Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.
The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.
Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.
The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.
When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.
Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.
We already have almost every version of this, hybrid drives for laptops, software techniques that mimic this but they're all fairly stupid and unpredictable, training it to cache the right things take time and suddenly what used to have SSD performance might have been evicted. If you're the kind of user who needs >100GB you probably know what it is taking space. Put your big media (video, photos, music) on D:, everything else like applications and documents stay on C:. The only really tough call is games which often have a huge install size but also app code that benefits from being on an SSD, Steam lets you define multiple library folders so you can have one on C:, one on D: but no easy way to swap them in and out, for now the only supported way is uninstall and reinstall on the other. There are workarounds for that though.
Here in Norway I have the impression that it's only two main groups. One is Romani that arrive through the EU agreement, basically the kind who come with no rights, no education, no work history, no nothing and the only thing they're here for is to beg, steal and live off various programs that provide shelter and food for the homeless while leaving a trail of littering and vandalism in their wake. And yes, I don't mind stigmatizing the whole group because 68 of 69 beggars in a random sweep of beggars had a criminal record. And despite a million attempts to integrate them, they have no intention of ever becoming productive members of society and raise their children just like them to embrace their nomadic and parasitic lifestyle. Many of the children aren't enrolled in primary/secondary education at all and the few who are absent more than 1/3rd of the time. They also have more than a few cultural issues with suckers who work all day for an honest wage, why anyone would give them money is incomprehensible to me.
The other big, big group is drug/alcohol addicts, but there are hospices and such that will give them shelter and food if they don't show up high as a kite. The truly homeless are the ones who can't keep their drug use outside the shelter, but even those get winter sleeping bags so they don't freeze to death on the streets. They're not trying to hustle you for money in order to eat or drink or put clothes on their backs or a roof over their heads, it's to feed their habit. It's almost a protection racket, we're addicts and we will find the money to get our kick so you can either throw a few bucks in our cup or we'll get desperate and you really don't want us to get desperate. If you give them anything nice they'll probably sell it for the money anyway, you can give them money but it's not going to lead to anything positive. The rest are mostly taken care of, if you just have mental or money problems you won't be the streets and you won't have to beg for a living.
Really? I think most people would accept "net worth" as the proper metric.
Well, he said "potentially liquid" not "liquid", like if you decided to become a Buddhist monk and give away everything you own selling your house, car and so on could you liquidate your 401(k)? From what it looks like you must pay a 10% early withdrawal fee and income tax, so it's a lot less worth to have $1 in a 401(k) than in a regular bank account. On the other hand should you include things like sales commission on the house? I don't know, but in an informal sense I'd say that you're only a millionaire if you could literally gather a million dollars in cash if you wanted to.
When you see how far they've stretched the "interstate commerce" clause, I think your proposal would only lead to a greater mess. Besides, people want laws that create simple rules like when can I carry this gun? Who, when, what, how, where are easy and categorical, why is often vaguely defined in someone's mind. For example if you say the "mission" is for self-defense then anyone caught with a gun can always claim that, even when it seems extremely unlikely.
I'd just start throwing lots of question at that definition until you got it narrowed down.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Who are "the people"? Is it the same "people" who have the right to a fair trial? Because I'm pretty sure that includes everyone, not just citizens or residents but that illegal immigrant crossing over from Mexico too. Does he have a right to "keep and bear arms"? Does anyone not connected to any milita? Even back then the militia was all "able bodied men", is a woman or a cripple protected? What about minors? The mentally ill? Felons? They all have the right to a fair trial, no ifs or buts about that. Can you condition this right on a license or registration or test? Can you deny anyone to buy a gun or place restrictions on those selling guns like mandatory waiting periods or is that denying them the right to have a gun like right now? Can you regulate how it's stored without violating the right to keep it, like keeping it dismantled, unloaded, ammo separate from gun, in a gun locker etc. because really you could demand it be encased in three feet of cement. What does it mean to bear arms, does it mean openly or concealed, can you have it in the glove box or under your seat? Can you carry it on private property, public property, in public buildings, on other people's private property that's open to the general public? What exactly does "arms" means, is it the right to have cannons and nukes or small arms? Poisoned darts, is that arms? What about knives or tazers or and any other non-gun "arms"?
Those are just off the top of my head, it wouldn't be that hard to make a law that actually answers all of these questions and it would lay most the issues at rest without ever going into the tricky question of why you might want to have a gun.
While this is true, there are generally two large parties that garner 60-80% of the seats, and these tend to be centrist parties with the same sort of minor differences that we see in the USA between Republican and Democrat.
That's where you're wrong, because even if you're a 30% party close to the center you can't just keep your attention on the swing voters as if they're the only ones that matter. In US politics the only other group that matters are the fence sitters and you'd need to be pretty damn pissed at the Democrats to let Bush run the show or pretty damn pissed at the Republicans to let Obama run the show. But here if you don't actually cater to your side your 35% party can be a 25% party next election and one of the usurper parties that promise to be "real" Democrats or "real" Republicans start taking over. Or if there's a wave of say environmentalism then a red-green or blue-green party might get an upswing even if there's not enough support for a pure green party. You have to defend yourself on all fronts.
One drawback to the parliamentary system that I've seen is that fringe parties can have a disproportionate influence since neither centrist party has enough votes to form a majority on its own and needs to bribe them to join a coalition. At least, this is what I saw in Israel, and bribe is precisely the correct word. At one point it got so sickening that the two major parties formed a coalition instead.
