We have dozens of Acrobat Pro 6, 7 and 8 installs. How do we fix them? Are they vulnerable? Will Adobe use this to take advantage of the market?
Probably someone will come out with a proper removal of the search hook DLLs that apparently stay behind if you uninstall.
Other than that, I strongly suggest to find a non-Adobe product.
Yes, they may have a product that seems like it's the only choice. But do you seriously want to use software from a company that has blatant disrespect for it's customers? And because of this puts their customers information at serious risk?
I mean, how bad does software (and the writer of) need to behave before you step away from it?
Of course an independent research company was able to get a patch out quicker- they didn't have test their "fix" and they won't be held responsible if it breaks something else.
Uhm, what worse thing can they be held responsible for than having their software cause all these computers to get trojaned?
Especially since apparently due to their negligence, even after uninstalling, the risk persists.
The reality is that software mfgs aren't held responsible for anything ever. Which IMNSHO is ridiculous.
As one of the people that got affected by this (first time in my 20yrs+ using computers btw), I'm seriously considering if a lawsuit here is in place. I'm sick of this, it cost me a ton of time, and I'm fucking furious with Adobe.
- do you _actually_ understand the legal ramifications of your state/country law with regards to work for hire and IP ownership? - do you _actually_ understand the legal ramifications of any contracts you signed to gain employment?
Unless you are a lawyer, the answer to those questions is most certainly going to be 'no'. Thus the recommendations to 'get a lawyer'.
Playing devils advocate here for a bit, so you are saying that your company has paid you to develop this product. Paid you to think about the possible implementations, architecture, shortcomings, missing features etc etc.
Now you don't quite like the way the company is run, so you want to walk away with a bunch of people and put ideas into practice which you developed (at least in your head) while being employed by this company.
Here's a few questions I would ask you in court, if I was the defense lawyer (and again, not being a lawyer and all, they'd undoubtedly do a much better job): - exactly during what time did you come up with this better design? Was it during working hours? At least part of it? - how hard did you try to get this better architecture implemented at the company? - even more troublesome: how hard did you try to NOT get this better architecture implemented at the company? I.e. did you think of it and never mention it?
The thing is, you are not working on the Cadillac assembly line. You are paid for working with your brain mostly.
This is definitely newer territory, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't enough precedence for a lawyer to give you good advice (and if I had to put money on it, I'd put it on "no freaking way is that a good idea").
Hey, I support the EFF; I don't like all of the craziness around IP, but when someone is paying you to do a job, I don't think it's unreasonable that they have *some* right to what they pay you for.
Here's what I would suggest, if you guys are a bunch of smart developers, why not create a product in a different market? There's so much stuff to be done, it's hard to believe that a bunch of smart people can't come up with a compelling product.
Alternatively, why don't you push for this better architecture inside the company a bit harder? Maybe go to your boss' boss. Yeah, that's not easy. Guess what, running your own business is a LOT harder. In many ways you may learn a lot from trying to sell your better architecture to the company.
"If Vista is so good, why are you being $20/hour to stand around and tell me how good it is?"
It's actually a really good question.
The answer is, in my opinion that Microsoft is currently making a classic marketing mistake. One which, from what I understand, I'm not an expert, rarely pays off.
It's the one where essentially the seller is in denial, and starts blaming the potential buyer for not understanding how fantastic their product is.
Apparently, to Microsoft it is inconceivable that people don't want Vista. And now they start blaming 'us', that we just don't understand.
On top of that, they are dissing their own products! They literally say "PCs with Vista are 60% less likely to get infected than PCs with Windows XP SP2". Heh. How do I know you are not going to say the same thing when your next product comes out?
If all this stuff wasn't so arrogant, it would simply be pathetic.
they are telling their potential customers that they are ill-informed, don't have the ability to evaluate a product on their own terms and they can't make the decision about what they want themselves. This product can't be bad, the customers are just wrong!
I hope the customers will prove to be not gullible and understand that and reward them with what they deserve.
(this btw from someone that chooses to mainly work on Windows XP, not Linux or Mac)
When we got a Mac, in a very short time (when we actually didn't use it much at all) they released two versions that were around that mark each. And they really were just upgrades; they didn't add much.
So after about $250 in not so impressive OS updates we decided to pay with our $$$ and put the Mac on eBay. Let some other sucker follow that track.
I love competition and all, but having to pay over a $100 for something that (as a freaking Windows user) appeared as an update got old really fast.
Good luck to people that are okay with that; you are the people that make Apple get away with it, and quite seriously, I don't think they can ever hit true mainstream with pricing like that. (but who cares what I think, they can have whatever business model they damn well please).
The good news is, that leaves an opportunity open for a company that can produce a sane product at a reasonable price.
Prefetching your search results doesn't protect you from viruses any more than just checking the pages you try to load at the time of loading.
