Out of curiosity, are there any remaining applications for solaris where hardware considerations(presumably local access to the video card; but there might be others) would drive customer purchases of a desktop sparc, rather than whatever the Dell rep is trying to get rid of and an SSH or Sun Ray Software and a sparc server?
The truth of the allegations is unknown, at present; but 'consent' obtained by fraud, deception, or coercion is not generally recognized as valid. And, of course, impersonation of a police officer is a crime in itself in California.
We don't know whether the situation played out as alleged; but if it did, it amounted to criminal activity...
I have no reason to be impressed by the moral fiber of the "finder"; but we have SFPD's confirmation that(just as the "finder" originally claimed, before any independent confirmation was available) that four of their people accompanied two of Apple's to the address given, that the two Apple people went inside to look, and that none of the SFPD did. We also know that the contact information allegedly provided by the Apple agent at the time matched those of an Apple agent on Linkedin, who promptly nuked his profile after the story appeared(which doesn't prove that he didn't look the details up in order to add flavor to his story; but is interesting). That doesn't tell us what was said at the scene; but it isn't as though our questionably fibrous friend made the incident up: we just don't know whether he embellished it.
Again, none of this suggests anything in favor of the guy's character; but it does provide a degree of corroboration for his claims, from a source that would have no obvious interest in corroborating a false allegation of their involvement...
The better question might be "what less could he have done"?
The 'controversy' over the handling of the lost iPhone includes the bit where Apple security flacks allegedly impersonated police officers in order to conduct an illicit search of somebody's house...
For a company of Apple's stature, with extensive offshore manufacturing and significant interest from both highly-visible tech-rumor-bloggers and 3rd party accessory makers who want to have their tooling done before the competition, the leak level is pretty good. Getting the company embroiled in a potentially messy criminal case, though, is one of those 'career limiting' moves...
So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger, and not have to buy the $35 sold at the phone store.
They don't really need a standard connector so much as a standard protocol for communicating over it beyond just filesystem access/etc.
The trouble with (just) USB is that only handles two sorts of use case gracefully, the second less so than the first:
1. Phone is USB slave, some reasonably powerful device is USB master: In this case, the phone can be charged and can expose any function supported by a USB device class or custom driver on the USB master. Most phones only actually seem to expose a USB Mass Storage device, along with ADB if turned on; but there isn't any architectural barrier to exposing other phone functions, camera as USB VDC device, Mic and speaker as a USB Audio device, GPS as a TTY emitting NMEA sentences, etc. Assuming the master is powerful enough, functions like playing back video on the phone can be bodged on top of one or more of the USB devices exposed by the phone, albeit with basically no help from the phone(in the case of something like video playback, you can grab the video from the mass storage device and decode it yourself; but using the phone's hardware H264 decoder isn't happening).
2. Phone is USB master, some USB peripheral is USB slave: This one is a bit hackier; but assuming USB OTG's oddities don't crash the party, and the phone has drivers for the USB peripheral, it should work. For low power, common, peripherals like flash drives, and keyboards it likely even works well. The problem is that you have to duplicate a fair amount of hardware already on the phone in order to support certain functions, which isn't good for your budget or your battery life: video output, say, just takes a few pins and a dirt-cheap mechanical adapter if you can take advantage of the host's video hardware(as few as 1 for composite video sharing an existing ground line, up to 10 for something like PDMI's 2-lane Displayport output). If you want to do that as a USB peripheral, you are looking at a $40 displaylink device pulling a nontrivial amount of power. Audio isn't as bad because the USB peripherals are cheaper, lower power, and have a standard device class; but they still don't stack up terribly favorably with a handful of pins exposing the host's audio capabilities.
A USB connector beats the hell out of a pointlessly proprietary power/data port; but it doesn't have enough pins to make physically exposing host capabilities to low-cost peripherals doable. If the driver gods are merciful, you can do a lot of things over a USB link with a suitably powerful peripheral; but you lose the ability to do all sorts of fairly simple and cheap peripherals that you could implement if you could piggyback on the host to a greater degree...
As best I was able to tell, the chart was looking at specifically genetic(SNPs), rather than lifestyle, risk factors across various historical migration paths.
If they are looking at genetic risk factors, rather than lifestyle risks or overall incidence, it seems more plausible that higher risks would show up in odd places: genetic risks only get selected against in environments where they cause problems. If alcohol or cheap calories aren't available, the genes impose no penalty and spread more readily.
