I recently ventured to ReactOS website and have seen lots of activity in the SVN [...] lots of commits on daily basis in the trunk now,
"Lots"? Really? Compared to what? How many do you think is "lots"? The Linux kernel was averaging ~70 commits per day from 2.6.13 - 2.6.27 (source - that's every day, for more than 3 years) and I'm pretty sure the pace has picked up a fair bit from that in the ~3 years since then, as hinted at by the right hand side of that graph.
God creates "light" first (1:3), and then notices day/night (1:4), but doesn't create the sun, moon and stars (1:16) until after the seas/Earth (1:9-10) and plant life (1:11-12).
Then He creates water life and fowl (1:20) but uses whales (1:21) as an example of an animal that sprung forth from the water before any land animals ever existed.
Then land animals (1:24-25) and finally humans (1:26...)
So the Bible has, in order: light, day/night, sea, earth, plants, sun, moon, stars, water animals (incl. whales), fowl, land animals, man.
Whereas the order we see is (I think): light, stars, sun, earth, day/night, sea, moon, plants, water animals (excl. whales), land animals, fowl, whales, man.
Aside from getting the first and last entries right, the only elements that follow each other in order are day/night followed by sea. The rest... doesn't look that much better than guesswork to me.
According to the BBC article, "IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action."
Right. Threatening the authors of a study with legal action, rather than pointing out flaws in the study, or doing a better study, or doing research into the possible reasons why the link might have existed, really makes it clear that those IE supporters are complete morons, who have no clue what research actually is, or how it works.
People showing off their stupidity proves that they're stupid.
Huh? The user's browser has, on behalf of the user, explicitly contacted Epic's webserver, requested a copy of the javascript from their site, and run it. It's not like Epic's servers attempted to connect to the user's computer, hacked a firewall, cracked a password or anything. The user (via their browser) has initiated the entire thing here.
If the user does not want their browser to retrieve and run javascript from every third-party server mentioned by websites they choose to visit, maybe they should get a browser that allows them to whitelist sites to run javascript from. They've been available, with Firefox+NoScript, for at least 5 years now.
"Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material,"
Everything is copyrighted! Well, nearly everything. With the exception of project Gutenberg and a few other sites that mostly go out of their way to find public domain material, everything else, i.e. >99.99% of content that exists on the internet, is copyrighted. Content that is not copyrighted is a negligible level of noise, small enough to be ignored for most practical purposes.
By extension, all links on the internet link to copyrighted material.
Oh, you want to make a distinction between material which is hosted with an appropriate license, and content which is not? How do you propose to do that? And given that the hoster/distributor of content can change the content behind any external link at any time, and for any subset of visitors of the hosters choosing (not the linkers choosing), which the linker may not be aware of, may I point out that What. The. Fuck.
How about the increased memory usage? If everything else on your system is using and sharing the 64-bit libc, libstdc++, libgcc, libgtk+, libjpeg, libpng, libz, libcairo, libpango, libx{11,composite,cursor,damage,ext,fixes,randr2,render} etc..., but then you have one single 32-bit process that all of a sudden needs its own incompatible version of those (rather large) libraries that it cannot share with any other apps, then IMO that's unnecessary pressure on the system.
It's not like 64-bit is new and experimental any more. I've been running a pure 64-bit system for more than 4 years now, and I thought I was a fairly late adopter. The 64-bit Opteron was released in 2003 for FSM's sake. What happened to "internet time"? It's 2011! We should all be using 64-bit everything by now.
Does this mean people are going to have to argue with their math-illiterate sales and marketing idiots about if there's a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents per kB, and which it is they charge, again?!?
Most people already carry around this much computing power with them in their smart phone. You can get adaptors for the USB perhipheral interface on most smart phones to turn it into a USB host with a hub, which can then be used to connect a keyboard. And I'm sure I've seen someone do a video-over-usb off one of those as well.
Why not just add a USB host port and an HDMI out to an existing smart phone? The incremental cost over the existing smart phone would be less than $25, they generally already have network connectivity via wi-fi or 3G, and it's still just about usable even if you don't have an external display and keyboard to plug in.
Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!
Way to bring politics into a supposed technical discussion
I thought the main point of his article is that deciding who to trust, how long to trust them, and what to trust them with, is a political, not a technical, problem.
According to Bruce Schneier, there are two types of cryptography - that which will keep secrets safe from your little sister, and that which will keep secrets safe from your government.
It seems to me that the new trend is to congregate on exclusive networks, like facebook.
That trend is not new. See AOL, Compuserve, and others going back to the dawn of the internet. Companies see the internet, and all the users, and realise that if only they could get all those netizens as their own exclusive customers, they'd make a mint. So they create some proprietary closed off system which, to be fair, does often fill an unmet (or poorly met) need, which people flock to.
What the companies don't entirely realise is that the most important part of internet's success is its openness; that the ability for anyone to talk to anyone else without the need for any specific intermediaries is the reason for the existence of all the applications which give the internet its value. The openness is the underlying reason that the customers are there. Eventually, other people will find a way to fill the need that that company fills. It might take a while, but it happens. Inevitably, it happens. The end result is less restrictive and cheaper than the original proprietary version, because it is more open.
So the proprietary company dies. Or, if it is very lucky, transforms itself into a player in the open market. And everything is open again.
Until a new company comes along with a new proprietary system to fill a new unmet need. And the cycle starts again...
(See also, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, chapter "The Technosphere", particularly: "Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below." and the paragraph on "temporal arbitrage" - keeping in mind that the essay is 12 years old now...)
On iOS devices, where each app takes over the entire screen when it's running, the only way to scale up the resolution without making everything look like crap (anti-aliasing, anyone) would be to *double* the resolution in each direction.
Uh, please explain the logic underlying that conclusion. Otherwise your argument is that, on a desktop where users always run all their apps maximised (taking up the entire screen when running), the only way to give them a higher resolution monitor without making everything look like crap would be to give them a new monitor with *double* the resolution of the old one in each direction.
Which is, obviously, complete crap.
Unless developers are writing apps which assume a fixed number of pixels and use pixel-based layouts everywhere. Surely iOS must have a dynamic layout engine in this day and age? I didn't think new pixel-based layout systems had been created by anyone sane in years, plus weren't Apple one of the earlier commercial companies to develop dynamic non-pixel-based layout engines with Quartz (or whatever it was)?
Yes, crappy developers can still create shitty apps which make stupid assumptions, but you're probably better off staying away from their software anyway, aren't you?
(Disclaimer, I have never used any MacOS X/iOS based device, let alone done any development work for one)
They work when the vendor changes formats for newer releases
For loose enough definitions of "work". Yes, I can read them, but they look out of place on my bookshelf!!111!!!! AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGG!!!!1111!!!!! aasgklj goigno iergoihrgohqpoigq oighqeroigqerglkrfvqerfgfrgm lkds lkfm dfgaioetpiurgeqag;klegnrk eqgjeqrgjlkdf
OK, I've read TFA, and this makes no sense to me. It's kind of implied that they're running 2 copies of Linux at the same time (Maybe one on each core? Is that the significance of the "dual-core" part? Or is that just a coincidental red herring) - because that's what running Android and Ubuntu would mean - but that's just bonkers.
KDE SC is so much more than the plasma desktop shell. Replacing the shell on Windows may not be to everyone's taste, but that doesn't mean that they might not appreciate any of the other apps, such as Konqueror, Dolphin (I find the "fish:" handler invaluable) Marble, Okular, Akregator, Kopete, Ktouch or any of the 3 dozen games, etc..., or allowing KOffice installs to share the KDE/Qt libs, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
"Lots"? Really? Compared to what? How many do you think is "lots"? The Linux kernel was averaging ~70 commits per day from 2.6.13 - 2.6.27 (source - that's every day, for more than 3 years) and I'm pretty sure the pace has picked up a fair bit from that in the ~3 years since then, as hinted at by the right hand side of that graph.
Please be more specific
Hmmm...
God creates "light" first (1:3), and then notices day/night (1:4), but doesn't create the sun, moon and stars (1:16) until after the seas/Earth (1:9-10) and plant life (1:11-12).