I'd guess the reason they do this is because when they check a page, they interact with their own server. That would make loading a web-site slower, and so they decided to prefetch so they can do the work upfront and when the user actually clicks they're already done. (of course there are many, much more productive, ways to get around that problem).
At least one problem with their implementation is that they don't send cookies. So they aren't always going to get the same html as the browser is getting. And of course given the rules posted elsewhere on/. it's entirely ineffective if the 'bad guys' want to make it so.
All in all it sounds like a poorly designed product (that could have actually been fairly useful/effective).
the same way Republicans are obsessed with Homosexuals.
If you thought GOP was bad in these past 8 years wait until Democrats assume the wheel with supermajority to push whatever nanny-state bullshit they can think of in the name of the "children"
Video games and the internet seem to be the useful idiots for Democrats. Just blame it on violence and child porn to shut things down and generate talking points for the next election cycle. Oh yeah, do that in between paying lip service to net neutrality proponents. Well, quite frankly when you know that 50% of the voters are complete idiots that can evidently be manipulated by these 'moral' and 'ethical' subjects (bj, whitehouse...), why _not_ pick the one thing that everyone will agree on and run with it.
Or to put it more bluntly, so long as people will base their vote on blowjobs in the whitehouse and gay marriage, you would be crazy to try and compete without some sort of counter moral issue.
It's not the politicians that 'think of the children'. It's the people that vote for them.
Quite honestly I don't think the GOP could have done a whole lot of a shittier job than the last 8 years...
Anyone that has ever driven the stretch of dessert between LA and Las Vegas probably recognizes that the sheer complexity of the landscape necessitates environmental studies, starting with just the first leg. Because it's like, FUCKING DESSERT.
I mean, like, personally, if I had $45M, I would definitely invest it in the environmental studies for the first leg of a project like this because who the hell knows if a train is going to be more environmentally friendly than "the millions of Southern Californians who make the 250-plus-mile drive to Las Vegas each year" by car.
Because when I try to do the math in my head, I can't figure it out. Definitely want to stick 200 environmental experts on that problem for a year, at a salary of $225K/year each.
No need to worry about the trivialities though, like why a previous train attempt was canceled "because of low ridership"./sarcasm
Seriously, there's got to be an error in that press-release, right? Or can anyone just get $45M for scratching their left nut?
It's depressing; I wish they would just start building one of these trains already.
The culture of DOS programming was corrupted from the beginning and you can partly blame IBM for a crappy BIOS. Were it not for the crappy BIOS, programmers wouldn't have had to resort to writing directly to hardware to get an acceptable speed on the screen. And it just kept going on from there.
Of course programmers did exactly the same thing on every other platform at the time. Never mind the insane amount of time it took for example Apple to understand virtual/protected memory and preemptive multitasking.
And now when a developer wants more "something" from the OS than they can get naturally, they write VxDs to help gain an advantage.
Yeah, in the circle-jerk definition of 'now'. VxDs died with WinME. The NT kernel never supported or understood them. (yes, that includes NT4, 2K, XP and Vista). In other words, you are talking about 10 years ago.
It would be so much more constructive if people knew what they were talking about. The Win32 API has plenty of flaws, but it's also pretty powerful. If you want to have a real discussion, let's talk about some of the 'recent' API calls that allows canceling pending IO requests from another thread (pre-Vista is lacking the necessary API - CancelIoEx). That was a major deficiency. Let's see how well that sort of stuff works on other platforms (I should perhaps give you a hint)
Windows programmers don't respect the rules... and if they do, they write what appears to be crappy software.
The developmen of control laws that are able to fully control the aircraft flying in those conditions, (not to mention being able to handle the transitions between such flying modes) is a hard problem.
This is due to the fact that the overall system is highly nonlinear, scarcely controllable, (since the control surfaces have little to no effect), and also not very well known in such conditions.
What if you had a very high degree of positional awareness? Wouldn't that make it a lot easier? I'm asking because I suspect that is exactly what those red (probably LED based) lights around the room are for. Look at how they are pulsating in the slow motion video (towards the end of the youtoob clip).
Just one possible scenario; Those lights look a lot like the Vicon motion capture cameras with LED rings. (although different enough, those are probably not actual Vicon cameras). The Vicon system can measure the position of a bunch of retro-reflective dots pretty accurately. In other words, it could provide pretty accurate absolute position of few key positions on the airplane.
Not that that wouldn't be a cool hack, but to me would be really stretching the 'autonomous' part of the equation...
Of course you can have a memory leak in a managed language! Any Java programmer who's decent understands that.
Decent programmers might understand that, but let's be honest, it's not like Java (and other GC languages) haven't been presented as if memory leaks were a thing of the past.
As a matter of fact, some people will probably still claim that it's technically not a memory leak, but instead an object life-span issue.
What surprises me is that outspoken proponents of managed languages use the garbage collection so often as a good thing, as if now you can be a sloppier programmer and get away with it.
