Prepaid cards definitely leave a trail, even if it's a little harder to follow. Most stores won't allow you to pay for them in cash (partly for this exact reason, partly due to anti-money laundering laws), and in any case they're more often given out as rebate cards for whatever reason and are definitely traceable unless the issuer is in complete violation of their contract with Visa/Mastercard. It may be a two-step process, but thinking using prepaid debit cards as if they're anonymous is _not_ a good idea if you need an anonymous transaction.
Unless you have one of those "favorites" things in your cell plan, where you have unlimited calls to 5 numbers (or whatever). Add your GV number as one of your favorites and config your GV account so incoming calls pass the GV caller ID instead of the normal caller pass-through it does, and you effectively have unlimited calling on the cheapest possible plan (not free, but close enough). At that point, it's as cheap as, if not cheaper than, Skype. Couple that with the fact that you can have all of the GV SMS services go over email and that Google now offers push services for many phones, and you're as close to free as you can ever hope.
I think T-Mobile started it; I saw an ad from AT&T offering a similar thing a couple days ago. I can't imagine Verizon and Sprint are too far off if they're not offering it already since the carriers all seem to mimic each other pretty quickly.
It's neither perfect nor foolproof, but until you can rig it up so that you have end-to-end VOIP (which is probably only a couple years out; carriers are starting to realize their future is data, not minutes), it's a decent approximation.
You can bet your ass that the people working with the first $5M, 10MB hard drives said the same thing about storage, and now I can buy a terabyte for under a hundred bucks. Similar trends exist for pretty much every computer component. If there's a need for insanely cheap pressure-sensitive keyboards, someone will find a way to make it happen.
I wouldn't doubt that (you can certainly fit a feature film's worth of 1080p on a dual layer DVD, but copyright holders waited for a more DRM-infected format), but I think bandwidth would have been the bigger issue. Lord knows they didn't have digital compression back then, never mind a decent implementation like h.264. I don't know a damn thing about analog compression, but I imagine that it's all inherently lossy so applying much would defeat the purpose of having the increased resolution in the first place.
No kidding. I'm a lot less likely to notice a cleverly-placed webcam than three dozen new WiFi APs.
Re:Do we need the anti-smoking jab
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 1
Are you crazy? I'd much rather be killed by a falling rack than by smoking. Much quicker (although not necessarily painless, depends how it falls), leaves an interesting story for future generations, and chances are it'll have a much better payout for those that you leave behind from some sort of workers comp or wrongful death case.
And the company would probably rename the server to Black Widow.
Tools like that aren't foolproof, especially since browsers go out of their way to attempt to parse malformed input (unless you're serving content as application/xml, in which case the browser will just show an ugly parse error). I can't speak about that tool not having used it, but all it takes is one hacker finding yet another way to create a broken script tag that a browser will still run that they don't yet know about and all your efforts are for nothing.
I think the parent's suggestion of BBCode is safer overall, but the safest solution is to not allow users to format content at all.
No, the problem here is that Reddit didn't sanitize their inputs properly, allowing a user to make OTHER users run arbitrary code. Running Reddit-created JS is perfectly safe, and by the sounds of it this hack is far more annoying than it is dangerous.
Javascript is only a problem when a) you have a malicious webmaster, or b) you allow unknown JS (which may have been created with malicious intent) to run on your page, intentionally (ads, typically) or otherwise. Or if you're running IE6, which just means it'll be miserably slow. But you're on Slashdot, so that's not a problem.
No, I'd expect them to not mention security at all and not draw attention to themselves. Not being a target goes quite a long way. It doesn't make you more secure against the guy that wants to get in, but it does increase the likelihood that guy is trying to hack someone else instead of you.
Actually the last time I did any serious writing in a word processor (at least two years ago), I found that enabling inline grammar checking and setting it to the strictest mode did tend to improve my writing. There were a few exceptions (it can never seen to decide between affect and effect), and while the suggestions weren't always great, it seemed to catch errors in syntax and structure often enough that I could go back and overall improve the writing.
That being said, it's certainly not foolproof and absolutely not ready to replace a human - let alone a trained English teacher. I'm sure it could catch papers that ought to fail miserably with relative ease, but once you get into papers that would get probably a C or better, it's time for something with a brain to take over.
A handy resource (Google has full O'reilly books? When did that happen?), but I don't think it's quite what the OP had in mind. It sounds like the issue is more of the checkin/checkout/merge nature, rather than table-level locking. In which case keep it simple (at least to start) - when the first user starts editing, some sort of "in use by $userId" flag is set, and everyone else gets read-only access. When that user saves the document (or closes/cancels), remove the flag. Some sort of live editing (a la Google Docs) or diff/merge functionality might be good for v2 for a nicer experience.
