Unfortunately, yes - it really does segfault so often that improving the behaviour during crashing is a Big Deal.
I tried running E17 (Debian jessie packages) for about a month but I eventually got fed up with the general buginess and missing features that I consider to be important. I switched to GNOME flashback a few days ago... it has a number of really frustrating bugs but in my view it is still way more usable than E17.
Here are my thoughts on E17:
The good:
Great eyecandy
Highly tweakable
The bad:
I don't like the way that virtual desktops work in E17 with multi-monitor configurations (each viewport switches independently) and there's no way to change it because Rasterman has decreed that the "E17 way" is the "right way"
Many gadgets seem rudimentary in comparison with the GNOME/KDE equivalents and are missing specific functionality that I rely on:
Calendar has no way of showing calendar weeks
There appears to be no way to set up multiple locations in order to see the local times in other timezones with a single glance
The ugly:
Average time between crashes was about 2 days
E17 caused Xorg to suck up about 50% of one CPU at all times (i7-2760QM CPU @ 2.40GHz) and would often climb as high as 95%
I wouldn't say that the website as a whole as a pro-Apple slant, although some of the individual writers certainly do. My biggest complaint is just the sheer volume of Apple-related pseudo-articles. They need to add some kind of filtering feature which allows articles with certain attributes (e.g. author) to be hidden, otherwise the signal-to-noise ratio is in danger of dropping too low.
Can anyone here suggest sites that are "like Ars was back when it was good"?
They don't just have to pay to get the classification. They have to pay lawyers to do the paperwork, accountants to handle the financials, service and support to handle refunds and disputes, and so on (not to mention the managerial overheads). It wouldn't surprise me if these costs exceeded $1 million.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the prices are always justified, and I'm sure that there is a big "because we can" factor as well. As an Australian, I too have been outraged on more than one occasion by the price that we have to pay for goods in comparison with the US. However, my day job (which admittedly involves hardware, not software) has given me an appreciation for the amount of actual effort required before you can start selling something in another country, and the company needs to recoup that cost somehow.
Water is also "stuff of life": it accounts for more than half of the chemical make-up of nearly every living thing. However, humans require a specific amount in order to live. If you try and breathe it, you will die. If you drink too much of it, you will die. If you don't drink enough of it, you will die. So there is a lower limit and an upper limit of desirable values.
The same goes for CO2: it's necessary to sustain life, but only in the right quantities. Therefore the objective is to determine what the desirable lower bound and desirable upper bound values are. We can start with the two boundary cases: * 0% of atmosphere: Plants cannot live * 100% of atmosphere: Animals cannot live So our desirable range exists somewhere between these two extremes, and we need to perform research in order to narrow the range to within acceptable error margins. The best research to date seems to indicate that the range is around 2-6ppm.
As NocturnHimtatagon has alluded to, data providers only tend to cover specific areas or countries. If Andoid does not provide low enough level access to the GPS hardware to do WAAS then I doubt that you'd be able to do any form of DGPS. Typical consumer-level chips will just output NMEA data, whereas you will need access to at least the raw pseudo-range data (i.e. distance from satellite to receiver) in order to be able to apply the pseudo-range correction (PRC) values. Some provides may provider Code Differential correction data in addition to/instead of PRC but you would still need access to low-level data from the GPS chip.
I've worked in the DGPS industry for nearly a decade now, and I can tell you that this is not a new concept in any way. Firstly, it is true that there exist many free correction sources (e.g. WAAS in the US, EGNOS in Europe) which will allow a DGPS receiver to determine it's position to decimetre accuracy. Centimetre accuracy can be achieved with Real Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections (either from a local base station or delivered remotely by some kind of long distance connection, e.g. GPRS). Neither option is free, but subscribing to a correction provider is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own base station. Millimetre accuracy can be achieved using very expensive laser equipment and is very common in the surveying industry.
The concept of using local transmitters for underground applications is not new either. I am aware of a number of mine sites in Australia which have been using Pseudolites (Pseudo Satellites) for a number of years for this exact purpose.
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but I can honestly say that I quite regularly use cars for non-transportation purposes. To me, a car is also a generator and a climate controlled environment. My line of work takes me to various locations which don't have any shelter or electricity, so the car becomes a mobile office for all intents and purposes.
Like pretty much everything else in life, it's not a clearly black-and-white situation. Sometimes government regulation is good (whether it is telecommunications, health care, food standards, whatever) and sometimes it is bad.
