This was targeting the PC gaming world where entry level systems start around $1500.
Entry level super-enthusiast? According to the Steam hardware survey about 5% have a GTX 970 ($300 card) and 1% a GTX 980 ($500 card). Of course you need the rest of the machine and monitor, but if you're building a gaming rig the graphics card should be the most expensive part. Only about 1% play at 1440p, 0.1% at 2160p.
Call him bluff and realize that he is far more terrified of losing his power, money and hoes than you are of his bomb.
That's not the point. If he is invaded and will lose his "power, money and hoes" either way, will he gracefully surrender? Or will he call on all his subjects to defend their Great Leader to the last man, launching the nukes not because it will change the outcome but for revenge? I don't seem him leaving power gracefully.
It won't be long before China or Russia sells them a delivery vehicle, if they haven't done so already.
They have Seoul with a population of almost 10 million only 35 miles from the border and that's as good a hostage as any. North Korea must have people who know about the outside world and that they'd be obliterated if they attacked anyone. Even China might just roll over them to avoid western forces on their borders if necessary. He's realized that if you only seem "half dangerous" like Iraq, Afghanistan etc. you get invaded. If you are armed to the teeth and batshit crazy maybe you're not. He would, as far as I can tell be the first nuclear force to be invaded.
when I read that summary is: How do we know that *this* time the data was handled correctly?
I am sure that the original researchers thought they were handling the data correctly too....
Nothing is absolutely certain, even mathematical proofs depend on them actually being correct. I'm sure a lot of people here have introduced a new bug when fixing an old one. All we can do is see what stands up to scrutiny...
Spying is not about having backdoors in hardware you produce in your own country. It's about getting those into foreign countries, foreign hardware, and about defeating encryptions that you're NOT already in control of. Literally, a signed court order saying that Cisco/Juniper has to put in a backdoor for US intelligence into products X, Y, Z achieves this aim in the same way. With non-disclosure clauses, it's as secret. That's not what the NSA should be wasting their time on, if that's even what the US want to do.
Sure, because slapping a multi-national full of foreigners with no security clearance with an NDA is totally simliar to an in-house NSA project with all Top Secret clearances. And if China or Russia is the customer, we'll just make a special order just for you without anybody noticing. It's not like the end result would be any better either, everybody would wonder if their hardware has been NSL'd instead of r00ted. I'm not saying either way is a good gamble, but I'd rather take the technical one than the legal one.
This was much more an issue a few years ago when the iPhone was much more dominant on the mobile web.
How is that? Safari uses Webkit, Google uses a Webkit fork, Opera is now using Webkit... the mobile web is pretty much all Webkit except for Windows Phone and Firefox, both of which have marginal market share.
This is one of those case where you're almost obligated to lie as a politician, or at least use weasel words. If you strongly support unbreakable backdoors, you get the police, intelligence services and such saying you're crippling their work against terrorism and crime, that you're naive and irresponsible. If you strongly support backdoors, you get all kinds of civil rights groups and others saying you're an authoritrian, totalitarian creep that is making the terrorists win by taking our freedoms away. And that you can't stop open source encryption, so you're just playing security theater and not being in touch with reality.
What you get is a muddy gray answer saying we're working on a way to let you eat your cake and have it too, please don't stop voting for us either way. Another example is gun control, there's no magic bullet to tell terrorists and school shooters from ordinary people. But if you hear a politican talk, they'll take away the guns from the "bad guys" and not the "good guys" all the same. Or that don't want the war on drugs with hard enforcement nor legalization and free weed, but some vague better treatment of addiction rather than punishment that is trying to score the vote of both the concerned teen mom and recreational drug users alike.
Here's the thing I've noticed after talking to quite a few people about politics, many have much clearer reasons why they're voting against someone than for someone. One burning issue where you really, really can't accept voting for that guy. So politicians tend to avoid making those kind of statements, trying to push the kind of politics that'll make you vote for them and doing damage control by being so bland as possible on the rest. After all this is a race against other politicians, it's not like they need a strong position on everything. What's important are the few issues they manage to make stick, the babble is quickly forgotten.
