How about this for spam - it got through our spam filter, but I read it and thought, WTF!
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Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 11:36:27 +0300
Subject: 1
Black market is online again !
1. Heroin, in liquid and crystal form.
2. Rocket fuel and Tomohawk rockets (serious enquiries only).
3. Other rockets (Air-to-Air), orders in batches of 10.
4. New shipment of cocaine has arrived, buy 9 grams and get 10th for free.
5. We also offer gay-slaves for sale, we offer only such service on the NET,
you can choose the one you like, then get straight to business.
6. Fake currencies, such as Euros and US dollars, prices would match competition.
7. Also, as always, we offer widest range of child pornography and exclusive lolita
galleries, to keep out clients busy.
Everyone is welcome, be it in States or any other place worldwide.
ATTENTION. Clearance offer. Buy 30 grams of heroin, get 5 free.
Prepay your batch of rockets (air-to-air) and recieve a portable rocket-lacuncher.
For security reasons, please email me if you want to get address of our online shop.
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Could this be for real? Some of it seems as if it could be real, but then 'prepay for your air-to-air rockets and get a free rocket launcher' seems a bit "WTF!" The 'clearance offer' on heroin seems a bit odd as well. Do drug dealers do clearance offers???
pscs
@pscs
Best posts made by pscs
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WTF Spam!
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RE: WTF Spam!
@GettinSadda said:
You do realise that the only meaningful type of rocket launcher for an air-to-air missile - is a fighter plane!
No, I hadn't noticed that... My eyes were reading air-to-air, but my brain was seeing 'surface-to-air'
I suppose some strong springs might count as well!
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RE: Windows Vista WTF
I have two PCs running Vista Ultimate as well as a few running XP.
My laptop running Vista is faster than my wife's slightly older laptop running XP. Battery life is similar.
My desktop running Vista (dual core 2.6GHz) is considerably faster than my previous one running XP (single core with hyperthreading 3.2GHz). OK, it has a much faster graphics card on it as well. The Vista 'Usability score' is 5.9 so it's pretty high spec. I built it for Supreme Commander which is a real CPU/resource hog, and it works fine on Vista - whereas if Vista was running at half the speed of XP, it would be awfully slow.
I think you'd need to know what benchmarks were run. If you were checking UI things like dragging windows, on a low-end graphics card, then it's pretty obvious that XP is going to be considerably faster than Vista, because it doesn't have all the eye-candy like the translucent window frames etc, so an XP windows move is a simple graphics card blit, whereas a Vista windows move is a lot more complex. For people who have to have it as fast as possible, you can always turn this off.
'Behind the scenes' stuff runs at pretty much similar speeds. For our software development I have two VMWare setups, one with Vista and one with XP, running on the same host system. You'd be struggling to find any difference in the performance of our software on the two systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of these 'Vista is half the speed of XP' benchmarks are done on low-end PCs with the 'eye candy options' all turned on and then are testing UI stuff.
Latest posts made by pscs
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RE: That can't be good...
Windows has two ways of allocating memory, a 'real' alloc, and a 'virtual' alloc.
With a real allocation, you get a bit of address space and it's got little bits of memory which you can put stuff in. The program knows it's got the memory it wants.
With a virtual allocation, you get a bit of address space, and hope you get some actual memory to put stuff in later. The program knows it may not get the memory it wants.
AIUI, the default behaviour of Linux is a mixture of these two ways - the program THINKS it's got the memory it wants, but it may not have.
As if this wasn't bad enough, if you start using the memory that you've been promised when there isn't enough left, Linux doesn't necessarily kill you; the "OOM killer" will 'randomly' kill processes to free up sufficient memory for you.
So, a common tweak is to turn off the 'overcommit' feature. (look for vm.overcommit_memory)
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RE: SQL injection: I didn't know you could do that!
@scruff said:
bridget99: "a Profession" and "Professional" are not exactly the same thing.
This
The rest of the discussion is pointless.
Football ("soccer" for those not in the colonies) is not "a profession", but you get 'amateur footballers' and 'professional footballers'. The difference is that the 'professional' ones do it for a living, the 'amateur' ones do it for fun. There is no correlation with skill; 'amateur' players could be better than 'professional' players.
The same applies to programmers. dog walkers, star gazers, masseuses etc.
You do not have to work in 'a profession' to be 'a professional <whatever>'.
Programming is not 'a profession' (in most places), but you can get 'professional programmers' anywhere.
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Software outsourcing
I don't know if this has been mentioned here before, but I thought it worth a mention....
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RE: Worrying C/C++ skills
@Mcoder said:
You just allocate 4 or 8 times the needed memory. No harm done. It is also good, because the coder forgot to include space for the trailing '/0', the fact that he allocaes at least 3 more bytes that he'll use fixes that.
Unless you pass in an empty string...
@Mcoder said:
There are garbage collectors that will act on memory allocated by 'new', but not by 'malloc'. Somehow, I doubt the poster of that explanation knew enough to think about that... But those things exist.
