Let's put on our thinking caps folks. Return Oriented Programing is an exploit engineering technique that uses the existing signed and/or encrypted code to create the exploit code. That means Secure Boot is defenseless to stop this type of exploit. If the application or OS code has mistakes in it then a function pointer on the stack, or in the heap (read/write memory) can be overwritten and be used by exploits via return oriented programming, and SecureBoot won't help one bit -- The code that's running is signed and/or encrypted. So if the Application or OS code isn't secure (which it won't be) then SecureBoot is pointless. What that? It won't be able to infect a boot sector? Well, if you've got malicious code running on your system then there exists an exploit vector that cane simply be re-exploited next time you boot up. See? Pointless.
Ah, but what if the Application and OS code could be written to be secure against stack smashing and undesired code pointer manipulations? Well then, there wouldn't be any exploit vectors that you needed SecureBoot to protect you against. See? Pointless.
Well, I say "Pointless", but what I mean is useless from an end user perspective. I don't mean to gloss over the only real use SecureBoot has: To prevent you from installing your own OSs and Applications, and having control over your own computers.
If they are so essential, why is there ALREADY a planned one year satellite gap?
You're operating under the flawed assumption that congress has the public's best interest in mind. There was no PLANNED one year satellite gap, you fucking fool.
Congressional budget cutting will delay the launch of a key weather satellite and hinder tracking of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe weather, officials warn.
The satellite, which had been scheduled to launch in 2016, will be postponed 18 months because of spending cuts and delays. The threat during that gap is that National Weather Service forecasts will become fuzzier, with the paths of hurricanes and tornadoes even less predictable.
With more budget cuts looming, further delays are possible — something President Obama alluded to last week....
"There will be a data gap. That data gap will have very serious consequences to our ability to do severe storm warnings, long-term weather forecasts, search and rescue and good weather forecasts," Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator, told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April....
Forecasters issued warnings five days ahead of tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., and five other states in April. A barrage of 312 tornadoes swept across the Southeast, killing 321 people. On storm day, forecasters gave warnings averaging 27 minutes before actual touchdowns.
Likewise, when a tornado struck Joplin, Mo., killing 151 on May 22, forecasters gave warnings averaging 24 minutes before strikes.
"The satellites are an important part of that early warning process," said Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the service....
Lubchenco said without information from the polar satellite, forecasts for a massive storm nicknamed "snowmageddon," which hit Washington in February 2010, would have had the location wrong by 200 to 300 miles and would have underestimated the snowfall by 10 inches. Hurricane tracking would also suffer, she said.
"Our severe storm warnings will be seriously degraded," Lubchenco testified April 1 before the House Appropriations subcommittee governing the agency.
Lawmakers and scientists lauded the value of the program, which provides forecasts for military troop deployments, ocean search-and-rescue missions and farmers tending crops.
"It's important for public safety," said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. Cutting the funding "would be penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Lubchenco credited the satellites with helping save 295 people in 2010 by helping track rescue beacons aboard ships.
"That's saving lives, that's saving money," said Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees NOAA funding.
But reduced federal spending threatens all domestic programs. Congress cut spending $38.5 billion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. House Republicans propose to cut another $30 billion next year.
So, there was never a planned gap. The damn funding got cut, and now it's getting cut some more. What's the point of having scientists advise on these issues if they get ignored? Fuck them, and fuck you. Can't prioritize anything or even look at the data and reason for yourselves. Go sleep in a tar-pit, you dickheads are hindering the herd.
::yawn:: Whilst my coffee is brewing I've made you this screenshot of said search, because "pics or it didn't happen". I'm a Northern Yank transplanted to Houston, but I like British comedy, so maybe that's what it's picking up in my case.
Using my google de-encryption method, the MBE Acronym appears to stand for the "Multi State Bar Exam" - a degree for Yankee lawyers practicing across state lines. Why on earth did they give that to this poor gentleman?
I agree. However, planned obsolescence is rarely what's best for the consumer. If we want games to be treated as an artistic medium, as I believe they can be, then we have to stop with the bullshit "end of life" -- If a developer wants to make a game for the PS1, NES, C64, x86 DOS or any other platform then they should be able to. Should people be able to port, say, Cavestory to run on an SNES? I think so. The difference between the consoles and PC platforms is that you can still publish software for the computers, but these latest generations of consoles require blessing from the manufacturers in order to release games for them. Should a painter have to seek permission to create works on rice paper or bamboo scrolls -- and should they be denied simply because cloth canvas is now available? I don't think so. These latest generation of gaming devices have also seen much litigation in the way of emulators and cracking down on Homebrew (un blessed) software development. Nintendo shutting down 3rd party DS carts that allow loading home made games, Sony suing a reverse engineer after they took away the ability to run your own software, Microsoft pushing system update after update to patch their OS against homebrew and also preventing the sale of mod chips on copyright grounds.
Turning off parts of the games also needs to stop. When Microsoft disabled the Halo2 matchmaking service I was a bit pissed off, because I knew how that service worked. Here was a game that merely needed to know the IPs of the folks I wanted to play with -- They could have disabled bungie.net BS, that wouldn't have affected gameplay, but it didn't matter which game I inserted it would have consumed the same matchmaking bandwidth, so disabling Halo2's multiplayer pissed me off. One day, on the 360, I joined a party-chat with my brother, "Still pining for her I see" he said over XBL chat after seeing the Halo2 icon near my name on the friends list. "Shut up, you're playing it too," I said after checking his in game status, "Too bad MS is a dick so we can't play on XBL." Do you see why we were angry? We're paying for an online service that refuses to work because a new shiny is out. Here our two game consoles know each other's IPs -- We're directly chatting with each other (verify via wireshark), our consoles each know we're both playing the same damn game, and yet we have no option to play the game with each other on XBL. "The VPN is up if you want to play some one on one over a LAN", I say. "I wouldn't miss it!", my sibling says, "--wait, yes I would... Let's Play!" And just like that we've tricked the Xboxes into thinking they're on the same local area network, so we can play "online"... That was two years ago. We've both stopped paying for XBL. Due to BS like Project $10, and the advent of always-online DRM I'm boycotting most Publishers and services. All of our friends are in the same boat. We play PC games now and chat over VOIP, if we want to enjoy some older games we play via system link. XBL and PSOnline are worthless -- They serve the DRM God who hates all, even games. "You'll not find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." so we went somewhere else.