In reality you have to identify/control the lifespan of objects anyway, so I personally never understood what the big deal is about freeing memory manually. Not to mention that memory leaks in say, C++ code, really aren't that hard to find. The tools have become pretty freakin decent.
And also not to mention that garbage collection might be handy for memory, but memory is only one of a plethora of resources that can be leaked. And since for many resources it isn't nearly as appropriate to 'lazy' free them, as a programmer you still have to be aware of the allocate/free paradigm. (as just one silly example, it would suck if you wouldn't be able to explicitly close a file, because you can't delete it before it's closed)
In other words, you are right. Of course you can have memory leaks in garbage collected languages. And I wish people would stop using GC as an argument why languages as Java are so much better to use than C++.
Yeah, it's kind of bizarre. I'm not part of the crowd that actually believes the/. people get anything for posting these articles.
But I do believe that articles written by companies pretending to be written by end-users are not terribly useful and probably shouldn't end up on/.
I mean, the article clearly states at the top "By Red Gate Software.".
So where did the "Bryan Cattle reflects on..." credit come from? Some random line towards the bottom of what appears a highly edited blurb?
Seriously.
"One of our team members downloaded the 14-day trial of ANTS Profiler"
"To our amazement, it was only minutes before we realized that our list of detected obstacles was never getting garbage collected"
"If Only We Had Used It Earlier..."
ANTS Profiler helped us fix a problem in minutes that would have taken us weeks to track down. If only we'd thought of it before the competition, we would most likely have finished the entire race and had a chance at the top prize money.
All this stuff sounds either very naive or very marketing. You choose.
The American educational system; where you get to sit on the couch smoking weed all day and end up in major news outlets.
Yes, all these unused cars taking up space. Boy. Let's think. What about all those unused dishwashers? Or for that matter homes? Maybe we should be thinking of foldable homes, since they sit empty for a good part of the day. And wait! It coincides with offices _not_ being empty at roughly the same time. If we built them side by side, WE COULD JUST MOVE A WALL BACK AND FORTH!!! OMFG!!! Who's got the cheetos?!
Sorry, but seriously, non-stories get silly replies, that's how it works;-)
You make a comment deriding others' entitlement and laziness... when the article is about some guys getting a taxpayer funded private parking space so that they don't have to walk as far to the front door.
Actually, the taxpayer has been paying to maintain a perfectly usable, but practically unused airstrip because of your typical Bay Area NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
The peninsula has many resources that can't be used because certain people, and forgive my generalization, who are often paying negligible property taxes thanks to California's brilliant (NOT) Prop 13, want to keep things the way they were 50 fucking years ago. That's great when other people are paying for the facilities and infrastructure that those assholes enjoy on a daily basis.
At the same time tons of people with an otherwise considered extremely well paying job (that bring in the actual tax $$$) will only be able to rent or perhaps if they have dual income they can get a $800K condo with $400/mo HOA fees. Interestingly enough I never hear those people complain about stuff like this.
I'd like to see how people that pay tax as if their property was worth $200K would like to live in a place in California that _actually_ is worth $200K. See how much they would object to some rich dudes parking a plane somewhere if that also meant that finally electricity would come to town.
If this is the beginning of the erosion of the out of balance power of the NIMBYs, then that is excellent news. Unless of course you'd prefer the bay area to become a Route 66 (See also: Cars).
Anyways, I'm glad to see that Anna Eshoo had a healthy response to this.
If I end up in prison after Yahoo 'complies' with my government, then I'll reconsider my perception of freedom.
Some people believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want so long as you don't hurt anyone else. Given that definition, the US is far from a free country.
As an example, explain how drinking alcohol is considered fine and smoking weed can land you in jail. (despite stacks of research proving that pot has less negative effects than alcohol does)
Not to mention Guantanamo. Those aren't citizens, so they don't count.
If a malfunction results in a failure of the local TV signal rather than resulting in a failure of the device, the FCCs decision is the right one.
Devices are expected to fail. Given a long enough timeframe, ALL of them fail.
Another uninformed piece of FUD.
This was a prototype to prove the concept of sharing the spectrum that is currently assigned for TV with data. The FCC doesn't allow that at all, so a first step is to convince them that it _can_ be done. Of course they haven't built a full consumer product with fail-safes yet because there's a pretty damn fine chance that the FCC won't allow it anyway.
Failure of wireless prototype equipment is not uncommon and says very little about how a failing consumer product would behave.
The FCCs decision should have been to try the backup prototype.
The whole point of FCC testing is to confirm the device works to specifications and doesn't violate FCC rules regarding emissions. It failed, and Microsoft needs to submit their design again. To imply the FCC was somehow faulty as is suggested by the "White Spaces" industry wag man (who also is one of those in-and-out regulatory-to-industry guys) is classic FUD. Fix your prototype, MS, and the FCC will certify it.
