Imagine hiding some nefarious code inside the SMBIOS, the contents of which are typically hidden from the operating system. Imagine including some hardware on the motherboard to trigger the system management interrupt and gate the SMBIOS to allow the CPU to to see and execute the code...
Hmm... Fun thought.
It could be quite challenging to even find out if it is there.
When I was self-employed in the UK, I didn't have to prepare my tax returns. I simply took all the paperwork to the local Inland Revenue office, sat in their waiting room for a bit, allowed them to go through all the paperwork and at the end of the day, I walked away with a cashier's cheque of how much they owed me. Cost to me: Zero.
It seems that they really try to not tell anyone that they must assist people with their tax returns free of charge.
(When I left the UK middle of the tax year, technically they owe me a few hundred pounds but it didn't seem worth the while to chase up on it afterwards... the phone calls, postage and time would rapidly eat up the refund.)
In many retail shop units, the door is part of the building and belongs to the landlord.
In this case, the glass door simply shattered into tiny glass fragments - so it was toughened but not a security door: It would make an adequate internal glass door but whoever fitted that as an exterior door was stupid.
Perhaps the landlord did that to save some money on the door. If that is the case, the landlord may find that Apple's insurer would want them to reimburse Apple for the loss of merchandise due to failure to use the correct type of door.
The correct kind of door would be laminated toughened glass... It may crack but it would take a lot more effort to break it down. They tend not to shatter into tiny pieces but instead would 'soften' after repeated assaults until they fail. The computer shop I worked at a decade ago had that kind of glass door - it was remarkably forgiving of rough treatment without failure... Although it did fail when a Land Rover hit it at more than 30 mph.
I have a near-mint condition Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k safely stored away somewhere - I haven't powered it up in years... The reason is because they were designed quite cheaply: You have a 9V power pack which is both regulated down to 5V for the majority of the logic and in an inspired piece of electronics, it is also inverted for the +12V and -12V power lines with very few components. Why is that important? Well, early DRAM, as used in the Spectrum, required those power lines too. However, there is a slight failure mode which claimed the life of my first Spectrum: The inverter regulation could fail and the memory/logic is zapped with 40+V before it fries and takes itself out of commission. As a result, there are relatively few operational ZX Spectrums around, despite how massively popular and successful they were.
My biggest lament is that I have lost the ZX Printer - I think it accidently was left behind in the last home move... I still have 6 or 7 rolls of the aluminiumised silver paper for it.
Ahh, fond memories of the smell of ozone and burning metal while it did print out for you...
I learnt BASIC first, on the Sinclair ZX-81 and then the Sinclar Spectrum. Soon after that, I learned to program using Turbo Pascal, and I translated a lot of my BASIC programs to Pascal on my Dad's PC. At school, I learned to program on a BBC Micro using BASIC and 6502 assembler and a little while after that I learned to how to program using 808[86] assembler. C++ was the next main language I learned to use but between Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal, I preferred Turbo Pascal, especially how well it managed dependencies and the sheer speed of compilation. I was a very loyal Borland customer, purchasing nearly every version of Turbo/Borland Pascal for DOS (excluding 5.5)... And then I went pure 32bit programming in 1994 and left the Borland world behind... Used Watcom C++ and Virtual Pascal. Found the GNU compiler. For the last 10+ years, I have almost exclusively been programming using GNU compiler in C and C++.
To answer the poster's question: I would recommend Pascal as a good learning language for learning structured programming. But to graduate to C and C++ after the basics are well understood and good practices have been learned.
As a SUN shareholder, I don't recall seeing any literature about this vote. I have been busy so maybe I simply forgot.
In any case, I believe that Oracle buying SUN is perhaps the best way to keep SPARC and Java alive. MySQL is valuable simply for the brand and goodwill. Wether the MySQL product will continue or we will get a Oracle Lite rebranded as MySQL... who knows. They could easily close-up MySQL and then we would have a split similar to what happened with InterBase becoming Firebird when Borland closed it up. Hopefully, Oracle would continue Solaris and drop their embarrassing Linux distro but personally I don't use Solaris anymore.