Yes, there's a bad side to it that one 5% party with special interests might end up with the swing votes and gain a disproportional amount of power. In a coalition each party also tends to blame the compromises they make when they don't fulfill their election promises. But you as a voter have more choices and the politics of a coalition mostly reflects the relative strength of the parties involved, a 30% party doesn't let a 10% party decide half the politics. Basically your vote might be a "blue" vote in US politics but it matters if it's light blue, dark blue, blue-green and there are always several parties fighting for your vote not just taking it as given.
I also don't think that the occasional grand coalition is a bad thing, it is the way to curb fringe parties from asking too much. It proves that there is a true choice in coalition partners, that the small parties can't just make ultimatums because the big party needs them. I'm sure that is an extremely foreign idea to US politics, but if you have say the fringe 20% on each side off in their own parties then finding a common ground in the 30% moderate left and 30% moderate right is not so incredible. Again if the people find they become too much Republicrats they can vote for the fringe parties, if the actually like moderates in government without loony bins on each side they might keep supporting it. Or the big parties can go back to the small parties next election and say "Can you be reasonable this time?"
Reminds me of a story how I read on how one girl "solved" her bullying problem, they'd raised the issue several times with the school to no effect. Dad finally has enough, teaches her to fight. She grabs the head of the lead bully and slams it on her knee, broken nose, blood everywhere. School threatens to expel her, her dad threatens to sue the shit out of them for everything she's been through. Like the good cowards they are, the school backs down and manages to convinces the bully's parents not to press charges either. She's now forever known as that crazy kid, but nobody's messing with her anymore. It's sad but school is mostly a lawless territory where violence is often the last and only means to defend yourself.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
I think that's a lie, the truth is everybody thought there were so many eyes on the code they all glazed over and nobody really looked. After all, if this was my company and the line was "Well everybody who works here has access to the source repository so I'm sure that someone would find it..." there'd be plenty alarm bells going off in my head. For sure, bumping into buggy code is often the way you find out about bugs but for security critical code it's review, more review, audits, all that really boring red tape that counts to stop it getting through in the first place. If the rumors are true, the NSA caught on pretty quick which is because they have lots of smart people getting paid well to look for exactly these kinds of issues. This is not magic. But it's the kind of boring shit you usually have to pay people to get done.
Except for corporate sponsored positions - which also typically have their own agendas - the work that gets done is the work people feel like doing. If what you need is 50% development, 50% review but 90% of what the people involved are interested in is the development of their own pet features well you don't have any authority to boss people around. You can ask the reviewers to be a bottleneck which will quickly turn sour, you can ask them to rubber stamp it faster or you can add people who really shouldn't be reviewers but you can't hire more qualified reviewers. Waiting a few years for someone to stumble into it just isn't a good process, no matter how much people pretend this proves how OSS "works".
For example, consider an server which acquires a passphrase from the client for authentication purposes. If your implementation language is C, you can receive that passphrase into a char array on the stack, use it, and zero it out immediately. Poof, gone in microseconds. But let's say you used some language which dynamically allocates memory for all strings and garbage-collects them when they go out of scope. (...)
That would be true if high level languages only offered the default implementation but usually they have a special implementation like SecureString in.NET, it'll let you do the exact same thing. For bonus points it'll also encrypt the data in memory in case you have to keep it around a little while, sure it's a bit of security through obscurity but it won't be trivial to find with a memory dump. The issue is more that people who aren't aware of the issues won't ever think to look for or use these classes, but they're available.
At the start of the war holding slaves was not unconstitutional, each state made their own laws and there was slavery on the Union side as well. The United States simply did not want 30% of their population and 70% of their exports seceding away, it would totally cripple their economy. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 - long after the war started - was just directed at the slaves in states in rebellion, those under Union control still remained in slavery. In short, it was a wartime measure to cripple an armed rebellion and recruit soldiers to their own side. I'm sure the Lincoln movie is not the most accurate historic source but there was huge doubt if the proclamation had any force once the war was over or if they'd all be returned to slavery.
There was huge resistance to passing the 13th amendment even with the southern states broken away, it was rejected as late as 1864 and only passed with the smallest possible 2/3rds margin (119-56) through the House in 1865 before the South rejoined. And that was only after years of negros serving in the Union army and dying for the north, at the start of the war... no. The abolitionists might have been on the rise but in 1860 support for slavery was alive and well all over the United States. They might have climbed to the moral high ground during the war, but initially it was a simple case of the government fighting down a rebellion like any other.
If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof.
In case you've been sleeping under a rock for the last year, the target of the NSA is everyone. Not that they put you on the same level as the Chinese military of course, but nobody's under their radar and if they can grab your data or metadata easily they will because you could be a terrorist or at least the friend of a friend of a friend of a terrorist. It's not that the average joe would stand a chance if they threw everything in their arsenal at us, but those "zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques" don't come free and using them highly increases the chances of exposing them. The question is more like "Does NSA grab all the TrueCrypt containers used as backup on Dropbox/GDrive/whatever and rifle through everyone's data?" than "If the NSA really wants the contents of my laptop, would this really stop them?"
If we had anti-gravity cars like those in "The Jetsons" then I think it'd be fine, we'd need some kind of virtual lane system with upwards/downwards corridors as a heads up display and an emergency parachute (space capsule style?) to save your ass but it'd work and you could stay to sane consumer speeds with high speed high altitude "interstates". Anything that depends on wings for lift though has to stay at very high speeds and can't practically stop for anything, even if you have a VTOL system hovering for even an extremely brief time will burn through your fuel in no time. If you think it's bad now, wait until slamming the brakes is not an option.