As someone who collects and plays games for fun, inspiration, nostalgia, research, and art, I think that saying, "The last game for $PLATFORM will be..." is disgusting. Why I've recently done some work in ASM on a side scrolling shooter game using DOS era 80x25x16c text 'graphics' + PC speakers as the complimentary game installed with the new OS I'm writing. I loved that old medium, it was the 1st I wrote code to, so I want to give it one last hurrah with today's CPU speeds before it's phased out by 64bit and UEFI. Current x86 systems still boot into 16bit protected mode, thus the bootable game will still run on the metal sans emulator on a lot of hardware. I'd love to one day be able to do the same for the 360 or PS3, but that's not (legally) possible with their DRM. To you it may just be hardware, that gets old and is
We can only be honest when we're anonymous. That *is* our real self. It's when we have to be out in the open that we hide behind bullshit politeness and "civility" (aka "We both bullshit each other rather than being honest").
Yep. When I show something to my friends and family and even work colleagues they all say it's neat. Fellow game devs may be a bit more to the point and give constructive criticism, but I don't really value them any more than I value the raw honesty of anonymous Internet commenters: "It's polished to a blinding gleam, but it's still a turd." "Your shit isn't fucking fun -- AT. ALL." "I died in 3 seconds, FUCK YOU!". There's good comments too, and I value all of them (lesser than my own opinion, mind you), but with any input I try to reason: "Do they have a valid point, what caused them to feel this way?" -- A good comment from a good friend? "Do they have a valid point?" maybe not! What caused them to feel that way could be rose colored glasses or niceness. Maybe the anonymous folks are just angsty teens, maybe not! Filtering though all this over-harshness and over-niceness shit wastes so much time... Ugh, and you wonder why I always root for the Borg.
I wish I could trust the people I know and trust with other affairs to be brutal when I ask them to be brutal and speak their mind, but you can't trust them -- That bullshit social politeness means that in many ways they're more fake to me than the anonymous folks on the web. We need anonymity to balance the bullshit. It takes all kinds.
Look Linus may be a great leader, but pompous crap like this doesn't belong. There's a reason why in management if you need to discipline/warn an employee, you do it in private not over the company mailing list.
Steve Ballmer
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
You're just seeing the stuff that normally goes on "behind closed doors" in other proprietary shops. Not that I wouldn't rather have a really nice guy that just called it like it is and then black-listed the moron, but I think that Linus does a fine job, even if a bit harsh at times. Would you have rather had him waste time coming up with a witty remark to point out the stupid behavior? Would you rather risk others not catching on to how wrong the guy was and thus waste their time chasing down a bug in pulse audio? I wouldn't.
As an application developer (and game developer by night), I concur. Test the patches before submitting them upstream. If you don't understand what the patches do, you don't approve them. Hell, that's the same requirement I have for all code in my projects. Even if it's a comment or whitespace change, you compile and (unit) test the module before committing it. It's a pretty brain dead rule of thumb: If you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't do it! It's when you pretend to know more than you do that you get in trouble. The stupid thing is that there's no excuse for not knowing -- If all else fails, you ask the submitter who sent you the patch.
Also, take Linus' wrath with a grain of salt. He enjoys being blunt and offending those that get offended. His opinion is that you can't actually offend someone, they have to take offense themselves. He get's most pissed when he knows he's right. He accepts people calling him stupid when they're right and he's wrong, like in this talk where he gives the finger to Nvida devs... WRT an early version of the Linux kernel: "We didn't have init. We don't need init, just a boot image and root console, that's how real men do it... Then someone came along and said, 'This is stupid, you need init', and they added init" -- I'm paraphrasing, that's pretty much how I remember it from the video. Sorry, too lazy to re-watch and find the exact quote. Also contained therein is his position on being harsh...
Also, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer -- Come on, they're all notorious as being harsh At least Linus isn't parking in handy cap spaces, or throwing chairs like a real asshole.
The 1st launch where they were going to dock the Dragon Capsule to the ISS failed. The launch was aborted after "Liftoff" was proclaimed. Indeed, with a solid rocket booster that couldn't have been shut off, the launch couldn't have been aborted a second after liftoff, it would have had to try to soldier on with the mission, or maybe execute a planned crash / destructive abort procedure; However, liquid fuel was used, so they just cut off the fuel, and tried again another day...
Today’s launch was aborted when the flight computer detected slightly high pressure in the engine 5 combustion chamber. We have discovered root cause and repairs are underway.
... the next launch succeeded, and they historically docked with the ISS. On the following resupply mission an engine failed mid flight, but the liquid fuel engines can be shut down mid-flight, routing fuel to the remaining engines, so that's what happened.
Approximately one minute and 19 seconds into last night’s launch, the Falcon 9 rocket detected an anomaly on one first stage engine. Initial data suggests that one of the rocket’s nine Merlin engines, Engine 1, lost pressure suddenly and an engine shutdown command was issued. We know the engine did not explode, because we continued to receive data from it. Panels designed to relieve pressure within the engine bay were ejected to protect the stage and other engines. Our review of flight data indicates that neither the rocket stage nor any of the other eight engines were negatively affected by this event.
You see? It's not that the engines are less fail proof, it's that they have better fail safes.
