People default to the iPhone because it is the best phone available.
Before the iPhone came out Nokia used to sell the best phone available and it cost twice as much as the iPhone. When the iPhone came out, Nokia freaked out and killed their high end products. Now their best phone costs the same as an iPhone and has roughly the same hardware as the iPhone, although Symbian sucks so it's not as good over all.
If the password is a four to six digit number that is not 1234 then it's probably an ATM card number as well. Actually if it's 1234 then it's still probably an ATM card.
All the money is really at the high end. Nokia went from owning 29% to owning 24% of the smart phone market. Everyone predicted that they would lose a lot of the market, but I don't think anyone predicted it would be that bad, that quickly.
When Nokia decided to switch to Windows, they knew that they would have to limp along selling their old phones this year. People were obviously going to buy fewer phones and they were going to want them at a cheaper price because they're EOL. Hopefully next year when the first Windows phones came out, they'd be able to make money again.
It was a huge gamble to throw away a year for something that wasn't tested. It seems like customers aren't willing to wait a year for a Windows phone.
The article conflates 2 things that make the URL bar suck.
1) It's basically the output of/dev/urandom which is ugly and a waste of space.
2) It's pretty stupid. It should be able to tell the difference between searches (words that form an invalid URL or that don't resolve) and searches. For example, if I want to find the time in San Francisco, I open a new tab, type google.com into the url bar and then enter "time: san francisco". That should all be done straight in the URL bar.
The article makes those two issues seem like one issue, which they're not. But at the same time both are real annoyances and it's good that someone is thinking about it.
The professor did that. But no one is a robot even at work. For example, there is always company politics and a lot of it happens over email. I'd never write anything libelous or otherwise illegal, but I'd still want to keep my private work email private.
According to wired the machines have never been tested against mice. That seems like an obvious test to do. Also it should be tested by somebody independent, because we're all sick of the blatant lies we've been told from Rapiscan vendors.
They didn't start the Wayland thing. Keith Packard and the other Xorg hackers started Wayland. It will be good. Linux people have been lying to ourselves for too long that X11 is an acceptable windowing system.
Wayland will still have an X server in it for legacy apps.
The 1000 signals is obviously hyperbole. What they meant was probably about 20.
Google has a point that they're getting google-like results because they're just copying google's results. Now that's not feasible anymore and they'll just have to recreate google to get the same results. That sounds very easy but they haven't been able to do it after ten years of trying and billions of dollars spent.
You could call it "copying" or "stealing" or "improving customer experience" or whatever but the fact is that Google has accurately described how to bump up search results on Bing by following the steps. So soon Bing will be full of search engine spam. And the engineers at google will feel _really_ bad about that. Snicker.
Other cultures have different rules on eye contact. In the second part of the study when they measured where people looked the most, the people were looking at the eyes. It's hardly surprising that if you make the bits that people focus on look more artificial, they think the whole model looks artificial.
If they had done this test in a different country where people don't make eye contact then the results might have been different.
Those figures are wrong. They're based on several false assumptions. The chances of cancer aren't known and neither are the chances of the scanners leading to birth defects.
Also it's not true that the radiation risks from being at a high altitude are more than the risks from the back scatter machines. At high altitude, you're inside a plane and the fuselage protects you. In fact in a normal x-ray they use a sheet of aluminum to filter out the back scatter rays. (They do this because they're concerned about the health effects).
Anyway, it will take some years before we can start measuring the increased rate of birth defects. I don't care about the privacy issues, but the health concerns are real so I won't be going through the back scatter machines.
The TSA has been fairly successful at portraying people who worry about X-rays in the same way as people who worry about cell phone radiation.
They say that these X-rays are: 1) "soft" X-rays 2) they only go through a tiny layer of skin and soft tissue 3) if you're in an air plane then you are getting cosmic radiation anyway and you don't worry about that.
But actually the hard x-rays at the dentist are absorbed by your teeth. No one gets tooth cancer. But soft tissue like your skin and breasts do get cancer. Your balls are seldom exposed to radiation so no one knows if your balls get cancer or if it makes you impotent or means your kids have birth defects or what happens. The fact that it gets absorbed in a small area of your body means that while it's a small dose, it's very concentrated in areas where you don't want to get cancer. If you're on a plane and this radiation was coming from the space then the fuselage would absorb almost of it.
The X-ray scanners work like the TV at your grand parents house. It scans a beam of X-rays and creates a picture. You know how your grand parents put up with a lousy picture instead of getting a new TV? The TSA is like that. These guys aren't trained radiologists. They'll live with a degraded picture instead of wondering if it's giving you too high a dose of radiation.
