Investing your time into Qt is the best investment. Stick to C++ and Python. Both work.
Avoid Perl-QT though. Not that it does not work, but it makes your brain go numb because you end up writing in pidgin-C++ intersperced with Perl. It overrides perl default OO conventions and uses C++ ones. There are parts where you have to outright put C++ snippets into the Perl code to get it work.
Tk is also good, but obsolete by today's standards. Its one and only remaining use is writing UIs for Perl where you cannot use web ones.
Avoid GTK: Grave danger you are in. Impatient you are. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will. Always write Yoda code you will...
The problem with them is also that most advanced typist type purely by touch. I never look at the keyboard when typing and having something that changes under my fingers or requires looking all the time is definitely not welcome.
There is another even more entertaining aspect - security. If the API to change the layouts is not locked down enough you can do all kinds of funky stuff compared to which XSS is a child's play.
There is a court order for shutting down this sites and the article refers to it.
So can we cut the "freedom", "internet only", etc malarkey. It is all above board and pretty much following proper due process and established procedures. If you sell counterfeit DVDs from a stall at the market you will get shut down. Do not see why you should not be shut down if you sell counterfeit media off a website.
Now the definition of counterfeit, grey, illegal copying, etc are all an entirely different matter. However, as long as the current definitions stand there is nothing particularly outrageous and illegal here. It is in fact definitely more legal than most DMCA shutdowns.
Radioactive material is allowed to be shipped by plane and special precautions are usually required. FedEx is right to bitch here. They have violated quite a few regs by inadvertently moving a radioactive package by air.
Who told you that Tandberg will use said patent after they have filed it.
Most patents today are filed defensively, to ensure that you have ammo to sue back a non-troll in a patent war similar to the one currently going on in mobile.
In fact, it is exceedingly rare for a non-troll company to actually license something for a fee from another company. If you try to do that, at the second meeting the lawyers of the company you are trying to license to open a FAT briefcase with their patent ammo and you are facing a mutually assured destruction. The sole exemption to this are industry standards with RAND tagged on them. However as the ongoing war in mobile has shown that is broken too.
This by itself should show that the system is broken. In fact that is what you need to show to _BUSINESS_ people when speaking why it is broken. They do not care about free, blah, whatever, what they care is bottom line and that has a very bad forecast in a Cold war. Cold war on the verge of mutually assured destruction is a guaranteed lose-lose situation. The budget to maintain a final solution war arsenal for all of your product exceeds by far the budget to innovate in the specific areas you want to advance.
At "green" condition in the days when I was living in Brezhnev's Soviet Union at the age of 10 (year 4 in their school system) I was supposed to know all the first aid stuff, be able to disassemble an AK47, service it and reassemble it in under 3 minutes, know how to use a gas mask, shoot at least 70+ score (1-10 additive, 10 shots) with a sport.22 or an air rifle as well as know all civil defence codes. I left around that time, however based on what I was told by my ex-classmates it actually got worse during Andropov's days with kids at the age of 12-13 being trained to use AK and PK for real and drills in schools.
The modern western world has not seen what a "forever war" means just yet. It has a long way to go to that and even longer to get to the Stalin's "war against the Trust" of the 1930-es.
It also is yet to see the real effect on the population of "not giving a f*ck". We are still far off from the days of "Brezhnev's despair". We are getting there though. It looks like some of the candidates to rule the biggest powers of the western world are demonstrating his educational level and IQ.
As with all patents read Claim No 1. It should contain the novel element, you cannot leave it for later. The "novelty" in this one is that you do not need to recompile the program the way original efence worked.
However, times have changed since the days of the original Efence and things are linked dynamically at runtime on all OSes which in turn means that any LD_PRELOAD-ed Efence like debugging library which relies on OS R/W page management to control access is prior art. It satisfies literally the requirements of claim 1.
I do not recall off the top of my head what valgrind uses, but I would not be surprised if it fits the bill. The original Efence does not - it has to be linked in.
At least a couple of the networking patents (the really scary ones) apply to any network device there including some of the fundamentals on the way iptables, marking and QoS are interfaced. You can basically wipe out the current prevalence of Linux in the home networking market in no time with these and a suitable budget to back the effort.
There are other scary ones there as well from the days when Novell still did networking.
I have no objection to that. Provided that it is attached on everything which my late father used to call "Pornography for the Soul" on all media including television. DTV has support for the "red button" and access control so if it is considered worthy to implement it over the Internet it should be implemented on DTV first.