As for the migration paths, I can only assume that the data for the americas are so sketchy because they have the shortest history of human habitation(not only did the first humans show up there relatively recently, their descendants died off pretty dramatically during the colonial period, leaving much of the present population largely descended from one old world migration path or another)...
At least in my limited experience, the set of people who will happily put sensitive information on Dropbox because it is simple and easy and the set of people who are implementing appropriate encryption and access control measures do not overlap very much...
Encryption isn't going to change the fact that there are fewer hashes available than there are inputs; but it might actually reduce the chances of a collision in practice...
Since most users are uninterested in storing random length-n chunks, but are interested in storing office documents and pictures and things, the expected set of inputs will probably be pretty strongly skewed in the direction of slightly-shorter-than-n-chunks with boilerplate file format required headers and/or footers. If your files are properly encrypted, they presumably won't have the same skew...(If true, of course, this would mean that collisions in general are more likely than a simple input length vs. hash length comparison would suggest.)
Probably. The video is clear evidence of him applying non-capital punishment to an offender who could have been charged as an adult. Are texan voters going to stand for a soft-on-crime stance like that?
I'm assuming that much(probably most) of that is simply convenience pricing, possibly with some for somebody to look it over and correct any serious aesthetic issues with the epub. Since they put no barriers in the way of loading most common ebook formats, they have no way of stopping you from getting them from Project Gutenberg for free; but they are presumably happy enough to take the money if you feel like downloading it from them.
I don't think that anybody has ever actually "joined" Bank of America, it's just that the probability that you become a customer by acquisition of your prior bank approaches 1 at around a decade or so...
It takes up very little space(not quite zero; but not a whole lot); but a touchscreen interface worth using bumps the BOM a fair bit. Resistive sucks, Wacom-style RF stylus isn't cheap, and consumer-friendly finger-paint capacitive also isn't cheap to do well.
At that point, you basically have a laptop that costs $100 more than your identical model, for the delight of being able to smudge at a few bundleware applications because nobody does touch applications for windows...
As best I can tell, EFI was what happened when somebody looked upon the BIOS, saw that it sucked compared to the OS, and decided that(rather than building a new firmware aimed at getting into the OS as simply and quickly as possible) they would build a BIOS large enough to possess every vice of an operating system and leave implementation to the capable hands of the PC OEMs, whose dedication to software quality is legendar...
While nice, if true, to hear that OEMs will be doing (part of) what people would like to see(specifically, having an option to disable 'secure boot' is better than nothing; but what you really want is the option to do a keyfill with trusted keys of your choice: signed boot components make good sense, it's just not being able to choose who is trusted to sign them that is an issue); this article could hardly be any smarmier or less informative.
"In response to the FUD campaign of the freetards, I asked some PR people. Dell said 'yes', HP emitted word salad, AMI said that they would do whatever their customers felt like. Case Solved!" If it weren't for the smirking invective, the whole thing could have been boiled down to a single paragraph(or, heaven forfend, bulked out with technical information...)
My understanding is that btrfs has something in that vein. In the meantime, the ability to use FUSE opens some convenient options for special-case compression of specific areas of your system:
fuse-zip, as its name suggests, lets you mount a zip archive as though it were a filesystem, giving arbitrary programs the ability to interact with the contents as though it were an ordinary FS, so no need for tool-specific zip support. The.zip still has to go somewhere, so this isn't really an FS for/; but if you have a giant pit of highly compressible material in a directory somewhere, replacing it with a fuse-zip is pretty simple.
There is alse FuseCompress, about which I know less...
The difficulty is that(while most compressed archives are supported) you run into the situation where either the tool you are using has to have the ad-hoc ability to operate on the contents of a given archive type, or you need to decompress somewhere temporary, operate, and then compress it back up. That is sort of annoying.
What you really want is something like http://code.google.com/p/fuse-zip/ Fuse-zip(ideally one with support for all common archives you are going to run into; but if this is just for your use it doesn't much matter: Because the zip archive becomes a FUSE-mounted filesystem location, all non-zip-aware programs will transparently operate on the contents of the archive without even knowing anything is different.
That Angry Birds has managed to achieve such popularity, even among mainstream non/casual gamers, without any of the media's paranoic talking heads getting worked up about it.
Let's be clear here, cutesy graphics and sounds aside, the game is about a bunch of birds, enraged at their dispossession by the pigs, launching martyrdom operations against the pigs and their infrastructure. You lose unless the pigs are exterminated and you get extra points for each infrastructure element destroyed. Surely that should have been enough for a hysterical article on the WorldNetDaily, or an ongoing conspiracy subthread over at freerepublic concerning the question of whether Angry Birds is objectively pro terror?