P.S. SpaceX, please tell your webmaster to replace those <strong> tags with the preceding named anchor tags, keep the "blue smallText" class (though you should name the class semantically, not describe what they do, that's just as bad as per element style attributes! Derp!), and set the href attribute to be "#" + the name attribute, eg: href="#Update100712" to create self referential links; That way instead of delving into the source of your HTML to get at the anchor names I can right click the link and copy the URL when I want to link to the pertinent places in that giant list of updates (also, might want to break them into smaller pages, maybe by month?) Alternatively: Fire that moron, and I'll do it for you for free.
If CMU invested capital in discovering/creating these innovations, they should get *some* return on their investment. Otherwise, they'll have to stop discovering/innovating because they can't afford it.
That's what I say too. For instance, All the people in the field researching the same technology should get *some* return on their investment from the newly granted patent holders who just prevented them from using their research. Otherwise, they'll have to stop discovering/innovating because they can't afford it, you know, because patents stifle progress as their core function. Why should any one group of researchers be granted a monopoly, simply because they're first? That's horrible thinking. What about they guy who showed up with a working telephone an hour after Alexander G. Bell did? He's now unable to even sell or USE the efforts of his own creation? Fuck. That.
Tell you what, I refuse to look at any software related patents because I make software. I'm an individual skilled in the arts just like all the other folks working in the field who get sued for patent infringement. If I stumble across an idea that makes sense while doing my job and it happens to infringe a patent, doesn't that make it fucking obvious by definition? Destroy All Patents. They're dumb as hell. Show me ONE Scientific report that shows patents as beneficial to our society vs not having patents... Guess what? NONE EXIST. We must abolish patents to do the experiment. We're running the whole world on UNPROVEN HYPOTHESES!?!
You humans are the worst. Can't even understand simple shit like the scientific method. You don't roll it out all over, you do so to a portion of the industries and then make a comparison.... What's that you say? The Automotive and Fashion industries are not allowed Design Patents, yet they are innovative in Design? So, let me get this straight... You ran the fucking experiment and IGNORED THE RESULTS!?! That's it. I'm disowning the entire human race. You fuckers might be related genetically to me, but you're sure as fuck not the same race as I -- You damn dirty apes! You've made monkeys of us ALL!
I never understood the point. Splice a parallel port to a bread board and hook it to any beige box PC that folks are literally giving (or throwing) away. They're better than the Raspberry Pi in every way except size. You can hook a LED (maybe w/ resistor) directly to many of the pins of the parallel port and they light up representing the individual bits. IO doesn't have to be serialized and deserialized, so you don't have to use a RS232 or any other integrated circuit chips. The beige box also supports Serial and Universal Serial Bus (USB), not to mention a 56k Modem. Old beige box has more RAM, more peripherals, EASIER to work with parallel interface for hardware. Man, I swear. If I spray painted them brown and called them "Chocolate Quaternion" people would be buying them just as fast as the Raspberry Pi were it to get the same level of press. I mean, it's like the folks buying these don't even search around for ways to do hardware projects with the machines they've got or even look for other single board computers before buying one due to all the damn press the Raspberry Pi gets. I mean, $25 is great, but there's other options with various speeds and features at other prices. It's not the only $100 computer with a nice IO header, damn. Seriously.
"It's also why we'll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
... Can anyone suggest a proper geek-speak version?
Aside from it being just a bunch of hot air, I think "push deeper into the cloud" is a reference to FFVII slash, which means that they'll dedicate more money to providing services."Making it even easier, faster and cost effective" - They're going to work (Cloud?) harder, better, faster, stronger so you can get satisfied cheaply. "to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice" Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Clouds to do with as you please! "or create clouds for your own consumption or commerce" You can have your own Cloud based Beowulf clusters, except they won't be yours, but you can still use them and even sell their services, or.. even... eat them?
To be fair, it's not that the OpenOffice and LibreOffice are crap, it's just that the format you're feeding them is. Get us an actual free and open source document standard, and have folks follow it, and things will be much better. Here's an interesting anecdote: My moderately computer literate mother now uses Linux at home and Win7 at work, and prefers Linux. She takes her Linux laptop with LibreOffice on it to work because there are MS Word documents that MS Word won't open that LibreOffice does. There. That should counter your "it's buggy" anecdote.
Have you had many corruption problems with the FLOSS office tools saving and loading their own format? Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with? How can a FLOSS word processor work with MS Office if they publish one thing and do another? Oooooh, so now you see do you? Perhaps your fingers have been pointing in the wrong direction all along. Look, I know you don't give a damn why the competing free alternatives are buggy, but let's not go pretending they can't do the work. There is a deficit of CAD, but then again, look at CAD users as a percentage of market share vs total users... Then again, I actually prefer Blender and YafaRay for 3D modeling and animation and even just adding special effects to videos.
(Un)Fortunately this doesn't work both ways. Here, I'll show you: MS has no Emacs or Vim replacement at all! Who can even write code for their system? VS doesn't even work with my Emacs macros or have block select! Ah, but you see? Emacs and Vim, and essentially every FLOSS program can run on Windows as well as any other OS -- They're not hindered by vendor lock-in strategies...
I will make you an amazing video game, song, movie, porn, etc. I will only create it if you pay me $COSTS + $PROFIT to make it. See? It's only about as ephemeral as a mechanic's labor... After the contract has been agreed to, I'll make the information product, and everyone can have it forever for free why? Because you already payed me for my work and a little extra for profit. It's only the publishers that suffer, not the programmers, in fact the programmers can charge a bit more for their work than they currently get under publishers and the public will still get the game for cheaper. I still have an audience. It's only the publishers that suffer, since they don't actually do any work, see? Working for a publisher vs working for the general public is the exact same, except I get free market research (you won't agree to pay for me to build games or make music you hate). You may, however, pay me NOT to make that porn...
True, there are starving artists out there, but what's really happening is that the independent artists that never could reach an audience with the Big Media Filter engaged, can actually make a living in the Information Age. IMO, working in media and not needing to have a publishing boss anymore is fucking awesome, I'd much rather work for everyone and just get paid to do work. Protip: the above method of working for money also prevents any "piracy". You can't copy what isn't yet made.