You don't know what the hell you are talking about. This has nothing to do with device certification. They didn't submit a consumer device for certification.
They (the coalition) are trying to prove that it's okay to use this type of wireless in the TV bands. The FCC currently doesn't allow the use of that spectrum for such a device at all. At this stage prototype malfunction isn't all that crazy and says little about how malfunction will be handled in real-world consumer devices.
'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do':
can it:
(1) boot your computer (without requiring local media and thus becoming more of a "real" OS)
A bootloader is what loads the OS. One could argue that a web-browser is a boot loader, if you really had to. In any case, booting itself is not, nor defines, an OS.
You are talking about something arbitrary and relative. Of course it doesn't run Photoshop. Nor does pretty much any other OS that Adobe specifically chooses to port it to. But you are getting somewhere with the 'resource' thing.
(3) run without any loss of functionality when you're sitting in the middle of nowhere without a wifi hotspot
It's written nowhere that an OS can not heavily rely on a network connection.
So none of these are things that are considered real requirements to call something an OS.
But I don't think Andy Tannenbaum would be too upset if we, for the sake of argument, described an OS as the manager of computer resources. I.e. the OS decides what 'application' can have which piece of memory/CPU time/network/audio/etc. Additionally I think an OS also contains (or makes available an API to create) drivers providing the access points to these resources.
So then the question is, does this thing manage in any way these resources? And if it does, does it do so in a way that's considered acceptable by todays standards with regards to protection/security? (perhaps also an arbitrary requirement, but I don't see how the next big thing in OS technology could be without that)
In other words: - does it manage the memory an app needs/wants to use? - does it make sure that separate apps can not access each others memory? - does it gracefully shutdown the app if it (perhaps 'uncleanly') terminates and free all memory used by the app? - how about for other resources, like audio input/output, network connections, etc? - when multiple apps run at the same time, does it make sure all apps actually get CPU cycles? - does it have per app and/or per user resource constraint capabilities? ie. can one app be prevented to connect to a certain server while another can? - when new resources are available on the platform, can these be made available directly to the apps? (for example, is it possible to write a driver in the OS so that something like a new webcam can be accessed to apps?)
I could go on, but I'll get off my high horse now. I don't know the answers to this, since I haven't seen the actual product. But I do know the answer for most things that are named 'web OSs', and it's pretty safe to say that something implemented in Javascript residing in HTML pages is most likely in no way what is generally considered an Operating System.
Again, based on what I've seen from other projects (I don't know the details of Parakey), it seems to me like a huge step back, which will only become apparent when (if!) the 'OS' became more succesful.
There's absolutely no protection between applications. So a bug in one 'app' can expose all resources available in the entire system without effort.
Then again, it seems like next-gen consumers don't really care as much about privacy/security etc. Maybe I should just lighten up, but I can't help a tiny bit of revolt.
Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public?
I'm I the only American on the planet rooting for higher gas prices in the US? Higher gas equals less SUVs and trucks which equals less congestion. I live in England now, and $7.50 gallon gas is the norm. Get over yourselves already America.
Actually, the SUV drivers are the ones that are working hardest to solve this problem, don't you get it?
More energy/mile => More Global Warming => Less Energy/$. You should thank the SUV/truck drivers on your bare knees for changing the climate so the slightest whiff of fuel will cost a fortune. And think of how festive the gas stations would look if they handed you a gallon of fuel in a buoyant balloon!
Last time I looked at the Intel driver source, there were a ton of calls into the video BIOS. Not something I would call an "Open Source" driver. This may have changed since then,- I really hope so.
Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).
And then you might ask, why do we need to get rid of the video BIOS? Well, when evaluating graphics chips for an embedded systems, I found out that the video BIOS can spend an insanely long time initializing stuff and displaying stuff that we don't want/need (some like several seconds). In general, video BIOSs are over-engineered and do waaaay more than needed.
If you are aiming to build a near-instant-on system, and/or something that doesn't look like a PC, you want this sort of flexibility. If AMD steps up to the plate, that would be awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
"I am Slashdot."
Uhm, actually, that would be me. ;-)
Here was my team's plane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW68B3DnNWA
lol, did the camera man have some of that Red Bull cola? ;-)
We have dozens of Acrobat Pro 6, 7 and 8 installs. How do we fix them? Are they vulnerable? Will Adobe use this to take advantage of the market?
Probably someone will come out with a proper removal of the search hook DLLs that apparently stay behind if you uninstall.
Other than that, I strongly suggest to find a non-Adobe product.
Yes, they may have a product that seems like it's the only choice. But do you seriously want to use software from a company that has blatant disrespect for it's customers? And because of this puts their customers information at serious risk?
I mean, how bad does software (and the writer of) need to behave before you step away from it?
Of course an independent research company was able to get a patch out quicker- they didn't have test their "fix" and they won't be held responsible if it breaks something else.
Uhm, what worse thing can they be held responsible for than having their software cause all these computers to get trojaned?
