For that definition of open standards, then OOXML is just as good, prehaps better since it is better documented (the good part of 6000 pages)
The length of any set of documentation is by no means an indication of its quality. In addition, the difference in length could be simply a matter of documenting an overly complicated bloated system vs. a simple, clean and elegant one.
All you need for that is to issue a serial number with a voting stub. Let the voter check that a given serial number exists in the tally, and what the vote was recorded as.
The problem with that solution is that votes can be bought or "coerced" and there is now documentation to prove to the buyer/"coercer" (is that a word?) that you voted the way they wanted to.
Systems like Punchscan give a means for a voter to verify their ballot was counted correctly without allowing others to verify it.
They're worse than the morons at starschmucks...."I'd like a large chocolate latte' please" "venti mocha?"
What's so bad about this?
And is there real difference between a chocolate latte and a mocha? (Serious question actually, I've asked but never really gotten an answer.)
There's an actual reason they restate the names of drinks. In a sense, it's turning what you ordered into the instructions for making it. Hence, the type of cup is specified first. (prefixed with 'iced' if neccessary, of course), then the syrups, milk preference, temperature (if you ordered it extra hot/not so hot/etc), espresso type (decaf/half-caf), toppings. Note that this probably isn't the exact order, and I have no idea why "double tall" specifies the number of shots before they know what cup to even put them in. IANABarrista
A check is essentially a legally binding contract that states an agreement to pay the recipient a specific amount. To be legally binding, a contract must be signed and dated.
Knowingly putting the incorrect date on the check is somewhat akin to fraud and/or forgery.
Keep all your canceled and expired credit cards with your good credit cards. If you don't have enough, apply for new ones and get them canceled.
Just as a warning: Just applying for a credit card has a (temporary) negative effect on your credit score, and I don't think it being canceled so soon after receiving it would look very good either.
Credit card auth systems have a way to report back to the retailer that a given card is flagged as "Stolen". It'd be interesting if there was a company that offered lookalike credit cards that weren't backed by an account and immediately reported "Stolen" to use as a decoy like you say. On the other hand, that would offer a ready avenue of scamming people who still take credit card imprints and don't have the means of validating a CC. (Often seen at fairs and other places where having a credit card machine isn't always feasible.)
Knowing the Slashdot crowd, I'd say hacking into Microsoft, Sony, or any MAFIAA member would definitely earn you a lot of respect. Well maybe not Microsoft, that's probably not challenging enough knowing their security history.
But if you even think about touching Apple... don't.
btw: Karma, meet toilet.
In America, ISBN13's have a "978" prefix added for now, and a recalculated checksum (the last digit of the ISBN).
That's technically a 10-digit ISBN.
EAN-13 is an international format of product codes (think UPC), a 3 digit country designation, 9 digit product #, and 1 check digit.
10-digit ISBNs are converted to EAN-13s (for purposes of creating a barcode that can be scanned) by making them into an EAN, using 978 (aka "Bookland") as the country code, then the first 9 digits of the ISBN (the tenth is a checkdigit), then computing the check digit according to how it's done with EAN-13.
Correction: As I wrote this, I found a new book I had lying around and noted it really does list an ISBN13 starting with 978-. I guess it's done that way for backwards compatibility, as it also has an ISBN10 with the 978 stripped off (and thus all existing books with ISBN10s automagically have ISBN13s as well). But if you look at any older book (pre ISBN13), you'll note the 978- prefix directly underneath the barcode.
Also, a little bit of trivia: the small 5 digit barcode that you'll often see next to the bigger ISBN/EAN barcode is *usually* the suggested retail price of the book with 1 preceding checkdigit -- the one I'm looking at is 50699, and retails for $06.99 US. There are some exceptions -- one book is 03584 and is also $6.99 US. Still, in a bookstore without prices clearly marked, it's usually a fast way to determine the price of a book.
I can walk into a Gamestop and buy a used PS2 game for $3 or for $80+. It depends on the game. No joke. Buy a copy of Madden Football [year-2] (aka it's 2008, get 2006) or a professional wrestling game and it'll probably be $3. Conversely, just the other day I found Marvel vs Capcom 2 for the PS2 for $79.99, no box slip, no manual, etc. Why? Because you cannot find MvC2 or games like some "Baulders Gate" or "Champions of Norrath", etc High Demand, Low Supply. It's economics, you cannot fault them for that.
My wife used to work at Gamestop (it was her first job, and she's as much -- if not more -- into gaming than I am), so as a result I spent quite a lot of time in the store.
