Years ago, before the miniaturisation of all this shit, webcams used to have a hardware light that lit up when the camera was active. Even on laptops.
Rather than software that can't possibly detect if another driver's been used to power the hardware, without all the hotkey/taskbar junk (if they're on your machine already, they can do anything, including disabling your hotkeys or rendering them irrelevant).
Yet again, some tiny, simplest, cheapest-possible-piece of hardware is excluded in favour of software that does a worse job (oh, just YET another thing running in the taskbar and reading your keyboard constantly for hotkeys, along with the wireless driver, the bluetooth driver, the printer driver, etc. etc. etc.).
Are you sure you guys are living in a first world country?
A city with a population density comparable to most and you can't get more than ISDN or modems? Hell, the world moved on while you lot were faffing about in the technological dark ages.
Honestly, even 128kbps on the modern web? That's just laughable. I can't even begin to fathom. I haven't used speeds like that for nearly 20 years. And at the time we were wondering what this DSL thing was that the Americans were always going on about and envious. When ADSL arrived in this country, we didn't stop to look back. 1Mbps, then 8Mbps, then 24, then 48, and I'm on 75 now as a BASE PACKAGE. They kept upgrading my equipment every time I moved house and charged no more. Hell, my phone does 4G and I have a speedtest screenshot at 30Mbps down.
Even the streams inside an MP3 are encoded at rates faster than your connections. I mean, seriously, what the hell are you playing at? You couldn't even stream an MP3 over your Internet connection without buffering?
It's not that it isn't there (how many Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there - I bet they all have leased lines), it's that you're not being allowed to have it as an ordinary customer? Or are they blaming distances to the population centers or what?
Honestly, when someone says "Have you got Wifi?" the presumption is that it's Wifi with a backend measured in the tens of Mbps. Otherwise people just laugh and use something else. Even up in the highlands of Scotland.
However, are we suggesting that assembler is a better memory manager? Because it's literally the bottom of the pack, with C only just slightly above it because it actually include a malloc function.
And Cosmos pretty much only works in VMWare and doesn't even have a single hardware video driver (my exact comment - when you need to start interfacing with hardware, it becomes almost impossible to make any guarantees about the pointers you need to play with) - strange that.
And it uses syslinux as the bootloader.
And critical parts are written in assembler (back to square one!) and literally the assembler code is just tacked into the final OS in place of C' functions (like a macro replacement).
Again, ZERO MEMORY POINTER GUARANTEES in assembler.
All they've done is wrote the OS frontend and maybe a filesystem etc. in C# while assembler (potentially insecure and able to do and access any memory or mess up stacks as normal) is used for all the critical parts - booting up, interfacing with hardware, and god knows what else.
It's an amazing achievement but it's NOT an OS written in C#.
Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.
"orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.
However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.
Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either. But people have this Star Trek definition that "orbit" means "just up there and close-by".
There are objects orbiting the Sun that only reappear once every few million years, whip past and then you don't see them again for another few million years. That's still an orbit.
Like Halley's Comet - an orbit doesn't mean it even spends more than 1% of its time actually near you. It could literally orbit at a radius of light year or a billion light years. That's still an orbit.
And with any telescope you can put in your back garden, you can just about get a decent image of most of the planets. That's about it. In terms of anything smaller, even with the largest of observatories and clever tricks, such objects are basically invisible and often only spotted by "Oh, look, there was a datapoint on this set of billions of other datapoints that looks periodic or related".
People misunderstand quite how far the planets are, how big they are, how fast they are moving, how fast we are spinning, and how tiny everything looks from here. Literally, at hundreds of times magnification, planets are only tiny dots in your retina and moving so fast that you can't follow them manually across the sky and need computers and motors to help do it. Yet their real size, speed and distance are inconceivable - in the "hundreds of thousands of Earths put together" ranges.
As yet, nobody has made an OS that isn't C at the bottom. There's a reason for that. Although there are projects that claim it's now possible, not one major operating system uses them for kernel programming.
And wrappers like this have existed since the first day of C. You can always wrap your own memory and pointer management functions and structures and just expect people to use them. They come with a performance cost, and wrapping C means people can only use your wrappers. Even this, which claims compatibility, basically just introduces two new pointer "types" which can't be dereferenced in the normal way.
It's not that this has been impossible forever and people are only just going "Oh, maybe we should do something". It's been this way because there are things that you need to take account of still. And though security is certainly a high-priority, a system that runs dog-slow, isn't compatible with other APIs, has to have tricks all over it to make it work, and ultimately still has to end up with hardware pointers where the bounds are set by the programmer (as here) means that it won't get used at all.
There's a reason that even "theoretical" OS like MINIX still use C and pointers. At the OS level, hardware access needs unbounded pointers or pointers that only the programmer knows the bounds of. Basically, bang, security problem if they use them wrong.
Even ordinary applications made in pointer-managed languages have to - by definition - include more checks and code than those that don't. I'm not saying those checks aren't worthwhile, or don't stop security problems, but there is still yet to be a serious OS or even low-level drivers written in anything other than C.
And people speak as if, if we were to all just move to Rust or whatever (which also includes its own pointer types including a special insecure "unbounded" pointer - wonder why that is even in there, hmm?) that all the security problems would magically disappear. Unfortunately it's not like that.
