I'm not sure which angle you are trolling from, but I'll bite.
If you were referring to OpenSolaris, then yes, something of value was clearly lost.
But if you're referring to Oracle taking part in OpenSolaris, then you have a point. However, even though few really expected Oracle to do anything useful or significant with OS, think of all the expertise and potential person hours from former sun employees that is very unlikely to come back to opensolaris work. Even tho Oracle hadn't been contributing of late, it was remotely possible that they were holding their source for some other reason or would again some day. The fact that they never will is a major kick in the seat for the OpenSolaris ecosystem and, to a lesser extent, for the free software community as a whole.
Android has really granular security, which is great! Everything from using bluetooth to writing to the sd card has a permission which the developer must explicitly ask for.The problem is that there are *lots* of these permissions, and a user is presented with a list at install time! I installed an IM client the other day (Nimbuzz, which is popular enough and has a good reputation AFAIK), and I don't even remember the 2 screens of permissions which I agreed too.
When presented with "This application has access to the following": Your location: coarse (network-based) location Network communication: full Internet access Phone calls: Read phone state and identity System tools: display system-level alerts, modify global system settings, prevent phone from sleeping, retrieve running applications... Uses bluetooth Writes to your sd card Changes your volume settings..... Executes instruction 0xdeadbeef
Even a geek's eyes glaze over - everybody just clicks ok and hopes for the best.
And to take the Nimbuzz example again, I am quite sure I agreed to authorize permissions which are associated with features I will never use. The fact that there is no way to say "grant this permission but not that one" is a shortcoming which needs to be fixed. There should probably be an "Advanced..." dialog for that, and some system that catches runtime violations and asks if you want to change your settings to allow them or not.
Yes, in some cases you can get shipping free and avoid taxes, but they did not claim to do that in their search - they merely said they excluded those costs. Including those costs would have made finding components more complicated, and the fact that they didn't even show the final actual cost makes the whole article seem like more of a gimmick than anything else.
excluding taxes and shipping is pretty ridiculous. they could easily add 1/4 to the budget, and if saving money (not just "ooh, look what i can do") is really a goal, they would have included it.
I RTFBingCache of the removed posts, and there was nothing useful there. Yes, it pointed to the consumer reports article, but after that there was nothing but trolling.
Seriously, whoever made that pdf, it's unreadable. How about using different colors so I can tell the lines apart? I would actually read it if you had done so.... Like this it's just illegible.
It sucks, but NTFS might just be the best option. OSX and linux both have had stable enough support for years. The main plusses over FAT32 are journaling and support for files > 4GB. Using UFS is dangerous (or at least has been until very recently) because there are so many different variants of it (solaris, BSD, osx, etc.) that linux support is notoriously troublesome. An extra plus of NTFS is you can use it easily on windows machines as well.
Whose number is 750kbit/s for your DSL? Is that effective speed as rendered in the browser (as tested by surfspeed), or is that what your ISP says it is? Because if you're using the advertised rate for your DSL, you're missing the point - your modem is not fast - your DSL is slow. In fact, this benchmark purports to test the same thing that gives your phone modem the apparent fastness relative to your DSL. Time to try a new broadband provider.
Uh, right. Your dialup is half as fast as broadband. And you used the same methodology (the program they wrote which takes into account all sorts of things) to determine that, of course.
Sure, it's lacking some features (such as process-per-tab, über-fast javascript execution) that chrome has, but it's still well ahead of Opera and IE. I've still never seen this "crash prone-ness" that people talk about with regard to firefox, maybe because I've always used adblock plus? In any event I suspect it will go away with 3.6.4, which pulls flash and other plugins out of the browser process.
Thunderbird, on the other hand, isn't doing so great. But I'd say that's as much about the rise of gmail and other good webmail based systems as anything else. I would even argue that Mozilla has made the right decision to de-prioritize thunderbird work given the "put literally everything including apps on the web" atmosphere these days.
Seems to me that this is just perl's taint mode, implemented in a less elegant fashion (one that relies on variable name prefixes, ugh).