Especially since apparently due to their negligence, even after uninstalling, the risk persists.
The reality is that software mfgs aren't held responsible for anything ever. Which IMNSHO is ridiculous.
As one of the people that got affected by this (first time in my 20yrs+ using computers btw), I'm seriously considering if a lawsuit here is in place. I'm sick of this, it cost me a ton of time, and I'm fucking furious with Adobe.
Seems like a very naive question.
(IANAL etc etc)
- do you _actually_ understand the legal ramifications of your state/country law with regards to work for hire and IP ownership?
- do you _actually_ understand the legal ramifications of any contracts you signed to gain employment?
Unless you are a lawyer, the answer to those questions is most certainly going to be 'no'. Thus the recommendations to 'get a lawyer'.
Playing devils advocate here for a bit, so you are saying that your company has paid you to develop this product. Paid you to think about the possible implementations, architecture, shortcomings, missing features etc etc.
Now you don't quite like the way the company is run, so you want to walk away with a bunch of people and put ideas into practice which you developed (at least in your head) while being employed by this company.
Here's a few questions I would ask you in court, if I was the defense lawyer (and again, not being a lawyer and all, they'd undoubtedly do a much better job):
- exactly during what time did you come up with this better design? Was it during working hours? At least part of it?
- how hard did you try to get this better architecture implemented at the company?
- even more troublesome: how hard did you try to NOT get this better architecture implemented at the company? I.e. did you think of it and never mention it?
The thing is, you are not working on the Cadillac assembly line. You are paid for working with your brain mostly.
This is definitely newer territory, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't enough precedence for a lawyer to give you good advice (and if I had to put money on it, I'd put it on "no freaking way is that a good idea").
Hey, I support the EFF; I don't like all of the craziness around IP, but when someone is paying you to do a job, I don't think it's unreasonable that they have *some* right to what they pay you for.
Here's what I would suggest, if you guys are a bunch of smart developers, why not create a product in a different market? There's so much stuff to be done, it's hard to believe that a bunch of smart people can't come up with a compelling product.
Alternatively, why don't you push for this better architecture inside the company a bit harder? Maybe go to your boss' boss. Yeah, that's not easy. Guess what, running your own business is a LOT harder. In many ways you may learn a lot from trying to sell your better architecture to the company.
Just a few thoughts...
"If Vista is so good, why are you being $20/hour to stand around and tell me how good it is?"
It's actually a really good question.
The answer is, in my opinion that Microsoft is currently making a classic marketing mistake. One which, from what I understand, I'm not an expert, rarely pays off.
It's the one where essentially the seller is in denial, and starts blaming the potential buyer for not understanding how fantastic their product is.
Apparently, to Microsoft it is inconceivable that people don't want Vista. And now they start blaming 'us', that we just don't understand.
I realized that when I saw this ridiculous website.
On top of that, they are dissing their own products! They literally say "PCs with Vista are 60% less likely to get infected than PCs with Windows XP SP2". Heh. How do I know you are not going to say the same thing when your next product comes out?
If all this stuff wasn't so arrogant, it would simply be pathetic.
they are telling their potential customers that they are ill-informed, don't have the ability to evaluate a product on their own terms and they can't make the decision about what they want themselves. This product can't be bad, the customers are just wrong!
I hope the customers will prove to be not gullible and understand that and reward them with what they deserve.
(this btw from someone that chooses to mainly work on Windows XP, not Linux or Mac)
I dunno, $129 for an OS seems like a lot to me
Hear hear.
When we got a Mac, in a very short time (when we actually didn't use it much at all) they released two versions that were around that mark each. And they really were just upgrades; they didn't add much.
So after about $250 in not so impressive OS updates we decided to pay with our $$$ and put the Mac on eBay. Let some other sucker follow that track.
I love competition and all, but having to pay over a $100 for something that (as a freaking Windows user) appeared as an update got old really fast.
Good luck to people that are okay with that; you are the people that make Apple get away with it, and quite seriously, I don't think they can ever hit true mainstream with pricing like that. (but who cares what I think, they can have whatever business model they damn well please).
The good news is, that leaves an opportunity open for a company that can produce a sane product at a reasonable price.
Prefetching your search results doesn't protect you from viruses any more than just checking the pages you try to load at the time of loading.
I'd guess the reason they do this is because when they check a page, they interact with their own server. That would make loading a web-site slower, and so they decided to prefetch so they can do the work upfront and when the user actually clicks they're already done. (of course there are many, much more productive, ways to get around that problem).
At least one problem with their implementation is that they don't send cookies. So they aren't always going to get the same html as the browser is getting. And of course given the rules posted elsewhere on /. it's entirely ineffective if the 'bad guys' want to make it so.
All in all it sounds like a poorly designed product (that could have actually been fairly useful/effective).