I know what rhetorical means but really, there's so many obvious ways. Take a piece of string, tie down one end and draw a circle in the sand with the other. Now use the same piece of string to measure out the circle. You'll get an approximation of pi more than good enough for any practical purpose, the only thing "special" about it is that numbers that aren't fractions like pi, e and the square root of 2 was fucking with their understanding of math. Even the ancient druids of Stonehenge could map out a circle, long before Euclid.
Well, he's using the only sales argument he has from the customer's point of view. From the store's point of view though they won't sell it at the same price you get online because they need to pay for location, staff, deal with shoplifters and books that go stale and unsold that need to be taken off the shelves again. It's better for them not to take your business rather than open up Pandora's box and have people coming in expecting to be price matched, taking up sales rep time and getting angry if they're refused. And if word got around you could get it cheaper just by pointing to a webpage on a smartphone, other people buying it at normal markup could feel cheated and generate a lot of negative publicity about you. As sales pitches go it's a honest one, but it's not the real reason why they won't price match.
Sadly(?) English doesn't keep the original pronunciation, though UK-English is closer than US-English. I mentioned the reason in another post, it's that damned Great Vowel Shift what makes English stand out among European languages.
Well that's maybe relevant for those coming from another European language or reading old English texts, but to users only interested in contemporary English that's more of a historical curiosity. Their challenge is that the rules aren't consistent, which is often traceable to its historic roots. For example let's take the word steak, it's a loanword from Old Norse steik which is why the "ea" in steak is different from that in peak, leak, beak, weak or freak. Of course every language has a few foreign words that don't follow the normal rules but English has it dialed up to 11.
And the next thing he knew, he woke up in an alley. His wallet, keys, phone and shoes were missing. For the life of him, he could not figure out why they didn't take his cool new toy.
It's a photo/video camera that might have been on, not even stupid crooks would leave that potential evidence behind.
I do not believe English has had the same done to it. Otherwise you would not end up with something like:
English keeps the pronunciation of the language they took it from, which means it's a smattering of Britons (~Welsh, -450), Anglo-Saxons ("English", 450-1066), Normans (~French, 1066-), Gaelic (~Scottish, ~Irish) with some Norse from Scandinavia, and through the British Empire it's picked up words from most of the world's languages by now. While "English" has pronunciation rules, unless you're a professor of etymology (the history of words) it's easier to just learn each word than trying to find a pattern.
Or in banking terminology, GNOME is too big to fail. Sorry, ever since Qt went LGPL in 2009 I've wished they'd go away so you can actually build a modular desktop, but as long as there's two competing languages it's almost impossible to build common components without going to awkward workarounds like D-Bus. Not even the kernel would work well with kernel modules written in C++, Java and Python, not that there's anything wrong with them as languages but as modules to a C program. Otherwise I expect the in-fighting will continue until Google pulls an Android and leaves GNOME, KDE, XFCE etc. to be a Nokia N900 niche in the desktop market. Not because it's technically the best solution, but because Google has a certain Steve Jobs effect too - if they tell everyone desktop Android is the next big thing devices, developers/applications and users will follow.
Well, first of all since OpenSSL is an open source project, I doubt staying anonymous was an option as you can go back and check git logs and mailing lists.
Dr. Seggelmann said the error he introduced was "quite trivial", but acknowledged that its impact was "severe". (,..) After he submitted the code, a reviewer "apparently also didn't notice the missing validation," Dr. Seggelmann said
So the takeaway here is that OpenSSL has a review process that lets "quite trivial" bugs in the input validation of a high security product through, that's comforting
Seggelmann said it might be "tempting" to assume the bug was inserted deliberately by a spy agency or hacker. "But in this case, it was a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security relevant area," he said, according to the newspaper report. "It was not intended at all, especially since I have previously fixed OpenSSL bugs myself and was trying to contribute to the project."
If you were a spy agency trying to get a vulnerability into OpenSSL, do you think it'd be on the first patch? Fix some insignificant bugs, get trusted, introduce seemingly innocent but deeply flawed code and trust that it gets rubber stamped through. He the first of three authors on the Heartbeat extension which for some reason includes an arbitrary size, arbitrary content data block where a simple PING/PONG would confirm the connection is still alive. I'm not saying he is a plant, but I am saying that everything he says is exactly the same as a plant would say to excuse his backdoor as a honest mistake. I mean, could you do it any better if you tried? Create a side channel by passing large chunks of data back and forth between the client and server, then create a flaw to pass the state buffer instead. It smells to high heaven.
Objects are generally passed by reference, so it should be MORE efficient than passing around 10 values. The problem arises if you are setting the object's values as you pass it around, which can lead to unexpected or hard to determine states.
If you have a natural owner that's just providing access to it I'd agree, references (or constant references) are great but in this case I'd disagree. If it's for example an application form the form itself is ephemeral, but the information in is not. If you submit it, I want the form to pass the information by value and self-destruct cleaning up after itself. Once it reaches some kind of data owner, it can pass the application by reference through processing steps. For the same reason references are not so good for display, for example you have a function to display an invoice. If some other process on the back-end deletes the invoice, you suddenly have a reference to nowhere and it could crash as you try getting more details or see the next page. In short, don't pass a reference unless you know the source will live longer than the reference.
There is also the argument that programming teaches logical thinking, much like learning Latin used to, but when I read Slashdot I'm not always sure that is the case.
