My device had root and an unlocked loader within hours of purchase.
It has never had a major android upgrade.
Neither the foss community, the rom hack community, the carrier, nor the handset maker have released such a rom.
At the time, the device was comparable hardware wise to early galaxy handsets. It looked for all the world like the community would be able to support it with little effort as a windfall from supporting galaxy.
Also, for devices with low RAM, tell the user it will run like ass, then make a build that loads zram, puts a swap partition on the/dev/zram0 device, then turns swap on. That can cut ram consumption by system daemons by nearly 50%, if the block device is sized sensibly, ans swappiness is set sanely. Because zram is a compressed ramdisk block device, the swap operations just munch a bit of CPU, and are quite speedy. Turning it on is commonplace in community rom builds.
Personally, for devices with crippled rom capacity, I would be willing to have the basic kernel image with the sdcard and FS drivers in the rom, and have the rest of the android platform in a filesystem on the sdcard, mounted in with symbolic links.
Alternatives are things like cramfs enabled kernels with cramfs packed rom block devices.
This doesn't solve the actual problem in the handset world, especially with android.
That problem?
Closed source binary drivers for novelty features in specific handsets that are incompatible with newer android builds, due to improved/newer linux kernels being in them.
Take for instance, my horribly crippled, antique android device: SGH-T839 (Sidekick 4G)
This device runs Froyo, and has been officially abandoned by T-mobile and Samsung for almost 2 years now. It has a 1ghz hummingbird cpu, and approx 512mb of ram, of which about 300mb is useable for programs. It has a strange camera driver, to make use of both rear facing and front facing cameras, and a strange hardware keyboard driver.
It is otherwise very similar inside to an older galaxy based device.
The only roms in existence for this device are recooked images of the (bloated as hell) stock rom. There is no CM support. There is no official ICS upgrade, despite it being theoretically possible. Nada. This, despite the complete source for the kernel of the device being GPLed by samsung when they EOLed it, and said sources being publicly available.
The device had a root access ad bootloader unlocker within weeks of release.
This community patch is the only security fix I have been able to apply to this handset in a very long time.
IMHO, better option is to require handset makers to offer at least one major android revision upgrade per device lifecycle.
This device was born froyo, it will eventually die froyo. I would rather it die ICS. Most times, EOLed devices are physically capable of running the next higher android release, but the maker refuses to sink the development money. I would pay 50$ extra or more for having the garantee of getting the next major android release during the product lifespan. The handset makers don't see that their refusal to provide extended support in this fashion hurts their brands, and hurts the device ecosystem. All they see is "the next big thing!" On the horizon.
They don't want to "waste time" with "old, legacy devices" like mine. They are much more interested in selling me a brand new device, that they will EOL in 1 year.
How does "african american" in any fashion whatsoever, more accurately describe black americans and not the stereotype, as portrayed in this sentence:
"The prefferenial treatment of african americans in the college entrance examination has led to a sharp decline in student achievement."
The fundemental problem, is that "african americans" is too broad of a category to use here. The problem is that individuals of a specific subcultural group who adhere to certain anti-intellectual precepts perform less favorably than individuals not of that subcultural group, which happens to correlate very strongly with ethnicity. In this case, having "black" skin.
It makes the implicit assertion that all black people perform less favorably in academia than do members of other ethnicities. At most, its use of "african american" limits this to just people who can trace ancestry to africa at some point, who live inside the united states, as opposed to say, austrailian aboriginal peoples who migrate to the united states. (They cannot be "african" americans, but can be called "black" americans.) In that edge case, kudos.
However, if your goal is to not be exclusionary, which precise language is intrinsically (which is WHY it is precise to begin with), then "african american" is a bad choice.
Say for instance, this sentence:
"African americans are still finding it difficult to be represented as true equals in american society, and are still frequently selected against by employers and home owners when seeking employment and rental opportunities, in open defiance of equal opportunity and equal housing laws."
Do you mean this only applies to african americans, or do you mean it applies to people with black skin in general? If you mean the former, how do you segregate out the aboriginal heritage people with black skin from the study, and how do you account for the "african-ness" being a significant factor? If you mean the latter, why not use the words "black people"?
Things like this tell me straight up that your "precise communication" motive simply does not add up.
It is when said court is *secret*, the laws used by the court are *secret*, the verdicts reached by the courts are *secret*, and the punishments and actions encted by that court are *secret*.
To better understand, let's use an argumentum ad absurdium:
The secret court decided that anyone who wears blue, of any shade, is a terror suspect, because of intelligence that cells of terrorists are identifying each other based on wearing blue clothing. They keep this pronouncement in the strictest of confidences, lest the terrorists find out, and switch to earing pink.
Blue jeans are absurdly popular as casual wear in the USA. As such, "wearing blue" makes basically everyone into a terror suspect. Due dilligence requires the intelligene agencies, and secret intelligence courts to investigate and authorize said investigation, of basically everyone. False positives happen. It's life.
Robert Anyman, who lives at 421 maple street, gets unceremoniously arrested, by a secret court order, issued by the secret court, by secret police. He is prevented from exercising his right to counsel of his choosing, because the law he is being charged under is secret, and ordinary lawyers are not alowed to know such laws even exist, let alone what they say!
In the end, since nobody is allowed to check and impose oversight on this secret legal system, that legal system, and its enforcers, can do anything and arrest anyone they want, for any reason. They don't have to explain their actions, under grounds of national security.
That is why this is a very bad thing, and you should not buy into the sob story they are spinning about catching terrorists.
The act of trying to avoid being offensive, is, in and of itself, offensive to some people.
To whit, Linus Torvalds finds it offensive. QED.
This means that political correctness is fundementally faulted at its very conception, and can never be satisfied.
In the instances of verbal slurs, the creation of "inoffensive surrogates", as often tendered by political correctness advocates, simply shift the problem and do NOTHING to fix it. Take for instance, calling somebody stupid, vs calling them "mentally challenged". They mean the same thing, and are equally offensive.
Same with monikers for race; for instance, people with very dark skin of african origin:
Negro->colored->black->"african american"
The fact of the matter, is that using *any* term to draw attention to the skin color of a person, to distinguish a racially profiled stereotype, is equally offensive.
To whit,
"The prefferential treatment of african americans in the college entrance exams has led to a sharp decline in student achievement scores."
The sentence is just as offensive if you use "colored", "black", or any other colorful descriptor.
The same is true of descriptors for men who like to bang other men.
It isn't the words you say, it is the way you say them, that causes offense, but the PC crowd never gets this, and instead just comandeers word after word, after word, in its relentless and futile attempt to eradicate the intent behind those words. The result is that previously benign clinical terms like "homosexual" start to get lurid connotations, when previously they were absolved from those implications, because of words like "faggot". Deleting "faggot" from the dictionary does not make everyone stop harboring negative views about homosexual males. All it does is make a previousy useful word no longer useful, as all the malign implication of the slur gets transferred.
I would much rather have people shout about "faggots", and expose just what kind of people they are by its use, than have perfectly useful terms like "homosexual" corrupted, because of a fundamentally faulted worldview gone wild.
So, I side with Torvalds with this issue. Is his use of profanity reasonable? Probably not. Is his argument about why he needs to be allowed to use profanity when he feels necessary, perfectly rational and well founded? Absolutely.
Profanity is intended to convey beligerance. Deleting profanity does not make people have to resort to civility, it makes them coopt civilized language for profane use. Profanity serves a valid role in human communication. Stop trying to delete it. You can't.
The US would definately have gotten involved sooner or later, as hitler's ambitions were global in scope. Rather, my objection is that the US chose to do lipservice to the problem, claim neutrality and isolationism in one breath, and crank out weapons and goods for europe in the the next, when nobody was looking. If the USA was really as highminded in its ideals as it claims, it would have joined immediately, but as lindbergh points out, the UK and France knew full well that the US didn't care what their political predicaments were, and wanted to avoid involvement in yet another world war caused by political provacatures in europe. So, instead of preparing for a deadly battle of attrition, it chose to gear up in secret, and engage i n guerilla tactics, using uninvolvement as a smokescreen.