It's about eliminating human error and there's a lot that can go wrong with pointer arithmetic and lack of checks. But that human error is present whether or not a pointer is used. Most of the time the problem is lack of bounds checking - that, in any language, can lead to serious problems like crashes, acting on incorrect data, getting into infinite loops, etc.
The problem is that the one part you NEED that kind of balance, deep in the kernel rings where you're using drivers and low-level memory access outside of the normal protections, you don't have it available as the hardware needs real pointers to be manipulated in order to operate.
Loyalty cards were invented because they allowed tracking of customer preferences etc.
Quite what data they get from them that actually results in greater sales I can't fathom (surely you can only give coupons for things, which results in less profit on things I probably don't want as I chose their competitor anyway) but in the era of having nothing like that, I'm sure it was a boost to discover that people who buy hot dog sausages also buy hot dog rolls.
But nowadays? And Facebook ads? You're suggesting that giving shops data on how many Facebook ads they bought resulted in someone walking into a store and buying products (which is purely correlative, not causative) is somehow profitable enough that it covers the bad press? I mean, honestly? How is that possible?
And surely it's "too late" if they've bought some Facebook ads to then tell the stores how many people went on to buy something. And couldn't that be done just as easily with a coupon, voucher, code etc. that's only in the Facebook advert? And then extrapolating from that to purely "we should buy more Facebook ads"?
I'm just not sure that I get this at all. How is it relevant to most stores, how many stores advertise on Facebook at all, how do you tie the correlation to a causation, what kind of rates are you expecting (aren't ad responses measured in PER THOUSAND and even then each is only a pittance of a measure?), and quite how does having all those statistics available magically make you more money than, say, putting up a sign or taking 5% off something?
It's Big Data applied to random human interactions again.
Which is why one of my side-hobbies is pissing off Facebook etc. "friends" by correcting their stories, linking to Snopes, and explaining the bullshit they're pushing.
If they block me after, that's up to them, but I'll be damned if I'll let spurious facts slide past without comment - whether they support my opinion or not.
But, hey, another of my side-hobbies is reporting advertising to the relevant agencies when it's non-compliant or misleading. Try it, it's fun to complain.
There's a reason that many workplace policies dealing with the media is "No comment". It's got nothing to do with hiding what happened (that will come out anyway), it's got everything to do with the source.
"A member of staff said" "Insiders at the company tell us" "A representative was quoted as saying".
Whereas if all they get is "A passerby commented" or "A witness was heard to say", then it instantly removes their credence.
It's not what was said (look at the nonsense spouted to media in any incident, including that they saw the policeman do this, or they heard 20 gunshots or whatever, compared to the CCTV of the same). It's who said it, in what capacity ("I heard that", "I think that", "It sounded like", etc.), and when that are much more important than the actual words.
Quotes are easy to come by. Quotes from officials are harder. And when the story is entirely "witness quotes" plus "the company was unavailable for comment" it's infinitely better than something which can be misconstrued as "We have it on the authority of person X working at the company that Y happened", whether that's true or not.
Yeah, I don't read the news to get someone's OPINION on it. I read the news to find out WHAT HAPPENED and form my own opinion.
It's a vastly different thing, and why social networking (OPINION-based) is a bad news source.
I would pay a lot of money for a website that edits the news back to "X happened in Y" without visible bias or opinions. Hell, I'd pay even more if I could filter out sports news, or stories about celebrities, etc.
I often think about creating a "How I read the headlines" website where I just suck in the headlines from BBC News and then reword them to reflect reality.
"Green to 'sort out BHS pensions mess'" at the moment. Roughly translated that's "millionaire who put a high street store into bankruptcy and then sold it off makes claims that he can't possible back up."
Social media? Gosh, the only thing more unreliable than the news channels.
Did you know, Facebook are soon going to make you pay unless you click this link before the 1st of June/July/August/September?
Did you know: this local crime happened (actually four years ago) and this little girl needs money for a life-saving operation (actually dead already), etc. etc. etc.?
Social media is the new gossip. The junk on there is really atrocious, and when news is discussed most of what pops up on social media is rumour and/or just outright lies.
If anything, my primary source of "news" is a web search. Not even a news search because that's just mainstream news lumped into one item. Even things like Wikinews at least have some element of journalism and truth to them more often that the TV channels or papers.
But social media? Really? Maybe that's how you hear *OF* a story, because you're always connected as a young kid, but for that to be your source of details of the news? That's just scary.
As someone who grew up in the ZX Spectrum era, then enjoyed my best gaming years in the DOS era and playing NetHack, and someone who often stops playing game series when they "go 3D" (yep, I'm just that old fashioned)...
Not at all. But a 13.3" display is a netbook, not a laptop. I have a gaming laptop. It plays GTA V (GTA 4 and 3 I hated, having played 1 and 2!), it plays 1000 Steam games, it plays all my old emulators, all in one location.
However, my ZX Spectrum was played on a display bigger than a 13.3" widescreen, which is just ridiculous, even back in the B&W days before we got a spare colour TV to play on.
Playing games on a 13.3" loses ALL immersion. My laptop is 17" and is just about right. But I often plug it into a 32" display. Yes, even when playing a ZX Spectrum emulator. Because, you know what, I don't want to squint at some stupendously high-res but tiny screen to work out which pixel to press.
