Actually, the whole efficiency thing has been studied by the IEEE and they came up with this summary that is about as close as you are likely to get without breaking the laws of physics:
Posts made by GettinSadda
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RE: Hydrogen Vehicles - Truly Beneficial?
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RE: Certified secure
Not sure about other countries (but sure most Western ones have similar):
[QUOTE User="Computer Misuse Act 1990"](1)A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a)he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer, or to enable any such access to be secured ;
(b)the access he intends to secure, or to enable to be secured, is unauthorised; and
(c)he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.
...(3)A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable—
(a)on summary conviction in England and Wales, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(b)on summary conviction in Scotland, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding the statutory maximum or to both;
(c)on conviction on indictment, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years or to a fine or to both.[/QUOTE]And just for fun:
[QUOTE USER="Criminal Law Act 1967"](1)Where a person has committed an arrestable offence, any other person who, knowing or believing him to be guilty of the offence or of some other arrestable offence, does without lawful authority or reasonable excuse any act with intent to impede his apprehension or prosecution shall be guilty of an offence.
[F1(1A)In this section and section 5 below “arrestable offence” has the meaning assigned to it by section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984.]
(2)If on the trial of an indictment for an arrestable offence the jury are satisfied that the offence charged (or some other offence of which the accused might on that charge be found guilty) was committed, but find the accused not guilty of it, they may find him guilty of any offence under subsection (1) above of which they are satisfied that he is guilty in relation to the offence charged (or that other offence).
(3)A person committing an offence under subsection (1) above with intent to impede another person’s apprehension or prosecution shall on conviction on indictment be liable to imprisonment according to the gravity of the other person’s offence, as follows:—
...(d)in any other case, he shall be liable to imprisonment for not more than three years.[/QUOTE]
So if this had happened in the UK then anyone who committed the act would be liable for up to two years in prison, and anyone who deliberately helped that person evade justice (say for example by witholding their name when recounting the story) would actually be liable for up to three yers in prison!
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RE: Video powered case fans
@ender said:
Not really that surprising - there's some current leakage through the cable, and the 5V rail is often shared. I've seen USB hub power the chipset fan myself.
I wouldn't exactly call it "leakage" the OP has connected a cable that is used to provide a 5v power supply to one device to the 5v rail of another device. He may as well have clipped a bench PSU to a 5v test-point. -
RE: Video powered case fans
Pin 14 of a DVI cable supplies +5v power to a monitor for use when in standby. If you connecta DVI cable from one PC to another then you link the +5v busses of each computer. Any devices powered from this 5v bus would try and use power via the DVI cable.
Actually I am pretty certain that the way modern PSUs work not all the 5v supplies are directly linked, so this is not guaranteed to happen depending on which output is used for each device - but it does not surprise me at all.
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RE: Rental Electrician
@frits said:
@GettinSadda said:
Also - a three room apartment with only 15 sockets? So 5 sockets per room on average? The room that I am in has 12 sockets, and that is not generous for the UK.
That's actually more like 10 sockets per room. US outlets are usually two sockets per outlet. The rule of thumb is an outlet every 6 feet (I think NEC requires no cord to be run for more than 6 feet). US homes also usually have dedicated outlets for appliances (of varying current capacity and voltages). Also, kitchen counters usually have several outlets and multiple circuits to accomodate microwave ovens, toasters, etc.
Sockets in the UK are usually paired, and count as two sockets.
Are US double sockets on the same circuit? If so it would be interesting to know how often someone plugs a kettle into one and a toaster into the other - which is a common situation in the UK.
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RE: Rental Electrician
In the UK, appliences such as this 3kW electric heater are common:
[img]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41hFUmyOgbL._SS500_.jpg[/img]As are ones such as this 2kW fan heater:
[img]http://247electrical.co.uk/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/f/2/f2001wh.jpg[/img]And of course this 2.7kW tumble dryer:
[img]http://www.365electrical.com/images/detail/IDC85.jpg[/img]This 3kW kettle:
[img]https://direct.tesco.com/pi/Enlarge/5/SS09204-8085TPS434183.jpg[/img]And this 1.8kW toaster:
[img]http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41ZbsqdmvuL._SL500_AA300_.jpg[/img]With 15A or 16A circuits I could not plug any two of these into sockets on the same circuit and I would have to be aware of the wiring in a property to even decide what I could plug in where.