But C++ does have some weirdness in places that can pose hazards. For example, from a more beginner-perspective, what percentage of users have at one point been frustrated by trying to understand why a pointer in one of their classes is getting freed unexpectedly, due to not realizing the dangers of the implicit copy constructor/assignment operator when it comes to pointers? I bet that's bit almost everyone at some point in their career. Sure, you can "reason out" that that would happen, but most people learn it by being bitten once or twice.
This is why I vastly prefer Qt with QObjects that disable the copy constructor, structuring the application like a hierarchy with managers that act as resource owners. Consider the pot at a poker table, you could model it as players pushing money into the pot and the winner grabbing it. Screw up your winning logic and two players might try to grab the pot (double free). But if you model it with a dealer collecting the bets and handing it out to the winner you have a single resource owner controlling the resource. Sure, your logic may still be faulty but the result is far more likely to just be incorrect, not a crash. Same way I'd have a seat manager to make sure two players don't grab the same seat. If this is a big tournament, maybe I have a table manager and a player manager too, each holding their collection of objects. It is a lot, lot easier to see the logic - or flaws in it - from a bird's eye perspective.
I spent most of my time at my previous job automating tasks for other people so that they could stop doing the repeated and error prone work. Then I got laid off because the bean-counters at central corporate did not believe I had enough "billable hours". The corporation actively encourages you to work slowly and inefficiently because they make more money that way...
So in other words you spent non-billable hours to reduce your colleagues' billable hours and got laid off? Shocker. Here's the rub, first you must provide value unless you're one of those credit-stealer types. Then you make sure people recognize that value, if nobody knows nobody cares. Then you make sure you're compensated for that value. That goes for the company, same as you. Did your company's clients recognize the value they got by your automation? Was the company compensated through winning more contracts or higher hourly rates? If not, what did you do to the company's bottom line before the collapse? If they'd kept you and laid off somebody else, would they be more profitable now? Because that's how bean counters measure value....
Not surprised, I play GTA V and even though I've never made in-game purchases if you want to buy luxury planes, yachts, apartments and garages filled with all maxed out super cars, military surplus and whatnot you can spend a ton of money quick. I don't think anyone expects you to buy all of them, particularly not in a week but maybe as a new cool thing now and then, unless you're Bill Gates or some kind of addict. I'm guessing this kid just bought everything with every upgrade because he could.
DPI is a meaningless measure without viewing distance. Since 20/20 vision means 1 arc minute or 1/60th degree resolution, the maximum field of vision (FOV) the screen should cover is easy to calculate.
For 20/20 vision ("normal" = does not need correction): 1920 pixels * 1/60th degree = 32 degrees 3840 pixels * 1/60th degree = 64 degrees 7680 pixels * 1/60th degree = 128 degrees
If you have 20/20 vision then FullHD at 55" / 7 feet = 31.9 degrees is all you can see. That's a fairly normal couch distance, but 28" / 3.4 feet is much further away from a desktop screen than is normal. A UHD monitor at 28" / 1.7 feet = 61.8 degrees is plenty though.
For 20/16 vision (normal in young and healthy): 1920 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 25.6 degrees 3840 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 51.2 degrees 7680 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 102.4 degrees
If you have 20/16 vision as about 1/3rd of the population does, then UHD at 79" / 6 feet = 51.1 degrees is the limit of your vision. For a monitor 28" / 2.1 feet is slightly on the far side, maybe get a 5K monitor.
Most people will won't ever see this good in their life ever, rare but also not truly exceptional. With UHD then 65" / 7 feet = 37.3 degrees is their limit, for a monitor 28" / 3 feet is clearly too long. An 8K monitor would actually be useful.
This is near the true limit of the human eye, there are a few elite baseball players like this. Since they have twice the vision of 20/16s, 8K at 79" / 6 feet = 51.1 degrees is the limit of their vision. For a monitor probably around 10K.
That doesn't even begin to cover the catch-22. You need: 1) capture devices 2) supporting formats 3) editing/mastering tools 4) distribution channels 5) displays 6) content
Islam is a religion; communism and NAZIism (fascism) are political ideologies....