Logical in some kind of binary-compulsive-autistic way. If you have some kind of fuzzy state like say raising a child where the answer is somewhere between "Let them do everything" and "Don't let them do anything" it makes geek heads hurt. Half our jobs is taking fuzzy requirements and turning them into rigorously defined, deterministic rules that defines behavior down to the last bit, it's our job to take a round peg and squeeze it until it fits a square hole. You also see it in geeks trying to reduce everything down to some oversimplified set of axioms, like free speech. Maybe we don't think threats or companies being able to lie in commercials or or kiddie porn is okay, but some will take it all the way to bizarro-world where Hitler didn't kill any jews unless he personally choked one to death, he was just exercising his free speech.
At least most geeks will agree there's a "street smart" too, maybe a little bit derisively but it's also a recognition that everything isn't in a book and being able to practically deal with situations as they happen in real life and interacting well with other people and your surroundings is a good thing and is important to function well in real life. Or I think maybe that's two things really, one is the practical side like knowing how to survive in the wilderness versus having read a book on how to survive in the wilderness and the other is dealing with people and animals with emotions. Your computer is your obedient slave, you tell it what to do and it executes it, it doesn't need a "please". It doesn't need motivation. It doesn't need buy-in or an explanation for what it's doing. If you think "HR" degrades people, you should hear the wetware's opinion on IT...
Depends on the type of coder, I've met too many old coders who try to keep the memory use low, performance high but code complexity is terrible because it's all one giant spaghetti ball of code.
For example now at work I've created a system which has a single master procedure( productionId, datasetId, stepId ) where NULL in the last two means all sets, all steps. I know some of the steps would be more efficient if merged, I know some contain one-time setup (but is hard to extract out) that's repeated many times when I run them on all datasets but for development it's a bliss. I can rerun a single step for a single set, a single step for all sets, all steps for a single set, I can easily time them (start and finish, per step, per set) and see what's making it choke not to mention if there's an error it's in a narrowly defined piece of code not the many-thousands-of-lines script it's replacing. A coworker of mine is starting to work on it setting up another production type and he loved the structure because it was so easy to grasp, even if he's only looked at a few steps.
Another feature I like is passing objects instead of values through layers. For example, say you have a form that has a string and a radiobutton but needs to have another UI element added, let's say a checkbox. If you pass the values as ( string, radioButton ) you have to change signatures everywhere. If you have an object FormValues, add the checkbox and pick up the value where it's needed. Is that efficient? Probably not, I guess I'm often passing ten values around when I only need two. But it saves a lot of pointless coding time when I find out that oh, I have to increase that from two to three. Defensive coding that makes it easy to expand or change functionality beats hardcoding every time.
I started out with a C64 which had 64kB of RAM, I'm not going to do that if we're talking about a million or a billion objects. But there are still people stuck in that mode where it's like every byte matters and it just doesn't. Make code that's easy to work with (verbose for clarity and descriptive names, but compact using standard functions and generic code where possible) and about 95% of the time it'll be worth more than trying to make it machine-efficient. A lot of "hardcore" developers dismiss abstractions as simplification for the simpletons and real developers code right on the metal, maybe not in assembler anymore but they kind of want to. It takes a real change of mindset to write code for coders, not code for the machine. Of course it must run in acceptable time with acceptable resource use, but that's often a low bar these days.
Does that software run on Linux? - Or a platinum rating on WINE? - Can we use our XP licenses for a VM if need be? If not, is there a comparable piece of software that would have all the functionality we need? - And make sure it's the functionality they need, that LibreOffice works for you doesn't mean it works for them. If not, can we live without the missing functionality? - And do you have a contingency plan when they suddenly a must-have feature they forgot to mention?
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why this is a never-ending competition, one thing is size but what about mass/gravity? Does it have a magnetic field? Does it have a Jupiter to clear the solar system of debris? Does it have a moon to produce tidal forces? Still, we know there's some slack in that life is almost everywhere on this planet from Sahara to the Arctic.
The flip side of that is that Canonical has been pretty clear that they're not building this for their existing users but rather to get new users on phones, tablets, phablets, convertibles, touchscreen laptops, TVs and whatnot other household devices. To trot out the old Henry Ford quote, if I asked my users what they'd wanted they'd say a faster horse. Well that's you, you want a better "classic" desktop the way it's been for the last 20 years or so but the users they have is 1% of a declining PC market that's being swarmed by other non-PC devices. That's why they won't listen when you complain that they're trying to put a steering wheel and pedals on your horse cart, they're trying to build a car and going back on that is clearly a step backwards compared to their goals.
Yes, he's trying to be Steve Jobs just like Google is, just like Microsoft is and when giants like that throw their weight around it's easy to get flung into irrelevance which is why the new business isn't exactly rolling in and the old business is cranky. Particularly now when Android has rolled in almost everywhere he wanted Ubuntu to be. He could just tuck his tail between his legs, admit defeat and say we'll be building a desktop of the geeks, by the geeks, for the geeks and that's that. Or at least aim the sights back to Microsoft, the old archenemy even though Ubuntu never managed to get very far there. But my impression is that he's too ambitious and stubborn to do that, besides "We're making this new Unity thing that no one wants and we'll force it on our users before its ready" sounds like GNOME 3, KDE 4 and a bunch of other projects so he fits right in.
The problem is Outlook and Exchange. The users see the mail client, calendering, and the like, as essential. The word processor and spreadsheet are secondary to that. Once some exec starts talking to sales about getting just Outlook, they are sold on the wonders of getting the whole MSOffice suite.