Then He creates water life and fowl (1:20) but uses whales (1:21) as an example of an animal that sprung forth from the water before any land animals ever existed.
Then land animals (1:24-25) and finally humans (1:26...)
So the Bible has, in order: light, day/night, sea, earth, plants, sun, moon, stars, water animals (incl. whales), fowl, land animals, man.
Whereas the order we see is (I think): light, stars, sun, earth, day/night, sea, moon, plants, water animals (excl. whales), land animals, fowl, whales, man.
Aside from getting the first and last entries right, the only elements that follow each other in order are day/night followed by sea. The rest ... doesn't look that much better than guesswork to me.
Ahem.
...even if the study itself didn't, or was faked.
According to the BBC article, "IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action."
Right. Threatening the authors of a study with legal action, rather than pointing out flaws in the study, or doing a better study, or doing research into the possible reasons why the link might have existed, really makes it clear that those IE supporters are complete morons, who have no clue what research actually is, or how it works.
People showing off their stupidity proves that they're stupid.
Mod parent up.
Huh? The user's browser has, on behalf of the user, explicitly contacted Epic's webserver, requested a copy of the javascript from their site, and run it. It's not like Epic's servers attempted to connect to the user's computer, hacked a firewall, cracked a password or anything. The user (via their browser) has initiated the entire thing here.
If the user does not want their browser to retrieve and run javascript from every third-party server mentioned by websites they choose to visit, maybe they should get a browser that allows them to whitelist sites to run javascript from. They've been available, with Firefox+NoScript, for at least 5 years now.
"Sharing links online, particularly links to copyrighted material,"
Everything is copyrighted! Well, nearly everything. With the exception of project Gutenberg and a few other sites that mostly go out of their way to find public domain material, everything else, i.e. >99.99% of content that exists on the internet, is copyrighted. Content that is not copyrighted is a negligible level of noise, small enough to be ignored for most practical purposes.
By extension, all links on the internet link to copyrighted material.
Oh, you want to make a distinction between material which is hosted with an appropriate license, and content which is not? How do you propose to do that? And given that the hoster/distributor of content can change the content behind any external link at any time, and for any subset of visitors of the hosters choosing (not the linkers choosing), which the linker may not be aware of, may I point out that What. The. Fuck.
Anyone know where they put the ia64 binaries?
How about the increased memory usage? If everything else on your system is using and sharing the 64-bit libc, libstdc++, libgcc, libgtk+, libjpeg, libpng, libz, libcairo, libpango, libx{11,composite,cursor,damage,ext,fixes,randr2,render} etc..., but then you have one single 32-bit process that all of a sudden needs its own incompatible version of those (rather large) libraries that it cannot share with any other apps, then IMO that's unnecessary pressure on the system.
It's not like 64-bit is new and experimental any more. I've been running a pure 64-bit system for more than 4 years now, and I thought I was a fairly late adopter. The 64-bit Opteron was released in 2003 for FSM's sake. What happened to "internet time"? It's 2011! We should all be using 64-bit everything by now.
Does this mean people are going to have to argue with their math-illiterate sales and marketing idiots about if there's a difference between 0.002 dollars and 0.002 cents per kB, and which it is they charge, again?!?
Most people already carry around this much computing power with them in their smart phone. You can get adaptors for the USB perhipheral interface on most smart phones to turn it into a USB host with a hub, which can then be used to connect a keyboard. And I'm sure I've seen someone do a video-over-usb off one of those as well.
Why not just add a USB host port and an HDMI out to an existing smart phone? The incremental cost over the existing smart phone would be less than $25, they generally already have network connectivity via wi-fi or 3G, and it's still just about usable even if you don't have an external display and keyboard to plug in.
Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!
WTF is a "blackberry experience"?
Uh, the phone is a computer, dimwit.
Srsly, WTF?
I thought the main point of his article is that deciding who to trust, how long to trust them, and what to trust them with, is a political, not a technical, problem.
According to Bruce Schneier, there are two types of cryptography - that which will keep secrets safe from your little sister, and that which will keep secrets safe from your government.
