, if there's a need to pass data directly from the database to the client application, what's the point of having the middle tier in the first place? So, this might turn out to be a non-issue.
(My examples were taken or adapted from this white paper, which is an overview of the LINQ project, including the new syntax added to C# 3.0.)
Now, I'll admit it's not always perfect, but in my experience it works. I work on a large LOB application, which has been developed for the 1.0 framework. It runs fine (in fact, it runs somewhat better) on the 1.1 framework.
The only work we had to do to enable this was add a few lines to the configuration files on the machines which had both 1.0 and 1.1 frameworks installed. This forced the applications to use a specific version (1.1), not the version they were compiled against. I believe the middle-tier components, which are web services hosted in IIS, required a similar tweak to the IIS configuration.
Requiring specific versions of other libraries may well be an issue - I've not had any experience one way or the other. The project I work on deploys all the required dependencies alongside the application files, which I would expect to mitigate most versioning issues with the libraries we use.
I think it did in previous versions; it's not in any of my lists of startup tasks, and I can't find it in the Office directory either.
[Note: I'm running Office 2003 here, and don't have access to any previous versions to check against.]
i did not bother to check through that, but there are a lot of components that are very closely tied together.
True - but is there anything stopping other applications from drawing on those components? This is veering towards the "undocumented APIs in Windows" thing - and on that, I have no opinion. I simply don't know enough either way.
usually they deploy one version and stick at it for years - maybe it was older version or first version in a branch ? as i said, 1.1.4 has not failed me from it's release date even once, and i am not the most polite user. maybe platform oo.org is running matters in this case ? i am running it on linux and have had only very pleasant experience :)
The CS department completely rebuilds the clones every year. They haven't had a major update since the last time I used OO.o on them, and they're currently running Slackware 10.0. The installed OO.o package is openoffice.org-1.1.2-i386-1. Not bang up to date, but only two minor versions behind, I think.
even though it is somewhat too late to make any changes for 2.0 version except serious crashes, you can always aim for 2.0.1 or further. you are welcome :)
If I get time, I will. Now, if you could name a software package (open source or otherwise) that can provide free time in abundance, I'd be eternally in your debt *grin*
I'm not at home right now, but when I get back, I'll check what files Office loads, and which of those were already loaded by something else. I'm interested if they actually are using a pre-loader, even with the startup component disabled or not installed.
Word and Excel, which are the main parts of Office that I use, tend to be very stable for me. They're not perfect, but I've only had a few crashes, and on the occasions it has crashed it's managed to recover my work from the autosave files.
As for OO.o, I've had problems with it randomly segfaulting on me, taking my unsaved work with me. This might be something to do with the way my uni has it set up on their systems as opposed to the applications themselves - I'm not entirely sure. But, the uni support staff are generally competent when setting up apps for us to use.
Missing features: the two off the top of my head are the lack of "normal mode" in the word processor, and the inability to get an equation from a trend line on a graph in the spreadsheet. These may have been added since I last used it, I'm not sure.
Perhaps it's a case of bad luck; perhaps the applications I used were somewhat outdated - I'm not sure. At the end of the day, it's all about picking the right tool for the job. I use F/OSS for a lot of tasks, but in this area, I've found that Microsoft's tools are superior. YMMV, of course, and when OO.o 2.0 comes out of beta, I'll give it another shot.
It's not there on my machine - not in Startup, nor in the registry. I'll admit it may have been there at installation and I've since deleted it, but the lack of it doesn't stop Word/Excel loading quickly.
It's not exactly a solution when all the preloaded bits are swapped out within half an hour anyway - it still takes just as long to load. Besides, what if every program tried that solution? You'd be well into the swap file before you'd finished logging in.
I've looked into OpenOffice a fair bit - I don't exactly want to pay the Office tax, but at the moment, Office best fits my needs. OO.o tends to be slower, more crash-prone and missing some features I use a fair bit - so for the time being, I'm sticking with Office. When OO.o matures a little more, I'll look at it again.
So the solution to crappy software is to load it at boot time? Riiiight.
I can sorta see that for browsers, considering how much of IE is shared with the shell and loaded at login. But for a word processor?
One word: drivers.
Whatever it's faults, Windows is very well supported by the hardware companies. As a general rule, the FOSS OSes aren't. Unless this changes, doing what you suggest just isn't practical - and even if it does, what happens if your hardware is newer than the driver release on the CD?
One warning - my university claims copyright and intellectual property rights on anything submitted to them for an assessment. Yours might do the same.
If you've been working on this for a class project, you might need to get permission from your university/department to take the code away again.
I've no idea how common this sort of restriction is, or if they're actually enforced - I just know that technically, I'm subject to one.
And for those of us in the UK, we've still got a couple of weeks before exams even start - and a month until the end of term. If they're trying to organise something like this internationally, getting the timing right is hard.
It's possible to split the read/write parts of a register - you write to it to set certain paramaters, for instance, then read from it to read a completely unrelated set of status bits.
I've got no idea if this is used in current hardware (I'm basing this on hardware devices I've built for very small Z80-based embedded systems for coursework), but it's certainly possible to do this.
On the positive side, you can't skim a C&P card and then use it in a C&P retail outlet.
The technology to clone the IC on a card isn't around yet, as far as I know, and you can't directly read the IC's memory.
If you merely clone the magstripe onto a blank card, both the new C&P terminals and the slightly older ICC terminals without pinpads will refuse to accept it, and insist that the card be plased in the ICC reader.
It's not perfect - but with a requirement for the original card for retail transactions, and the CCV2 number for customer-not-present transactions, it's a lot harder to use someone's card without their knowledge.
If your card is skimmed at a restraunt, you probably won't notice until you get your next statement. If your wallet is swiped, you're much more likely to report and cancel the card quickly, hopefully before the theives get a chance to use it. As they need to have seen your enter your PIN, there's also a fair chance they'll be on CCTV too.
Chip & Pin isn't perfect, by a long way - but it's a fair whack better than magstripes and signature checking.
Jacksons (now part of Sainsbury's) pay the bounty to the cashier - or at least they did around six months ago when I did my last stint of till-monkeying.
Didn't make much difference to me - I always checked the signatures, and have refused purchases on those that don't match.