If it becomes more common to require passports, then more people will routinely get passports, and the passport office will be more overwhelmed with work, and more people who should not be given passports will get them. If passports are routinely checked, instead of only suspcious situations, then border agents will be overwhelmed with work, and more people who should never be allowed to cross the border, will do so.
Good lord. I need a 2-D desktop with no more than 1280x1024 resolution, to drive a program with no more requirements than, say, Cakewalk Sonar, and you show me a $300 video card?
>Why aren't we seeing 1 GHz+ fanless systems in the >Mini-ITX form factor?
That's a very good question. I've been on a quest for some years now, for a system that can be mounted in a shallow 19" rack form factor, that has no fan whatsoever but enough power to run audio applications. I can't even find good compromises, although I make do with my Antec Sonata, Zalman coolers, etc.
Shuttles are *way* too noisy, which was upsetting because they were recommended to me on the basis of them being very quiet, so I bought one, yuck.
Dell desktop machines are surprisingly quiet, I've discovered.
The Antec Sonata case is still not quiet enough to be called "silent" but it's pretty good. The hardest part of putting my system together has been finding a fanless 1.5v AGP video card. ASUS PxPN00 boards have no fan on the bridge chip, which is nice. Seagate SATA drives with the SNXXXX model numbers are pretty quiet, especially in the Antec case.
But as far as Mini-ITX, except for the 533 C3 boards, they all have fans.
>Author talks aout line counts and method numbers..
Also, it's a data-driven design. If you aren't using a code generator to create most of your value objects automatically from your DB schema, you're working too hard - and you shouldn't be counding those objects as lines of code.
>Hibernate seems to be the most hyped technology for >webapps on java right now.
I use Hibernate for databinding in production systems with thousands of users. I don't think of anything as "hype" when it works. Hibernate is very good at what it does, although it is a little tricky to learn how to use it effectively.
As to the comparison of configuration lines, you have a huge amount of power in Java config, and the tradeoff for that, of course, is a little complexity.
>I'd be very surprised if Adobe doesn't send out a >storm of DMCA notices "protecting" the patents I'm >sure they've taken out on the "look and feel" of >photo-shop.
Anybody can "ask" anything they would like of anyone else. Getting a court order is another matter.
Never capitulate to demands in a mere *letter.* Anybody can write a letter.
"The fact this girl changed her grades is of course wrong in every way possible but I give her credit for being original about it."
Original? I can remember when computers on campus meant mainframes, and when we could access with remote terminals, the very first question many people would ask, would be along the lines of "can you get into the system and change your grades?"
Sounds like some fool has actually gone and done it, and I'm sure people have tried similar tactics before, but nothing is new under the sun.
>Yeah, like you'd accept a new car with scratches in >the paintwork.
Actually, this makes it very easy to negotiate thousands of dollars off the sticker price. I bought a hail damaged car and a last-year's model pickup truck using this strategy.
"If it's got dead pixels, i'd be returning it for replacement/refund."
I can't mail-order an LCD for this reason. If I bought one, I'd check it in the store. I realize pixels can go south after a while, but that's really not in the same category as something that was defective before it left the store.
The first dead pixel in a screen lowers the value by an exponential amount. The second and subsequent dead pixels aren't that much worse than the first, until there are more than a few.
A dead pixel near the middle of the screen makes a $400 panel worth $50.
The attitude of the manufacturers has just made me keep using CRTs. But I do have an LCD panel on my keyboard rig, because it's convenient. And, truth be told, for that application, dead pixels wouldn't be a huge problem, and it's probably going to break anyway (gets banged around on stage, packed and moved and unpacked and bolted to a stand, etc.)
But for a primary desktop or laptop screen, or for a movie screen, I'd never accept any visible, usage-limiting defects.
The last thing I want to hear as a consumer, is that a product is defective because "it's hard to get it right".
"How long have you worked with a piece of dust or a smudge on the screen before you: a) noticed; b) findlly got irritated enough to do something about it?"
Never. And I've threatened, not jokingly, to remove the fingers from any hand that TOUCHES MY LAPTOP SCREEN.
Just because YOU are willing to accept a defective product at full price, does not mean everyone should accept it.