In all the time I've been there, I've never seen a used game for more than $60 -- with the sole exception of Steel Batallion, which comes with its own giant mech-like controller
I always wanted to use the fact that employees can 'check out' used games for a couple days to play with that, but we never did. (Idea being that if you check out and play lots of games you'll better know what to recommend to people.)
Used games is where stores like Gamestop make their money. It's not selling consoles or new games. The games industry has very tight control over the games price and the profit garnered from each game. Suffice it to say, the margins are small. Without used games, such speciality stores probably wouldn't be able to operate.
This is very much true, and is why they offer so many incentives dealing with used games -- buy 2 get 1 free seems like it's happening every other month almost. Some Gamestops that receive very little trade-ins (like mall stores) actually receive shipments of used games from other stores.
but, how do you get by on no private cars as you seem to wish for?
In Seattle, WA they have something called Flexcar -- which (I'm a little shy on the details, I don't live in Seattle proper) is basically a quick per-hour car (or truck) rental for doing those sorts of things that you would need a car for while allowing you to use Metro Transit for everything else.
IIRC, the rental rates include gas and insurance and whatnot, so the idea is you don't have any of the expenses that regular car ownership has... and you can rent based on what you need at the time. If you only need a car for a couple hours each week (say 8 hours a month), the $8/hr or so rental fee is far cheaper than ~$100/mo+ on insurance + oil changes, maintenance, gas, etc.
It never worked for Apple? At one time the only computers you could find in schools were from Apple, from the student labs to the principal's desk.
I believe the idea was that by having Apple computers in schools, when parents purchased a PC for home they would buy Apple, because that is what their kids were used to.
In reality, what happened is most people bought PCs (In the "IBM and compatible sense", so don't get pendantic) because that's what they used themselves in the workplace.
It's been argued in the past that "Your Rights Online" means "Your rights, discussed online", not "Your online rights". I believe this is the intended nature of the category.
And this could easily be classified as first amendment rights.
You're not using ANSI-style JOIN syntax (except for the LEFT JOIN), which is a big no-no. It should never have been written that way to begin with, unless an old version of MySQL didn't understand INNER JOIN syntax. The "JOIN condition in WHERE clause" appraoch can be ambiguous in a lot of situations, which is why the ANSI JOIN syntax was created.
I'm aware of the issues with JOINs. It actually happens to be one of a few issues preventing me from upgrading to MySQL 5 as well -- and the project is too large to fixup.
It also doesn't help that I self-taught myself databases from MySQL exclusively (Postgres was crummy documentation-wise at the time, among other things) so it's still the habit I'm stuck in.
Actually, to be ANSI-compliant [...] the use of the temp table (make it a subselect)
The temptable happens to have a subset of the contents of the table being inserted into. MySQL (at least 4.x) does not allow you to select from the same table being updated from in a subquery, thus the temptable is required as a workaround. I'd be very happy if I could remove the few remaining temporary tables from my code.
[...] and the non-standard functions (UNIX_TIMESTAMP, INTERVAL, GREATEST, and LEAST), which have ANSI equivalents.
GREATEST and LEAST don't have equivalents that I've seen -- at least not in PostgreSQL (which is the only other database I've seriously considered moving to). They can be imitated, yes, but that method seemed overly clunky.
For some fairly hardcore applications it's not really *that* feasible.
This is fairly tame compared to some of the queries done by my application (mix of SQL and PHP):
sql_query("
INSERT INTO allocation (year, sid, term, start, end, fte, grade, amount, relevant)
SELECT
yci.year, s.id, yci.term,
IF(ls.start IS NULL, yci.start, GREATEST(yci.start, ls.start)),
IF(ls.end IS NULL, yci.end, LEAST(yci.end, ls.end)),
ls.fte, ls.grade+yci.year-ls.gradeyear,
((
(UNIX_TIMESTAMP(IF(ls.end IS NULL, yci.end, LEAST(yci.end, ls.end))) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(IF(ls.start IS NULL, yci.start, GREATEST(yci.start, ls.start))))
/ (UNIX_TIMESTAMP(yci.end) - UNIX_TIMESTAMP(yci.start))
) * gi.allocation * ls.fte * 0.01)/numterms allocation,
yci.relevant
FROM
((
SELECT yi.year, 0 term, 1 numterms, MIN(cal.startdate) start, MAX(cal.enddate)+INTERVAL 1 DAY-INTERVAL 1 SECOND end, '0000-00-00 00:00:00' relevant
FROM yearinfo yi, calendar cal
WHERE cal.year=yi.year AND cal.type='term' {$ywhere}
AND NOT yi.allocation_periodic
GROUP BY yi.year
) UNION ALL (
SELECT yi.year, cal.code term, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM calendar cal2 WHERE cal2.type='aterm' AND cal2.year=yi.year) numterms, cal.startdate start, cal.enddate+INTERVAL 1 DAY-INTERVAL 1 SECOND end, cal.startdate relevant
FROM yearinfo yi, calendar cal
WHERE cal.year=yi.year AND cal.type='aterm' {$ywhere}
AND yi.allocation_periodic
)) yci,
student s,
log_status ls,
gradeinfo gi
LEFT JOIN {$temptable} o ON o.year=yci.year AND o.sid=s.id
WHERE
ls.sid=s.id AND ls.status>0 {$swhere}
AND (ls.start <= yci.end OR ls.start IS NULL)
AND (yci.start <= ls.end OR ls.end IS NULL)
AND gi.year=yci.year AND gi.grade=ls.grade+yci.year-ls.gradeyear
AND o.year IS NULL ");
I'd love to be able to move it though -- a lot of it would make more sense as triggers and/or functions ran on the SQL side.