From perldoc perlsec:
You may not use data derived from outside your program to affect
something else outside your program--at least, not by accident. All
command line arguments, environment variables, locale information (see
perllocale), results of certain system calls ("readdir()",
"readlink()" [snip - "and other stuff" ] and all file input are marked as "tainted".
Tainted data may not be used directly or indirectly in any command that
invokes a sub-shell, nor in any command that modifies files,
directories, or processes, with the following exceptions:
They don't explicitly mention this (I suspect for reasons that are about to become clear), but it's not clear to me what twitter is using to hash their links. It could be the target URL, but it could just as easily be $user_id + $tweet_id. With 8 url-safe characters, they have room for ~300-700billion possible links (depending on their definition of url-safe), which means if one user posts a tweet with a link in it and then someone else RT's it or posts a tweet pointing to that same url, these tweets may very well have different t.co links!
If so, that gives twitter the ability not only to track information about what links a user clicks on, but also a way to track which user and tweet they got the URL from, which opens the door to all sorts of interesting, privacy defeating, stats.
This is all speculation of course, but I'd like to see what twitter says about this.
it's simple, really - spin-offs are, by definition, lame and derivative.
books based on tv shows, books based on movies, tv shows based on movies, movies based on movies (aka sequels), video games based on movies, and movies based on video games - all are driven by profit over artistry. these products don't start with the question "wouldn't this be a neat idea?", they start with "can we extract more profit from this franchise?" because people already have a positive relationship with the brand, there is less incentive to work on quality, because there are large numbers of people who will consume the product regardless of its quality. since the product's quality does not dictate its profitability, the quality tends to suck.
Slashdot Mirror
...was anything of value lost?
I'm not sure which angle you are trolling from, but I'll bite.
If you were referring to OpenSolaris, then yes, something of value was clearly lost.
But if you're referring to Oracle taking part in OpenSolaris, then you have a point. However, even though few really expected Oracle to do anything useful or significant with OS, think of all the expertise and potential person hours from former sun employees that is very unlikely to come back to opensolaris work. Even tho Oracle hadn't been contributing of late, it was remotely possible that they were holding their source for some other reason or would again some day. The fact that they never will is a major kick in the seat for the OpenSolaris ecosystem and, to a lesser extent, for the free software community as a whole.
It doesn't even say which if any of those techniques it's using. It's a teaser, not news.
... am I the only one who read that as "armed" ? :)
In the real world (specifically, the irc support channels)
You lost me right there :)
Android has really granular security, which is great! Everything from using bluetooth to writing to the sd card has a permission which the developer must explicitly ask for.The problem is that there are *lots* of these permissions, and a user is presented with a list at install time! I installed an IM client the other day (Nimbuzz, which is popular enough and has a good reputation AFAIK), and I don't even remember the 2 screens of permissions which I agreed too.
When presented with "This application has access to the following": ... .....
Your location: coarse (network-based) location
Network communication: full Internet access
Phone calls: Read phone state and identity
System tools: display system-level alerts, modify global system settings, prevent phone from sleeping, retrieve running applications
Uses bluetooth
Writes to your sd card
Changes your volume settings
Executes instruction 0xdeadbeef
Even a geek's eyes glaze over - everybody just clicks ok and hopes for the best.
And to take the Nimbuzz example again, I am quite sure I agreed to authorize permissions which are associated with features I will never use. The fact that there is no way to say "grant this permission but not that one" is a shortcoming which needs to be fixed. There should probably be an "Advanced..." dialog for that, and some system that catches runtime violations and asks if you want to change your settings to allow them or not.
Yes, in some cases you can get shipping free and avoid taxes, but they did not claim to do that in their search - they merely said they excluded those costs. Including those costs would have made finding components more complicated, and the fact that they didn't even show the final actual cost makes the whole article seem like more of a gimmick than anything else.
excluding taxes and shipping is pretty ridiculous. they could easily add 1/4 to the budget, and if saving money (not just "ooh, look what i can do") is really a goal, they would have included it.
pedant warning: you are missing a slash. :)
Byline: Simson Garfinkel. Bad jokes and crazy conspiracy theories commence in 3...2....1....
Who the hell mods you "offtopic" for helping to clean the racist trolls out when they have been up-ranked?
please mod racist troll parent down. thanks.