(disclaimer, former MySQL AB employee whose options was converted into Sun stock)
To quote DNA.... the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard".
Admittedly, I had thought the same when I first heard the name "Google". It is not a bad association. Maybe DNA made the same mistake or decided that "Googolplex" didn't sound as nice.
When I went to university, they used a Modula-2 variant for imperative programming, Poplog (Prolog+Lisp variant) for AI and I have forgotten what was the language for functional programming but it was another oddball one. Anyways... The argument for it was: You won't encounter these languages in the "real world (tm)" but everything you learn can be transplanted into whatever languages you need to use. In the final year, some C/C++/Java was looked at as a means to transplant the knowledge learnt earlier.
To be honest: When I started at university, I was already a proficient at C, C++, Turbo Pascal and 80386 assembly so I mostly went to get the piece of paper. I guess another reason why they used an in-house modified language for teaching is that it puts everyone at the starting point for those languages.
They probably won't want to make the sales data for specific songs public for a much simpler reason:
The artists who originally created the music would sue them for fraud because their royalties were paid for a much smaller amount of claimed sales.
If the music labels simply reported the numbers which they told the artists, the judge would probably see that the claimed damages are way over-inflated. Even if they used the real numbers, their claimed damages would likely seem excessive. So they (the labels) would like to use some outlandish sales data to show that when individual X "made available" song Y, the sales dropped to a thousandth of what it once was and hence justifying the damages.
Taxing road users per mile of use is a bad idea if it does not take into account the mass of the vehicle, condition of the vehicle and condition of the vehicle's exhaust. Why:
Vehicles with more mass would put more static load on the road surface and damage the road, causing pot-holes etc.
Vehicles with poorly maintained and/or modified suspension will put more dynamic load on the road surface and damage the road, causing pot-holes etc.
Vehicles with poor emissions, oil/fuel in the exhaust will cause such matter to attack the road surface and damage the road, causing pot-holes etc.
This will all be very difficult to regulate.
This is why a tax on gasoline works well:
Vehicles with more mass consume more fuel.
Vehicles which are poorly maintained and/or modified will consume more fuel.
Vehicles which are more polluting consume more fuel.
In my opinion, they should be looking to double or triple the tax on fuel. They would easily collect more money and it is easy for them to collect payment as the infrastructure is already in place. It would cost the taxpayers nothing more in infrastructure and equipment. Even if they double the tax per gallon of fuel, it won't affect the price of gasoline as much as recent fuel price fluctuations during the past 12 months.
A tax on only milage will hurt fuel efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.
This was annoying enough for me to make me put together my own UK keyboard layout which allowed me to use my standard UK layout PC keyboard on my Mac. My complaint is that they don't adequately document the keyboard descriptor files and it required much trial and error to get to an acceptable layout.
Douglas Adams recorded a brief history of this catastrophe... It is only now in the near future that the light will reach Earth and that we may observe with our antiquated electromagnetic telescopes.
It's ok... I am British and I now live in Los Angeles, so fairly often they seem to assume I am Australian based upon my accent.
I do find it annoying when "their", "they", "they're" are all used interchangeably. I have also found that "accept" and "except" are both used interchangeably here; which has caused major confusion in handling some requests.
"cheque"/"check" and "colour"/"color" is a minor irritation. "trousers"/"pants" and "pants"/"underwear" causes minor confusion.
English: "I couldn't care less" vs American: "I could care less"
There seems to be thousands of interesting little changes between American English and what I shall call International English.
All of that pales into insignificance when you're driving around LA.
Ever since the first IBM PCs, there was a specific data line in the ribbon cable dedicated for disc-change sense.
The real problem was that IBM never specified in the spec what voltage level it should be for when there is a disc in the drive and when it is out.