It is my understanding that copyright trolls are supposed to have their faces either branded or tattooed with a scarlet trollface to prevent them from blending in with real humans, and ensure that all mankind can avoid and revile them.
I'm assuming that any real money(if Righthaven wasn't itself the assetless shell company being used by the real money) will already have been snuck of the premises by various means, with nothing but a bunch of leased office furniture and a few cheap suits on site; but some days watching those who would crush others with the force of law having their stuff dumped into the street and sold off is just satisfying...
The cyclically-evicted members of the poor are all too familiar with the treatment; but we don't give it to the arrogant nearly as often as would be socially useful...
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
Would one be right in guessing that their Itanium based Integrity servers have been a disaster?
It is entirely possible that their Itanium units haven't been doing so hot(though, from what I've read, it's more of a 'small number of cost-insensitive customers' which is why neither HP nor intel can just shoot the program in the head; but why they can't seem to get it to expand and gain any economies of scale).
However, the fate of Itanium and the fate of this curious box should be almost 100% unconnected with one another: The two are about as different in design and intended workload as two servers could be.
The fact that they've special-magic-backplane-fabric-ed away all the other busses, while leaving each card bristling with SATA connectors, seems rather weird, just because that's a lot of headers to bring out if nobody is going to use them and it'll be a hell of a rat's nest if you actually try(could they really not have stretched their backplane fabric a little bit more, to include allocating direct attached storage to nodes across it?).
The use of SATA, though, seems reasonable enough, given the low-performance, low-cost, low-energy focus of the design. It just seems really weird that the connectors are on the cards, rather than their being a few high-density SAS connectors on the back, allowing you to either use an iSCSI device over the 10gigE ports or a big SATA/SAS cage directly cabled, with disks being farmed out over the backplane, rather than via internal SATA cabling...
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Out of curiosity, are there any remaining applications for solaris where hardware considerations(presumably local access to the video card; but there might be others) would drive customer purchases of a desktop sparc, rather than whatever the Dell rep is trying to get rid of and an SSH or Sun Ray Software and a sparc server?
The truth of the allegations is unknown, at present; but 'consent' obtained by fraud, deception, or coercion is not generally recognized as valid. And, of course, impersonation of a police officer is a crime in itself in California.
We don't know whether the situation played out as alleged; but if it did, it amounted to criminal activity...
I have no reason to be impressed by the moral fiber of the "finder"; but we have SFPD's confirmation that(just as the "finder" originally claimed, before any independent confirmation was available) that four of their people accompanied two of Apple's to the address given, that the two Apple people went inside to look, and that none of the SFPD did. We also know that the contact information allegedly provided by the Apple agent at the time matched those of an Apple agent on Linkedin, who promptly nuked his profile after the story appeared(which doesn't prove that he didn't look the details up in order to add flavor to his story; but is interesting). That doesn't tell us what was said at the scene; but it isn't as though our questionably fibrous friend made the incident up: we just don't know whether he embellished it.
Again, none of this suggests anything in favor of the guy's character; but it does provide a degree of corroboration for his claims, from a source that would have no obvious interest in corroborating a false allegation of their involvement...
Arguably, if Apple wanted the investigation to have been conducted in accordance with US law, they wouldn't have hired an FBI agent...
The better question might be "what less could he have done"?
The 'controversy' over the handling of the lost iPhone includes the bit where Apple security flacks allegedly impersonated police officers in order to conduct an illicit search of somebody's house...
For a company of Apple's stature, with extensive offshore manufacturing and significant interest from both highly-visible tech-rumor-bloggers and 3rd party accessory makers who want to have their tooling done before the competition, the leak level is pretty good. Getting the company embroiled in a potentially messy criminal case, though, is one of those 'career limiting' moves...
So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger, and not have to buy the $35 sold at the phone store.
They don't really need a standard connector so much as a standard protocol for communicating over it beyond just filesystem access/etc.
The trouble with (just) USB is that only handles two sorts of use case gracefully, the second less so than the first:
1. Phone is USB slave, some reasonably powerful device is USB master: In this case, the phone can be charged and can expose any function supported by a USB device class or custom driver on the USB master. Most phones only actually seem to expose a USB Mass Storage device, along with ADB if turned on; but there isn't any architectural barrier to exposing other phone functions, camera as USB VDC device, Mic and speaker as a USB Audio device, GPS as a TTY emitting NMEA sentences, etc. Assuming the master is powerful enough, functions like playing back video on the phone can be bodged on top of one or more of the USB devices exposed by the phone, albeit with basically no help from the phone(in the case of something like video playback, you can grab the video from the mass storage device and decode it yourself; but using the phone's hardware H264 decoder isn't happening).