Also - a three room apartment with only 15 sockets? So 5 sockets per room on average? The room that I am in has 12 sockets, and that is not generous for the UK.
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RE: Rental Electrician
Very few people seem to understand the reason that UK plugs contain fuses - they are to protect the cables. The principle is that any cable must be protected by a "protective device" (i.e. a fuse or breaker) that will trip before the cable is damaged by high current. The cable entering a property could be safe for hundreds of amps and is protected upstream, then there is main fuse, usually 100A. This means that anything after this fuse must be able to function safely while passing 100A - this includes the main switch for the property, the meter, consumer unit (fuse box) and cables connecting them. In the consumer unit there will be breakers (usually at 32A) which feed ring mains. This means that the wiring for each ring must be able to safely pass 32A. A ring will contain many sockets, and what happens from that point onwards depends on what the homeowner wants to do. A typical example may be a 2kW electric heater being plugged in - this has a design current of about 8.7A. The question is, how much current must the cable to that heater be able to safely take? You have to assume that a fault could develop in the heater causing it to draw more power (a common fault in a heater). If there is no fuse in the plug, then the cable has to be safe at 32A because that it what it will take to trip the breaker. This would not be a good solution, so in this case the plug will have a 13A fuse, and the cable will be designed to be safe at 13A. Note that even though the design current of the heater is less than 9A, the cable must be rated at over 13A as that is the "fault current" for this device (determined by the fuse in the plug). Where it gets even more interesting is where I want to plug in a radio taking a couple of watts (about 10mA). Here I can have a plug with a 3A fuse, and size my cable for 3A rather than 13A. To understand why this is important, consider the fact that 13A cable is fat, expensive and not that flexible, but 3A cable is thin, cheap and considerably more flexible.
So, why not use the US system and have a breaker for each circuit and noting in the plug? Firstly a typical UK house might have well over 100 sockets, each able to supply 13A if required (not all at once obviously, but you should never be far from a socket that can supply you with 13A if required). Even if you were to put 10 sockets on each breaker, that would require more than 10 breakers for sockets. Assuming that you use 15A breakers for each of those, it will be difficult to be sure whether any socket can supply you with more than 8 or 9 amps without knowing which other sockets are on the same breaker. For a 13A socket on a 32A ring to not be able to supply 13A, there has to be over 19A used elsewhere on the same ring; for a socket on a 15A circuit to not be able to supply 13A, there only has to be 2A use elsewhere on the circuit. Also, to give the same protection as UK wiring, every cable on every device must be safe at 15A, and my understanding is that this is not true of most devices in the USA.
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RE: State of the "Union"
I do wonder wether it was about trying to scupper Romney so that Newt will run against Obama and he will then have an easier election!
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RE: Else return null
@Jaime said:
My bigger pet peeve is; why return null instead of an empty list? I think an empty list or an exception are both easier to handle than to have to check for a "null bomb" every time the method is called.
I disagree - to me returning an empty list means "all went well, and the following is the list of zero results", returning null means "something went wrong"
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RE: I18n fail message box
@SilentRunner said:
If it wasn't for Microsoft, people, you'd be playing some dumb game on your updated Commodore 64.
The majority of the Commodore 64 ROM was written by Microsoft - so that comment is TRWTF!
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RE: WTF Epson
@El_Heffe said:
If you use POP3, you do log in to GMail - part of the POP protocol is the sending of username and password at the start of a session.@GettinSadda said:
I suspect that you are logged in as GMail #2 and sending with "From:" set to GMail #1
Uh....no. To keep my original post short and hopefully not too confusing, I left out some of the details about the email accounts. I do not send or receive mail using Gmail's web interface. I only connect via POP3 from the email client on my PC. I am never "logged in" to Gmail.Also, if you send via a different server, there may be other problems such as Epson checking the details of the sending server (even checking the reverse DNS to see if it matches the sending domain).
I wonder if the person that implemented the system was a recent graduate with a thesis about web security.
