Seems we need reminding of this classic by Ken Thompson.
Slip a backdoor into a RHEL 6.x (or any other major Linux distribution) version of GCC and make it do two major things: 1. Slip a backdoor into any Linux kernel it compiles. 2. Replicate itself in any version of GCC it compiles.
Choose some entry point which changes very rarely so the chances of incompatibility with new code is small.
This would probably keep RHEL with any kernel version tainted for generations of releases without very little chance of being spotted, because there are no changes in the distributed source code of either project
Gay has been used as a synonym for bad for a long time by infantile morons. The rest of us don't use Gay as a synomym for bad and will tell you to grow up when you do. It certainly doesn't make you appear smart.
I'm almost 100% sure my children will go to public schools, because that is the norm in my country. Instead of private school, families here will move to ensure their children are in the catchment area for good schools. The consequences are obviously more or less the same as what Allison Benedikt warns against, namely "ghettofication" of schools, where the poor schools get worse for losing children of resourceful parents.
I understand her point and I would suggest that if your local public school is reasonably safe and you yourself are resourceful and educated, chances are you can ensure a decent education for your children regardless of some shortcomings in the local school. If you're working extra hard to provide the income for a private school, then that extra time at work may be better spent at home tutoring your children. To use examples from the articles, what is the point in working an extra half hour a day to ensure your children learn about Rosa Parks and read the Iliad in school, when you yourself could spend that half hour teaching them about Rosa Parks and read the Iliad with them?
In this case, it would be better for everyone if you stayed, put your children into this school and worked to improve it.
Up to a point. School age children are not old enough to decide to make major personal sacrifices in order to improve the world and I don't think it is right for me to make that decision for them. If putting them in a particular school carries a massively inflated risk of ruining their life and education then I'm failing them as a parent. If the school is actually dangerous, contains large amounts of drugs, etc. then the risk in staying behind to improve it is too great.
(As it turns out. TFA itself is more balanced and uses the word "bad" instead of the more loaded "evil", which Slashdot just had to throw in there).
The article says "fewer Microsoft products", not "no Microsoft products". Windows PC/Laptop manufacturing is incredibly competitive and consequently profit margins are razor thin. Acer has decided to narrow their line up to increase their Windows product profitability. At the same time, they've decided they can get a bigger slice of the ChromeBook market.
That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
No. Spain and Greece are great examples of a typical boom and bust where too much is attempted in a short amount of time using borrowed money in a country with large amounts of corruption and tax evasion both from greedy big shots and "Average Joe [tm]". The same is the case for Ireland and the other countries struggling the worst in Europe. Ireland had a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who didn't have a bank account for years, but kept cash in his office safe and received "gifts" from influential businessmen. This is a milder version of the same problem that exists in most African countries.
You never mentioned Sweden, Finland, Germany, etc. who all have socialised medicine and whos main economic problem at the moment are paying for the mess of southern Europe (and Ireland).
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already. This problem would not exist. Work only 10 hours a week? No problem, your National Health Service will still admit you. A heart condition discovered before your poor parents could get you health insurance? The National Health Service will still admit you.
There is lots of arguments about the quality of the National Health Services in various European countries. There is, for instance, a long-standing argument about privatisation of hospital services (in the sense that the government, not the patient, would be the customer), but as of yet, I haven't seen any major political party (right or left) advocating we get rid of it. It would be political suicide.
The "every man for himself" mindset is completely alien to us on this point. Especially since we know that even having medical insurance is not a guarantee that a for-profit company will actually pay out when you need to. And it most definitely would be too late to "take your money elsewhere" at that stage.
If students graduate from university without a knowledge of the world outside their field, this is a despicable failure of the primary (and secondary education). Most education systems are built to give us a broad knowledge at a lower level and let us focus as we move up the educational pyramid, because only the rare renaissance genius has the ability to excel in everything. This story makes it seem as if John Horgan has some fantastic idea about giving us a broader education, but the only difference is that he feels we are focusing too early.
That, and he shows the amazing arrogance (and ignorance) to assume that his field is the important one, which the oher parties should study. Does he not think that chemical engineers may receive the same curiosity and refusal to accept "facts" from simply studying chemical science? The may also get relevant domain knowledge.
