The headline and the summary are pretty much completely wrong: as the NY Times article explains, the trial was two years ago, but the government cancelled plans to introduce "rekeningrijden" (GPS-based metered driving) last year. So it's not going to happen anytime soon - unless the Netherlands suddenly gets a left-wing government, which is unlikely.
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status.
In most of CS, conference publications are actually more prestigious than journals. Top conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA/Splash, Usenix ATC, ICSE and so on are highly selective, difficult to get into, and look very good on your CV (if you're pursuing an academic career). By contrast, journal articles tend to be published almost as an afterthought, years after anybody still cared about the research in question.
Best for all the people who miss this little nugget? Include it in the kernel.
Or just include it in the system-wide bashrc. That doesn't seem particularly hard to me from a distro-maintainer point of view. And it seems preferable to hard-coding a scheduling policy choice in the kernel.
If NAT is seriously as big a deal as you make it out to be, that's man-hours that kept someone employed.
Classic example of the broken window fallacy. Are you really saying we should prefer one protocol over another because it employs more sysadmins and developers in activities that would otherwise be unnecessary? Continuing this line of reasoning, we should abolish protocols such as DHCP and require manual configuration of all machines.
This is silly. The EU isn't "planning" anything. INDECT is an FP7 research project. So it's a bunch of universities and industrial partners that happened to get funding from the EU because the reviewers thought it was a scientifically interesting proposal. That doesn't mean anything the researchers come up with is EU policy. Besides, the EU doesn't have any authority or power whatsoever to impose a police state on its members.
Replacing Mork with sqlite started a long time ago, has achieved limited success in some Mozilla products, and has been effectively abandoned in Thunderbird.
You sure about that? I have a big fat file named global-messages-db.sqlite in my Thunderbird profile, and it contains the text of my messages among other things (e.g. I can do select * from messagesText_content). It still seems to update the MSF files as well though.
Indeed, the real story here (though not news by any means) is the inability of the British press to report on the EU without being willfully misleading. The headline "European £1bn IT programme to study three-legged dogs" is not strictly speaking false - it just fails to mention that that 1 billion will be used for many other things as well. A more reasonable article is here: European IT Research Gets €1.2 Billion From EU.
Correct. The EU Parliament is almost completely irrelevant. It's the (unelected, unaccountable) EU Commission that actually controls regulation.
The Commission can only propose legislation. The Council and Parliament must approve it (and can amend it). Also, the Commission is not unaccountable: it can be - and has been - dismissed by Parliament.
And even then, it's generally only the UK that actually implements any of it; the rest of the EU either cherry picks aspects, or ignores it altogether.
The fact that on x86 you can e.g. use one instruction to modify the next instruction in the pipeline is just so ridiculously horribly wrong it's not even funny.
This hasn't been the case for a long time (if ever). I remember writing some some self-modifying code on a 386SX that worked fine when single-stepping through it in a debugger but not when executed normally, due to instruction prefetch. It's required to do a JMP to flush the instruction prefetch queue. (See also here.) It is true however (AFAIK) that the CPU requires logic to detect when a data write implicitly invalidates the instruction cache.
From the same declaration, Article 26:... Elementary education shall be compulsory....
Actually, that's article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not the European Convention on Human Rights to which the GP was referring. The ECHR does say in Protocol 1, Article 2:
No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religions and philosophical convictions.
It was foolish of them to let the EU be able to completely trump individual governments laws on issues not regarding the economy or military.
It seems that you're misinterpreting what happened here: namely, that the European Parliament decided not to trump an individual government's law (i.e. the French three-strikes law). You may not like the French law, but the EP overruling it would be something of a violation of the subsidiarity principle (not that that ever stops the EU).
Article 6 of the Directive provides protection for "technological measures", any technology device or component which is designed to restrict or prevent certain acts which are not authorised by the rightholder.
All the Idiots who scream here that the OS is doing something worng: no, it's not.
