Well, you could calculate the encryption with pen and paper, and only enter the encrypted values. That would be safe on an untrusted terminal, but would not be immune to a hidden camera.
It also would not be immune to the user selecting "large" primes like 3 and 5, but that's their own fault.:)
Agreed. I LOVE my Galaxy SII. When I bought it, it was down to this or the Atrix 2. Both were about 4.3 inch screens.
I actually bought it after the Skyrocket came out, but bought the original Galaxy SII because I felt the larger (4.5 inch) screen was just too big. Even the SII is a little big in some of my pockets. The only thing I miss on this phone is that I wish it had a higher resolution screen.
This year's phones like the Galaxy S3 are just huge. I had a friend who had a Galaxy Note and that was ridiculous (I have other friends who loved it.) The point is, some of us don't want the uber-huge screens. We often buy them because there is no other alternative if we want a high-end phone.
I'm up for contract renewal in a few months and I'm not sure what to get. I may get a second Galaxy SII for my wife, as the current phones are just so darn huge that I may be willing to stay on my older phone and see if a mid-range line of medium sized phones comes out. If I do get something bigger I will consider the larger screen size to be a minus, not a plus. The main feature that I'm after is a qHD or preferably 720p screen, I just want it in a more reasonable size.
Beyond that, there are nations that would effectively use terrorist groups to act as proxies in a nuclear quasi-war.
If Iran had nuclear weapons, we know they can't use them directly, that would result in outright destruction. However, if they "carelessly" get a nuclear weapon stolen, a terrorist group could bomb a target in Israel or the US without giving the victim an excuse to invade. This has been the strategy of many nations for a while with conventional weapons, and it only becomes more effective with nuclear weapons.
Both the US and the USSR understood that if one of their nukes got used on the other, there was going to be war, and it was going to be devastating. Many of the terrorist-supporting states won't have that fear because it hasn't worked that way for them in the past.
Right now, most of the nations of the world with nuclear weapons (this includes North Korea and Israel) are nations that carry out their military operations overtly. If they decide to attack with nuclear weapons, the whole world will know they were the ones responsible. These nations know that openly attacking a nuclear power will simply result in their annihilation, so they won't do it.
That isn't true for many of the nations in the middle east. They have a strategy of letting terrorist groups do their dirty work precisely because they don't get the direct repercussions of it. There's no reason to believe that the strategy would be any different with nuclear weapons. So, how does the US respond when some terrorist group operating out of Iran "steals" a nuclear weapon and uses it to blow up DC? Do you nuke Iran? They'll simply tell the world "we didn't do it, the terrorists did." Do you kill a few individual terrorists after the fact? That won't appease the american people, who will be out for blood, I assure you. I can see Iran expecting (particularly against the US) that the world community would prevent the victim from directly attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, and thus expecting controlled use of nuclear weapons through terrorist groups to move political negotiations in their favor.
The only ways I see to avoid this are either to make terrorist-supporting countries responsible for the terrorism now, so that they won't attempt nuclear terrorism, or to prevent those kinds of countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Since the former will just make the US look like a bully in the short term and result in significant instability, I understand why the current plan is to try and prevent nuclear weapons from spreading.
Both my wife and I agree: we could have been doctors, but we didn't WANT to be doctors. For me, I wanted to study a field where working in the field doesn't require anything more than a BS or maybe an MS. I don't want to teach, I want to get my hands dirty designing things. My wife is a nurse, and after seeing what Doctors have to put up with, is quite happy with her decision not to pursue medical school.
Doctors and Ph.D.s have a right to be *proud* of what they have achieved. They have succeeded in a difficult field and have no doubt overcome obstacles to achieve their success. I am also proud of what I have achieved and of being able to point to things and say "I made that," or "I know they use what I made." None of this entitles them or me to be arrogant. It may entitle them to a certain amount of deference on topics that are specifically within the purview of their specialty, but even that only extends to situations where outside constraints mean that they are legitimately unable to fully support their assertions with reasoned argument.
Basically his argument is that everyone who makes any money off of a product that is used in illegal file sharing is morally culpable for the decline of the music industry. This is ridiculous.
First, realize where I'm coming from. I have the CD for all of the songs on my MP3 player, mainly because I encode to FLAC. I am not the type that morally condones acquiring music from illegal downloads.
The author argues that we already pay for music, we just pay Dell/HP for our laptop, Apple for our iPod, Sun for the servers, Google for the advertisements, AT&T/Time Warner for the bandwidth, etc. He also argues that all of these companies are as morally culpable as Napster or The Pirate Bay.
For the consumer products, these products have substantial non-infringing uses. I use my laptop for a myriad of other things that are not illegal file sharing. This is true even for the people who do share files illegally. To imply the entire cost of the laptop constitutes a cost of acquiring music is silly. I can at least partially accept this argument for the iPod (not for me, see above), but not for any of the other consumer costs.
Similarly, the server-side suppliers who are paid by the illegal sharing site are also not morally culpable. Someone offered to buy their computer, and so they sold it to them. Why does that make them morally culpable if someone uses that computer to do something illegal? Furthermore, complaining that they make a profit on illegal file sharing is like complaining that the person who works at a restaurant near the server farm is morally culpable. They're just doing honest work. That someone doing something bad happens to purchase their work does NOT make them morally culpable for that person's actions. Taking music without compensating the artists is bad. It's bad no matter if it's the record companies or the consumer doing it. That doesn't make everyone who's ever sold anything to someone in the illegal file sharing business immoral or a criminal.
Further, there is no conspiracy among electronics companies to try and extract music industry profits, as the author implies. Most electronics companies are just as happy to sell you a laptop whether you get your music from iTunes or Napster. Similarly, the server manufacturers are just as happy to sell to Apple or The Pirate Bay. They don't have a horse in this race. I'll accept the argument that Spotify does, but that's a symptom of the larger problem, and they ARE behaving legally.
I hate to say it, but the only ones who have betrayed the music industry are their own customers, the ones who used to buy music and now download it instead. There is no global conspiracy among electronics companies to support file sharing, only among consumers who want cheap music. It sucks to be a musician in this environment, and I realize the author wants someone to blame for poor music sales besides the fans. However, I refuse to be held morally culpable for the illegal or immoral actions that others take using computers simply because I work in the technology industry.