Religion is the belief in a higher power than man. That makes religion the supreme authority of its believers, no matter what man-made law says about the separation of church and state or what is legal or not. It is the Creator himself dictating what believers must do and how unbelievers are to be treated, what is right and what is wrong, rewards and punishments both in life and in death. In the old days, the king ruled supreme over his subjects. The Pope ruled over the kings as God's acting representative on Earth. To think that religion is not about politics is naive in the extreme and with total disregard to history. Or even current day, as vast areas of the world still live under religious law.
Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. (...) There are a great many ways to communicate with people.
Yes, but the mode has mostly changed from push to pull. People don't call or invite you over to watch photos or home videos, they share it on Facebook or similar for people to read/watch, skim, skip or like according to their level of interest. If you don't view it, people assume you're not interested. If you don't share, people assume you don't want to. People like the freedom to publish their little tidbits of life within their social sphere without imposing and being able to pick and choose from their social feed, that is the killer feature of social media that makes most communication tools completely irrelevant as competitors.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has been explaining for years that the "tradeoff" between security and liberty is a false one. It's put out there by politicians to justify a war on liberties.
Except all he's doing is setting up a strawman and cutting it down. Nobody claimed that every loss of privacy would lead to gain in security. If that were true, they'd be cheering for Snowden reducing NSA's privacy. It's like asking "Would you be willing to pay more taxes to get more services from the government?", they're still able to raise taxes and deliver less. A rational reformulation would be "If it could provide you with higher security, would you be willing to give up some liberties?" Even the Founding Fathers realized you needed warrants to give law enforcement some access to otherwise private property, communication it's not like you ever had perfect privacy.
That dereferencing a null pointer is a very common programming mistake? You only need the optional syntax if your objects can be null, if your objects can be null you better make handle that situation. But in many cases people rely on some other business logic to always make it not null, which works great until somebody changes something and the code goes boom. This isn't so much a feature for writing code as it is for maintaining code.
The real sin is the decision of the foss community to pick a side, and in so doing, remove that choice from other people, by choosing to make systemd a hard requirement, solely for their own convenience.
Did you just try to make writing software to scratch your own itch sound like a bad thing? If Poettering wants to write systemd-only software, nobody's going to stop him. Nobody should be able to stop him. Nobody's going to force him to create or maintain SysV init scripts either. And if other projects find that depending on systemd is convenient, so can they. Open source is not a democracy. Developers do what developers want, regardless of what their users think and by users I mean everybody from other projects to distro packagers to system administrators to end users. The conflict was lost when systemd was voted in as the default, trying to bend the Debian system to force developers to preserve the old ways was a fool's errand. If it had passed, all that would have happened is that Debian would have lost them. Nobody can make that kind of committee decision stick.
BTW, receptionists are dying off, just as secretaries are. People do their own typing these days, and automated phone systems route calls. So this article has no relevance.
Most companies don't want random people roaming their premises, so guests are routed through a reception area that also deals with employees that have misplaced or lost their badge. Likewise they're dealing with random inquiries from the general public, receiving mail and packages and whatever else shows up on your doorstep. Office duties are typically secondary work to fill the time. Maybe in future world where all meetings are virtual, all communication is electronic, phone bots can deal with "other" and so on they'll disappear but most places I've seen with a reception still has one. Don't think they're a dying breed, even if we try to take the routine work out.
What? There's plenty breweries and car companies. It's more dubious when you get down to only two or three and nobody else is even on the radar, like do you want AMD or Intel processor? AMD or nVidia graphics card? The workers do need better conditions, but that's primarily the workers' fight for better pay and better conditions. The consumers vote with their wallet for best products, unless it's something big like child labor or animal testing they're not going do "intervene" in how the labor is organized.
Yet some models and explanations are solid and work. One of them is the concept of the natural monopoly. I would argue that Facebook, Microsoft (Windows and Office) operate in markets with natural monopolies.
Yes, but for different reasons. Software is in general a natural monopoly. There's a mostly fixed development cost, hardly any marginal cost. That means there is a strong cost incentive to reduce the number of implementations until there is only one, which is the definition of a natural monopoly. On the bright side there are two alternatives, a proprietary solution monopolized by one company or an open source solution shared by everyone. Both are theoretically efficient since there's no reinventing of the wheel. Of course once you introduce a few more real world conditions like whether there's is really one product to fit every need, how the feedback cycle from profit/benefit to new development works etc. it's a bit more complicated.
