They could easily insert some custom hardware that is required to run OS X intel. This hardware will then have to be cloned or emulated to run it on a bog standard x86 box.
"Note the remark about the preview 10.4.1? On which machine are you supposed to run it when Mac mini x86 is not yet available?"
If you RTFA you would see that they already ship a custom intel box to developers.
.. however, the following was a relief: "News Xcode generates a single "universal binary" that supports both processors. Available to everybody at registration desk following the keynote. [10:37 am]"
They are reintroducing fat binaries folks. So software that gets released after the Intel Mac is out will still run on PPC Mac.
As long as the tool does not log the IP-information, it would be much harder for someone like RIAA to find out who actually downloaded all those Britney Spears albums.
RIAA can't just log all the people accessing the stuff, because the IP-address accessing all the data is just a third party who probably doesn't even know anything.
The problem is that you might be somehow incriminated if someone downloaded child porn using your computer as a relay, and you would probably have a hard time proving it wasn't you.
.. and I am opposed to the draconian ways of which copyright is being enforced today, I have to say that this has very little use other than copyright infringement.
I have a hard time seeing that going through hoops in order to hide your identity while dowloading stuff is going to be necessary for legal downloads so, while regular BitTorrent has many legal uses, this tool does not, making it more likely that providing the tool for download might constitute a crime.
If it uses the same key, but a very long one, all the computers in the world would be very unlikely to break the key in a decent amount of time.
Remember the RC5 challenge? It took 1757 days worth of massive collaboration effort to break a 64 bit key, showing that 64 bits RC5 is not enough for data that is still sensitive after several years.
Now they are trying to break a 72 bit version of the same algorithm. It should take 2^8=256 times more computational effort or over 1000 years with current processing power.
Processing power increases, but you can imagine that something encrypted with a public key algorithm that requires as much effort as 80 bit RC5, could be impossible to break in the time-frame where the data is still valuable, even with a combined world-wide effort.
"The first thing that jumped out at me once I personalized my googlepage was that/lots/ of saved searches from a long time ago showed up in a drop down from the search bar."
You know, that is most likely just the autofill feature of your BROWSER, rather than a feature of Google.
Look through the saved information in your browser and delete it if you are paranoid.
All of his problems with the bank comes from the fact that he is not a UK citizen with a history in the UK. If you are, your parents will have sorted you out with a bank account and you will have no problems getting a new one with a different bank.
When you are new in a country, getting a bank account isn't necessarily all that easy, though.
It might have been easier before, but certainly after the 9/11, the government put in much stricter regulations for obtaining a bank account.
By regulation, in the UK, you need TWO forms of proof of address and proof of identity.
No amounts of passports or identity cards is going to help you get by the demand for proof of address. If the utility bill had his name spelt wrongly, it is the banks duty to deny him an account, because he didn't fulfill the minimum requirements of proof of address. Always make damn sure your name has the correct spelling.
I had horrible problems at first in the UK, and kept on thinking that the whole UK system was pretty shitty. Then I started thinking about how a new resident in my own country (Norway) would be treated, and (surprise, surprise) found out they would have pretty much the exact same problems.
Basically, because of fear of terrorism and money laundering, the system have become much more rigid over the last years, sometimes making things very hard for a law abiding resident.
You obviously know nothing about statistics or surveying. Even if there is a big number of people voting, it could easily be extremely biased towards one or another project.
The fact that a relatively small distribution like Yoper managed to completely fudge the result by simply posting links to it on Yoper discussion forums, just goes to show how worthless this data is when it comes to usage statistics.
Do you think phone in votes on television debates give an accurate representation of the majority as well?
It is pretty much the same thing, although the Linux poll results are likely to be even more worthless.
The people that know about the poll is not likely to be a good representation of the full user base (not every user cares enough about desktop linux to actually visit desktop linux sites). The people that both know AND care about voting is an even worse representation of the majority.
While this data isn't completely useless, it does not show what most people think it shows.
It certainly does NOT show usage, but rather zealotry.
Basically it shows which distribution has the most number of hard core followers that care (and know about) the poll.
KDE in my knowledge have many more hard core followers than GNOME, while GNOME has attracted quite a few of the "I don't care, as long as it works" crowd.
I would thus claim that GNOME users on average are less likely to care (or know about) this poll. I certainly didn't give a ****.
It could also show that links to the poll was posted up on KDE fora. It certainly does not prove (it isn't even valid enough to indicate) that KDE has massively increased it's usage share.
"So, giving away something at a loss to drive competition out of business is illegal."