Mobile processors (even those made by Intel) are NOT desktop processors. While it's pretty clear you know this, you make a mistake by trying to count the hardware decoders on the ARM but not on the x86. I don't care who makes the processor, no general-purpose mobile phone processor is going to be able to do 1080p video decoding in software. Intel couldn't even do it on Atom, which has substantially higher power draws than a mobile phone CPU. This is true of anything in the current generation of processors and should be true for the next few die shrinks. With technology scaling not providing the performance gains it once did, this really means it won't be possible for the foreseeable future. Even if the x86 cores could do 1080p video decoding, you'd still rather have the dedicated hardware, as dedicated hardware will use substantially less power doing it than the x86 core, and video decoding is one of the cases where power draw matters on mobile phones. The point of all this is that the graphics hardware comes out to be a wash when comparing Intel and ARM systems for mobile phones. Both of them need one, so you can't assume the x86 chip can get by without one. Thus, it really is comparing apples to apples to compare just the x86 cores and the ARM cores.
As far as the IPC difference between Intel and ARM, I'm going to side with Intel this time and say that architecture doesn't really matter. The back-end of these chips all run RISC-like. Cache sizes are going to be similar and the Intel core isn't all that sophisticated. There is no reason to believe that, at a given frequency, x86 performance will be significantly better than ARM performance. The argument is whether or not, at a given frequency, the added area required to decode x86 represents a significant additional power draw (or, worse yet, additional pipeline stages, which would have a detrimental impact on x86 performance.)
As far a fabs go, Intel is playing this in an interesting way. Intel seems to be using mobile chips as a way to keep their older fabs busy. This makes the mobile chips very nearly free for them to manufacture. They're just keeping up with ARM, rather than moving to their current process and absolutely blowing them away. So, let's be clear. Intel could be a die shrink ahead of where they are, which probably would make the x86 cores on a newer process better than the ARM ones on an older process. Intel is staying on the old process for cost reasons, not performance ones.
AMD doesn't really have anything that plays in the mobile space, but their closest comparison is Bobcat. Bobcat is a pretty good core for the power envelope it works in. I think AMD could build an x86 core for the mobile space, if they wanted to. The real problem is that they couldn't maintain current performance while using a back-level process to compete with Intel on cost. In some ways Intel might prefer that they could, as it might make x86 in the mobile space seem less like locking yourself into a single vendor, indirectly helping Intel sell Medfield.
For a "modern" CPU the instruction decoder is an absurdly tiny part. This is because the branch prediction, caches, issue queue, regfiles, etc. are all much larger or at least the same size.
This isn't nearly so true in a super-low-power mobile design. The instruction decoder size for a given instruction set architecture is pretty much a fixed size per decode pipe. This means that in one of these tiny mobile chips the relative size of the decoders is dramatically larger. A super-low-power chip dramatically reduces the sizes of the caches and branch prediction, reduces the size of the regfiles, and often eliminates the issue queue. It probably also removes a decode pipe, but the relative reduction in decode size is much smaller than the relative size reduction in other areas.
The limited register set absolutely hurts x86 on power usage, perhaps more than the decoders do, since it forces more data cache accesses for register spills and fills.
Now, I'm not saying that x86 is necessarily worse than arm on power usage, as the richer instruction set may have other advantages such as reducing instruction cache miss rate which can be used to improve IPC which can be spent to lower frequency and reduce power. Also, microcoded instructions may turn out to be more power efficient because they don't have to access the instruction cache every cycle.
None of this considers the fact that Intel has the best fab technology in the world. This means their processors will be a generation more efficient than everyone else's, which is probably more than enough to counter any "x86 tax" which the instruction set incurs.
I think the lack of women in tech fields goes significantly deeper than the assumption that at 17 or so the girls decide not to enter tech fields because they view the field as misogynistic. Our culture teaches women to avoid math and science fields and focus on liberal arts fields. This results in a lack of women in all math and science careers, although this is seen most acutely in computer science and engineering. I suspect this is because computer science and engineering are viewed as the most nerdy of the math and science fields. The attitude is that it's okay for a girl to be into biology, but not to be into computer science. To fix the gender gap there needs to be a significant cultural shift, which is much harder to produce than simply ending unfair hiring practices or worker treatment.
"Booth babes" are marketing, NOT development, and hiring them shows little about the development hiring practices. Particularly in consumer-oriented shows, they are a sign of the cultural problem, not hiring practices. They work because the people most likely to make or influence purchasing decisions for tech gadgets are men.
Exactly. You can't use social media to invite the friends to the party, or to discuss the party in any way.
The rules as stated are ridiculous. They sound okay until you realize that teachers are also parents, and so things that are inappropriate in their role as a teacher may be appropriate in their role as a parent. A teacher shouldn't use personal e-mail or social media to do their job (i.e. communicate with their current students.) At the same time, it is completely appropriate to use personal e-mail or personal social media to communicate with their child or their child's friends.
This is the same as it being generally inappropriate to, as a teacher, invite students to your house, but it is perfectly appropriate to, as a parent, invite your child's friends to your house on behalf of your child.
The school district can tell the difference for real-world events, but has the common fallacy of "if it happens on the internet, it must be a dramatically greater risk for evil."
The actual guidelines for personal social media are far too strict.
The guidelines say no DOE employee my have any social media contact with any DOE student who they are not related to. This effectively means that ALL DOE employees may not user personal accounts to communicate on social media sites with ANY student under 18 living in their district boundaries.
So, if you're a kindergarten teacher with a 17 year old son, it is not appropriate to use social media to (for instance) plan a birthday party for your son.
While I understand why the district might want the rule to be so broad (read: simplicity and lawsuits), it is so broad as to be nearly meaningless, and will likely be ignored in many cases where it shouldn't be. Much more sensible would have been guidelines such as: "It is inappropriate to use personal social media to communicate with any student for which the employee has a direct supervisory role or has had a direct supervisory role in the preceding two(2) academic years. For example, teachers may not use personal social media to communicate with their students or students of other teachers in their teaching team. School administrative employees may not use personal social media to communicate with students who attend their school. It is strongly recommended that any DOE employee using personal social media to communicate with a student not subject to the above guidelines receive prior consent from the student's parent or guardian and review their communication with the student's parent or guardian regularly."
While my set of guidelines seems strict, it should be sufficient as the consent and review provisions did not specify "in writing" and so can be done verbally. It also isn't so broad as to outlaw usage that is clearly reasonable. More importantly, such rules are more likely to be followed when it appears that the administrators made an attempt to really codify the appropriate and inappropriate uses, and didn't just take a "personal use of social media is evil" stance.
I get comics for both my kids, but I do limit their choices.