If you look at Microsoft's pricing, it's fairly obvious why. If you're first getting Outlook for 135 euro then another 135 euro to get everything else is an easy sell-up, particularly since I'm guessing the sales reps will give you a volume rebate on the Office suite but never on Outlook alone. For at least a decade I've heard product after product being called "Outlook killer" but they all seem to fizzle and my impression mostly because they focus on being POP/IMAP clients. Calendaring is probably more essential to an organization, and I don't mean the simple one-off meeting.
When are people available and what meeting rooms are available. Setting up recurring meetings (like say a weekly staff meeting) that lets you easily modify single instances (because this week is easter), calendar sharing, forwarding events with proper notification to the meeting owner, overviews of who will/will not attend or haven't answered, including the agenda or attachments, corporate directories, personal directories, all that practical stuff like that if I start writing a mail to someone in-house it warns me right away they're going to send an away message instead of waiting for me to send it, get the auto-reply, realize what I just send won't work, then another email to say forget that, let's do something else when you're back on Monday.
Geeks hate meetings and scheduling, every one of them myself included. Good calendar software which makes it easy to drown people in meetings is just begging to be swamped with them so it's not exactly an itch we'd like to scratch. We're very busy trying to invent and push non-meeting solutions like email or IM and claim we're solving it better. I'm not going to fire up debate, but the fact of the matter is that getting all of the people involved in the same room at the same time to discuss/decide matters is still a very popular idea. And if you want to get rid of Office, you need to get rid of Outlook and if you want to get rid of Outlook you must handle this well. I'm sure there's lots of people who'd like to drop Exchange and the CALs, using non-MS products despite still sending around MS documents so it should be easier than taking down all of MS Office at once.
We already have almost every version of this, hybrid drives for laptops, software techniques that mimic this but they're all fairly stupid and unpredictable, training it to cache the right things take time and suddenly what used to have SSD performance might have been evicted. If you're the kind of user who needs >100GB you probably know what it is taking space. Put your big media (video, photos, music) on D:, everything else like applications and documents stay on C:. The only really tough call is games which often have a huge install size but also app code that benefits from being on an SSD, Steam lets you define multiple library folders so you can have one on C:, one on D: but no easy way to swap them in and out, for now the only supported way is uninstall and reinstall on the other. There are workarounds for that though.
Here in Norway I have the impression that it's only two main groups. One is Romani that arrive through the EU agreement, basically the kind who come with no rights, no education, no work history, no nothing and the only thing they're here for is to beg, steal and live off various programs that provide shelter and food for the homeless while leaving a trail of littering and vandalism in their wake. And yes, I don't mind stigmatizing the whole group because 68 of 69 beggars in a random sweep of beggars had a criminal record. And despite a million attempts to integrate them, they have no intention of ever becoming productive members of society and raise their children just like them to embrace their nomadic and parasitic lifestyle. Many of the children aren't enrolled in primary/secondary education at all and the few who are absent more than 1/3rd of the time. They also have more than a few cultural issues with suckers who work all day for an honest wage, why anyone would give them money is incomprehensible to me.
The other big, big group is drug/alcohol addicts, but there are hospices and such that will give them shelter and food if they don't show up high as a kite. The truly homeless are the ones who can't keep their drug use outside the shelter, but even those get winter sleeping bags so they don't freeze to death on the streets. They're not trying to hustle you for money in order to eat or drink or put clothes on their backs or a roof over their heads, it's to feed their habit. It's almost a protection racket, we're addicts and we will find the money to get our kick so you can either throw a few bucks in our cup or we'll get desperate and you really don't want us to get desperate. If you give them anything nice they'll probably sell it for the money anyway, you can give them money but it's not going to lead to anything positive. The rest are mostly taken care of, if you just have mental or money problems you won't be the streets and you won't have to beg for a living.
Really? I think most people would accept "net worth" as the proper metric.
Well, he said "potentially liquid" not "liquid", like if you decided to become a Buddhist monk and give away everything you own selling your house, car and so on could you liquidate your 401(k)? From what it looks like you must pay a 10% early withdrawal fee and income tax, so it's a lot less worth to have $1 in a 401(k) than in a regular bank account. On the other hand should you include things like sales commission on the house? I don't know, but in an informal sense I'd say that you're only a millionaire if you could literally gather a million dollars in cash if you wanted to.
When you see how far they've stretched the "interstate commerce" clause, I think your proposal would only lead to a greater mess. Besides, people want laws that create simple rules like when can I carry this gun? Who, when, what, how, where are easy and categorical, why is often vaguely defined in someone's mind. For example if you say the "mission" is for self-defense then anyone caught with a gun can always claim that, even when it seems extremely unlikely.
I'd just start throwing lots of question at that definition until you got it narrowed down.
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Who are "the people"? Is it the same "people" who have the right to a fair trial? Because I'm pretty sure that includes everyone, not just citizens or residents but that illegal immigrant crossing over from Mexico too. Does he have a right to "keep and bear arms"? Does anyone not connected to any milita? Even back then the militia was all "able bodied men", is a woman or a cripple protected? What about minors? The mentally ill? Felons? They all have the right to a fair trial, no ifs or buts about that. Can you condition this right on a license or registration or test? Can you deny anyone to buy a gun or place restrictions on those selling guns like mandatory waiting periods or is that denying them the right to have a gun like right now? Can you regulate how it's stored without violating the right to keep it, like keeping it dismantled, unloaded, ammo separate from gun, in a gun locker etc. because really you could demand it be encased in three feet of cement. What does it mean to bear arms, does it mean openly or concealed, can you have it in the glove box or under your seat? Can you carry it on private property, public property, in public buildings, on other people's private property that's open to the general public? What exactly does "arms" means, is it the right to have cannons and nukes or small arms? Poisoned darts, is that arms? What about knives or tazers or and any other non-gun "arms"?