It takes a -company- like Microsoft to bring the PC to the unwashed masses and all the ancillary technology that goes along with it. And it had to be an open platform. IBM almost succeeded in keeping the PC platform closed in a way that Apple succeeded in. Below are some facts.
IBM and MS both worked on OS2, which MS eventually named Windows NT. MS screwed their partner by introducing incompatibilities with OS2, as MS had done with DOS back when DR DOS was a competitor. IBM now advocates Linux. You're pretty far from the mark if you think it was MS that caused all the openness. It was Intel when they allowed "clones", for fuck's sake man. THINK.
Without a world of Microsoft.
1. GPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.
Why's that? OpenGL existed DirectX was never really needed, it was just yet another proprietary MS standard to assist with vendor lock-in. MS doesn't make GPU hardware, but the vendors now had to support two drivers instead of one. That means more work for no good reason -- even if they make a good DX driver and skimp on the OGL one, that's still extra wheel spinning for no fucking reason. Why would MS not use OpenGL instead of wasting time on DX? The early versions of DX was an OpenGL wrapper. There must have been some reason for MS to embrace and extend... OH! Extinguish. I'd say that was a step backwards. We could have had one really awesome cross platform driver stack, but because of MS that didn't happen. This means your selection of Games is dependent on the OS you use, which is fucking retarded in every sense of the word -- It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game devs, it's bad for hardware makers, it's bad for everyone but.... Microsoft.
2. CPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.
What? No. MS didn't make CPUs better. Chip makers did. In fact, because of so much proprietary Windows market share, and resistance to architecture changes meant that the bloated x86 had to stick around FAR longer than it was actually needed. For fuck's sake man, we have interpretors on the chip just to emulate rarely used instructions! That's not an advance! That's Retardation!
3. Fuck it- **HARDWARE** wouldn't be as advanced as today.
I might give you this one just for the hell of it. It's blatantly wrong, but for the sake of argument, Windows consumes more cycles than BSD, Linux, and some OSX versions. The consumers had to buy new hardware to run the bloat ware... "and there was much rejoicing. yay"
4. You wouldn't have the Internet you're using today.
"The Internet is just a Fad", Bill Gates. Seriously, they were pushing some other proprietary bullshit networking standard. Their decade long lag with IE6, and non adherence to standards is the scourge of every the web designer. We'd have had the web we have now, but Sooner and FASTER without MS's browser shenanigans, i.e., w/o IE.
5. Smartphones wouldn't have advanced in technology because of all the aforementioned progress in fabrication R&D.
Hahah, no. My PDA wouldn't have gotten faster without MS's R&D? I don't think so. Even if I gave you this one too, the progress would have been made by someone else. If Alexander G. Bell would have died at birth, we'd have had the Telephone one hour later. We had incandescent bulbs two years before Edison figured out which gas to put in them, others were doing the same work, but he had more money -- Someone would have replaced the vacuum bulb with argon, there's only so many known elements. MS could have never existed and nothing of value would have been lost.
6. On and on and so forth....
Bitch, moan, and whine about Microsoft all you want. But most people are not techno
How many people do sharks kill every year?
How many people does excess dietary fat kill every year?
Which of the two are people more afraid of?
Hmm, I'm going with "people". I think the TSA proves some folks are more terrified of other people than sharks or fat.
People are nonsensical beings.
Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. I'd say that's a pretty broad generalization, toss a "some" in there, then I might consider your statement as something other than nonsensical babbling...
I don't know about you, but when I first started driving I was terrified. In fact, I don't know of a single driver that wasn't fearing for their life at first. Fear is why I'm a damn safe driver: I'm so paranoid about other people I'll pull off the freeway if I see some speed demon approaching from behind and weaving through traffic. I was once a bit less careful, just letting folks like that pass me in traffic, until one day a BMW going 60mph (100kph) zipped across 4 lanes of traffic to cut in front of me with only half a car length of clearance between either my car or the exit ramp's barricade. They could have easily wrecked in front of a number of folks, causing multiple car collisions. I've never been so terrified in my life, and I've been in knife fights with hobos, and even witnessed People emerge from within Other People!
Airplanes? FISH?! Pah!
Now, that's not to say that a lot of folks don't get complacent due to lack of incidents involving themselves or loved ones and instead play into the copious amount of fear mongering media available about other more sensational things, but can you imagine what rush hour traffic would be like they didn't? To dismiss such behavior as simply "nonsensical" is to dismiss the cause of this behavior out of hand -- You're being just as senseless as those you accuse.
What is a gift but a $0.00 sale? Posted on December 25th? Clearly, copyright law is merely the newest means for the Grinch to steal Christmas.
Would you like a new restriction?
I would fight it with conviction.
Would you comply just to obey?
I would revolt and say, "no way!"
Would you resale a copyrighted box?
I'd say, "It's blighted with a pox!"
Would you ignore wrapper licensing?
Can blind men be found infringing?!
Would you strip off protected bits?
I'd rather deal in counterfeits!
I do not like less rights and corporate SPAM,
-Signed, Estranged Nephew of Uncle Sam.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's put on our thinking caps folks. Return Oriented Programing is an exploit engineering technique that uses the existing signed and/or encrypted code to create the exploit code. That means Secure Boot is defenseless to stop this type of exploit. If the application or OS code has mistakes in it then a function pointer on the stack, or in the heap (read/write memory) can be overwritten and be used by exploits via return oriented programming, and SecureBoot won't help one bit -- The code that's running is signed and/or encrypted. So if the Application or OS code isn't secure (which it won't be) then SecureBoot is pointless. What that? It won't be able to infect a boot sector? Well, if you've got malicious code running on your system then there exists an exploit vector that cane simply be re-exploited next time you boot up. See? Pointless.