A tradition that has endured ever since.
These days, any peek behind that smokescreen at the real dirty deaing of american politicians and their interest groups, or the engines with whic they condct those affairs, such as the recent IRS and NSA scandals, is met with the harshest of resistences, and with outright smear campaigns, ad hominem attacks, and worse.
Note how the snowden incident's fallout has NOT been about what was revealed, but instead become a mockery of investigative jouralism, as story after story emerges about how snowden is holed up in a russian airport, and or, about how big of a traitor he is for making those dirty dealings known without room for denial.
Note also how the bengazi scandal has completely evaporated from the mainstream press. You know, the one where we knowingly sold anti-aircraft and other heavy weapons to "resistance fighters", who turned out to be terrorists?
Let's not forget how we practically dump AK47s into south america where they get sucked up by local drug lords and crime bosses like water into sponges.
The big thing that lindbergh was angry about was that the US govt was acting contrary to the people's will, was doing so in secret, and was openly abusing its powers in response to the upset caused by the war.
Whatever reasons the US may have had to do that in WW2, no longer matters. What matters now is the legacy created by that kind of disregard for the will of the american public, and the lessons about propoganda and seditious activities it taught to our government. Lessons further amplified by the cold war, and its ilk.
If the US govt wants to be an imperialist thug, I say they should be open and unabashed about it, rather than talking out their asses about how peace loving and compassionate they are about other cultures and the soveriegnty of other nations, because it gives truly peace loving nations a bad name.
Calling ourselves defenders of the free world, while simultaneously fomenting rebellion, attempting to assasinate foriegn officials, abusing our economic dominance to force one sided trade agreements, and systemically using "extraordinary rendition" tactics, is quite possibly the ultimate in hipocrisy.
I don't say these things because I hate america. I say it because I hate what america has become.
Instigation does not require the US to be the first to officially delcare. For instance, the US's involvement with the kurds in iraq, prior to declaring war on that country. It could have been just as likely that saddam would have filed first; doesn't mean the US didn't instigate the problem by passing out guns and missiles like icecream on a hot day.
First to officially declare != instigation. Insighting an upset in political circles that sews unrest and causes political upheval? Instigation.
By your metric, Eris didn't instigate anything by tossing her golden apples.
"Initiated formal conflict" is actually a nebulous condition to employ.
Take for instance, the US' involvement in the second world war. Prior to any formal induction into the war, the US was actively engaged in sending supplies, munitions, and other sundries to the UK and "her" allies, by misusing merchant and civilain transport vessels. The Lucitania was NOT an innocent casualty mistakenly sunk by the germans. There were weapons intended for europe on board, and it was clandestine.
Prior to the, the US was isolationist, and was not involved politically with europe in any really major fashion.
This passive aggressivenesds was likewise carried out in the pacific, which is why the japanese bombed pearl harbor. While not "formal conflict", the US was up to its eyeballs in informal conflict, and willfully was engaging in such.
Similar to today, where the BS of our NSA and our various corporate interests are influecing foriegn politics, causing issues with how we deal with diplomatic issues, and even how we go about humaitarian aid operations. The continued "interest seeking" in the middle east is another ripe example of these "informal conflicts" that predate the formal hostilities. Al queda itself has roots in such "informal" conflicts, having been created by actions by the US CIA during the cold war (which you blithely write off) to obstruct soviet expansion into the middle east. Similar to therecent bengazi scandal, we, the US, actually created and trained al queda. We only now are going after them, since they have gone rouge against us. The US is responsible for the Taliban.
As such, I find the "Formal conflict" requirement to be diversionary. The US is openly hostile to many governments without official declarations of hostility. That hostility and the bullying tactics employed, are why the USA has a reputation synonymous with mud (or dung, depending on whom you ask.)
"Protecting our interests" is not suitable grounds to interfere with a soveriegn government. The damned Nazi's used the same line of reasoning when they invaded poland.
In the past century (excluding the world wars), not in any particular order:
Korean war Vietnam war Cold War (Including all the BS associated, like the Bay of Pigs scandal) 1st Iraq war. ("operation desert shield, then Operation desert freedom, and pals) Ephemeral "War on Drugs" (cough) Afghanistan war Second Iraq war (to depose Houssain) Ephemeral "War on Terror" (cough)
*IF* those were evenly divided up for time, that is 1 war every 10 years.
And I am SURE I left out all kinds of shenanigans by my country that doesn't get such big press.
The reason for this is pretty simple: Our constitution makes it REALLY hard to justify having a standing, 24/7 military force without a formal declaration of war in effect. That is why our government keeps declaring war, OFFICIALLY, on things you can't really make war on. Like drugs, and terror.
The US's economic infrastructure is built around warfare, and has been since the restructure from the great depression, when we entered the second world war. Aircraft industry? Offshoot of military aircraft expenditures. (In fact, military contracts are more lucrative, and are what drive down costs for consumer craft) Automotive is the same--- And, anymore, it is getting that way with software too. Even Hollywood has deep roots with the US wartime propaganda machine.
I live in the USA, but I am not so deluded to believe that this is a "Peaceful nation". The residents may be more or less peaceful, but the nation is certainly anything but.
1) social darwinism is full of shit, but that doesn't mean that failure to reward excellence has no penalty. Like all things in philosophy, it isn't a boolean property. Treating it like one results in the current educational clusterfuck. Not everyone can be Dr Feinman. Sabotaging the people that could be by removing any sense of accomplishment through dilution actively discourages them from reaching their potentials. Instead, it is OK to be less than Dr. Feinman. You don't *have* to be the absolute best, just do the best you yourself are capable of. The problem here, is that uniformity is being demanded from an intrinsically heterogenous substance. It can't be done; instead, you have people redefining the terms, until all subjects appear homogenous. It's a lie. A lie that gets exposed the moment those kids enter the real world. It is a lie that does them a terrible disservice.
2) white, non-hispanic
3) does have alcohol intolerance.
4) industrial draftsman and CNC programmer.
5) you incorrectly assert that I am against social wellfare for people that simply can't provide for themselves. We might disagree where that line gets drawn, but we do not disagree that social welfare is vital to a large and cosmopolitan society that values public health and safety. By definition, such financial assistance to such persons is a negative income tax.
The issue I have, is that a home-built coherent laser light source and a potato battery at the school science fair get the same "A". They aren't even in the same league. There must be a penalty for failing to try, if you want people to actually succeed. Potato battery kid probably did the best they could, but it isn't the very best there is. They should get a high B, at best. Lying to them, and leading them to think that they can compete with laser boy in the cuthroat world of academia is flat out irresponsible. If potato boy wants to compete with laser boy, it gives him something to strive to accomplish. But, to prove the accomplishment, the grading cannot be rigged in his favor. If he succeeds in competing with laser boy by buildng a homebrew farnsworth fuser next year? He just won the prize, and his pride is well earned.
Academia doesn't care about things like people's feelings. It cares only about objective quality of the work done. Making kids think mediocre work is excellent work, by hiding the line and shifting the curve, only leads them up to a cliff, and pushes them over the side. Science is heartless, and cruel. It doesn't care how hard you worked. Either your theory is useful, or it isn't. Either you make papers worth publishing, or you wash up as a scientist.
Reality is not fair. That is the objective truth. Trying to cast it as anything otherwise is magical thinking.
I actually found college to be delightfully refreshing.
In highschool, the teacher staff has a kind of "paranoia" about students failing, due to the inseperable link between the school's federal funding, and their performance on standardized test scores.
