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It's interesting there was no sample of computers bought in countries other than China. Are we to assume they'd be clean? I doubt it.
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I always figured that, since the Chinese make all the chips, they were in a position to put anything they wanted directly into the hardware if they desired. Kinda makes you wonder about all that military hardware out there, doesn't it.
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Fortunately most military hardware isn't allowed to be made with chips and processors sourced outside the U.S. There is a major concern that countries like China will alter the chips at the factories to contain security bypasses that will allow them to get around security or funnel information back to China. The downside is that this increases the costs of the components by a lot and causes longs delays before you can get replacements. If one of these computers goes out, they can't just order a new one from a computer store.
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Probaly doing computers in China wasn't a good idea after all...
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One company I worked for had a QA department and their computers were always infected. Tech support would roll through and clean their computers, but right after they left, it seemed someone would pull out a floppy and manage to reinfect all the systems.
At one time I was asked to download a program over our WAN and then compile and create 5-1/4" and 3.5" floppies with the install EXEs. It was strange that people from different departments would stop by to ask me how things were going, so I suspected there was more going on than I had been told about. Therefore I was very careful in creating the sets. In fact I had made both sets before lunch and during lunch, reviewing things in my mind, I concluded I had made a mistake with one of the sets. Rather than just redo one set, I did both so the timestamps would be the same. (no need to give them something simple to seize on, witch hunting was their favorite sport, as you will soon see).
So I delivered the disks to the QA department and the head of the department asked me if I had virus checked the disks. I hadn't because we had been given boxes of clean disks that had been blessed by the tech department and I had pulled the blanks from those boxes. The QA head said, "That's probably for the best, we should check that ourselves."
Later, I saw the QA head and others who had stopped by my cube, going from cube to cube of others who had stopped by and were added to the group. I had visions of peasants gathering their pitchfolks and torches heading towards my cube.
So I was forced to run a virus check on my computer (clean) and several of the disks in the boxes of "clean" disks the tech department had given me (clean) while everyone stood as witness. They still tried to place the blame on me by asking if I could have found the infection before they got to me and removed it. I asked, "If I had found a virus, why wouldn't I just go to you and warn you?" They sort of hemmed and hawed at that.
Seems that they had replicated around 5000 copies of the disks before they realized that they were all infected with some virus.
It was a large company and if they could monumentally screw up after going through their QA department, I'm not surprised that some electronics are delivered the same way. Wasn't there some game cartridge manufactured with a virus on it a few years back?
Psychosis at 10
Film at 11
Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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 That's horrible. Seems that this problem has been going on for some time.
I can't recall if a game has done something along of these lines, but what I do recall is Sony used to put a tracking device on their cd's to find out how many rips you were doing and forced paying customers to choose a certain format in the rip. Unsurprisingly, mp3s were not part of the choice. But it was soon reversed.
It's sad that companies resort to these petty annoyances.
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Good find! 
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Code which never gets tested is an accident waiting to happen. The coverage of the code as it is exercised by the suite becomes an important metric. It is not a surprise if everyone aims to hit that magical 100% coverage. This applies also to the world of front-end web development with JavaScript.... While statement coverage is important and you should definitely try to hit its peak, care must be taken to ensure that this is not the only coverage analysis being considered. We've got you covered.
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Seems he's only concerned about if q is undefined in his example of inc, but what about when it is zero? He didn't cover it as it seems...
"Any sort of work in VB6 is bound to provide several WTF moments." - Christian Graus
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Sometimes the compiler can know via "static" analysis (that is, analysis done knowing only the compile-time types of expressions, rather than knowing their possibly more specific run-time types) that an "is" operator is guaranteed to produce a particular result. But before we get into that, let's briefly review the meaning of "is" in C#. It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.
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Today we released an update for xScope that supports the Retina display. This update was harder than most. The 68k to PowerPC, Carbon to Cocoa, and PowerPC to Intel transitions were no walk in the park, but this update really kicked my butt. Here’s hoping that sharing some of the things I learned along the way will help you with your own Retina work. Four times the pixels for ten times the work.