But not in this environment AFAICT - you write DLLs (actually '.so's) which IBM's "super" (but very badly documented and/or designed) system calls when it feels like it. Your DLL uses whichever memory allocator it feels like. The DLL can be written in either C or C++, so requiring 'new' would be impossible.
(the DataStage system seems to be fundamentally flawed as far as we can tell - you have to return "char *"s, but there's no way of freeing "malloc"ed memory, and it's multi-threaded so you shouldn't use statics. (The only 'simple' solution would be return stack variables and 'hope' that they get copied before they're overwritten. A more complex "solution" would be to write your own memory manager with a time based de-allocator, and assume that the returned variables can be deleted after a certain amount of time). All the suggestions on the forums either have memory leaks or potential overwrite situations. And 90% of the people on the forums don't even seem to realise!)
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Worrying C/C++ skills
Whenever I wonder if I'm a decent C/C++ programmer, I just need to look around some programming websites.
This is one which really had me wondering if this was a new trick I should have known - then I realised - no, it wasn't...
As an example.
To allocate a block of memory to store a copy of a string in, we should all use:
char *ptr = new char[strlen(sourcestring) * sizeof(char *)];
This is OK 'because sizeof(char *) is always 1'. Also, you should use 'new' rather than 'malloc' because 'new' will manage the memory allocation & freeing for you, so you won't get memory leaks.
I certainly wish I'd known that trick.
I've been living with the misconception for years that:
- sizeof(char *) is probably either 4 or 8, but pretty certainly not '1' (except on computers with 256 or fewer bytes of memory)
- strlen(string) is the length of the string. For storing a string in a C character array, you need 1 extra byte (in this case, probably not an problem, except for empty strings, because of the massive overallocation caused by the previous issue)
- I always thought a 'new' should have a matching 'delete'. I could have saved so much typing and thinking if I'd known that 'new' managed the memory for you.
So, I feel humbled by the superior knowledge of the people on these forums.
(It's just slightly worrying that this is from a forum for people using IBM's DataStage, which is a thing for high performance handling of large databases. So, these people could well be working for your bank, or health service or government)
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RE: Switch-if antipattern
@PSWorx said:
... and then, of course, there is Duff's device...
I did that quite often when I wrote in assembler, but I didn't realise it would work in C...
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RE: PC won't start? Our software fixes that!
@tdb said:
Well, Windows is the most common point of comparison. Pardon me for assuming that if it wasn't what you meant. It's well within the realm of possibility that Linux package managers have shortcomings without being compared to anything. If you have some specific points in mind, I'd be interested to hear of them so that the software can be improved.
My gripe is that if you want to install a device whose driver ISN'T in the kernel, you have to rebuild the kernel.
So, you have to download the kernel source, download a compiler, download 27 different library sources (which takes a while, since you don't know which ones you need until you try to build it, so it's a recursive process), work out how to compile it, then compile the kernel, then hope that things work and you don't end up having to start from scratch again.
If you try to ask anyone for help with this (because it's not intuitive for 99.9999% of the population) you get looked at (metaphorically, since you won't be able to actually FIND someone who knows how to do it, so you'll have to ask online) as if you're stupid, and told to RTFM - but there isn't one, or if there is, no one can tell you where it is. If there are docs, they'll say something like 'download the driver source, then recompile the kernel, then do x, y, z'
I've been programming computers for 30 years, and even I lost 2 or 3 days of my life when I wanted to install a video capture card in Linux a couple of years ago. I'm not sure what an average person on the street could have done. I recently wanted to install a telephone card, and that was quicker - just a day and a half, but it didn't work, so I had to remove it and do a fresh Linux install to get it working again.
With Windows, you download a file/insert a disk, and hey presto.
Yes, Linux has many advantages over Windows, but ease of use isn't one of them.
If you want a plain server with standard apps, then you're fine, but if you want anything special, you really need to know what you're doing.
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RE: Google maps conspiracy!
@Mole said:
WTF? They placed a wildlife preserve directly next to a nuclear power plant? People may complain, but animals can't, so who cares? Sheesh.
Actually, that's a good reason to have it there. People will stay away, and people are generally more harm to animals than the perfectly clean water which comes out of a nuclear plant. In fact, that's a good argument to have nuclear plants next to ALL wildlife preserves (no I'm not kidding).
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RE: Plain rocks
@_moz said:
I don't think anyone tried to sell tap water in a bottle in the UK, certainly not since the Dasani debacle.
I don't know if it is just tap water, but quite a few places do sell just 'water' (not 'mineral water' or 'spring water'). eg Tesco will sell you 2 litres of water for 13p. At that price, I wouldn't be surprised if it came out of a tap... (A fair portion of the cost will be the bottle, shipping etc). While this may sound dumb, it can actually be useful occasionally. A few years ago there was a hard-to-find water leak further along our road. That meant that sometimes water would be brown when it came through the tap. We just bought a supply of el-cheapo water from Tesco for drinking until they found it and got it fixed, which took a couple of days. (The water company reimbursed anyone who had to buy water at that time).
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RE: Microsoft hasn't found out about tinyURL yet... or rewrite rules either.
I would normally do surveys like that, but when I saw the URL, it just went in the bin. Life's too short.