As a result, highschool teachers institute a LOT of unnecessary bloat in their curriculum. Like those fucking "agenda books". I spent more time putting bullshit in that fucker than I did doing actual school work, so that I could then document doing school work. There was even a percenage of the grade for the year assigned to how well you complied with the paper pushing!
College? Straight up, the instructor really just does not fucking care if you studied or not. He doesn't care how you studied, if you took notes or not, how long you studied, or who you studied with. He doesn't even care how well you do on the test. You already paid to be there, and if you fuck up, it's no skin off his back. I FUCKING LOVED THAT.
I didn't have constant naggng over inane clerical bullshit, didn't have the "no child left behind!" Nanny philosophy to saddle me with other people's problems to try and float their test scores, nada. Just me, the lectures, the textbook, the assignments, and the tests. It was glorious. How well I did was directly tied to how much effort I put into understanding the material, and not on how well I filled out forms documenting the time I spent studying, and other such insanities.
The "I didn't have to even try in highschool!" Line is, in my opinion, EXACTLY the problem. How can you ever HOPE to be successful, if you don't even try? And, for those that DO try, if there is no tangible benefit for the effort? What does that teach them about expending said effort?
You go to school to learn. Education does not make somebody smarter. It gives a person the tools to use to effectively employ the smarts they already have.
My message for educators? (Specifically, highschool educators--)
Stop trying to fix the problem of poor student performance with ever increasing layers of beaurocracy. Are you trying to teach children how to do algebra, or how to fill out attendence forms? Are you concerned with giving a quality educational OPPORTUNITY, or are you concerned about what the feds THINK about your employer?
The very word "achievement" implies that an obstacle has been overcome; that the expenditure of effort has occured, and that through that exercise, something of value has been gained. If you cook the books with beaurocratic bullshit to inflate group test scores, and in so doing, REWARD LAZINESS, your students don't achieve anything, and those that put forth actual effort, do not get rewarded for it.
Rather than roll over, and blithely accept the "on high" orders from people who are clearly ignorant of anything even remotely connected to effective education, (like capitulating to the "no child left behind" bullshit), use your union for something actually fucking constructive for a change, and demand better policies from the feds instead of pay raises.
Covering up the problem by wrapping it up in fluffy feelgood bullshit does NOT help children to succeed. It sets them up to fail. Lying to kids for 12 years, and pushing them through the system instead of making them actually earn their grades, out of some misguided belief that if they do bad, it will break their little hearts instead of wake them the fuck up, is exactly why this happens at the university level. What do you suppose finding out that you lied to them for 12 years does to their self esteem? The competency fairy doesn't come visit them after their senior year you know.
Somebody didn't pay very close attention, did they? I *clearly* stated that my hand is on the MOUSE, and NOT the keyboard. As such, taking my hands OFF the mouse, so I can put them on the keyboard, is just as deleterious as asking you to take your hands off the keyboard, and onto the mouse.
Let's say I use calculator a lot. I mean A LOT. But, I don't want to put a quick launch button down, because the group policy enforced by my employer locks that thing down tighter than a nun's cunt, prevents it from being resized, enforces that certain things be in it, etc.
The win7 start menu keeps track what what I launch from it frequently, and puts quick links in for those applications, waaaaaaaaaay above the demonized 'all programs' area. I DON'T HAVE TO MANAGE THIS LIST. It is simply populated with what I most frequently invoke. Thus, to start calulator, it is literally: START->Calculator.
TWO CLICKS.
TWO.
Moreover, the software I use TO DO MY JOB, makes very heavy use of the mouse. Letting go of the mouse, so I can type "calc.exe" into the wild blue void is measurably less productive for my use case.
STOP INSISTING THAT ALL USERS ARE DATA ENTRY DRONES.
Moreover? YES, I *HAVE* used windows 8. Know what? It is counter productive to the workflow paradigm of the software I use, because it requires me to let go of the goddamn mouse, and type shit.
Know what else? I use notepad to look at the generated NC code I produce to make sure the toolpaths I am making are generating sane results, ad guess what? Windows 8 tries to make fucking notepad full screen! BULLSHIT, I just need it as a teeny little window to scroll through, jackasses!
I fucking hate the "why are you afraid of change!? Are you some kind of luddite?! You're a luddite aren't you?1 yeah, You're a Luddite if you don't like the new formerly-known-as-metro UI paradigm, because it is new, and the old way is old, and if you like old, and not new, then you are a luddite!" Circular reasoning bullshit. No, I dislike the new windows 8 UI because it fucking sucks for what I do for a living, gets in my way, slows me the fuck down, and invokes assholes to character assasinate me (and others in my boat) when we say we DON'T WANT the windows 8 UI paradigm on the desktop!
Is it so fucking hard to understand that NOT EVERYONE uses the keyboard the way you do, and that this is NOT a case of "idiots at the wheel"? That perhaps, the mouse is a legitimate input device, and not something to arrogantly scorn, since it has real, legitimate uses in graphical design that fucking keyboard shortcut keys will *NEVER* be able to replace?
Of course not. It is just easier to measure everyone else as being whiners, and not having legitimate complaints, because that makes you feel better without having to actually acknowledge wrongdoing, character assasinate them as luddites who are afraid of change, and arrogantly (and ignorantly) assert that they should just use the keyboard instead of the mouse anyway, "because it's faster".
Yeah buddy, try selecting NC geometry to drive 5 axis toolpaths on using the tab key. I fucking dare ya to, and to show how much faster it is. Because it fucking isn't. There are operations you can't even DO without a goddamn mouse in this software, for god's sake!
"Well, just use different software then!" You arrogantly chortle-- Not an option bitches, its mandated by contract agreements what softwares are allowed. Besides, more "open" offerings just don't have the functionality anyway.
Can you do what you do faster with metro by using the keyboard? Quite possibly. That isn't what is being argued.
What is being argued is that what *I* do with the computer is greatly hobbled by metro's hamfisted bullshit, and I have legitimate complaints about it that are fundamentaly intractable by anything other than reverting the changes.
That is why my employer, and our partners we do work for, DON'T USE WIN8.
What would have bee the POLITE thing to do? Turn on metro by default allright, but make it truly optional-- GIVE US A WAY TO TURN IT OFF.
But no, the response we had shoved down our throats so hard that our asses bled?
"Metro is the future! Its faster and better, and the old way is old, and if you don't like it, tha
A wii can drive at 480p. While certainly not HD, it *is* progressive scan, and that *does* make a difference.
Where I live, I can't realistically stream an HD stream anyway. My hacked Wii was a solid investment, and I have many hours logged on it. (And yes, I bought it specifically to hack it. Eat it nintendo. Your many attempts to kill HBC and kill custom IOSes have all met in failure.)
I may consider ordering an Ouya. I don't need another console to emulate other, older, consoles with. (I have the Wii for that. Works great with the classic controller. There's even a port of dosbox for the wii, that pretty faithfully keeps up with an emulation of a 486DX2/50, and a port of the Frodo c64 emulator that works well.) I would get it as something to tinker with, and play indie titles on. The open nature of the console and OS underneath means plenty of interesting potential for tinkering.
As an american (and probably on the NSA watchlist for being 'suspicious' for not drinking the 'kill snowden, rah rah rah!' Koolaid) let me be quite open, honest, and frank here.
You should not trust my nation to do anything but fuck yours up. Our number one and number two exports are bad foriegn policy legislation, and military munitions (as in, shots fired, not sold.)
The time where you cannot trust the firmware in your equipment happened a long time ago. The need for fully auditable software has never been greater. Do not trust my government. They are snakes and liars, looking to swallow you whole, or numb you with their poisonous PR, like they have so many of my countrymen already.
