First, the plural of box is boxes, boxen is not a word. Second, you have been able to mount isos using "mount -o loop blah.iso" using root privileges in a console for ages. No Linux desktop has, afaik, made it as easy as just double clicking the file.
Maybe you don't think it is a big deal if the Brazilian Rosewood tree goes extinct, others think it is. Rosewood is used in high-end guitars, that are extremely sough after by collectors because almost no guitars are made using it anymore. If they are found out to have been using Rosewood harvested after 1992, then that is a very serious crime.
But Id like a clarification-- if there were 13,000 bugs 15 months ago, and now there are 6000, doesnt that speak to massive improvement? Why not leave back in spring 2010?
Number like that mean absolutely NOTHING. It MAY be that 7000 bugs have been solved in a proper way by one or more developers who has either committed a fix or closed the bug if it objectively does not indicate a problem with Firefox. Unfortunately, it is just as likely that the 7000 bugs have been closed by bug triagers obsessing over their number of closed bugs count. That means bugs closed because a new minor release is out and the original reporter can't be assed to retest the bug on each and every new version, bugs closed because even though it was well-written, the triager doesn't comprehend the problem, bugs closed because the root cause is in another product (well ok, but it still crashes firefox), bugs closed because the triager doesn't think the problem is that severe, or my favourite, because the bug report is to old. That destroys a massive amount of work that went into writing those bug reports, some of which actually describes real problems with the product.
I've had to keep a certain bug report alive in Launchpad about lvm2 for several years that causes your computer to become unbootable when you upgrade by basically shouting at triagers not to close it. Every three to four months someone wants to close it because a new Linux kernel version is out and the triager hopes that that will fix the problem (it doesn't). No real fix in sight though. Which I don't lament because people that work for free are hard to come by. But please don't close unfixed bug reports!
That's not how you do it. Levenshtein distance is one of the fundamental functions in text analysis, but it is not the end of it! One approach to detect the grammar mistake in the above sentence is to use markov chains and analyse the probability of a word following another. It is extremely uncommon for the word "is" to follow the word "their" in correctly written English (check with google if you like). But "is" is very likely to follow the word "is" hence "their is" is very likely a grammatical error.
They also plan to run it up the SF peninsula, 50 miles of heavily urbanized cities. Tunnel is too expensive. Grade level would require elevating all cross streets. Above ground is the only affordable plan. Can you imagine the racket from a 300 kph train crossing 50 miles of urban area? There are a lot of wealthy people around there -- I doubt they're thrilled with the idea. I am sure getting it into LA is more so.
Actually, the noise polution isn't that bad. You're probably imagining old freight trains which indeed, do sound a lot. New high-speed trains with rigid bodies are surprisingly quiet. Compared to living next to a busy highway, next to a high speed railway is nothing.
Lol, I don't know who would be suicidal enough to drive google street view vans in the occupied territories. I mean ambulances have been for allegedly containing terrorist weapons, what chances do you think a foreign spy vehicle has?
Nice read. Guess someone who likes HTC phones could offer some counter points to at least some of your issues. But you know as well as I do that none of the above is the reason why 99% of iphone consumers chose that phone. Of course, in reality most smart phones are underutilized status symbols. It's just that the iphone is the most egregious example since marketing, combined with the herd mentality of the status seekers has made it the dominant one.
You are wrong. Maintaining the unused stuff takes a ton of effort which is proportional to the amount of stuff there is. Additionally, for each new component you add, you have to check with each of the unused ones if any weird interactions causes any of them to break. Maintaining software is just as expensive as developing new one.
No, people want status symbols. Overpriced phones from Apple are perfect status symbols for people with to much money to spend. We geeks get it 100%, it is just that we despise it because it disguists us.
X11 is a protocol, X.Org is an implementation of it. The protocol specfication is here: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/x11proto/proto.html As you can see, the protocol is pretty bloat for something that is mostly just managing your display buffer these days. The protcol commands for drawing arcs were all the rage in the 80's but are not at all used these days. Then there are all the extensions such as SHM, Composite, xrandr, XAA and probably a dozen more. All these specifications that has to be implemented creates a very bloated piece of software with lots of features almost noone ever uses.