For my 10-year old, she can read most comics (I won't let her read my Fatale) but she generally wants to read the older kids comics to the younger teen comics. She likes Young Justice and Teen Titans. She also likes Supergirl (mostly pre-relaunch.)
For my 5-year old, he prefers the kids comics like Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Earth's Mightiest Heroes: The Avengers(I think that's the title of the kids version). Scooby-Doo comics are pretty popular with him, and there is a series of DC Superpets books that he likes.
We'll let either of them get graphic novels aimed at older kids, but only after we've looked through them.
Marvel and especially DC both have "kids comics" labeled on their websites, so you can find ones that are likely to be appropriate for a younger kid. Archie and Disney also make comics for kids, but those are going to be less "Superhero," unless you count Darkwing Duck.
I agree that the mainstream comics may be more mature than you want, especially for a 3-7 year old, but there are still some good options. Graphic Novels make a nice addition if you want to get a little more variety because you can preview in the comic shop and decide if that particular story-line is appropriate for your child. (Unless your local comic shop is a strict "No Reading" shop, in which case I suggest you find a better one.)
Basically, Amazon formed a wholly owned subsidiary to run the shipping business in Texas. They then argued that while the subsidiary had a presence in Texas, Amazon didn't.
From the way it was reported, it seemed Amazon was fairly clearly in the wrong, but Rick Perry (for better or worse) stepped in when Amazon threatened to close down the distribution center if Texas made them pay sales tax.
I think Texas and Amazon worked out a deal where Amazon would pay sales tax "after a while" and this is probably that deal coming to fruition.
Having a single-purpose device for voting that was attached to the internet would be overly complicating things. The amount of data transferred between machines in an election is tiny. Any given precinct is going to have about 25 races with at most 8 choices per race. Even at 8 bytes per choice that's only 2 kilobytes of data that needs to be transferred to generate the totals. That can be sent in under a second over a typical modem.
Having a device connected to the internet increases the security exposure dramatically. Right now there are two ways to hack an electronic voting machine: 1.) Hack the device manufacturer. or 2.) Hack the machine at the polling place. #1 is the biggest weakness, but it's also the best protected. #2 would only affect a single polling place's machines, and requires a physical presence, making it much more risky. With an internet-connected device it becomes possible to attack all of the machines remotely, and they likely will not have the same level of security as the manufacturer's internal network. The security has to be flawless from the OS to the application layer to prevent a determined attacker from altering the election. All of this added security exposure wouldn't even result in significantly faster results tallies since the actual data transfer takes so little time anyway.
When everyone says internet voting, they mean web voting, or at least voting away from any established polling place on an internet-connected device owned by the voter. As soon as the voter has admin rights to the device, something like I described above becomes possible.
I have one labeled "Work". I have another labeled "Home" I think for a while I also had one labeled "Wife"
This is actually a problem with my current phone. Contacts are naturally just names because it picks them up from my e-mail. This is as opposed to them being nicknames that would be recognizable to a stranger.
Most likely the easiest way to contact me on my current phone would be through my e-mail. Just look there and get my e-mail address, then e-mail me.
It's actually quite sinister when you consider that you can combine this with a Super PAC.
A Super PAC is an organization that can get unlimited amounts of money from corporations and has zero legal accountability to the candidate. This means it's perfectly possible for a Super PAC to offer to pay anyone $20 to vote (implied "for their candidate") then include some kind of browser plug-in that actually checks that the voter voted. If it's determined that this is illegal then the Super PAC goes down, but the candidate is squeaky clean. I'm sure they'd portray this as the internet equivalent of driving you to the polling place, though it's obviously much worse.
$20 per person x 300 million people = about 6 billion dollars to pay every man woman and child $20 to vote. It's probably a billion or two cheaper than that when you consider that children can't vote. This means it is well within the abilities of a well-funded Super PAC to offer $20 per vote (technically not necessarily for their candidate) to anyone who will take it.
All I've tried to describe above would likely be considered legal. If they wanted to step a little outside legal, the plug-in could "helpfully" fill out the vote form for the candidates they wanted you to vote for. A little less sinister would be to add a "default vote" or "Vote with Super PAC for Hope!" button to the ballot shown to the voter. Even if they said they would still pay you, some people would vote as directed for fear they would lose the money, and many would vote as directed because clicking the button or just pressing "VOTE" on the form as presented was easier than thinking about the issues. They could go even less sinister than that and just reorder the candidate listings on the ballot, such that their candidates were always on top.
If I knew that Newark was where to order from Farnell, then I would have known to order from there. Farnell's web site doesn't make this clear anywhere that I could find, and while that is primarily Farnell's problem, it reflects badly on Raspberry Pi, even if it isn't their fault.
The companies do have an interest in informing the Raspberry Pi team in order to reduce load on their own sites, if nothing else. That only works if the Raspberry Pi team goes through the effort of sharing what information they get. Also, the Raspberry Pi team probably has an internal phone contact that the rest of us don't have.
All of this isn't to say that I think Raspberry Pi is a bad organization or that I'm angry or anything. I'm frustrated at not getting one (which I expected) and confused about how to get one in the future (which I did not expect.) I think resolving the confusion would tame at least some of the anger that other people are experiencing.
BTW, are you saying that you don't get charged the $20 handling fee (or get charged something smaller) if you order by phone?
Where raspberry pi is really failing at the moment is messaging. We were initially told that we could order internationally direct from the foundation. The post on the website says that you can buy them now from RS and Farnell, which would also be fine. While I think this is true for Farnell if you live in the UK, it isn't true for RS or Farnell if you live in the USA, so a lot of people feel like they've been deceived.
Furthermore, Farnell doesn't even seem to sell to USA consumers, and RS only has an "express an interest" site, and nothing on their USA site.
So, consumers are very confused about what is going on. Because of the inconsistent messaging, USA consumers have no idea if we'll ever be able to buy them online, at least without significant retail markup.
What I think would improve the goodwill would be for the Raspberry Pi team to:
1.) Contact RS and Farnell and figure out what the heck is going on, particularly for international customers. Put a post on the website to the effect that you're doing this. 2.) Once they do figure out what's going on, TELL US.
If, in two weeks time, when all the traffic has died down, international customers will be able to get them, that's fine, but people currently don't feel like that's the case. The two distributors are ruining Raspberry Pi's goodwill (which often happens when you give this power to someone else) but Raspberry Pi isn't compensating by over-communicating on their end.
I agree with paragraphs 1 and 2, but completely disagree with paragraph 3.