X-rays really are quite a different thing from cell phone radiation. It's true that most scientists don't think cell phones cause cancer, but these are a different thing and the TSA is being dishonest here. If the protest succeeded or if it didn't succeed doesn't matter. I'm not going to go through the scanners until you people have beta tested it.
The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
If we didn't drive them out, they would say here. You're right that we should eliminate the H1-B visas, instead we should just let the smart people live here indefinitely.
The mere act of immigrating means that you are willing to take risks and try new things. That you are willing to make sacrifices. That you are highly motivated. These are the people we need to build the economy.
Unfortunately, the H1-B visa is business unfriendly because it doesn't let immigrants create their own start-ups. It's also worker unfriendly. H1-B workers know they have can't afford to get fired so they take all kinds of abuse at work. And we have to do it too because we have to compete with them.
When we boot them out of the country, most of them don't go home. Once they have immigrated the first time, it's easy to do it again. Most go to Canada, Germany or Switzerland. They only go home when they want to. But when they do you're right that we're screwed. These days anything can be made anywhere and sold anywhere. They'll compete with us directly. They'll have a lower cost of living. They'll pay taxes to their government instead of to ours. When our company goes out of business, we'll have to learn Mandarin or retire early.
These days most of Africa has pretty OK water. Governments and NGOs have put wells everywhere. I've drank water from hundreds of villages across southern Africa and I didn't get any sicker than when I only drank bottled water.
The locals are often paranoid about their water. They'll boil city water, or in Zambia they mix Klorin[tm] into it.
I drink filtered water at home because it's no work, but if I were visiting someone's house I'd be fine with drinking whatever water they drink.
Except if it comes from a river. Only drink well water or tap water. Never drink water from a river.
And the can't hurt you. Except for the raw beaf in Ethiopia. It's risky to eat raw beaf, but it's good to try new things.:)
I live in Zambia so I mostly know that area of Africa. The US was sponsering wars in Mozambique, Angola and Zaire as part of the cold war efforts.
Also the if you look at Sudan the civil war with the south and the current crisis in Darfur are funded by European oil interests. Read up on the story of Tiny Roland. He made his money by funding rebel movements in exchange for land and minerals. He was a large SPLA funder.
There is also a dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea funded by oil. The US is the largest foreign investor in that country.
We all know that security researchers are drama queens. As soon as they find a bug, they want to get a bull-horn out and start crowing about it.
Microsoft on the other hand says that if you don't keep it secret for months or even years then you are a bad person and will try to get you fired.
What they should do is just pay a $100 per day for keeping it secret until the bug is fixed. That way even if you don't get bragging rights, you get a pay check.
Signing a non-disclosure agreement like this is pretty normal. It's a part of most businesses but no one wants to do it for free.
There is no wifi in East Africa. You're wrong that laying cables is unimportant and also wrong that it's not happening.
When I traveled in Ethiopia they had 200 day labourers digging ditches for fibre optic cables to Kenya. On the Kenyan side it's mechanized and faster. One night I camped next to a huge pile of fibre optic cables higher than my head. In Zambia as well they are laying cable everywhere. It's very exciting.
From the guardian article, they're projecting that biogas will be cheaper.
"What's more, aside from the intial set-up costs, we expect to see an average saving of 0.40 per litre of fuel (based on an average diesel price of 0.67 per litre compared with biomethane at 0.27 per litre)".
Of course, 200 buses is quite a small scale operation, but it's still very cool.
"You'll wonder why these people thought living on an island right along Hurricane Alley would be a good idea, and why you should be asked to partially subsidize their choice."
According to some dude on NPR it's so that when Russia nukes the cities there will be a lot of survivors living out in the boonies. No one would build there house in the path of a wildfire if they couldn't get government subsidized insurance.
As part of the CML2 work Eric added help texts to document a bunch of config options. The thing was he could have merged those instead of hoarding his changes. It would have been easy.
The problem was that ESR wanted to do a big dramatic change all at once with tons of splash and glory. He didn't want to go through the normal review process which would mean splitting things up into small understandable changes.
Whether that's a technical reason or not, it seems clear in hind sight that keeping CML2 out was right choice.
Slashdot Mirror
People default to the iPhone because it is the best phone available.
Before the iPhone came out Nokia used to sell the best phone available and it cost twice as much as the iPhone. When the iPhone came out, Nokia freaked out and killed their high end products. Now their best phone costs the same as an iPhone and has roughly the same hardware as the iPhone, although Symbian sucks so it's not as good over all.