This is called "hiding behind the standard" (a disease very common among kernel developers). Just because the standard doesn't specify behaviour in a certain situation doesn't mean that any behaviour is equally okay. In this case, ext4's behaviour very much hurts the robustness of the system, which is rather important in unreliable environments like laptops.
In this case, what KDE does is certainly not unreasonable (and its developers are certainly not "idiots"). It doesn't overwrite configuration files in place, which would be bad even in the absence of system crashes, as doing it that way is not atomic. Instead it creates a new temporary file, writes the new contents, then renames the temporary file to the old one. This is an atomic operation on Unix: you either see the old contents or the new contents, but nothing in between. Now, the problem is that in case of a crash, ext4 gives you the worst possible outcome by reordering the operations: it will "recover" the rename for you, but not the actual write of the new data. So you end up with a 0-byte file - far from atomic. POSIX of course allows this, but POSIX allows just about anything: that doesn't mean its reasonable. The only guaranteed solution - use an fsync/fdatasync - is something that almost nobody does because the performance is horrible (ext3 in fact will write the entire journal, IIRC, when doing an fsync() on a single file - this really hurt Firefox 3 performance). So the KDE developers can be excused for not doing that.
It's the job of a modern filesystem to ensure robustness and performance. If you don't use an fsync, you should expect that there is a time window during which transactions might become undone (not the end of the world for configuration files), but they should never be reordered. For instance, this is how Berkeley DB works if you disable fsync: it guarantees ACI but not ACID. For many desktop applications, that's good enough. Destroying every file that has been updated since the last fsync isn't. And your users aren't going to be impressed by the argument that POSIX allows it.
ls -1 | awk '{ if ( length($1) > 2000 ) printf "%s\t%s\n", $1, length($1)}'
This command won't work properly for filenames that have whitespace in them. That's the problem with the Unix everything-is-text philosophy: unless you're very careful, it works in 99% of the cases, and fails mysteriously for the remainder. In that sense a shell that uses structured data (like the Powershell) is a big improvement.
The solution for New Orleans is not to give up on living there but to fix the damn levies. Surely it can't be that hard for the richest country on Earth.
Um... did you notice that the award is called the Nobel Peace Prize? A "well-deserved honor" implies that he's done something to promote peace, aka stopping wars. Now, does stopping global warming stop wars?
That's a rather narrow view of what the Nobel Peace Prize is about, and it doesn't match reality. Have a look a the list of winners. What wars did Martin Luther King, Amnesty International, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Shirin Ebadi, or Muhammad Yunus end? They didn't, but the Nobel committee has a broader view of "promoting peace" than merely ending wars. Promoting human rights is also part of it, and yes, so is the environment - it won't be easy to life peacefully together if the global environment goes to hell.
This is not at all clear. By what metric do you claim that Linux won that argument? Popularity? Then surely the Windows kernel wins even more.
Truth is, just because one technology is superior to another (in terms of, say, stability, maintainability, whatever) doesn't mean that it will immediately win in the marketplace. I think that Linux became a success because of other factors, such as that it was easy for people to contribute, and because it conservatively copied a 1970s design which everybody who wanted to contribute already understood.
The performance argument is of course rapidly declining in importance. I would gladly spend a little bit of performance for increased stability. In the 60s some people claimed that high-level languages would never fly - too slow. Turns out that there are more important things than CPU cycles.
It's exactly the other way around: if you want to be immune from Windows malware, then you should run Windows inside a virtual machine. Then you can restrict it to its own virtual disk (which would just be a big file on your Mac disk), restrict it from accessing the network if you want to, and so on. On the other hand, if you dual-boot into Windows, then a Windows program with sufficient privileges can destroy your Mac partition as easily as it can with the Windows partition: just run fdisk. So there is no fundamental level of extra security in dual-booting.
Besides, there is just too much overhead to do this kind of thing in the VM at the driver level. They could theoretically create their own DirectX implementation that worked with the hosts drivers, but this seems like a LOT of work for a small gain.
You may laugh, but consider this; The Netherlands, the pesky little country I'm from actually has secret treaties with the US. These supercede our own constitution.