2. Phone is USB master, some USB peripheral is USB slave: This one is a bit hackier; but assuming USB OTG's oddities don't crash the party, and the phone has drivers for the USB peripheral, it should work. For low power, common, peripherals like flash drives, and keyboards it likely even works well. The problem is that you have to duplicate a fair amount of hardware already on the phone in order to support certain functions, which isn't good for your budget or your battery life: video output, say, just takes a few pins and a dirt-cheap mechanical adapter if you can take advantage of the host's video hardware(as few as 1 for composite video sharing an existing ground line, up to 10 for something like PDMI's 2-lane Displayport output). If you want to do that as a USB peripheral, you are looking at a $40 displaylink device pulling a nontrivial amount of power. Audio isn't as bad because the USB peripherals are cheaper, lower power, and have a standard device class; but they still don't stack up terribly favorably with a handful of pins exposing the host's audio capabilities.
A USB connector beats the hell out of a pointlessly proprietary power/data port; but it doesn't have enough pins to make physically exposing host capabilities to low-cost peripherals doable. If the driver gods are merciful, you can do a lot of things over a USB link with a suitably powerful peripheral; but you lose the ability to do all sorts of fairly simple and cheap peripherals that you could implement if you could piggyback on the host to a greater degree...
As best I was able to tell, the chart was looking at specifically genetic(SNPs), rather than lifestyle, risk factors across various historical migration paths.
If they are looking at genetic risk factors, rather than lifestyle risks or overall incidence, it seems more plausible that higher risks would show up in odd places: genetic risks only get selected against in environments where they cause problems. If alcohol or cheap calories aren't available, the genes impose no penalty and spread more readily.
As for the migration paths, I can only assume that the data for the americas are so sketchy because they have the shortest history of human habitation(not only did the first humans show up there relatively recently, their descendants died off pretty dramatically during the colonial period, leaving much of the present population largely descended from one old world migration path or another)...
At least in my limited experience, the set of people who will happily put sensitive information on Dropbox because it is simple and easy and the set of people who are implementing appropriate encryption and access control measures do not overlap very much...
Encryption isn't going to change the fact that there are fewer hashes available than there are inputs; but it might actually reduce the chances of a collision in practice...
Since most users are uninterested in storing random length-n chunks, but are interested in storing office documents and pictures and things, the expected set of inputs will probably be pretty strongly skewed in the direction of slightly-shorter-than-n-chunks with boilerplate file format required headers and/or footers. If your files are properly encrypted, they presumably won't have the same skew...(If true, of course, this would mean that collisions in general are more likely than a simple input length vs. hash length comparison would suggest.)
Probably. The video is clear evidence of him applying non-capital punishment to an offender who could have been charged as an adult. Are texan voters going to stand for a soft-on-crime stance like that?
I'm assuming that much(probably most) of that is simply convenience pricing, possibly with some for somebody to look it over and correct any serious aesthetic issues with the epub. Since they put no barriers in the way of loading most common ebook formats, they have no way of stopping you from getting them from Project Gutenberg for free; but they are presumably happy enough to take the money if you feel like downloading it from them.
I don't think that anybody has ever actually "joined" Bank of America, it's just that the probability that you become a customer by acquisition of your prior bank approaches 1 at around a decade or so...
Is the "Godfather of Xen" the guy I need to talk to if I need the Buddha 'removed from this cycle of suffering and reincarnation', so to speak?
It takes up very little space(not quite zero; but not a whole lot); but a touchscreen interface worth using bumps the BOM a fair bit. Resistive sucks, Wacom-style RF stylus isn't cheap, and consumer-friendly finger-paint capacitive also isn't cheap to do well.
At that point, you basically have a laptop that costs $100 more than your identical model, for the delight of being able to smudge at a few bundleware applications because nobody does touch applications for windows...
As best I can tell, EFI was what happened when somebody looked upon the BIOS, saw that it sucked compared to the OS, and decided that(rather than building a new firmware aimed at getting into the OS as simply and quickly as possible) they would build a BIOS large enough to possess every vice of an operating system and leave implementation to the capable hands of the PC OEMs, whose dedication to software quality is legendar...