Ah, but what if the Application and OS code could be written to be secure against stack smashing and undesired code pointer manipulations? Well then, there wouldn't be any exploit vectors that you needed SecureBoot to protect you against. See? Pointless.
Well, I say "Pointless", but what I mean is useless from an end user perspective. I don't mean to gloss over the only real use SecureBoot has: To prevent you from installing your own OSs and Applications, and having control over your own computers.
The truth is why should everyone be executed to be experts at computing.
One does not simply avoid getting Malware. Only the dead can know peace from this evil.
If they are so essential, why is there ALREADY a planned one year satellite gap?
You're operating under the flawed assumption that congress has the public's best interest in mind. There was no PLANNED one year satellite gap, you fucking fool.
Here, from June, 2012:
Congressional budget cutting will delay the launch of a key weather satellite and hinder tracking of killer hurricanes, tornadoes and other severe weather, officials warn.
...
...
...
The satellite, which had been scheduled to launch in 2016, will be postponed 18 months because of spending cuts and delays. The threat during that gap is that National Weather Service forecasts will become fuzzier, with the paths of hurricanes and tornadoes even less predictable.
With more budget cuts looming, further delays are possible — something President Obama alluded to last week.
"There will be a data gap. That data gap will have very serious consequences to our ability to do severe storm warnings, long-term weather forecasts, search and rescue and good weather forecasts," Jane Lubchenco, NOAA administrator, told members of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee in April.
Forecasters issued warnings five days ahead of tornadoes that struck Tuscaloosa, Ala., and five other states in April. A barrage of 312 tornadoes swept across the Southeast, killing 321 people. On storm day, forecasters gave warnings averaging 27 minutes before actual touchdowns.
Likewise, when a tornado struck Joplin, Mo., killing 151 on May 22, forecasters gave warnings averaging 24 minutes before strikes.
"The satellites are an important part of that early warning process," said Christopher Vaccaro, a spokesman for the service.
Lubchenco said without information from the polar satellite, forecasts for a massive storm nicknamed "snowmageddon," which hit Washington in February 2010, would have had the location wrong by 200 to 300 miles and would have underestimated the snowfall by 10 inches. Hurricane tracking would also suffer, she said.
"Our severe storm warnings will be seriously degraded," Lubchenco testified April 1 before the House Appropriations subcommittee governing the agency.
Lawmakers and scientists lauded the value of the program, which provides forecasts for military troop deployments, ocean search-and-rescue missions and farmers tending crops.
"It's important for public safety," said Christine McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union. Cutting the funding "would be penny-wise and pound-foolish."
Lubchenco credited the satellites with helping save 295 people in 2010 by helping track rescue beacons aboard ships.
"That's saving lives, that's saving money," said Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, the top Democrat on the House panel that oversees NOAA funding.
But reduced federal spending threatens all domestic programs. Congress cut spending $38.5 billion in the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30. House Republicans propose to cut another $30 billion next year.
So, there was never a planned gap. The damn funding got cut, and now it's getting cut some more. What's the point of having scientists advise on these issues if they get ignored? Fuck them, and fuck you. Can't prioritize anything or even look at the data and reason for yourselves. Go sleep in a tar-pit, you dickheads are hindering the herd.
In response to the article about Death Valley, Slashdot generated this quote:
It'll be just like Beggars' Canyon back home. -- Luke Skywalker
Indeed, except all the womp rats are dead, and not even a moisture farmer can make a living there. You nerf herders have it easy...
::yawn:: Whilst my coffee is brewing I've made you this screenshot of said search, because "pics or it didn't happen". I'm a Northern Yank transplanted to Houston, but I like British comedy, so maybe that's what it's picking up in my case.
Forgive the self reply, I was a bit hasty. For illustrative reference, I too searched google and this is MY first result: Order of the British Empire.
Using my google de-encryption method, the MBE Acronym appears to stand for the "Multi State Bar Exam" - a degree for Yankee lawyers practicing across state lines. Why on earth did they give that to this poor gentleman?
Welcome to the search filter bubble.
I agree. However, planned obsolescence is rarely what's best for the consumer. If we want games to be treated as an artistic medium, as I believe they can be, then we have to stop with the bullshit "end of life" -- If a developer wants to make a game for the PS1, NES, C64, x86 DOS or any other platform then they should be able to. Should people be able to port, say, Cavestory to run on an SNES? I think so. The difference between the consoles and PC platforms is that you can still publish software for the computers, but these latest generations of consoles require blessing from the manufacturers in order to release games for them. Should a painter have to seek permission to create works on rice paper or bamboo scrolls -- and should they be denied simply because cloth canvas is now available? I don't think so. These latest generation of gaming devices have also seen much litigation in the way of emulators and cracking down on Homebrew (un blessed) software development. Nintendo shutting down 3rd party DS carts that allow loading home made games, Sony suing a reverse engineer after they took away the ability to run your own software, Microsoft pushing system update after update to patch their OS against homebrew and also preventing the sale of mod chips on copyright grounds.
Turning off parts of the games also needs to stop. When Microsoft disabled the Halo2 matchmaking service I was a bit pissed off, because I knew how that service worked. Here was a game that merely needed to know the IPs of the folks I wanted to play with -- They could have disabled bungie.net BS, that wouldn't have affected gameplay, but it didn't matter which game I inserted it would have consumed the same matchmaking bandwidth, so disabling Halo2's multiplayer pissed me off. One day, on the 360, I joined a party-chat with my brother, "Still pining for her I see" he said over XBL chat after seeing the Halo2 icon near my name on the friends list. "Shut up, you're playing it too," I said after checking his in game status, "Too bad MS is a dick so we can't play on XBL." Do you see why we were angry? We're paying for an online service that refuses to work because a new shiny is out. Here our two game consoles know each other's IPs -- We're directly chatting with each other (verify via wireshark), our consoles each know we're both playing the same damn game, and yet we have no option to play the game with each other on XBL. "The VPN is up if you want to play some one on one over a LAN", I say. "I wouldn't miss it!", my sibling says, "--wait, yes I would... Let's Play!" And just like that we've tricked the Xboxes into thinking they're on the same local area network, so we can play "online"... That was two years ago. We've both stopped paying for XBL. Due to BS like Project $10, and the advent of always-online DRM I'm boycotting most Publishers and services. All of our friends are in the same boat. We play PC games now and chat over VOIP, if we want to enjoy some older games we play via system link. XBL and PSOnline are worthless -- They serve the DRM God who hates all, even games. "You'll not find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." so we went somewhere else.
