Yes, in some ways I agree it is a "smear campaign", but I don't think it's an unjustified one. When a product has had vulns this serious this many times, yet maintains huge deployment due to market dominance and user lock-in, a huge smear campaign is needed to destroy it. This was the case in the past with products like BIND, Sendmail, WU-FTPD, IIS, IE, etc. and Java is just the latest necessary target.
In fairness, this is complicated a lot by two issues:
1. Many of the optimizations that help things like memcpy, memcmp, etc. are utterly wrong and backwards in any loop that actually DOES SOMETHING in its body; they only end up being optimal in the degenerate case where everything but the load and store is loop overhead and the optimal result is achieved by eliminating overhead. And on some CPU models such as most modern 32-bit x86's and some 64-bit ones, the optimal result is actually attained with a special instruction that's not usable in general for more complex loops (i.e. "rep movsb"). Factors like these make optimizing these specific functions in the compiler a task that's largely separate from general-case optimization, and when the main target libc is already providing the asm anyway, there's little demand/motivation to get the compiler to do something that won't even be used.
2. Distros want a binary library that can run optimally on all variants of a particular instruction set architecture. Relying on the compiler to optimize functions for which the optimal variant is highly cpu model specific would only give a binary that runs optimally on one model, unless a lot of logic is added to the build system to rebuild the same source file with different optimizations. This is not prohibitively difficult, but it's also not easy, and it's not worthwhile when the compiler can't even deliver the desired optimization quality yet.
Overall I agree that machine-specific asm in glibc (and elsewhere) is a disease that results in machine-specific bugs and maintenance hell, but when there are people demanding the performance and pushing benchmark-centric agendas, it's hard to fight it...
Or just have the good sense to purchase business-class service. I really doubt they do this crap to their business class. Most of the time, business class is only marginally more expensive than residential, and has none of the restrictions such as no-server rules or other crippling of the connection. Sometimes it's even the SAME price; this seems very common in the case of DSL but I'm not sure about cable. Often you can get one or more static ips at little cost that way, too.
Not quite as impressive as the 100% reduction in the rate of Alzheimer's, but 49% is still pretty damn good. Not sure what's up with all the anti-coffee trolls calling this propaganda from "the coffee industry".
I have multiple skype accounts created on the same email address (for different people, however) and it does not allow one to login as the other. It's possible to password-reset any of them independently.
There are already laws addressing that type of voter fraud. That's the whole point of this article, in case you missed it. And it's why it doesn't happen much. The voter ID laws attempt to address a completely different type of voter fraud that DOES NOT HAPPEN in any statistically significant amount, in ways that disenfranchise huge (statistically significant) numbers of voters, mostly low-income and minority voters.
Your argument only appeals to selfish faux-libertarian types who don't care about anything but not paying taxes. Some of us are happy to see litigation against authorities who commit injustices in our names, even if it means financial losses for us too. That part of it is what we get for letting them get into power. Ideally, the system would be reformed so that the majority of the liability is on the parties (industry, lobbyists, etc.) who convinced those authorities to perform illegal acts in our name, but it's everybody's responsibility to take part in making that happen.
Before you call MSE non-intrusive, you might want to read this...
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924707/fwrite-chokes-on-xml-version/
Overall, the other "AV" products are orders of magnitude worse in bloat and intrusiveness, but I can't believe they messed up something as fundamental as this...
When I wrote "stupid or unlucky" instead of just "stupid", I meant it. I know a lot of traffic citations are just a matter of being unlucky, but I still think the sample is highly biased towards bad drivers.
Actually it means 3/4 of the people who were either stupid enough or unlucky enough to get caught by a cop don't know the basic rules of driving. If your sample is people in (remedial) "driving school" for having lots of tickets, you have a huge selection bias towards bad drivers.
Any smart insurance company would insure them at somewhere between 10% and 75% of the cost of ensuring a human driver, and make INSANE profits since they can just keep all the premiums and never have to pay anything out.
Your individual decision to adblock or not makes no financial consequence for sites you like. Only the prevailing collective behavior affects their bottom line. Simply keep up the adblock and send them a donation if you want to do something much easier and less-costly to yourself (in terms of time and effort and privacy) than trying to support their ads.
As for the perspective of sites, those whose users are savvy enough that a significant portion use adblock should take concrete steps to make it easy and safe for their users to whitelist them, or offer other easy ways to support them (like donations, premium/supporter accounts, merch stores, etc.).
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Absolute usage, or relative? Their market dominance has surely eroded, and people who know what they're doing aren't using the old clunkers anymore.
Yes, in some ways I agree it is a "smear campaign", but I don't think it's an unjustified one. When a product has had vulns this serious this many times, yet maintains huge deployment due to market dominance and user lock-in, a huge smear campaign is needed to destroy it. This was the case in the past with products like BIND, Sendmail, WU-FTPD, IIS, IE, etc. and Java is just the latest necessary target.