But there is one important reason why (male) engineering students may want to study humanities; your chances of procreating may increase massively. If for no other reason, then for the sheer number of women attending these courses.
Proper medical care should not be subject to an insurance which the insurance companies could refuse to give you due to prior illness. What if someone grows up in a poor family without medical insurance and is diagnosed with a heart defect at a young age which may or may not manifest itself at an older age. If it does happen, they're practically screwed, even if the defect could be treated with proper medical care. The insurance companies could easily say that this is a prior condition that was diagnosed before the insurance was taken out.
We can argue about socialised medicine, which works pretty well in Europe, warts and all, but it baffles me that such a large portion of Americans are highly enthusiastic about a system where a large for-profit corporation with a huge profit motive can decide to screw you over, due to technicalities in your insurance contract, or because you got a test done when you where 13.
The rest of Larry Page's arguments seem nonsense to me. We, as a society, should be less judgemental and prickly or private about a lot of illnesses, but as an individual, you have to live in a society where people will judge you for your medical history. We are not ready for full disclosure and probably never will be.
"A very complex and wonderful piece of engineering"
On the contrary. We suffer from severe race conditions in the brain, we have obsolete and potentially dangerous "features" (i.e. the appendix). Replacement parts are hard to come by and we are very, very difficult to service. A simple service procedure can lead to catastrophic system failure. We're also got extremely poor interoperability with each other, leading to very large knowledge loss in transmission between systems and often disastrous and destructive intra-system interaction.
We perform impressive tasks in the same way that a PC running Microsoft Windows and Autodesk Inventor can perform impressive tasks. But like those two systems we are not so much engineered as stuck together with gaffa tape from millions of smaller components developed over a large number of years. Perhaps the best way to describe us is that we arose organically without any real engineering oversight.
"Did you know that signal DELAY is essential in organic brains? That whole hosts of disorders with debilitating effects come from signals arriving too early? Did you stop to consider that thse faults may actually be features that are essential?"
Are you saying that our maker created a system with severe race condition problems? I guess that is another issue to add to the existing; inclusion of obsolete and potentially dangerous features (the appendix), only poor and limited third party replacement parts available (i.e. limbs), design makes repairs hazardous with large potential for catastrophic system failure (surgery), poor interoperability with other units with widespread loss of data when transferring between units, etc.
If we add severe race conditions in the brain to this list of issues, I'm quite frankly surprised there hasn't yet been a massive class action suit against the manufacturer.
How are they getting away with this in Great Britain?
Using the tool may well be a criminal offence, but selling it isn't necessarily. And making it look like Firefox is Trademark violation, which is a Civil matter, not a criminal one.
It took a while for Mozilla to hear about Gamma and put together a lawsuit. I don't see how this is any different in the US.
If you have worked for the company for 25+ years, you must have someone in upper management who you know and who would trust your work, right? Or have the entire management system changed?
If it is the former, I would just book a meeting with your friend in upper management and your clueless new manager where you ask both of them the following questions: 1. Have I demonstrated my commitment to the company over the last 25+ years? 2. Have I given you a reason not to trust me on this? 3. Do you believe I am slacking off?
The expected answers are "Yes. No. No.". If this is the case, you can rightly ask for your new manager to start taking your estimates seriously and stop trying to question your commitment. If those are not the answers you're given, you should look for a new job immediately.
.. and they have no idea what it is. Something they have never heard of is not toxic. They hadn't heard about Google Chrome or ChromeOS either, before Google started pushing it. Android is massively well known these days, but almost nobody knows it has a Linux kernel.
The reason Google calls it ChromeOS rather than Chrome Linux or Google Linux, is that they don't want to share brand recognition with other Linux distributions, pure and simple.
It is the same reason that there is not a single mention of the word 'Linux' on the Ubuntu front web site, or the download page, or the "What is Ubuntu" page. You'll have to dig pretty hard to find any mention of the word 'Linux' on ubuntu.com at all.
