So there was apparently one and only one person motivated enough to actually start hacking ECMAScript into Lisp. And after some time that person didn't have the time/interest/motivation/whatever to continue that one-man project.
Somehow even if it's a relatively small language to build a compiler for, I have the feeling that it's a bigger bite than a single hacker can chew. Especially as that hacker is doing it as a hobby project. It could have been helpful if that hacker had received some support and help with the work, instead of receiving such a negative mention in the manual. It's to me not something that would make me say "hey that's interesting, let's have a look and see whether I can help out a bit".
They should be thankful that at least someone made a serious start with it, and encourage other people to pick it up.
OK whether they are incompetent or not is another matter, some questions arose from this whole issue.
From other comments it seems there is no system in place to automatically revoke certificates. I really don't understand this, such an oversight. Breaches can not be prevented, no matter how hard you try (and of course the CAs should do their utmost best), so there is a need for revoking any certificates automatically and instantly. For example by having the browsers check a CA with the issuer or at DNS level.
Besides revoking the known forged certificates, the CA's root certificate should be revoked as well. And the CA should issue a new root certificate, and with it new certificates to all their customers. It's a chore I know but the only way to be secure again.
What I mean to say is... the aviation industry simply has no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon fuels, whether that be petroleum, syngas, or cellulose based.
Which, in itself, is not a problem. If this kerosene is bio-based, it's carbon neutral. Carbon in carbohydrate form is just a very efficient way to store a massive amount of energy, that can be handled easily and pretty safely, and that can be released easily with combustion. As energy source (maybe better to say: as energy storage medium) it's just hard to beat.
Corn ethanol is a joke indeed, if only because of the massive amounts of waste it generates (i.e. the rest of the corn plant). Though with this butanol process it may change the picture drastically. Use the corn for food, the excess for ethanol (mind: to this day the world produces more food than we need; hunger is a distribution problem not a scarcity problem), and the rest of the plant for it's cellulose.
Yes that's a big number (and only a 1/4 of the what the world uses as a whole)
Considering that this 1/4 of the world's total is used by 5% of the world's population, it'd be a very good idea to do something about that, and to start looking for alternatives.
The bigger issue is that gasoline consumption is only about half of our yearly petroleum usage, and for some fields such as aviation, there is simply no alternative.
Not entirely true.
Back in the 1930s, when the Germans were planning for war, the realised they needed an important ingredient for their war machine: oil. But they don't have oil over there. So instead they made their own oil, mostly from coal, using the Fischer-Tropsch process. This process can make oil from basically any carbohydrate source, including cellulose. All you have to do is gasify them into synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and H2). Plants are still in operation today, but there are not many, as there are only few situations where it's economical to use this process.
Jet engines may require a high-energy fuel, like kerosene is. But fossil fuel deposits are not the only potential source of kerosene. It's of course currently by far the cheapest process, as oil today is still cheap and plentiful. However when there is the necessity, like the Germans had in war times, there are other ways to obtain this fuel.
TFA mentions 323 million tons of cellulotic material a year that can potentially be used. No indication on butanol conversion rates or how a liter of butanol compares to a liter of gasoline - so it's hard to really make a comparison.
Anyway assume you use all those 323 million tons, assume a 20% conversion rate, could yield 65 million tons of butanol. Or 180 thousand tons a day. That's almost 50 million gallons a day. So that could put a serious dent in the gasoline use.
Of course it's not a 100% replacement. But it could be.
First of all: start buying fuel efficient cars (US cars are still really bad in that respect).
Secondly: use more public transport, rely less on cars. I know US has a lot of countryside, but just put up parking garages at the outside of the city with good links to existing metro networks or so (that's how it's done in Europe) can help a lot. And make cities more livable to boot.
Thirdly: improve conversion rate to maybe 60-70%, and start collecting more cellulotic waste. Or even start growing plants for it. There are plenty of areas that could yield such energy crop that are not suitable for food crops.
And finally: do not rely on a single source of energy. Find other solutions: electric cars using solar/wind/water energy.
And this technology can very go hand in hand with the existing fuel ethanol business: grow sugar cane or corn, use the sugars in it for ethanol, and the cellulose waste materials can go to the butanol process.