This includes but is not limited to: Simon the FreakMonger and all of his shows, Big Brother, I am Tw*t get me out of here, Emmerdale, Coronation street, Holby, etc.
Lazarus Long: "Armed society is a polite society". While good idea in principle it is not very clear how that will scale to todays population densities. All armed societies known so far had population densities of several orders of magnitude less than today.
In any case, there is a much less radical step that can and should be taken first. The terrorists exist because they have resources. As long as they have money and resources arming everyone will not help. They will simply be better armed with more lethal weapons.
So what has been done in reality to ensure that countries which fund terrorism do not have that capability anymore in the first place?
Nothing. So that is the answer - do more. Embargo on a number of "allies" which actively subsidise terrorism at a government level or close their eyes on their cittizens doing so is a good place to start.
The instructions to the dispatchers in cases like this used to be that they ignore you and hang up. This has thankfully recently changed as a result of a inquiry on a case where a girl was hijacked and called 999 (UK equivalent of 911) twice, got ignored twice and was raped and murdered. This has also happened more than once - 2003, 2004, 2007 are the well known cases which have made the national media.
However, IIRC even the new instructions which have been put in after this, still require the dispatcher to try to talk to you first which will make the phone speak and give away your position and the fact that you have dialed straight away (you really do not want your pants talking to you when you are looking down the barrel of a 9mm handgun). In addition to that nobody knows that you are not listened to and nobody knows that you are supposed to press a few numbers to indicate that you actually mean what you mean. And nobody knows the text number even if it is available in your area and it is not standardised internationally.
Compared vs that I would rather have texts to 112 (999/911 are handled by same call routing) anyday.
It is not the pricing which is interesting here, it is will there be anticompetitive marketing restrictions.
Atom was intentionally crippled through pairing with crippled 5+ year old video and a specific resolution restriction for systems with it. After NVidia broke this restriction it was redesigned to exclude it.
i815e was intentionally crippled to 512 RAM through a marketing restriction so that RDRAM and 840 and 820 sell.
Turning off SMP anywhere they could turn it off for 10 years since PPro so that the "server varieties" of the same chip (often from the same tray) sell.
And so on.
Intel has a long history of shooting itself in the foot on non-cannibalisation grounds. I suspect it shot itself here as well. This can make a phenomennal HPC platform due to its motherboard "real estate" and cooling requirements, however that will eat into Intel Xeon + QPI enabled FPGA sales. So I guess it will be crippled through marketing to disallow that.
FFS, it does not take a genius to understand the basic idea that "If there is money in it, someone else will cannibalise it for you, so you might as well cannibalise yourself and expand the market".
The 4th common problem I've found is hissy. Low signal to noise ratio by virtue of high white (pink?) noise level.
And that one too, though in a lot of cases it can be traced to the power supply. That is one of the reasons why the MiniITX systems tend to behave better - most of their cases have the low freq AC portion out of the case in a separate dead rat. In a lot of cases it is actually not the PC fault. There was a long period between mid-90-es and mid-2000es when the manufacturers did not give a damn about the AUX input on most kit. On a lot of cheap kit from those days you get passable CD playback and surprisingly hissy and crappy AUX. This cannot be helped:(
The 5th common problem I've found is weak outputs. I have a 1st gen mac mini as sort of a MP3 jukebox and it just barely outputs line level on a good day. It's probably running a bit low to my occasional annoyance. So just run everything at a lower level, resulting in problem #4 rearing its ugly head again hisssssssssssss.
I am typing this on one of those and I am surprised that you get it to produce tolerable audio in the first place (unless you left it with OSX). My experience with that one is that it skips. It is supposedly fixed in the latest ALSA drivers though.
The 6th common problem I've found is way funky drivers with creeping featureitis: weird pre-distortion to "expand the stereo experience", equalization that doesn't work as well as a real eq although it clips pretty well, strange attempts at internal DSP to simulate echos. Just turn my bytes into AC voltage and leave it alone, please!
Most of these can be disabled from a decent mixer even if they are implemented in hardware. The bloody Fuji-Siemens Scaleo and other Intel HD systems are an example at hand here as it has all kinds of unwanted effects you have to put to 0 to get decent sound.
The 7th common problem, admittedly not too often a problem, is ground loops. Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Gimme a transformer isolated input any day. Not so bad with optical digital inputs of course.
