Posts by h4rm0ny

Re: Total layman

It's never a stupid question if you don't know the answer, so there's no problem in asking. But what you suggest isn't how things work.

There are two reasons for this. A superficial one and a real one. The superficial one is that the programming languages don't have Right to Left variants. If you run the gcc compiler against some source code, it expects that source code to be the same whatever your native language. That's the superficial reason because you *could* write a parser that read things right to left if you wanted to. It wouldn't be hard. (For all I know, someone could have).

But there's a real reason why it wouldn't work like this as well. That is that regardless of how a single statement is written, the compiler is likely to render it to the same outputted machine code. So both "return 0;" and our hypothetical ";0 return" are both going to come out of the other side of a compiler as the same thing. That's the job of a compiler - to turn statements into their machine equivalent. Whether you say something in Arabic or in English, the *equivalent* in machine language is going to be the same.

(Also, I bet this isn't "Muslim". Israeli would be my bet).

Hope this helps.

Re: So for all you guys out there...

Ah yes, the endlessly old "why don't you calm down" comment, suggesting that the person you're talking to (over the Internet) is somehow hysterically wound up. Or alternately, you could just recognize that I'm pointing out that were it a male who was being run down by other males, being forcibly kissed and turned gay, a lot of men would suddenly feel differently about the ad. Nothing wrong with pointing out double-standards, is there? Not all men would dislike the ad that way, but a lot would.

Re: Am I the only one here that thinks this is not good?

"The problem is that if you break the law, you will eventually get caught and prosecuted."

More accurately, if you *keep* breaking the law, you will eventually be caught and prosecuted. If this individual (or others) had pulled off perhaps just half a dozen of these attacks, they could have escaped capture forever apparently.

Re: Bah!

Sodium has a melting point of just under 100C. I dread to think that we ever produces processors that run so hot that liquid sodium would be a coolant!

Re: Re:Oh, how I laughed!

"whine from the Left!" ???

Why on Earth do you suppose that anyone who wanted AV is on the "Left" ? Labour were against it, the Conservatives were against it. I'm considered right-wing on many issues and I supported AV. You're constructing odd strawmen images of your critics. Some sort of Divide and Conquer principle trying to turn it into a Right-Left division and garner some support? Sorry - your preconceptions are misplaced. Also, calling someone's post a "whine" is just a cheap way of trying to dismiss what they say. Argument by analogy, as you do by immediately resorting to talk about traininers vs. wellies, is the real flaw. Unless you can explain how wellies are closely analoguous to the existing system and trainers are closely analoguous to AV other than just because you say one is better than the other.

Re: I wonder...

Because poor punctuation, spelling and use of incorrect words really makes one attractive to others?

"Web-design bachelors"

It's been a while since I left Uni so I'm not sure if the above means you can actually get a BSc in Web Design or if you're just amusingly commenting on the state of CS these days. I fear the latter... but I fear the former more.

Re: What's surprising me...

"I actually sort of agree with Limbaugh's point that society (through health insurance) paying for birth control is essentially society helping people have sex for pleasure. Yes, there are medical reasons some for the use of birth control, but as a general rule it's about worry-free romping."

There's another very good reason for providing birth control to people. It reduces the rate of abortions.

Re: Not new

"Only now they're doing it with computers."

More quickly, more efficiently, less traceably.

BLAM - the noise your brain makes when it tries to think

Look, I'm actually a skeptic of AGW. But apart from that, I pretty much agree with Trevor Potts' whole post! You go "yawn yawn peak oil" but unless you think that oil is magically replaced by gnomes, how can you not believe that there will be a peak in oil production? Or maybe it's just that you are yawning because you don't think running out of oil will matter. In which case, I wonder half of our technology runs on. More gnomes, perhaps?

You don't have to swallow the entire AGW hypothesis (it will be a theory when they figure out how to test it properly) to realize that our dependence on oil is a very bad thing. And add to the previous arguments the fact that we keep bombing people for it too and proping up regimes like the Saudis. We need nuclear power. Lots of it. Right now. It's possibly the best thing we could realistically do to improve our country and our world right now.

You're an idiot.

"so the point is - i invented this and want some bloody recognition"

*Points and screeches* Copyright supporter! Burn her! Burn her! She turned me into Newt Gingrich!

re: The Kiwi Government

Why? I mean surely you can't believe that Megaupload *isn't* primarily a resource for copyright infringement and that its where the money comes from. So why is it weak of the Kiwi government to allow enforcement of laws against this?

Well firstly, Apache is not the same as Linux. I personally always run it on Linux and I don't think I'm alone there, but it needs pointing out that your statistics aren't quite what you say they are.

But the real point I want to make is that Linux servers operating behind "major sites" as you put it, are going to be better secured than people's home desktops and laptops in general. Yes, there's a lot of Linux out there, but it's more generally run by competent people. Whereas by virtue of being the vast majority of home systems, a lot of people who know little about computer security are running it. That makes the latter a juicier target by far, imo.

Ahh, 23k may not sound like much...

But where else does the company provide people on staff that you can go to to be told that your work actually is ethical and you're not doing anything wrong? You can't beat that sort of brainwa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H job affirmation.

@Kobus Botes

Relevant to the man on the street, or even most developers? Not relevant. 98% of your HTML and CSS is going to look pretty much the same in any of the main browsers. I bash out pages in Firefox, do some quick comparisons in IE7,8,9, Opera and a webkit based browser before release, but very seldom do I actually need to go back and change anything for the sake of one of these other browsers. I can think of one instance in the past year. (Admittedly, I am not primarily a web-designer, but I do quite a bit of it) and that actually had to do with form submission rather than layout.

Still, it is nice to be compliant as much as possible and so it's interesting to see how they perform in Acid3. I think browser writers are now coding to the test as far as Acid3 is concerned, mind you.