Adjust as needed to fit your actual requirements, but don't overcomplicate it.
For that much data, that's only a practical solution if you've got a dedicated 100Mbit or faster (1Gbit?) line just to upload. And downloading the data back is going to take quite some time as well.
Plus I think the $5/mo is only for home/personal use - that tends to be the case with most of their competition at least.
Why not just add a GPS receiver into the mix to compensate for MN/TN separation? If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - right? It only needs to be accurate within 20 miles or so (unless you're in Antarctica or the North Pole) which should still get you easily within a degree of the offset so grabbing location from the nearest cell tower should be more than enough.
Of course, there's always the more traditional, low-tech solution of spending five bucks on a compass and a map, which usually has the magnetic declination listed somewhere if not an entire set of MN lines.
Aren't LED lifetimes usually rated to the point at which they hit half brightness, not die completely? And don't white LEDs tend to turn blue over time due to the powder stuff (sorry, it's almost 4am, I can't be bothered to look up the technical term) they use to adjust the color to white fading unevenly, or something to that general effect?
In either case, it doesn't matter. If the apocalypse hasn't come in 19 years, you can bet your ass that we'll have much cheaper and better alternatives available.
The bulb in TFA (I know, I know... but it wasn't in TFS) is rated 6.9w consumption, and is presumably the 60w-equivalent referenced in the summary. Most "60w" CFLs take around 12-15w if memory serves - so these LED bulbs are about twice as efficient. Save $23/yr for 19 years vs $12/yr for 5 years (you say 10, but they're usually rated to five and I've almost never seen one last more than two; they seem very sensitive to older wiring). It pays for itself in less than two years compared to an incandescent, and in four compared to a CFL.
Of course, that's all assuming they actually last that long. I don't doubt the power consumption ratings, but as I said I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life. My understanding is that they have a limited number of starts due to the ignition ballast (which is external to the bulb in standard fluorescent tubes); I'd assume that if you have older wiring or other factors that may cause frequent power sags you'll burn through those starts unusually fast. That seems to be the case at my house, or would at least make some degree of sense to me. I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.
Tabs have existed in the Windows UI for as long as I can remember. Their application in browsers is relatively new (why it took as long as it did for someone to think it up is beyond me, but I can't hold that against them since they thought of it before I would have), but Microsoft's use of tabbed interfaces existed LONG before the release of IE7.
Like, say, motor vehicle fatalities? I think that number is in the tens of thousands annually (yes, I'm too lazy to google it) and yet people bitch and moan about the thing that has less than a one in ten million chance of affecting them.
It's interesting that people obsess over the things that have an astonishingly low chance of affecting them and that are nearly impossible to avoid*, yet they'll continue driving while texting and reading the newspaper which kills people daily and is quite obviously highly preventable. I suppose it's a hazard of the disappearance of personal responsibility and parenting in this country.
Protect schools from being sued except in cases of gross negligence and maybe some of the absurdity will go away. Probably not, but we can hope.
* This is more the case with being struck by lightning or being involved in a terrorist bombing than with health-related issues, but the general concept still applies
When I can have gym class in a friggen SPACE STATION, I'll agree to wearing a heart rate monitor. Until then, I think the more traditional approach of "run around until you're out of breath or the bell rings" is more than sufficient.
Um, what now? RAID5 can sustain at least one drive failure (or more, depending on the configuration of the array), and RAID10 can sustain one to two drive failures depending which drives go. Unless the whole controller goes, in which case you're totally screwed.
But in theory, SSDs should be a bit more durable than spinning platters - and I'd assume it's also easier to recover the data (or at least most of it) without the need for a clean room. Emphasis on "in theroy" as I had an SSD go with absolutely no warning less than 48 hours after installation, but I'm filing that under bad luck.
As other smartphones adopt the new standards (many already use Webkit-based browsers), you instantly gain compatibility on those devices. No need to maintain three separate codebases for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android if your app works great in the browser of all three platforms.
I also prefer sites/apps where I don't have to perform any installation to get at the content, but that's more a matter of personal preferences. Right now that's only practical for a small subset of apps, but WebGL may change that.
Slashdot Mirror
The comments in that page's source are definite winners.
Which you're clicking on with your compromised mouse input.
All that does is inconvenience you further.