Do you have any citation for that? I'm Dutch and I've never heard of anything like this. In any case it sounds like it would be quite unconstitutional:
Article 91
(1) The Kingdom shall not be bound by treaties, nor shall such treaties be denounced without the prior approval of the Parliament. The cases in which approval is not required shall be specified by Act of Parliament.
(...)
(3) Any provisions of a treaty that conflict with the Constitution or which lead to conflicts with it may be approved by the Chambers of the Parliament only if at least two-thirds of the votes cast are in favor. (...)
Please don't perpetuate urban legends without providing proof.
You know, Tycho is a smart guy, but he's completely wrong about Wikipedia. "A model of how and where distributed intellect fails"? Come on. The surprising thing about Wikipedia is not that you can vandalize it. That's rather obvious. The surprising thing is that it works so amazingly well. He must have missed the article in Nature that found Wikipedia to be almost as reliable as Brittanica, despite being maintained by unpaid volunteers and being two centuries or so younger.
And the trivia? There is a lot of trivia in Wikipedia that you wouldn't find in a print encyclopedia, but so what? That's what makes it fun. It would only be a problem if the "serious" topics were missing, which isn't the case.
No. My local newspaper purports to be accurate and non-libelous. Wikipedia does not. The difference (almost) is between something in a newspaper, and something scribbled on a bathroom wall.
Wikipedia is not analogous to a bathroom wall. It is one of the busiest, most visible, most used websites on the Internet. Being slandered on Wikipedia may well be worse - in terms of the number of people who get to see the disinformation - than a local newspaper.
Slashdot Mirror
The headline and the summary are pretty much completely wrong: as the NY Times article explains, the trial was two years ago, but the government cancelled plans to introduce "rekeningrijden" (GPS-based metered driving) last year. So it's not going to happen anytime soon - unless the Netherlands suddenly gets a left-wing government, which is unlikely.
if i say, at this point, that Apple has become a rather villainous, control whore.
Nonsense.
They always were control whores.
BTW, a conference publication isn't considered a "journal" publication, and doesn't confer the same status.
In most of CS, conference publications are actually more prestigious than journals. Top conferences such as PLDI, OOPSLA/Splash, Usenix ATC, ICSE and so on are highly selective, difficult to get into, and look very good on your CV (if you're pursuing an academic career). By contrast, journal articles tend to be published almost as an afterthought, years after anybody still cared about the research in question.
Best for all the people who miss this little nugget? Include it in the kernel.
Or just include it in the system-wide bashrc. That doesn't seem particularly hard to me from a distro-maintainer point of view. And it seems preferable to hard-coding a scheduling policy choice in the kernel.
If NAT is seriously as big a deal as you make it out to be, that's man-hours that kept someone employed.
Classic example of the broken window fallacy. Are you really saying we should prefer one protocol over another because it employs more sysadmins and developers in activities that would otherwise be unnecessary? Continuing this line of reasoning, we should abolish protocols such as DHCP and require manual configuration of all machines.
This is silly. The EU isn't "planning" anything. INDECT is an FP7 research project. So it's a bunch of universities and industrial partners that happened to get funding from the EU because the reviewers thought it was a scientifically interesting proposal. That doesn't mean anything the researchers come up with is EU policy. Besides, the EU doesn't have any authority or power whatsoever to impose a police state on its members.
(They have a FAQ, by the way.)
Replacing Mork with sqlite started a long time ago, has achieved limited success in some Mozilla products, and has been effectively abandoned in Thunderbird.
You sure about that? I have a big fat file named global-messages-db.sqlite in my Thunderbird profile, and it contains the text of my messages among other things (e.g. I can do select * from messagesText_content). It still seems to update the MSF files as well though.
Indeed, the real story here (though not news by any means) is the inability of the British press to report on the EU without being willfully misleading. The headline "European £1bn IT programme to study three-legged dogs" is not strictly speaking false - it just fails to mention that that 1 billion will be used for many other things as well. A more reasonable article is here: European IT Research Gets €1.2 Billion From EU.