And that is a GOOD thing. However, most (if not all) free software projects do NOT do this to drive competition out..
And "below-sales-cost" is hardly a problem, because cost is virtually zero. It costs virtually nothing to copy and distribute per item and people are programming for fun in their spare time, so that cost is zero as well.
IANAL, but if your business model is based on doing something a few volunteers can do for the fun of it, then your business model is not very valid.
It IS a big thing. This is the first freely distributable, readily available compiler of Fortran 95.
Up until now, my PhD work has needed compilers I can't just simply install without high fees, because the academic free license for propriatary compilers still sounds a bit fishy in it's requirements. This is actually a major boost for the Scientific Computing community.
However, lots of people have just NOW started to trust current F95 compilers (lots of academic code are still written in F77). It will be several more years until they trust the GNU Fortran 95 compilers.
Besides, while it is called Fortran 95, does not mean it was actually in heavy use by 1995.
Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.
He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.
Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
While I do agree that the most important data is what is stored in the $HOME directory, running everything as root, puts the OTHER users at risk and not just yourself.
Some would say that this doesn't matter if you are a home user but even home users should (and often do) have different users for the different family members.
If the 13 year old kid downloads lots of 31337 warez and gets a worm thrown in with it, this shouldn't affect dads documents, budget, tax stuff and credit card information.
If you run each account as root, this is bound to happen sooner or later.
The Right Thing [tm] to do is to make it easier for home users to live with security, rather than just remove security. OS X manages this decently, why can't Linspire?
Just to put the funniness in a bit of context: For people not in The Know [tm], Iceland is normally considered to have been populated by people fleeing Norway because they didn't want to bow to the King.
Still, Iceland was part of Norway from around 1250 to around 1400 if I remember correctly, until both countries became part of Denmark.
If the free (and pirated) music takes three times as long to find and gives you worries of being caught, then most people would gladly pay a bit for convenience and legality.
The question is finding how much they are willing to pay.. I would think more than the 5 cents listed, but less than the $0.99 at iTunes music store. The price in the UK store (£.79) is ridiculously high and almost twice the US price.
What pisses me off about the TV license is that you can only pay for a full year, which is crap if you only have a TV for a limited period.
Also the TV-license system makes no difference between people with very limited amounts of money (for instance students and OAPs) and a small 17" screen and rich people with 44" plasma screens. Only a difference between b/w TVs and colour TVs (who has b/w these days?).
Personally, if they need the funds, the government should just make it part of the regular income tax system.
EVERYONE has a TV, and the system of license controllers ++ costs a hell of a lot to run. It would be much cheaper and much more fair if you instead of having a £120 TV-license, just increased taxes on average with £60 a year. I'm sure it would have pretty much the same economical effect for BBC. Most people would be better off as well and it would be harder to just skip paying it.
I was just told that about 300 people have been caught in Swindon without a license the last year. To catch these 300 they probably had to check at least three times as many (900) which is around 0.5% of Swindon's population, meaning that on a national level they are probably checking about 300.000 brits per year. This is expensive and annoying.
The only people worse off would be: a) The people without TV. A very small minority. b) the people with a very high income that will pay more than the old £120 per year. They can afford it. c) The TV license inspectors (f*** them).
You also have a reputation for not so good looking women, but so does the US.
Being a foreigner watching american television programmes you will think they are all gorgeous, skinny women with huge tits, until you turn 13 and start actually meeting americans and people that have lived there.
The british reputation of mingers is not fully deserved I realised after moving here. It will never reach the heights of my scandinavian home though;-).
IANAL but as far as I know you are right about Apple not being able to sue people using their former trade secrets.
They CAN however sue the people who made the secret public knowledge.
So while you can't sue companies using your cookie recipe once it becomes public knowledge, you CAN sue the newspaper that made it public knowledge. Whether or not you are successful depends on the specific case I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
History is full of people letting awful things happen because it doesn't affect them personally.
When it happens to you or your family, it is too late to act.
They could easily insert some custom hardware that is required to run OS X intel. This hardware will then have to be cloned or emulated to run it on a bog standard x86 box.
"Note the remark about the preview 10.4.1? On which machine are you supposed to run it when Mac mini x86 is not yet available?"
If you RTFA you would see that they already ship a custom intel box to developers.
.. however, the following was a relief:
"News Xcode generates a single "universal binary" that supports both processors. Available to everybody at registration desk following the keynote. [10:37 am]"
They are reintroducing fat binaries folks. So software that gets released after the Intel Mac is out will still run on PPC Mac.