"As a side note, the lackey at the Best Buy store I talked to told me that they couldn't do anything for me because I neglected to purchase their extended warranty. I probably could have pushed the issue with a manager but I figured I'd try the lower stress Sony option first"
It is probably much cheaper to file in the US Court of Claims than to buy the extended warranty. Mention that to the manager.
>Can someone please explain to me how having an LCD >with dead pixels (even one) is considered "normal"?
Given the process required to make these things, it's a miracle that they work at all.
The substrate has to be etched to a precision of hundreds of angstroms. Then several layers are applied with a sputtering process, also to extremely small tolerances.
The main way to keep manufacturing costs down is to make not one panel at a time, but to make large sheets of Si-TFT, sort of the inverse of the "more transistors per die" method used to reduce costs for microchips.
Each pixel in a color LCD panel has 3 transistors (TFT's) and 6 capacitors.
The problem is the transistor that gates each subpixel can fail, and there's no redundancy, and of course, no way it can be repaired. Personally, I think the solution may be to increase the number of TFT's by an order of magnitude, so that if one fails, another can take over. But if they could get more transistors on the substrate, they'd be used for higher resolutions, not for fault tolerance.
"Smart-alec remarks don't breed technical acceptance. Usually contempt."
So are you talking about my contempt for a finance guy's smart-ass remarks about technical merits of something he knew nothing about? As PHB moments go, this was mild. Lighten up, will you? That was 1993.
"I don't ****ing care if you think the UN is run by imcompetent fools!"
"Incompetent fool" might be ok. We're observing very intelligent, systematic corruption, not the result of incopetence at all. That's very different, and a source of some concern that must be considered before putting the UN in charge of *anything.*
"I know it sounds a bit like 1337-speak, but it's very easy to make a common word virtually un-guessable by doing easy-to-remember substitutions like 0 for o, 1 for i, & for 8 and so forth."
That does not make it substantially more "un-guessable", it doesn't even increase the complexity of a brute-force attack by any significant magnitude. Neither would merely going to foreign languages.
But I suspect you know this, and you are trolling.
My company was an early adopter of Linux for core tech infrastructure.
Once, one of the finance people asked me, half jokingly, "So is this Linux a piece of shit or what?"
I replied: It is. we use it for the fertilizer your paycheck grows in.
I mark that moment as the turning point when linux went from skepticism to aceeptance in my company.
Re:Python with Cocoa
on
Hacking Mac OS X
·
· Score: 3, Informative
>I would like to know more about it.
www.python.org
>What is it good for?
It's good for general-purpose programming, particularly if you need the end result to be cross-platform.
It's extensible with all kinds of 3rd party libraries available. It's a much better fit for many types of work than is Perl, and arguments have been made that it is more efficient and easier to learn than Java.
>Any drawbacks?
Like Java, it's a bytecode-interpreted language, so to-the-metal programming isn't really possible.
>How to learn it?
It's quite easy to learn, even as a first programming language. It's extremely easy to do certain kinds of complex things (you name it) because there are so many modules available. This is something that Python shares with Perl and Java, of course, but python programmers argue that it's altogether easier to work with.
I was on the fence, until some production code rolled in my company that was written in Python. It's a success story for the folks involved, and the quality of their work and the speed at which it was completed, really speaks for itself.
"While we're on the subject of that, why do they not let nail clippers through security"
Nail clippers are allowed, even those with nail files.
"but let you take glass bottles on to the plane?"
Do you believe there should be such a restriction? Talk to your Congressman, not us.
Long before the current scenario, I got in trouble for the empty grenade that I kept in my tool bag. It falls under "realistic replicas of incendiary devices" and is not allowed. It was unfortunate, since the grenade was always the first tool to come out of my bag...
Slashdot Mirror
If it becomes more common to require passports, then more people will routinely get passports, and the passport office will be more overwhelmed with work, and more people who should not be given passports will get them. If passports are routinely checked, instead of only suspcious situations, then border agents will be overwhelmed with work, and more people who should never be allowed to cross the border, will do so.
Good lord. I need a 2-D desktop with no more than 1280x1024 resolution, to drive a program with no more requirements than, say, Cakewalk Sonar, and you show me a $300 video card?
>Why aren't we seeing 1 GHz+ fanless systems in the
>Mini-ITX form factor?