When these systems fail, they will fail in spectacular ways. However, they will not fail when there are obvious sensible things to do and when the software has good input. The case you describe is obvious: If the brakes are out (or mostly out) use a combination of the working brakes and the transmission to slow the car down.
Here's a better example: What if the cables for the left side brakes and the right side brakes are in backwards? The car detects that when braking the car pulls to the left, and so it increases force on the right side brakes and reduces force on the left side brakes. However, as the brake cables are backwards, this only causes the car to pull more to the left, which the car then tries to compensate for with steering, causing a loss of traction on the front wheels and perhaps a nasty spin. All this happens on a simple straight stop because the car gets confused by the bad input.
We see this from time to time in autopilot systems. It's hard to anticipate every bad set of inputs, so there is bound to be some combination that just confuses the heck out of the software and causes something flaky to happen (in an autopilot, hopefully handing control back to the pilot.) Often it's the combination of something the system was designed to handle on a temporary basis (but that lasts longer than usual) with something else slightly tricky adding to it, and then encountering some kind of unusual situation. These cases are a nightmare to try and debug because you can't reproduce them.
Actually, many atheists would argue that there IS evidence against at least the Judeo-Christian image of a benevolent deity. This is the simple "why are there starving children?" To an atheist, there are no satisfying answers for why a benevolent deity would allow that.
Now, this doesn't preclude the existence of either a indifferent or vindictive deity, only that of a benevolent one. However, there's very little point in worshiping an indifferent or vindictive deity, thus many of those holding this belief pledge Atheism, even if they're really in a sense agnostic.
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Based on your comment above, you agree that Atheism is "a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews" which seems appropriate given that only "cultural systems" is questionable.
"moral values" is behind a sometimes, so is not required to meet the definition.
So, the main open question is, does Atheism "relate humanity to sprituality?" Atheism most decidedly DOES relate humanity to spirituality. Specifically, Atheism includes a belief that humanity created spirituality to serve its own interests. This is not the relation proposed by most religions, but Atheism isn't most religions.
NOTE: I'm unclear on what "establishes symbols" means in the context of the Wikipedia definition. If it is essentially referring to ritual, I suspect many Eastern religions would not fit this definition. The definition holds without it, so I'll choose to consider it non-operative for now. Parent also did not argue this point.
Does Atheism require a person to go to Atheist School on Tuesday mornings? no. There is no ritual in Atheism. However, many Eastern religions also have very little to no ritual. Does Atheism require a belief in the Supernatural? no. However, as this is the defining belief of Atheism, that alone seems slim grounds to exclude it. Do Atheists self-identify with Atheism as their religion? not usually. This is probably the best argument that Atheism is not a religion, but it won't keep others from classifying it as such, just like no matter how much Mormons claim to be Christians, most evangelicals will not accept them. The unsettling part here is that the argument is quite literally: "Atheism isn't a religion because Atheists say it isn't."
While I agree that this is probably true, consider the following:
1.) If 20% of consumers delay their purchase by six months, this may be long enough to mean that they're buying after a price decrease, or that you've lost a bunch of possible game sales. Either way you don't want to give people a reason not to buy your product.
2.) If another console maker is allowing used game sales, this may drive a significant portion of customers to the other platform. I'd happily pay $100 more to be able to play used games, and would tell my friends to do so as well. This significantly decreases the effect you describe above, as they will simply get the other shiny new console instead of yours.
3.) Many people will buy some new games and some used games. If those people choose not to buy a console, you've lost the new game sales too.
4.) Many people never connect their game console to the internet. How is this going to work again?
5.) This realistically could drive people to PC gaming, where piracy (instead of used games) is the norm. I don't think the game makers would want to trade used game sales for piracy. That would be a significant net loss as consumers would get used to paying nothing for a game, rather than $20-$30 for a used or greatest hits game.
Actually, Ubuntu LTS is supported for 3-5 years. They release every 2 years, but have an ENTIRE YEAR of overlap to allow for deployment.
This makes the yearly release with 12 weeks overlap seem downright rapid. (It's only 24 weeks if you count alpha and beta releases.)
While I admit this is significantly better than a release every 6 weeks with the prior release completely unsupported, this only moves from "completely broken" to "barely adequate" for enterprise use.
For DSLRs, there are really only 3 sensor sizes: Four Thirds, APS-C, and Full-Frame.
Four Thirds is the smallest, and I would avoid it, partially because it is the newest.
APS-C is sort of the "standard" for DSLRs. The vast majority use this, even in the "lowest end" bodies.
Full-Frame comes with a significant price premium, both in bodies and in lenses. While I understand the argument to buy lenses planning that you *might* move to full frame, I see no reason to jump to full frame when buying your first DSLR.
There are advantages in newer bodies, particularly for high ISO and video, but even the oldest, lowest-end DSLR will be streaks above point-and-shoot. I've got fairly decent glass, but still shoot with an older body. I see far more difference from a new lens than I see from comparing with a new body. My trusty D70 is still one of the best cameras for flash sync outdoors due to the electronic shutter.
The business case for opening up YOUR code is the same one any other company uses for opening up THEIR code.
Does your code increase the value of your product, or is it just an enabler for what you're really selling and providing value? Who benefits more from your competitors using your code, you or them?
A simple answer is that if you think you might be able to sell the code in the future, then you do NOT want to open source it. If you think you can sell more hardware if your competitor uses your code but you go to a customer and say that your hardware runs it "better" then it can pay off to open source.
The advantage of open code is open standards, extensibility and, if you're lucky, community involvement. You should assume that you can get the first two, but I wouldn't count on the latter.
Based on the specific case described here, it sounds like the code is providing core value, and thus should be kept closed.
Another thing to consider with open code is that if your code implements patented algorithms then you might not be allowed to open source it. The area described here sounds like it would either have some existing art that you would want to use, or you might be generating some patentable work that you should be protecting.
I agree, this is a dumb move. I want / to be a separate PARTITION.
partition/boot contains the kernel and boot-related files. partition / contains the minimal stuff required to get a running system. This is enough to debug problems on the other partitions. partition/usr is dramatically larger, and contains the bulk of what has become modern user space programs and libraries. partition/home is user data. partition/tmp is temporary files partition/var is system data files.
Directories/etc and/root are on the / partition.
If you combine the functions of/usr and/, you run a greater risk of breaking things under a variety of scenarios.
For the average user who puts all of their data on a single partition, the distinction is irrelevant. For someone who actually cares about partitioning, there is a BIG difference.
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Well, you could calculate the encryption with pen and paper, and only enter the encrypted values. That would be safe on an untrusted terminal, but would not be immune to a hidden camera.