A number of years back I spent ages fixing a complex device that formed part of a television studio infrastructure. Thissystem had several boards in a rack and they talked to each other via a 'simple' network. The person that coded this system was a recent graduate and so he built a complete network stack to run this inter-board communication system. This ended up being the cause of the failures (it even took a very major live programme of-air for a while!) What happened is that a mistake in the datasheet for one part of the comms system caused circuits based on the flawed data to have an instability that occasionally caused packets to become corrupted. If the corruption happened in the address field, the internal network would attempt to route the packets to the new address. As the internal network was 'fully-featured' this meant that the internal packets contained the machine's address as well as the board address and port, so a corrupted machine address would cause the packet to be sent to the main control board (the one with the external network interface) and then forwarded on to the machine with the new address. This was pretty bad as it would cause the wrong machine to have its settings change - but even worse was if the machine address ended up as "0". This was the "broadcast" address. When this happened, every machine on the network would receive the packet, but rather than this causing every machine on the network to change to the new setting, it caused ever machine on the network to inspect the packet and try and determine what to do with it. And what do you do with a broadcast packet? You broadcast it! So the second broadcast wave includes a broadcast message from every machine on the network.Then it just grows exponentially until the network is swamped and all the machines fall over and reboot. All that was required was a method for each control board to receve signals from a controller and set one of about 6 integer parameters on sub-boards. The sub-boards should never have needed to talk to the outside world, and the outside world should never have needed to talk to the internal boards. Also, machines never had any need to talk to each other, just the controller. Broadcast packets were also never intended to be a part of the system. The lesson that the original coder should have learned (though he left when it became apparent he didn't know how to fix it) was that just because you know how to do it, doesn't mean you should!
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RE: WTF Epson
GMail adds a "Sender:" field to the header of all outgoing e-mails showing the exact source of the message. This is the e-mail address that you are signed into when you sent the message, NOT the "From:" field. If you have several e-mail addresses that are aggredated under one GMail account you will find that you are often sending e-mails with "Sender:" and "From:" different. I suspect that you are logged in as GMail #2 and sending with "From:" set to GMail #1
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RE: Punting the Power Strip
It could be worse!
A few years back I did lots of trade shows for various broadcast equipment. When we designed the stands we did crcuit diagrams showing every connection, including power routing. Unfortunately the people building the stands did not worry too much about following the diagrams. I turned up at one show the day before it opened and was debugging the set-up of the equipment. The stands were quite big and included crawl-ways that were a little bit like [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferies_tube]Jeffries tubes[/url]. I was crawling through one of these to check a suspect connection when I became aware that one of the cables I was crawling over was painfully hot. I traced the power cables and realised that an entire section of the stand was connected at random via power strips that all ended up in the same strip. How this strip was managing at least 20A or so, and how nothing had blown or caught fire, I will never know!
Needless to say, I spend a couple of hours re-wiriing the power!
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RE: I can't wait to watch this movie!
@delta534 said:
Eh, I will wait for the sequel Example 9 hour 59.987 Remote Content: an example of 60 frames per second.
Except that would be 59.94
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RE: Log out - or crash the site?
You can LogOut any time you want - but you can never leave!
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RE: There is a God
What you are doing is basically allowing abuse to continue.
As far as I am concerned this makes you partly responsible for it.
This family need professional help. Now.
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RE: Member-Level SqlConnection
I'm afraid that my opinion is as follows: You have misunderstood the purpose of you job - it is not to produce the most efficient, up-to-date and maintainable code, it is to do what your bosses tell you to do. Ideally this should be to produce the most efficient, up-to-date and maintainable code, but then life is rarely like that! You may beleive that your way of coding this is better (and for what it's worth I agree) but the people responsible for paying you money and ensuring you still have a job on Monday morning disagree. As far as they are concerned what you did is about the same as coding your latest contribution in Perl or Java because you beleived they were better languages for this application.
</$0.02>
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RE: Any thoughts on this password behaviour?
@Lingerance said:
@b-redeker said:
So are you saying that everyone that has any reason to have shell access to your servers has Rain-Man-like memory? And that we should all have known that?So basically everyone has their password written on a yellow postit stuck to their monitor?
Might want to reread what I said the passwords are used for. Everyone who has shell access to the servers has no issue remembering the passwords, and if they do it's usually 5 minutes for someone else to reset their password.
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RE: Clearly the Welsh government have nothing better to do.
Actually, I would be quite happy to have my representatives doing this sort of work.