IBM PC-DOS (which had IBM's own IBMBIO.SYS instead of Microsoft's one) behaved differently on the original IBM I had years ago. When there was no diskette in the drive, attempts to use it immediately failed. However, it could not detect if I had not closed the gate so if the diskette was in but the gate open, the drive motor would spin but the floppy couldn't spin. If you ever look at the insides of those old 5.25" full height floppy drives, you'd notice that there are 2 opto-switches: One to detect the write-protect tab, the other was deep in the drive to detect if a floppy was pushed all the way in.
I recall that most 3.5" drives have two microswitches inside them right next to each other - one for the write-protect and the other simply to detect disk presence. Some of them won't even bother spinning the drive motor if unless that switch was depressed.
There was a very well adhered to de-facto standard which applied to floppy drives, the early MFM/RLL ST501 style hard drives and even the later IDE drives:
Pin one (red stripe on ribbon cable) is always closest to the power connector.
Yeah, I know that the venerable '81 had no "sound" but it could make noise through it's cassette interface... and somewhere I have an old book for ZX-81 machine code programming which has a program which would play music out though the TV's FM audio... but it does require de-tuning the channel frequency just a little bit because the '81 doesn't have a audio modulator either.
I really enjoyed my visit to Bletchley Park back in 2005.... wouldn't mind spending another relaxing and pleasant day there again in the future. Just this little problem of being 6000+ miles away.
(The Beeb has a fairly sophisticated Yamaha sound chip... for some reason, whenever I think of that machine, the tune to Repton plays repeatedly in my mind... along with the 'dings' when a diamond is collected)
Water is heavy stuff - you don't have to expel much of it at a mediocre velocity in order to support the weight of a adult human.
What made those portable jetpacks interesting is that they used a limited amount of reaction mass and managed to expel it with sufficient velocity that it was able to support the weight of the pilot+jetpack.
Personally, I would be satisfied to see a solution based upon small jet turbines with vectored thrust. In some ways, it would be more tricky to make stable due to the response lag on controlling the jet engine's thrust and that the exhaust output cannot typically be considered as a point thrust. If made to work, I'd imagine that hovering/flying time in the order of several tens of minutes would be feasible.
This water jet thing is just *yawn* by comparison.
These so-called Christian and Parent groups who advocate such nanny state intervention are only doing so because they are too lazy.
You want to protect the children? You supervise them. You don't give them a computer with internet access that they can use privately in their bedroom in the dead of night: You put the computer in some family location where a responsible adult is available.
Or... Lock the router in a cabinet with a simple timer switch on the power brick.
The phrase which sums up our modern era : "Can't someone else do it?"
Once upon a time, directors would use different film with different grain size to effect a desired mood for an act.
In this modern era of digital recording and projection, where any visual artifact may simply be a by-product of the video compression algorithm, I think that Hollywood needs to come up with more compelling and entertaining story lines than simply relying on the "new shiny" effect.
I think that they are finally running out of ideas to recycle.
Anyways, kudos to ODEON for trying to take some initiative to lure people out of their homes and into the cinemas. Alas, I have moved to La La Land where the projectors are old and creaky and routinely scratch the film after the first couple of showings. Not to mention the defects in the screen, rips, tears and unidentifiable stains, which mar the viewing quality.
Which reminds me of my other rant - will someone please clean the screen at Disney's California Adventure's California Soaring attraction? It just keeps getting worse: First a palm print, then something which looks like a coffee stain. Come on, Disney... It's been like that for at least 3 years already! It ruins the effect!
You'd thunk that Los Angeles would have the most up-to-date and well maintained entertainment technology for the theatre patrons to enjoy but it simply isn't so. And the art/small projects which actually do have a story line rarely get wide screenings, if at all.
I miss the old ODEON in Aylesbury... Shame that they deliberately left a grade 1 listed building derelict so that it will become structurally unsound to allow property developers an excuse to tear it down.
MySQL AB was very roughly half engineers... the other half were sales/marketing, accounts, legal etc. with sales/marketing being the next largest group.
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Just think.... with the money spent passing such nonsense, dozens of teachers or police officers could have been employed.
*sighs*
Google AdSense for Domains has more impressions than most people would believe.