You crazy consumer, you. Next you'll be wanting to know your TPM's private endorsement key.
While nice, if true, to hear that OEMs will be doing (part of) what people would like to see(specifically, having an option to disable 'secure boot' is better than nothing; but what you really want is the option to do a keyfill with trusted keys of your choice: signed boot components make good sense, it's just not being able to choose who is trusted to sign them that is an issue); this article could hardly be any smarmier or less informative.
"In response to the FUD campaign of the freetards, I asked some PR people. Dell said 'yes', HP emitted word salad, AMI said that they would do whatever their customers felt like. Case Solved!" If it weren't for the smirking invective, the whole thing could have been boiled down to a single paragraph(or, heaven forfend, bulked out with technical information...)
My understanding is that btrfs has something in that vein. In the meantime, the ability to use FUSE opens some convenient options for special-case compression of specific areas of your system:
.zip still has to go somewhere, so this isn't really an FS for /; but if you have a giant pit of highly compressible material in a directory somewhere, replacing it with a fuse-zip is pretty simple.
fuse-zip, as its name suggests, lets you mount a zip archive as though it were a filesystem, giving arbitrary programs the ability to interact with the contents as though it were an ordinary FS, so no need for tool-specific zip support. The
There is alse FuseCompress, about which I know less...
The difficulty is that(while most compressed archives are supported) you run into the situation where either the tool you are using has to have the ad-hoc ability to operate on the contents of a given archive type, or you need to decompress somewhere temporary, operate, and then compress it back up. That is sort of annoying.
What you really want is something like http://code.google.com/p/fuse-zip/ Fuse-zip(ideally one with support for all common archives you are going to run into; but if this is just for your use it doesn't much matter: Because the zip archive becomes a FUSE-mounted filesystem location, all non-zip-aware programs will transparently operate on the contents of the archive without even knowing anything is different.
That Angry Birds has managed to achieve such popularity, even among mainstream non/casual gamers, without any of the media's paranoic talking heads getting worked up about it.
Let's be clear here, cutesy graphics and sounds aside, the game is about a bunch of birds, enraged at their dispossession by the pigs, launching martyrdom operations against the pigs and their infrastructure. You lose unless the pigs are exterminated and you get extra points for each infrastructure element destroyed. Surely that should have been enough for a hysterical article on the WorldNetDaily, or an ongoing conspiracy subthread over at freerepublic concerning the question of whether Angry Birds is objectively pro terror?
It is my understanding that copyright trolls are supposed to have their faces either branded or tattooed with a scarlet trollface to prevent them from blending in with real humans, and ensure that all mankind can avoid and revile them.
I'm assuming that any real money(if Righthaven wasn't itself the assetless shell company being used by the real money) will already have been snuck of the premises by various means, with nothing but a bunch of leased office furniture and a few cheap suits on site; but some days watching those who would crush others with the force of law having their stuff dumped into the street and sold off is just satisfying...
The cyclically-evicted members of the poor are all too familiar with the treatment; but we don't give it to the arrogant nearly as often as would be socially useful...
Why would you need a URL, just call you rep for a quote! We understand the internet!
Let's count - they have Xeon/Opteron, Itanium, and among their dead platforms, they have PA-RISC, Alpha (DEC/Compaq) and MIPS (Tandem/Compaq). What made them pick this for servers?
Would one be right in guessing that their Itanium based Integrity servers have been a disaster?
It is entirely possible that their Itanium units haven't been doing so hot(though, from what I've read, it's more of a 'small number of cost-insensitive customers' which is why neither HP nor intel can just shoot the program in the head; but why they can't seem to get it to expand and gain any economies of scale).
However, the fate of Itanium and the fate of this curious box should be almost 100% unconnected with one another: The two are about as different in design and intended workload as two servers could be.
The fact that they've special-magic-backplane-fabric-ed away all the other busses, while leaving each card bristling with SATA connectors, seems rather weird, just because that's a lot of headers to bring out if nobody is going to use them and it'll be a hell of a rat's nest if you actually try(could they really not have stretched their backplane fabric a little bit more, to include allocating direct attached storage to nodes across it?).
The use of SATA, though, seems reasonable enough, given the low-performance, low-cost, low-energy focus of the design. It just seems really weird that the connectors are on the cards, rather than their being a few high-density SAS connectors on the back, allowing you to either use an iSCSI device over the 10gigE ports or a big SATA/SAS cage directly cabled, with disks being farmed out over the backplane, rather than via internal SATA cabling...