Aaa.. that one. Now that is a very interesting one. If you perform surgery on the stereo connector on a lot of these you can find that the imbecile designing it has used a 4 contact connector they can do "easy" headphone detection and report headphones presense in software (instead of doing this based on current). That can often be helped by using a 4 contact connector similar to the one used by Nokia for their universal cable (audio+video) instead of 3 (left, right, ground) and doing some soldering of your own. It is of course unnecessary if it is implemented correctly (HP NC4000 is a good example).
Depends which ones. I have tried making a media center out of nearly anything short of a dead badger. Based on my experience:
Most VIA EPIAs have sound quality on par with discrete audio solutions. It is something you can hook to a proper amp and not be disgusted by what comes out from the other end. Most via based mini-ITXes can proudly play flac encoded audio with proper Hi Fi quality. So are some of the older Crystal Audio chipsets found on really old high end motherboards.
Compared to that most audio on Intel chipset motherboards I have had to deal with is utter tripe (with the notable exemption of Asus). The most common problems are:
1. Interference from the network hardware. As the network works it "ticks" over the audio channel. Makes a PC totally unusable for music. This is more common on older kit, though I still see it here and there even today. 2. IRQ interference problems on new hardware. I thought that shared IRQ problems are something of the distant (circa 1998) past. Recently Fujitsu-Siemens and Intel proved me wrong. The Intel HD on the Scaleo-E needs special IRQ tweaking on Linux in order not to skip: http://foswiki.sigsegv.cx/bin/view/Net/DebianScaleoE 3. Distortion. Most onboard Intel HD audio has notable distortion in the high freq range. Examples - HP 6xxx series laptops, Lenovo S10e.
You get whatever you pay for. Viva le monopoly - result is crap video, crap audio, crap disk IO and the consumer is blaming it all on guess what - the too slow CPU so they are aiming to get a bigger one for Xmas which is in favour of guess who...
If gnome is being handed off - goodbye and good riddance. With mono together. And with the Microsoft worshipper AKA Miguel de Icasa as an added bonus. Please, pretty please...
I am more concerned about the Unix copyrights. That may allow restart of the whole sorry SCO affair on a whole new level - not just going after Linux per se, but also after all of the stuff running on top it like Android.
That is not accomplished by the current visa legislation. Just the opposite.
To be more specific US is the only developed country whose immigration legislation prohibits the spouses of people on high-skill labour visas from working. The ones that are not prohibited have to go through so many demeaning and outright stupid hurdles that they do not want to even consider it. For example for L2 visa (in-company qualified labour transfer) you have to supply 5 pictures of your wedding ceremony and they have to be approved by the immigration officials. What's next? Pictures of your sex life?
This ultra conservative approach means that USA will be getting only a small fraction of smart people out there. Smart people nowdays have smart wives (and husbands) with careers of their own so they are not coming. These restrictions specifically exclude them in favour of slave labour from countries where the wife is draped top to bottom and is a dedicated child production and home cleaning device with no other functionality. Call me biased, but I have my doubts about anyone in this category being "qualified labour".
Well, it uses fairly low yield warheads and at 20km+ intercept altitude. While not elegant it is a typical russian engineering solution: "Do not force it, use a LARGER hammer". Do not forget - it was designed for WW3. At a moment when EMP has broken all lose from USA and USSR nuking each other into a glass lake who cares about a couple of extra sub-10K nukes. Also, the newer interceptors are not nuclear armed and they are also supplemented by S300 at a lower altitude which can also intercept warheads (or at least is rumoured to) at least on par with Aegis and Patriot if not even better. All in all, compared to what US has got it is probably by up to 10 years ahead.
The missile interceptors around and inside Moscow have been since the 70-es. The first missile defence treaty specified that existing systems are to stay. While USA have barely managed to get theirs working for a couple of months in 1975, the Russians have managed to deploy, improve and maintain theirs ever since.
If you do not contribute to the economy of your host country one of the results is that it will have a low living standard, housing in disarray, unemployment through the roof. This will automatically put a number of limitations on what kind of people you can hire. To be more specific - you can hire only wageslaves with non-working dependants.
While that may be OK if your aim is to import labour from Talebanic countries where the wife is a houseslave, it does not work well in the civilised world. If it did, Google would not have had to post 200+ positions on a weekly basis for Dublin and consistently _FAIL_ to fill them. The situation with a lot of other emloyers in Ireland is not much different. They all continue to have a long list of positions for qualified labour open.
