Dum-da-da-dum-dum?
No. NO! Dum-da-da-dum. There is no second dum. Sweet Jesus man, these things matter.
385 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jul 2008
I thought it best to quantify the outrage of 5 seconds to calculate this, and I confess I've surprised myself.
Same code in Java: 854ms (average of 100 runs after the 1st)
Same code in C: 3751ms (average of 100 runs)
Same code in Perl: I got bored, but the first round took about 163000s
So Node.js with it's slightly daft event model, at 5600ms - call it 5500ms to generously allow for network stack overhead - is only 22% slower than the same impementation in C, which is a whopping 430% slower than Java.
So although I vaguely dislike Node.js I'm reluctantly going to qualify my previous post as follows: "shit code can be written in any language; and never underestimate the power of an optimizing JIT compiler".
JS in itself isn't a bad language - I was writing JS OO libraries as far back as 1999 - but it stops bad coders from shooting themselves in the foot, and that's not necessarily good thing.
But 5 seconds to calculate Fibonacci sequence to 40? My dad had a pocket calculator that could beat that, and that was in 1983.
Sure it's is a contrived example, but other than the recursion the code looks OK on the surface and I've interviewed devs who've written worse. Abstraction is good - actually great - to a point, but like any model you've got to know when to apply it, and that comes from experience and understanding how it works under the hood.
According to this morning's Metro front page, the entire financial system could be brought to a grinding halt! Our learned friends reported that some banks rely on GPS timing signals for trading. For calibrating NTP perhaps, but it's perhaps "a bit of a stretch" from interrupting that calibration to pwning the market.
http://www.metro.co.uk/news/world/891008-gps-jammers-could-make-criminals-millions-on-the-stock-market. Try not to snort out your coffee in derision like I did. The Metro is overpriced.
Not really. If true it's quite interesting - routers etc. generate a self-signed keypair for their admin pages, so if there's a weakness there then you're in. From there you can still do fun stuff like DNS poisoning, although SSL sessions passing through the router would likely be OK.
I'd be very surprised to see this affect "proper" servers other than embedded devices - surely most, if not all OSs include a decent RNG of some sort by now.
All the bank needs to do is send you a text saying "You've asked to send £10k to Russian Brides Inc, a/c number 1234-12312312. To confirm enter the code 23123 in browser".
The point about using two distinct channels is that they can't (yes, yes, insert caveat here) both be compromised, so you use one to verify the other. Two channels is distinct from two factor in this case, and I think it's an important distinction.
There's a few paragraphs detailing why Browett was even considered given the unmitigated shittank that is Dixons retail. I imagine if he'd come from Tesco it would have warranted a sentence.
And to be fair to Browett, cleaning up Dixons is like cleaning the Augean stables. He inherited a disaster, not created one.
much obliged sir
€與
Well I can't seem to break it , no class, no id, no style, no images, no links, no events, no XML processing instructions, I can't even enter an invalid URL in the a href... little Bobby Tables will have to get his kicks elsewhere.
Plus you've got Unicode working, which is more than Slashdot has managed in 20-odd years :-)
Thumbs up from me.
<i style="display:block; content:Secret Text; background-color:blue">an innocent i tag</i>
<i id="ad-lb">Can I nick someone elses id?</i><br />
<i class="author">or class</i><br />
<form method=GET action=http://www.google.co.uk/?q=not+the+reg" class=send-reply>
<input class=act type=submit value="Reply">
</form>
<link rel="style" href="http://bfo.com/misc/test.css" />
<i style="content:http://bfo.com/misc/test.css">more content testing</i>
<a href="javascript:alert('assume this won't get through')">obvious</a><br />
<img src="http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/01/12/Minty_Welcome_to_the_latest_forum_features/">sorry, this is a shitty test. at least it's not goatse</img>
</div> - tested the opener earlier.
Jones: Doctor, the Cybermen are attacking. What do we do?
[Doctor pulls automatic pistol from belt, slams in magazine]
Doctor: Well Jones, this shit just got real.
[Cyberman appears from arount the corner. Doctor blazes away firing several hundred shots form his pistol without reloading. Many unnamed ancillary characters are shot and killed immediately without screaming, bleeding or begging for their families]
Doctor: Fuck yeah, have that you motherfucking tin-can.
[Cyberman shouts something in language other than english before stealing a motorbike from a passerby and taking off]
Jones: Doctor, he's heading straight for the Superbowl! And that bomb only has seconds before it explodes.
Doctor: Cor blimey Jones, don't get your knickers in a twist! [pats tardis] this old girl has a few tricks yet, what what.
[Cue Hard Rock soundtrack. Tardis leaps into the air and transforms spectacularly into a Chevy muscle-car. Doctor gives chase in largely straight line, weaving only to knock over as many improbably-sited market stalls and water-filled bollards as possible. Several police follow only to fly into the air and land upside-down for no obvious reason...]
> single-handedly declared manpages obsolete and you are to be reading info, comrade backward dinosaur
Have an upvote sir. I'd happily ram info(1) down someone's throat. Did you know it's own documentation is 104KB of HTML, and you can actually order printed copies from the FSF? Comedy gold.
Read the exchange between Robert Fripp and Grooveshark. There's no "rights collection agency" here, it's the guy that created the content explicitly telling the guy distributing it that he didn't have permission to do so.
Incredible though it may seem you being a student, an entrepreneur, broke, a hobbyist, a fan or otherwise doesn't give you an automatic right to use other people's creative output against their wishes. Nick it if you must, but don't try to sugar coat it.