:)
It also would not be immune to the user selecting "large" primes like 3 and 5, but that's their own fault.
Agreed. I LOVE my Galaxy SII. When I bought it, it was down to this or the Atrix 2. Both were about 4.3 inch screens.
I actually bought it after the Skyrocket came out, but bought the original Galaxy SII because I felt the larger (4.5 inch) screen was just too big. Even the SII is a little big in some of my pockets. The only thing I miss on this phone is that I wish it had a higher resolution screen.
This year's phones like the Galaxy S3 are just huge. I had a friend who had a Galaxy Note and that was ridiculous (I have other friends who loved it.) The point is, some of us don't want the uber-huge screens. We often buy them because there is no other alternative if we want a high-end phone.
I'm up for contract renewal in a few months and I'm not sure what to get. I may get a second Galaxy SII for my wife, as the current phones are just so darn huge that I may be willing to stay on my older phone and see if a mid-range line of medium sized phones comes out. If I do get something bigger I will consider the larger screen size to be a minus, not a plus. The main feature that I'm after is a qHD or preferably 720p screen, I just want it in a more reasonable size.
Beyond that, there are nations that would effectively use terrorist groups to act as proxies in a nuclear quasi-war.
If Iran had nuclear weapons, we know they can't use them directly, that would result in outright destruction. However, if they "carelessly" get a nuclear weapon stolen, a terrorist group could bomb a target in Israel or the US without giving the victim an excuse to invade. This has been the strategy of many nations for a while with conventional weapons, and it only becomes more effective with nuclear weapons.
Both the US and the USSR understood that if one of their nukes got used on the other, there was going to be war, and it was going to be devastating. Many of the terrorist-supporting states won't have that fear because it hasn't worked that way for them in the past.
Right now, most of the nations of the world with nuclear weapons (this includes North Korea and Israel) are nations that carry out their military operations overtly. If they decide to attack with nuclear weapons, the whole world will know they were the ones responsible. These nations know that openly attacking a nuclear power will simply result in their annihilation, so they won't do it.
That isn't true for many of the nations in the middle east. They have a strategy of letting terrorist groups do their dirty work precisely because they don't get the direct repercussions of it. There's no reason to believe that the strategy would be any different with nuclear weapons. So, how does the US respond when some terrorist group operating out of Iran "steals" a nuclear weapon and uses it to blow up DC? Do you nuke Iran? They'll simply tell the world "we didn't do it, the terrorists did." Do you kill a few individual terrorists after the fact? That won't appease the american people, who will be out for blood, I assure you. I can see Iran expecting (particularly against the US) that the world community would prevent the victim from directly attacking Iran with nuclear weapons, and thus expecting controlled use of nuclear weapons through terrorist groups to move political negotiations in their favor.
The only ways I see to avoid this are either to make terrorist-supporting countries responsible for the terrorism now, so that they won't attempt nuclear terrorism, or to prevent those kinds of countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. Since the former will just make the US look like a bully in the short term and result in significant instability, I understand why the current plan is to try and prevent nuclear weapons from spreading.
I agree with this completely.
Both my wife and I agree: we could have been doctors, but we didn't WANT to be doctors. For me, I wanted to study a field where working in the field doesn't require anything more than a BS or maybe an MS. I don't want to teach, I want to get my hands dirty designing things. My wife is a nurse, and after seeing what Doctors have to put up with, is quite happy with her decision not to pursue medical school.
Doctors and Ph.D.s have a right to be *proud* of what they have achieved. They have succeeded in a difficult field and have no doubt overcome obstacles to achieve their success. I am also proud of what I have achieved and of being able to point to things and say "I made that," or "I know they use what I made." None of this entitles them or me to be arrogant. It may entitle them to a certain amount of deference on topics that are specifically within the purview of their specialty, but even that only extends to situations where outside constraints mean that they are legitimately unable to fully support their assertions with reasoned argument.
Basically his argument is that everyone who makes any money off of a product that is used in illegal file sharing is morally culpable for the decline of the music industry. This is ridiculous.
First, realize where I'm coming from. I have the CD for all of the songs on my MP3 player, mainly because I encode to FLAC. I am not the type that morally condones acquiring music from illegal downloads.
The author argues that we already pay for music, we just pay Dell/HP for our laptop, Apple for our iPod, Sun for the servers, Google for the advertisements, AT&T/Time Warner for the bandwidth, etc. He also argues that all of these companies are as morally culpable as Napster or The Pirate Bay.
For the consumer products, these products have substantial non-infringing uses. I use my laptop for a myriad of other things that are not illegal file sharing. This is true even for the people who do share files illegally. To imply the entire cost of the laptop constitutes a cost of acquiring music is silly. I can at least partially accept this argument for the iPod (not for me, see above), but not for any of the other consumer costs.
Similarly, the server-side suppliers who are paid by the illegal sharing site are also not morally culpable. Someone offered to buy their computer, and so they sold it to them. Why does that make them morally culpable if someone uses that computer to do something illegal? Furthermore, complaining that they make a profit on illegal file sharing is like complaining that the person who works at a restaurant near the server farm is morally culpable. They're just doing honest work. That someone doing something bad happens to purchase their work does NOT make them morally culpable for that person's actions. Taking music without compensating the artists is bad. It's bad no matter if it's the record companies or the consumer doing it. That doesn't make everyone who's ever sold anything to someone in the illegal file sharing business immoral or a criminal.
Further, there is no conspiracy among electronics companies to try and extract music industry profits, as the author implies. Most electronics companies are just as happy to sell you a laptop whether you get your music from iTunes or Napster. Similarly, the server manufacturers are just as happy to sell to Apple or The Pirate Bay. They don't have a horse in this race. I'll accept the argument that Spotify does, but that's a symptom of the larger problem, and they ARE behaving legally.
I hate to say it, but the only ones who have betrayed the music industry are their own customers, the ones who used to buy music and now download it instead. There is no global conspiracy among electronics companies to support file sharing, only among consumers who want cheap music. It sucks to be a musician in this environment, and I realize the author wants someone to blame for poor music sales besides the fans. However, I refuse to be held morally culpable for the illegal or immoral actions that others take using computers simply because I work in the technology industry.
