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Comment Re:Different types of terms (Score 5, Funny) 175

Something other than Node is likely used for the static parts of a site or for caching. Apache or Nginx are likely candidates. There are endless stack names, and they can be as silly as we want and someone could still build something useful on them. LAMP got coined because the stack was so popular together, with the 'P' being /P(erl|HP|ython)/ in many camps. That doesn't mean they'll all catch on as common, popular stacks.

Some people use BAPP -- BSD, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl/Python/PHP. Some people use specifically FreeBSD: FAPP. Some people use FreeBSD, Apache, Perl, and SQLite...

Here are some other less common web stacks:

MongoDB, ExpressJS, Linux, AngularJS, NodeJS, Groovy, Erlang
MELANGE

Scala, Python, AngularJS, Zope
SPAZ

Clojure, Linux, Oracle DB, WebGL, Nginx
CLOWN

PostgreSQL, io.js, Scala, Solaris, Erlang, D
PISSED

SQLite, Ubuntu, C, korn shell, io.js, TCL
SUCKIT

Lighttpd, io.js, C, Kadmelia
LICK

Apache, Mumps, io.js, R, Ingres, Twitter API, Enterprise JavaBeans
AMIRITE

Comment Re:Stop with the cop bashing. (Score 2) 31

Do you mean we should look at the crime rates that took a precipitous fall in the mid 1990s? Those crime rates you want us to look at? The ones that have been falling ever since, even through the worst recession in decades? How much more spending on putting "broken window" offenders in expensive prisons do we need to stave off this unfortunate fall in crime? We need crime to look so bad and scary so the people will keep letting their governments spend disproportionate amounts of money imprisoning people for victimless crimes. How else will the prison lobbies bring home the bacon to their masters?

AI

NIST Workshop Explores Automated Tattoo Identification 71

chicksdaddy writes: Security Ledger reports on a recent NIST workshop dedicated to improving the art of automated tattoo identification. It used to be that the only place you'd commonly see tattoos was at your local VA hospital. No more. In the last 30 years, body art has gone mainstream. One in five adults in the U.S. has one. For law enforcement and forensics experts, this is a good thing; tattoos are a great way to identify both perpetrators and their victims. Given the number and variety of tattoos, though, how to describe and catalog them? Clearly this is an area where technology can help, but it's also one of those "fuzzy" problems that challenges the limits of artificial intelligence.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Tattoo Recognition Technology Challenge Workshop challenged industry and academia to work towards developing an automated image-based tattoo matching technology. Participating organizations in the challenge used a FBI -supplied dataset of thousands of images of tattoos from government databases. They were challenged to develop methods for identifying a tattoo in an image, identifying visually similar or related tattoos from different subjects; identifying the same tattoo image from the same subject over time; identifying a small region of interest that is contained in a larger image; and identifying a tattoo from a visually similar image like a sketch or scanned print.

Comment Re:Meh (Score 1) 124

I'm not sure which Sony scandal you're talking about.

The PS3 alternate boot thing when it was sold with the feature and then had the feature stolen was pretty tangential for most people. The Windows rootkits on normal Redbook audio CDs was not an inconsequential thing.

Creating and then killing UMD rather than using MiniDisc or SD cards or downloads for PSP games was pretty tangential to the core purpose of the product. Using MS Pro Duo cards rather than SD for saving was too, for that matter. Putting a rootkit on the PSP media encoder software CD was not inconsequential.

Comment Re:Stupid Question (Score 1) 1067

IEEE floating point has positive and negative infinity, but there's not enough information in "/ 0" to say which is which considering true 0 is nonpositive and nonnegative (despite signed zero for convenience). There's a gap in the graph.

Try breaking it down into grade-school division for people though. Why? Because you can subtract 2 from 6, three times and build up the result as grade school children are taught, leaving 6= 1 + 4 / 2 = 2 + 2 / 2 = 3, but you can't take subtract 0 from itself 0 times leaving 0 + 0 / 0 to be simplified and expect it to make any progress. There is literally nothing to divide it into. x / 0 where x > 0 comes out to be x / 0 = 0 + x / 0 = 0 + x / 0 ad infinitum, or what a graph of 1 / x shows, approaching infinity. Where x < 0 it approaches negative infinity. Where x = 0 it never reduces. In other cases it reduces to a case that may or may not be useful.