Until recently, in Australia our options for ISPs have been very poor. This was essentially the result of the previous government's (whose Communication Minister for some time was Robert Alston, regularly pilloried by The Register as being "The World's Biggest Luddite") blind ideological drive to privatise the government monopoly (Telstra, nee Telecom). To preserve the value to shareholders of the newly privatised company, the company was not split into separate retail and wholesale parts (which was advocated by pretty much everyone in the industry who wasn't Telstra) but instead a private company found itself with a complete monopoly over the entire national infrastructure. The government passed some feel-good laws about minimum service obligations (e.g. see http://www.telstra.com.au/universalservice/docs/uso_smp.pdf) to prevent people in the bush from getting screwed over because they weren't economical to service, but these covered only telephony services. As a result, many people outside of the major cities (and even a substantial number inside their suburban areas) have only been able to use dial-up (and then not even at 56k) until wireless services became more widespread recently. Telstra also abused it's monopoly and illegally prevented other companies from accessing the telephone exchanges (e.g. see http://www.theage.com.au/business/telstra-cops-18m-fine-for-exchange-block-20100728-10uwx.html) which prevented any serious competition from emerging.
Thankfully, in the last few years, things have been changing - some great ISPs have finally been able to build up some infrastructure (iiNet, Internode) and offer at least some level of competition to Telstra. These guys mostly service only the cities (which includes something like 80% of our population) but it doesn't help those in rural areas. In most places there is now some level of wireless coverage available. Although this is fairly expensive (e.g. $30/month for 1GB, $150/GB for excess data with Optus) it's still much better than what they had before. The current government has started building a $40bn National Broadband Network, but it will take many years until this is finished.
TL;DR: Sometimes government regulations are good, and sometimes they are bad.
Hydroelectric has significant failure mode issues - if the dam breaks then lives can be lost. This in fact occurred at Fujinuma Dam and has led to more loss of life than Fukushima. Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures is a list of major dam failures but I don't hear people running around saying that we need to shut them all down.
Perhaps ethics may have played a part. Some engineers refuse to work for defence companies as they are not able to morally justify building machines to kill people in new and improved ways. Perhaps your top students couldn't morally justify designing new and improved ways to kill the concept of privacy.
I do agree however that your initial suggestion may have also played a significant role. The majority of web technologies simply aren't interesting, and PHP is the worst of a bad bunch.
There's a such thing as responsible disclosure, and Wikileaks blew it. They're irresponsible. We do need to know about wrongdoing, yes. But there's a huge difference between reporting and disclosing serious wrongdoing and just throwing hundreds of thousands of documents at the world and saying here, read this! I don't know what agenda Wikileaks really has, but it's not a good one.
http://documents.nytimes.com/letters-between-wikileaks-and-govWikileaks tried to be responsible and gave the US government a chance to redact anything they though would endanger lives or should be not be disclosed for national security reasons. The US government threw away the chance and decided to throw a tantrum instead. So if these disclosures cause anyone's life to be put in peril then the US government should be held responsible.
This is not always true. When I bought plasma TV I bought the cheapest HDMI cable that I could find (a $5 cheap Asian one) to hook it up to my plasma, rationalising exactly the same as you did above: "it's a digital connection so it either works or it doesn't". Everything seemed to work well... but just *occasionally* I would have brief periods (about 20s worth once an hour) where I would see kind sparkly static all over the screen. Over the next few months I tried various combinations of things (plugged everything into a UPS, updated the firmware on my AVR, tested with a direct connection to my HTPC, tried a friend's PS3, etc) but I could not make the problem go away. Eventually all of my testing convinced me that the TV must be faulty, so I got the service people to take it away for investigation (a non-trivial task, requiring lots of phone calls and then travelling home from work on my lunch break, etc). They keep it for a week or so and can't find anything wrong with it. I, being of a cynical nature, assumed that they hadn't even turned the damn thing on and just wanted me to stop hassling them.
A few months later I'm describing this situation to my brother-in-law. He's not really as technically minded as I am, but he works in retail selling consumer electronics gear (like cameras/stereos/TVs) so he's dealt with all kinds of equipment incompatibilities and malfunctions. He tells me that he's heard of this kind of problem when using cheap HDMI cables.
"Poppycock!", I say. "Digital connections either work or they don't".
But he is insistent. He "borrows" a cable from work which he lends to me to test out his theory. Having nothing to lose (and not wanting to strain family relations) I replaced the my cheap $5 cable with the one he lent me (not a $200 monster cable but one of their cheapest which sells for around $20). To my great surprise he was right - the problem had been the cable all along! I have not seen the problem since changing the cable (this was about 18 months ago) and I have moved house twice since then.