Imagine hiding some nefarious code inside the SMBIOS, the contents of which are typically hidden from the operating system. Imagine including some hardware on the motherboard to trigger the system management interrupt and gate the SMBIOS to allow the CPU to to see and execute the code...
Hmm... Fun thought.
It could be quite challenging to even find out if it is there.
When I was self-employed in the UK, I didn't have to prepare my tax returns. I simply took all the paperwork to the local Inland Revenue office, sat in their waiting room for a bit, allowed them to go through all the paperwork and at the end of the day, I walked away with a cashier's cheque of how much they owed me. Cost to me: Zero.
It seems that they really try to not tell anyone that they must assist people with their tax returns free of charge.
(When I left the UK middle of the tax year, technically they owe me a few hundred pounds but it didn't seem worth the while to chase up on it afterwards ... the phone calls, postage and time would rapidly eat up the refund.)
In many retail shop units, the door is part of the building and belongs to the landlord.
In this case, the glass door simply shattered into tiny glass fragments - so it was toughened but not a security door: It would make an adequate internal glass door but whoever fitted that as an exterior door was stupid.
Perhaps the landlord did that to save some money on the door. If that is the case, the landlord may find that Apple's insurer would want them to reimburse Apple for the loss of merchandise due to failure to use the correct type of door.
The correct kind of door would be laminated toughened glass... It may crack but it would take a lot more effort to break it down. They tend not to shatter into tiny pieces but instead would 'soften' after repeated assaults until they fail.
The computer shop I worked at a decade ago had that kind of glass door - it was remarkably forgiving of rough treatment without failure... Although it did fail when a Land Rover hit it at more than 30 mph.
I have actually had a brief conversation with an American who asked what language do British people speak in England....
I have a near-mint condition Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k safely stored away somewhere - I haven't powered it up in years... The reason is because they were designed quite cheaply: You have a 9V power pack which is both regulated down to 5V for the majority of the logic and in an inspired piece of electronics, it is also inverted for the +12V and -12V power lines with very few components. Why is that important? Well, early DRAM, as used in the Spectrum, required those power lines too. However, there is a slight failure mode which claimed the life of my first Spectrum: The inverter regulation could fail and the memory/logic is zapped with 40+V before it fries and takes itself out of commission.
As a result, there are relatively few operational ZX Spectrums around, despite how massively popular and successful they were.
My biggest lament is that I have lost the ZX Printer - I think it accidently was left behind in the last home move ... I still have 6 or 7 rolls of the aluminiumised silver paper for it.
Ahh, fond memories of the smell of ozone and burning metal while it did print out for you...
I learnt BASIC first, on the Sinclair ZX-81 and then the Sinclar Spectrum.
Soon after that, I learned to program using Turbo Pascal, and I translated a lot of my BASIC programs to Pascal on my Dad's PC.
At school, I learned to program on a BBC Micro using BASIC and 6502 assembler and a little while after that I learned to how to program using 808[86] assembler.
C++ was the next main language I learned to use but between Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal, I preferred Turbo Pascal, especially how well it managed dependencies and the sheer speed of compilation. I was a very loyal Borland customer, purchasing nearly every version of Turbo/Borland Pascal for DOS (excluding 5.5)...
And then I went pure 32bit programming in 1994 and left the Borland world behind... Used Watcom C++ and Virtual Pascal. Found the GNU compiler. For the last 10+ years, I have almost exclusively been programming using GNU compiler in C and C++.
To answer the poster's question: I would recommend Pascal as a good learning language for learning structured programming.
But to graduate to C and C++ after the basics are well understood and good practices have been learned.
Oh great. You had to do it didn't you? You've just provided them a citable reference that they can use to claim "Out of this world service".
As a SUN shareholder, I don't recall seeing any literature about this vote. I have been busy so maybe I simply forgot.