That's a very good question. I've been on a quest for some years now, for a system that can be mounted in a shallow 19" rack form factor, that has no fan whatsoever but enough power to run audio applications. I can't even find good compromises, although I make do with my Antec Sonata, Zalman coolers, etc.
Shuttles are *way* too noisy, which was upsetting because they were recommended to me on the basis of them being very quiet, so I bought one, yuck.
Dell desktop machines are surprisingly quiet, I've discovered.
The Antec Sonata case is still not quiet enough to be called "silent" but it's pretty good. The hardest part of putting my system together has been finding a fanless 1.5v AGP video card. ASUS PxPN00 boards have no fan on the bridge chip, which is nice. Seagate SATA drives with the SNXXXX model numbers are pretty quiet, especially in the Antec case.
But as far as Mini-ITX, except for the 533 C3 boards, they all have fans.
Fortran still wins on numerical integration methods.
>Author talks aout line counts and method numbers..
Also, it's a data-driven design. If you aren't using a code generator to create most of your value objects automatically from your DB schema, you're working too hard - and you shouldn't be counding those objects as lines of code.
>Hibernate seems to be the most hyped technology for
>webapps on java right now.
I use Hibernate for databinding in production systems with thousands of users. I don't think of anything as "hype" when it works. Hibernate is very good at what it does, although it is a little tricky to learn how to use it effectively.
As to the comparison of configuration lines, you have a huge amount of power in Java config, and the tradeoff for that, of course, is a little complexity.
"I cannot STAND when otherwise generally reputable news sources buy into the retarded pranks of April Fools."
Did they? Or just
>I'd be very surprised if Adobe doesn't send out a
>storm of DMCA notices "protecting" the patents I'm
>sure they've taken out on the "look and feel" of
>photo-shop.
Anybody can "ask" anything they would like of anyone else. Getting a court order is another matter.
Never capitulate to demands in a mere *letter.* Anybody can write a letter.
"The fact this girl changed her grades is of course wrong in every way possible but I give her credit for being original about it."
Original? I can remember when computers on campus meant mainframes, and when we could access with remote terminals, the very first question many people would ask, would be along the lines of "can you get into the system and change your grades?"
Sounds like some fool has actually gone and done it, and I'm sure people have tried similar tactics before, but nothing is new under the sun.
"I've even considered writing a mass storage driver for the netMD."
You gonna change the firmware on the MD?
I'd love this.
"If one pixel is fixed at black or a bright colour, there's absolutely fuck all you can do"
A bright pixel can be disabled by using a laser to kill the responsible TFT.
>I think bad pixels could reasonably be called
>"defective".
It could be, if they did not represent to you in writing that up to N dead pixels is not defective.
If you, a reasonable person, agreed to that reasonable disclaimer, you won't have a case you can take to court.
>Yeah, like you'd accept a new car with scratches in
>the paintwork.
Actually, this makes it very easy to negotiate thousands of dollars off the sticker price. I bought a hail damaged car and a last-year's model pickup truck using this strategy.
"If it's got dead pixels, i'd be returning it for replacement/refund."
I can't mail-order an LCD for this reason. If I bought one, I'd check it in the store. I realize pixels can go south after a while, but that's really not in the same category as something that was defective before it left the store.
The first dead pixel in a screen lowers the value by an exponential amount. The second and subsequent dead pixels aren't that much worse than the first, until there are more than a few.
A dead pixel near the middle of the screen makes a $400 panel worth $50.
The attitude of the manufacturers has just made me keep using CRTs. But I do have an LCD panel on my keyboard rig, because it's convenient. And, truth be told, for that application, dead pixels wouldn't be a huge problem, and it's probably going to break anyway (gets banged around on stage, packed and moved and unpacked and bolted to a stand, etc.)
But for a primary desktop or laptop screen, or for a movie screen, I'd never accept any visible, usage-limiting defects.
The last thing I want to hear as a consumer, is that a product is defective because "it's hard to get it right".
"How long have you worked with a piece of dust or a smudge on the screen before you: a) noticed; b) findlly got irritated enough to do something about it?"
Never. And I've threatened, not jokingly, to remove the fingers from any hand that TOUCHES MY LAPTOP SCREEN.
Just because YOU are willing to accept a defective product at full price, does not mean everyone should accept it.