The BSD license is irrelevant. The GPL does not cover aggregation, that is shipping two non-related components together in the same distribution, and it specifically provides an exception for allowing essential GPL operating system libraries to be used by proprietary applications.
There are many, many proprietary GUIs used on top of a GNU/Linux base system out there. Particularly in terms of TV Set-top boxes and other embedded systems. This alone is proof that your argument is flawed.
Microsoft could well have done the same. They could even have used Xorg with proprietary extensions if they wanted, since the X11 license is pretty much the same as the BSD license.
The only issue would be difficulty in keeping drivers locked in to Microsoft Linux so they can't be used for regular GNU/Linux, but I imagine they would just introduce deliberately incompatible changes to stop this from being easy.
They could also move most drivers into userland where they could certainly control a proprietary driver model.
"You can't justify subjecting 5 people to the negative effects of the cure in order to save one zombie, so your discovery is completely useless."
No. You would administer it and risk killing many healthy humans, because the alternative is certain annihilation of the human race.
The premise of the story is fine though. Although my zombie analogy would be the difference between a 99% chance of no zombie outbreak in a year vs. a 99.9% chance. The former would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free century. The latter would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free millennium.
However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm?
One fan at 3X... for a sufficiently small X.
This is an enthusiasts card, pushing the boundaries of the current generation AMD GPUs to squeeze out more performance. I think it is safe to say that X will not be sufficiently small. Or more accurately; 3X will not be sufficiently small.
I would venture to guess that fan reliability scales super-linearly with fan speed and that we're talking about a speed for which the failure rate of one fan of speed X is smaller than the failure rate of any of 3 fans at 3X.
I just don't think the AMD engineers are total idiots. Obviously I have no evidence, but I prefer not to assume they are.
It's terrible. X is very much second class. Here are all the things that don't work:
* Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X * Remoting of non X windows * Drag and drop from X to non X * Pleasant window management of non X windows
I share your concerns, but please allow me to moderate it slightly. X on OSX and Windows uses completely different UI toolkits between the native display server and X.
X on Wayland, on the other hand, would use GTK+/Qt on both X and Wayland. You would thus think that it would be easier for the GTK+/Qt developers to ensure the apps work transparently between the two on both display servers. It should be entirely possible to make it impossible for the user to tell whether a Window was displayed with X or Wayland.
None of this does anything to explain WHY we should switch though, other than the codebase being so "modern" and "elegant", something which doesn't matter at all to the user, and doesn't take into account all the inelegance which will be introduced when optimising Wayland and reintroducing some of the lost features.
We can also add that it will be ages before Wayland is actually as fast as X for most things on most drivers, since it simply isn't optimised yet. So we have a hope and a promise that it will one day be faster than X.
We also have a bunch of meaningless words such as "modern" and "elegant". Words that are meaningless to the users, and only give an extremely vague hint that future versions may be better because of this modernity and elegance.
I'm not completely dismissing Wayland, but I find the idea of switching such a crucial core component based on vague future promises to be absolutely insane. I'd like to see the promises become reality first. Maybe not everything, but we need enough that the switch is worth it.
However, I am less concerned about Wayland-only apps than you. I have faith in the Qt and GTK+ developers to make the backend choice transparent to the user and app developers so that an app developed with Qt or GTK+ will automatically work with both backends. Indeed it seems you simply have to set the Environment variable GDK_BACKEND (i.e. export GDK_BACKEND=wayland) and the application will choose the backend at runtime. This way, when using an SSH tunnel, the SSH startup scripts can automatically set the GDK_BACKEND to X11 and it should display on the remote X-server.
Citation needed. Employment and minimum wage is not a straight-forward linear releationship and this is subject to a lot of discussion (I know this is Wikipedia, but you should at least find references to the arguments).
In isolation, an employer is of course correct in that being required to increase the wages would mean they couldn't afford to hire as many, but with a minimum wage being enforced across the market it is entirely possible that increasing it will lead to more people being able to afford the products and services they themselves provide, thus providing a feedback loop to encourage growth.
Why would you need a Raspberry Pi to build a Pez dispenser?
Congratulations on the ingenuity of the winners!