As long as the tool does not log the IP-information, it would be much harder for someone like RIAA to find out who actually downloaded all those Britney Spears albums.
RIAA can't just log all the people accessing the stuff, because the IP-address accessing all the data is just a third party who probably doesn't even know anything.
The problem is that you might be somehow incriminated if someone downloaded child porn using your computer as a relay, and you would probably have a hard time proving it wasn't you.
.. and I am opposed to the draconian ways of which copyright is being enforced today, I have to say that this has very little use other than copyright infringement.
I have a hard time seeing that going through hoops in order to hide your identity while dowloading stuff is going to be necessary for legal downloads so, while regular BitTorrent has many legal uses, this tool does not, making it more likely that providing the tool for download might constitute a crime.
If it uses the same key, but a very long one, all the computers in the world would be very unlikely to break the key in a decent amount of time.
Remember the RC5 challenge? It took 1757 days worth of massive collaboration effort to break a 64 bit key, showing that 64 bits RC5 is not enough for data that is still sensitive after several years.
Now they are trying to break a 72 bit version of the same algorithm. It should take 2^8=256 times more computational effort or over 1000 years with current processing power.
Processing power increases, but you can imagine that something encrypted with a public key algorithm that requires as much effort as 80 bit RC5, could be impossible to break in the time-frame where the data is still valuable, even with a combined world-wide effort.
Note, "This is London" is NOT the BBC, but rather the Internet edition of the London tabloid Evening Standard.
There is no real shortage of IT-people, only a shortage of people that are willing to work for almost nothing.
The industry's wet dream is for IT-workers to become completely disposable and low paid.
We really should not let this happen, and most could use a history lesson to figure out what happens when we get into this situation.
There once was a seriously real need for labour unions folks, and that time could easily come again. Maybe it is already here.
"The first thing that jumped out at me once I personalized my googlepage was that /lots/ of saved searches from a long time ago showed up in a drop down from the search bar."
You know, that is most likely just the autofill feature of your BROWSER, rather than a feature of Google.
Look through the saved information in your browser and delete it if you are paranoid.
All of his problems with the bank comes from the fact that he is not a UK citizen with a history in the UK. If you are, your parents will have sorted you out with a bank account and you will have no problems getting a new one with a different bank.
When you are new in a country, getting a bank account isn't necessarily all that easy, though.
It might have been easier before, but certainly after the 9/11, the government put in much stricter regulations for obtaining a bank account.
By regulation, in the UK, you need TWO forms of proof of address and proof of identity.
No amounts of passports or identity cards is going to help you get by the demand for proof of address. If the utility bill had his name spelt wrongly, it is the banks duty to deny him an account, because he didn't fulfill the minimum requirements of proof of address. Always make damn sure your name has the correct spelling.
I had horrible problems at first in the UK, and kept on thinking that the whole UK system was pretty shitty. Then I started thinking about how a new resident in my own country (Norway) would be treated, and (surprise, surprise) found out they would have pretty much the exact same problems.
Basically, because of fear of terrorism and money laundering, the system have become much more rigid over the last years, sometimes making things very hard for a law abiding resident.
You obviously know nothing about statistics or surveying. Even if there is a big number of people voting, it could easily be extremely biased towards one or another project.
The fact that a relatively small distribution like Yoper managed to completely fudge the result by simply posting links to it on Yoper discussion forums, just goes to show how worthless this data is when it comes to usage statistics.
Do you think phone in votes on television debates give an accurate representation of the majority as well?
It is pretty much the same thing, although the Linux poll results are likely to be even more worthless.
The people that know about the poll is not likely to be a good representation of the full user base (not every user cares enough about desktop linux to actually visit desktop linux sites). The people that both know AND care about voting is an even worse representation of the majority.
While this data isn't completely useless, it does not show what most people think it shows.
It certainly does NOT show usage, but rather zealotry.
Basically it shows which distribution has the most number of hard core followers that care (and know about) the poll.
KDE in my knowledge have many more hard core followers than GNOME, while GNOME has attracted quite a few of the "I don't care, as long as it works" crowd.
I would thus claim that GNOME users on average are less likely to care (or know about) this poll. I certainly didn't give a ****.
It could also show that links to the poll was posted up on KDE fora. It certainly does not prove (it isn't even valid enough to indicate) that KDE has massively increased it's usage share.
When Apple ships 256MB memory, people complain that it is not enough (even though you can easily upgrade your option through the web site).
The other major complaint is that their memory is too expensive.
Surely, if their memory is too expensive, isn't it better they simply ship less of it, so you can fill in 3rd party memory yourself?