Social networks on the other hand have a huge network effect. That is to say, the value of an empty Facebook is almost none. Even they gave away all the source, said you can build your own site but not take any accounts or anything posted on Facebook, it would be almost worthless. So while software is a natural monopoly on the cost side, Facebook is a natural monopoly on the benefit side. Like the phone network, if you couldn't call someone with a different provider it doesn't matter even if the technology is trivial. That one is much harder to solve because you can always build better software, open source carries on even with almost no market share. But even if you have a better service, getting all the users to jump sides is incredibly hard. It's like how I'm sure it'd be easier if we all agreed to drive on the left or the right or 50Hz vs 60Hz or 110V vs 220V but the costs involved are absolutely massive compared to the gains.
Standards tend to only happen in markets where there are multiple parties ganging up on a dominant player by following a standard. If you already have a "winner-takes-all" situation like MS Office, they're not going to work for a real standard to open them up to competition. Take for example online storage, there's Dropbox, GDrive, SkyDrive, iCloud and whatever. I'm sure it would be possible to create a standard so you could have a drop-in storage provider, heck with a compliant implementation maybe you could have your own 24/7 home or co-lo box instead. But I don't see any of them being interested in opening up, you can create a standard but it doesn't matter if nobody uses it.
If the cost of 'pinging' is lower than that, then the idea may hold true.
But he also picked the very simplest use case, verification where you're only interested in the outcome. If you're looking to attach it to something like getting the shipping address for an order you normally want to store it. If you want to be able to effectively query it like age for a partner search you must store it. And the vast majority of data is gathered for analysis, where you typically want fast and local access to all the samples like all the purchases in a shopping history. And the value of polling instead of storing only matters if there's rate control, if your HR department needs to report payroll on everybody and can effectively query for the whole database then it's no significantly safer. And finally, if a compromised server can siphon sensitive data as they're used you will get the data eventually so it doesn't really prevent it completely. There's just not many places it works in practice even if companies wanted to, which they mostly don't.
What he said was among the lines of "look, now it's happening also for a successful white man, you cannot ignore it like you did when they were beating up NIGGERS".
That part was clear... but what was less than stellar clear is if it was "You think you can beat me up the way you beat up NIGGERS? I'm going to raise hell." or "You think you can beat up people, but now you picked on a person who is not a NIGGER and can raise hell."
As for your first two points unless you're trying very, very hard to avoid dependencies you simply call the standard dialog of your toolkit. They could forward it to a system-wide dialog, but it's unlikely there will be one. The reason for this is that even the simplest dialog requires a massive infrastructure locked in place. Is it an X window or Wayland window? What do the standard objects like lists, buttons, dropdowns etc. look like? How does it do layout? Fonts & anti-aliasing? Key bindings? Before you know it you've replicated a ton of toolkit functionality. Windows doesn't have to worry, it has only one stack and that's Microsoft's and they need it anyway to draw the system UI and dialogs so the standard dialog DLL is just a thin layer calling a system that's 99% there anyway. Also to do it that way you need a stable ABI too. I guess you could manage to do it over D-bus, just send it the parameters and let a system daemon pop up a dialog but it'd probably need some more magic to function as a proper subwindow of the application. Also you'd have to deal with situations like the application getting killed. Lots of work. But seriously, your absolute #1 complaint is something that at worst is an inconvenience? Even though they're inconsistent, they do work. I got a long list of things that aren't working at all I'd want to see first before that hits #1 on my list.
Slashdot Mirror
This was targeting the PC gaming world where entry level systems start around $1500.
Entry level super-enthusiast? According to the Steam hardware survey about 5% have a GTX 970 ($300 card) and 1% a GTX 980 ($500 card). Of course you need the rest of the machine and monitor, but if you're building a gaming rig the graphics card should be the most expensive part. Only about 1% play at 1440p, 0.1% at 2160p.
Call him bluff and realize that he is far more terrified of losing his power, money and hoes than you are of his bomb.