Those are just off the top of my head, it wouldn't be that hard to make a law that actually answers all of these questions and it would lay most the issues at rest without ever going into the tricky question of why you might want to have a gun.
While this is true, there are generally two large parties that garner 60-80% of the seats, and these tend to be centrist parties with the same sort of minor differences that we see in the USA between Republican and Democrat.
That's where you're wrong, because even if you're a 30% party close to the center you can't just keep your attention on the swing voters as if they're the only ones that matter. In US politics the only other group that matters are the fence sitters and you'd need to be pretty damn pissed at the Democrats to let Bush run the show or pretty damn pissed at the Republicans to let Obama run the show. But here if you don't actually cater to your side your 35% party can be a 25% party next election and one of the usurper parties that promise to be "real" Democrats or "real" Republicans start taking over. Or if there's a wave of say environmentalism then a red-green or blue-green party might get an upswing even if there's not enough support for a pure green party. You have to defend yourself on all fronts.
One drawback to the parliamentary system that I've seen is that fringe parties can have a disproportionate influence since neither centrist party has enough votes to form a majority on its own and needs to bribe them to join a coalition. At least, this is what I saw in Israel, and bribe is precisely the correct word. At one point it got so sickening that the two major parties formed a coalition instead.
Yes, there's a bad side to it that one 5% party with special interests might end up with the swing votes and gain a disproportional amount of power. In a coalition each party also tends to blame the compromises they make when they don't fulfill their election promises. But you as a voter have more choices and the politics of a coalition mostly reflects the relative strength of the parties involved, a 30% party doesn't let a 10% party decide half the politics. Basically your vote might be a "blue" vote in US politics but it matters if it's light blue, dark blue, blue-green and there are always several parties fighting for your vote not just taking it as given.
I also don't think that the occasional grand coalition is a bad thing, it is the way to curb fringe parties from asking too much. It proves that there is a true choice in coalition partners, that the small parties can't just make ultimatums because the big party needs them. I'm sure that is an extremely foreign idea to US politics, but if you have say the fringe 20% on each side off in their own parties then finding a common ground in the 30% moderate left and 30% moderate right is not so incredible. Again if the people find they become too much Republicrats they can vote for the fringe parties, if the actually like moderates in government without loony bins on each side they might keep supporting it. Or the big parties can go back to the small parties next election and say "Can you be reasonable this time?"
Reminds me of a story how I read on how one girl "solved" her bullying problem, they'd raised the issue several times with the school to no effect. Dad finally has enough, teaches her to fight. She grabs the head of the lead bully and slams it on her knee, broken nose, blood everywhere. School threatens to expel her, her dad threatens to sue the shit out of them for everything she's been through. Like the good cowards they are, the school backs down and manages to convinces the bully's parents not to press charges either. She's now forever known as that crazy kid, but nobody's messing with her anymore. It's sad but school is mostly a lawless territory where violence is often the last and only means to defend yourself.
So, the "with many eyes all bugs are shallow" notion fails. There were not enough eyes on the OpenSSL library, which is why nobody discovered the bug.
I think that's a lie, the truth is everybody thought there were so many eyes on the code they all glazed over and nobody really looked. After all, if this was my company and the line was "Well everybody who works here has access to the source repository so I'm sure that someone would find it..." there'd be plenty alarm bells going off in my head. For sure, bumping into buggy code is often the way you find out about bugs but for security critical code it's review, more review, audits, all that really boring red tape that counts to stop it getting through in the first place. If the rumors are true, the NSA caught on pretty quick which is because they have lots of smart people getting paid well to look for exactly these kinds of issues. This is not magic. But it's the kind of boring shit you usually have to pay people to get done.
Except for corporate sponsored positions - which also typically have their own agendas - the work that gets done is the work people feel like doing. If what you need is 50% development, 50% review but 90% of what the people involved are interested in is the development of their own pet features well you don't have any authority to boss people around. You can ask the reviewers to be a bottleneck which will quickly turn sour, you can ask them to rubber stamp it faster or you can add people who really shouldn't be reviewers but you can't hire more qualified reviewers. Waiting a few years for someone to stumble into it just isn't a good process, no matter how much people pretend this proves how OSS "works".
For example, consider an server which acquires a passphrase from the client for authentication purposes. If your implementation language is C, you can receive that passphrase into a char array on the stack, use it, and zero it out immediately. Poof, gone in microseconds. But let's say you used some language which dynamically allocates memory for all strings and garbage-collects them when they go out of scope. (...)
That would be true if high level languages only offered the default implementation but usually they have a special implementation like SecureString in .NET, it'll let you do the exact same thing. For bonus points it'll also encrypt the data in memory in case you have to keep it around a little while, sure it's a bit of security through obscurity but it won't be trivial to find with a memory dump. The issue is more that people who aren't aware of the issues won't ever think to look for or use these classes, but they're available.
At the start of the war holding slaves was not unconstitutional, each state made their own laws and there was slavery on the Union side as well. The United States simply did not want 30% of their population and 70% of their exports seceding away, it would totally cripple their economy. The Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 - long after the war started - was just directed at the slaves in states in rebellion, those under Union control still remained in slavery. In short, it was a wartime measure to cripple an armed rebellion and recruit soldiers to their own side. I'm sure the Lincoln movie is not the most accurate historic source but there was huge doubt if the proclamation had any force once the war was over or if they'd all be returned to slavery.