Well I'll be the last to admit that China isn't a secretive country, with a lot of corruption going on as well. So for that part you're right. Yet the problem is - as proven with the diginotar case - that being found out just one time may put an end to your complete business, and invalidate any other certificates you issued. A very heavy punishment, one could call it a corporate death penalty, but it's the only thing we have to keep them in line.
This automatic trust we have to put in the registrars is an issue, definitely. And there'd better be some third parties (if only competing registrars) that check on issued certificates.
A validation request for *.google.com should have landed at a technical contact inside Google. So how did this come into the hands of the Iranian government?
Nothing states it didn't. Google has many technical people working for them - who says none of them are spies for foreign governments? OK running into conspiracy theory/paranoia terrain here of course. But in this kind of cases, particularly when dealing with popular domains like google.com, you'd better be paranoid.
Trolling because that name sounds Chinese? And why would you trust Verisign and all the others?
The answer is: because trust is what their business is built upon. Break that trust, break your business, like what's now happened to diginotar. And that's why you can trust them: because they need you to trust them, and that's a good reason for such a business to be and to remain trustworthy.
That said of course we should remain vigilant. Trust is just that - trust. It needs independent verification, and how we can do that properly well I don't know yet. Other than staying vigilant, and reporting issues like this one as soon as they are found.
To debunk the last bit: it's not that hard for a spy operation to ask some friends in the US, possibly friends that are actually Google employees, to apply for such certificates. To have at least the request coming from a plausible source.
And on the rest... sure, should have raised plenty of red flags. Why would a US company ask a Dutch CA for a certificate? Why would an established site need a new or an extra certificate - a wild card (*.google.com) cert to boot? Now I have no idea how a CA certifies that the requester is actually the owner of a certain domain, it certainly failed badly in this case.
For some reason the first quote went missing... I should have checked the preview of course:
It is my understanding that the patches that are being created will blacklist all DigiNotar-issued certificates based on "CN=DigiNotar " in the certificate issuer.
I just looked through the bug report listed; at the end two very interesting comments:
So it seems Mozilla is basically going to blacklist that CA. I think that's an appropriate response: the CA has proven that their methods are flawed, and that there certificates can not be trusted. This one has been found out; who knows whether there are more out there? I surely hope this is a one-off incident but better safe than sorry. And it sends the message nice and clear to other CAs that they have to be really careful.
As of 9:26pm PDT this bug report has made the frontpage of slashdot.org [...] Please address this issue immediately.
In that case I'd say the problem lies with the timing of the traffic lights themselves. The village where my parents live had a "green wave" for the main road well over 30 years ago already. At the beginning of the village they just put a sign "green wave at 50 km/h" (which is the speed limit), and the traffic lights were timed in such a manner that you would only have to wait for the first light (or, if lucky, not at all). After that continue at 50 km/h and a minute or two later you've passed half a dozen green lights.
Melbourne obviously had their traffic lights timed in a manner that only with extremely high or low speeds you could catch the next green. Instead of timing them to match traffic moving at normal speeds. After which the speed indicators would start to give reasonable speeds too.
I think in city traffic most roads are too busy for this kind of arrangements. I've seen this it a lot in The Netherlands, but only in rural areas. And particularly at night.
More like: when you slow down too much the car will stop the engine. That's usually not an exactly smooth transition. Happens when you forget to use the clutch. Remember OP was talking about manual gears.
On the other hand, this is also how you can actually start an engine, useful in cold conditions (with older cars) when the engine is still cold. When slowing down, if the engine shuts off the moment you press the clutch, release the clutch again and the engine will be forced to start. Helps preventing an empty battery. Preferably do this in second gear, not first gear - much smoother. Third gear may work too.
The above is of course also how you push-start a car.
I recall it was even simpler, that you could fix it from within the default user interface: the volume control button in the task bar. You didn't have to call alsamixer or so. But nevertheless it was really silly and should have never been released like that. And silly enough to be memorable!
Re:When Mandriva was Mandrake...
on
Mandriva 2011 Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I recall one release of Mandriva that had lots of support requests on the forums for not working sound.
The problem: by default the volume control was turned down completely! Just turning up the volume solved it. Silly.