That is to expected, because foreign labour does not want to move into the middle of a dump (and Ireland in the economic sense is a dump) and the Irish educational system does not have enough money (taxes are actually used for something ya know) to produce an equivalent.
So overall, Google should stop wingeing here and realise that by moving a high skilled labour activity into a low tax rate country it has shot itself in the foot in the long term. High skilled labour, Low Taxes and Growth - you have to pick two. All three together are mutually exclusive.
Dell was not the worst by any means. IIRC, the worst as far as caps leaks from those days was probably MSI. Asus was mostly OK (only some MB models affected) and I have not seen a single Via EPIA motherboard exhibit any of these problems.
I am still using about 7-8 Vias from those days quietly shuffling files as a small file server or serving as a media center. Not a single one of them is showing any problem and some of them have been through thermal hell in cases with failed fans.
This approach is similar to what other countries have been taking for a while. The governments pretty much slept through the Internet becoming the predominant telecommunication medium and the awakening has been rather rude for all of them.
Nearly all other governments have taken similar steps. It is actually positive that USA has put some legal framework behind it. That has not been the case with other big-8 countries where the various three symbol abbreviated agencies have forced a number of changes on the infrastructure without any legal framework to back them up.
Do we like it or not - this is something that could not be avoided. It is probably better if it is done legally, above board and with clear and well defined game rules instead of a cloak and dagger.
So if a UK company sued in a USA court does a no-show, the troll wins by default. They can then get a court order and have the company USA assets which includes their domain transferred to them. This may include even a co.uk domain as long as it has been registered through Verisign or any of the other USA based registrars. If that is not enough they may get court orders and force any USA ISP to filter out (or deny routing) to any of the UK company servers and thus cut off any USA traffic.
So in cases like this there are 3 options:
1. Shut off any USA business you may have completely. That is what non-Internet companies like for example diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies making generics do. In the Internet case this is rather difficult.
2. Pay up.
3. Fight it on the troll's home turf
This happens both ways by the way though the usual weapon in UK courts is not patents - it is libel and copyright. As a result a lot of USA Internet companies now filter out UK blocks altogether to minimise their libel exposure.
As I said in my post to the previous article on Slashdot on this it should be the window manager's job to do this and it should be based on which process talks to which. No terminal should be involved.
Both of the suggested approaches - the shell hack and the linux kernel patch are nerd material. They work only for stuff that has controlling terminal (kernel patch) or for stuff that is launched from the terminal (bash hack), not for stuff you launch directly from the desktop environment.
The 5 lines worth of bash need to be rewritten into 10 lines of python for KDE or a couple of pages of C for the gnomish abominations. With proper permissions of course- I see some chmod 777 there which generally makes me start looking for an axe and a neck to apply to. Then it will be the "right patch". Another alternative is to add this to the PM system - the KDE power daemon or the gnome alternative. It will be right in place there as it will have access to current power and performance preferences. For example - if I am watching a video or presenting I want that in a separate process group from the rest of the crap that is being done in the background.
Cell broadcast and its use for emergencies has been part of the GSM spec since its inception. WTF is here to implement at all? All you need is to "have a word with the BSC" which inserts this into a paging message going to specific BTSes for specific cells.
AFAIK, You cannot ship kit that does not have this. At least in EU.
It is just that the USA has forgotten the Internet basics. It has also forgotten major past incidents like that case from 10 years back when one small ISP in Florida directed most of the Internet traffic through itself and fell over.
USA internet has very little redundancy. Most of the peering is private, in very few locations and the routes announced by ISPs to each other are not filtered based on declared ISP announcement policy. As the few remaining ISPs are so big the announcement lists have grown to a size where filtering them poses a technical difficulty. In addition to that because the ISPs are big they trust each others change control that routes for blocks which are "somebody's elses will not be announced". Bad Idea (TM). And that is why this was possible in the first place.
Compared to that in Europe most of the peering is public and nearly all ISPs heavily filter the route announcements coming from other peers. A Chinese ISP which would announce blocks it does not own would simply be ignored. It is of course possible for the ISP in question to add the policy to its official export list, post it to RIPE, get it propagated to other ISPs and then announce the routes, but that will take time and will have a big chance to be noticed. It will also be clear that there is "no mistake" there so the ISP in question will really get kicked off the internet for this one.
Slashdot Mirror
I would agree.
Investing your time into Qt is the best investment. Stick to C++ and Python. Both work.