I am aware that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, I no longer believe that all digital cables are created equal. I'm only talking about at the very very low-end of the market - the $5 cable probably didn't even meet the requirements for shielding from the HDMI specification (and the "sparkly static" was probably due to the connection to between the two pieces of equipment temporarily being degraded when it went out of range).
I don't believe for a minute that there is any difference between a $20 and $200 cable. All I am saying is that there *can* be a difference between a $5 and a $20 one. I have experienced it first hand.
Redboot is a boot loader, not a build environment. You're probably thinking of BitBake, which is a common build system for embedded environments.
Back on topic though, I don't believe that the manufacturer has any responsibility to provide a build environment. For all you know they may have used some kind of proprietary build system (a few years ago this was more common but these days pretty much everyone uses GCC). Just patch the binary!
Anecdotally, I live in a small town (approx' 20K people) in Arizona. More than half the population here has a handgun (I have 2), closer to 75% if you add rifles and shotguns. In the last 2 years there has been 2 murders, only one with a gun, and that involved a gang that chased someone and happened to catch up with them in our town.
Anecdotally, I live in a large country (approx' 20M people) in the Southern Hemisphere. In the 10 year period from 1991-2001, 5083 were killed by guns (3930 suicides). So that's 0.0025% of people per year killed with guns (or 0.00057% excluding suicide). From the latest statistics we see 260 murders in 2008, 12% of which were committed with firearms - 31 murders with a gun. Out of 21 million people (population reached 21 million in 2008). That is 0.00014%.
Now in your example you have 1 murder out of 20k, i.e. 0.005%. That makes your "safe" example 33 times more dangerous!
I'm not a staid AMD fanboy but you must admit that Intel realised that AMD had a superior interconnect technology and decided to take a leaf from their book (the more uncouth would call this "stealing" but AMD has borrowed their fair share of technology from Intel [x86, MMX, MMX2, SSE, etc] so you could say it's only fair)
Slashdot Mirror
If you're taking ethical advice from C. Montgomery Burns then you're probably on the wrong side of the argument
Surely you meant to say: "with great power comes great flexibility"
Unfortunately, yes - it really does segfault so often that improving the behaviour during crashing is a Big Deal.
I tried running E17 (Debian jessie packages) for about a month but I eventually got fed up with the general buginess and missing features that I consider to be important. I switched to GNOME flashback a few days ago... it has a number of really frustrating bugs but in my view it is still way more usable than E17.
Here are my thoughts on E17:
The good:
The bad:
The ugly:
I wouldn't say that the website as a whole as a pro-Apple slant, although some of the individual writers certainly do. My biggest complaint is just the sheer volume of Apple-related pseudo-articles. They need to add some kind of filtering feature which allows articles with certain attributes (e.g. author) to be hidden, otherwise the signal-to-noise ratio is in danger of dropping too low.
Can anyone here suggest sites that are "like Ars was back when it was good"?
Although I wouldn't phrase it as agressively, I must say that I share your sentiment.
They don't just have to pay to get the classification. They have to pay lawyers to do the paperwork, accountants to handle the financials, service and support to handle refunds and disputes, and so on (not to mention the managerial overheads). It wouldn't surprise me if these costs exceeded $1 million.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that the prices are always justified, and I'm sure that there is a big "because we can" factor as well. As an Australian, I too have been outraged on more than one occasion by the price that we have to pay for goods in comparison with the US. However, my day job (which admittedly involves hardware, not software) has given me an appreciation for the amount of actual effort required before you can start selling something in another country, and the company needs to recoup that cost somehow.
In Australia, a "Diploma" is not the same as a "Degree", see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Qualifications_Framework#Diploma.2C_Advanced_Diploma.2C_Associate_degree
A diploma is a 2-3 year course, whereas a degree is 3-4.
Water is also "stuff of life": it accounts for more than half of the chemical make-up of nearly every living thing. However, humans require a specific amount in order to live. If you try and breathe it, you will die. If you drink too much of it, you will die. If you don't drink enough of it, you will die. So there is a lower limit and an upper limit of desirable values.
The same goes for CO2: it's necessary to sustain life, but only in the right quantities. Therefore the objective is to determine what the desirable lower bound and desirable upper bound values are. We can start with the two boundary cases:
* 0% of atmosphere: Plants cannot live
* 100% of atmosphere: Animals cannot live
So our desirable range exists somewhere between these two extremes, and we need to perform research in order to narrow the range to within acceptable error margins. The best research to date seems to indicate that the range is around 2-6ppm.
WAAS is only available in North America. The equivalent CDGPS source for Europe is EGNOS.