That's not the point. If he is invaded and will lose his "power, money and hoes" either way, will he gracefully surrender? Or will he call on all his subjects to defend their Great Leader to the last man, launching the nukes not because it will change the outcome but for revenge? I don't seem him leaving power gracefully.
It won't be long before China or Russia sells them a delivery vehicle, if they haven't done so already.
They have Seoul with a population of almost 10 million only 35 miles from the border and that's as good a hostage as any. North Korea must have people who know about the outside world and that they'd be obliterated if they attacked anyone. Even China might just roll over them to avoid western forces on their borders if necessary. He's realized that if you only seem "half dangerous" like Iraq, Afghanistan etc. you get invaded. If you are armed to the teeth and batshit crazy maybe you're not. He would, as far as I can tell be the first nuclear force to be invaded.
when I read that summary is: How do we know that *this* time the data was handled correctly?
I am sure that the original researchers thought they were handling the data correctly too....
Nothing is absolutely certain, even mathematical proofs depend on them actually being correct. I'm sure a lot of people here have introduced a new bug when fixing an old one. All we can do is see what stands up to scrutiny...
Spying is not about having backdoors in hardware you produce in your own country. It's about getting those into foreign countries, foreign hardware, and about defeating encryptions that you're NOT already in control of. Literally, a signed court order saying that Cisco/Juniper has to put in a backdoor for US intelligence into products X, Y, Z achieves this aim in the same way. With non-disclosure clauses, it's as secret. That's not what the NSA should be wasting their time on, if that's even what the US want to do.
Sure, because slapping a multi-national full of foreigners with no security clearance with an NDA is totally simliar to an in-house NSA project with all Top Secret clearances. And if China or Russia is the customer, we'll just make a special order just for you without anybody noticing. It's not like the end result would be any better either, everybody would wonder if their hardware has been NSL'd instead of r00ted. I'm not saying either way is a good gamble, but I'd rather take the technical one than the legal one.
This was much more an issue a few years ago when the iPhone was much more dominant on the mobile web.
How is that? Safari uses Webkit, Google uses a Webkit fork, Opera is now using Webkit... the mobile web is pretty much all Webkit except for Windows Phone and Firefox, both of which have marginal market share.
This is one of those case where you're almost obligated to lie as a politician, or at least use weasel words. If you strongly support unbreakable backdoors, you get the police, intelligence services and such saying you're crippling their work against terrorism and crime, that you're naive and irresponsible. If you strongly support backdoors, you get all kinds of civil rights groups and others saying you're an authoritrian, totalitarian creep that is making the terrorists win by taking our freedoms away. And that you can't stop open source encryption, so you're just playing security theater and not being in touch with reality.
What you get is a muddy gray answer saying we're working on a way to let you eat your cake and have it too, please don't stop voting for us either way. Another example is gun control, there's no magic bullet to tell terrorists and school shooters from ordinary people. But if you hear a politican talk, they'll take away the guns from the "bad guys" and not the "good guys" all the same. Or that don't want the war on drugs with hard enforcement nor legalization and free weed, but some vague better treatment of addiction rather than punishment that is trying to score the vote of both the concerned teen mom and recreational drug users alike.
Here's the thing I've noticed after talking to quite a few people about politics, many have much clearer reasons why they're voting against someone than for someone. One burning issue where you really, really can't accept voting for that guy. So politicians tend to avoid making those kind of statements, trying to push the kind of politics that'll make you vote for them and doing damage control by being so bland as possible on the rest. After all this is a race against other politicians, it's not like they need a strong position on everything. What's important are the few issues they manage to make stick, the babble is quickly forgotten.
But C++ does have some weirdness in places that can pose hazards. For example, from a more beginner-perspective, what percentage of users have at one point been frustrated by trying to understand why a pointer in one of their classes is getting freed unexpectedly, due to not realizing the dangers of the implicit copy constructor/assignment operator when it comes to pointers? I bet that's bit almost everyone at some point in their career. Sure, you can "reason out" that that would happen, but most people learn it by being bitten once or twice.