Avoid Perl-QT though. Not that it does not work, but it makes your brain go numb because you end up writing in pidgin-C++ intersperced with Perl. It overrides perl default OO conventions and uses C++ ones. There are parts where you have to outright put C++ snippets into the Perl code to get it work.
Tk is also good, but obsolete by today's standards. Its one and only remaining use is writing UIs for Perl where you cannot use web ones.
Avoid GTK: Grave danger you are in. Impatient you are. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will. Always write Yoda code you will...
The problem with them is also that most advanced typist type purely by touch. I never look at the keyboard when typing and having something that changes under my fingers or requires looking all the time is definitely not welcome.
There is another even more entertaining aspect - security. If the API to change the layouts is not locked down enough you can do all kinds of funky stuff compared to which XSS is a child's play.
A court order is what happened.
There is a court order for shutting down this sites and the article refers to it.
So can we cut the "freedom", "internet only", etc malarkey. It is all above board and pretty much following proper due process and established procedures. If you sell counterfeit DVDs from a stall at the market you will get shut down. Do not see why you should not be shut down if you sell counterfeit media off a website.
Now the definition of counterfeit, grey, illegal copying, etc are all an entirely different matter. However, as long as the current definitions stand there is nothing particularly outrageous and illegal here. It is in fact definitely more legal than most DMCA shutdowns.
Sorry dude, I have to disagree.
Radioactive material is allowed to be shipped by plane and special precautions are usually required. FedEx is right to bitch here. They have violated quite a few regs by inadvertently moving a radioactive package by air.
Who told you that Tandberg will use said patent after they have filed it.
Most patents today are filed defensively, to ensure that you have ammo to sue back a non-troll in a patent war similar to the one currently going on in mobile.
In fact, it is exceedingly rare for a non-troll company to actually license something for a fee from another company. If you try to do that, at the second meeting the lawyers of the company you are trying to license to open a FAT briefcase with their patent ammo and you are facing a mutually assured destruction. The sole exemption to this are industry standards with RAND tagged on them. However as the ongoing war in mobile has shown that is broken too.
This by itself should show that the system is broken. In fact that is what you need to show to _BUSINESS_ people when speaking why it is broken. They do not care about free, blah, whatever, what they care is bottom line and that has a very bad forecast in a Cold war. Cold war on the verge of mutually assured destruction is a guaranteed lose-lose situation. The budget to maintain a final solution war arsenal for all of your product exceeds by far the budget to innovate in the specific areas you want to advance.
Stop winging.
At "green" condition in the days when I was living in Brezhnev's Soviet Union at the age of 10 (year 4 in their school system) I was supposed to know all the first aid stuff, be able to disassemble an AK47, service it and reassemble it in under 3 minutes, know how to use a gas mask, shoot at least 70+ score (1-10 additive, 10 shots) with a sport .22 or an air rifle as well as know all civil defence codes. I left around that time, however based on what I was told by my ex-classmates it actually got worse during Andropov's days with kids at the age of 12-13 being trained to use AK and PK for real and drills in schools.
The modern western world has not seen what a "forever war" means just yet. It has a long way to go to that and even longer to get to the Stalin's "war against the Trust" of the 1930-es.
It also is yet to see the real effect on the population of "not giving a f*ck". We are still far off from the days of "Brezhnev's despair". We are getting there though. It looks like some of the candidates to rule the biggest powers of the western world are demonstrating his educational level and IQ.
As with all patents read Claim No 1. It should contain the novel element, you cannot leave it for later. The "novelty" in this one is that you do not need to recompile the program the way original efence worked.
However, times have changed since the days of the original Efence and things are linked dynamically at runtime on all OSes which in turn means that any LD_PRELOAD-ed Efence like debugging library which relies on OS R/W page management to control access is prior art. It satisfies literally the requirements of claim 1.
I do not recall off the top of my head what valgrind uses, but I would not be surprised if it fits the bill. The original Efence does not - it has to be linked in.
Wrong.
At least a couple of the networking patents (the really scary ones) apply to any network device there including some of the fundamentals on the way iptables, marking and QoS are interfaced. You can basically wipe out the current prevalence of Linux in the home networking market in no time with these and a suitable budget to back the effort.
There are other scary ones there as well from the days when Novell still did networking.
I have no objection to that. Provided that it is attached on everything which my late father used to call "Pornography for the Soul" on all media including television. DTV has support for the "red button" and access control so if it is considered worthy to implement it over the Internet it should be implemented on DTV first.