I didn't know Mandriva is still alive. I've used them for the better part of a decade, first Mandrake, later it became Mandriva. They had so many problems: near bankruptcy, and for a while completely seemed to have lost it completely. Their distro anyway was a bit hit and miss, one great release followed by a mediocre release and then a great one again, but overall I loved it. Some three years ago I made the switch to Ubuntu because of all that - and Ubuntu seemed to have the better future. Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often. Keeping things as they are for a while is nice when you're using the computer to get actual work done.
Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?
As long as they are 100% open in their intentions it's hard to call it evil. If you don't like or agree with those intentions, then you just don't sign up.
Not necessarily. With foreign call centers becoming common, telephone calls between India and Indiana need some sort of common time reference.
The caller doesn't have to know where the call centre is located. Caller uses their local time; call centre just puts up a clock set to their caller's time. After that it's just a matter of routing callers from one time zone to one group of operators, callers from another time zone to another group. And as time zones are geographic, that's easy to do. Problem solved. And I would expect it works like that in practice already.
How about a mixed system? I'm used to write "16:00" but to pronounce it as "4 o'clock". If necessary add "in the morning/afternoon" to it but usually that's obvious. When you're arranging a meeting at 4, then it's pretty much always 16:00 and not 4:00. Many Dutch do it that way, the conversion goes automatically, no thinking needed. Germans do it too, but over there are also many people that will say "16 o'clock".
Give me a tablet with GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, multi-touch hi-res screen, 802.11n, bluetooth, perhaps an infrared interface, a dock/USB connector for anything else (perhaps including external video), a microSD slot for boot/system software, and two standard SD slots (one for user data, including all settings; the other for importing data (e.g. camera card) or doing backups). No built-in storage, microSD stores all the system software plus whatever apps you want to put there.
Well let's see... this sounds very much like my phone. Well no gyroscope, no need what you want that for, but it has a hardware compass and that's very useful in combination with the GPS. Screen is smaller of course (and that's a large part of the price of course). It has Bluetooth and Wifi. A USB connector. No SD card slots, no space in this form factor, but it does have a micro-SD for user data, and smallish internal storage for system and apps.
Boot/system on built-in storage I think is more sensible than on removable storage.
Another difference is that my phone comes with camera and 3G data option (and can make phone calls).
And the price, now almost a year ago, was about USD 260.
So basically what you're describing is the same as my phone, with bigger screen, without the GSM and camera. At a similar price point. Bigger screen costs more; not having to squeeze it in a so small form factor should save some; will need a bigger battery; though overall price shouldn't be much more than this phone.
Yet the problem is the internal storage: you can not copy a small movie collection to the device. Unless you copy them to SD cards, but they're still quite expensive.
We've seen tons of tablets from various manufactures, some are both cheaper and better than Apples offering, yet they're not really selling in great quantity.
Better in what way? It seems the general tablet-buying public thinks the iPad is the best option out there, and most worth its money.
Actually it doesn't really bother me, let them just go ahead.
Many real-life games come with expansion packs as well. Settlers of Catan was (is?) a very popular one where people could buy extras to play with. It enhanced their enjoyment of the game, so they put down money to buy more parts for it - no problem with that, is there?
Magic the Gathering is another game that has many expansion options. Many cards are there, some are becoming increasingly rare and have become collector's items. People pay a lot of money for it - even though it's basically just a piece of printed paper. There surely are people trading in this kind of cards, whether they make a living out of it I don't know but it will be possible.
These virtual items I don't think are that different. It's a game, people enjoy it, and are willing to pay extra money to enjoy it even more. Some (probably most) of these traded items may be available to anyone playing enough, others may be created one-off by the game designer, whatever. But not everyone is willing to do all that work, they just want to buy the finished product. And as long as they're not scammed (i.e. they get what they pay for) it's fine with me. Let them go ahead.
I hope this means they will have basic functions like copy built-in. I was quite surprised when I took up Java on Android that such a function was simply not there. And that I basically had to add it myself (luckily code snippets all over the place, but still). The whole I/O felt very primitive to me - it may have its advantages to do it that way, but me coming from Python is used to being able to address files much easier.