If you thought GOP was bad in these past 8 years wait until Democrats assume the wheel with supermajority to push whatever nanny-state bullshit they can think of in the name of the "children"
Video games and the internet seem to be the useful idiots for Democrats. Just blame it on violence and child porn to shut things down and generate talking points for the next election cycle. Oh yeah, do that in between paying lip service to net neutrality proponents. Well, quite frankly when you know that 50% of the voters are complete idiots that can evidently be manipulated by these 'moral' and 'ethical' subjects (bj, whitehouse...), why _not_ pick the one thing that everyone will agree on and run with it.
Or to put it more bluntly, so long as people will base their vote on blowjobs in the whitehouse and gay marriage, you would be crazy to try and compete without some sort of counter moral issue.
It's not the politicians that 'think of the children'. It's the people that vote for them.
Quite honestly I don't think the GOP could have done a whole lot of a shittier job than the last 8 years...
This sounds great!
/sarcasm
Anyone that has ever driven the stretch of dessert between LA and Las Vegas probably recognizes that the sheer complexity of the landscape necessitates environmental studies, starting with just the first leg. Because it's like, FUCKING DESSERT.
I mean, like, personally, if I had $45M, I would definitely invest it in the environmental studies for the first leg of a project like this because who the hell knows if a train is going to be more environmentally friendly than "the millions of Southern Californians who make the 250-plus-mile drive to Las Vegas each year" by car.
Because when I try to do the math in my head, I can't figure it out. Definitely want to stick 200 environmental experts on that problem for a year, at a salary of $225K/year each.
No need to worry about the trivialities though, like why a previous train attempt was canceled "because of low ridership".
Seriously, there's got to be an error in that press-release, right? Or can anyone just get $45M for scratching their left nut?
It's depressing; I wish they would just start building one of these trains already.
The culture of DOS programming was corrupted from the beginning and you can partly blame IBM for a crappy BIOS. Were it not for the crappy BIOS, programmers wouldn't have had to resort to writing directly to hardware to get an acceptable speed on the screen. And it just kept going on from there.
Of course programmers did exactly the same thing on every other platform at the time. Never mind the insane amount of time it took for example Apple to understand virtual/protected memory and preemptive multitasking.
And now when a developer wants more "something" from the OS than they can get naturally, they write VxDs to help gain an advantage.
Yeah, in the circle-jerk definition of 'now'. VxDs died with WinME. The NT kernel never supported or understood them. (yes, that includes NT4, 2K, XP and Vista). In other words, you are talking about 10 years ago.
It would be so much more constructive if people knew what they were talking about. The Win32 API has plenty of flaws, but it's also pretty powerful. If you want to have a real discussion, let's talk about some of the 'recent' API calls that allows canceling pending IO requests from another thread (pre-Vista is lacking the necessary API - CancelIoEx). That was a major deficiency. Let's see how well that sort of stuff works on other platforms (I should perhaps give you a hint)
Windows programmers don't respect the rules... and if they do, they write what appears to be crappy software.
Man, let me hand you the KY...
The developmen of control laws that are able to fully control the aircraft flying in those conditions, (not to mention being able to handle the transitions between such flying modes) is a hard problem.
This is due to the fact that the overall system is highly nonlinear, scarcely controllable, (since the control surfaces have little to no effect), and also not very well known in such conditions.
What if you had a very high degree of positional awareness? Wouldn't that make it a lot easier? I'm asking because I suspect that is exactly what those red (probably LED based) lights around the room are for. Look at how they are pulsating in the slow motion video (towards the end of the youtoob clip).
Just one possible scenario; Those lights look a lot like the Vicon motion capture cameras with LED rings. (although different enough, those are probably not actual Vicon cameras). The Vicon system can measure the position of a bunch of retro-reflective dots pretty accurately. In other words, it could provide pretty accurate absolute position of few key positions on the airplane.
Not that that wouldn't be a cool hack, but to me would be really stretching the 'autonomous' part of the equation...
Of course you can have a memory leak in a managed language! Any Java programmer who's decent understands that.
Decent programmers might understand that, but let's be honest, it's not like Java (and other GC languages) haven't been presented as if memory leaks were a thing of the past.
As a matter of fact, some people will probably still claim that it's technically not a memory leak, but instead an object life-span issue.
What surprises me is that outspoken proponents of managed languages use the garbage collection so often as a good thing, as if now you can be a sloppier programmer and get away with it.
In reality you have to identify/control the lifespan of objects anyway, so I personally never understood what the big deal is about freeing memory manually. Not to mention that memory leaks in say, C++ code, really aren't that hard to find. The tools have become pretty freakin decent.
And also not to mention that garbage collection might be handy for memory, but memory is only one of a plethora of resources that can be leaked. And since for many resources it isn't nearly as appropriate to 'lazy' free them, as a programmer you still have to be aware of the allocate/free paradigm. (as just one silly example, it would suck if you wouldn't be able to explicitly close a file, because you can't delete it before it's closed)
In other words, you are right. Of course you can have memory leaks in garbage collected languages. And I wish people would stop using GC as an argument why languages as Java are so much better to use than C++.