Converting a blog or message board, however, seems fairly trivial.
Everyone used WordPerfect, that is until almost overnight everyone was using Word.
You can open WordPerfect documents in Word and they work. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, and only assume that this was the case when Word was 'new')
You can't open up your MySQL database and applications in PostgreSQL and have them automagically work. If so, I'd have tried moving to PostgreSQL long ago.
I'm personally interested in Neuros OSD, which is an open source hardware solution to DVR and whatnot. The specs seem to require a separate memory card or USB hard drive though (no indication of any built-in capacity) -- and I haven't ever actually seen/purchased/played with one.
Talking on a hands-free kit is the same as talking to someone behind you in the same car.
Another comment I read in some other Slashdot article suggested (and I agree) that this is not neccessarily true. Passengers in the car with you will react with you -- if traffic gets hairy, they'll usually be quiet and let you drive. Not to mention that they can alert you to obstacles you might not have been able to see.
People talking to you on your phone, however, don't see what you do and can care less that the guy in front of you just slammed on his brakes and is doing a rapid 60-to-zero.
From the website: "IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox."
It's also configurable in such a way where you can set it to automatically use IE's view of pages at certain locations instead of Firefox's, but use Firefox for the rest of the web.
Slashdot Mirror
What's so bad about this?
And is there real difference between a chocolate latte and a mocha? (Serious question actually, I've asked but never really gotten an answer.)
There's an actual reason they restate the names of drinks. In a sense, it's turning what you ordered into the instructions for making it. Hence, the type of cup is specified first. (prefixed with 'iced' if neccessary, of course), then the syrups, milk preference, temperature (if you ordered it extra hot/not so hot/etc), espresso type (decaf/half-caf), toppings. Note that this probably isn't the exact order, and I have no idea why "double tall" specifies the number of shots before they know what cup to even put them in. IANABarrista
Depends on what OS the laptop is running.
A check is essentially a legally binding contract that states an agreement to pay the recipient a specific amount. To be legally binding, a contract must be signed and dated.
Knowingly putting the incorrect date on the check is somewhat akin to fraud and/or forgery.
It could be worse. If it was Nintendo, you'd have... Hey... Hey... Hey listen! Hey listen!
Just as a warning: Just applying for a credit card has a (temporary) negative effect on your credit score, and I don't think it being canceled so soon after receiving it would look very good either.
Credit card auth systems have a way to report back to the retailer that a given card is flagged as "Stolen". It'd be interesting if there was a company that offered lookalike credit cards that weren't backed by an account and immediately reported "Stolen" to use as a decoy like you say. On the other hand, that would offer a ready avenue of scamming people who still take credit card imprints and don't have the means of validating a CC. (Often seen at fairs and other places where having a credit card machine isn't always feasible.)
Knowing the Slashdot crowd, I'd say hacking into Microsoft, Sony, or any MAFIAA member would definitely earn you a lot of respect. Well maybe not Microsoft, that's probably not challenging enough knowing their security history. But if you even think about touching Apple... don't. btw: Karma, meet toilet.
That's technically a 10-digit ISBN.
EAN-13 is an international format of product codes (think UPC), a 3 digit country designation, 9 digit product #, and 1 check digit.
10-digit ISBNs are converted to EAN-13s (for purposes of creating a barcode that can be scanned) by making them into an EAN, using 978 (aka "Bookland") as the country code, then the first 9 digits of the ISBN (the tenth is a checkdigit), then computing the check digit according to how it's done with EAN-13.
Correction:
As I wrote this, I found a new book I had lying around and noted it really does list an ISBN13 starting with 978-. I guess it's done that way for backwards compatibility, as it also has an ISBN10 with the 978 stripped off (and thus all existing books with ISBN10s automagically have ISBN13s as well). But if you look at any older book (pre ISBN13), you'll note the 978- prefix directly underneath the barcode.