If the password is a four to six digit number that is not 1234 then it's probably an ATM card number as well. Actually if it's 1234 then it's still probably an ATM card.
All the money is really at the high end. Nokia went from owning 29% to owning 24% of the smart phone market. Everyone predicted that they would lose a lot of the market, but I don't think anyone predicted it would be that bad, that quickly.
When Nokia decided to switch to Windows, they knew that they would have to limp along selling their old phones this year. People were obviously going to buy fewer phones and they were going to want them at a cheaper price because they're EOL. Hopefully next year when the first Windows phones came out, they'd be able to make money again.
It was a huge gamble to throw away a year for something that wasn't tested. It seems like customers aren't willing to wait a year for a Windows phone.
The article conflates 2 things that make the URL bar suck.
1) It's basically the output of /dev/urandom which is ugly and a waste of space.
2) It's pretty stupid. It should be able to tell the difference between searches (words that form an invalid URL or that don't resolve) and searches. For example, if I want to find the time in San Francisco, I open a new tab, type google.com into the url bar and then enter "time: san francisco". That should all be done straight in the URL bar.
The article makes those two issues seem like one issue, which they're not. But at the same time both are real annoyances and it's good that someone is thinking about it.
The professor did that. But no one is a robot even at work. For example, there is always company politics and a lot of it happens over email. I'd never write anything libelous or otherwise illegal, but I'd still want to keep my private work email private.
"Better not tell the DoJ, or every credit card company on Earth is going to be in deep shit."
Uh... Credit card companies are hardly good examples of ethics. It's hard to think of a worse example of ethics really. :P
You make a fair point.
According to wired the machines have never been tested against mice. That seems like an obvious test to do. Also it should be tested by somebody independent, because we're all sick of the blatant lies we've been told from Rapiscan vendors.
They didn't start the Wayland thing. Keith Packard and the other Xorg hackers started Wayland. It will be good. Linux people have been lying to ourselves for too long that X11 is an acceptable windowing system.
Wayland will still have an X server in it for legacy apps.
The 1000 signals is obviously hyperbole. What they meant was probably about 20.
Google has a point that they're getting google-like results because they're just copying google's results. Now that's not feasible anymore and they'll just have to recreate google to get the same results. That sounds very easy but they haven't been able to do it after ten years of trying and billions of dollars spent.
You could call it "copying" or "stealing" or "improving customer experience" or whatever but the fact is that Google has accurately described how to bump up search results on Bing by following the steps. So soon Bing will be full of search engine spam. And the engineers at google will feel _really_ bad about that. Snicker.
Other cultures have different rules on eye contact. In the second part of the study when they measured where people looked the most, the people were looking at the eyes. It's hardly surprising that if you make the bits that people focus on look more artificial, they think the whole model looks artificial.
If they had done this test in a different country where people don't make eye contact then the results might have been different.
2600.org points out that if you want to make a donation to the KKK then Visa is everywhere you want to be.
Those figures are wrong. They're based on several false assumptions. The chances of cancer aren't known and neither are the chances of the scanners leading to birth defects.
Also it's not true that the radiation risks from being at a high altitude are more than the risks from the back scatter machines. At high altitude, you're inside a plane and the fuselage protects you. In fact in a normal x-ray they use a sheet of aluminum to filter out the back scatter rays. (They do this because they're concerned about the health effects).
Anyway, it will take some years before we can start measuring the increased rate of birth defects. I don't care about the privacy issues, but the health concerns are real so I won't be going through the back scatter machines.
The TSA has been fairly successful at portraying people who worry about X-rays in the same way as people who worry about cell phone radiation.
They say that these X-rays are:
1) "soft" X-rays
2) they only go through a tiny layer of skin and soft tissue
3) if you're in an air plane then you are getting cosmic radiation anyway and you don't worry about that.
But actually the hard x-rays at the dentist are absorbed by your teeth. No one gets tooth cancer. But soft tissue like your skin and breasts do get cancer. Your balls are seldom exposed to radiation so no one knows if your balls get cancer or if it makes you impotent or means your kids have birth defects or what happens. The fact that it gets absorbed in a small area of your body means that while it's a small dose, it's very concentrated in areas where you don't want to get cancer. If you're on a plane and this radiation was coming from the space then the fuselage would absorb almost of it.
The X-ray scanners work like the TV at your grand parents house. It scans a beam of X-rays and creates a picture. You know how your grand parents put up with a lousy picture instead of getting a new TV? The TSA is like that. These guys aren't trained radiologists. They'll live with a degraded picture instead of wondering if it's giving you too high a dose of radiation.