It is more like a Pez dispenser which will only dispense candy N times a day, where N is programmable through a website, and will alert the user with an alarm and flashing light when the dispenser is ready to dispense another sweet. And even better, will alert a family member via email if the sweet has not been removed from the machine within a reasonable time frame.
In most of Europe, we have decent ones. If a product doesn't work as advertised, you return it to the vendor that sold it to you and get your money back. You very, very rarely have to go to the trouble of court.
I don't always research a £25 purchase beforehand, but I do expect that if that purchase turns out to be unusable through no fault of my own, then I can return it. EA is an exception to my usual behaviour. EA and Sony are now so infamous for poor consumer treatment that I will assume the product won't work as advertised due to draconian DRM and won't purchase it.
Is it likely that EA will release a game that "pro gamers" want to play? A game that is not a glorified FarmVille.
SimCity existed way before FarmVille. If anything, FarmVille is a dumbed down SimCity rather than SimCity being a glorified FarmVille.
Some of us who have been playing computer games for 30 years remember SimCity and SimCity 2000 quite fondly. I'm not sure what you define as a "pro gamer", but as a long time gamer, I'd love to give SimCity 5 a go to see if I like it, but EA and their draconian attitude towards their customers means I won't.
"I can testify that this is simply bullshit (as in a bold-faced lie)."
No. It was rhetoric. The grand parent picked the E-450 as an example. While it was admittedly a poor example, he/she did not mean for you to take this as a literal description of the E-450's prowess.
The point, which you missed, was that you don't need either a Core i5 or an AMD Bulldozer to surf the web and write documents. This point is true regardless of the poor choice of example. For the vast majority of software out there a $60 cpu will do just fine (think modern Pentium or high-end Celeron).
Slashdot Mirror
Seems we need reminding of this classic by Ken Thompson.
Slip a backdoor into a RHEL 6.x (or any other major Linux distribution) version of GCC and make it do two major things:
1. Slip a backdoor into any Linux kernel it compiles.
2. Replicate itself in any version of GCC it compiles.
Choose some entry point which changes very rarely so the chances of incompatibility with new code is small.
This would probably keep RHEL with any kernel version tainted for generations of releases without very little chance of being spotted, because there are no changes in the distributed source code of either project
Gay has been used as a synonym for bad for a long time by infantile morons. The rest of us don't use Gay as a synomym for bad and will tell you to grow up when you do. It certainly doesn't make you appear smart.
Grow up.
I'm almost 100% sure my children will go to public schools, because that is the norm in my country. Instead of private school, families here will move to ensure their children are in the catchment area for good schools. The consequences are obviously more or less the same as what Allison Benedikt warns against, namely "ghettofication" of schools, where the poor schools get worse for losing children of resourceful parents.
I understand her point and I would suggest that if your local public school is reasonably safe and you yourself are resourceful and educated, chances are you can ensure a decent education for your children regardless of some shortcomings in the local school. If you're working extra hard to provide the income for a private school, then that extra time at work may be better spent at home tutoring your children. To use examples from the articles, what is the point in working an extra half hour a day to ensure your children learn about Rosa Parks and read the Iliad in school, when you yourself could spend that half hour teaching them about Rosa Parks and read the Iliad with them?
In this case, it would be better for everyone if you stayed, put your children into this school and worked to improve it.
Up to a point. School age children are not old enough to decide to make major personal sacrifices in order to improve the world and I don't think it is right for me to make that decision for them. If putting them in a particular school carries a massively inflated risk of ruining their life and education then I'm failing them as a parent. If the school is actually dangerous, contains large amounts of drugs, etc. then the risk in staying behind to improve it is too great.
(As it turns out. TFA itself is more balanced and uses the word "bad" instead of the more loaded "evil", which Slashdot just had to throw in there).
The article says "fewer Microsoft products", not "no Microsoft products". Windows PC/Laptop manufacturing is incredibly competitive and consequently profit margins are razor thin. Acer has decided to narrow their line up to increase their Windows product profitability. At the same time, they've decided they can get a bigger slice of the ChromeBook market.
This sounds a little less sexy than the headline.