This includes but is not limited to: Simon the FreakMonger and all of his shows, Big Brother, I am Tw*t get me out of here, Emmerdale, Coronation street, Holby, etc.
Lazarus Long: "Armed society is a polite society". While good idea in principle it is not very clear how that will scale to todays population densities. All armed societies known so far had population densities of several orders of magnitude less than today.
In any case, there is a much less radical step that can and should be taken first. The terrorists exist because they have resources. As long as they have money and resources arming everyone will not help. They will simply be better armed with more lethal weapons.
So what has been done in reality to ensure that countries which fund terrorism do not have that capability anymore in the first place?
Nothing. So that is the answer - do more. Embargo on a number of "allies" which actively subsidise terrorism at a government level or close their eyes on their cittizens doing so is a good place to start.
Welcome to the UK then.
The instructions to the dispatchers in cases like this used to be that they ignore you and hang up. This has thankfully recently changed as a result of a inquiry on a case where a girl was hijacked and called 999 (UK equivalent of 911) twice, got ignored twice and was raped and murdered. This has also happened more than once - 2003, 2004, 2007 are the well known cases which have made the national media.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/mobile/magazine/7748046.stm
However, IIRC even the new instructions which have been put in after this, still require the dispatcher to try to talk to you first which will make the phone speak and give away your position and the fact that you have dialed straight away (you really do not want your pants talking to you when you are looking down the barrel of a 9mm handgun). In addition to that nobody knows that you are not listened to and nobody knows that you are supposed to press a few numbers to indicate that you actually mean what you mean. And nobody knows the text number even if it is available in your area and it is not standardised internationally.
Compared vs that I would rather have texts to 112 (999/911 are handled by same call routing) anyday.
It is not the pricing which is interesting here, it is will there be anticompetitive marketing restrictions.
Atom was intentionally crippled through pairing with crippled 5+ year old video and a specific resolution restriction for systems with it. After NVidia broke this restriction it was redesigned to exclude it.
i815e was intentionally crippled to 512 RAM through a marketing restriction so that RDRAM and 840 and 820 sell.
Turning off SMP anywhere they could turn it off for 10 years since PPro so that the "server varieties" of the same chip (often from the same tray) sell.
And so on.
Intel has a long history of shooting itself in the foot on non-cannibalisation grounds. I suspect it shot itself here as well. This can make a phenomennal HPC platform due to its motherboard "real estate" and cooling requirements, however that will eat into Intel Xeon + QPI enabled FPGA sales. So I guess it will be crippled through marketing to disallow that.
FFS, it does not take a genius to understand the basic idea that "If there is money in it, someone else will cannibalise it for you, so you might as well cannibalise yourself and expand the market".
The 4th common problem I've found is hissy. Low signal to noise ratio by virtue of high white (pink?) noise level.
And that one too, though in a lot of cases it can be traced to the power supply. That is one of the reasons why the MiniITX systems tend to behave better - most of their cases have the low freq AC portion out of the case in a separate dead rat. In a lot of cases it is actually not the PC fault. There was a long period between mid-90-es and mid-2000es when the manufacturers did not give a damn about the AUX input on most kit. On a lot of cheap kit from those days you get passable CD playback and surprisingly hissy and crappy AUX. This cannot be helped :(
The 5th common problem I've found is weak outputs. I have a 1st gen mac mini as sort of a MP3 jukebox and it just barely outputs line level on a good day. It's probably running a bit low to my occasional annoyance. So just run everything at a lower level, resulting in problem #4 rearing its ugly head again hisssssssssssss.
I am typing this on one of those and I am surprised that you get it to produce tolerable audio in the first place (unless you left it with OSX). My experience with that one is that it skips. It is supposedly fixed in the latest ALSA drivers though.
The 6th common problem I've found is way funky drivers with creeping featureitis: weird pre-distortion to "expand the stereo experience", equalization that doesn't work as well as a real eq although it clips pretty well, strange attempts at internal DSP to simulate echos. Just turn my bytes into AC voltage and leave it alone, please!
Most of these can be disabled from a decent mixer even if they are implemented in hardware. The bloody Fuji-Siemens Scaleo and other Intel HD systems are an example at hand here as it has all kinds of unwanted effects you have to put to 0 to get decent sound.
The 7th common problem, admittedly not too often a problem, is ground loops. Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Gimme a transformer isolated input any day. Not so bad with optical digital inputs of course.
