Out of curiosity I've just tried, with every terminal application I have (xterm, lxterm, uxterm, gnome-termonal, konsole...). I can't do it. Perhaps I'm incompetent? Or perhaps it's a bug in some specific window manager? Or perhaps Guy Harris is special?
Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.
This patch was sneaked into CVS bypassing the proper channels;
The submitter identity was (allegedly) forged;
The UID assignment was surrounded in parentheses to prevent a compiler warning
strongly suggest that this was a deliberate feature, and not a casual error. I've done a lot of security audits of mission critical systems in my time and I've seen a lot of potentially catastrophic casual errors. You can always see what (innocent) thing the programmer intended to do. There's no 'innocent' thing this change could do. This is intended.
Why have a solar powered CO2 remover when we could use solar (or wind, or tidal, or geothermal) energy and never release the CO2 in the first place? Continuing to burn fossil fuels is unbelievably stupid.
This is a very good reason not to trust any closed source browser, actually. If the source is closed, how the heck do you know what it's doing to show you that nice, safe green password icon? Of course, actually ploughing through and understanding every line of the SSL implementation code in your browser is a lot of work and 99.9% of us haven't done it, but if there were anything dodgy going on in an open source browser it would pretty quickly hit the headlines on Slashdot and we'd all know. Of course again, you don't actually know that a browser (or any other program) was compiled from the published source code unless you compile it yourself.
If you're working with an application which hasn't been engineered for database portability, yes, it can be a complete pain. Which is why a good software engineer, embarking on what may be a long-lived application, designs for database portability. You know those 'special features' your favourite RDBMS offers? They're called 'vendor lock-in', and you should avoid them.
To be honest, I still have Ubuntu on one computer but on the whole I've moved back to Debian stable. I did try Mint, but found it sufficiently broken in minor ways to be just irritating. Yes, Debian is broken too, in as much as installing codecs and playing media is a complete pain, but it's broken in ways which don't greatly influence things I actually want to do. For my everyday use - writing software, browsing the web, reading email - Debian stable is rock solid and unannoying.
Yes, just occasionally I curse because something I need to use is in testing, but for all my Clojure stuff I simply bypass the Debian package system and use Leiningen.
The real joke of this is that Postgres has been, by any measure, a better database than MySQL for twenty years. Back in the early 1990s when we were running on i386s and Sparcs, there was some argument for using MySQL because (in those days) the fact that it didn't have proper transactions and proper reverential integrity, it was faster for simple queries from single tables. Now, even that isn't true any more. Postgres is just the best engineered RDBMS out there bar none, and it's free.
Designs, like MP3s, are digital data which is by nature infinitely reproducible. You can only build an industry on selling designs if you introduce legally sanctioned mechanisms of artificial scarcity. Which means a bunch of lawyers will get together calling themselves the Design Industry Association of America. They will argue for a tax on raw plastic, to be paid to them; and will sue anyone they think might have a 3D printer stashed away in the attic. Of course they won't actually have any connection with real designers any more than the Recording Industry Association of America has any connection with real musicians, but that doesn't matter because as everyone knows it's the lawyers who get to keep all the money. They are, after all, the only people (apart from bankers) who actually add value in this economy.
Did you know that the United States is made up of many states that are overall very different and spread across a wide geographical area? We even have our own separate laws. I am from Missouri and find it frustrating to be lumped in with Texans.
England and Scotland, constituent nations of the United Kingdom, not only have separate laws, we have separate legal systems based on separate legal theories. No judgement made in English law is binding on anything in Scotland and vice-versa (Wales and Northern Ireland also have different laws, but I believe both share legal theory with England). There's no such thing as 'United Kingdom' law. But the United Kingdom is in turn just one of the constituent nations of the European Union, all of which have different and incompatible legal systems. Yes, Missouri and Texas are different. But you have the same federal law, the same currency, (mostly) the same official language.
The Ph.D took longer than expected, so before finishing me and three others
Ph.Ds generally do take a bit longer than expected when one starts in the 4th grade. But if he had waited until he had mastered the 6th grade, his editing task would have been so much easier.
What's really sad, is all the people who don't have the skill and determination to build something of real use to the community or the generosity to donate anything to the community complaining about the grammar and spelling of one of the few people who do.
I live in a wood in Scotland three miles from the nearest streetlight, half a mile from the nearest other house. I don't have any exterior lights, because I don't need them. There's no more than two nights a year when it's murky enough - usually because of fog - to need a torch. The human eye is extremely good at adapting to low light, if you give yourself a couple of minutes to adjust. And out of doors, on planet Earth, it is literally never dark.