The issue that these regulations tackles is a serious one that has claimed the lives of a significant number of children and old people. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konjac#Fruit_jelly[/url]
The reason that these sorts of amendments get made is often that someone has escaped conviction for doing something that the original law was intended to ban, because a lawyer pointed out that a comma in a certain place changed the interpretation just enough that the "banned" activity was not really banned in this case.
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RE: Windows wireless/mapped share stupidity - need help
I have this same problem too, with a wired network, and have since Win2k as far as I can recall.
After re-booting I always have to go to explorer and click on all my shares.
I just figured one day someone at Microsoft will figure out how to make on OS that works properly.
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RE: Possible sue-age in preparation
When viewing [b]this[/b] page I get:
[img]http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/2696/avmess1.png[/img]
When I try and go to msgdiscovery.com I get:
[img]http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/4236/avmess2.png[/img]
When I try and view the Google cache of the page I get:
[img]http://img39.imageshack.us/img39/9013/avmess3.png[/img]
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RE: Possible sue-age in preparation
@Zecc said:
Did you really go to msgdicovery.com or msgdiscovery.com? Which time did you make the typo?
Typo in post, not in visiting site (or attempting to)
will post more info in a minute
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RE: Possible sue-age in preparation
Why does my anti-virus get so upset about that image? It won't even allow it to be shown!
If i try and go to msgdicovery.com it says that the page is attempting to install "ScrInject.B.Gen"
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RE: Windows Notepad Bug Has Reached Legal Drinking Age
When WordWrap is enabled, "Go To" and "Status Bar" are disabled as the wrapped display does not match the lines/columns of the file being edited.
Odd, but there is logic to it.
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RE: Rounding bug wierdness, methinks!
@Thief^ said:
@PJH said:
VAT is currently 17.5%. (Even to those 'advertising' 15% - all those businesses are doing is absorbing the difference.)
True, they changed it back.
I've had a play on ebuyer's site, for the "Line Total" column it's definitely taking the exVAT price, multiplying it by units and VAT (real, 17.5% VAT), then rounding. The "exVAT" view (link at the top of the screen to switch) totals up fine. I'm not sure what the law demands for VAT calculation, should it be applying VAT per unit or applying VAT to the total?
Last time I did any of this stuff you were allowed a 1p per line "rounding discrepancy"
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RE: Marty! We're going Back to the Future!
You need to phone them back and explain to them that they have legal obligations under the Distance Selling Regulations
The information required to be provided by paragraph (1) is ... information about the conditions and procedures for exercising the right to cancel under regulation 10
So, they need to give you written details of their cancellation procedures when you place an order. Sounds like they can't possibly do that as they don't have any proper procedures!
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RE: Feel the Sicness
If there is any chance that this kid is doing the "internet banking" for this bank - run as fast as you can to your nearest branch and transfer your account to somewhere safe! Otherwise some script kiddie will have emptied your account within 24 hours of the site going live!
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RE: This is not an IT WTF.
OK, what I see in this picture (stop me when I get to the WTF...):
* Some sort of road repair is going on (hence the coned off area)
* The guy in the picture is doing something to a cable - perhaps preparing it for splicing or some complicated and fiddly work
* It is a hot and sunny area
* The guy finds it easier to do the work when in shade - perhaps because the cable is a multi-core data cable for controlling the new signal lights about to be installed and the colours are easier to see when not in full glare (hint... shades do not help with colour-coded cables)
* You took a picture
* You posted it here with no further explanation
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RE: Generic programming in C
@LoztInSpace said:
And with any compiler worth considering I would expect memcmp() to be at worst exactly the same speed as this version, probably faster.Definately assembly background.
It's curious that someone that knows C can be unfamiliar with the memcmp() function that has come with every C runtime library that has ever shipped. It even (gasp!) handles odd byte counts, although I don't think you will find many odd sized structures for code targetted at modern CPUs.
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RE: 17-year-old Dead after Tweeting in the Bathtub
Well, in the"electrical safety" lectures of my electrical engineering degree we were taught that almost any voltage can be fatal in the right circumstances - in fact 30 volts DC was quoted as dangerous hand-to-hand when wet. Directly applied to a wet chest 19VDC could be fatal.
It is also worth considering that laptops generally have very high voltages for the LCD backlight (about 2000V)
However it is more likely that the cause was either the mains side of the PSU.