Europe isn't much better off at the moment, having already drank our koolaid, but most of you populace aren't drooling idiots that think exposing the government's dirty dealings is an act of treason, and honestly hold the opinion that their interests are the givernment's interests. As such, if you and your fellow citizens of EU countries act quickly, you can circumvent the bullshit by refusing to drink any more koolaid, and ousting koolaid pushers fromm office. That should be the single biggest red flag ever: if the politician pushes koolaid for US interests, vote them out. Don't question the choice. Just do it. (The koolaid poisoning is so bad here, that I will certainly attract the attention of a few of the addled addicts with just this message alone.)
If you buy equipment from a US firm, treat it like a spy bug. Either wipe the firmware and install auditable 3rd party programming, or isolate and monitor it religiously.
When presented with a choice to buy open standards based equipment, always go for the open standards. Don't get suckered in by "support contracts" and the like. If you have to build your routers and run linux on them yourself, so be it. The vacuum for quality, and auditable open standard hardware in your market will create business opportunities for your own companies to satisfy, and if they hold true to those ideals, they will get business elsewhere as well.
(And for you koolaid drinkers: as long as the "US's interests" run counter to US principles, I will always, and without reservation, steer people away from such interests, because my interests are for a free and healthy US, not a wealthy despotic and totalitarian one built on lies. I won't trade my principles for money or comfort. You should be ashamed to have done such a thing.)
I apologize for the highly tangental nature of the OP. It just bothers me greatly that there is such an omnipresent data collection and sieving aparatus actively at work, and that the support for companies to jump into that pool comes directly from governments lusting for such big data.
(Quantas represents a feast of big data for the AU govt, and just a court order away. It's outsourced costs in action! As such, they have exactly ZERO real motivation to tell quantas to go hump a stump, like they should be doing.)
Making it impossible for that big data collection to even happen on a scale that would be useful (you can't easily break encryption whe the key changes with each and every datagram in a genuinely random manner. This means attacks like rainbow tables and the like, or other technical faults in the encryption method itself won't reveal enough information to decode useful amounts of information, and the computational burdens of trying to process big data under those conditions would be too large, even for the NSA. Quantum keypairs represent *real* random one time pads for each and every datagram.) Removes the incentive the government has to allow private companies to be data aggregators like this.
In order for public adoption to take off for something like that, the secure transaction mode must be silent, and also be the default mode of operation, in addition to being ubiquitous. As long as "all data free and clear!" Is the industry default, encrypted data will always remain an outlier.
*preface: I know you can't send data using entanglement. That isn't what this does. Coments along that bent aren't welcome.
Recently, experiments have shown that distance isn't a factor for entangled photons, nor is linear time. This means that a small device for entangling a few photons with a similar device at a remote host, can permit immdiate knowledge of man in the middle attempts, if the entangled samples are used as a cryptographic feature.
Basically, it's just another IC that you add to the NIC. When two hosts wish to enter a secure communication, they begin asynchronous entanglement attempts to create a correlated, random data set on which to encode the data portion of their messages to and from each other. It may take several attempts to arrive at a handshake. Once the correlated random sample is generated, the entanglement is propogated locally in the chip(s) with additional quantum bits, which is how the encode/decode pad changes and stays synchronized with each datagram. A man in the middle will hear only noise.
In light of the NSA bullshit, and other insanity lately, there is a real and present need for a technology like this.
It won't fix the "I'm with stupid!" Problem of installing the quantas toolbar, but it would go a long way on curtailing omnipresent goverment espionage.
Improper application of government secret ratings, results in dilution of meaning for those designations.
To wit:
General Cockgobbler has a serious sex addiction problem, and routinely has hookers, callgirls, and outright sluts in his quarters and office on a regular basis, and even uses goverment expense accounts to pay for his addiction, and for sexual products involved in his trysts. Because it would be an astounding scandal, all expenses related to his sexual appeties are locked up as a state secrets.
Now, somebody has the undesirable job of processing General Cockgobbler's expenses, and of commuting his orders for prostitutes. This is not a job for a high ranking official; this is what disposable underlings are for. Thus, disposable underlings get assigned top secret clearance, so they can perform their "jobs".
If this happens often enough, the REAL top secret data is heavily outmatched by the number of "embarasing" datapoints, and the number o disposale underlings with access to strictly dangerous data becomes very top heavy. It eventually becomes too expensive to exercise proper oversight. Dilution accomplished.
When developing a product, one should attempt to anticipate points of failure, and incorporate failsafes and safety systems into the design to make it fail gracefully, instead of spectacularly. For example, if the function you just made deals with input from an outside module in the form of a pointer, it is simply prudent to sanity check the inputs when that function fires to ensure that it hasn't been fed a null pointer. If designing an electrical system that absolutely, positively must have the polarity right on the power feed, (say, it has high voltages and lytic capacitors involved), then make the power connector physically impossible to get flipped over.
These are simple things that are clearly aparent on design time, and can be incorporated on the beta of the project.
Dealing with unforseeable situations, like "use on systems with both MesaGL and vendor proprietary openGL libraries installed causes erronious and unpredictable behavior" (because the proprietary driver does a SneakyDumbTrick() that is completely off spec, and is part of the vendor's secret sauce, and expects only its own libraries installed and expects such nonstandard behaviors from other parts of the opengl implementation, which the standards compliant mesa lib just doesn't do, causing [crazy_shit] to happen when the proprietary lib calls part of the mesa lib for service, due to the heterogenous install), that kind of thing simply can't really be predicted, because the developer/engineer can't read minds, and know in advance what kinds of shennanigans can happen there. As such, it can only be dealt with after it has happened before.
"Ditzy soccermom drives off with pump handle still in tank" is the former kind of problem. "Aluminum bearing races, coupled with steel ball bearings, and bearing lubricant under high vibrational environments with lots of ambient particulate matter in the environment leads to rapid deterioration of bearing race as particulates accumulate in lubricant, erode the race, and cause runaway deterioration, enhanced by chatter from the vibration" on a bearing that was designed for a clean and sealed environment and for minimal weight with low noise is the latter.
If you try to think of every possible thing that can ever possibly go wrong, and design your systems that way, you are not a very good engineer. Likewise, if you put your head in the ground, and ignore the fact that the product will be used in ways and environments other than the perfectly ideal conditions for operation, and end up making a very fragile product, you likewise aren't a very good engineer.
The secret sauce is dealing with all the low hanging fruit on the potential problems sides of things, and then responding to real world deployments in an iterative manner later. Realworld deployments may have you finding your software running in a configuration you would never have even dreamed of, and may in fact, be very frequently employed that way, because of other silly requirements of the real world. That's where iterative design changes come in.
Gas&Go Gladdys at the gaspump is a low hanging fruit. So are things like gas cutoffs on furnaces, and the like. A furnace that doesn't check that the pilot light is lit using a thermocoupler is simply poorly designed. The engineer should have dealt with that low hanging fruit before houses started blowing up. Etc. Low hanging fruit are things that are clearly obvious at design time.
Arguing "you have to think of *EVERYTHING!*" will end up with your product having so many failsafes in it that is prohibitively expensive to build (either has lots of expensive physical parts that should never actually activate during normal use, and are there only to deal with a hypothetical problem that in practice, never happens, or has more input sanity check code than the function itself, and suffers performance bottlenecks looking for exceptions that never actually happen in practice.). Arguing "No its an iterative process exclusively!" M
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My device had root and an unlocked loader within hours of purchase.
It has never had a major android upgrade.
Neither the foss community, the rom hack community, the carrier, nor the handset maker have released such a rom.
At the time, the device was comparable hardware wise to early galaxy handsets. It looked for all the world like the community would be able to support it with little effort as a windfall from supporting galaxy.
Turns out that wasn't the case.
Also, for devices with low RAM, tell the user it will run like ass, then make a build that loads zram, puts a swap partition on the /dev/zram0 device, then turns swap on. That can cut ram consumption by system daemons by nearly 50%, if the block device is sized sensibly, ans swappiness is set sanely. Because zram is a compressed ramdisk block device, the swap operations just munch a bit of CPU, and are quite speedy. Turning it on is commonplace in community rom builds.