(P.S. Currently have an isometric 2D pixel art game in development... fucking hate 3D "for the sake of it").
It saves you having to write out a CV (resume to Americans).
Just link in your profile and you have a "work Facebook" that has all the cleansed info you'd give to a potential employer, including exact dates, what you did at each place, who you worked with (for reference purposes, etc.) and if you didn't work there, it would be difficult to link to those people and/or stay on that page for very long.
I literally keep it up to date should I ever change jobs - you can just hand it to job agencies who know exactly what you do, who you are, where you've worked and for how long in one URL.
Facebook is to share pictures with your granny and keep in touch with old friends. Linked is to share your job titles and project photos with potential employers and keep in touch with old colleagues.
Note that neither is a vital, irreplaceable or worth-paying-for service.
What they do is upgrade every crime to something worse. A burglary becomes murder, a robbery becomes armed robbery, an assault becomes assault with a deadly weapon.
The irony is, they upgrade the crime NO MATTER which side has the guns, or whether both sides have them.
Petty crime in the UK is no worse than any other nation. It's really not, check the stats. Daily Mail stories about immigrants breaking open lorries really are fiction or exaggeration.
But our gun crime is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than the US. By orders of magnitude. Because we had a school shooting 20 years ago (with a man with pistols against 5-year-olds) and we said enough was enough and banned even those weapons outside of regulated activities. As a result, though not "zero", the number of weapons available is significantly reduced and the number of weapon crimes even more so.
Literally there were 370 "mass shootings" (i.e. more than 4 people killed) last year in the US. We've had about 4 in the last few DECADES.
But Americans don't want to hear that. They want their guns "to prevent" crimes like mass shootings. How many people shot back and how many died as a result? One. Fifty.
Guns just amplify the crime, not prevent it. What in the UK would be a simple mugging, you'd go home with a black-eye and no wallet (your "petty" crime), would turn into a murder or manslaughter case if a gun was involved. You would EXPECT the number of petty crimes to rise not because more petty crimes are carried out, but because none of them amplify to lethal violence with firearms because some kid was trying to steal your purse.
You can't prevent medical errors. They are, quite literally, errors that - even with the best of controls, training and supervision, still happen. By definition something went wrong that wasn't supposed to.
You can, however, prevent 370 MASS SHOOTINGS IN THE LAST YEAR. Please compare and contrast with the UK - 4 "mass shootings" in the last decade.
For context - more US people have died by the hands of private guns since World War 2 than in all the wars since then.
It doesn't matter what strawman you pull out - you're voluntarily allowing mass shootings to happen so that you are allowed a gun yourself. If you don't see the irony in that statement, no amount of statistics are going to sway you.
Only the default "press and go" option actually sucks in your Apache configs, finds all the domains, makes certs for them all, then plugs those certs back into your Apache config. That's the "dumb user" mode.
You can have it just create the certs you specify for you, save them into a given location, and just put the command that does that into, say, a cron job or do it manually.
Both parts you specify are high-standard parts which, if they go wrong, can start fires or otherwise kill people. The safety of such parts - even after-market - is REQUIRED, not optional, and so the parts expense reflects that.
As such, it's not a fair comparison by any stretch of the imagination.
But we're talking about a bit of Gorilla Glass that, for other manufacturers, is about $60. Hey, why do you think "curved" glass is cool these days? The users? No, it's because it's almost impossible to replace with cheap solutions.
I work in a school, we have hundreds of iPads. To buy, they cost GBP200. By the time we add cases, chargers, licences, etc. it costs us GBP250. Repairs from Apple for screens? GBP 150 and up. Or the guy down the road who owns a repair shop does them for us for GBP 90, will collect and deliver and rush-job when we need it.
Apple aren't even TRYING to compete. Everyone raves about AppleCare and everything else, but honestly they can't get close. They literally just bin the device and give you a new one. I presume the binned ones are sold off as recons via third-parties, because I see a LOT of cheap recon iPads, which we can also get for GBP 130 each in Grade A condition. When the cost of a refurb iPad is less than the cost of a screen for one, there's something wrong.
Apple don't care. People still buy their junk, and they don't have to provide support/repair/recon services. That's part of how they make so much money on a glorified tablet and smartphone that doesn't do anything that every other model on the market does.
Well, judging from any quick search of release notes for just about every service I look into, they are unlikely to be able to online bank, use Google services, use quite a lot of modern websites, Google and Bing will be whinging at them constantly, and most websites will look like shit or just not work at all.
Sure, it's nice to retain compatibility, but there's also a time to move on. Do you still push out Windows 3.1 apps? Do you test on Windows 95? Still using plugins from the 90's?
If you haven't noticed, without an HTML5 browser (all the plugins are dead now by the way - Java, ActiveX, etc. - only Flash really "works" at all and that's going) almost all the websites you visit are just broken.
So if you ask your users to move on to a modern browser, you won't be the first to ask them that, by a long shot, and that's warning enough itself.
As someone who works in education, where they never throw anything away if it can still be used in lessons, where I'm often asked to install CDs that have been lying around for 20 years or more (Shockwave anyone?), with teachers complaining they can't teach what they used to 20 years ago because they don't have that software (yeah, I know, don't go there), almost everything is now HTML5 - from both paid and free resources. Even the CDs have gone and everything's now web-based, even testing, assessment, etc. tools.