Starlight is a free natural service offered you by the planet which doesn't run up your energy bill or cause light pollution. Use it.
When I first started in this industry, I worked with Chris Burton who'd worked on Baby (and later led the team which rebuilt it); he had known Turing, as had another man I worked with later. Our team was led by Charlie Portman, who gets a credit in The Mythical Man Month. It's pretty amazing how close we are - two generations away - from the legendary figures who founded our industry, who built the first computers.
Chris was famous in our team because we had some new Mannesman Tally inkjet printers, which could only print ASCII, and we needed them to print bitmaps. The processor in the printers was one that no-one in the team had any experience of. So Chris took the datasheet for the printer, the datasheet for the processor, a dump of the printer ROM, and a square ruled pad home with him on the train, and came back in the morning on the train with code for a new ROM for the printer, written not in assembler but in the actual opcodes (hexadecimal), in pencil on the pad. We blew them into the ROM and it worked first time printing perfect bitmaps, no errors, no bugs to fix.
That's how good the first generation programmers were. I am still in awe of that. And he was a very modest man, very generous with his experience. I'm proud to have learned from him.
should genes be patentable, but it seems that we maybe have lost that one (sadly)
Actually, it's the same issue, since genes are information structures which are processed by the cell. Consequently, genes are software, and consequently are mathematics. The fact that we don't yet understand in detail the mechanisms by which the cell processes the information structures is irrelevant.
If you can't patent software because it is mathematics, then you can't patent genes because they are software.
Can a computer interpret it? If it can, then it's maths, because all a computer can do is manipulate symbols, which is maths. If, of course, it can't be interpreted by a computer, it may not be maths.
An interesting attack on U.K. libel law might be for foreigners to sue various MPs for things they've said.
Wrong, on all points. Comprehensively.
There is no such thing as United Kingdom law. There's English law, Welsh law, Scots law, and Northern Irish law. They're all different.
Under all of them, truth is a defence in a libel case.
However under English law, the burden of proof is on the defendant to prove that the allegedly libellous statement was true (see People v Croswell, 1804).
Because of parliamentary privilege, no member of parliament can be sued for libel for anything said in parliament.
I know that Slashdot is now primarily a place for the immature and ill-informed to run off at the mouth on topics of which they know little, but that was a particularly clueless contribution.
Because the permissions are too coarse grained. Weren't you paying attention? That's what this whole thread has been about!
This.
I don't, in general, mind apps knowing whether or not I'm in a call. I mind very much their knowing who I'm calling. That's exceedingly intrusive. It's the single thing which makes me most unhappy about Android at present - more and more apps are asking for this permission, and as it's an all or nothing thing, you either grant the permission or don't install the app. Generally, I don't install the app - because I don't want commercial companies building up a map of who calls who when. I particularly don't want them knowing who I call, or who calls me. But the problem is, even if you don't install the app, the chances are the person you're talking to has, so the owners of the app get to log your call anyway.
As it is, if you actually want a Windows RT tablet for some reason, you've got to know that there's going to be a huge fire-sale of these things, and soon. Why would anyone pay those prices?
Curiously enough I saw an idea to solve this problem this morning. It's a small bag lined with material opaque to radio waves (possibly lead foil or barium, I don't know). Whether this particular implementation works or is a tin-foil beanie, again I don't know. But the concept seems to me good. With modern phones like iPhones or my HTC One, the battery is non-removable, so it isn't easy for the user to verify that all radio transmission is in fact shut down - there could still be things like, for example, passive RFID. But if you had a radio-opaque bag in which you kept your phone, you could have a phone with you in case of emergencies, without the possibility of being tracked except when you were actively using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity I've just tried, with every terminal application I have (xterm, lxterm, uxterm, gnome-termonal, konsole...). I can't do it. Perhaps I'm incompetent? Or perhaps it's a bug in some specific window manager? Or perhaps Guy Harris is special?
Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.
The fact that
strongly suggest that this was a deliberate feature, and not a casual error. I've done a lot of security audits of mission critical systems in my time and I've seen a lot of potentially catastrophic casual errors. You can always see what (innocent) thing the programmer intended to do. There's no 'innocent' thing this change could do. This is intended.
Who intended it? That's another question.
Why have a solar powered CO2 remover when we could use solar (or wind, or tidal, or geothermal) energy and never release the CO2 in the first place? Continuing to burn fossil fuels is unbelievably stupid.