Because someone will, or already has, misinterpreted the correlation to mean that more torrent downloads leads to higher game reviews. So as you can see, piracy is really good for the game industry!
"But who would waste all that space just to make calculations faster?" Actually, Perl represents all Unicode in UTF-32 (native byte-alignment) and renders out to UTF-8 when printed. Precisely because space is relatively cheap, and processing time is still often the current limiting factor.
Which is not always true either. Often the limiting factor is the space in the cpu cache, since ram access is relatively expensive.
You are not entirely correct about the details. Getting the information is not illegal, but publishing it is. You may not publish a database online containing personally identifiable information. The mugshot database in the article would definitely classify and would carry a hefty fine. Still, there are ways to get around the law, for example there are multiple sites around here that let people see how much their neighbours earn because tax records are public. I don't think that the law is the problem and it is good that the information is public, but it's unfortunate that some people, like the authors of the website have no shame.
That's not always the case, probably not even most of the time. Consider someone enlisted in the army who at the same times writes a journal. Is the journal the property of the army? Nope. Is this silly slashdot comment the property of *my* employer because I'm writing it at their computer? No again. It all depends on in what effect the asker wrote his framework. Was it his main job to develop a web framework for the companys new product? Or was it something he was having fun with at breaks and in the downtime between tasks?
I think you are missing the point completely. It is not that money is being moved around in what basically amounts to a huge zero-sum game. One daytrader has better computers or lower ping to the nyse and beats out another trader who hasn't. That's really not a problem. The problem is the huge amounts of resources that is wasted on this game and the impact we are letting it have on our lives. The worlds brightest minds are spent in the game. You may not see it as a problem that the best mathematicians and programmers are working in the finance industry instead of developing a cure for cancer, affordable space shuttles, electric cars, aids vaccine or whatever because the salaries are much higher there so obviously that is what the market wants and the market is always right. But I do, I think it is a waste. But the worst problem is the importance we are giving to the stock market game. The idea was that the stock price should reflect the progress if its company. Now it's the other way around. It doesn't matter what the company does, if the stock price is high, then that's good otherwise it is bad. Oh and if the price of most stocks are low, and most players in the game have lost, then that is really bad. It's a depression coming and because the game was busted the rest of society will have to clean it up.
Well, they figured out women aren't made to be geeks. They don't program for the fun of it and they don't play with computers to learn everything there is about them because that's their passion. They do it to make a salary to be able to buy stuff and comfortably generate a pair of children with their hubby. The job bores them to death because looking at a computer screen all day is not social enough so they either quit or become managers where they can spend their time being social in meetings. That's why they changed the meaning of the word geek, if you can control that pointer thing on the screen with a mouse, congratulations, you're a girl geek!
"If you have a LulzSec or an Anonymous that is perhaps being manipulated by a foreign actor, it takes us back to the days of the Stasi and the KGB, which were manipulating [anti-nulear campaign group] CND quite easily from Moscow,"
Not true in the slightest. CND and other anti-nuclear proliferation groups were not manipulated by the Soviet Union. In fact, they were just as opposed to Soviet nuclear weapons as Western ones. Though the allegation that they were controlled by Moscow were frequently thrown out by their opponents to avoid debating the insanity of stockpiling more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world ten times over. The only ones infiltrating them were the MI5, because apparently the security services had nothing better to do than monitor harmless hippies.
DNS filtering is just the beginning. That it is easy to route around is a feature of the plan not a flaw in it. They figure techies will be more inclined to accept it if the idea of censorship if the implementation seems toothless. The next step is to plug the holes in the DNS filtering system, for example by outlawing links to sites banned in the dns filtering registry. Since the public has then already accepted the idea of a filtered internet as a reality, it will be easy for them to drive those changes through.
Cairo always was too slow, even when Firefox first started using it in 2006. Not slow as in fixable slow by improving the code. Slow as in
user: "this cairo library slows down rendering 5x!"
cairo developer: "no it doesn't!"
user: "yes it does!"
developer: "please provide a benchmark..."
user: "ok"
developer: "bad video drivers!" / "faulty benchmark!" / "edit this config file and try again!" / "go pester someone else, it's fast enough for me!"