That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
No. Spain and Greece are great examples of a typical boom and bust where too much is attempted in a short amount of time using borrowed money in a country with large amounts of corruption and tax evasion both from greedy big shots and "Average Joe [tm]". The same is the case for Ireland and the other countries struggling the worst in Europe. Ireland had a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who didn't have a bank account for years, but kept cash in his office safe and received "gifts" from influential businessmen. This is a milder version of the same problem that exists in most African countries.
You never mentioned Sweden, Finland, Germany, etc. who all have socialised medicine and whos main economic problem at the moment are paying for the mess of southern Europe (and Ireland).
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already. This problem would not exist. Work only 10 hours a week? No problem, your National Health Service will still admit you. A heart condition discovered before your poor parents could get you health insurance? The National Health Service will still admit you.
There is lots of arguments about the quality of the National Health Services in various European countries. There is, for instance, a long-standing argument about privatisation of hospital services (in the sense that the government, not the patient, would be the customer), but as of yet, I haven't seen any major political party (right or left) advocating we get rid of it. It would be political suicide.
The "every man for himself" mindset is completely alien to us on this point. Especially since we know that even having medical insurance is not a guarantee that a for-profit company will actually pay out when you need to. And it most definitely would be too late to "take your money elsewhere" at that stage.
If students graduate from university without a knowledge of the world outside their field, this is a despicable failure of the primary (and secondary education). Most education systems are built to give us a broad knowledge at a lower level and let us focus as we move up the educational pyramid, because only the rare renaissance genius has the ability to excel in everything. This story makes it seem as if John Horgan has some fantastic idea about giving us a broader education, but the only difference is that he feels we are focusing too early.
That, and he shows the amazing arrogance (and ignorance) to assume that his field is the important one, which the oher parties should study. Does he not think that chemical engineers may receive the same curiosity and refusal to accept "facts" from simply studying chemical science? The may also get relevant domain knowledge.
But there is one important reason why (male) engineering students may want to study humanities; your chances of procreating may increase massively. If for no other reason, then for the sheer number of women attending these courses.
Proper medical care should not be subject to an insurance which the insurance companies could refuse to give you due to prior illness. What if someone grows up in a poor family without medical insurance and is diagnosed with a heart defect at a young age which may or may not manifest itself at an older age. If it does happen, they're practically screwed, even if the defect could be treated with proper medical care. The insurance companies could easily say that this is a prior condition that was diagnosed before the insurance was taken out.
We can argue about socialised medicine, which works pretty well in Europe, warts and all, but it baffles me that such a large portion of Americans are highly enthusiastic about a system where a large for-profit corporation with a huge profit motive can decide to screw you over, due to technicalities in your insurance contract, or because you got a test done when you where 13.
The rest of Larry Page's arguments seem nonsense to me. We, as a society, should be less judgemental and prickly or private about a lot of illnesses, but as an individual, you have to live in a society where people will judge you for your medical history. We are not ready for full disclosure and probably never will be.
"A very complex and wonderful piece of engineering"
On the contrary. We suffer from severe race conditions in the brain, we have obsolete and potentially dangerous "features" (i.e. the appendix). Replacement parts are hard to come by and we are very, very difficult to service. A simple service procedure can lead to catastrophic system failure. We're also got extremely poor interoperability with each other, leading to very large knowledge loss in transmission between systems and often disastrous and destructive intra-system interaction.
We perform impressive tasks in the same way that a PC running Microsoft Windows and Autodesk Inventor can perform impressive tasks. But like those two systems we are not so much engineered as stuck together with gaffa tape from millions of smaller components developed over a large number of years. Perhaps the best way to describe us is that we arose organically without any real engineering oversight.
"Did you know that signal DELAY is essential in organic brains? That whole hosts of disorders with debilitating effects come from signals arriving too early? Did you stop to consider that thse faults may actually be features that are essential?"
Are you saying that our maker created a system with severe race condition problems? I guess that is another issue to add to the existing; inclusion of obsolete and potentially dangerous features (the appendix), only poor and limited third party replacement parts available (i.e. limbs), design makes repairs hazardous with large potential for catastrophic system failure (surgery), poor interoperability with other units with widespread loss of data when transferring between units, etc.