As NocturnHimtatagon has alluded to, data providers only tend to cover specific areas or countries. If Andoid does not provide low enough level access to the GPS hardware to do WAAS then I doubt that you'd be able to do any form of DGPS. Typical consumer-level chips will just output NMEA data, whereas you will need access to at least the raw pseudo-range data (i.e. distance from satellite to receiver) in order to be able to apply the pseudo-range correction (PRC) values. Some provides may provider Code Differential correction data in addition to/instead of PRC but you would still need access to low-level data from the GPS chip.
I've worked in the DGPS industry for nearly a decade now, and I can tell you that this is not a new concept in any way. Firstly, it is true that there exist many free correction sources (e.g. WAAS in the US, EGNOS in Europe) which will allow a DGPS receiver to determine it's position to decimetre accuracy. Centimetre accuracy can be achieved with Real Time Kinematic (RTK) corrections (either from a local base station or delivered remotely by some kind of long distance connection, e.g. GPRS). Neither option is free, but subscribing to a correction provider is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying your own base station. Millimetre accuracy can be achieved using very expensive laser equipment and is very common in the surveying industry.
The concept of using local transmitters for underground applications is not new either. I am aware of a number of mine sites in Australia which have been using Pseudolites (Pseudo Satellites) for a number of years for this exact purpose.
I'm not sure if you were being sarcastic or not, but I can honestly say that I quite regularly use cars for non-transportation purposes. To me, a car is also a generator and a climate controlled environment. My line of work takes me to various locations which don't have any shelter or electricity, so the car becomes a mobile office for all intents and purposes.
Like pretty much everything else in life, it's not a clearly black-and-white situation. Sometimes government regulation is good (whether it is telecommunications, health care, food standards, whatever) and sometimes it is bad.
Until recently, in Australia our options for ISPs have been very poor. This was essentially the result of the previous government's (whose Communication Minister for some time was Robert Alston, regularly pilloried by The Register as being "The World's Biggest Luddite") blind ideological drive to privatise the government monopoly (Telstra, nee Telecom). To preserve the value to shareholders of the newly privatised company, the company was not split into separate retail and wholesale parts (which was advocated by pretty much everyone in the industry who wasn't Telstra) but instead a private company found itself with a complete monopoly over the entire national infrastructure. The government passed some feel-good laws about minimum service obligations (e.g. see http://www.telstra.com.au/universalservice/docs/uso_smp.pdf) to prevent people in the bush from getting screwed over because they weren't economical to service, but these covered only telephony services. As a result, many people outside of the major cities (and even a substantial number inside their suburban areas) have only been able to use dial-up (and then not even at 56k) until wireless services became more widespread recently. Telstra also abused it's monopoly and illegally prevented other companies from accessing the telephone exchanges (e.g. see http://www.theage.com.au/business/telstra-cops-18m-fine-for-exchange-block-20100728-10uwx.html) which prevented any serious competition from emerging.
Thankfully, in the last few years, things have been changing - some great ISPs have finally been able to build up some infrastructure (iiNet, Internode) and offer at least some level of competition to Telstra. These guys mostly service only the cities (which includes something like 80% of our population) but it doesn't help those in rural areas. In most places there is now some level of wireless coverage available. Although this is fairly expensive (e.g. $30/month for 1GB, $150/GB for excess data with Optus) it's still much better than what they had before. The current government has started building a $40bn National Broadband Network, but it will take many years until this is finished.
TL;DR: Sometimes government regulations are good, and sometimes they are bad.
Hydroelectric has significant failure mode issues - if the dam breaks then lives can be lost. This in fact occurred at Fujinuma Dam and has led to more loss of life than Fukushima.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure#List_of_major_dam_failures is a list of major dam failures but I don't hear people running around saying that we need to shut them all down.
Perhaps ethics may have played a part. Some engineers refuse to work for defence companies as they are not able to morally justify building machines to kill people in new and improved ways. Perhaps your top students couldn't morally justify designing new and improved ways to kill the concept of privacy.
I do agree however that your initial suggestion may have also played a significant role. The majority of web technologies simply aren't interesting, and PHP is the worst of a bad bunch.
Are you saying that you are approximately 70 years old? I never imagined that there were any Slashdotters older than 40 (physically, that is).
There's a such thing as responsible disclosure, and Wikileaks blew it. They're irresponsible. We do need to know about wrongdoing, yes. But there's a huge difference between reporting and disclosing serious wrongdoing and just throwing hundreds of thousands of documents at the world and saying here, read this! I don't know what agenda Wikileaks really has, but it's not a good one.
http://documents.nytimes.com/letters-between-wikileaks-and-govWikileaks tried to be responsible and gave the US government a chance to redact anything they though would endanger lives or should be not be disclosed for national security reasons. The US government threw away the chance and decided to throw a tantrum instead. So if these disclosures cause anyone's life to be put in peril then the US government should be held responsible.