I'm all for HD porn, but 4GB doesn't even fill a standard DVD (regardless of the content)
Prepaid cards definitely leave a trail, even if it's a little harder to follow. Most stores won't allow you to pay for them in cash (partly for this exact reason, partly due to anti-money laundering laws), and in any case they're more often given out as rebate cards for whatever reason and are definitely traceable unless the issuer is in complete violation of their contract with Visa/Mastercard. It may be a two-step process, but thinking using prepaid debit cards as if they're anonymous is _not_ a good idea if you need an anonymous transaction.
Unless you have one of those "favorites" things in your cell plan, where you have unlimited calls to 5 numbers (or whatever). Add your GV number as one of your favorites and config your GV account so incoming calls pass the GV caller ID instead of the normal caller pass-through it does, and you effectively have unlimited calling on the cheapest possible plan (not free, but close enough). At that point, it's as cheap as, if not cheaper than, Skype. Couple that with the fact that you can have all of the GV SMS services go over email and that Google now offers push services for many phones, and you're as close to free as you can ever hope.
I think T-Mobile started it; I saw an ad from AT&T offering a similar thing a couple days ago. I can't imagine Verizon and Sprint are too far off if they're not offering it already since the carriers all seem to mimic each other pretty quickly.
It's neither perfect nor foolproof, but until you can rig it up so that you have end-to-end VOIP (which is probably only a couple years out; carriers are starting to realize their future is data, not minutes), it's a decent approximation.
What? WHAT WAS THAT? I couldn't hear you over all that damn clicking!
You can bet your ass that the people working with the first $5M, 10MB hard drives said the same thing about storage, and now I can buy a terabyte for under a hundred bucks. Similar trends exist for pretty much every computer component. If there's a need for insanely cheap pressure-sensitive keyboards, someone will find a way to make it happen.
I wouldn't doubt that (you can certainly fit a feature film's worth of 1080p on a dual layer DVD, but copyright holders waited for a more DRM-infected format), but I think bandwidth would have been the bigger issue. Lord knows they didn't have digital compression back then, never mind a decent implementation like h.264. I don't know a damn thing about analog compression, but I imagine that it's all inherently lossy so applying much would defeat the purpose of having the increased resolution in the first place.
No kidding. I'm a lot less likely to notice a cleverly-placed webcam than three dozen new WiFi APs.
Are you crazy? I'd much rather be killed by a falling rack than by smoking. Much quicker (although not necessarily painless, depends how it falls), leaves an interesting story for future generations, and chances are it'll have a much better payout for those that you leave behind from some sort of workers comp or wrongful death case.
And the company would probably rename the server to Black Widow.
Tools like that aren't foolproof, especially since browsers go out of their way to attempt to parse malformed input (unless you're serving content as application/xml, in which case the browser will just show an ugly parse error). I can't speak about that tool not having used it, but all it takes is one hacker finding yet another way to create a broken script tag that a browser will still run that they don't yet know about and all your efforts are for nothing.
I think the parent's suggestion of BBCode is safer overall, but the safest solution is to not allow users to format content at all.
No, the problem here is that Reddit didn't sanitize their inputs properly, allowing a user to make OTHER users run arbitrary code. Running Reddit-created JS is perfectly safe, and by the sounds of it this hack is far more annoying than it is dangerous.
Javascript is only a problem when a) you have a malicious webmaster, or b) you allow unknown JS (which may have been created with malicious intent) to run on your page, intentionally (ads, typically) or otherwise. Or if you're running IE6, which just means it'll be miserably slow. But you're on Slashdot, so that's not a problem.
No, I'd expect them to not mention security at all and not draw attention to themselves. Not being a target goes quite a long way. It doesn't make you more secure against the guy that wants to get in, but it does increase the likelihood that guy is trying to hack someone else instead of you.
Actually the last time I did any serious writing in a word processor (at least two years ago), I found that enabling inline grammar checking and setting it to the strictest mode did tend to improve my writing. There were a few exceptions (it can never seen to decide between affect and effect), and while the suggestions weren't always great, it seemed to catch errors in syntax and structure often enough that I could go back and overall improve the writing.
That being said, it's certainly not foolproof and absolutely not ready to replace a human - let alone a trained English teacher. I'm sure it could catch papers that ought to fail miserably with relative ease, but once you get into papers that would get probably a C or better, it's time for something with a brain to take over.
A handy resource (Google has full O'reilly books? When did that happen?), but I don't think it's quite what the OP had in mind. It sounds like the issue is more of the checkin/checkout/merge nature, rather than table-level locking. In which case keep it simple (at least to start) - when the first user starts editing, some sort of "in use by $userId" flag is set, and everyone else gets read-only access. When that user saves the document (or closes/cancels), remove the flag. Some sort of live editing (a la Google Docs) or diff/merge functionality might be good for v2 for a nicer experience.