Personally, for devices with crippled rom capacity, I would be willing to have the basic kernel image with the sdcard and FS drivers in the rom, and have the rest of the android platform in a filesystem on the sdcard, mounted in with symbolic links.
Alternatives are things like cramfs enabled kernels with cramfs packed rom block devices.
This doesn't solve the actual problem in the handset world, especially with android.
That problem?
Closed source binary drivers for novelty features in specific handsets that are incompatible with newer android builds, due to improved/newer linux kernels being in them.
Take for instance, my horribly crippled, antique android device:
SGH-T839 (Sidekick 4G)
This device runs Froyo, and has been officially abandoned by T-mobile and Samsung for almost 2 years now. It has a 1ghz hummingbird cpu, and approx 512mb of ram, of which about 300mb is useable for programs. It has a strange camera driver, to make use of both rear facing and front facing cameras, and a strange hardware keyboard driver.
It is otherwise very similar inside to an older galaxy based device.
The only roms in existence for this device are recooked images of the (bloated as hell) stock rom. There is no CM support. There is no official ICS upgrade, despite it being theoretically possible. Nada. This, despite the complete source for the kernel of the device being GPLed by samsung when they EOLed it, and said sources being publicly available.
The device had a root access ad bootloader unlocker within weeks of release.
This community patch is the only security fix I have been able to apply to this handset in a very long time.
IMHO, better option is to require handset makers to offer at least one major android revision upgrade per device lifecycle.
This device was born froyo, it will eventually die froyo. I would rather it die ICS. Most times, EOLed devices are physically capable of running the next higher android release, but the maker refuses to sink the development money. I would pay 50$ extra or more for having the garantee of getting the next major android release during the product lifespan. The handset makers don't see that their refusal to provide extended support in this fashion hurts their brands, and hurts the device ecosystem. All they see is "the next big thing!" On the horizon.
They don't want to "waste time" with "old, legacy devices" like mine. They are much more interested in selling me a brand new device, that they will EOL in 1 year.
How does "african american" in any fashion whatsoever, more accurately describe black americans and not the stereotype, as portrayed in this sentence:
"The prefferenial treatment of african americans in the college entrance examination has led to a sharp decline in student achievement."
The fundemental problem, is that "african americans" is too broad of a category to use here. The problem is that individuals of a specific subcultural group who adhere to certain anti-intellectual precepts perform less favorably than individuals not of that subcultural group, which happens to correlate very strongly with ethnicity. In this case, having "black" skin.
It makes the implicit assertion that all black people perform less favorably in academia than do members of other ethnicities. At most, its use of "african american" limits this to just people who can trace ancestry to africa at some point, who live inside the united states, as opposed to say, austrailian aboriginal peoples who migrate to the united states. (They cannot be "african" americans, but can be called "black" americans.) In that edge case, kudos.
However, if your goal is to not be exclusionary, which precise language is intrinsically (which is WHY it is precise to begin with), then "african american" is a bad choice.
Say for instance, this sentence:
"African americans are still finding it difficult to be represented as true equals in american society, and are still frequently selected against by employers and home owners when seeking employment and rental opportunities, in open defiance of equal opportunity and equal housing laws."
Do you mean this only applies to african americans, or do you mean it applies to people with black skin in general? If you mean the former, how do you segregate out the aboriginal heritage people with black skin from the study, and how do you account for the "african-ness" being a significant factor? If you mean the latter, why not use the words "black people"?
Things like this tell me straight up that your "precise communication" motive simply does not add up.
It is when said court is *secret*, the laws used by the court are *secret*, the verdicts reached by the courts are *secret*, and the punishments and actions encted by that court are *secret*.
To better understand, let's use an argumentum ad absurdium:
The secret court decided that anyone who wears blue, of any shade, is a terror suspect, because of intelligence that cells of terrorists are identifying each other based on wearing blue clothing. They keep this pronouncement in the strictest of confidences, lest the terrorists find out, and switch to earing pink.
Blue jeans are absurdly popular as casual wear in the USA. As such, "wearing blue" makes basically everyone into a terror suspect. Due dilligence requires the intelligene agencies, and secret intelligence courts to investigate and authorize said investigation, of basically everyone. False positives happen. It's life.
Robert Anyman, who lives at 421 maple street, gets unceremoniously arrested, by a secret court order, issued by the secret court, by secret police. He is prevented from exercising his right to counsel of his choosing, because the law he is being charged under is secret, and ordinary lawyers are not alowed to know such laws even exist, let alone what they say!
In the end, since nobody is allowed to check and impose oversight on this secret legal system, that legal system, and its enforcers, can do anything and arrest anyone they want, for any reason. They don't have to explain their actions, under grounds of national security.
That is why this is a very bad thing, and you should not buy into the sob story they are spinning about catching terrorists.
This is the problem with "political correctness":
The act of trying to avoid being offensive, is, in and of itself, offensive to some people.
To whit, Linus Torvalds finds it offensive. QED.
This means that political correctness is fundementally faulted at its very conception, and can never be satisfied.
In the instances of verbal slurs, the creation of "inoffensive surrogates", as often tendered by political correctness advocates, simply shift the problem and do NOTHING to fix it. Take for instance, calling somebody stupid, vs calling them "mentally challenged". They mean the same thing, and are equally offensive.
Same with monikers for race; for instance, people with very dark skin of african origin:
Negro->colored->black->"african american"
The fact of the matter, is that using *any* term to draw attention to the skin color of a person, to distinguish a racially profiled stereotype, is equally offensive.
To whit,
"The prefferential treatment of african americans in the college entrance exams has led to a sharp decline in student achievement scores."
The sentence is just as offensive if you use "colored", "black", or any other colorful descriptor.
The same is true of descriptors for men who like to bang other men.
"Effeminate"->'poofter'->queer->gay->"homosexual male"
It isn't the words you say, it is the way you say them, that causes offense, but the PC crowd never gets this, and instead just comandeers word after word, after word, in its relentless and futile attempt to eradicate the intent behind those words. The result is that previously benign clinical terms like "homosexual" start to get lurid connotations, when previously they were absolved from those implications, because of words like "faggot". Deleting "faggot" from the dictionary does not make everyone stop harboring negative views about homosexual males. All it does is make a previousy useful word no longer useful, as all the malign implication of the slur gets transferred.
I would much rather have people shout about "faggots", and expose just what kind of people they are by its use, than have perfectly useful terms like "homosexual" corrupted, because of a fundamentally faulted worldview gone wild.
So, I side with Torvalds with this issue. Is his use of profanity reasonable? Probably not. Is his argument about why he needs to be allowed to use profanity when he feels necessary, perfectly rational and well founded? Absolutely.
Profanity is intended to convey beligerance. Deleting profanity does not make people have to resort to civility, it makes them coopt civilized language for profane use. Profanity serves a valid role in human communication. Stop trying to delete it. You can't.
I presume you mean this.
The US would definately have gotten involved sooner or later, as hitler's ambitions were global in scope. Rather, my objection is that the US chose to do lipservice to the problem, claim neutrality and isolationism in one breath, and crank out weapons and goods for europe in the the next, when nobody was looking. If the USA was really as highminded in its ideals as it claims, it would have joined immediately, but as lindbergh points out, the UK and France knew full well that the US didn't care what their political predicaments were, and wanted to avoid involvement in yet another world war caused by political provacatures in europe. So, instead of preparing for a deadly battle of attrition, it chose to gear up in secret, and engage i n guerilla tactics, using uninvolvement as a smokescreen.
A tradition that has endured ever since.