In fairness, this is complicated a lot by two issues:
1. Many of the optimizations that help things like memcpy, memcmp, etc. are utterly wrong and backwards in any loop that actually DOES SOMETHING in its body; they only end up being optimal in the degenerate case where everything but the load and store is loop overhead and the optimal result is achieved by eliminating overhead. And on some CPU models such as most modern 32-bit x86's and some 64-bit ones, the optimal result is actually attained with a special instruction that's not usable in general for more complex loops (i.e. "rep movsb"). Factors like these make optimizing these specific functions in the compiler a task that's largely separate from general-case optimization, and when the main target libc is already providing the asm anyway, there's little demand/motivation to get the compiler to do something that won't even be used.
2. Distros want a binary library that can run optimally on all variants of a particular instruction set architecture. Relying on the compiler to optimize functions for which the optimal variant is highly cpu model specific would only give a binary that runs optimally on one model, unless a lot of logic is added to the build system to rebuild the same source file with different optimizations. This is not prohibitively difficult, but it's also not easy, and it's not worthwhile when the compiler can't even deliver the desired optimization quality yet.
Overall I agree that machine-specific asm in glibc (and elsewhere) is a disease that results in machine-specific bugs and maintenance hell, but when there are people demanding the performance and pushing benchmark-centric agendas, it's hard to fight it...
The GNU coding standard for C++ should be that you use only the subset of C++ that's also valid as C... :-)
Or just have the good sense to purchase business-class service. I really doubt they do this crap to their business class. Most of the time, business class is only marginally more expensive than residential, and has none of the restrictions such as no-server rules or other crippling of the connection. Sometimes it's even the SAME price; this seems very common in the case of DSL but I'm not sure about cable. Often you can get one or more static ips at little cost that way, too.
Not quite as impressive as the 100% reduction in the rate of Alzheimer's, but 49% is still pretty damn good. Not sure what's up with all the anti-coffee trolls calling this propaganda from "the coffee industry".
This rubble belongs on Fox News, not "news for nerds".
Depends on whether you count BitTorrent...
Apparently you missed the part where he told the cops where he hid the body...
No, apparently he picked the $10,000 heap with a garbage bag for a passenger-side window.
I have multiple skype accounts created on the same email address (for different people, however) and it does not allow one to login as the other. It's possible to password-reset any of them independently.
And Romney is smaller...where it counts. :-)
Judging by their userbase, perhaps they could just go with pe.do instead of pe.ta?
Some of us care about more important things than taxes.
There are already laws addressing that type of voter fraud. That's the whole point of this article, in case you missed it. And it's why it doesn't happen much. The voter ID laws attempt to address a completely different type of voter fraud that DOES NOT HAPPEN in any statistically significant amount, in ways that disenfranchise huge (statistically significant) numbers of voters, mostly low-income and minority voters.
Your argument only appeals to selfish faux-libertarian types who don't care about anything but not paying taxes. Some of us are happy to see litigation against authorities who commit injustices in our names, even if it means financial losses for us too. That part of it is what we get for letting them get into power. Ideally, the system would be reformed so that the majority of the liability is on the parties (industry, lobbyists, etc.) who convinced those authorities to perform illegal acts in our name, but it's everybody's responsibility to take part in making that happen.
I have an easier way to make the light go out: clip the cable.
No need for ImageMagick. MPlayer has its own tile filter.
Pretty sad that it took an $85000 camera to do the same thing you could do with any video camera and a few hundred lines of code...
Before you call MSE non-intrusive, you might want to read this... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5924707/fwrite-chokes-on-xml-version/ Overall, the other "AV" products are orders of magnitude worse in bloat and intrusiveness, but I can't believe they messed up something as fundamental as this...
How about flipping 200 McMansions per day?
When I wrote "stupid or unlucky" instead of just "stupid", I meant it. I know a lot of traffic citations are just a matter of being unlucky, but I still think the sample is highly biased towards bad drivers.
Actually it means 3/4 of the people who were either stupid enough or unlucky enough to get caught by a cop don't know the basic rules of driving. If your sample is people in (remedial) "driving school" for having lots of tickets, you have a huge selection bias towards bad drivers.
Any smart insurance company would insure them at somewhere between 10% and 75% of the cost of ensuring a human driver, and make INSANE profits since they can just keep all the premiums and never have to pay anything out.
Your individual decision to adblock or not makes no financial consequence for sites you like. Only the prevailing collective behavior affects their bottom line. Simply keep up the adblock and send them a donation if you want to do something much easier and less-costly to yourself (in terms of time and effort and privacy) than trying to support their ads. As for the perspective of sites, those whose users are savvy enough that a significant portion use adblock should take concrete steps to make it easy and safe for their users to whitelist them, or offer other easy ways to support them (like donations, premium/supporter accounts, merch stores, etc.).