Aaa.. that one. Now that is a very interesting one. If you perform surgery on the stereo connector on a lot of these you can find that the imbecile designing it has used a 4 contact connector they can do "easy" headphone detection and report headphones presense in software (instead of doing this based on current). That can often be helped by using a 4 contact connector similar to the one used by Nokia for their universal cable (audio+video) instead of 3 (left, right, ground) and doing some soldering of your own. It is of course unnecessary if it is implemented correctly (HP NC4000 is a good example).
Depends which ones. I have tried making a media center out of nearly anything short of a dead badger. Based on my experience:
Most VIA EPIAs have sound quality on par with discrete audio solutions. It is something you can hook to a proper amp and not be disgusted by what comes out from the other end. Most via based mini-ITXes can proudly play flac encoded audio with proper Hi Fi quality. So are some of the older Crystal Audio chipsets found on really old high end motherboards.
Compared to that most audio on Intel chipset motherboards I have had to deal with is utter tripe (with the notable exemption of Asus). The most common problems are:
1. Interference from the network hardware. As the network works it "ticks" over the audio channel. Makes a PC totally unusable for music. This is more common on older kit, though I still see it here and there even today.
2. IRQ interference problems on new hardware. I thought that shared IRQ problems are something of the distant (circa 1998) past. Recently Fujitsu-Siemens and Intel proved me wrong. The Intel HD on the Scaleo-E needs special IRQ tweaking on Linux in order not to skip: http://foswiki.sigsegv.cx/bin/view/Net/DebianScaleoE
3. Distortion. Most onboard Intel HD audio has notable distortion in the high freq range. Examples - HP 6xxx series laptops, Lenovo S10e.
You get whatever you pay for. Viva le monopoly - result is crap video, crap audio, crap disk IO and the consumer is blaming it all on guess what - the too slow CPU so they are aiming to get a bigger one for Xmas which is in favour of guess who...
If gnome is being handed off - goodbye and good riddance. With mono together. And with the Microsoft worshipper AKA Miguel de Icasa as an added bonus. Please, pretty please...
I am more concerned about the Unix copyrights. That may allow restart of the whole sorry SCO affair on a whole new level - not just going after Linux per se, but also after all of the stuff running on top it like Android.
That is not accomplished by the current visa legislation. Just the opposite.
To be more specific US is the only developed country whose immigration legislation prohibits the spouses of people on high-skill labour visas from working. The ones that are not prohibited have to go through so many demeaning and outright stupid hurdles that they do not want to even consider it. For example for L2 visa (in-company qualified labour transfer) you have to supply 5 pictures of your wedding ceremony and they have to be approved by the immigration officials. What's next? Pictures of your sex life?
This ultra conservative approach means that USA will be getting only a small fraction of smart people out there. Smart people nowdays have smart wives (and husbands) with careers of their own so they are not coming. These restrictions specifically exclude them in favour of slave labour from countries where the wife is draped top to bottom and is a dedicated child production and home cleaning device with no other functionality. Call me biased, but I have my doubts about anyone in this category being "qualified labour".
Well, it uses fairly low yield warheads and at 20km+ intercept altitude. While not elegant it is a typical russian engineering solution: "Do not force it, use a LARGER hammer".
Do not forget - it was designed for WW3. At a moment when EMP has broken all lose from USA and USSR nuking each other into a glass lake who cares about a couple of extra sub-10K nukes.
Also, the newer interceptors are not nuclear armed and they are also supplemented by S300 at a lower altitude which can also intercept warheads (or at least is rumoured to) at least on par with Aegis and Patriot if not even better.
All in all, compared to what US has got it is probably by up to 10 years ahead.
Russia has a missile shield you dolt.
Always had one.
The missile interceptors around and inside Moscow have been since the 70-es. The first missile defence treaty specified that existing systems are to stay. While USA have barely managed to get theirs working for a couple of months in 1975, the Russians have managed to deploy, improve and maintain theirs ever since.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-135_anti-ballistic_missile_system
Kind'a...
If you do not contribute to the economy of your host country one of the results is that it will have a low living standard, housing in disarray, unemployment through the roof. This will automatically put a number of limitations on what kind of people you can hire. To be more specific - you can hire only wageslaves with non-working dependants.
While that may be OK if your aim is to import labour from Talebanic countries where the wife is a houseslave, it does not work well in the civilised world. If it did, Google would not have had to post 200+ positions on a weekly basis for Dublin and consistently _FAIL_ to fill them. The situation with a lot of other emloyers in Ireland is not much different. They all continue to have a long list of positions for qualified labour open.