There was huge resistance to passing the 13th amendment even with the southern states broken away, it was rejected as late as 1864 and only passed with the smallest possible 2/3rds margin (119-56) through the House in 1865 before the South rejoined. And that was only after years of negros serving in the Union army and dying for the north, at the start of the war... no. The abolitionists might have been on the rise but in 1860 support for slavery was alive and well all over the United States. They might have climbed to the moral high ground during the war, but initially it was a simple case of the government fighting down a rebellion like any other.
If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof.
In case you've been sleeping under a rock for the last year, the target of the NSA is everyone. Not that they put you on the same level as the Chinese military of course, but nobody's under their radar and if they can grab your data or metadata easily they will because you could be a terrorist or at least the friend of a friend of a friend of a terrorist. It's not that the average joe would stand a chance if they threw everything in their arsenal at us, but those "zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques" don't come free and using them highly increases the chances of exposing them. The question is more like "Does NSA grab all the TrueCrypt containers used as backup on Dropbox/GDrive/whatever and rifle through everyone's data?" than "If the NSA really wants the contents of my laptop, would this really stop them?"
If we had anti-gravity cars like those in "The Jetsons" then I think it'd be fine, we'd need some kind of virtual lane system with upwards/downwards corridors as a heads up display and an emergency parachute (space capsule style?) to save your ass but it'd work and you could stay to sane consumer speeds with high speed high altitude "interstates". Anything that depends on wings for lift though has to stay at very high speeds and can't practically stop for anything, even if you have a VTOL system hovering for even an extremely brief time will burn through your fuel in no time. If you think it's bad now, wait until slamming the brakes is not an option.
Rhetorical question: I wonder how Euclid managed?
I know what rhetorical means but really, there's so many obvious ways. Take a piece of string, tie down one end and draw a circle in the sand with the other. Now use the same piece of string to measure out the circle. You'll get an approximation of pi more than good enough for any practical purpose, the only thing "special" about it is that numbers that aren't fractions like pi, e and the square root of 2 was fucking with their understanding of math. Even the ancient druids of Stonehenge could map out a circle, long before Euclid.
Well, he's using the only sales argument he has from the customer's point of view. From the store's point of view though they won't sell it at the same price you get online because they need to pay for location, staff, deal with shoplifters and books that go stale and unsold that need to be taken off the shelves again. It's better for them not to take your business rather than open up Pandora's box and have people coming in expecting to be price matched, taking up sales rep time and getting angry if they're refused. And if word got around you could get it cheaper just by pointing to a webpage on a smartphone, other people buying it at normal markup could feel cheated and generate a lot of negative publicity about you. As sales pitches go it's a honest one, but it's not the real reason why they won't price match.
Sadly(?) English doesn't keep the original pronunciation, though UK-English is closer than US-English. I mentioned the reason in another post, it's that damned Great Vowel Shift what makes English stand out among European languages.
Well that's maybe relevant for those coming from another European language or reading old English texts, but to users only interested in contemporary English that's more of a historical curiosity. Their challenge is that the rules aren't consistent, which is often traceable to its historic roots. For example let's take the word steak, it's a loanword from Old Norse steik which is why the "ea" in steak is different from that in peak, leak, beak, weak or freak. Of course every language has a few foreign words that don't follow the normal rules but English has it dialed up to 11.
And the next thing he knew, he woke up in an alley. His wallet, keys, phone and shoes were missing. For the life of him, he could not figure out why they didn't take his cool new toy.
It's a photo/video camera that might have been on, not even stupid crooks would leave that potential evidence behind.
I do not believe English has had the same done to it. Otherwise you would not end up with something like:
English keeps the pronunciation of the language they took it from, which means it's a smattering of Britons (~Welsh, -450), Anglo-Saxons ("English", 450-1066), Normans (~French, 1066-), Gaelic (~Scottish, ~Irish) with some Norse from Scandinavia, and through the British Empire it's picked up words from most of the world's languages by now. While "English" has pronunciation rules, unless you're a professor of etymology (the history of words) it's easier to just learn each word than trying to find a pattern.
Or in banking terminology, GNOME is too big to fail. Sorry, ever since Qt went LGPL in 2009 I've wished they'd go away so you can actually build a modular desktop, but as long as there's two competing languages it's almost impossible to build common components without going to awkward workarounds like D-Bus. Not even the kernel would work well with kernel modules written in C++, Java and Python, not that there's anything wrong with them as languages but as modules to a C program. Otherwise I expect the in-fighting will continue until Google pulls an Android and leaves GNOME, KDE, XFCE etc. to be a Nokia N900 niche in the desktop market. Not because it's technically the best solution, but because Google has a certain Steve Jobs effect too - if they tell everyone desktop Android is the next big thing devices, developers/applications and users will follow.
Well, first of all since OpenSSL is an open source project, I doubt staying anonymous was an option as you can go back and check git logs and mailing lists.
Dr. Seggelmann said the error he introduced was "quite trivial", but acknowledged that its impact was "severe". (,..) After he submitted the code, a reviewer "apparently also didn't notice the missing validation," Dr. Seggelmann said
So the takeaway here is that OpenSSL has a review process that lets "quite trivial" bugs in the input validation of a high security product through, that's comforting
Seggelmann said it might be "tempting" to assume the bug was inserted deliberately by a spy agency or hacker. "But in this case, it was a simple programming error in a new feature, which unfortunately occurred in a security relevant area," he said, according to the newspaper report. "It was not intended at all, especially since I have previously fixed OpenSSL bugs myself and was trying to contribute to the project."