This is why I vastly prefer Qt with QObjects that disable the copy constructor, structuring the application like a hierarchy with managers that act as resource owners. Consider the pot at a poker table, you could model it as players pushing money into the pot and the winner grabbing it. Screw up your winning logic and two players might try to grab the pot (double free). But if you model it with a dealer collecting the bets and handing it out to the winner you have a single resource owner controlling the resource. Sure, your logic may still be faulty but the result is far more likely to just be incorrect, not a crash. Same way I'd have a seat manager to make sure two players don't grab the same seat. If this is a big tournament, maybe I have a table manager and a player manager too, each holding their collection of objects. It is a lot, lot easier to see the logic - or flaws in it - from a bird's eye perspective.
I spent most of my time at my previous job automating tasks for other people so that they could stop doing the repeated and error prone work. Then I got laid off because the bean-counters at central corporate did not believe I had enough "billable hours". The corporation actively encourages you to work slowly and inefficiently because they make more money that way...
So in other words you spent non-billable hours to reduce your colleagues' billable hours and got laid off? Shocker. Here's the rub, first you must provide value unless you're one of those credit-stealer types. Then you make sure people recognize that value, if nobody knows nobody cares. Then you make sure you're compensated for that value. That goes for the company, same as you. Did your company's clients recognize the value they got by your automation? Was the company compensated through winning more contracts or higher hourly rates? If not, what did you do to the company's bottom line before the collapse? If they'd kept you and laid off somebody else, would they be more profitable now? Because that's how bean counters measure value....
Not surprised, I play GTA V and even though I've never made in-game purchases if you want to buy luxury planes, yachts, apartments and garages filled with all maxed out super cars, military surplus and whatnot you can spend a ton of money quick. I don't think anyone expects you to buy all of them, particularly not in a week but maybe as a new cool thing now and then, unless you're Bill Gates or some kind of addict. I'm guessing this kid just bought everything with every upgrade because he could.
DPI is a meaningless measure without viewing distance. Since 20/20 vision means 1 arc minute or 1/60th degree resolution, the maximum field of vision (FOV) the screen should cover is easy to calculate.
For 20/20 vision ("normal" = does not need correction):
1920 pixels * 1/60th degree = 32 degrees
3840 pixels * 1/60th degree = 64 degrees
7680 pixels * 1/60th degree = 128 degrees
If you have 20/20 vision then FullHD at 55" / 7 feet = 31.9 degrees is all you can see. That's a fairly normal couch distance, but 28" / 3.4 feet is much further away from a desktop screen than is normal. A UHD monitor at 28" / 1.7 feet = 61.8 degrees is plenty though.
For 20/16 vision (normal in young and healthy):
1920 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 25.6 degrees
3840 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 51.2 degrees
7680 pixels * 1/60th degree * 16/20 = 102.4 degrees
If you have 20/16 vision as about 1/3rd of the population does, then UHD at 79" / 6 feet = 51.1 degrees is the limit of your vision. For a monitor 28" / 2.1 feet is slightly on the far side, maybe get a 5K monitor.
For 20/12 vision (the sharp-eyed):
1920 pixels * 1/60th degree * 8/20 = 19.2 degrees
3840 pixels * 1/60th degree * 8/20 = 38.4 degrees
7680 pixels * 1/60th degree * 8/20 = 76.8 degrees
Most people will won't ever see this good in their life ever, rare but also not truly exceptional. With UHD then 65" / 7 feet = 37.3 degrees is their limit, for a monitor 28" / 3 feet is clearly too long. An 8K monitor would actually be useful.
For 20/8 vision (the very, very few):
1920 pixels * 1/60th degree * 12/20 = 12.8 degrees
3840 pixels * 1/60th degree * 12/20 = 25.6 degrees
7680 pixels * 1/60th degree * 12/20 = 51.2 degrees
This is near the true limit of the human eye, there are a few elite baseball players like this. Since they have twice the vision of 20/16s, 8K at 79" / 6 feet = 51.1 degrees is the limit of their vision. For a monitor probably around 10K.
That became a much longer post than I expected...
That doesn't even begin to cover the catch-22. You need: 1) capture devices
2) supporting formats
3) editing/mastering tools
4) distribution channels
5) displays
6) content
Looks like we're getting there tho.