That is to expected, because foreign labour does not want to move into the middle of a dump (and Ireland in the economic sense is a dump) and the Irish educational system does not have enough money (taxes are actually used for something ya know) to produce an equivalent.
So overall, Google should stop wingeing here and realise that by moving a high skilled labour activity into a low tax rate country it has shot itself in the foot in the long term. High skilled labour, Low Taxes and Growth - you have to pick two. All three together are mutually exclusive.
Yes, but some did not.
Dell was not the worst by any means. IIRC, the worst as far as caps leaks from those days was probably MSI. Asus was mostly OK (only some MB models affected) and I have not seen a single Via EPIA motherboard exhibit any of these problems.
I am still using about 7-8 Vias from those days quietly shuffling files as a small file server or serving as a media center. Not a single one of them is showing any problem and some of them have been through thermal hell in cases with failed fans.
This approach is similar to what other countries have been taking for a while. The governments pretty much slept through the Internet becoming the predominant telecommunication medium and the awakening has been rather rude for all of them.
Nearly all other governments have taken similar steps. It is actually positive that USA has put some legal framework behind it. That has not been the case with other big-8 countries where the various three symbol abbreviated agencies have forced a number of changes on the infrastructure without any legal framework to back them up.
Do we like it or not - this is something that could not be avoided. It is probably better if it is done legally, above board and with clear and well defined game rules instead of a cloak and dagger.
Unfortunately, most registrar's are USA based.
So if a UK company sued in a USA court does a no-show, the troll wins by default. They can then get a court order and have the company USA assets which includes their domain transferred to them. This may include even a co.uk domain as long as it has been registered through Verisign or any of the other USA based registrars. If that is not enough they may get court orders and force any USA ISP to filter out (or deny routing) to any of the UK company servers and thus cut off any USA traffic.
So in cases like this there are 3 options:
1. Shut off any USA business you may have completely. That is what non-Internet companies like for example diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies making generics do. In the Internet case this is rather difficult.
2. Pay up.
3. Fight it on the troll's home turf
This happens both ways by the way though the usual weapon in UK courts is not patents - it is libel and copyright. As a result a lot of USA Internet companies now filter out UK blocks altogether to minimise their libel exposure.
Neither.
As I said in my post to the previous article on Slashdot on this it should be the window manager's job to do this and it should be based on which process talks to which. No terminal should be involved.
Both of the suggested approaches - the shell hack and the linux kernel patch are nerd material. They work only for stuff that has controlling terminal (kernel patch) or for stuff that is launched from the terminal (bash hack), not for stuff you launch directly from the desktop environment.
The 5 lines worth of bash need to be rewritten into 10 lines of python for KDE or a couple of pages of C for the gnomish abominations. With proper permissions of course- I see some chmod 777 there which generally makes me start looking for an axe and a neck to apply to. Then it will be the "right patch". Another alternative is to add this to the PM system - the KDE power daemon or the gnome alternative. It will be right in place there as it will have access to current power and performance preferences. For example - if I am watching a video or presenting I want that in a separate process group from the rest of the crap that is being done in the background.
Cell broadcast and its use for emergencies has been part of the GSM spec since its inception. WTF is here to implement at all? All you need is to "have a word with the BSC" which inserts this into a paging message going to specific BTSes for specific cells.
AFAIK, You cannot ship kit that does not have this. At least in EU.
Or it is.
It is just that the USA has forgotten the Internet basics. It has also forgotten major past incidents like that case from 10 years back when one small ISP in Florida directed most of the Internet traffic through itself and fell over.
USA internet has very little redundancy. Most of the peering is private, in very few locations and the routes announced by ISPs to each other are not filtered based on declared ISP announcement policy. As the few remaining ISPs are so big the announcement lists have grown to a size where filtering them poses a technical difficulty. In addition to that because the ISPs are big they trust each others change control that routes for blocks which are "somebody's elses will not be announced". Bad Idea (TM). And that is why this was possible in the first place.
Compared to that in Europe most of the peering is public and nearly all ISPs heavily filter the route announcements coming from other peers. A Chinese ISP which would announce blocks it does not own would simply be ignored. It is of course possible for the ISP in question to add the policy to its official export list, post it to RIPE, get it propagated to other ISPs and then announce the routes, but that will take time and will have a big chance to be noticed. It will also be clear that there is "no mistake" there so the ISP in question will really get kicked off the internet for this one.