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RE: Plain rocks
@Vechni said:
@GettinSadda said:
In most countries picking up rocks that are "just lying around" and taking them home is actually theft (unless you own the land where the rock was lying or have permission from the owner). There are places where the number of stones or rocks being picked up by people to use in gardens etc. is such a problem that you WILL be prosecuted if you are spotted doing it.
Not suprised at all that scots are this stingy to have laws about taking pebbles off the ground.
Cornwall is not in Scotland!
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RE: Plain rocks
In most countries picking up rocks that are "just lying around" and taking them home is actually theft (unless you own the land where the rock was lying or have permission from the owner). There are places where the number of stones or rocks being picked up by people to use in gardens etc. is such a problem that you WILL be prosecuted if you are spotted doing it.
[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/news/seaside-pebble-thieves-warned-1104590.html]See this example[/url]
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RE: Very expensive watch
@Shinhan said:
Yeah sure, I'd pay $1,000,000 for it, but asking an extra $87,499.99 is just daylight robbery!$1000000 is appropriate for a watch with such a long name
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RE: Who needs ||?
I have been known to do something similar - when the conditions are clear one way, but not the other, e.g:
if( ((option_one != null) && (option_one.valid())) || ((option_two != null) && (option_two.valid())))
{
// We have at least one valid option
}
else
{
DoErrorReport()
}
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RE: ExecuteScalar maybe?
I'm assuming that is C#, which I have never used, and I did my very first proper (yet very basic) SQL yesterday (loading a table from a flat file using PHP) but the problem with that code leaped out at me as soon as I read it.
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RE: OO - The *other* end of the spectrum
I know nothing significant about Java, but... in any sane language a lookup of any one of 150 objects indexed by an 8-bit integer should always be faster using a 256 entry array than any form of hash map.
Also, one of my very first C programs was a CPU emulator for an 8-bit CPU that used a 2D array of microcode steps stored as function pointers. It worked pretty well!
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RE: Similar? WTF?
It's obvious - all of the item numbers start "1103" so they are similar!
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RE: MySpace message WTF
That makes me want to sign up for MySpace and set my first name to "[@AuthorFirstName]"
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RE: VB.NET chops the Ouroboros in half! Critical hit! The Ouroboros takes 0 damage!
@Spectre said:
@GettinSadda said:
Yeah - OK, but I was trying to simplify. Languages are much more complicated tham most people think - but even the basic principles are not always well understood.In C (and C++ etc.) there is no such thing as a Statement - everything is a function, and therefore an Expression.
That is preposterous.
C has the following types of statements:
...
I think I shall refrain from attempting to clarify things in future as someone always picks holes in any attempt to do that.
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RE: VB.NET chops the Ouroboros in half! Critical hit! The Ouroboros takes 0 damage!
OK, there is a very fundamental principle that is at work here, and it seems that it is not widely understood.
In BASIC (and variants of), there are two types of construct that are used to write programs: Statements and Expressions
A Statement is a command for the computer to do something. Statements can take a number of Arguments. Generally speaking each argument is an Expression. Statements do things, but do not have a value.
An Expression is something that has a value. This may be a simple value such as "3" or it may be made up of a combination of Operators and other Expressions, such as "1 + 2" or "SQRT(3+LEN(A$))". Some Expressions may be functions and as such they may cause things to happen in a Statement-like way, but they are not Statements because they have values. Expressions cannot generally be used "on thier own" in BASIC, they must be an Argument of a Statement.
In C (and C++ etc.) there is no such thing as a Statement - everything is a function, and therefore an Expression.
In BASIC the message "Hello World" can be displayed using the PRINT Statement:
PRINT "Hello World"
This is a Statement that takes a single Expression and displays it - there is no "return value".
In C the message "Hello World" can be displayed using the printf function:
printf("Hello World\n");
This is really just an Expression that is made up of a function taking a single argument. Evaluating the expression causes the function to be called and this displays the message. However, the key think to know here is that unlike the PRINT Statement in BASIC, the message display is technically a side-effect of calculating the value of the function. In this case the value is 12, and it is discarded.