I don't think this counts as either.
Fail.
That trend is not new. See AOL, Compuserve, and others going back to the dawn of the internet. Companies see the internet, and all the users, and realise that if only they could get all those netizens as their own exclusive customers, they'd make a mint. So they create some proprietary closed off system which, to be fair, does often fill an unmet (or poorly met) need, which people flock to.
What the companies don't entirely realise is that the most important part of internet's success is its openness; that the ability for anyone to talk to anyone else without the need for any specific intermediaries is the reason for the existence of all the applications which give the internet its value. The openness is the underlying reason that the customers are there. Eventually, other people will find a way to fill the need that that company fills. It might take a while, but it happens. Inevitably, it happens. The end result is less restrictive and cheaper than the original proprietary version, because it is more open.
So the proprietary company dies. Or, if it is very lucky, transforms itself into a player in the open market. And everything is open again.
Until a new company comes along with a new proprietary system to fill a new unmet need. And the cycle starts again...
(See also, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, chapter "The Technosphere", particularly: "Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth's biosphere, the technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below." and the paragraph on "temporal arbitrage" - keeping in mind that the essay is 12 years old now...)
Uh, please explain the logic underlying that conclusion. Otherwise your argument is that, on a desktop where users always run all their apps maximised (taking up the entire screen when running), the only way to give them a higher resolution monitor without making everything look like crap would be to give them a new monitor with *double* the resolution of the old one in each direction.
Which is, obviously, complete crap.
Unless developers are writing apps which assume a fixed number of pixels and use pixel-based layouts everywhere. Surely iOS must have a dynamic layout engine in this day and age? I didn't think new pixel-based layout systems had been created by anyone sane in years, plus weren't Apple one of the earlier commercial companies to develop dynamic non-pixel-based layout engines with Quartz (or whatever it was)?
Yes, crappy developers can still create shitty apps which make stupid assumptions, but you're probably better off staying away from their software anyway, aren't you?
(Disclaimer, I have never used any MacOS X/iOS based device, let alone done any development work for one)
For loose enough definitions of "work". Yes, I can read them, but they look out of place on my bookshelf!!111!!!! AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGG!!!!1111!!!!! aasgklj goigno iergoihrgohqpoigq oighqeroigqerglkrfvqerfgfrgm lkds lkfm dfgaioetpiurgeqag;klegnrk eqgjeqrgjlkdf
NO CARRIER
OK, I've read TFA, and this makes no sense to me. It's kind of implied that they're running 2 copies of Linux at the same time (Maybe one on each core? Is that the significance of the "dual-core" part? Or is that just a coincidental red herring) - because that's what running Android and Ubuntu would mean - but that's just bonkers.
WTF?
People are distrustful of any religion which isn't theirs in general.
FTFY.
(And most USAians are not Catholics)
I think that makes even less sense. I read it as "...but it bugs me when Dutch/Belgians don't..."
Also, "you don't you've made a mistake" is missing a "know".
Even if you are not trying to be a spelling Nazi, McKean's Law is still there, waiting to strike! :-)
It would also filter any legitimate email mentioning prices in £, € or ¥ (do friends ever email you telling you how cheap/expensive things were on holiday?), or containing smart quotes like “ and ” (do friends have email clients which insert these?) or the occasional useful mathematical symbol like ±, ×, ÷ (do you know maths geeks?), or if they make fun of Overly® Protected Products© (do you know anyone prone to humorous hyperbole?), or talking about Mëtäl Bänds (do you know anyone who likes metal?), or .... need I go on?
KDE SC is so much more than the plasma desktop shell. Replacing the shell on Windows may not be to everyone's taste, but that doesn't mean that they might not appreciate any of the other apps, such as Konqueror, Dolphin (I find the "fish:" handler invaluable) Marble, Okular, Akregator, Kopete, Ktouch or any of the 3 dozen games, etc..., or allowing KOffice installs to share the KDE/Qt libs, etc...
I think the GP meant "in the next release after Squeeze", which probably will be in about 2 years from now.