Islam is a religion; communism and NAZIism (fascism) are political ideologies....
Religion is the belief in a higher power than man. That makes religion the supreme authority of its believers, no matter what man-made law says about the separation of church and state or what is legal or not. It is the Creator himself dictating what believers must do and how unbelievers are to be treated, what is right and what is wrong, rewards and punishments both in life and in death. In the old days, the king ruled supreme over his subjects. The Pope ruled over the kings as God's acting representative on Earth. To think that religion is not about politics is naive in the extreme and with total disregard to history. Or even current day, as vast areas of the world still live under religious law.
Getting a job is hard without social networking, the mistake is to confuse data-mining platforms for social networks. (...) There are a great many ways to communicate with people.
Yes, but the mode has mostly changed from push to pull. People don't call or invite you over to watch photos or home videos, they share it on Facebook or similar for people to read/watch, skim, skip or like according to their level of interest. If you don't view it, people assume you're not interested. If you don't share, people assume you don't want to. People like the freedom to publish their little tidbits of life within their social sphere without imposing and being able to pick and choose from their social feed, that is the killer feature of social media that makes most communication tools completely irrelevant as competitors.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has been explaining for years that the "tradeoff" between security and liberty is a false one. It's put out there by politicians to justify a war on liberties.
Except all he's doing is setting up a strawman and cutting it down. Nobody claimed that every loss of privacy would lead to gain in security. If that were true, they'd be cheering for Snowden reducing NSA's privacy. It's like asking "Would you be willing to pay more taxes to get more services from the government?", they're still able to raise taxes and deliver less. A rational reformulation would be "If it could provide you with higher security, would you be willing to give up some liberties?" Even the Founding Fathers realized you needed warrants to give law enforcement some access to otherwise private property, communication it's not like you ever had perfect privacy.
And I don't think the test versus 0 is very good in this case. There are indeed people who met and became friends on 1/1/1970.
In the real world, yes. On Facebook, no.
What?.Were?.They?.Thinking
That dereferencing a null pointer is a very common programming mistake? You only need the optional syntax if your objects can be null, if your objects can be null you better make handle that situation. But in many cases people rely on some other business logic to always make it not null, which works great until somebody changes something and the code goes boom. This isn't so much a feature for writing code as it is for maintaining code.
The real sin is the decision of the foss community to pick a side, and in so doing, remove that choice from other people, by choosing to make systemd a hard requirement, solely for their own convenience.
Did you just try to make writing software to scratch your own itch sound like a bad thing? If Poettering wants to write systemd-only software, nobody's going to stop him. Nobody should be able to stop him. Nobody's going to force him to create or maintain SysV init scripts either. And if other projects find that depending on systemd is convenient, so can they. Open source is not a democracy. Developers do what developers want, regardless of what their users think and by users I mean everybody from other projects to distro packagers to system administrators to end users. The conflict was lost when systemd was voted in as the default, trying to bend the Debian system to force developers to preserve the old ways was a fool's errand. If it had passed, all that would have happened is that Debian would have lost them. Nobody can make that kind of committee decision stick.
BTW, receptionists are dying off, just as secretaries are. People do their own typing these days, and automated phone systems route calls. So this article has no relevance.
Most companies don't want random people roaming their premises, so guests are routed through a reception area that also deals with employees that have misplaced or lost their badge. Likewise they're dealing with random inquiries from the general public, receiving mail and packages and whatever else shows up on your doorstep. Office duties are typically secondary work to fill the time. Maybe in future world where all meetings are virtual, all communication is electronic, phone bots can deal with "other" and so on they'll disappear but most places I've seen with a reception still has one. Don't think they're a dying breed, even if we try to take the routine work out.
What? There's plenty breweries and car companies. It's more dubious when you get down to only two or three and nobody else is even on the radar, like do you want AMD or Intel processor? AMD or nVidia graphics card? The workers do need better conditions, but that's primarily the workers' fight for better pay and better conditions. The consumers vote with their wallet for best products, unless it's something big like child labor or animal testing they're not going do "intervene" in how the labor is organized.