These days, any peek behind that smokescreen at the real dirty deaing of american politicians and their interest groups, or the engines with whic they condct those affairs, such as the recent IRS and NSA scandals, is met with the harshest of resistences, and with outright smear campaigns, ad hominem attacks, and worse.
Note how the snowden incident's fallout has NOT been about what was revealed, but instead become a mockery of investigative jouralism, as story after story emerges about how snowden is holed up in a russian airport, and or, about how big of a traitor he is for making those dirty dealings known without room for denial.
Note also how the bengazi scandal has completely evaporated from the mainstream press. You know, the one where we knowingly sold anti-aircraft and other heavy weapons to "resistance fighters", who turned out to be terrorists?
Let's not forget how we practically dump AK47s into south america where they get sucked up by local drug lords and crime bosses like water into sponges.
The big thing that lindbergh was angry about was that the US govt was acting contrary to the people's will, was doing so in secret, and was openly abusing its powers in response to the upset caused by the war.
Whatever reasons the US may have had to do that in WW2, no longer matters. What matters now is the legacy created by that kind of disregard for the will of the american public, and the lessons about propoganda and seditious activities it taught to our government. Lessons further amplified by the cold war, and its ilk.
If the US govt wants to be an imperialist thug, I say they should be open and unabashed about it, rather than talking out their asses about how peace loving and compassionate they are about other cultures and the soveriegnty of other nations, because it gives truly peace loving nations a bad name.
Calling ourselves defenders of the free world, while simultaneously fomenting rebellion, attempting to assasinate foriegn officials, abusing our economic dominance to force one sided trade agreements, and systemically using "extraordinary rendition" tactics, is quite possibly the ultimate in hipocrisy.
I don't say these things because I hate america. I say it because I hate what america has become.
Instigation does not require the US to be the first to officially delcare. For instance, the US's involvement with the kurds in iraq, prior to declaring war on that country. It could have been just as likely that saddam would have filed first; doesn't mean the US didn't instigate the problem by passing out guns and missiles like icecream on a hot day.
First to officially declare != instigation. Insighting an upset in political circles that sews unrest and causes political upheval? Instigation.
By your metric, Eris didn't instigate anything by tossing her golden apples.
"Initiated formal conflict" is actually a nebulous condition to employ.
Take for instance, the US' involvement in the second world war. Prior to any formal induction into the war, the US was actively engaged in sending supplies, munitions, and other sundries to the UK and "her" allies, by misusing merchant and civilain transport vessels. The Lucitania was NOT an innocent casualty mistakenly sunk by the germans. There were weapons intended for europe on board, and it was clandestine.
Prior to the, the US was isolationist, and was not involved politically with europe in any really major fashion.
This passive aggressivenesds was likewise carried out in the pacific, which is why the japanese bombed pearl harbor. While not "formal conflict", the US was up to its eyeballs in informal conflict, and willfully was engaging in such.
Similar to today, where the BS of our NSA and our various corporate interests are influecing foriegn politics, causing issues with how we deal with diplomatic issues, and even how we go about humaitarian aid operations. The continued "interest seeking" in the middle east is another ripe example of these "informal conflicts" that predate the formal hostilities. Al queda itself has roots in such "informal" conflicts, having been created by actions by the US CIA during the cold war (which you blithely write off) to obstruct soviet expansion into the middle east. Similar to therecent bengazi scandal, we, the US, actually created and trained al queda. We only now are going after them, since they have gone rouge against us. The US is responsible for the Taliban.
As such, I find the "Formal conflict" requirement to be diversionary. The US is openly hostile to many governments without official declarations of hostility. That hostility and the bullying tactics employed, are why the USA has a reputation synonymous with mud (or dung, depending on whom you ask.)
"Protecting our interests" is not suitable grounds to interfere with a soveriegn government. The damned Nazi's used the same line of reasoning when they invaded poland.
In the past century (excluding the world wars), not in any particular order:
Korean war
Vietnam war
Cold War (Including all the BS associated, like the Bay of Pigs scandal)
1st Iraq war. ("operation desert shield, then Operation desert freedom, and pals)
Ephemeral "War on Drugs" (cough)
Afghanistan war
Second Iraq war (to depose Houssain)
Ephemeral "War on Terror" (cough)
*IF* those were evenly divided up for time, that is 1 war every 10 years.
And I am SURE I left out all kinds of shenanigans by my country that doesn't get such big press.
The reason for this is pretty simple: Our constitution makes it REALLY hard to justify having a standing, 24/7 military force without a formal declaration of war in effect. That is why our government keeps declaring war, OFFICIALLY, on things you can't really make war on. Like drugs, and terror.
The US's economic infrastructure is built around warfare, and has been since the restructure from the great depression, when we entered the second world war. Aircraft industry? Offshoot of military aircraft expenditures. (In fact, military contracts are more lucrative, and are what drive down costs for consumer craft) Automotive is the same--- And, anymore, it is getting that way with software too. Even Hollywood has deep roots with the US wartime propaganda machine.
I live in the USA, but I am not so deluded to believe that this is a "Peaceful nation". The residents may be more or less peaceful, but the nation is certainly anything but.
Maybe she was a grammar nazi?
They're VS their, and all that. :D
Wrong on nearly all counts.
1) social darwinism is full of shit, but that doesn't mean that failure to reward excellence has no penalty. Like all things in philosophy, it isn't a boolean property. Treating it like one results in the current educational clusterfuck. Not everyone can be Dr Feinman. Sabotaging the people that could be by removing any sense of accomplishment through dilution actively discourages them from reaching their potentials. Instead, it is OK to be less than Dr. Feinman. You don't *have* to be the absolute best, just do the best you yourself are capable of. The problem here, is that uniformity is being demanded from an intrinsically heterogenous substance. It can't be done; instead, you have people redefining the terms, until all subjects appear homogenous. It's a lie. A lie that gets exposed the moment those kids enter the real world. It is a lie that does them a terrible disservice.
2) white, non-hispanic
3) does have alcohol intolerance.
4) industrial draftsman and CNC programmer.
5) you incorrectly assert that I am against social wellfare for people that simply can't provide for themselves. We might disagree where that line gets drawn, but we do not disagree that social welfare is vital to a large and cosmopolitan society that values public health and safety. By definition, such financial assistance to such persons is a negative income tax.
The issue I have, is that a home-built coherent laser light source and a potato battery at the school science fair get the same "A". They aren't even in the same league. There must be a penalty for failing to try, if you want people to actually succeed. Potato battery kid probably did the best they could, but it isn't the very best there is. They should get a high B, at best. Lying to them, and leading them to think that they can compete with laser boy in the cuthroat world of academia is flat out irresponsible. If potato boy wants to compete with laser boy, it gives him something to strive to accomplish. But, to prove the accomplishment, the grading cannot be rigged in his favor. If he succeeds in competing with laser boy by buildng a homebrew farnsworth fuser next year? He just won the prize, and his pride is well earned.
Academia doesn't care about things like people's feelings. It cares only about objective quality of the work done. Making kids think mediocre work is excellent work, by hiding the line and shifting the curve, only leads them up to a cliff, and pushes them over the side. Science is heartless, and cruel. It doesn't care how hard you worked. Either your theory is useful, or it isn't. Either you make papers worth publishing, or you wash up as a scientist.
Reality is not fair. That is the objective truth. Trying to cast it as anything otherwise is magical thinking.
I actually found college to be delightfully refreshing.
In highschool, the teacher staff has a kind of "paranoia" about students failing, due to the inseperable link between the school's federal funding, and their performance on standardized test scores.
As a result, highschool teachers institute a LOT of unnecessary bloat in their curriculum. Like those fucking "agenda books". I spent more time putting bullshit in that fucker than I did doing actual school work, so that I could then document doing school work. There was even a percenage of the grade for the year assigned to how well you complied with the paper pushing!