If we add severe race conditions in the brain to this list of issues, I'm quite frankly surprised there hasn't yet been a massive class action suit against the manufacturer.
How are they getting away with this in Great Britain?
Using the tool may well be a criminal offence, but selling it isn't necessarily. And making it look like Firefox is Trademark violation, which is a Civil matter, not a criminal one.
It took a while for Mozilla to hear about Gamma and put together a lawsuit. I don't see how this is any different in the US.
You 6-digit username kids might not remember this
Says the poster with a 6-digit slashdot ID using terms like M$. This is not the best way to come across as a fountain of wisdom.
If you have worked for the company for 25+ years, you must have someone in upper management who you know and who would trust your work, right? Or have the entire management system changed?
If it is the former, I would just book a meeting with your friend in upper management and your clueless new manager where you ask both of them the following questions:
1. Have I demonstrated my commitment to the company over the last 25+ years?
2. Have I given you a reason not to trust me on this?
3. Do you believe I am slacking off?
The expected answers are "Yes. No. No.". If this is the case, you can rightly ask for your new manager to start taking your estimates seriously and stop trying to question your commitment. If those are not the answers you're given, you should look for a new job immediately.
.. and they have no idea what it is. Something they have never heard of is not toxic. They hadn't heard about Google Chrome or ChromeOS either, before Google started pushing it. Android is massively well known these days, but almost nobody knows it has a Linux kernel.
The reason Google calls it ChromeOS rather than Chrome Linux or Google Linux, is that they don't want to share brand recognition with other Linux distributions, pure and simple.
It is the same reason that there is not a single mention of the word 'Linux' on the Ubuntu front web site, or the download page, or the "What is Ubuntu" page. You'll have to dig pretty hard to find any mention of the word 'Linux' on ubuntu.com at all.
The BSD license is irrelevant. The GPL does not cover aggregation, that is shipping two non-related components together in the same distribution, and it specifically provides an exception for allowing essential GPL operating system libraries to be used by proprietary applications.
There are many, many proprietary GUIs used on top of a GNU/Linux base system out there. Particularly in terms of TV Set-top boxes and other embedded systems. This alone is proof that your argument is flawed.
Microsoft could well have done the same. They could even have used Xorg with proprietary extensions if they wanted, since the X11 license is pretty much the same as the BSD license.
The only issue would be difficulty in keeping drivers locked in to Microsoft Linux so they can't be used for regular GNU/Linux, but I imagine they would just introduce deliberately incompatible changes to stop this from being easy.
They could also move most drivers into userland where they could certainly control a proprietary driver model.
"You can't justify subjecting 5 people to the negative effects of the cure in order to save one zombie, so your discovery is completely useless."
No. You would administer it and risk killing many healthy humans, because the alternative is certain annihilation of the human race.
The premise of the story is fine though. Although my zombie analogy would be the difference between a 99% chance of no zombie outbreak in a year vs. a 99.9% chance. The former would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free century. The latter would mean a 37% chance of a zombie free millennium.
However, which do you think would be more reliable, three fans at X rpm or one fan at 3X rpm?
One fan at 3X... for a sufficiently small X.
This is an enthusiasts card, pushing the boundaries of the current generation AMD GPUs to squeeze out more performance. I think it is safe to say that X will not be sufficiently small. Or more accurately; 3X will not be sufficiently small.
I would venture to guess that fan reliability scales super-linearly with fan speed and that we're talking about a speed for which the failure rate of one fan of speed X is smaller than the failure rate of any of 3 fans at 3X.
I just don't think the AMD engineers are total idiots. Obviously I have no evidence, but I prefer not to assume they are.
It's terrible. X is very much second class. Here are all the things that don't work:
* Copy/paste of more than text between X and non X
* Remoting of non X windows
* Drag and drop from X to non X
* Pleasant window management of non X windows
I share your concerns, but please allow me to moderate it slightly. X on OSX and Windows uses completely different UI toolkits between the native display server and X.