And this year, pretty much every supplier announced HTML5 versions because NOTHING ELSE works on an iPad - Flash, etc. Our banks enforce IE 10 minimum but recommend Firefox or Chrome.
These 15%? Yeah, they're not your main source of income if they haven't bought a PC or upgraded their browser in 10 years.
To be honest, if they'd named them "_main_support" or "_internal", nobody would have been any the wiser.
Lucky that they left the function name, with obvious telemetry marker, in the data areas of the executable, or you'd not know or suspect what was happening without actually disassembling the thing.
Hell, surely an optimised/stripped executable wouldn't show them anyway, so you have really no way of knowing whether someone's put these into major parts of Windows, drivers or applications.
As always, without the source, you really have NO idea what these things are doing. And, hell, even an old 1MByte DOS game with plain interrupt calls and obvious code paths can take YEARS to properly disassemble and work out what it's actually doing.
And giving that they've been fining their own NHS hospitals, schools, courts, etc. hundreds of thousands of pounds, for breaches much less severe - not even including medical data for instance, but just names, email addresses and maybe a postcode to the wrong people - then it's hard to imagine this won't be enforced quite harshly on an entity so liable.
Hell, in one case, a hospital was fined £100,000 because it couldn't prove that it DID NOT HAVE sensitive data encrypted properly on a disk that it sent in the post that was lost. Not even that it had been lost, or had data, but that they couldn't prove that the known-lost did HAD definitely been encrypted or what personal data would have been on it.
I work in schools - the DPA is scary stuff and my boss (our data controller, you're correct on that), issues edicts on it on a regular basis. Case law even gives PERSONAL LIABILITY now. I can go to jail or be fined for handling data in ways I shouldn't be doing in my job, irrespective of whether my employer "gave me permission to", if I fail to act sensibly with it.
Even someone typing in a list of our kid's names into a non-EU website to let them play a game is such a breach of the DPA that we have disciplined staff, deleted the data, shut down the service and removed staff access to it. Unless you can prove that they are operating under UK or EU data protection laws, it's your arse on the line for any "personally identifiable data" (i.e. a name and a date of birth).
Breach of the Data Protection Act. Even employers cannot ask you to do this, and not providing service if the user refuses to allow it will see you in court too.
Honestly, that's a business with a life expectancy of precisely one lawsuit threat.
No, this isn't going on in Britain. No, it's nothing to do with Big Brother.
It's a company being stupid and knowingly doing illegal stuff that, when the Data Controller finds out, he'll nail them to the wall for. It has absolutely no basis is reality, even if some people were stupid enough to give them access.
I'm British myself. We stopped listening a long time ago. Nobody really protested.
Given that vast portions of Morse usage are nothing more than an emergency signal that in most areas of the world won't be heard anyway, only 180 years after we started using it, in practical terms it's dead and means nothing. It's certainly no good as a communications medium any more if we you have to check the map to see if anyone's listening, and it won't be long before NOBODY anywhere is listening.
Iceland - population 332,529 Greece - population 10,955,000
Greece has a GDP 20 times as much as Iceland - AFTER the crash.
Iceland is basically a large town, or small city.
Iceland also didn't "recover" - the state took over the banks, secured the local money, and allowed the rest of it to go bankrupt. Billions were lost in the Iceland crash by foreign investors, and the government was dissolved at least once. Imagine what that means in terms of future exports, imports and investment.
Despite starting from a much higher standpoint than Greece, Iceland still suffered significantly for it, and is still doing so.
Your UK newspaper interpretation of an EU MORI poll is interesting - in that almost all the EU countries "would vote remain" if there was a referendum in their countries (2nd graph). Gosh, they must hate it.
And the rest of the countries waiting to join have been there forever. Look on a map. West to East, the only things left to join are former Soviet states, Turkey (looking to join the EU too) and a couple of countries who've never had any interest in it (highly independent countries, by tradition anyway, neutral in wars, etc.).
The fact that the EU are CONSIDERING allowing those countries in, when they have removed all kinds of other applications because of the risk to stability, means they feel secure enough to let those countries in. It would be like letting the lame duck into the group of survivors otherwise - bound to bring everything down.
Brexit would probably be quite stupid. But nobody knows for sure. Picking the two countries most affected by the crash (and not even mentioning, say, Italy) and using them as the reason why Britain (one of the most financially stable of all EU countries) should leave - and then implying Greece's collapse was because of those same EU countries, including the UK, somehow "robbing" it of money - is just inconsistent. Either the EU are there to rob countries like Greece of their stability and profit from it, or they are running away from the opportunity to do so. You can't have it both ways.
Or maybe the EU is quite happy to have Greece in it so long as they don't all start retiring at 40, drawing their pensions, and letting the politicians pay off debts from their billions of bailouts that benefit them personally first, and then blaming the EU for "not helping".
Probably more to do with they are each making so much profit from app stores for so little work, they can each follow the competitive pricing to the bottom without even bothering to do the sums.
Slashdot Mirror
Years ago, before the miniaturisation of all this shit, webcams used to have a hardware light that lit up when the camera was active. Even on laptops.
Rather than software that can't possibly detect if another driver's been used to power the hardware, without all the hotkey/taskbar junk (if they're on your machine already, they can do anything, including disabling your hotkeys or rendering them irrelevant).