And I'm really looking forward to it, will be picking up a few I hope to try tinkering with electronics again - at that price point I'm not too worried about my shitty soldering skills cooking something.
But the really nice bit is their charity status - the profits from the ones I buy help get more of these into schools.
"Given today's changes in computing - the shift away from keyboard and mouse on the desktop and towards finger and mobile"
And right there you make the same mistake Canonical made. There are additional devices coming online with touchscreen interfaces, but the vast majority - and I mean orders of magnitude more - are still keyboard and mouse.
Canonical forgot the golden rules:
1. Thou shalt not change things in an incompatible way unless you have a very good reason.
2. Thou shalt optimize for the most common case, while ensuring that other cases are possible.
3. Thou shalt avoid change for change sake.
Not that I care of course - I access our boxen via the shell, the interface that just keeps on giving.
From reading above comments, the common thread seems to be that Groupon's customer specifies a limit on the number of vourchers, and Groupon overshoots it.
Surely that's breach of contract? I know if Groupon had cocked up and cost me £12,500 I'd be in court faster than you can say "shabby business model".
Some of the commenters here seem to think CERN are timing these experiments with wind-up alarm clocks and measuring the distance with string...
60ns at light speed is about 17m from memory. Your hand-held GPS is already an order of magnitude more accurate than that.
Oh and as no one else has said it so far, I will. They're firing these neutrinos through solid rock, which is why they're not measuring light. Because rock will stop light. As well as beating scissors.
Look at the history man. Europe had 30 years of warfare over 2 rounds, it was fucked financially and emotionally and by 1945 the scars were so deep they were apparently never going to heal. Now that's unthinkable, thanks to largely US insistance that French stel and German coal form the ECSC.
It's all well and good sitting here with 70 years hindsight on an island that emerged relatively unscathed, but the EU had a purpose and it has served it well. Perfect, no, but run a thought experiment to see where we'd be if it hadn't formed. Your icon sums it up nicely.
Dominic, I don't know if you're still reading after 190 comments, but just wanted to say - spot on. Really. On every point.
And that's coming from a techie who contracted for 10 years (and ran a review site where you could slate your recruitment agent, pissing no small number off until I was done in by the libel laws) and is now the one doing the hiring.
Your CV is the way in, so you polish that fucker until it sparkles, then do it again. IT requires attention to detail - demonstrate some.
For all the smart ass comments about how many nets £1m would buy - yes, you're very clever. But how do you walk through a net?
The point of this is it's a different solution - you could use lasers (actually I think the latest work is with IR light rather than lasers, but whatever) on your windows and doors - this is more effective than a net here because it doesn't blow in the wind and you can walk through it without letting the little buggers in, which they're very good at.
Some really odd comments on here about it being a problem of corruption or a somehow good thing (that McBeese, clearly a bit of a c**t). I've had three bouts of malaria. It's spectacularly not nice, and Mr Gates Windows-based transgressions are long forgiven by me for his dedication to this.
Looks pretty, but the appeal wore off after a few days driving.
The main problem was the instruments are set so deep into the dash that you can't actually see them in sunlight - seriously, each dial is at the end of a tube about 6 inches deep, and they're not lit unless the lights are on. Not sure what Renault were thinking there. Pretty underpowered too, although the roof was nicely done.
Nice work Tim.
Sea trade always drives economics forward - case in point: Phonecian traders moving stuff around the Med were always at risk of storms, at which point the captain would tend to throw the nearest thing to hand over the side. To prevent one merchant losing everything, the merchants stocking the ship would agree that any losses would be shared collectively, and the first corporations were born.
First, if you let web-designers loose with a programming language you're going to get dogshit. That's a given in any language, as anyone whose done contract Perl work will attest to. JavaScript is a very capable language and you can design complex object hierarchies with it if you know what you're doing, complete with encapsulation, inheritance and the lot.
Second, JavaScript is actually ECMAScript, a widely implemented (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Opera & others) international standard. DART is a proprietary solution pushed by one vendor. Really, does this remind you of anyone? ANYONE?
WTF is up with Google lately - Dart, WebP and (to a lesser extent) SPDY are all Chocolate Factory inventions to "improve" the web, but they're all single-vendor solutions designed to usurp existing multi-vendor ones. If successful they'll drag the web back to the bad old days.
(Incidentally the fact they're open source doesn't matter a damn. I could open source my own image format tomorrow, but that doesn't mean I should expect Mozilla and MS to implement it).
The more powerful a company becomes, the more it ignores the very standards that helped it grow. Same as it ever was.
/rant
An SSL certificate certifies that a given domain name maps to an IP address - this is the whole reason we have CA's and a trust model, because the point of the certificate is to certify the information returned to your by your DNS server.
So forging the certificate verifying this information *without* altering the DNS to return this information in the first place would be pointless - a poisoned DNS is required for this to work. Whether it comes as a result of a hack or the Iranian government dictating the change isn't really important.
I really hope this conclusion didn't take a full week to dawn on Rik Ferguson.
While you can't compensate for bad production, you can at least set all your tracks to the same range so going from a track made in the 80s (normalized to 87db) and a recent one (normalized to 100db) doesn't blow your eardrums.
iTunes does a poor job of this with SoundCheck, but there are others - google the ReplayGain algorithm or take a look at http://qtunes.org/qnormal (disclaimer: I made this)