Yeah, it's kind of bizarre. I'm not part of the crowd that actually believes the /. people get anything for posting these articles.
/.
..." credit come from? Some random line towards the bottom of what appears a highly edited blurb?
But I do believe that articles written by companies pretending to be written by end-users are not terribly useful and probably shouldn't end up on
I mean, the article clearly states at the top "By Red Gate Software.".
So where did the "Bryan Cattle reflects on
Seriously.
"One of our team members downloaded the 14-day trial of ANTS Profiler"
"To our amazement, it was only minutes before we realized that our list of detected obstacles was never getting garbage collected"
"If Only We Had Used It Earlier..."
ANTS Profiler helped us fix a problem in minutes that would have taken us weeks to track down. If only we'd thought of it before the competition, we would most likely have finished the entire race and had a chance at the top prize money.
All this stuff sounds either very naive or very marketing. You choose.
The American educational system; where you get to sit on the couch smoking weed all day and end up in major news outlets.
;-)
Yes, all these unused cars taking up space. Boy. Let's think. What about all those unused dishwashers? Or for that matter homes? Maybe we should be thinking of foldable homes, since they sit empty for a good part of the day. And wait! It coincides with offices _not_ being empty at roughly the same time. If we built them side by side, WE COULD JUST MOVE A WALL BACK AND FORTH!!! OMFG!!! Who's got the cheetos?!
Sorry, but seriously, non-stories get silly replies, that's how it works
You make a comment deriding others' entitlement and laziness... when the article is about some guys getting a taxpayer funded private parking space so that they don't have to walk as far to the front door.
Actually, the taxpayer has been paying to maintain a perfectly usable, but practically unused airstrip because of your typical Bay Area NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard).
The peninsula has many resources that can't be used because certain people, and forgive my generalization, who are often paying negligible property taxes thanks to California's brilliant (NOT) Prop 13, want to keep things the way they were 50 fucking years ago. That's great when other people are paying for the facilities and infrastructure that those assholes enjoy on a daily basis.
At the same time tons of people with an otherwise considered extremely well paying job (that bring in the actual tax $$$) will only be able to rent or perhaps if they have dual income they can get a $800K condo with $400/mo HOA fees. Interestingly enough I never hear those people complain about stuff like this.
I'd like to see how people that pay tax as if their property was worth $200K would like to live in a place in California that _actually_ is worth $200K. See how much they would object to some rich dudes parking a plane somewhere if that also meant that finally electricity would come to town.
If this is the beginning of the erosion of the out of balance power of the NIMBYs, then that is excellent news. Unless of course you'd prefer the bay area to become a Route 66 (See also: Cars).
Anyways, I'm glad to see that Anna Eshoo had a healthy response to this.
If I end up in prison after Yahoo 'complies' with my government, then I'll reconsider my perception of freedom.
Some people believe that freedom is the ability to do whatever you want so long as you don't hurt anyone else. Given that definition, the US is far from a free country.
As an example, explain how drinking alcohol is considered fine and smoking weed can land you in jail. (despite stacks of research proving that pot has less negative effects than alcohol does)
Not to mention Guantanamo. Those aren't citizens, so they don't count.
If a malfunction results in a failure of the local TV signal rather than resulting in a failure of the device, the FCCs decision is the right one.
Devices are expected to fail. Given a long enough timeframe, ALL of them fail.
Another uninformed piece of FUD.
This was a prototype to prove the concept of sharing the spectrum that is currently assigned for TV with data. The FCC doesn't allow that at all, so a first step is to convince them that it _can_ be done. Of course they haven't built a full consumer product with fail-safes yet because there's a pretty damn fine chance that the FCC won't allow it anyway.
Failure of wireless prototype equipment is not uncommon and says very little about how a failing consumer product would behave.
The FCCs decision should have been to try the backup prototype.
The whole point of FCC testing is to confirm the device works to specifications and doesn't violate FCC rules regarding emissions. It failed, and Microsoft needs to submit their design again. To imply the FCC was somehow faulty as is suggested by the "White Spaces" industry wag man (who also is one of those in-and-out regulatory-to-industry guys) is classic FUD. Fix your prototype, MS, and the FCC will certify it.
You don't know what the hell you are talking about. This has nothing to do with device certification. They didn't submit a consumer device for certification.
They (the coalition) are trying to prove that it's okay to use this type of wireless in the TV bands. The FCC currently doesn't allow the use of that spectrum for such a device at all. At this stage prototype malfunction isn't all that crazy and says little about how malfunction will be handled in real-world consumer devices.
Playing devil's advocate first:
'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do':
can it:
(1) boot your computer (without requiring local media and thus becoming more of a "real" OS)
A bootloader is what loads the OS. One could argue that a web-browser is a boot loader, if you really had to. In any case, booting itself is not, nor defines, an OS.