The simplest way to define x / 0 were we to define it is that it is irreducible. 5 / 0 = 5 / 0 and 22345 / 0 = 22345 / 0 which is about useless without handling it as an exception anyway. This is unless one is doing other math and can therefore cancel out zeros, but then that would have to be done beforehand or in the exception handler/error checking code, which means it still needs to be handled as an exceptional case.

In certain applications it's okay to approximate to +inf or -inf or MAXINT or MININT or 0 but it's application-specific. There can't be a rule in the hardware or the language. The exception handler can do the approximation (and can log that it's an approximation or alert the user or whatever) or can fail out to user intervention if necessary. The exception is always the right default for an exceptional situation. :-)

Comment Re:I'm with you to some extent (Score 1) 1067

So let's see about that. Say you have $10,000 set assigned for an on-site training class and want to budget it against four employees, but none of them can make it to the class.

What percentage did you spend on employee A's spot in the training class since there were zero students?

10000/0 = ???

Did you spend zero percent on that employee? Or does that $10000 stay in the training budget and not get spent (assuming you canceled early enough that you don't still owe the instructor)? Or did the instructor not get notified in time, and you spent the $10000, but zero employees benefit from it? Did the instructor not get notified because your training department didn't check for zero students attending?

What's the return on investment of $2500 for which you get no return? Well, that's easy enough. It's zero, because 0/2500 is 0. But you didn't get the 2500 by dividing by zero. You got that by dividing by the expected 4. Zero was unexpected, or you wouldn't have scheduled the class in the first place.

Canceling the class due to having zero students is an exceptional circumstance. Paying a traveling instructor to show up for a day and do nothing is an exceptional circumstance. There are multiple ways to handle exceptional circumstances: check beforehand or raise an exception message and handle it. You don't just ignore the exceptional circumstance because you end up doing stupid things with bad information.

You don't suddenly have a zero cost per student class because nobody showed up and you spent $10000. You have just wasted ten grand if you still have to pay the instructor.

tl;dr: 0 != 1 and 0 as a divisor is not an identity function.

One DEFINITION of division is subtraction of the denominator from the numerator x times, where x is the result. You stop dividing when there's nothing left to divide out.

Now let's try dividing some things by 2.


6 / 2 = 1 + 4 / 2 = 2 + 2 / 2 = 2 + 1 = 3
12 / 2 = 1 + 10 / 2 = 2 + 8 / 2 = 3 + 6 / 2 = 4 + 4 / 2 = 5 + 2 / 2 = 5 + 1 = 6

by 3:
9 / 3 = 1 + 6 / 3 = 2 + 3 / 3 = 3
12 / 3 = 1 + 9 / 3 = 2 + 6 / 3 = 3 + 3 / 3 = 4

by 0 :
5 / 0 = 0 + 5 / 0 = 5 / 0
3 / 0 = 0 + 3 / 0 3 / 0

There's nothing to subtract there. You can't subtract zero from 5 enough times to get any number. Does that make 5/0 == 5 ? Does it make it 0? Does it make it approximately positive infinity? You can't simplify dividing by zero and have a meaningful integer result. (hint: you can subtract zero infinitely many times from 5 and still have 5.) IOW:

5 / 0 = 0 + 5 / 0 = 0 + 5 / 0 = 0 + 5 / 0 = (the same thing ad infinitum) = 5 / 0

Now there may be certain logical situations in which setting something to zero is the right thing to do in your exception handling code. Just letting everything be represented as if n/0 == 0 is not correct or desirable. It takes reasoning about how to handle the exceptional case.

Comment Re:Another Deceptive Slashdot Title (Score 1) 182

Perhaps you should update your lovely Wikipedia page, because it is outdated.

SATA 3.1 standard note at techreport
Webopedia info on SATA 3.x
Wikipedia's own entry on SATA 3.1
TechPowerUp article about SATA 3.1

Here's a press release from sata-io about it: in PDF format

Not only does TRIM via NCQ exist, it is in the recent specifications. You see, the thing about computer technology is that it keeps being improved. Outdated information doesn't stop that. It just becomes outdated.

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