"As a side note, the lackey at the Best Buy store I talked to told me that they couldn't do anything for me because I neglected to purchase their extended warranty. I probably could have pushed the issue with a manager but I figured I'd try the lower stress Sony option first"
It is probably much cheaper to file in the US Court of Claims than to buy the extended warranty. Mention that to the manager.
"They hide behind excuses, while selling product with visible, known defects. WTF? And then they *tell* you those defects are normal? Double WTF!"
Consumers continue to buy the products, sales *increase*, triple or quadruple WTF!
>Can someone please explain to me how having an LCD
>with dead pixels (even one) is considered "normal"?
Given the process required to make these things, it's a miracle that they work at all.
The substrate has to be etched to a precision of hundreds of angstroms. Then several layers are applied with a sputtering process, also to extremely small tolerances.
The main way to keep manufacturing costs down is to make not one panel at a time, but to make large sheets of Si-TFT, sort of the inverse of the "more transistors per die" method used to reduce costs for microchips.
Each pixel in a color LCD panel has 3 transistors (TFT's) and 6 capacitors.
The problem is the transistor that gates each subpixel can fail, and there's no redundancy, and of course, no way it can be repaired. Personally, I think the solution may be to increase the number of TFT's by an order of magnitude, so that if one fails, another can take over. But if they could get more transistors on the substrate, they'd be used for higher resolutions, not for fault tolerance.
"The iritation from that one tiny discoloured dot alone is enough to wipe out any satisfaction to be had from owning that product."
A dark pixel that is precisely on the border is completely different than an always-bright pixel near the center of the screen.
Also, a screen that arrives with no dead pixels has a different resale value than a screen with defects.
Has nobody come up with a way to *cause* dead pixels? Got a dead one? Company policy says you need 10 dead ones to return it? Make fifty!
"Smart-alec remarks don't breed technical acceptance. Usually contempt."
So are you talking about my contempt for a finance guy's smart-ass remarks about technical merits of something he knew nothing about? As PHB moments go, this was mild. Lighten up, will you? That was 1993.
"I don't ****ing care if you think the UN is run by imcompetent fools!"
"Incompetent fool" might be ok. We're observing very intelligent, systematic corruption, not the result of incopetence at all. That's very different, and a source of some concern that must be considered before putting the UN in charge of *anything.*
"What exactly is so secret that it requires a whole 40GB?"
The whole point is that, while HE knows, YOU don't, and can't find out.
"I know it sounds a bit like 1337-speak, but it's very easy to make a common word virtually un-guessable by doing easy-to-remember substitutions like 0 for o, 1 for i, & for 8 and so forth."
That does not make it substantially more "un-guessable", it doesn't even increase the complexity of a brute-force attack by any significant magnitude. Neither would merely going to foreign languages.
But I suspect you know this, and you are trolling.
My company was an early adopter of Linux for core tech infrastructure.
Once, one of the finance people asked me, half jokingly, "So is this Linux a piece of shit or what?"
I replied: It is. we use it for the fertilizer your paycheck grows in.
I mark that moment as the turning point when linux went from skepticism to aceeptance in my company.
>I would like to know more about it.
www.python.org
>What is it good for?
It's good for general-purpose programming, particularly if you need the end result to be cross-platform.
It's extensible with all kinds of 3rd party libraries available. It's a much better fit for many types of work than is Perl, and arguments have been made that it is more efficient and easier to learn than Java.
>Any drawbacks?
Like Java, it's a bytecode-interpreted language, so to-the-metal programming isn't really possible.
>How to learn it?
It's quite easy to learn, even as a first programming language. It's extremely easy to do certain kinds of complex things (you name it) because there are so many modules available. This is something that Python shares with Perl and Java, of course, but python programmers argue that it's altogether easier to work with.
I was on the fence, until some production code rolled in my company that was written in Python. It's a success story for the folks involved, and the quality of their work and the speed at which it was completed, really speaks for itself.
"While we're on the subject of that, why do they not let nail clippers through security"
Nail clippers are allowed, even those with nail files.
"but let you take glass bottles on to the plane?"
Do you believe there should be such a restriction? Talk to your Congressman, not us.
Long before the current scenario, I got in trouble for the empty grenade that I kept in my tool bag. It falls under "realistic replicas of incendiary devices" and is not allowed. It was unfortunate, since the grenade was always the first tool to come out of my bag...