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Last week at Vimeo we had a challenge. Build a better query string parameter sorter for a Varnish plugin. The gauntlet was thrown down at 5pm on a Friday and by 2am Friday night we had our first contender. I arrived home to see the code and decided to throw my hat into the ring. I had made some attempts at c plugins for php but never really got anything off the ground. The K&R book had been a fascination for me but now it was time to put it into practice. An interesting tactic for getting the kids to put in free overtime.
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Abstraction layers are great tools for building things, but they can sometimes get in the way of learning. My goal in this post is to convince you that in order to rigorously understand C, we must also understand the assembly that our C compiler generates. I'll do this by showing you how to disassemble and read a simple program with GDB, and then we'll use GDB and our knowledge of assembly to understand how static local variables work in C. Or: learning to program the really hard way.
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Inspired by the low-cost computing power of the Raspberry Pi, a team at the University of Southampton has used the ARM-based Linux computer-on-a-board as a building block for a low-cost supercomputer—racked and stacked using Lego blocks. And they’ve published a step-by-step guide for anyone interested in creating their own Raspberry Pi high-performance computing “bramble." So easy, a 6-year-old child prodigy could do it.
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Benchmarks man, benchmarks is what we need!
I went looking but couldn't find anything relating to this build, but did come across another article that said you would need approximately 1.4 million Rasperberry Pi's to get into the Top500 list (#500 = 60 TFlops/s).
Now that would be a fair Lego build!
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Today Apple announced the iPhone 5, with a new thin design, larger screen, and faster processor. It wasn’t much of a surprise primarily due to all the leaked parts, but as with all of Apple’s products, it made a big splash. Here are some first impressions from the point of a designer and web developer. It was perfectly integrated, and it had a marvelous kind of negative capability.
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Without some details about the 160 attacks on “critical infrastructure” in 2011, it’s impossible to evaluate whether the solution is stronger hardware, better training, or advanced deep-breathing relaxation techniques. Some Internet attacks are the equivalent of knocking on a door and trying the handle to see if it’s unlocked. These might be targeted against millions of computers in numeric sequence, and happen to include “critical infrastructure” only by accident. The only thing we have to fear is corrupted backups.
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A common dream of most developers is to develop a game. Game development can be very intimidating to jump into straight away. The hardest decision is to determine what kind of game you’re going to create – what’s the backstory, who are the actors, what’s their purpose, what does success look like, and so on. One of the more popular casual game types and one not to intimidating for new game developers to jump into is the Tower Defense game genre. Developers vs. Zombies.
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Terrence Dorsey wrote: Developers vs. Zombies.
What weapons would we use? A machine gun that shoots exploding keyboard keys? Computer mouse grenades? Monitor mines? Exploding CDs/DVDs?
I do know that our rations would consist mostly of BACON!
I honestly think that would be a fun game!
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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I'll skip the rumor mongering that lead to the NFC speculations and get straight to it. I'm glad Apple is not using NFC in the new iPhone. My iPhone already has one of the best data transmission options available, a retina display and a high resolution camera. NFC is solving the wrong problem. Here's the real problem: how do we communicate data a short distance as quick as possible with the least effort? Near-field curmudgeon.
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The OP's username seems to indicate 'Apple Fanboy' and, as such, of course any feature that the iPhone 5 lacks would be considered as extraneous, unnecessary and lacking, and they'd be (publicly) glad that the phone didn't have it. The fact is that NFC does the job of exchanging information over a short distance very well as is being widely adopted as an industry standard. Even £40 PAYG phones have NFC these days. It seems that Apple have dropped a clanger to save the price of a chip and a bit of software development.
Live the Apple mantras: "We're not going to let you do that" and "We'll save that for the iPhone 6 and screw another upgrade out of you".
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One of Steve Jobs’ wishes, to have Apple employees wear a uniform, seems to have come to fruition and was on display yesterday. But would he approve? Do you? ITworld
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I just don't care what they wear. Of what importance is it?
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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Might be a marketing fail, if people start talking about the dress style instead of the product. 
Chris Meech
I am Canadian. [heard in a local bar]
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. [Yogi Berra]
posting about Crystal Reports here is like discussing gay marriage on a catholic church’s website.[Nishant Sivakumar]
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