Also, a little bit of trivia: the small 5 digit barcode that you'll often see next to the bigger ISBN/EAN barcode is *usually* the suggested retail price of the book with 1 preceding checkdigit -- the one I'm looking at is 50699, and retails for $06.99 US. There are some exceptions -- one book is 03584 and is also $6.99 US. Still, in a bookstore without prices clearly marked, it's usually a fast way to determine the price of a book.
My wife used to work at Gamestop (it was her first job, and she's as much -- if not more -- into gaming than I am), so as a result I spent quite a lot of time in the store.
In all the time I've been there, I've never seen a used game for more than $60 -- with the sole exception of Steel Batallion, which comes with its own giant mech-like controller
I always wanted to use the fact that employees can 'check out' used games for a couple days to play with that, but we never did. (Idea being that if you check out and play lots of games you'll better know what to recommend to people.)
This is very much true, and is why they offer so many incentives dealing with used games -- buy 2 get 1 free seems like it's happening every other month almost. Some Gamestops that receive very little trade-ins (like mall stores) actually receive shipments of used games from other stores.
I don't live in Australia and thus can't say for sure...
But my guess is that since it's not made in the US with the US's sugar tariffs, it's probably made with real sugar.
Interestingly, a search for "Regal Cola" on Google shows the GP as the #1 result, and "Regal Cola" ingredients shows the GP as the only result.
In Seattle, WA they have something called Flexcar -- which (I'm a little shy on the details, I don't live in Seattle proper) is basically a quick per-hour car (or truck) rental for doing those sorts of things that you would need a car for while allowing you to use Metro Transit for everything else.
IIRC, the rental rates include gas and insurance and whatnot, so the idea is you don't have any of the expenses that regular car ownership has... and you can rent based on what you need at the time. If you only need a car for a couple hours each week (say 8 hours a month), the $8/hr or so rental fee is far cheaper than ~$100/mo+ on insurance + oil changes, maintenance, gas, etc.
I believe the idea was that by having Apple computers in schools, when parents purchased a PC for home they would buy Apple, because that is what their kids were used to.
In reality, what happened is most people bought PCs (In the "IBM and compatible sense", so don't get pendantic) because that's what they used themselves in the workplace.
Actually, out of state residents are tax-exempt, though many don't know it and some retailers don't honor it.
My wife used to work retail and would occasionally deal with people from Oregon. There's a lot of paperwork involved though, so it's rarely worth it.
It's been argued in the past that "Your Rights Online" means "Your rights, discussed online", not "Your online rights". I believe this is the intended nature of the category.
And this could easily be classified as first amendment rights.
I'm aware of the issues with JOINs. It actually happens to be one of a few issues preventing me from upgrading to MySQL 5 as well -- and the project is too large to fixup.
It also doesn't help that I self-taught myself databases from MySQL exclusively (Postgres was crummy documentation-wise at the time, among other things) so it's still the habit I'm stuck in.
The temptable happens to have a subset of the contents of the table being inserted into. MySQL (at least 4.x) does not allow you to select from the same table being updated from in a subquery, thus the temptable is required as a workaround. I'd be very happy if I could remove the few remaining temporary tables from my code.
GREATEST and LEAST don't have equivalents that I've seen -- at least not in PostgreSQL (which is the only other database I've seriously considered moving to). They can be imitated, yes, but that method seemed overly clunky.
This is fairly tame compared to some of the queries done by my application (mix of SQL and PHP): I'd love to be able to move it though -- a lot of it would make more sense as triggers and/or functions ran on the SQL side.
Converting a blog or message board, however, seems fairly trivial.
You can open WordPerfect documents in Word and they work. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried this, and only assume that this was the case when Word was 'new')
You can't open up your MySQL database and applications in PostgreSQL and have them automagically work. If so, I'd have tried moving to PostgreSQL long ago.
I'm personally interested in Neuros OSD, which is an open source hardware solution to DVR and whatnot. The specs seem to require a separate memory card or USB hard drive though (no indication of any built-in capacity) -- and I haven't ever actually seen/purchased/played with one.
Segmentation fault. Core dumped. Programmer shot. Blue Screen of Death? The usual. Six letter story? Way too short. That is all folks. Good night!
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1419/
From the website: "IE Tab - an extension from Taiwan, features: Embedding Internet Explorer in tabs of Mozilla/Firefox."
It's also configurable in such a way where you can set it to automatically use IE's view of pages at certain locations instead of Firefox's, but use Firefox for the rest of the web.