X on Wayland, on the other hand, would use GTK+/Qt on both X and Wayland. You would thus think that it would be easier for the GTK+/Qt developers to ensure the apps work transparently between the two on both display servers. It should be entirely possible to make it impossible for the user to tell whether a Window was displayed with X or Wayland.
None of this does anything to explain WHY we should switch though, other than the codebase being so "modern" and "elegant", something which doesn't matter at all to the user, and doesn't take into account all the inelegance which will be introduced when optimising Wayland and reintroducing some of the lost features.
We can also add that it will be ages before Wayland is actually as fast as X for most things on most drivers, since it simply isn't optimised yet. So we have a hope and a promise that it will one day be faster than X.
We also have a bunch of meaningless words such as "modern" and "elegant". Words that are meaningless to the users, and only give an extremely vague hint that future versions may be better because of this modernity and elegance.
I'm not completely dismissing Wayland, but I find the idea of switching such a crucial core component based on vague future promises to be absolutely insane. I'd like to see the promises become reality first. Maybe not everything, but we need enough that the switch is worth it.
However, I am less concerned about Wayland-only apps than you. I have faith in the Qt and GTK+ developers to make the backend choice transparent to the user and app developers so that an app developed with Qt or GTK+ will automatically work with both backends. Indeed it seems you simply have to set the Environment variable GDK_BACKEND (i.e. export GDK_BACKEND=wayland) and the application will choose the backend at runtime. This way, when using an SSH tunnel, the SSH startup scripts can automatically set the GDK_BACKEND to X11 and it should display on the remote X-server.
Higher unemployment? How does that help anyone?
Citation needed. Employment and minimum wage is not a straight-forward linear releationship and this is subject to a lot of discussion (I know this is Wikipedia, but you should at least find references to the arguments).
In isolation, an employer is of course correct in that being required to increase the wages would mean they couldn't afford to hire as many, but with a minimum wage being enforced across the market it is entirely possible that increasing it will lead to more people being able to afford the products and services they themselves provide, thus providing a feedback loop to encourage growth.
Why would you need a Raspberry Pi to build a Pez dispenser?
Congratulations on the ingenuity of the winners!
It is more like a Pez dispenser which will only dispense candy N times a day, where N is programmable through a website, and will alert the user with an alarm and flashing light when the dispenser is ready to dispense another sweet. And even better, will alert a family member via email if the sweet has not been removed from the machine within a reasonable time frame.
In most of Europe, we have decent ones. If a product doesn't work as advertised, you return it to the vendor that sold it to you and get your money back. You very, very rarely have to go to the trouble of court.
I don't always research a £25 purchase beforehand, but I do expect that if that purchase turns out to be unusable through no fault of my own, then I can return it. EA is an exception to my usual behaviour. EA and Sony are now so infamous for poor consumer treatment that I will assume the product won't work as advertised due to draconian DRM and won't purchase it.
As far as I know, the biggest consumer boycott ever is the Nestle Boycott. It has been going on since 1977 and is actually quite well organised. Yet Nestle is the largest food company in the world based on revenue.
If strategic consumption is the grassroots political movement of the future, then we are doomed.
Is it likely that EA will release a game that "pro gamers" want to play? A game that is not a glorified FarmVille.
SimCity existed way before FarmVille. If anything, FarmVille is a dumbed down SimCity rather than SimCity being a glorified FarmVille.
Some of us who have been playing computer games for 30 years remember SimCity and SimCity 2000 quite fondly. I'm not sure what you define as a "pro gamer", but as a long time gamer, I'd love to give SimCity 5 a go to see if I like it, but EA and their draconian attitude towards their customers means I won't.
I think that's a shame.
"I can testify that this is simply bullshit (as in a bold-faced lie)."
No. It was rhetoric. The grand parent picked the E-450 as an example. While it was admittedly a poor example, he/she did not mean for you to take this as a literal description of the E-450's prowess.
The point, which you missed, was that you don't need either a Core i5 or an AMD Bulldozer to surf the web and write documents. This point is true regardless of the poor choice of example. For the vast majority of software out there a $60 cpu will do just fine (think modern Pentium or high-end Celeron).