Yet some models and explanations are solid and work. One of them is the concept of the natural monopoly. I would argue that Facebook, Microsoft (Windows and Office) operate in markets with natural monopolies.
Yes, but for different reasons. Software is in general a natural monopoly. There's a mostly fixed development cost, hardly any marginal cost. That means there is a strong cost incentive to reduce the number of implementations until there is only one, which is the definition of a natural monopoly. On the bright side there are two alternatives, a proprietary solution monopolized by one company or an open source solution shared by everyone. Both are theoretically efficient since there's no reinventing of the wheel. Of course once you introduce a few more real world conditions like whether there's is really one product to fit every need, how the feedback cycle from profit/benefit to new development works etc. it's a bit more complicated.
Social networks on the other hand have a huge network effect. That is to say, the value of an empty Facebook is almost none. Even they gave away all the source, said you can build your own site but not take any accounts or anything posted on Facebook, it would be almost worthless. So while software is a natural monopoly on the cost side, Facebook is a natural monopoly on the benefit side. Like the phone network, if you couldn't call someone with a different provider it doesn't matter even if the technology is trivial. That one is much harder to solve because you can always build better software, open source carries on even with almost no market share. But even if you have a better service, getting all the users to jump sides is incredibly hard. It's like how I'm sure it'd be easier if we all agreed to drive on the left or the right or 50Hz vs 60Hz or 110V vs 220V but the costs involved are absolutely massive compared to the gains.
Standards tend to only happen in markets where there are multiple parties ganging up on a dominant player by following a standard. If you already have a "winner-takes-all" situation like MS Office, they're not going to work for a real standard to open them up to competition. Take for example online storage, there's Dropbox, GDrive, SkyDrive, iCloud and whatever. I'm sure it would be possible to create a standard so you could have a drop-in storage provider, heck with a compliant implementation maybe you could have your own 24/7 home or co-lo box instead. But I don't see any of them being interested in opening up, you can create a standard but it doesn't matter if nobody uses it.
If the cost of 'pinging' is lower than that, then the idea may hold true.
But he also picked the very simplest use case, verification where you're only interested in the outcome. If you're looking to attach it to something like getting the shipping address for an order you normally want to store it. If you want to be able to effectively query it like age for a partner search you must store it. And the vast majority of data is gathered for analysis, where you typically want fast and local access to all the samples like all the purchases in a shopping history. And the value of polling instead of storing only matters if there's rate control, if your HR department needs to report payroll on everybody and can effectively query for the whole database then it's no significantly safer. And finally, if a compromised server can siphon sensitive data as they're used you will get the data eventually so it doesn't really prevent it completely. There's just not many places it works in practice even if companies wanted to, which they mostly don't.
What he said was among the lines of "look, now it's happening also for a successful white man, you cannot ignore it like you did when they were beating up NIGGERS".
That part was clear... but what was less than stellar clear is if it was "You think you can beat me up the way you beat up NIGGERS? I'm going to raise hell." or "You think you can beat up people, but now you picked on a person who is not a NIGGER and can raise hell."
As for your first two points unless you're trying very, very hard to avoid dependencies you simply call the standard dialog of your toolkit. They could forward it to a system-wide dialog, but it's unlikely there will be one. The reason for this is that even the simplest dialog requires a massive infrastructure locked in place. Is it an X window or Wayland window? What do the standard objects like lists, buttons, dropdowns etc. look like? How does it do layout? Fonts & anti-aliasing? Key bindings? Before you know it you've replicated a ton of toolkit functionality. Windows doesn't have to worry, it has only one stack and that's Microsoft's and they need it anyway to draw the system UI and dialogs so the standard dialog DLL is just a thin layer calling a system that's 99% there anyway. Also to do it that way you need a stable ABI too. I guess you could manage to do it over D-bus, just send it the parameters and let a system daemon pop up a dialog but it'd probably need some more magic to function as a proper subwindow of the application. Also you'd have to deal with situations like the application getting killed. Lots of work. But seriously, your absolute #1 complaint is something that at worst is an inconvenience? Even though they're inconsistent, they do work. I got a long list of things that aren't working at all I'd want to see first before that hits #1 on my list.