Correct. The EU Parliament is almost completely irrelevant. It's the (unelected, unaccountable) EU Commission that actually controls regulation.
The Commission can only propose legislation. The Council and Parliament must approve it (and can amend it). Also, the Commission is not unaccountable: it can be - and has been - dismissed by Parliament.
And even then, it's generally only the UK that actually implements any of it; the rest of the EU either cherry picks aspects, or ignores it altogether.
[citation needed]
The fact that on x86 you can e.g. use one instruction to modify the next instruction in the pipeline is just so ridiculously horribly wrong it's not even funny.
This hasn't been the case for a long time (if ever). I remember writing some some self-modifying code on a 386SX that worked fine when single-stepping through it in a debugger but not when executed normally, due to instruction prefetch. It's required to do a JMP to flush the instruction prefetch queue. (See also here.) It is true however (AFAIK) that the CPU requires logic to detect when a data write implicitly invalidates the instruction cache.
From the same declaration, Article 26: ... Elementary education shall be compulsory. ...
Actually, that's article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, not the European Convention on Human Rights to which the GP was referring. The ECHR does say in Protocol 1, Article 2:
No person shall be denied the right to education. In the exercise of any functions which it assumes in relation to education and to teaching, the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religions and philosophical convictions.
It was foolish of them to let the EU be able to completely trump individual governments laws on issues not regarding the economy or military.
It seems that you're misinterpreting what happened here: namely, that the European Parliament decided not to trump an individual government's law (i.e. the French three-strikes law). You may not like the French law, but the EP overruling it would be something of a violation of the subsidiarity principle (not that that ever stops the EU).
For years Harald Welte has been the only serious chaser I know of.
As you can read on the About page, one of the authors of this article, Armijn Hemel, is actually the other half of the gpl-violations.org core team.
And that's where you're wrong.
Like most US abominations, the DMCA is a US-only thing.
You're deluding yourself:
Article 6 of the Directive provides protection for "technological measures", any technology device or component which is designed to restrict or prevent certain acts which are not authorised by the rightholder.
All the Idiots who scream here that the OS is doing something worng: no, it's not.
This is called "hiding behind the standard" (a disease very common among kernel developers). Just because the standard doesn't specify behaviour in a certain situation doesn't mean that any behaviour is equally okay. In this case, ext4's behaviour very much hurts the robustness of the system, which is rather important in unreliable environments like laptops.
In this case, what KDE does is certainly not unreasonable (and its developers are certainly not "idiots"). It doesn't overwrite configuration files in place, which would be bad even in the absence of system crashes, as doing it that way is not atomic. Instead it creates a new temporary file, writes the new contents, then renames the temporary file to the old one. This is an atomic operation on Unix: you either see the old contents or the new contents, but nothing in between. Now, the problem is that in case of a crash, ext4 gives you the worst possible outcome by reordering the operations: it will "recover" the rename for you, but not the actual write of the new data. So you end up with a 0-byte file - far from atomic. POSIX of course allows this, but POSIX allows just about anything: that doesn't mean its reasonable. The only guaranteed solution - use an fsync/fdatasync - is something that almost nobody does because the performance is horrible (ext3 in fact will write the entire journal, IIRC, when doing an fsync() on a single file - this really hurt Firefox 3 performance). So the KDE developers can be excused for not doing that.
It's the job of a modern filesystem to ensure robustness and performance. If you don't use an fsync, you should expect that there is a time window during which transactions might become undone (not the end of the world for configuration files), but they should never be reordered. For instance, this is how Berkeley DB works if you disable fsync: it guarantees ACI but not ACID. For many desktop applications, that's good enough. Destroying every file that has been updated since the last fsync isn't. And your users aren't going to be impressed by the argument that POSIX allows it.
ls -1 | awk '{ if ( length($1) > 2000 ) printf "%s\t%s\n", $1, length($1)}'
This command won't work properly for filenames that have whitespace in them. That's the problem with the Unix everything-is-text philosophy: unless you're very careful, it works in 99% of the cases, and fails mysteriously for the remainder. In that sense a shell that uses structured data (like the Powershell) is a big improvement.