Slashdot Mirror
So there was apparently one and only one person motivated enough to actually start hacking ECMAScript into Lisp. And after some time that person didn't have the time/interest/motivation/whatever to continue that one-man project.
Somehow even if it's a relatively small language to build a compiler for, I have the feeling that it's a bigger bite than a single hacker can chew. Especially as that hacker is doing it as a hobby project. It could have been helpful if that hacker had received some support and help with the work, instead of receiving such a negative mention in the manual. It's to me not something that would make me say "hey that's interesting, let's have a look and see whether I can help out a bit".
They should be thankful that at least someone made a serious start with it, and encourage other people to pick it up.
OK whether they are incompetent or not is another matter, some questions arose from this whole issue.
From other comments it seems there is no system in place to automatically revoke certificates. I really don't understand this, such an oversight. Breaches can not be prevented, no matter how hard you try (and of course the CAs should do their utmost best), so there is a need for revoking any certificates automatically and instantly. For example by having the browsers check a CA with the issuer or at DNS level.
Besides revoking the known forged certificates, the CA's root certificate should be revoked as well. And the CA should issue a new root certificate, and with it new certificates to all their customers. It's a chore I know but the only way to be secure again.
What I mean to say is... the aviation industry simply has no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon fuels, whether that be petroleum, syngas, or cellulose based.
Which, in itself, is not a problem. If this kerosene is bio-based, it's carbon neutral. Carbon in carbohydrate form is just a very efficient way to store a massive amount of energy, that can be handled easily and pretty safely, and that can be released easily with combustion. As energy source (maybe better to say: as energy storage medium) it's just hard to beat.
Corn ethanol is a joke indeed, if only because of the massive amounts of waste it generates (i.e. the rest of the corn plant). Though with this butanol process it may change the picture drastically. Use the corn for food, the excess for ethanol (mind: to this day the world produces more food than we need; hunger is a distribution problem not a scarcity problem), and the rest of the plant for it's cellulose.
Yes that's a big number (and only a 1/4 of the what the world uses as a whole)
Considering that this 1/4 of the world's total is used by 5% of the world's population, it'd be a very good idea to do something about that, and to start looking for alternatives.
The bigger issue is that gasoline consumption is only about half of our yearly petroleum usage, and for some fields such as aviation, there is simply no alternative.
Not entirely true.
Back in the 1930s, when the Germans were planning for war, the realised they needed an important ingredient for their war machine: oil. But they don't have oil over there. So instead they made their own oil, mostly from coal, using the Fischer-Tropsch process. This process can make oil from basically any carbohydrate source, including cellulose. All you have to do is gasify them into synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and H2). Plants are still in operation today, but there are not many, as there are only few situations where it's economical to use this process.
Jet engines may require a high-energy fuel, like kerosene is. But fossil fuel deposits are not the only potential source of kerosene. It's of course currently by far the cheapest process, as oil today is still cheap and plentiful. However when there is the necessity, like the Germans had in war times, there are other ways to obtain this fuel.
TFA mentions 323 million tons of cellulotic material a year that can potentially be used. No indication on butanol conversion rates or how a liter of butanol compares to a liter of gasoline - so it's hard to really make a comparison.
Anyway assume you use all those 323 million tons, assume a 20% conversion rate, could yield 65 million tons of butanol. Or 180 thousand tons a day. That's almost 50 million gallons a day. So that could put a serious dent in the gasoline use.
Of course it's not a 100% replacement. But it could be.
First of all: start buying fuel efficient cars (US cars are still really bad in that respect).
Secondly: use more public transport, rely less on cars. I know US has a lot of countryside, but just put up parking garages at the outside of the city with good links to existing metro networks or so (that's how it's done in Europe) can help a lot. And make cities more livable to boot.
Thirdly: improve conversion rate to maybe 60-70%, and start collecting more cellulotic waste. Or even start growing plants for it. There are plenty of areas that could yield such energy crop that are not suitable for food crops.
And finally: do not rely on a single source of energy. Find other solutions: electric cars using solar/wind/water energy.
And this technology can very go hand in hand with the existing fuel ethanol business: grow sugar cane or corn, use the sugars in it for ethanol, and the cellulose waste materials can go to the butanol process.