College? Straight up, the instructor really just does not fucking care if you studied or not. He doesn't care how you studied, if you took notes or not, how long you studied, or who you studied with. He doesn't even care how well you do on the test. You already paid to be there, and if you fuck up, it's no skin off his back. I FUCKING LOVED THAT.
I didn't have constant naggng over inane clerical bullshit, didn't have the "no child left behind!" Nanny philosophy to saddle me with other people's problems to try and float their test scores, nada. Just me, the lectures, the textbook, the assignments, and the tests. It was glorious. How well I did was directly tied to how much effort I put into understanding the material, and not on how well I filled out forms documenting the time I spent studying, and other such insanities.
The "I didn't have to even try in highschool!" Line is, in my opinion, EXACTLY the problem. How can you ever HOPE to be successful, if you don't even try? And, for those that DO try, if there is no tangible benefit for the effort? What does that teach them about expending said effort?
You go to school to learn. Education does not make somebody smarter. It gives a person the tools to use to effectively employ the smarts they already have.
My message for educators? (Specifically, highschool educators--)
Stop trying to fix the problem of poor student performance with ever increasing layers of beaurocracy. Are you trying to teach children how to do algebra, or how to fill out attendence forms? Are you concerned with giving a quality educational OPPORTUNITY, or are you concerned about what the feds THINK about your employer?
The very word "achievement" implies that an obstacle has been overcome; that the expenditure of effort has occured, and that through that exercise, something of value has been gained. If you cook the books with beaurocratic bullshit to inflate group test scores, and in so doing, REWARD LAZINESS, your students don't achieve anything, and those that put forth actual effort, do not get rewarded for it.
Rather than roll over, and blithely accept the "on high" orders from people who are clearly ignorant of anything even remotely connected to effective education, (like capitulating to the "no child left behind" bullshit), use your union for something actually fucking constructive for a change, and demand better policies from the feds instead of pay raises.
Covering up the problem by wrapping it up in fluffy feelgood bullshit does NOT help children to succeed. It sets them up to fail. Lying to kids for 12 years, and pushing them through the system instead of making them actually earn their grades, out of some misguided belief that if they do bad, it will break their little hearts instead of wake them the fuck up, is exactly why this happens at the university level. What do you suppose finding out that you lied to them for 12 years does to their self esteem? The competency fairy doesn't come visit them after their senior year you know.
Failure is required, for there to be achievement.
End of story.
Somebody didn't pay very close attention, did they?
I *clearly* stated that my hand is on the MOUSE, and NOT the keyboard. As such, taking my hands OFF the mouse, so I can put them on the keyboard, is just as deleterious as asking you to take your hands off the keyboard, and onto the mouse.
That was point # fucking 2 above.
*protip: read the whole message before replying.
There is also a completely unneeded task switch as the desktop switches to the full screen start screen.
I don't need nor want that, and it is part of the problem. I want a way to turn it off. There isn't.
Thanks a ton for that innovative feature. /s
I prefer the win7 start menu.
Why?
Let's say I use calculator a lot. I mean A LOT. But, I don't want to put a quick launch button down, because the group policy enforced by my employer locks that thing down tighter than a nun's cunt, prevents it from being resized, enforces that certain things be in it, etc.
The win7 start menu keeps track what what I launch from it frequently, and puts quick links in for those applications, waaaaaaaaaay above the demonized 'all programs' area. I DON'T HAVE TO MANAGE THIS LIST. It is simply populated with what I most frequently invoke. Thus, to start calulator, it is literally: START->Calculator.
TWO CLICKS.
TWO.
Moreover, the software I use TO DO MY JOB, makes very heavy use of the mouse. Letting go of the mouse, so I can type "calc.exe" into the wild blue void is measurably less productive for my use case.
STOP INSISTING THAT ALL USERS ARE DATA ENTRY DRONES.
Moreover? YES, I *HAVE* used windows 8. Know what? It is counter productive to the workflow paradigm of the software I use, because it requires me to let go of the goddamn mouse, and type shit.
Know what else? I use notepad to look at the generated NC code I produce to make sure the toolpaths I am making are generating sane results, ad guess what? Windows 8 tries to make fucking notepad full screen! BULLSHIT, I just need it as a teeny little window to scroll through, jackasses!
I fucking hate the "why are you afraid of change!? Are you some kind of luddite?! You're a luddite aren't you?1 yeah, You're a Luddite if you don't like the new formerly-known-as-metro UI paradigm, because it is new, and the old way is old, and if you like old, and not new, then you are a luddite!" Circular reasoning bullshit. No, I dislike the new windows 8 UI because it fucking sucks for what I do for a living, gets in my way, slows me the fuck down, and invokes assholes to character assasinate me (and others in my boat) when we say we DON'T WANT the windows 8 UI paradigm on the desktop!
Is it so fucking hard to understand that NOT EVERYONE uses the keyboard the way you do, and that this is NOT a case of "idiots at the wheel"? That perhaps, the mouse is a legitimate input device, and not something to arrogantly scorn, since it has real, legitimate uses in graphical design that fucking keyboard shortcut keys will *NEVER* be able to replace?
Of course not. It is just easier to measure everyone else as being whiners, and not having legitimate complaints, because that makes you feel better without having to actually acknowledge wrongdoing, character assasinate them as luddites who are afraid of change, and arrogantly (and ignorantly) assert that they should just use the keyboard instead of the mouse anyway, "because it's faster".
Yeah buddy, try selecting NC geometry to drive 5 axis toolpaths on using the tab key. I fucking dare ya to, and to show how much faster it is. Because it fucking isn't. There are operations you can't even DO without a goddamn mouse in this software, for god's sake!
"Well, just use different software then!" You arrogantly chortle-- Not an option bitches, its mandated by contract agreements what softwares are allowed. Besides, more "open" offerings just don't have the functionality anyway.
Can you do what you do faster with metro by using the keyboard? Quite possibly. That isn't what is being argued.
What is being argued is that what *I* do with the computer is greatly hobbled by metro's hamfisted bullshit, and I have legitimate complaints about it that are fundamentaly intractable by anything other than reverting the changes.
That is why my employer, and our partners we do work for, DON'T USE WIN8.
What would have bee the POLITE thing to do? Turn on metro by default allright, but make it truly optional-- GIVE US A WAY TO TURN IT OFF.
But no, the response we had shoved down our throats so hard that our asses bled?
"Metro is the future! Its faster and better, and the old way is old, and if you don't like it, tha
A wii can drive at 480p. While certainly not HD, it *is* progressive scan, and that *does* make a difference.
Where I live, I can't realistically stream an HD stream anyway. My hacked Wii was a solid investment, and I have many hours logged on it. (And yes, I bought it specifically to hack it. Eat it nintendo. Your many attempts to kill HBC and kill custom IOSes have all met in failure.)
I may consider ordering an Ouya. I don't need another console to emulate other, older, consoles with. (I have the Wii for that. Works great with the classic controller. There's even a port of dosbox for the wii, that pretty faithfully keeps up with an emulation of a 486DX2/50, and a port of the Frodo c64 emulator that works well.) I would get it as something to tinker with, and play indie titles on. The open nature of the console and OS underneath means plenty of interesting potential for tinkering.
As an american (and probably on the NSA watchlist for being 'suspicious' for not drinking the 'kill snowden, rah rah rah!' Koolaid) let me be quite open, honest, and frank here.
You should not trust my nation to do anything but fuck yours up. Our number one and number two exports are bad foriegn policy legislation, and military munitions (as in, shots fired, not sold.)
The time where you cannot trust the firmware in your equipment happened a long time ago. The need for fully auditable software has never been greater. Do not trust my government. They are snakes and liars, looking to swallow you whole, or numb you with their poisonous PR, like they have so many of my countrymen already.