The curious reader may check out the performance related cairo threads from about 2005-2008, of which there are many. Wouldn't surprise me if cairo is still slower than the gdk routines it was supposed to replace over six years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
First, the plural of box is boxes, boxen is not a word. Second, you have been able to mount isos using "mount -o loop blah.iso" using root privileges in a console for ages. No Linux desktop has, afaik, made it as easy as just double clicking the file.
Maybe you don't think it is a big deal if the Brazilian Rosewood tree goes extinct, others think it is. Rosewood is used in high-end guitars, that are extremely sough after by collectors because almost no guitars are made using it anymore. If they are found out to have been using Rosewood harvested after 1992, then that is a very serious crime.
Number like that mean absolutely NOTHING. It MAY be that 7000 bugs have been solved in a proper way by one or more developers who has either committed a fix or closed the bug if it objectively does not indicate a problem with Firefox. Unfortunately, it is just as likely that the 7000 bugs have been closed by bug triagers obsessing over their number of closed bugs count. That means bugs closed because a new minor release is out and the original reporter can't be assed to retest the bug on each and every new version, bugs closed because even though it was well-written, the triager doesn't comprehend the problem, bugs closed because the root cause is in another product (well ok, but it still crashes firefox), bugs closed because the triager doesn't think the problem is that severe, or my favourite, because the bug report is to old. That destroys a massive amount of work that went into writing those bug reports, some of which actually describes real problems with the product.
I've had to keep a certain bug report alive in Launchpad about lvm2 for several years that causes your computer to become unbootable when you upgrade by basically shouting at triagers not to close it. Every three to four months someone wants to close it because a new Linux kernel version is out and the triager hopes that that will fix the problem (it doesn't). No real fix in sight though. Which I don't lament because people that work for free are hard to come by. But please don't close unfixed bug reports!
That's not how you do it. Levenshtein distance is one of the fundamental functions in text analysis, but it is not the end of it! One approach to detect the grammar mistake in the above sentence is to use markov chains and analyse the probability of a word following another. It is extremely uncommon for the word "is" to follow the word "their" in correctly written English (check with google if you like). But "is" is very likely to follow the word "is" hence "their is" is very likely a grammatical error.
There are a a lot more software developers than there are nerds.
Actually, the noise polution isn't that bad. You're probably imagining old freight trains which indeed, do sound a lot. New high-speed trains with rigid bodies are surprisingly quiet. Compared to living next to a busy highway, next to a high speed railway is nothing.
Lol, I don't know who would be suicidal enough to drive google street view vans in the occupied territories. I mean ambulances have been for allegedly containing terrorist weapons, what chances do you think a foreign spy vehicle has?
Great, so now when the stupid iphone gets the same feature other phones have had for years it is somehow news?
Um.. Verizon's owners take home several billions quarterly in profits. They should be able to afford not to cut their employees compensation.
But Sir, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months!
Nice read. Guess someone who likes HTC phones could offer some counter points to at least some of your issues. But you know as well as I do that none of the above is the reason why 99% of iphone consumers chose that phone. Of course, in reality most smart phones are underutilized status symbols. It's just that the iphone is the most egregious example since marketing, combined with the herd mentality of the status seekers has made it the dominant one.
You are wrong. Maintaining the unused stuff takes a ton of effort which is proportional to the amount of stuff there is. Additionally, for each new component you add, you have to check with each of the unused ones if any weird interactions causes any of them to break. Maintaining software is just as expensive as developing new one.
No, people want status symbols. Overpriced phones from Apple are perfect status symbols for people with to much money to spend. We geeks get it 100%, it is just that we despise it because it disguists us.
X11 is a protocol, X.Org is an implementation of it. The protocol specfication is here: http://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.5/doc/x11proto/proto.html As you can see, the protocol is pretty bloat for something that is mostly just managing your display buffer these days. The protcol commands for drawing arcs were all the rage in the 80's but are not at all used these days. Then there are all the extensions such as SHM, Composite, xrandr, XAA and probably a dozen more. All these specifications that has to be implemented creates a very bloated piece of software with lots of features almost noone ever uses.