In C the Expression "LValue = Expr" has a value of Expression "Expr" and a side-effect of setting "LValue" to that value. The Expression could validly be another instance of this assignment Expression. So "a = b = c;" is broken down into "a = (b = c)", then "b = c" is processed, setting b to the value of c and returning the value of c. Next "a = c" is processed, as the value of "(b + c)" was discovered to be "c". End result, all three variable end up with the same value.
In early versions of BASIC there was a Statement "LET Variable = Expr" that set the value of Expression "Expr" into "Variable". Later versions of BASIC made the "LET" keyword optional (in fact more modern versions may not even have this keyword). If you get BASIC to process "LET A = B = C" it will see that this is a LET statement with "Variable" equal to "A" and "Expr" equal to "B = C". The first "=" is part of the syntax of the LET statement, the second is an Expression operator. So, first "B = C" will be evaluated by comparing the two values, this will give 0 if they are different and a non-zero value if they are the same (what value depends on which version of BASIC!). The result of this boolean comparison is then set into "A".
When a modern version of BASIC sees "A = B = C" it needs to first find the statement, and the only way to find one here is to insert the optional "LET".
</BoringLecture>
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RE: World of Warcraft WTF?
@rohypnol said:
Actually I seem to recall that new users can't add links until they have a few posts under thier belt (half-arsed spam prevention)Yes, direct link is possible: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=11381238&sid=1
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RE: How to compare data
@Someone You Know said:
No, as far as I understand it, "123 Some Street, Apt. 34" and "123 Some Street" would be classified different in both, but "123 Some Street, Apt. 34" and "" would be skipped inthe boss^n version as would "" and "123 Some Street".@jetcitywoman said:
Different results but it would have taken too long to figure out exactly why.
If I understand this correctly, the results are different because your version compares all the fields, while his only compares those for which both records have data, ignoring any fields which are empty in at least one of the records.
For instance, your version would consider "123 Some Street, Apt. 34" and "123 Some Street" to be different, while his would consider them to be the same.
If the results are quoted as a percentage, I guess the boss^n version would give a higher percentage because many non-matched entries would be ignored.
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RE: The Old Black Apple Laptop
Actually, there is a very good reason to put an Apple label on a non-Apple PC.
If you check the OS X license you are only permitted to run it on a computer that has an Apple label - strange but true!
@http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macosx104.pdf said:
This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.
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RE: UK VAT down from 17.5% to 15%....It's the Y2K bug all over again!!
@Zecc said:
@GettinSadda said:
When I started there were three: 15%, 0% and exempt (yes, zero and exempt are different!)
Ok, I'm curious....If something is zero-rated then it is subject to VAT (but the total amount is zero).
If something is exempt then it is not subject to VAT.
The difference becomes important when you realise that the person selling or supplying a VATed item or service can claim back the VAT spent to do so (providing you are VAT registered).
For example: If I buy some paper at £2.35 (£2 + 35p VAT) and paint at £1.76 (£1.50 + 26p VAT) and paint a picture that I sell for £300 (£255.32 + £44.68 VAT), I have to pay the government the £44.68 VAT I collected, but I can claim back the VAT on the materials (61p).
The same would apply if I used the same paper and a £1.76 pen to write a book that I sell for £300. However the book would be zero-rated so I would not have to pay the government £44.68. I could still claim back the 61p VAT from materials!
If I use the same paper and pen to write out an insurance policy, that would be exempt from VAT (but not insurance tax) and so I could not claim back the VAT spent
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RE: UK VAT down from 17.5% to 15%....It's the Y2K bug all over again!!
I so hope that there is no serious software out there that is coded badly enough to not cope with this!
Unfortunately I know the industry well enough to expect to be disappointed!
I have always treated VAT as a variable number of adjustable rates. When I started there were three: 15%, 0% and exempt (yes, zero and exempt are different!). Later this got updated by the simple action of changing the rate of one to 17.5% (just the one entry to update). Then the table grew an extra row for insulation and heating fuel at 5%. Now it should simply be another change to take the 17.5% rate back to 15%.
The big kicker is going to be re-labelling almost everything in a large shop on Sunday night! What do you bet that an awful lot of stuff just gets adjusted so that the final price is the same to save doing this!
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RE: Conditional comments
I would expect many documentation tools to obey the #ifdef and only add this section to the file documentation for configurations that have ENABLE_FOO defined. Maybe that is the reason.