Well I'll be the last to admit that China isn't a secretive country, with a lot of corruption going on as well. So for that part you're right. Yet the problem is - as proven with the diginotar case - that being found out just one time may put an end to your complete business, and invalidate any other certificates you issued. A very heavy punishment, one could call it a corporate death penalty, but it's the only thing we have to keep them in line.
This automatic trust we have to put in the registrars is an issue, definitely. And there'd better be some third parties (if only competing registrars) that check on issued certificates.
A validation request for *.google.com should have landed at a technical contact inside Google. So how did this come into the hands of the Iranian government?
Nothing states it didn't. Google has many technical people working for them - who says none of them are spies for foreign governments? OK running into conspiracy theory/paranoia terrain here of course. But in this kind of cases, particularly when dealing with popular domains like google.com, you'd better be paranoid.
Trolling because that name sounds Chinese? And why would you trust Verisign and all the others?
The answer is: because trust is what their business is built upon. Break that trust, break your business, like what's now happened to diginotar. And that's why you can trust them: because they need you to trust them, and that's a good reason for such a business to be and to remain trustworthy.
That said of course we should remain vigilant. Trust is just that - trust. It needs independent verification, and how we can do that properly well I don't know yet. Other than staying vigilant, and reporting issues like this one as soon as they are found.
To debunk the last bit: it's not that hard for a spy operation to ask some friends in the US, possibly friends that are actually Google employees, to apply for such certificates. To have at least the request coming from a plausible source.
And on the rest... sure, should have raised plenty of red flags. Why would a US company ask a Dutch CA for a certificate? Why would an established site need a new or an extra certificate - a wild card (*.google.com) cert to boot? Now I have no idea how a CA certifies that the requester is actually the owner of a certain domain, it certainly failed badly in this case.
It is my understanding that the patches that are being created will blacklist all DigiNotar-issued certificates based on "CN=DigiNotar " in the certificate issuer.
I just looked through the bug report listed; at the end two very interesting comments:
So it seems Mozilla is basically going to blacklist that CA. I think that's an appropriate response: the CA has proven that their methods are flawed, and that there certificates can not be trusted. This one has been found out; who knows whether there are more out there? I surely hope this is a one-off incident but better safe than sorry. And it sends the message nice and clear to other CAs that they have to be really careful.
As of 9:26pm PDT this bug report has made the frontpage of slashdot.org [...] Please address this issue immediately.
A Slashdot side-effect :)
In that case I'd say the problem lies with the timing of the traffic lights themselves. The village where my parents live had a "green wave" for the main road well over 30 years ago already. At the beginning of the village they just put a sign "green wave at 50 km/h" (which is the speed limit), and the traffic lights were timed in such a manner that you would only have to wait for the first light (or, if lucky, not at all). After that continue at 50 km/h and a minute or two later you've passed half a dozen green lights.
Melbourne obviously had their traffic lights timed in a manner that only with extremely high or low speeds you could catch the next green. Instead of timing them to match traffic moving at normal speeds. After which the speed indicators would start to give reasonable speeds too.
I think in city traffic most roads are too busy for this kind of arrangements. I've seen this it a lot in The Netherlands, but only in rural areas. And particularly at night.
More like: when you slow down too much the car will stop the engine. That's usually not an exactly smooth transition. Happens when you forget to use the clutch. Remember OP was talking about manual gears.
On the other hand, this is also how you can actually start an engine, useful in cold conditions (with older cars) when the engine is still cold. When slowing down, if the engine shuts off the moment you press the clutch, release the clutch again and the engine will be forced to start. Helps preventing an empty battery. Preferably do this in second gear, not first gear - much smoother. Third gear may work too.
The above is of course also how you push-start a car.
I recall it was even simpler, that you could fix it from within the default user interface: the volume control button in the task bar. You didn't have to call alsamixer or so. But nevertheless it was really silly and should have never been released like that. And silly enough to be memorable!
I recall one release of Mandriva that had lots of support requests on the forums for not working sound.
The problem: by default the volume control was turned down completely! Just turning up the volume solved it. Silly.