As someone who collects and plays games for fun, inspiration, nostalgia, research, and art, I think that saying, "The last game for $PLATFORM will be ..." is disgusting. Why I've recently done some work in ASM on a side scrolling shooter game using DOS era 80x25x16c text 'graphics' + PC speakers as the complimentary game installed with the new OS I'm writing. I loved that old medium, it was the 1st I wrote code to, so I want to give it one last hurrah with today's CPU speeds before it's phased out by 64bit and UEFI. Current x86 systems still boot into 16bit protected mode, thus the bootable game will still run on the metal sans emulator on a lot of hardware. I'd love to one day be able to do the same for the 360 or PS3, but that's not (legally) possible with their DRM. To you it may just be hardware, that gets old and is
We can only be honest when we're anonymous. That *is* our real self. It's when we have to be out in the open that we hide behind bullshit politeness and "civility" (aka "We both bullshit each other rather than being honest").
Yep. When I show something to my friends and family and even work colleagues they all say it's neat. Fellow game devs may be a bit more to the point and give constructive criticism, but I don't really value them any more than I value the raw honesty of anonymous Internet commenters: "It's polished to a blinding gleam, but it's still a turd." "Your shit isn't fucking fun -- AT. ALL." "I died in 3 seconds, FUCK YOU!". There's good comments too, and I value all of them (lesser than my own opinion, mind you), but with any input I try to reason: "Do they have a valid point, what caused them to feel this way?" -- A good comment from a good friend? "Do they have a valid point?" maybe not! What caused them to feel that way could be rose colored glasses or niceness. Maybe the anonymous folks are just angsty teens, maybe not! Filtering though all this over-harshness and over-niceness shit wastes so much time... Ugh, and you wonder why I always root for the Borg.
I wish I could trust the people I know and trust with other affairs to be brutal when I ask them to be brutal and speak their mind, but you can't trust them -- That bullshit social politeness means that in many ways they're more fake to me than the anonymous folks on the web. We need anonymity to balance the bullshit. It takes all kinds.
Look Linus may be a great leader, but pompous crap like this doesn't belong. There's a reason why in management if you need to discipline/warn an employee, you do it in private not over the company mailing list.
Steve Ballmer
Bill Gates
Steve Jobs
You're just seeing the stuff that normally goes on "behind closed doors" in other proprietary shops. Not that I wouldn't rather have a really nice guy that just called it like it is and then black-listed the moron, but I think that Linus does a fine job, even if a bit harsh at times. Would you have rather had him waste time coming up with a witty remark to point out the stupid behavior? Would you rather risk others not catching on to how wrong the guy was and thus waste their time chasing down a bug in pulse audio? I wouldn't.
As an application developer (and game developer by night), I concur. Test the patches before submitting them upstream. If you don't understand what the patches do, you don't approve them. Hell, that's the same requirement I have for all code in my projects. Even if it's a comment or whitespace change, you compile and (unit) test the module before committing it. It's a pretty brain dead rule of thumb: If you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't do it! It's when you pretend to know more than you do that you get in trouble. The stupid thing is that there's no excuse for not knowing -- If all else fails, you ask the submitter who sent you the patch.
Also, take Linus' wrath with a grain of salt. He enjoys being blunt and offending those that get offended. His opinion is that you can't actually offend someone, they have to take offense themselves. He get's most pissed when he knows he's right. He accepts people calling him stupid when they're right and he's wrong, like in this talk where he gives the finger to Nvida devs... WRT an early version of the Linux kernel: "We didn't have init. We don't need init, just a boot image and root console, that's how real men do it... Then someone came along and said, 'This is stupid, you need init', and they added init" -- I'm paraphrasing, that's pretty much how I remember it from the video. Sorry, too lazy to re-watch and find the exact quote. Also contained therein is his position on being harsh...
Also, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer -- Come on, they're all notorious as being harsh At least Linus isn't parking in handy cap spaces, or throwing chairs like a real asshole.
Do you even Assembly?!
actually, they can't.
My patent for "Doing Stuff with Things" that covers just about anything.
Fortunately, according to bosses around the world, your patent doesn't apply to Slashdot commenters: "You're not doing anything! Get back to Work!"
The 1st launch where they were going to dock the Dragon Capsule to the ISS failed. The launch was aborted after "Liftoff" was proclaimed. Indeed, with a solid rocket booster that couldn't have been shut off, the launch couldn't have been aborted a second after liftoff, it would have had to try to soldier on with the mission, or maybe execute a planned crash / destructive abort procedure; However, liquid fuel was used, so they just cut off the fuel, and tried again another day...
Update: May 19, 2012
Today’s launch was aborted when the flight computer detected slightly high pressure in the engine 5 combustion chamber. We have discovered root cause and repairs are underway.
October 8, Update
Approximately one minute and 19 seconds into last night’s launch, the Falcon 9 rocket detected an anomaly on one first stage engine. Initial data suggests that one of the rocket’s nine Merlin engines, Engine 1, lost pressure suddenly and an engine shutdown command was issued. We know the engine did not explode, because we continued to receive data from it. Panels designed to relieve pressure within the engine bay were ejected to protect the stage and other engines. Our review of flight data indicates that neither the rocket stage nor any of the other eight engines were negatively affected by this event.
You see? It's not that the engines are less fail proof, it's that they have better fail safes.