Adjust as needed to fit your actual requirements, but don't overcomplicate it.
For that much data, that's only a practical solution if you've got a dedicated 100Mbit or faster (1Gbit?) line just to upload. And downloading the data back is going to take quite some time as well.
Plus I think the $5/mo is only for home/personal use - that tends to be the case with most of their competition at least.
Why not just add a GPS receiver into the mix to compensate for MN/TN separation? If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - right? It only needs to be accurate within 20 miles or so (unless you're in Antarctica or the North Pole) which should still get you easily within a degree of the offset so grabbing location from the nearest cell tower should be more than enough.
Of course, there's always the more traditional, low-tech solution of spending five bucks on a compass and a map, which usually has the magnetic declination listed somewhere if not an entire set of MN lines.
Aren't LED lifetimes usually rated to the point at which they hit half brightness, not die completely? And don't white LEDs tend to turn blue over time due to the powder stuff (sorry, it's almost 4am, I can't be bothered to look up the technical term) they use to adjust the color to white fading unevenly, or something to that general effect?
In either case, it doesn't matter. If the apocalypse hasn't come in 19 years, you can bet your ass that we'll have much cheaper and better alternatives available.
The bulb in TFA (I know, I know... but it wasn't in TFS) is rated 6.9w consumption, and is presumably the 60w-equivalent referenced in the summary. Most "60w" CFLs take around 12-15w if memory serves - so these LED bulbs are about twice as efficient. Save $23/yr for 19 years vs $12/yr for 5 years (you say 10, but they're usually rated to five and I've almost never seen one last more than two; they seem very sensitive to older wiring). It pays for itself in less than two years compared to an incandescent, and in four compared to a CFL.
Of course, that's all assuming they actually last that long. I don't doubt the power consumption ratings, but as I said I've never seen a CFL last anywhere near it's rated life. My understanding is that they have a limited number of starts due to the ignition ballast (which is external to the bulb in standard fluorescent tubes); I'd assume that if you have older wiring or other factors that may cause frequent power sags you'll burn through those starts unusually fast. That seems to be the case at my house, or would at least make some degree of sense to me. I could be dead wrong about the reasoning, but CFLs unquestionably die faster than incandescent bulbs around here. Hopefully this isn't an issue with LED bulbs.
Tabs have existed in the Windows UI for as long as I can remember. Their application in browsers is relatively new (why it took as long as it did for someone to think it up is beyond me, but I can't hold that against them since they thought of it before I would have), but Microsoft's use of tabbed interfaces existed LONG before the release of IE7.
Like, say, motor vehicle fatalities? I think that number is in the tens of thousands annually (yes, I'm too lazy to google it) and yet people bitch and moan about the thing that has less than a one in ten million chance of affecting them.
It's interesting that people obsess over the things that have an astonishingly low chance of affecting them and that are nearly impossible to avoid*, yet they'll continue driving while texting and reading the newspaper which kills people daily and is quite obviously highly preventable. I suppose it's a hazard of the disappearance of personal responsibility and parenting in this country.
Protect schools from being sued except in cases of gross negligence and maybe some of the absurdity will go away. Probably not, but we can hope.
* This is more the case with being struck by lightning or being involved in a terrorist bombing than with health-related issues, but the general concept still applies
When I can have gym class in a friggen SPACE STATION, I'll agree to wearing a heart rate monitor. Until then, I think the more traditional approach of "run around until you're out of breath or the bell rings" is more than sufficient.
True, but the latency on your approach is a deal-breaker (see also: recent carrier pigeon vs. African ISP experiment).
Um, what now? RAID5 can sustain at least one drive failure (or more, depending on the configuration of the array), and RAID10 can sustain one to two drive failures depending which drives go. Unless the whole controller goes, in which case you're totally screwed.
But in theory, SSDs should be a bit more durable than spinning platters - and I'd assume it's also easier to recover the data (or at least most of it) without the need for a clean room. Emphasis on "in theroy" as I had an SSD go with absolutely no warning less than 48 hours after installation, but I'm filing that under bad luck.
As other smartphones adopt the new standards (many already use Webkit-based browsers), you instantly gain compatibility on those devices. No need to maintain three separate codebases for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android if your app works great in the browser of all three platforms.
I also prefer sites/apps where I don't have to perform any installation to get at the content, but that's more a matter of personal preferences. Right now that's only practical for a small subset of apps, but WebGL may change that.