I didn't know Mandriva is still alive. I've used them for the better part of a decade, first Mandrake, later it became Mandriva. They had so many problems: near bankruptcy, and for a while completely seemed to have lost it completely. Their distro anyway was a bit hit and miss, one great release followed by a mediocre release and then a great one again, but overall I loved it. Some three years ago I made the switch to Ubuntu because of all that - and Ubuntu seemed to have the better future. Also Ubuntu has an LTS option, saves me having to do a complete upgrade so often. Keeping things as they are for a while is nice when you're using the computer to get actual work done.
Any current experience with Mandriva? Are they still good? Worth trying again?
As long as they are 100% open in their intentions it's hard to call it evil. If you don't like or agree with those intentions, then you just don't sign up.
Not necessarily. With foreign call centers becoming common, telephone calls between India and Indiana need some sort of common time reference.
The caller doesn't have to know where the call centre is located. Caller uses their local time; call centre just puts up a clock set to their caller's time. After that it's just a matter of routing callers from one time zone to one group of operators, callers from another time zone to another group. And as time zones are geographic, that's easy to do. Problem solved. And I would expect it works like that in practice already.
How about a mixed system? I'm used to write "16:00" but to pronounce it as "4 o'clock". If necessary add "in the morning/afternoon" to it but usually that's obvious. When you're arranging a meeting at 4, then it's pretty much always 16:00 and not 4:00. Many Dutch do it that way, the conversion goes automatically, no thinking needed. Germans do it too, but over there are also many people that will say "16 o'clock".
Give me a tablet with GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, camera, multi-touch hi-res screen, 802.11n, bluetooth, perhaps an infrared interface, a dock/USB connector for anything else (perhaps including external video), a microSD slot for boot/system software, and two standard SD slots (one for user data, including all settings; the other for importing data (e.g. camera card) or doing backups). No built-in storage, microSD stores all the system software plus whatever apps you want to put there.
Well let's see... this sounds very much like my phone. Well no gyroscope, no need what you want that for, but it has a hardware compass and that's very useful in combination with the GPS. Screen is smaller of course (and that's a large part of the price of course). It has Bluetooth and Wifi. A USB connector. No SD card slots, no space in this form factor, but it does have a micro-SD for user data, and smallish internal storage for system and apps.
Boot/system on built-in storage I think is more sensible than on removable storage.
Another difference is that my phone comes with camera and 3G data option (and can make phone calls).
And the price, now almost a year ago, was about USD 260.
So basically what you're describing is the same as my phone, with bigger screen, without the GSM and camera. At a similar price point. Bigger screen costs more; not having to squeeze it in a so small form factor should save some; will need a bigger battery; though overall price shouldn't be much more than this phone.
Yet the problem is the internal storage: you can not copy a small movie collection to the device. Unless you copy them to SD cards, but they're still quite expensive.
We've seen tons of tablets from various manufactures, some are both cheaper and better than Apples offering, yet they're not really selling in great quantity.
Better in what way? It seems the general tablet-buying public thinks the iPad is the best option out there, and most worth its money.
Actually it doesn't really bother me, let them just go ahead.
Many real-life games come with expansion packs as well. Settlers of Catan was (is?) a very popular one where people could buy extras to play with. It enhanced their enjoyment of the game, so they put down money to buy more parts for it - no problem with that, is there?
Magic the Gathering is another game that has many expansion options. Many cards are there, some are becoming increasingly rare and have become collector's items. People pay a lot of money for it - even though it's basically just a piece of printed paper. There surely are people trading in this kind of cards, whether they make a living out of it I don't know but it will be possible.
These virtual items I don't think are that different. It's a game, people enjoy it, and are willing to pay extra money to enjoy it even more. Some (probably most) of these traded items may be available to anyone playing enough, others may be created one-off by the game designer, whatever. But not everyone is willing to do all that work, they just want to buy the finished product. And as long as they're not scammed (i.e. they get what they pay for) it's fine with me. Let them go ahead.
I hope this means they will have basic functions like copy built-in. I was quite surprised when I took up Java on Android that such a function was simply not there. And that I basically had to add it myself (luckily code snippets all over the place, but still). The whole I/O felt very primitive to me - it may have its advantages to do it that way, but me coming from Python is used to being able to address files much easier.