Mobile processors (even those made by Intel) are NOT desktop processors. While it's pretty clear you know this, you make a mistake by trying to count the hardware decoders on the ARM but not on the x86. I don't care who makes the processor, no general-purpose mobile phone processor is going to be able to do 1080p video decoding in software. Intel couldn't even do it on Atom, which has substantially higher power draws than a mobile phone CPU. This is true of anything in the current generation of processors and should be true for the next few die shrinks. With technology scaling not providing the performance gains it once did, this really means it won't be possible for the foreseeable future. Even if the x86 cores could do 1080p video decoding, you'd still rather have the dedicated hardware, as dedicated hardware will use substantially less power doing it than the x86 core, and video decoding is one of the cases where power draw matters on mobile phones. The point of all this is that the graphics hardware comes out to be a wash when comparing Intel and ARM systems for mobile phones. Both of them need one, so you can't assume the x86 chip can get by without one. Thus, it really is comparing apples to apples to compare just the x86 cores and the ARM cores.
As far as the IPC difference between Intel and ARM, I'm going to side with Intel this time and say that architecture doesn't really matter. The back-end of these chips all run RISC-like. Cache sizes are going to be similar and the Intel core isn't all that sophisticated. There is no reason to believe that, at a given frequency, x86 performance will be significantly better than ARM performance. The argument is whether or not, at a given frequency, the added area required to decode x86 represents a significant additional power draw (or, worse yet, additional pipeline stages, which would have a detrimental impact on x86 performance.)
As far a fabs go, Intel is playing this in an interesting way. Intel seems to be using mobile chips as a way to keep their older fabs busy. This makes the mobile chips very nearly free for them to manufacture. They're just keeping up with ARM, rather than moving to their current process and absolutely blowing them away. So, let's be clear. Intel could be a die shrink ahead of where they are, which probably would make the x86 cores on a newer process better than the ARM ones on an older process. Intel is staying on the old process for cost reasons, not performance ones.
AMD doesn't really have anything that plays in the mobile space, but their closest comparison is Bobcat. Bobcat is a pretty good core for the power envelope it works in. I think AMD could build an x86 core for the mobile space, if they wanted to. The real problem is that they couldn't maintain current performance while using a back-level process to compete with Intel on cost. In some ways Intel might prefer that they could, as it might make x86 in the mobile space seem less like locking yourself into a single vendor, indirectly helping Intel sell Medfield.
For a "modern" CPU the instruction decoder is an absurdly tiny part. This is because the branch prediction, caches, issue queue, regfiles, etc. are all much larger or at least the same size.
This isn't nearly so true in a super-low-power mobile design. The instruction decoder size for a given instruction set architecture is pretty much a fixed size per decode pipe. This means that in one of these tiny mobile chips the relative size of the decoders is dramatically larger. A super-low-power chip dramatically reduces the sizes of the caches and branch prediction, reduces the size of the regfiles, and often eliminates the issue queue. It probably also removes a decode pipe, but the relative reduction in decode size is much smaller than the relative size reduction in other areas.
The limited register set absolutely hurts x86 on power usage, perhaps more than the decoders do, since it forces more data cache accesses for register spills and fills.
Now, I'm not saying that x86 is necessarily worse than arm on power usage, as the richer instruction set may have other advantages such as reducing instruction cache miss rate which can be used to improve IPC which can be spent to lower frequency and reduce power. Also, microcoded instructions may turn out to be more power efficient because they don't have to access the instruction cache every cycle.
None of this considers the fact that Intel has the best fab technology in the world. This means their processors will be a generation more efficient than everyone else's, which is probably more than enough to counter any "x86 tax" which the instruction set incurs.
I think the lack of women in tech fields goes significantly deeper than the assumption that at 17 or so the girls decide not to enter tech fields because they view the field as misogynistic. Our culture teaches women to avoid math and science fields and focus on liberal arts fields. This results in a lack of women in all math and science careers, although this is seen most acutely in computer science and engineering. I suspect this is because computer science and engineering are viewed as the most nerdy of the math and science fields. The attitude is that it's okay for a girl to be into biology, but not to be into computer science. To fix the gender gap there needs to be a significant cultural shift, which is much harder to produce than simply ending unfair hiring practices or worker treatment.
"Booth babes" are marketing, NOT development, and hiring them shows little about the development hiring practices. Particularly in consumer-oriented shows, they are a sign of the cultural problem, not hiring practices. They work because the people most likely to make or influence purchasing decisions for tech gadgets are men.
Exactly. You can't use social media to invite the friends to the party, or to discuss the party in any way.
The rules as stated are ridiculous. They sound okay until you realize that teachers are also parents, and so things that are inappropriate in their role as a teacher may be appropriate in their role as a parent. A teacher shouldn't use personal e-mail or social media to do their job (i.e. communicate with their current students.) At the same time, it is completely appropriate to use personal e-mail or personal social media to communicate with their child or their child's friends.
This is the same as it being generally inappropriate to, as a teacher, invite students to your house, but it is perfectly appropriate to, as a parent, invite your child's friends to your house on behalf of your child.
The school district can tell the difference for real-world events, but has the common fallacy of "if it happens on the internet, it must be a dramatically greater risk for evil."
The actual guidelines for personal social media are far too strict.
The guidelines say no DOE employee my have any social media contact with any DOE student who they are not related to. This effectively means that ALL DOE employees may not user personal accounts to communicate on social media sites with ANY student under 18 living in their district boundaries.
So, if you're a kindergarten teacher with a 17 year old son, it is not appropriate to use social media to (for instance) plan a birthday party for your son.
While I understand why the district might want the rule to be so broad (read: simplicity and lawsuits), it is so broad as to be nearly meaningless, and will likely be ignored in many cases where it shouldn't be. Much more sensible would have been guidelines such as:
"It is inappropriate to use personal social media to communicate with any student for which the employee has a direct supervisory role or has had a direct supervisory role in the preceding two(2) academic years. For example, teachers may not use personal social media to communicate with their students or students of other teachers in their teaching team. School administrative employees may not use personal social media to communicate with students who attend their school. It is strongly recommended that any DOE employee using personal social media to communicate with a student not subject to the above guidelines receive prior consent from the student's parent or guardian and review their communication with the student's parent or guardian regularly."
While my set of guidelines seems strict, it should be sufficient as the consent and review provisions did not specify "in writing" and so can be done verbally. It also isn't so broad as to outlaw usage that is clearly reasonable. More importantly, such rules are more likely to be followed when it appears that the administrators made an attempt to really codify the appropriate and inappropriate uses, and didn't just take a "personal use of social media is evil" stance.
I get comics for both my kids, but I do limit their choices.
For my 10-year old, she can read most comics (I won't let her read my Fatale) but she generally wants to read the older kids comics to the younger teen comics. She likes Young Justice and Teen Titans. She also likes Supergirl (mostly pre-relaunch.)