Because the last time a hurricane hit the Netherladns was... uhh... never?
The Netherlands doesn't get hurricanes, but it has a long history of disastrous storms, the last one being the 1953 flood (over 1800 casualties, about the same as Katrina).
The solution for New Orleans is not to give up on living there but to fix the damn levies. Surely it can't be that hard for the richest country on Earth.
Um... did you notice that the award is called the Nobel Peace Prize? A "well-deserved honor" implies that he's done something to promote peace, aka stopping wars. Now, does stopping global warming stop wars?
That's a rather narrow view of what the Nobel Peace Prize is about, and it doesn't match reality. Have a look a the list of winners. What wars did Martin Luther King, Amnesty International, Mother Teresa, Lech Walesa, Desmond Tutu, Elie Wiesel, Shirin Ebadi, or Muhammad Yunus end? They didn't, but the Nobel committee has a broader view of "promoting peace" than merely ending wars. Promoting human rights is also part of it, and yes, so is the environment - it won't be easy to life peacefully together if the global environment goes to hell.
Actually, you mean the Council of Europe. The European Council is an EU thing.
I think it is clear that Linux won that argument.
This is not at all clear. By what metric do you claim that Linux won that argument? Popularity? Then surely the Windows kernel wins even more.
Truth is, just because one technology is superior to another (in terms of, say, stability, maintainability, whatever) doesn't mean that it will immediately win in the marketplace. I think that Linux became a success because of other factors, such as that it was easy for people to contribute, and because it conservatively copied a 1970s design which everybody who wanted to contribute already understood.
The performance argument is of course rapidly declining in importance. I would gladly spend a little bit of performance for increased stability. In the 60s some people claimed that high-level languages would never fly - too slow. Turns out that there are more important things than CPU cycles.
It's exactly the other way around: if you want to be immune from Windows malware, then you should run Windows inside a virtual machine. Then you can restrict it to its own virtual disk (which would just be a big file on your Mac disk), restrict it from accessing the network if you want to, and so on. On the other hand, if you dual-boot into Windows, then a Windows program with sufficient privileges can destroy your Mac partition as easily as it can with the Windows partition: just run fdisk. So there is no fundamental level of extra security in dual-booting.
Besides, there is just too much overhead to do this kind of thing in the VM at the driver level. They could theoretically create their own DirectX implementation that worked with the hosts drivers, but this seems like a LOT of work for a small gain.
Actually, VMware 5.0 has some experimental support for 3D acceleration through the host's drivers: http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_vidsound_ d3d.html
You may laugh, but consider this; The Netherlands, the pesky little country I'm from actually has secret treaties with the US. These supercede our own constitution.
Do you have any citation for that? I'm Dutch and I've never heard of anything like this. In any case it sounds like it would be quite unconstitutional:
Please don't perpetuate urban legends without providing proof.
You know, Tycho is a smart guy, but he's completely wrong about Wikipedia. "A model of how and where distributed intellect fails"? Come on. The surprising thing about Wikipedia is not that you can vandalize it. That's rather obvious. The surprising thing is that it works so amazingly well. He must have missed the article in Nature that found Wikipedia to be almost as reliable as Brittanica, despite being maintained by unpaid volunteers and being two centuries or so younger.
And the trivia? There is a lot of trivia in Wikipedia that you wouldn't find in a print encyclopedia, but so what? That's what makes it fun. It would only be a problem if the "serious" topics were missing, which isn't the case.
No. My local newspaper purports to be accurate and non-libelous. Wikipedia does not. The difference (almost) is between something in a newspaper, and something scribbled on a bathroom wall.
Wikipedia is not analogous to a bathroom wall. It is one of the busiest, most visible, most used websites on the Internet. Being slandered on Wikipedia may well be worse - in terms of the number of people who get to see the disinformation - than a local newspaper.