Because someone will, or already has, misinterpreted the correlation to mean that more torrent downloads leads to higher game reviews. So as you can see, piracy is really good for the game industry!
Which is not always true either. Often the limiting factor is the space in the cpu cache, since ram access is relatively expensive.
You are not entirely correct about the details. Getting the information is not illegal, but publishing it is. You may not publish a database online containing personally identifiable information. The mugshot database in the article would definitely classify and would carry a hefty fine. Still, there are ways to get around the law, for example there are multiple sites around here that let people see how much their neighbours earn because tax records are public. I don't think that the law is the problem and it is good that the information is public, but it's unfortunate that some people, like the authors of the website have no shame.
That's not always the case, probably not even most of the time. Consider someone enlisted in the army who at the same times writes a journal. Is the journal the property of the army? Nope. Is this silly slashdot comment the property of *my* employer because I'm writing it at their computer? No again. It all depends on in what effect the asker wrote his framework. Was it his main job to develop a web framework for the companys new product? Or was it something he was having fun with at breaks and in the downtime between tasks?
I think you are missing the point completely. It is not that money is being moved around in what basically amounts to a huge zero-sum game. One daytrader has better computers or lower ping to the nyse and beats out another trader who hasn't. That's really not a problem. The problem is the huge amounts of resources that is wasted on this game and the impact we are letting it have on our lives. The worlds brightest minds are spent in the game. You may not see it as a problem that the best mathematicians and programmers are working in the finance industry instead of developing a cure for cancer, affordable space shuttles, electric cars, aids vaccine or whatever because the salaries are much higher there so obviously that is what the market wants and the market is always right. But I do, I think it is a waste. But the worst problem is the importance we are giving to the stock market game. The idea was that the stock price should reflect the progress if its company. Now it's the other way around. It doesn't matter what the company does, if the stock price is high, then that's good otherwise it is bad. Oh and if the price of most stocks are low, and most players in the game have lost, then that is really bad. It's a depression coming and because the game was busted the rest of society will have to clean it up.
Well, they figured out women aren't made to be geeks. They don't program for the fun of it and they don't play with computers to learn everything there is about them because that's their passion. They do it to make a salary to be able to buy stuff and comfortably generate a pair of children with their hubby. The job bores them to death because looking at a computer screen all day is not social enough so they either quit or become managers where they can spend their time being social in meetings. That's why they changed the meaning of the word geek, if you can control that pointer thing on the screen with a mouse, congratulations, you're a girl geek!
Wanting to use something without paying for it, that is.
"If you have a LulzSec or an Anonymous that is perhaps being manipulated by a foreign actor, it takes us back to the days of the Stasi and the KGB, which were manipulating [anti-nulear campaign group] CND quite easily from Moscow,"
Not true in the slightest. CND and other anti-nuclear proliferation groups were not manipulated by the Soviet Union. In fact, they were just as opposed to Soviet nuclear weapons as Western ones. Though the allegation that they were controlled by Moscow were frequently thrown out by their opponents to avoid debating the insanity of stockpiling more than enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world ten times over. The only ones infiltrating them were the MI5, because apparently the security services had nothing better to do than monitor harmless hippies.
DNS filtering is just the beginning. That it is easy to route around is a feature of the plan not a flaw in it. They figure techies will be more inclined to accept it if the idea of censorship if the implementation seems toothless. The next step is to plug the holes in the DNS filtering system, for example by outlawing links to sites banned in the dns filtering registry. Since the public has then already accepted the idea of a filtered internet as a reality, it will be easy for them to drive those changes through.
I care about bitcoins. It's a welcome change from the usual apple evangelism.
Cairo always was too slow, even when Firefox first started using it in 2006. Not slow as in fixable slow by improving the code. Slow as in
user: "this cairo library slows down rendering 5x!"
cairo developer: "no it doesn't!"
user: "yes it does!"
developer: "please provide a benchmark..."
user: "ok"
developer: "bad video drivers!" / "faulty benchmark!" / "edit this config file and try again!" / "go pester someone else, it's fast enough for me!"
The curious reader may check out the performance related cairo threads from about 2005-2008, of which there are many. Wouldn't surprise me if cairo is still slower than the gdk routines it was supposed to replace over six years ago.