X-rays really are quite a different thing from cell phone radiation. It's true that most scientists don't think cell phones cause cancer, but these are a different thing and the TSA is being dishonest here. If the protest succeeded or if it didn't succeed doesn't matter. I'm not going to go through the scanners until you people have beta tested it.
The kids are all foreign. When they all go home, we won't have anything left at all.
If we didn't drive them out, they would say here. You're right that we should eliminate the H1-B visas, instead we should just let the smart people live here indefinitely.
The mere act of immigrating means that you are willing to take risks and try new things. That you are willing to make sacrifices. That you are highly motivated. These are the people we need to build the economy.
Unfortunately, the H1-B visa is business unfriendly because it doesn't let immigrants create their own start-ups. It's also worker unfriendly. H1-B workers know they have can't afford to get fired so they take all kinds of abuse at work. And we have to do it too because we have to compete with them.
When we boot them out of the country, most of them don't go home. Once they have immigrated the first time, it's easy to do it again. Most go to Canada, Germany or Switzerland. They only go home when they want to. But when they do you're right that we're screwed. These days anything can be made anywhere and sold anywhere. They'll compete with us directly. They'll have a lower cost of living. They'll pay taxes to their government instead of to ours. When our company goes out of business, we'll have to learn Mandarin or retire early.
These days most of Africa has pretty OK water. Governments and NGOs have put wells everywhere. I've drank water from hundreds of villages across southern Africa and I didn't get any sicker than when I only drank bottled water.
The locals are often paranoid about their water. They'll boil city water, or in Zambia they mix Klorin[tm] into it.
I drink filtered water at home because it's no work, but if I were visiting someone's house I'd be fine with drinking whatever water they drink.
Except if it comes from a river. Only drink well water or tap water. Never drink water from a river.
And the can't hurt you. Except for the raw beaf in Ethiopia. It's risky to eat raw beaf, but it's good to try new things. :)
I live in Zambia so I mostly know that area of Africa. The US was sponsering wars in Mozambique, Angola and Zaire as part of the cold war efforts.
Also the if you look at Sudan the civil war with the south and the current crisis in Darfur are funded by European oil interests. Read up on the story of Tiny Roland. He made his money by funding rebel movements in exchange for land and minerals. He was a large SPLA funder.
There is also a dictatorship in Equatorial Guinea funded by oil. The US is the largest foreign investor in that country.
We all know that security researchers are drama queens. As soon as they find a bug, they want to get a bull-horn out and start crowing about it.
Microsoft on the other hand says that if you don't keep it secret for months or even years then you are a bad person and will try to get you fired.
What they should do is just pay a $100 per day for keeping it secret until the bug is fixed. That way even if you don't get bragging rights, you get a pay check.
Signing a non-disclosure agreement like this is pretty normal. It's a part of most businesses but no one wants to do it for free.
This is my personal favorite.
There is no wifi in East Africa. You're wrong that laying cables is unimportant and also wrong that it's not happening.
When I traveled in Ethiopia they had 200 day labourers digging ditches for fibre optic cables to Kenya. On the Kenyan side it's mechanized and faster. One night I camped next to a huge pile of fibre optic cables higher than my head. In Zambia as well they are laying cable everywhere. It's very exciting.
From the guardian article, they're projecting that biogas will be cheaper.
"What's more, aside from the intial set-up costs, we expect to see an average saving of 0.40 per litre of fuel (based on an average diesel price of 0.67 per litre compared with biomethane at 0.27 per litre)".
Of course, 200 buses is quite a small scale operation, but it's still very cool.
"You'll wonder why these people thought living on an island right along Hurricane Alley would be a good idea, and why you should be asked to partially subsidize their choice."
According to some dude on NPR it's so that when Russia nukes the cities there will be a lot of survivors living out in the boonies. No one would build there house in the path of a wildfire if they couldn't get government subsidized insurance.
It gets zillions of rewrites if you don't use noatime. Hardware wear-leveling algorithms suck.
http://valhenson.livejournal.com/25228.html
As part of the CML2 work Eric added help texts to document a bunch of config options. The thing was he could have merged those instead of hoarding his changes. It would have been easy.
The problem was that ESR wanted to do a big dramatic change all at once with tons of splash and glory. He didn't want to go through the normal review process which would mean splitting things up into small understandable changes.
Whether that's a technical reason or not, it seems clear in hind sight that keeping CML2 out was right choice.