I'm a bit confused.
"So, giving away something at a loss to drive competition out of business is illegal."
And that is a GOOD thing. However, most (if not all) free software projects do NOT do this to drive competition out..
And "below-sales-cost" is hardly a problem, because cost is virtually zero. It costs virtually nothing to copy and distribute per item and people are programming for fun in their spare time, so that cost is zero as well.
IANAL, but if your business model is based on doing something a few volunteers can do for the fun of it, then your business model is not very valid.
It IS a big thing. This is the first freely distributable, readily available compiler of Fortran 95.
Up until now, my PhD work has needed compilers I can't just simply install without high fees, because the academic free license for propriatary compilers still sounds a bit fishy in it's requirements. This is actually a major boost for the Scientific Computing community.
However, lots of people have just NOW started to trust current F95 compilers (lots of academic code are still written in F77). It will be several more years until they trust the GNU Fortran 95 compilers.
Besides, while it is called Fortran 95, does not mean it was actually in heavy use by 1995.
Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.
He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.
Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
While I do agree that the most important data is what is stored in the $HOME directory, running everything as root, puts the OTHER users at risk and not just yourself.
Some would say that this doesn't matter if you are a home user but even home users should (and often do) have different users for the different family members.
If the 13 year old kid downloads lots of 31337 warez and gets a worm thrown in with it, this shouldn't affect dads documents, budget, tax stuff and credit card information.
If you run each account as root, this is bound to happen sooner or later.
The Right Thing [tm] to do is to make it easier for home users to live with security, rather than just remove security. OS X manages this decently, why can't Linspire?
Just to put the funniness in a bit of context:
For people not in The Know [tm], Iceland is normally considered to have been populated by people fleeing Norway because they didn't want to bow to the King.
Still, Iceland was part of Norway from around 1250 to around 1400 if I remember correctly, until both countries became part of Denmark.
"specially for a guy who's probably brighter than 99% of anyone in ./, regardless of nationality."
If Slashdot only has about a million readers it would still mean that about ten thousand Slashdot readers are as bright or brighter than Ramanujan.
Somehow I don't think that is the case.
He was probably brighter than ALL Slashdot readers, but to allow for the possibility of me replying to a super-genius, let's say 99,99999%
If the free (and pirated) music takes three times as long to find and gives you worries of being caught, then most people would gladly pay a bit for convenience and legality.
The question is finding how much they are willing to pay.. I would think more than the 5 cents listed, but less than the $0.99 at iTunes music store. The price in the UK store (£.79) is ridiculously high and almost twice the US price.
For disabling flash, use Flashblock. It replaces the flash with a placeholder that allows you to click to view the flash.
http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
What pisses me off about the TV license is that you can only pay for a full year, which is crap if you only have a TV for a limited period.
Also the TV-license system makes no difference between people with very limited amounts of money (for instance students and OAPs) and a small 17" screen and rich people with 44" plasma screens. Only a difference between b/w TVs and colour TVs (who has b/w these days?).
Personally, if they need the funds, the government should just make it part of the regular income tax system.
EVERYONE has a TV, and the system of license controllers ++ costs a hell of a lot to run. It would be much cheaper and much more fair if you instead of having a £120 TV-license, just increased taxes on average with £60 a year. I'm sure it would have pretty much the same economical effect for BBC. Most people would be better off as well and it would be harder to just skip paying it.
I was just told that about 300 people have been caught in Swindon without a license the last year. To catch these 300 they probably had to check at least three times as many (900) which is around 0.5% of Swindon's population, meaning that on a national level they are probably checking about 300.000 brits per year. This is expensive and annoying.
The only people worse off would be:
a) The people without TV. A very small minority.
b) the people with a very high income that will pay more than the old £120 per year. They can afford it.
c) The TV license inspectors (f*** them).
You also have a reputation for not so good looking women, but so does the US.
;-).
Being a foreigner watching american television programmes you will think they are all gorgeous, skinny women with huge tits, until you turn 13 and start actually meeting americans and people that have lived there.
The british reputation of mingers is not fully deserved I realised after moving here. It will never reach the heights of my scandinavian home though
IANAL but as far as I know you are right about Apple not being able to sue people using their former trade secrets.
They CAN however sue the people who made the secret public knowledge.
So while you can't sue companies using your cookie recipe once it becomes public knowledge, you CAN sue the newspaper that made it public knowledge. Whether or not you are successful depends on the specific case I guess.
And what would stop the big companies from just starting smaller companies to do the patenting for them?