For my 5-year old, he prefers the kids comics like Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Earth's Mightiest Heroes: The Avengers(I think that's the title of the kids version). Scooby-Doo comics are pretty popular with him, and there is a series of DC Superpets books that he likes.
We'll let either of them get graphic novels aimed at older kids, but only after we've looked through them.
Marvel and especially DC both have "kids comics" labeled on their websites, so you can find ones that are likely to be appropriate for a younger kid. Archie and Disney also make comics for kids, but those are going to be less "Superhero," unless you count Darkwing Duck.
I agree that the mainstream comics may be more mature than you want, especially for a 3-7 year old, but there are still some good options. Graphic Novels make a nice addition if you want to get a little more variety because you can preview in the comic shop and decide if that particular story-line is appropriate for your child. (Unless your local comic shop is a strict "No Reading" shop, in which case I suggest you find a better one.)
Basically, Amazon formed a wholly owned subsidiary to run the shipping business in Texas. They then argued that while the subsidiary had a presence in Texas, Amazon didn't.
From the way it was reported, it seemed Amazon was fairly clearly in the wrong, but Rick Perry (for better or worse) stepped in when Amazon threatened to close down the distribution center if Texas made them pay sales tax.
I think Texas and Amazon worked out a deal where Amazon would pay sales tax "after a while" and this is probably that deal coming to fruition.
Sure, you could, but why would you want to?
Having a single-purpose device for voting that was attached to the internet would be overly complicating things. The amount of data transferred between machines in an election is tiny. Any given precinct is going to have about 25 races with at most 8 choices per race. Even at 8 bytes per choice that's only 2 kilobytes of data that needs to be transferred to generate the totals. That can be sent in under a second over a typical modem.
Having a device connected to the internet increases the security exposure dramatically. Right now there are two ways to hack an electronic voting machine: 1.) Hack the device manufacturer. or 2.) Hack the machine at the polling place. #1 is the biggest weakness, but it's also the best protected. #2 would only affect a single polling place's machines, and requires a physical presence, making it much more risky. With an internet-connected device it becomes possible to attack all of the machines remotely, and they likely will not have the same level of security as the manufacturer's internal network. The security has to be flawless from the OS to the application layer to prevent a determined attacker from altering the election. All of this added security exposure wouldn't even result in significantly faster results tallies since the actual data transfer takes so little time anyway.
When everyone says internet voting, they mean web voting, or at least voting away from any established polling place on an internet-connected device owned by the voter. As soon as the voter has admin rights to the device, something like I described above becomes possible.
I have it in case someone finds my phone.
I have one labeled "Work".
I have another labeled "Home"
I think for a while I also had one labeled "Wife"
This is actually a problem with my current phone. Contacts are naturally just names because it picks them up from my e-mail. This is as opposed to them being nicknames that would be recognizable to a stranger.
Most likely the easiest way to contact me on my current phone would be through my e-mail. Just look there and get my e-mail address, then e-mail me.
Absolutely. This was my first thought.
It's actually quite sinister when you consider that you can combine this with a Super PAC.
A Super PAC is an organization that can get unlimited amounts of money from corporations and has zero legal accountability to the candidate. This means it's perfectly possible for a Super PAC to offer to pay anyone $20 to vote (implied "for their candidate") then include some kind of browser plug-in that actually checks that the voter voted. If it's determined that this is illegal then the Super PAC goes down, but the candidate is squeaky clean. I'm sure they'd portray this as the internet equivalent of driving you to the polling place, though it's obviously much worse.
$20 per person x 300 million people = about 6 billion dollars to pay every man woman and child $20 to vote. It's probably a billion or two cheaper than that when you consider that children can't vote. This means it is well within the abilities of a well-funded Super PAC to offer $20 per vote (technically not necessarily for their candidate) to anyone who will take it.
All I've tried to describe above would likely be considered legal. If they wanted to step a little outside legal, the plug-in could "helpfully" fill out the vote form for the candidates they wanted you to vote for. A little less sinister would be to add a "default vote" or "Vote with Super PAC for Hope!" button to the ballot shown to the voter. Even if they said they would still pay you, some people would vote as directed for fear they would lose the money, and many would vote as directed because clicking the button or just pressing "VOTE" on the form as presented was easier than thinking about the issues. They could go even less sinister than that and just reorder the candidate listings on the ballot, such that their candidates were always on top.
And I think this is an example of my point.
If I knew that Newark was where to order from Farnell, then I would have known to order from there. Farnell's web site doesn't make this clear anywhere that I could find, and while that is primarily Farnell's problem, it reflects badly on Raspberry Pi, even if it isn't their fault.
The companies do have an interest in informing the Raspberry Pi team in order to reduce load on their own sites, if nothing else. That only works if the Raspberry Pi team goes through the effort of sharing what information they get. Also, the Raspberry Pi team probably has an internal phone contact that the rest of us don't have.
All of this isn't to say that I think Raspberry Pi is a bad organization or that I'm angry or anything. I'm frustrated at not getting one (which I expected) and confused about how to get one in the future (which I did not expect.) I think resolving the confusion would tame at least some of the anger that other people are experiencing.
BTW, are you saying that you don't get charged the $20 handling fee (or get charged something smaller) if you order by phone?
Where raspberry pi is really failing at the moment is messaging. We were initially told that we could order internationally direct from the foundation. The post on the website says that you can buy them now from RS and Farnell, which would also be fine. While I think this is true for Farnell if you live in the UK, it isn't true for RS or Farnell if you live in the USA, so a lot of people feel like they've been deceived.
Furthermore, Farnell doesn't even seem to sell to USA consumers, and RS only has an "express an interest" site, and nothing on their USA site.
So, consumers are very confused about what is going on. Because of the inconsistent messaging, USA consumers have no idea if we'll ever be able to buy them online, at least without significant retail markup.
What I think would improve the goodwill would be for the Raspberry Pi team to:
1.) Contact RS and Farnell and figure out what the heck is going on, particularly for international customers. Put a post on the website to the effect that you're doing this.
2.) Once they do figure out what's going on, TELL US.
If, in two weeks time, when all the traffic has died down, international customers will be able to get them, that's fine, but people currently don't feel like that's the case. The two distributors are ruining Raspberry Pi's goodwill (which often happens when you give this power to someone else) but Raspberry Pi isn't compensating by over-communicating on their end.
I agree with paragraphs 1 and 2, but completely disagree with paragraph 3.