Yet again, some tiny, simplest, cheapest-possible-piece of hardware is excluded in favour of software that does a worse job (oh, just YET another thing running in the taskbar and reading your keyboard constantly for hotkeys, along with the wireless driver, the bluetooth driver, the printer driver, etc. etc. etc.).
Are you sure you guys are living in a first world country?
A city with a population density comparable to most and you can't get more than ISDN or modems? Hell, the world moved on while you lot were faffing about in the technological dark ages.
Honestly, even 128kbps on the modern web? That's just laughable. I can't even begin to fathom. I haven't used speeds like that for nearly 20 years. And at the time we were wondering what this DSL thing was that the Americans were always going on about and envious. When ADSL arrived in this country, we didn't stop to look back. 1Mbps, then 8Mbps, then 24, then 48, and I'm on 75 now as a BASE PACKAGE. They kept upgrading my equipment every time I moved house and charged no more. Hell, my phone does 4G and I have a speedtest screenshot at 30Mbps down.
Even the streams inside an MP3 are encoded at rates faster than your connections. I mean, seriously, what the hell are you playing at? You couldn't even stream an MP3 over your Internet connection without buffering?
It's not that it isn't there (how many Fortune 500 companies are headquartered there - I bet they all have leased lines), it's that you're not being allowed to have it as an ordinary customer? Or are they blaming distances to the population centers or what?
Honestly, when someone says "Have you got Wifi?" the presumption is that it's Wifi with a backend measured in the tens of Mbps. Otherwise people just laugh and use something else. Even up in the highlands of Scotland.
Technically, of course you're correct.
However, are we suggesting that assembler is a better memory manager? Because it's literally the bottom of the pack, with C only just slightly above it because it actually include a malloc function.
And Cosmos pretty much only works in VMWare and doesn't even have a single hardware video driver (my exact comment - when you need to start interfacing with hardware, it becomes almost impossible to make any guarantees about the pointers you need to play with) - strange that.
And it uses syslinux as the bootloader.
And critical parts are written in assembler (back to square one!) and literally the assembler code is just tacked into the final OS in place of C' functions (like a macro replacement).
Again, ZERO MEMORY POINTER GUARANTEES in assembler.
All they've done is wrote the OS frontend and maybe a filesystem etc. in C# while assembler (potentially insecure and able to do and access any memory or mess up stacks as normal) is used for all the critical parts - booting up, interfacing with hardware, and god knows what else.
It's an amazing achievement but it's NOT an OS written in C#.
Yes.
But your cooling bill is about to go through the roof.
Yeah, "orbit" is a term that people assume has a secondary meaning that it really doesn't.
"orbit" means you're moving in a circle around something. Nowhere does it say that circle isn't as large as the solar system itself.
However, people take "orbit" to mean "close enough to send a ship down" because they watch too much star trek.
Literally, we are orbiting the Sun. That's not close - we've never really sent anything to the Sun. We are also orbiting the centre of the Milky Way. That's not close either. But people have this Star Trek definition that "orbit" means "just up there and close-by".
There are objects orbiting the Sun that only reappear once every few million years, whip past and then you don't see them again for another few million years. That's still an orbit.
Like Halley's Comet - an orbit doesn't mean it even spends more than 1% of its time actually near you. It could literally orbit at a radius of light year or a billion light years. That's still an orbit.
And with any telescope you can put in your back garden, you can just about get a decent image of most of the planets. That's about it. In terms of anything smaller, even with the largest of observatories and clever tricks, such objects are basically invisible and often only spotted by "Oh, look, there was a datapoint on this set of billions of other datapoints that looks periodic or related".
People misunderstand quite how far the planets are, how big they are, how fast they are moving, how fast we are spinning, and how tiny everything looks from here. Literally, at hundreds of times magnification, planets are only tiny dots in your retina and moving so fast that you can't follow them manually across the sky and need computers and motors to help do it. Yet their real size, speed and distance are inconceivable - in the "hundreds of thousands of Earths put together" ranges.
As yet, nobody has made an OS that isn't C at the bottom. There's a reason for that. Although there are projects that claim it's now possible, not one major operating system uses them for kernel programming.
And wrappers like this have existed since the first day of C. You can always wrap your own memory and pointer management functions and structures and just expect people to use them. They come with a performance cost, and wrapping C means people can only use your wrappers. Even this, which claims compatibility, basically just introduces two new pointer "types" which can't be dereferenced in the normal way.
It's not that this has been impossible forever and people are only just going "Oh, maybe we should do something". It's been this way because there are things that you need to take account of still. And though security is certainly a high-priority, a system that runs dog-slow, isn't compatible with other APIs, has to have tricks all over it to make it work, and ultimately still has to end up with hardware pointers where the bounds are set by the programmer (as here) means that it won't get used at all.
There's a reason that even "theoretical" OS like MINIX still use C and pointers. At the OS level, hardware access needs unbounded pointers or pointers that only the programmer knows the bounds of. Basically, bang, security problem if they use them wrong.
Even ordinary applications made in pointer-managed languages have to - by definition - include more checks and code than those that don't. I'm not saying those checks aren't worthwhile, or don't stop security problems, but there is still yet to be a serious OS or even low-level drivers written in anything other than C.