If you were a spy agency trying to get a vulnerability into OpenSSL, do you think it'd be on the first patch? Fix some insignificant bugs, get trusted, introduce seemingly innocent but deeply flawed code and trust that it gets rubber stamped through. He the first of three authors on the Heartbeat extension which for some reason includes an arbitrary size, arbitrary content data block where a simple PING/PONG would confirm the connection is still alive. I'm not saying he is a plant, but I am saying that everything he says is exactly the same as a plant would say to excuse his backdoor as a honest mistake. I mean, could you do it any better if you tried? Create a side channel by passing large chunks of data back and forth between the client and server, then create a flaw to pass the state buffer instead. It smells to high heaven.
Objects are generally passed by reference, so it should be MORE efficient than passing around 10 values. The problem arises if you are setting the object's values as you pass it around, which can lead to unexpected or hard to determine states.
If you have a natural owner that's just providing access to it I'd agree, references (or constant references) are great but in this case I'd disagree. If it's for example an application form the form itself is ephemeral, but the information in is not. If you submit it, I want the form to pass the information by value and self-destruct cleaning up after itself. Once it reaches some kind of data owner, it can pass the application by reference through processing steps. For the same reason references are not so good for display, for example you have a function to display an invoice. If some other process on the back-end deletes the invoice, you suddenly have a reference to nowhere and it could crash as you try getting more details or see the next page. In short, don't pass a reference unless you know the source will live longer than the reference.
There is also the argument that programming teaches logical thinking, much like learning Latin used to, but when I read Slashdot I'm not always sure that is the case.
Logical in some kind of binary-compulsive-autistic way. If you have some kind of fuzzy state like say raising a child where the answer is somewhere between "Let them do everything" and "Don't let them do anything" it makes geek heads hurt. Half our jobs is taking fuzzy requirements and turning them into rigorously defined, deterministic rules that defines behavior down to the last bit, it's our job to take a round peg and squeeze it until it fits a square hole. You also see it in geeks trying to reduce everything down to some oversimplified set of axioms, like free speech. Maybe we don't think threats or companies being able to lie in commercials or or kiddie porn is okay, but some will take it all the way to bizarro-world where Hitler didn't kill any jews unless he personally choked one to death, he was just exercising his free speech.
At least most geeks will agree there's a "street smart" too, maybe a little bit derisively but it's also a recognition that everything isn't in a book and being able to practically deal with situations as they happen in real life and interacting well with other people and your surroundings is a good thing and is important to function well in real life. Or I think maybe that's two things really, one is the practical side like knowing how to survive in the wilderness versus having read a book on how to survive in the wilderness and the other is dealing with people and animals with emotions. Your computer is your obedient slave, you tell it what to do and it executes it, it doesn't need a "please". It doesn't need motivation. It doesn't need buy-in or an explanation for what it's doing. If you think "HR" degrades people, you should hear the wetware's opinion on IT...
Depends on the type of coder, I've met too many old coders who try to keep the memory use low, performance high but code complexity is terrible because it's all one giant spaghetti ball of code.
For example now at work I've created a system which has a single master procedure( productionId, datasetId, stepId ) where NULL in the last two means all sets, all steps. I know some of the steps would be more efficient if merged, I know some contain one-time setup (but is hard to extract out) that's repeated many times when I run them on all datasets but for development it's a bliss. I can rerun a single step for a single set, a single step for all sets, all steps for a single set, I can easily time them (start and finish, per step, per set) and see what's making it choke not to mention if there's an error it's in a narrowly defined piece of code not the many-thousands-of-lines script it's replacing. A coworker of mine is starting to work on it setting up another production type and he loved the structure because it was so easy to grasp, even if he's only looked at a few steps.
Another feature I like is passing objects instead of values through layers. For example, say you have a form that has a string and a radiobutton but needs to have another UI element added, let's say a checkbox. If you pass the values as ( string, radioButton ) you have to change signatures everywhere. If you have an object FormValues, add the checkbox and pick up the value where it's needed. Is that efficient? Probably not, I guess I'm often passing ten values around when I only need two. But it saves a lot of pointless coding time when I find out that oh, I have to increase that from two to three. Defensive coding that makes it easy to expand or change functionality beats hardcoding every time.
I started out with a C64 which had 64kB of RAM, I'm not going to do that if we're talking about a million or a billion objects. But there are still people stuck in that mode where it's like every byte matters and it just doesn't. Make code that's easy to work with (verbose for clarity and descriptive names, but compact using standard functions and generic code where possible) and about 95% of the time it'll be worth more than trying to make it machine-efficient. A lot of "hardcore" developers dismiss abstractions as simplification for the simpletons and real developers code right on the metal, maybe not in assembler anymore but they kind of want to. It takes a real change of mindset to write code for coders, not code for the machine. Of course it must run in acceptable time with acceptable resource use, but that's often a low bar these days.
Does that software run on Linux?
- Or a platinum rating on WINE?
- Can we use our XP licenses for a VM if need be?
If not, is there a comparable piece of software that would have all the functionality we need?
- And make sure it's the functionality they need, that LibreOffice works for you doesn't mean it works for them.
If not, can we live without the missing functionality?
- And do you have a contingency plan when they suddenly a must-have feature they forgot to mention?