I RTFBingCache of the removed posts, and there was nothing useful there. Yes, it pointed to the consumer reports article, but after that there was nothing but trolling.
Seriously, whoever made that pdf, it's unreadable. How about using different colors so I can tell the lines apart? I would actually read it if you had done so.... Like this it's just illegible.
It sucks, but NTFS might just be the best option. OSX and linux both have had stable enough support for years. The main plusses over FAT32 are journaling and support for files > 4GB. Using UFS is dangerous (or at least has been until very recently) because there are so many different variants of it (solaris, BSD, osx, etc.) that linux support is notoriously troublesome. An extra plus of NTFS is you can use it easily on windows machines as well.
RTFA again. speedtest.net is not a comparable test. Sigh.
Whose number is 750kbit/s for your DSL? Is that effective speed as rendered in the browser (as tested by surfspeed), or is that what your ISP says it is? Because if you're using the advertised rate for your DSL, you're missing the point - your modem is not fast - your DSL is slow. In fact, this benchmark purports to test the same thing that gives your phone modem the apparent fastness relative to your DSL. Time to try a new broadband provider.
Go back and read the article again.
Uh, right. Your dialup is half as fast as broadband. And you used the same methodology (the program they wrote which takes into account all sorts of things) to determine that, of course.
Firefox is hardly "going down in flames".
Sure, it's lacking some features (such as process-per-tab, über-fast javascript execution) that chrome has, but it's still well ahead of Opera and IE. I've still never seen this "crash prone-ness" that people talk about with regard to firefox, maybe because I've always used adblock plus? In any event I suspect it will go away with 3.6.4, which pulls flash and other plugins out of the browser process.
Thunderbird, on the other hand, isn't doing so great. But I'd say that's as much about the rise of gmail and other good webmail based systems as anything else. I would even argue that Mozilla has made the right decision to de-prioritize thunderbird work given the "put literally everything including apps on the web" atmosphere these days.
It also looks like an implementation of what Joel Spolsky recommended a while back (search for the stuff about hungarian notation):
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html
Seems to me that this is just perl's taint mode, implemented in a less elegant fashion (one that relies on variable name prefixes, ugh).
From perldoc perlsec:
You may not use data derived from outside your program to affect
something else outside your program--at least, not by accident. All
command line arguments, environment variables, locale information (see
perllocale), results of certain system calls ("readdir()",
"readlink()" [snip - "and other stuff" ] and all file input are marked as "tainted".
Tainted data may not be used directly or indirectly in any command that
invokes a sub-shell, nor in any command that modifies files,
directories, or processes, with the following exceptions:
http://www.webreference.com/programming/perl/taint/
In short, it's not that interesting, although if people pick it up and actually use it, it could do some good.
Nah. If you RTFA, you'll see it's much more like perl's taint mode.
They don't explicitly mention this (I suspect for reasons that are about to become clear), but it's not clear to me what twitter is using to hash their links. It could be the target URL, but it could just as easily be $user_id + $tweet_id. With 8 url-safe characters, they have room for ~300-700billion possible links (depending on their definition of url-safe), which means if one user posts a tweet with a link in it and then someone else RT's it or posts a tweet pointing to that same url, these tweets may very well have different t.co links!
If so, that gives twitter the ability not only to track information about what links a user clicks on, but also a way to track which user and tweet they got the URL from, which opens the door to all sorts of interesting, privacy defeating, stats.
This is all speculation of course, but I'd like to see what twitter says about this.
it's simple, really - spin-offs are, by definition, lame and derivative.
books based on tv shows, books based on movies, tv shows based on movies, movies based on movies (aka sequels), video games based on movies, and movies based on video games - all are driven by profit over artistry. these products don't start with the question "wouldn't this be a neat idea?", they start with "can we extract more profit from this franchise?" because people already have a positive relationship with the brand, there is less incentive to work on quality, because there are large numbers of people who will consume the product regardless of its quality. since the product's quality does not dictate its profitability, the quality tends to suck.
Since when does a simple fork cause the parent to die?
In your answer, please provide actual examples. Like, when OpenBSD's fork killed NetBSD, or the proliferation of webkit browsers killed konqueror.
Thanks.