And people speak as if, if we were to all just move to Rust or whatever (which also includes its own pointer types including a special insecure "unbounded" pointer - wonder why that is even in there, hmm?) that all the security problems would magically disappear. Unfortunately it's not like that.
It's about eliminating human error and there's a lot that can go wrong with pointer arithmetic and lack of checks. But that human error is present whether or not a pointer is used. Most of the time the problem is lack of bounds checking - that, in any language, can lead to serious problems like crashes, acting on incorrect data, getting into infinite loops, etc.
The problem is that the one part you NEED that kind of balance, deep in the kernel rings where you're using drivers and low-level memory access outside of the normal protections, you don't have it available as the hardware needs real pointers to be manipulated in order to operate.
I have to say:
Loyalty cards were invented because they allowed tracking of customer preferences etc.
Quite what data they get from them that actually results in greater sales I can't fathom (surely you can only give coupons for things, which results in less profit on things I probably don't want as I chose their competitor anyway) but in the era of having nothing like that, I'm sure it was a boost to discover that people who buy hot dog sausages also buy hot dog rolls.
But nowadays? And Facebook ads? You're suggesting that giving shops data on how many Facebook ads they bought resulted in someone walking into a store and buying products (which is purely correlative, not causative) is somehow profitable enough that it covers the bad press? I mean, honestly? How is that possible?
And surely it's "too late" if they've bought some Facebook ads to then tell the stores how many people went on to buy something. And couldn't that be done just as easily with a coupon, voucher, code etc. that's only in the Facebook advert? And then extrapolating from that to purely "we should buy more Facebook ads"?
I'm just not sure that I get this at all. How is it relevant to most stores, how many stores advertise on Facebook at all, how do you tie the correlation to a causation, what kind of rates are you expecting (aren't ad responses measured in PER THOUSAND and even then each is only a pittance of a measure?), and quite how does having all those statistics available magically make you more money than, say, putting up a sign or taking 5% off something?
It's Big Data applied to random human interactions again.
Which is why one of my side-hobbies is pissing off Facebook etc. "friends" by correcting their stories, linking to Snopes, and explaining the bullshit they're pushing.
If they block me after, that's up to them, but I'll be damned if I'll let spurious facts slide past without comment - whether they support my opinion or not.
But, hey, another of my side-hobbies is reporting advertising to the relevant agencies when it's non-compliant or misleading. Try it, it's fun to complain.
There's a reason that many workplace policies dealing with the media is "No comment". It's got nothing to do with hiding what happened (that will come out anyway), it's got everything to do with the source.
"A member of staff said"
"Insiders at the company tell us"
"A representative was quoted as saying".
Whereas if all they get is "A passerby commented" or "A witness was heard to say", then it instantly removes their credence.
It's not what was said (look at the nonsense spouted to media in any incident, including that they saw the policeman do this, or they heard 20 gunshots or whatever, compared to the CCTV of the same). It's who said it, in what capacity ("I heard that", "I think that", "It sounded like", etc.), and when that are much more important than the actual words.
Quotes are easy to come by. Quotes from officials are harder. And when the story is entirely "witness quotes" plus "the company was unavailable for comment" it's infinitely better than something which can be misconstrued as "We have it on the authority of person X working at the company that Y happened", whether that's true or not.
Yeah, I don't read the news to get someone's OPINION on it. I read the news to find out WHAT HAPPENED and form my own opinion.
It's a vastly different thing, and why social networking (OPINION-based) is a bad news source.
I would pay a lot of money for a website that edits the news back to "X happened in Y" without visible bias or opinions. Hell, I'd pay even more if I could filter out sports news, or stories about celebrities, etc.
I often think about creating a "How I read the headlines" website where I just suck in the headlines from BBC News and then reword them to reflect reality.
"Green to 'sort out BHS pensions mess'" at the moment.
Roughly translated that's "millionaire who put a high street store into bankruptcy and then sold it off makes claims that he can't possible back up."
Social media? Gosh, the only thing more unreliable than the news channels.
Did you know, Facebook are soon going to make you pay unless you click this link before the 1st of June/July/August/September?
Did you know: this local crime happened (actually four years ago) and this little girl needs money for a life-saving operation (actually dead already), etc. etc. etc.?
Social media is the new gossip. The junk on there is really atrocious, and when news is discussed most of what pops up on social media is rumour and/or just outright lies.
If anything, my primary source of "news" is a web search. Not even a news search because that's just mainstream news lumped into one item. Even things like Wikinews at least have some element of journalism and truth to them more often that the TV channels or papers.
But social media? Really? Maybe that's how you hear *OF* a story, because you're always connected as a young kid, but for that to be your source of details of the news? That's just scary.
As someone who grew up in the ZX Spectrum era, then enjoyed my best gaming years in the DOS era and playing NetHack, and someone who often stops playing game series when they "go 3D" (yep, I'm just that old fashioned)...
Not at all. But a 13.3" display is a netbook, not a laptop. I have a gaming laptop. It plays GTA V (GTA 4 and 3 I hated, having played 1 and 2!), it plays 1000 Steam games, it plays all my old emulators, all in one location.
However, my ZX Spectrum was played on a display bigger than a 13.3" widescreen, which is just ridiculous, even back in the B&W days before we got a spare colour TV to play on.