(2) run photoshop / gimp / doom 3 / (insert resource-heavy app here)
You are talking about something arbitrary and relative. Of course it doesn't run Photoshop. Nor does pretty much any other OS that Adobe specifically chooses to port it to. But you are getting somewhere with the 'resource' thing.
(3) run without any loss of functionality when you're sitting in the middle of nowhere without a wifi hotspot
It's written nowhere that an OS can not heavily rely on a network connection.
So none of these are things that are considered real requirements to call something an OS.
But I don't think Andy Tannenbaum would be too upset if we, for the sake of argument, described an OS as the manager of computer resources. I.e. the OS decides what 'application' can have which piece of memory/CPU time/network/audio/etc. Additionally I think an OS also contains (or makes available an API to create) drivers providing the access points to these resources.
So then the question is, does this thing manage in any way these resources? And if it does, does it do so in a way that's considered acceptable by todays standards with regards to protection/security? (perhaps also an arbitrary requirement, but I don't see how the next big thing in OS technology could be without that)
In other words:
- does it manage the memory an app needs/wants to use?
- does it make sure that separate apps can not access each others memory?
- does it gracefully shutdown the app if it (perhaps 'uncleanly') terminates and free all memory used by the app?
- how about for other resources, like audio input/output, network connections, etc?
- when multiple apps run at the same time, does it make sure all apps actually get CPU cycles?
- does it have per app and/or per user resource constraint capabilities? ie. can one app be prevented to connect to a certain server while another can?
- when new resources are available on the platform, can these be made available directly to the apps? (for example, is it possible to write a driver in the OS so that something like a new webcam can be accessed to apps?)
I could go on, but I'll get off my high horse now. I don't know the answers to this, since I haven't seen the actual product. But I do know the answer for most things that are named 'web OSs', and it's pretty safe to say that something implemented in Javascript residing in HTML pages is most likely in no way what is generally considered an Operating System.
Again, based on what I've seen from other projects (I don't know the details of Parakey), it seems to me like a huge step back, which will only become apparent when (if!) the 'OS' became more succesful.
There's absolutely no protection between applications. So a bug in one 'app' can expose all resources available in the entire system without effort.
Then again, it seems like next-gen consumers don't really care as much about privacy/security etc. Maybe I should just lighten up, but I can't help a tiny bit of revolt.
Can you show me the Billboard Top 10 for any month in history that is just chock-full of talent, as opposed to being filled with well-marketed acts which happened to catch a passing fancy of the public?
although not really my taste, Dec. 20, 1969 might do:
No. 1, "Abbey Road," the Beatles
No. 2, "Led Zeppelin II," Led Zeppelin
No. 3, "Tom Jones Live in Las Vegas," Tom Jones
No. 4, "Green River," Creedence Clearwater Revival
No. 5, "Let It Bleed," the Rolling Stones
No. 6, "Santana," Santana
No. 7, "Puzzle People," the Temptations
No. 8, "Blood Sweat & Tears," Blood Sweat & Tears
No. 9, "Crosby, Stills & Nash," Crosby, Stills & Nash
No. 10, "Easy Rider" soundtrack (featuring the Byrds, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Steppenwolf)
I'm I the only American on the planet rooting for higher gas prices in the US? Higher gas equals less SUVs and trucks which equals less congestion. I live in England now, and $7.50 gallon gas is the norm. Get over yourselves already America.
Actually, the SUV drivers are the ones that are working hardest to solve this problem, don't you get it?
More energy/mile => More Global Warming => Less Energy/$. You should thank the SUV/truck drivers on your bare knees for changing the climate so the slightest whiff of fuel will cost a fortune. And think of how festive the gas stations would look if they handed you a gallon of fuel in a buoyant balloon!
I have a Chinese mfg make a couple thou of them. pre-bleached. Stamped "Teh First Years"
You be seeing them on eBay soon, though, since they were also washed overboard it's not entirely clear where I be pickin them up yet.
Last time I looked at the Intel driver source, there were a ton of calls into the video BIOS. Not something I would call an "Open Source" driver. This may have changed since then,- I really hope so.
Why is it important to have more source you might ask. Well, for one thing it would be really nice if we can get rid of the video BIOS altogether. A full source driver which shows how to switch video modes is a very good start to accomplish this (although not necessarily enough).
And then you might ask, why do we need to get rid of the video BIOS? Well, when evaluating graphics chips for an embedded systems, I found out that the video BIOS can spend an insanely long time initializing stuff and displaying stuff that we don't want/need (some like several seconds). In general, video BIOSs are over-engineered and do waaaay more than needed.
If you are aiming to build a near-instant-on system, and/or something that doesn't look like a PC, you want this sort of flexibility. If AMD steps up to the plate, that would be awesome.