P.S. SpaceX, please tell your webmaster to replace those <strong> tags with the preceding named anchor tags, keep the "blue smallText" class (though you should name the class semantically, not describe what they do, that's just as bad as per element style attributes! Derp!), and set the href attribute to be "#" + the name attribute, eg: href="#Update100712" to create self referential links; That way instead of delving into the source of your HTML to get at the anchor names I can right click the link and copy the URL when I want to link to the pertinent places in that giant list of updates (also, might want to break them into smaller pages, maybe by month?) Alternatively: Fire that moron, and I'll do it for you for free.
If CMU invested capital in discovering/creating these innovations, they should get *some* return on their investment. Otherwise, they'll have to stop discovering/innovating because they can't afford it.
That's what I say too. For instance, All the people in the field researching the same technology should get *some* return on their investment from the newly granted patent holders who just prevented them from using their research. Otherwise, they'll have to stop discovering/innovating because they can't afford it, you know, because patents stifle progress as their core function. Why should any one group of researchers be granted a monopoly, simply because they're first? That's horrible thinking. What about they guy who showed up with a working telephone an hour after Alexander G. Bell did? He's now unable to even sell or USE the efforts of his own creation? Fuck. That.
Tell you what, I refuse to look at any software related patents because I make software. I'm an individual skilled in the arts just like all the other folks working in the field who get sued for patent infringement. If I stumble across an idea that makes sense while doing my job and it happens to infringe a patent, doesn't that make it fucking obvious by definition? Destroy All Patents. They're dumb as hell. Show me ONE Scientific report that shows patents as beneficial to our society vs not having patents... Guess what? NONE EXIST. We must abolish patents to do the experiment. We're running the whole world on UNPROVEN HYPOTHESES!?!
You humans are the worst. Can't even understand simple shit like the scientific method. You don't roll it out all over, you do so to a portion of the industries and then make a comparison.... What's that you say? The Automotive and Fashion industries are not allowed Design Patents, yet they are innovative in Design? So, let me get this straight... You ran the fucking experiment and IGNORED THE RESULTS!?! That's it. I'm disowning the entire human race. You fuckers might be related genetically to me, but you're sure as fuck not the same race as I -- You damn dirty apes! You've made monkeys of us ALL!
I never understood the point. Splice a parallel port to a bread board and hook it to any beige box PC that folks are literally giving (or throwing) away. They're better than the Raspberry Pi in every way except size. You can hook a LED (maybe w/ resistor) directly to many of the pins of the parallel port and they light up representing the individual bits. IO doesn't have to be serialized and deserialized, so you don't have to use a RS232 or any other integrated circuit chips. The beige box also supports Serial and Universal Serial Bus (USB), not to mention a 56k Modem. Old beige box has more RAM, more peripherals, EASIER to work with parallel interface for hardware. Man, I swear. If I spray painted them brown and called them "Chocolate Quaternion" people would be buying them just as fast as the Raspberry Pi were it to get the same level of press. I mean, it's like the folks buying these don't even search around for ways to do hardware projects with the machines they've got or even look for other single board computers before buying one due to all the damn press the Raspberry Pi gets. I mean, $25 is great, but there's other options with various speeds and features at other prices. It's not the only $100 computer with a nice IO header, damn. Seriously.
"It's also why we'll push deeper into the cloud, making it even easier, faster and cost effective to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice, or create clouds for your own consumption and commerce."
... Can anyone suggest a proper geek-speak version?
Aside from it being just a bunch of hot air, I think "push deeper into the cloud" is a reference to FFVII slash, which means that they'll dedicate more money to providing services. "Making it even easier, faster and cost effective" - They're going to work (Cloud?) harder, better, faster, stronger so you can get satisfied cheaply. "to scale out modern infrastructure on the cloud of your choice" Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Clouds to do with as you please! "or create clouds for your own consumption or commerce" You can have your own Cloud based Beowulf clusters, except they won't be yours, but you can still use them and even sell their services, or.. even ... eat them?
To be fair, it's not that the OpenOffice and LibreOffice are crap, it's just that the format you're feeding them is. Get us an actual free and open source document standard, and have folks follow it, and things will be much better. Here's an interesting anecdote: My moderately computer literate mother now uses Linux at home and Win7 at work, and prefers Linux. She takes her Linux laptop with LibreOffice on it to work because there are MS Word documents that MS Word won't open that LibreOffice does. There. That should counter your "it's buggy" anecdote.
Have you had many corruption problems with the FLOSS office tools saving and loading their own format? Or is it just them failing to comply with MS's flawed published document standards that not even MS complies with? How can a FLOSS word processor work with MS Office if they publish one thing and do another? Oooooh, so now you see do you? Perhaps your fingers have been pointing in the wrong direction all along. Look, I know you don't give a damn why the competing free alternatives are buggy, but let's not go pretending they can't do the work. There is a deficit of CAD, but then again, look at CAD users as a percentage of market share vs total users... Then again, I actually prefer Blender and YafaRay for 3D modeling and animation and even just adding special effects to videos.
(Un)Fortunately this doesn't work both ways. Here, I'll show you: MS has no Emacs or Vim replacement at all! Who can even write code for their system? VS doesn't even work with my Emacs macros or have block select! Ah, but you see? Emacs and Vim, and essentially every FLOSS program can run on Windows as well as any other OS -- They're not hindered by vendor lock-in strategies...
The second or third next atavist-stan we get ourselves mired in will be fought in-part with armed autonomous bipedal robots.
I'd prefer treads if we're going to make Johnny5, "Alive"... Treads, or quad rotors.