Well I think that http://www.itnews.com.au/News/215939,nbn-co-to-buy-telstra-network-for-11-billion.aspx$11,000,000,000 counts as a "massive upside" in anyone's books...
Congratulations Broadcom, you have just made at least one geek very happy.
While you're at it, any chance of releasing the source for your video decoders? I promise that you will own the HTPC market if you do.
This is not always true. When I bought plasma TV I bought the cheapest HDMI cable that I could find (a $5 cheap Asian one) to hook it up to my plasma, rationalising exactly the same as you did above: "it's a digital connection so it either works or it doesn't". Everything seemed to work well... but just *occasionally* I would have brief periods (about 20s worth once an hour) where I would see kind sparkly static all over the screen. Over the next few months I tried various combinations of things (plugged everything into a UPS, updated the firmware on my AVR, tested with a direct connection to my HTPC, tried a friend's PS3, etc) but I could not make the problem go away. Eventually all of my testing convinced me that the TV must be faulty, so I got the service people to take it away for investigation (a non-trivial task, requiring lots of phone calls and then travelling home from work on my lunch break, etc). They keep it for a week or so and can't find anything wrong with it. I, being of a cynical nature, assumed that they hadn't even turned the damn thing on and just wanted me to stop hassling them.
A few months later I'm describing this situation to my brother-in-law. He's not really as technically minded as I am, but he works in retail selling consumer electronics gear (like cameras/stereos/TVs) so he's dealt with all kinds of equipment incompatibilities and malfunctions. He tells me that he's heard of this kind of problem when using cheap HDMI cables.
"Poppycock!", I say. "Digital connections either work or they don't".
But he is insistent. He "borrows" a cable from work which he lends to me to test out his theory. Having nothing to lose (and not wanting to strain family relations) I replaced the my cheap $5 cable with the one he lent me (not a $200 monster cable but one of their cheapest which sells for around $20). To my great surprise he was right - the problem had been the cable all along! I have not seen the problem since changing the cable (this was about 18 months ago) and I have moved house twice since then.
I am aware that the plural of anecdote is not data. However, I no longer believe that all digital cables are created equal. I'm only talking about at the very very low-end of the market - the $5 cable probably didn't even meet the requirements for shielding from the HDMI specification (and the "sparkly static" was probably due to the connection to between the two pieces of equipment temporarily being degraded when it went out of range).
I don't believe for a minute that there is any difference between a $20 and $200 cable. All I am saying is that there *can* be a difference between a $5 and a $20 one. I have experienced it first hand.
Redboot is a boot loader, not a build environment. You're probably thinking of BitBake, which is a common build system for embedded environments.
Back on topic though, I don't believe that the manufacturer has any responsibility to provide a build environment. For all you know they may have used some kind of proprietary build system (a few years ago this was more common but these days pretty much everyone uses GCC). Just patch the binary!
Anecdotally, I live in a small town (approx' 20K people) in Arizona. More than half the population here has a handgun (I have 2), closer to 75% if you add rifles and shotguns. In the last 2 years there has been 2 murders, only one with a gun, and that involved a gang that chased someone and happened to catch up with them in our town.
Anecdotally, I live in a large country (approx' 20M people) in the Southern Hemisphere. In the 10 year period from 1991-2001, 5083 were killed by guns (3930 suicides). So that's 0.0025% of people per year killed with guns (or 0.00057% excluding suicide). From the latest statistics we see 260 murders in 2008, 12% of which were committed with firearms - 31 murders with a gun. Out of 21 million people (population reached 21 million in 2008). That is 0.00014%.
Now in your example you have 1 murder out of 20k, i.e. 0.005%. That makes your "safe" example 33 times more dangerous!
Eventually Intel saw the error of their ways and they invented QPI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_QuickPath_Interconnect
I'm not a staid AMD fanboy but you must admit that Intel realised that AMD had a superior interconnect technology and decided to take a leaf from their book (the more uncouth would call this "stealing" but AMD has borrowed their fair share of technology from Intel [x86, MMX, MMX2, SSE, etc] so you could say it's only fair)
I agree with the first sentence of this post - baselayout-2 (which uses openrc) improved the bootup time of my Gentoo HTPC by an enormous amount.
Ignore the elitist garbage about how much you earn. It doesn't matter.
It is also better than ndiswrapper because you can get 802.11g instead of only 802.11b.