Europe isn't much better off at the moment, having already drank our koolaid, but most of you populace aren't drooling idiots that think exposing the government's dirty dealings is an act of treason, and honestly hold the opinion that their interests are the givernment's interests. As such, if you and your fellow citizens of EU countries act quickly, you can circumvent the bullshit by refusing to drink any more koolaid, and ousting koolaid pushers fromm office. That should be the single biggest red flag ever: if the politician pushes koolaid for US interests, vote them out. Don't question the choice. Just do it. (The koolaid poisoning is so bad here, that I will certainly attract the attention of a few of the addled addicts with just this message alone.)
If you buy equipment from a US firm, treat it like a spy bug. Either wipe the firmware and install auditable 3rd party programming, or isolate and monitor it religiously.
When presented with a choice to buy open standards based equipment, always go for the open standards. Don't get suckered in by "support contracts" and the like. If you have to build your routers and run linux on them yourself, so be it. The vacuum for quality, and auditable open standard hardware in your market will create business opportunities for your own companies to satisfy, and if they hold true to those ideals, they will get business elsewhere as well.
(And for you koolaid drinkers: as long as the "US's interests" run counter to US principles, I will always, and without reservation, steer people away from such interests, because my interests are for a free and healthy US, not a wealthy despotic and totalitarian one built on lies. I won't trade my principles for money or comfort. You should be ashamed to have done such a thing.)
[Waves at the NSA spook]
I apologize for the highly tangental nature of the OP. It just bothers me greatly that there is such an omnipresent data collection and sieving aparatus actively at work, and that the support for companies to jump into that pool comes directly from governments lusting for such big data.
(Quantas represents a feast of big data for the AU govt, and just a court order away. It's outsourced costs in action! As such, they have exactly ZERO real motivation to tell quantas to go hump a stump, like they should be doing.)
Making it impossible for that big data collection to even happen on a scale that would be useful (you can't easily break encryption whe the key changes with each and every datagram in a genuinely random manner. This means attacks like rainbow tables and the like, or other technical faults in the encryption method itself won't reveal enough information to decode useful amounts of information, and the computational burdens of trying to process big data under those conditions would be too large, even for the NSA. Quantum keypairs represent *real* random one time pads for each and every datagram.) Removes the incentive the government has to allow private companies to be data aggregators like this.
In order for public adoption to take off for something like that, the secure transaction mode must be silent, and also be the default mode of operation, in addition to being ubiquitous. As long as "all data free and clear!" Is the industry default, encrypted data will always remain an outlier.
*preface: I know you can't send data using entanglement. That isn't what this does. Coments along that bent aren't welcome.
Recently, experiments have shown that distance isn't a factor for entangled photons, nor is linear time. This means that a small device for entangling a few photons with a similar device at a remote host, can permit immdiate knowledge of man in the middle attempts, if the entangled samples are used as a cryptographic feature.
Basically, it's just another IC that you add to the NIC. When two hosts wish to enter a secure communication, they begin asynchronous entanglement attempts to create a correlated, random data set on which to encode the data portion of their messages to and from each other. It may take several attempts to arrive at a handshake. Once the correlated random sample is generated, the entanglement is propogated locally in the chip(s) with additional quantum bits, which is how the encode/decode pad changes and stays synchronized with each datagram. A man in the middle will hear only noise.
In light of the NSA bullshit, and other insanity lately, there is a real and present need for a technology like this.
It won't fix the "I'm with stupid!" Problem of installing the quantas toolbar, but it would go a long way on curtailing omnipresent goverment espionage.
Conjecture:
Improper application of government secret ratings, results in dilution of meaning for those designations.
To wit:
General Cockgobbler has a serious sex addiction problem, and routinely has hookers, callgirls, and outright sluts in his quarters and office on a regular basis, and even uses goverment expense accounts to pay for his addiction, and for sexual products involved in his trysts. Because it would be an astounding scandal, all expenses related to his sexual appeties are locked up as a state secrets.
Now, somebody has the undesirable job of processing General Cockgobbler's expenses, and of commuting his orders for prostitutes. This is not a job for a high ranking official; this is what disposable underlings are for. Thus, disposable underlings get assigned top secret clearance, so they can perform their "jobs".
If this happens often enough, the REAL top secret data is heavily outmatched by the number of "embarasing" datapoints, and the number o disposale underlings with access to strictly dangerous data becomes very top heavy. It eventually becomes too expensive to exercise proper oversight. Dilution accomplished.
Orbiting, hell!? Have you even SEEN the place!? YOU CAN SEE THE RUTS FROM SPACE!
Damned kids, tell em to stay away from developing ecosystems, and what do they do? Go muddin', that's what!
(/joke)
*cough*
(You are being equally idiotic.)
When developing a product, one should attempt to anticipate points of failure, and incorporate failsafes and safety systems into the design to make it fail gracefully, instead of spectacularly. For example, if the function you just made deals with input from an outside module in the form of a pointer, it is simply prudent to sanity check the inputs when that function fires to ensure that it hasn't been fed a null pointer. If designing an electrical system that absolutely, positively must have the polarity right on the power feed, (say, it has high voltages and lytic capacitors involved), then make the power connector physically impossible to get flipped over.
These are simple things that are clearly aparent on design time, and can be incorporated on the beta of the project.
Dealing with unforseeable situations, like "use on systems with both MesaGL and vendor proprietary openGL libraries installed causes erronious and unpredictable behavior" (because the proprietary driver does a SneakyDumbTrick() that is completely off spec, and is part of the vendor's secret sauce, and expects only its own libraries installed and expects such nonstandard behaviors from other parts of the opengl implementation, which the standards compliant mesa lib just doesn't do, causing [crazy_shit] to happen when the proprietary lib calls part of the mesa lib for service, due to the heterogenous install), that kind of thing simply can't really be predicted, because the developer/engineer can't read minds, and know in advance what kinds of shennanigans can happen there. As such, it can only be dealt with after it has happened before.
"Ditzy soccermom drives off with pump handle still in tank" is the former kind of problem. "Aluminum bearing races, coupled with steel ball bearings, and bearing lubricant under high vibrational environments with lots of ambient particulate matter in the environment leads to rapid deterioration of bearing race as particulates accumulate in lubricant, erode the race, and cause runaway deterioration, enhanced by chatter from the vibration" on a bearing that was designed for a clean and sealed environment and for minimal weight with low noise is the latter.
If you try to think of every possible thing that can ever possibly go wrong, and design your systems that way, you are not a very good engineer. Likewise, if you put your head in the ground, and ignore the fact that the product will be used in ways and environments other than the perfectly ideal conditions for operation, and end up making a very fragile product, you likewise aren't a very good engineer.
The secret sauce is dealing with all the low hanging fruit on the potential problems sides of things, and then responding to real world deployments in an iterative manner later. Realworld deployments may have you finding your software running in a configuration you would never have even dreamed of, and may in fact, be very frequently employed that way, because of other silly requirements of the real world. That's where iterative design changes come in.
Gas&Go Gladdys at the gaspump is a low hanging fruit. So are things like gas cutoffs on furnaces, and the like. A furnace that doesn't check that the pilot light is lit using a thermocoupler is simply poorly designed. The engineer should have dealt with that low hanging fruit before houses started blowing up. Etc. Low hanging fruit are things that are clearly obvious at design time.
Arguing "you have to think of *EVERYTHING!*" will end up with your product having so many failsafes in it that is prohibitively expensive to build (either has lots of expensive physical parts that should never actually activate during normal use, and are there only to deal with a hypothetical problem that in practice, never happens, or has more input sanity check code than the function itself, and suffers performance bottlenecks looking for exceptions that never actually happen in practice.). Arguing "No its an iterative process exclusively!" M
This sounds like a golden opportunity for the oija.. erhm.. ouya console, and the steambox.
Those two groups should be grabbing hold of this shit with both hands, and giving sony and microsoft what for in the press.