I will make you an amazing video game, song, movie, porn, etc. I will only create it if you pay me $COSTS + $PROFIT to make it. See? It's only about as ephemeral as a mechanic's labor... After the contract has been agreed to, I'll make the information product, and everyone can have it forever for free why? Because you already payed me for my work and a little extra for profit. It's only the publishers that suffer, not the programmers, in fact the programmers can charge a bit more for their work than they currently get under publishers and the public will still get the game for cheaper. I still have an audience. It's only the publishers that suffer, since they don't actually do any work, see? Working for a publisher vs working for the general public is the exact same, except I get free market research (you won't agree to pay for me to build games or make music you hate). You may, however, pay me NOT to make that porn...
True, there are starving artists out there, but what's really happening is that the independent artists that never could reach an audience with the Big Media Filter engaged, can actually make a living in the Information Age. IMO, working in media and not needing to have a publishing boss anymore is fucking awesome, I'd much rather work for everyone and just get paid to do work. Protip: the above method of working for money also prevents any "piracy". You can't copy what isn't yet made.
BAH! It's been all downhill since Kennedy died...
Nah! It's been all downhill since 1945...
It takes a -company- like Microsoft to bring the PC to the unwashed masses and all the ancillary technology that goes along with it. And it had to be an open platform. IBM almost succeeded in keeping the PC platform closed in a way that Apple succeeded in. Below are some facts.
IBM and MS both worked on OS2, which MS eventually named Windows NT. MS screwed their partner by introducing incompatibilities with OS2, as MS had done with DOS back when DR DOS was a competitor. IBM now advocates Linux. You're pretty far from the mark if you think it was MS that caused all the openness. It was Intel when they allowed "clones", for fuck's sake man. THINK.
Without a world of Microsoft.
1. GPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.
Why's that? OpenGL existed DirectX was never really needed, it was just yet another proprietary MS standard to assist with vendor lock-in. MS doesn't make GPU hardware, but the vendors now had to support two drivers instead of one. That means more work for no good reason -- even if they make a good DX driver and skimp on the OGL one, that's still extra wheel spinning for no fucking reason. Why would MS not use OpenGL instead of wasting time on DX? The early versions of DX was an OpenGL wrapper. There must have been some reason for MS to embrace and extend... OH! Extinguish. I'd say that was a step backwards. We could have had one really awesome cross platform driver stack, but because of MS that didn't happen. This means your selection of Games is dependent on the OS you use, which is fucking retarded in every sense of the word -- It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game devs, it's bad for hardware makers, it's bad for everyone but.... Microsoft.
2. CPUs wouldn't be as advanced today.
What? No. MS didn't make CPUs better. Chip makers did. In fact, because of so much proprietary Windows market share, and resistance to architecture changes meant that the bloated x86 had to stick around FAR longer than it was actually needed. For fuck's sake man, we have interpretors on the chip just to emulate rarely used instructions! That's not an advance! That's Retardation!
3. Fuck it- **HARDWARE** wouldn't be as advanced as today.
I might give you this one just for the hell of it. It's blatantly wrong, but for the sake of argument, Windows consumes more cycles than BSD, Linux, and some OSX versions. The consumers had to buy new hardware to run the bloat ware... "and there was much rejoicing. yay"
4. You wouldn't have the Internet you're using today.
"The Internet is just a Fad", Bill Gates. Seriously, they were pushing some other proprietary bullshit networking standard. Their decade long lag with IE6, and non adherence to standards is the scourge of every the web designer. We'd have had the web we have now, but Sooner and FASTER without MS's browser shenanigans, i.e., w/o IE.
5. Smartphones wouldn't have advanced in technology because of all the aforementioned progress in fabrication R&D.
Hahah, no. My PDA wouldn't have gotten faster without MS's R&D? I don't think so. Even if I gave you this one too, the progress would have been made by someone else. If Alexander G. Bell would have died at birth, we'd have had the Telephone one hour later. We had incandescent bulbs two years before Edison figured out which gas to put in them, others were doing the same work, but he had more money -- Someone would have replaced the vacuum bulb with argon, there's only so many known elements. MS could have never existed and nothing of value would have been lost.
6. On and on and so forth....
Bitch, moan, and whine about Microsoft all you want. But most people are not techno
How many people do sharks kill every year?
How many people does excess dietary fat kill every year?
Which of the two are people more afraid of?
Hmm, I'm going with "people". I think the TSA proves some folks are more terrified of other people than sharks or fat.
People are nonsensical beings.
Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man. I'd say that's a pretty broad generalization, toss a "some" in there, then I might consider your statement as something other than nonsensical babbling...
I don't know about you, but when I first started driving I was terrified. In fact, I don't know of a single driver that wasn't fearing for their life at first. Fear is why I'm a damn safe driver: I'm so paranoid about other people I'll pull off the freeway if I see some speed demon approaching from behind and weaving through traffic. I was once a bit less careful, just letting folks like that pass me in traffic, until one day a BMW going 60mph (100kph) zipped across 4 lanes of traffic to cut in front of me with only half a car length of clearance between either my car or the exit ramp's barricade. They could have easily wrecked in front of a number of folks, causing multiple car collisions. I've never been so terrified in my life, and I've been in knife fights with hobos, and even witnessed People emerge from within Other People!
Airplanes? FISH?! Pah!
Now, that's not to say that a lot of folks don't get complacent due to lack of incidents involving themselves or loved ones and instead play into the copious amount of fear mongering media available about other more sensational things, but can you imagine what rush hour traffic would be like they didn't? To dismiss such behavior as simply "nonsensical" is to dismiss the cause of this behavior out of hand -- You're being just as senseless as those you accuse.
What is a gift but a $0.00 sale? Posted on December 25th? Clearly, copyright law is merely the newest means for the Grinch to steal Christmas.
Would you like a new restriction?
I would fight it with conviction.
Would you comply just to obey?
I would revolt and say, "no way!"
Would you resale a copyrighted box?
I'd say, "It's blighted with a pox!"
Would you ignore wrapper licensing?
Can blind men be found infringing?!
Would you strip off protected bits?
I'd rather deal in counterfeits!
I do not like less rights and corporate SPAM,
-Signed, Estranged Nephew of Uncle Sam.