Playing games on a 13.3" loses ALL immersion. My laptop is 17" and is just about right. But I often plug it into a 32" display. Yes, even when playing a ZX Spectrum emulator. Because, you know what, I don't want to squint at some stupendously high-res but tiny screen to work out which pixel to press.
(P.S. Currently have an isometric 2D pixel art game in development... fucking hate 3D "for the sake of it").
13.3".
Gaming.
Yeah, right.
It saves you having to write out a CV (resume to Americans).
Just link in your profile and you have a "work Facebook" that has all the cleansed info you'd give to a potential employer, including exact dates, what you did at each place, who you worked with (for reference purposes, etc.) and if you didn't work there, it would be difficult to link to those people and/or stay on that page for very long.
I literally keep it up to date should I ever change jobs - you can just hand it to job agencies who know exactly what you do, who you are, where you've worked and for how long in one URL.
Facebook is to share pictures with your granny and keep in touch with old friends. Linked is to share your job titles and project photos with potential employers and keep in touch with old colleagues.
Note that neither is a vital, irreplaceable or worth-paying-for service.
Guns do not stop crimes.
What they do is upgrade every crime to something worse. A burglary becomes murder, a robbery becomes armed robbery, an assault becomes assault with a deadly weapon.
The irony is, they upgrade the crime NO MATTER which side has the guns, or whether both sides have them.
Petty crime in the UK is no worse than any other nation. It's really not, check the stats. Daily Mail stories about immigrants breaking open lorries really are fiction or exaggeration.
But our gun crime is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than the US. By orders of magnitude. Because we had a school shooting 20 years ago (with a man with pistols against 5-year-olds) and we said enough was enough and banned even those weapons outside of regulated activities. As a result, though not "zero", the number of weapons available is significantly reduced and the number of weapon crimes even more so.
Literally there were 370 "mass shootings" (i.e. more than 4 people killed) last year in the US. We've had about 4 in the last few DECADES.
But Americans don't want to hear that. They want their guns "to prevent" crimes like mass shootings. How many people shot back and how many died as a result? One. Fifty.
Guns just amplify the crime, not prevent it. What in the UK would be a simple mugging, you'd go home with a black-eye and no wallet (your "petty" crime), would turn into a murder or manslaughter case if a gun was involved. You would EXPECT the number of petty crimes to rise not because more petty crimes are carried out, but because none of them amplify to lethal violence with firearms because some kid was trying to steal your purse.
You can't prevent medical errors. They are, quite literally, errors that - even with the best of controls, training and supervision, still happen. By definition something went wrong that wasn't supposed to.
You can, however, prevent 370 MASS SHOOTINGS IN THE LAST YEAR. Please compare and contrast with the UK - 4 "mass shootings" in the last decade.
For context - more US people have died by the hands of private guns since World War 2 than in all the wars since then.
It doesn't matter what strawman you pull out - you're voluntarily allowing mass shootings to happen so that you are allowed a gun yourself. If you don't see the irony in that statement, no amount of statistics are going to sway you.
Only the default "press and go" option actually sucks in your Apache configs, finds all the domains, makes certs for them all, then plugs those certs back into your Apache config. That's the "dumb user" mode.
You can have it just create the certs you specify for you, save them into a given location, and just put the command that does that into, say, a cron job or do it manually.
Same utility, different command line parameters.
Both parts you specify are high-standard parts which, if they go wrong, can start fires or otherwise kill people. The safety of such parts - even after-market - is REQUIRED, not optional, and so the parts expense reflects that.
As such, it's not a fair comparison by any stretch of the imagination.
But we're talking about a bit of Gorilla Glass that, for other manufacturers, is about $60. Hey, why do you think "curved" glass is cool these days? The users? No, it's because it's almost impossible to replace with cheap solutions.
I work in a school, we have hundreds of iPads. To buy, they cost GBP200. By the time we add cases, chargers, licences, etc. it costs us GBP250. Repairs from Apple for screens? GBP 150 and up. Or the guy down the road who owns a repair shop does them for us for GBP 90, will collect and deliver and rush-job when we need it.
Apple aren't even TRYING to compete. Everyone raves about AppleCare and everything else, but honestly they can't get close. They literally just bin the device and give you a new one. I presume the binned ones are sold off as recons via third-parties, because I see a LOT of cheap recon iPads, which we can also get for GBP 130 each in Grade A condition. When the cost of a refurb iPad is less than the cost of a screen for one, there's something wrong.
Apple don't care. People still buy their junk, and they don't have to provide support/repair/recon services. That's part of how they make so much money on a glorified tablet and smartphone that doesn't do anything that every other model on the market does.
Well, judging from any quick search of release notes for just about every service I look into, they are unlikely to be able to online bank, use Google services, use quite a lot of modern websites, Google and Bing will be whinging at them constantly, and most websites will look like shit or just not work at all.
Sure, it's nice to retain compatibility, but there's also a time to move on. Do you still push out Windows 3.1 apps? Do you test on Windows 95? Still using plugins from the 90's?
If you haven't noticed, without an HTML5 browser (all the plugins are dead now by the way - Java, ActiveX, etc. - only Flash really "works" at all and that's going) almost all the websites you visit are just broken.
So if you ask your users to move on to a modern browser, you won't be the first to ask them that, by a long shot, and that's warning enough itself.