In any case, I believe that Oracle buying SUN is perhaps the best way to keep SPARC and Java alive. MySQL is valuable simply for the brand and goodwill. Wether the MySQL product will continue or we will get a Oracle Lite rebranded as MySQL ... who knows. They could easily close-up MySQL and then we would have a split similar to what happened with InterBase becoming Firebird when Borland closed it up. Hopefully, Oracle would continue Solaris and drop their embarrassing Linux distro but personally I don't use Solaris anymore.
(disclaimer, former MySQL AB employee whose options was converted into Sun stock)
A good question to ask is how many kWh were consumed for that computing output.
Since they know what CPUs are running on every BOINC client and the thermal power of them are generally known, it should be possible to calculate...
To quote DNA.... the "Googleplex Star Thinker in the Seventh Galaxy of Light and Ingenuity which can calculate the trajectory of every single dust particle throughout a five-week Dangrabad Beta sand blizzard".
Admittedly, I had thought the same when I first heard the name "Google". It is not a bad association. Maybe DNA made the same mistake or decided that "Googolplex" didn't sound as nice.
(disclaimer, my employer is Google)
When I went to university, they used a Modula-2 variant for imperative programming, Poplog (Prolog+Lisp variant) for AI and I have forgotten what was the language for functional programming but it was another oddball one.
Anyways... The argument for it was: You won't encounter these languages in the "real world (tm)" but everything you learn can be transplanted into whatever languages you need to use.
In the final year, some C/C++/Java was looked at as a means to transplant the knowledge learnt earlier.
To be honest: When I started at university, I was already a proficient at C, C++, Turbo Pascal and 80386 assembly so I mostly went to get the piece of paper. I guess another reason why they used an in-house modified language for teaching is that it puts everyone at the starting point for those languages.
They probably won't want to make the sales data for specific songs public for a much simpler reason:
The artists who originally created the music would sue them for fraud because their royalties were paid for a much smaller amount of claimed sales.
If the music labels simply reported the numbers which they told the artists, the judge would probably see that the claimed damages are way over-inflated. Even if they used the real numbers, their claimed damages would likely seem excessive. So they (the labels) would like to use some outlandish sales data to show that when individual X "made available" song Y, the sales dropped to a thousandth of what it once was and hence justifying the damages.
Thats what my bet is on.
Taxing road users per mile of use is a bad idea if it does not take into account the mass of the vehicle, condition of the vehicle and condition of the vehicle's exhaust.
Why:
This will all be very difficult to regulate.
This is why a tax on gasoline works well:
In my opinion, they should be looking to double or triple the tax on fuel. They would easily collect more money and it is easy for them to collect payment as the infrastructure is already in place. It would cost the taxpayers nothing more in infrastructure and equipment. Even if they double the tax per gallon of fuel, it won't affect the price of gasoline as much as recent fuel price fluctuations during the past 12 months.
A tax on only milage will hurt fuel efficient and alternative fuel vehicles.
This was annoying enough for me to make me put together my own UK keyboard layout which allowed me to use my standard UK layout PC keyboard on my Mac.
My complaint is that they don't adequately document the keyboard descriptor files and it required much trial and error to get to an acceptable layout.
Douglas Adams recorded a brief history of this catastrophe... It is only now in the near future that the light will reach Earth and that we may observe with our antiquated electromagnetic telescopes.
It's ok... I am British and I now live in Los Angeles, so fairly often they seem to assume I am Australian based upon my accent.
I do find it annoying when "their", "they", "they're" are all used interchangeably.
I have also found that "accept" and "except" are both used interchangeably here; which has caused major confusion in handling some requests.
"cheque"/"check" and "colour"/"color" is a minor irritation.
"trousers"/"pants" and "pants"/"underwear" causes minor confusion.
English: "I couldn't care less" vs
American: "I could care less"
There seems to be thousands of interesting little changes between American English and what I shall call International English.
All of that pales into insignificance when you're driving around LA.
Ever since the first IBM PCs, there was a specific data line in the ribbon cable dedicated for disc-change sense.
The real problem was that IBM never specified in the spec what voltage level it should be for when there is a disc in the drive and when it is out.