When these systems fail, they will fail in spectacular ways. However, they will not fail when there are obvious sensible things to do and when the software has good input. The case you describe is obvious: If the brakes are out (or mostly out) use a combination of the working brakes and the transmission to slow the car down.
Here's a better example: What if the cables for the left side brakes and the right side brakes are in backwards? The car detects that when braking the car pulls to the left, and so it increases force on the right side brakes and reduces force on the left side brakes. However, as the brake cables are backwards, this only causes the car to pull more to the left, which the car then tries to compensate for with steering, causing a loss of traction on the front wheels and perhaps a nasty spin. All this happens on a simple straight stop because the car gets confused by the bad input.
We see this from time to time in autopilot systems. It's hard to anticipate every bad set of inputs, so there is bound to be some combination that just confuses the heck out of the software and causes something flaky to happen (in an autopilot, hopefully handing control back to the pilot.) Often it's the combination of something the system was designed to handle on a temporary basis (but that lasts longer than usual) with something else slightly tricky adding to it, and then encountering some kind of unusual situation. These cases are a nightmare to try and debug because you can't reproduce them.
Actually, many atheists would argue that there IS evidence against at least the Judeo-Christian image of a benevolent deity. This is the simple "why are there starving children?" To an atheist, there are no satisfying answers for why a benevolent deity would allow that.
Now, this doesn't preclude the existence of either a indifferent or vindictive deity, only that of a benevolent one. However, there's very little point in worshiping an indifferent or vindictive deity, thus many of those holding this belief pledge Atheism, even if they're really in a sense agnostic.
Okay, let's use your definition:
Wikipedia: "Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values."
Based on your comment above, you agree that Atheism is "a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews" which seems appropriate given that only "cultural systems" is questionable.
"moral values" is behind a sometimes, so is not required to meet the definition.
So, the main open question is, does Atheism "relate humanity to sprituality?"
Atheism most decidedly DOES relate humanity to spirituality. Specifically, Atheism includes a belief that humanity created spirituality to serve its own interests. This is not the relation proposed by most religions, but Atheism isn't most religions.
NOTE: I'm unclear on what "establishes symbols" means in the context of the Wikipedia definition. If it is essentially referring to ritual, I suspect many Eastern religions would not fit this definition. The definition holds without it, so I'll choose to consider it non-operative for now. Parent also did not argue this point.
Does Atheism require a person to go to Atheist School on Tuesday mornings? no. There is no ritual in Atheism. However, many Eastern religions also have very little to no ritual.
Does Atheism require a belief in the Supernatural? no. However, as this is the defining belief of Atheism, that alone seems slim grounds to exclude it.
Do Atheists self-identify with Atheism as their religion? not usually. This is probably the best argument that Atheism is not a religion, but it won't keep others from classifying it as such, just like no matter how much Mormons claim to be Christians, most evangelicals will not accept them. The unsettling part here is that the argument is quite literally: "Atheism isn't a religion because Atheists say it isn't."
While I agree that this is probably true, consider the following:
1.) If 20% of consumers delay their purchase by six months, this may be long enough to mean that they're buying after a price decrease, or that you've lost a bunch of possible game sales. Either way you don't want to give people a reason not to buy your product.
2.) If another console maker is allowing used game sales, this may drive a significant portion of customers to the other platform. I'd happily pay $100 more to be able to play used games, and would tell my friends to do so as well. This significantly decreases the effect you describe above, as they will simply get the other shiny new console instead of yours.
3.) Many people will buy some new games and some used games. If those people choose not to buy a console, you've lost the new game sales too.
4.) Many people never connect their game console to the internet. How is this going to work again?
5.) This realistically could drive people to PC gaming, where piracy (instead of used games) is the norm. I don't think the game makers would want to trade used game sales for piracy. That would be a significant net loss as consumers would get used to paying nothing for a game, rather than $20-$30 for a used or greatest hits game.
Actually, Ubuntu LTS is supported for 3-5 years. They release every 2 years, but have an ENTIRE YEAR of overlap to allow for deployment.
This makes the yearly release with 12 weeks overlap seem downright rapid. (It's only 24 weeks if you count alpha and beta releases.)
While I admit this is significantly better than a release every 6 weeks with the prior release completely unsupported, this only moves from "completely broken" to "barely adequate" for enterprise use.
For DSLRs, there are really only 3 sensor sizes: Four Thirds, APS-C, and Full-Frame.
Four Thirds is the smallest, and I would avoid it, partially because it is the newest.
APS-C is sort of the "standard" for DSLRs. The vast majority use this, even in the "lowest end" bodies.
Full-Frame comes with a significant price premium, both in bodies and in lenses. While I understand the argument to buy lenses planning that you *might* move to full frame, I see no reason to jump to full frame when buying your first DSLR.
There are advantages in newer bodies, particularly for high ISO and video, but even the oldest, lowest-end DSLR will be streaks above point-and-shoot. I've got fairly decent glass, but still shoot with an older body. I see far more difference from a new lens than I see from comparing with a new body. My trusty D70 is still one of the best cameras for flash sync outdoors due to the electronic shutter.
The business case for opening up YOUR code is the same one any other company uses for opening up THEIR code.
Does your code increase the value of your product, or is it just an enabler for what you're really selling and providing value? Who benefits more from your competitors using your code, you or them?
A simple answer is that if you think you might be able to sell the code in the future, then you do NOT want to open source it. If you think you can sell more hardware if your competitor uses your code but you go to a customer and say that your hardware runs it "better" then it can pay off to open source.
The advantage of open code is open standards, extensibility and, if you're lucky, community involvement. You should assume that you can get the first two, but I wouldn't count on the latter.
Based on the specific case described here, it sounds like the code is providing core value, and thus should be kept closed.
Another thing to consider with open code is that if your code implements patented algorithms then you might not be allowed to open source it. The area described here sounds like it would either have some existing art that you would want to use, or you might be generating some patentable work that you should be protecting.
I agree, this is a dumb move. I want / to be a separate PARTITION.
/boot contains the kernel and boot-related files. /usr is dramatically larger, and contains the bulk of what has become modern user space programs and libraries. /home is user data. /tmp is temporary files /var is system data files.
/etc and /root are on the / partition.
/usr and /, you run a greater risk of breaking things under a variety of scenarios.
partition
partition / contains the minimal stuff required to get a running system. This is enough to debug problems on the other partitions.
partition
partition
partition
partition
Directories
If you combine the functions of
For the average user who puts all of their data on a single partition, the distinction is irrelevant. For someone who actually cares about partitioning, there is a BIG difference.