the body of a very slow loop
Microsoft has donated $25,000 to the Creative Commons, according to Larry Lessig, CEO of the non-profit organization.
Microsoft deserve serious kudos for this. It’s this type of Slashdot-head-exploding action that can save them from their current reputation. For an encore they should open-source something.
According to ABC News, ticket sales at movie theaters have declined for the 3rd year in a row.
Last time I went to the theater, I was charged $10 for popcorn, made to sit extremely close to an enormous screen, and then forced to watch 30 minutes of paid advertisements and previews.
Here’s a trick for increasing your revenue: try providing a service that doesn’t suck.
If you know x86 assembly, you know that it’s pretty quirky and irregular. Instructions are between one and fifteen bytes long. You need to know the length of current instruction in order to find the beginning of the next.
I’ve often wondered, if one got lost in the middle of an x86 byte stream, is there any way to get back on track? Well, I did an experiment and the results were sort-of surprising.
I took a 4k chunk of assembly from the middle of a C++ hello world program, and began disassembling it at arbitrary offsets. Well over half the time, the disassembler recovered in less than three instructions. In other words, it got zero, one, or two instructions wrong. It was never confused for more than 12 instructions.
I investigated a little further, and here’s my explanation: quite often, if you lop off the first byte or two of an x86 instruction, you get another valid x86 instruction which ends on the same byte.
Are guitar tabs illegal? The Music Publishers’ Association thinks so:
MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed. He said unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the Internet but were “completely illegal”.
(Source: BBC News)
OK here’s the thing: I could argue that fan-contributed tabs are legal under US copyright law, but it would be moot. The only two facts that matter are:
End of discussion. Seriously. Don’t empty your lobbyist piggy-bank for this one, Keiser. Its a lost cause. There’s a reason why your quote has spread like Internet wildfire: it betrays a point of view so jaw-droppingly out-of-sync with the rest of us, it’s laughable.
Sometimes I make money in the stock market, and sometimes I “pay tuition”. Today’s lesson is: if you own an equity, pay attention on the 3rd Friday of the month (when options expire).
Here’s the chart for CWTR, a stock I owned until about 10:15 this morning:
Just after 10AM the stock dropped 10% on big volume, triggering my stop-loss order. To add insult to injury, it pretty much recovered right away. I was “shaken out.”
Dissapointed, I went hunting for the bad news that must have caused this. There was nothing to be found. It seemed like there was no reason for this behavior.
And then I learned about the Theory of Maximum Pain.
Tomorrow is the 3rd Friday of the month. There were a lot of in-the-money $30 calls set to expire tomorrow. Whoever had written these calls was incredibly lucky that they got this opportunity to buy them back at-the-money.
This post from the Yahoo Message Boards pretty much says it all.
…you never know what you might find. I’ve done this many times, and it’s always fun.
Tonight, I was listening to the first episode of Triangulation, which was a disussion between Larry Lessig, John C Dvorak, and Leo Laporte about the Google Book Search project.
Afterwards, I Google-Booked myself and got a big surprise: it turns out that my name is actually in a book.
This is a chapter of ShaderX3 that was written by my coworker and good friend Kent Knox. My name is mentioned in the acknowledgments, along with our fellow team members Jim and Navreet.
Pretty cool.
As a side note, I also Google-Booked my rather Italian family name and found some references to organized crime.
It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.
— Alan J. Perlis
Too true.
Of couse, understanding an incorrect program is harder than understanding a correct one. I think that says something about the relative difficulty of debugging versus programming.
Unix-heads are used to perl scripts begining with #!/usr/bin/perl (the so-called, “shebang” notation). This is a feature I’ve always missed on Windows.
Thanks to Google’s filetype keyword, I found I a solution.
@rem = '
@echo off
\path\to\perl\perl.exe %0.cmd %*
exit /B %ERRORLEVEL%
';
print "Hello Perl World!";
The one caveat here is that you must name your file with the .cmd extension.
Update: Changed to return a proper errorlevel. Thanks, Kevin.
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