IBM PC-DOS (which had IBM's own IBMBIO.SYS instead of Microsoft's one) behaved differently on the original IBM I had years ago. When there was no diskette in the drive, attempts to use it immediately failed. However, it could not detect if I had not closed the gate so if the diskette was in but the gate open, the drive motor would spin but the floppy couldn't spin. If you ever look at the insides of those old 5.25" full height floppy drives, you'd notice that there are 2 opto-switches: One to detect the write-protect tab, the other was deep in the drive to detect if a floppy was pushed all the way in.
I recall that most 3.5" drives have two microswitches inside them right next to each other - one for the write-protect and the other simply to detect disk presence. Some of them won't even bother spinning the drive motor if unless that switch was depressed.
There was a very well adhered to de-facto standard which applied to floppy drives, the early MFM/RLL ST501 style hard drives and even the later IDE drives:
Pin one (red stripe on ribbon cable) is always closest to the power connector.
Very rarely did anything not adhere to that.
Yeah, I know that the venerable '81 had no "sound" but it could make noise through it's cassette interface ... and somewhere I have an old book for ZX-81 machine code programming which has a program which would play music out though the TV's FM audio ... but it does require de-tuning the channel frequency just a little bit because the '81 doesn't have a audio modulator either.
I really enjoyed my visit to Bletchley Park back in 2005.... wouldn't mind spending another relaxing and pleasant day there again in the future. Just this little problem of being 6000+ miles away.
(The Beeb has a fairly sophisticated Yamaha sound chip ... for some reason, whenever I think of that machine, the tune to Repton plays repeatedly in my mind... along with the 'dings' when a diamond is collected)
Water is heavy stuff - you don't have to expel much of it at a mediocre velocity in order to support the weight of a adult human.
What made those portable jetpacks interesting is that they used a limited amount of reaction mass and managed to expel it with sufficient velocity that it was able to support the weight of the pilot+jetpack.
Personally, I would be satisfied to see a solution based upon small jet turbines with vectored thrust. In some ways, it would be more tricky to make stable due to the response lag on controlling the jet engine's thrust and that the exhaust output cannot typically be considered as a point thrust. If made to work, I'd imagine that hovering/flying time in the order of several tens of minutes would be feasible.
This water jet thing is just *yawn* by comparison.
These so-called Christian and Parent groups who advocate such nanny state intervention are only doing so because they are too lazy.
You want to protect the children? You supervise them. You don't give them a computer with internet access that they can use privately in their bedroom in the dead of night: You put the computer in some family location where a responsible adult is available.
Or... Lock the router in a cabinet with a simple timer switch on the power brick.
The phrase which sums up our modern era : "Can't someone else do it?"
Bah!
Once upon a time, directors would use different film with different grain size to effect a desired mood for an act.
In this modern era of digital recording and projection, where any visual artifact may simply be a by-product of the video compression algorithm, I think that Hollywood needs to come up with more compelling and entertaining story lines than simply relying on the "new shiny" effect.
I think that they are finally running out of ideas to recycle.
Anyways, kudos to ODEON for trying to take some initiative to lure people out of their homes and into the cinemas. Alas, I have moved to La La Land where the projectors are old and creaky and routinely scratch the film after the first couple of showings. Not to mention the defects in the screen, rips, tears and unidentifiable stains, which mar the viewing quality.
Which reminds me of my other rant - will someone please clean the screen at Disney's California Adventure's California Soaring attraction? It just keeps getting worse: First a palm print, then something which looks like a coffee stain. Come on, Disney... It's been like that for at least 3 years already! It ruins the effect!
You'd thunk that Los Angeles would have the most up-to-date and well maintained entertainment technology for the theatre patrons to enjoy but it simply isn't so. And the art/small projects which actually do have a story line rarely get wide screenings, if at all.
I miss the old ODEON in Aylesbury... Shame that they deliberately left a grade 1 listed building derelict so that it will become structurally unsound to allow property developers an excuse to tear it down.
MySQL AB was very roughly half engineers... the other half were sales/marketing, accounts, legal etc. with sales/marketing being the next largest group.