As someone who works in education, where they never throw anything away if it can still be used in lessons, where I'm often asked to install CDs that have been lying around for 20 years or more (Shockwave anyone?), with teachers complaining they can't teach what they used to 20 years ago because they don't have that software (yeah, I know, don't go there), almost everything is now HTML5 - from both paid and free resources. Even the CDs have gone and everything's now web-based, even testing, assessment, etc. tools.
And this year, pretty much every supplier announced HTML5 versions because NOTHING ELSE works on an iPad - Flash, etc. Our banks enforce IE 10 minimum but recommend Firefox or Chrome.
These 15%? Yeah, they're not your main source of income if they haven't bought a PC or upgraded their browser in 10 years.
To be honest, if they'd named them "_main_support" or "_internal", nobody would have been any the wiser.
Lucky that they left the function name, with obvious telemetry marker, in the data areas of the executable, or you'd not know or suspect what was happening without actually disassembling the thing.
Hell, surely an optimised/stripped executable wouldn't show them anyway, so you have really no way of knowing whether someone's put these into major parts of Windows, drivers or applications.
As always, without the source, you really have NO idea what these things are doing. And, hell, even an old 1MByte DOS game with plain interrupt calls and obvious code paths can take YEARS to properly disassemble and work out what it's actually doing.
And giving that they've been fining their own NHS hospitals, schools, courts, etc. hundreds of thousands of pounds, for breaches much less severe - not even including medical data for instance, but just names, email addresses and maybe a postcode to the wrong people - then it's hard to imagine this won't be enforced quite harshly on an entity so liable.
Hell, in one case, a hospital was fined £100,000 because it couldn't prove that it DID NOT HAVE sensitive data encrypted properly on a disk that it sent in the post that was lost. Not even that it had been lost, or had data, but that they couldn't prove that the known-lost did HAD definitely been encrypted or what personal data would have been on it.
I work in schools - the DPA is scary stuff and my boss (our data controller, you're correct on that), issues edicts on it on a regular basis. Case law even gives PERSONAL LIABILITY now. I can go to jail or be fined for handling data in ways I shouldn't be doing in my job, irrespective of whether my employer "gave me permission to", if I fail to act sensibly with it.
Even someone typing in a list of our kid's names into a non-EU website to let them play a game is such a breach of the DPA that we have disciplined staff, deleted the data, shut down the service and removed staff access to it. Unless you can prove that they are operating under UK or EU data protection laws, it's your arse on the line for any "personally identifiable data" (i.e. a name and a date of birth).
Breach of the Data Protection Act. Even employers cannot ask you to do this, and not providing service if the user refuses to allow it will see you in court too.
Honestly, that's a business with a life expectancy of precisely one lawsuit threat.
No, this isn't going on in Britain.
No, it's nothing to do with Big Brother.
It's a company being stupid and knowingly doing illegal stuff that, when the Data Controller finds out, he'll nail them to the wall for. It has absolutely no basis is reality, even if some people were stupid enough to give them access.
Not really.
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
I'm British myself. We stopped listening a long time ago. Nobody really protested.
Given that vast portions of Morse usage are nothing more than an emergency signal that in most areas of the world won't be heard anyway, only 180 years after we started using it, in practical terms it's dead and means nothing. It's certainly no good as a communications medium any more if we you have to check the map to see if anyone's listening, and it won't be long before NOBODY anywhere is listening.
Iceland - population 332,529
Greece - population 10,955,000
Greece has a GDP 20 times as much as Iceland - AFTER the crash.
Iceland is basically a large town, or small city.
Iceland also didn't "recover" - the state took over the banks, secured the local money, and allowed the rest of it to go bankrupt. Billions were lost in the Iceland crash by foreign investors, and the government was dissolved at least once. Imagine what that means in terms of future exports, imports and investment.
Despite starting from a much higher standpoint than Greece, Iceland still suffered significantly for it, and is still doing so.
Your UK newspaper interpretation of an EU MORI poll is interesting - in that almost all the EU countries "would vote remain" if there was a referendum in their countries (2nd graph). Gosh, they must hate it.
And the rest of the countries waiting to join have been there forever. Look on a map. West to East, the only things left to join are former Soviet states, Turkey (looking to join the EU too) and a couple of countries who've never had any interest in it (highly independent countries, by tradition anyway, neutral in wars, etc.).
The fact that the EU are CONSIDERING allowing those countries in, when they have removed all kinds of other applications because of the risk to stability, means they feel secure enough to let those countries in. It would be like letting the lame duck into the group of survivors otherwise - bound to bring everything down.
Brexit would probably be quite stupid. But nobody knows for sure. Picking the two countries most affected by the crash (and not even mentioning, say, Italy) and using them as the reason why Britain (one of the most financially stable of all EU countries) should leave - and then implying Greece's collapse was because of those same EU countries, including the UK, somehow "robbing" it of money - is just inconsistent. Either the EU are there to rob countries like Greece of their stability and profit from it, or they are running away from the opportunity to do so. You can't have it both ways.
Or maybe the EU is quite happy to have Greece in it so long as they don't all start retiring at 40, drawing their pensions, and letting the politicians pay off debts from their billions of bailouts that benefit them personally first, and then blaming the EU for "not helping".
Probably more to do with they are each making so much profit from app stores for so little work, they can each follow the competitive pricing to the bottom without even bothering to do the sums.