This is a very good reason not to trust any closed source browser, actually. If the source is closed, how the heck do you know what it's doing to show you that nice, safe green password icon? Of course, actually ploughing through and understanding every line of the SSL implementation code in your browser is a lot of work and 99.9% of us haven't done it, but if there were anything dodgy going on in an open source browser it would pretty quickly hit the headlines on Slashdot and we'd all know. Of course again, you don't actually know that a browser (or any other program) was compiled from the published source code unless you compile it yourself.
Gentoo, anyone?
If you're working with an application which hasn't been engineered for database portability, yes, it can be a complete pain. Which is why a good software engineer, embarking on what may be a long-lived application, designs for database portability. You know those 'special features' your favourite RDBMS offers? They're called 'vendor lock-in', and you should avoid them.
To be honest, I still have Ubuntu on one computer but on the whole I've moved back to Debian stable. I did try Mint, but found it sufficiently broken in minor ways to be just irritating. Yes, Debian is broken too, in as much as installing codecs and playing media is a complete pain, but it's broken in ways which don't greatly influence things I actually want to do. For my everyday use - writing software, browsing the web, reading email - Debian stable is rock solid and unannoying.
Yes, just occasionally I curse because something I need to use is in testing, but for all my Clojure stuff I simply bypass the Debian package system and use Leiningen.
The real joke of this is that Postgres has been, by any measure, a better database than MySQL for twenty years. Back in the early 1990s when we were running on i386s and Sparcs, there was some argument for using MySQL because (in those days) the fact that it didn't have proper transactions and proper reverential integrity, it was faster for simple queries from single tables. Now, even that isn't true any more. Postgres is just the best engineered RDBMS out there bar none, and it's free.
Designs, like MP3s, are digital data which is by nature infinitely reproducible. You can only build an industry on selling designs if you introduce legally sanctioned mechanisms of artificial scarcity. Which means a bunch of lawyers will get together calling themselves the Design Industry Association of America. They will argue for a tax on raw plastic, to be paid to them; and will sue anyone they think might have a 3D printer stashed away in the attic. Of course they won't actually have any connection with real designers any more than the Recording Industry Association of America has any connection with real musicians, but that doesn't matter because as everyone knows it's the lawyers who get to keep all the money. They are, after all, the only people (apart from bankers) who actually add value in this economy.
Cynical? Moi?
You won't text on it, that's so last century. You'll talk to it, and it will send text. Standard Android speech-to-text is very good these days.
... Those are the fruits of the Enlightenment* in Italy...
* what a silly, arrogant-sounding English word for this era.
Italy gave Europe the Renaissance, but the Enlightenment was the gift of the Dutch, the French, the English and later the Scots.
Did you know that the United States is made up of many states that are overall very different and spread across a wide geographical area? We even have our own separate laws. I am from Missouri and find it frustrating to be lumped in with Texans.
England and Scotland, constituent nations of the United Kingdom, not only have separate laws, we have separate legal systems based on separate legal theories. No judgement made in English law is binding on anything in Scotland and vice-versa (Wales and Northern Ireland also have different laws, but I believe both share legal theory with England). There's no such thing as 'United Kingdom' law. But the United Kingdom is in turn just one of the constituent nations of the European Union, all of which have different and incompatible legal systems. Yes, Missouri and Texas are different. But you have the same federal law, the same currency, (mostly) the same official language.
Europe just isn't like that.
So really what you're saying is that no true Scotsman thinks that Scotland is the best?
I'm not sure if that's double irony or triple irony :)
Speaking as someone in Scotland, I don't think anyone in Scotland thinks Scotland is the best. That, after all, is why we're trying to make it better.
Yeah, Scotland isn't known at all for having any nationalist pride.
It's not like they made a fucking movie about it or anything.....
What movie is this you're talking about? One made in Ireland by ignorant Americans? What on earth has that to do with Scotland?
Thought the same thing....
The Ph.D took longer than expected, so before finishing me and three others
Ph.Ds generally do take a bit longer than expected when one starts in the 4th grade.
But if he had waited until he had mastered the 6th grade, his editing task would have been so much easier.
What's really sad, is all the people who don't have the skill and determination to build something of real use to the community or the generosity to donate anything to the community complaining about the grammar and spelling of one of the few people who do.
I live in a wood in Scotland three miles from the nearest streetlight, half a mile from the nearest other house. I don't have any exterior lights, because I don't need them. There's no more than two nights a year when it's murky enough - usually because of fog - to need a torch. The human eye is extremely good at adapting to low light, if you give yourself a couple of minutes to adjust. And out of doors, on planet Earth, it is literally never dark.
Starlight is a free natural service offered you by the planet which doesn't run up your energy bill or cause light pollution. Use it.
So the writers of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, for example, were theorising and speculating, were they?
When I first started in this industry, I worked with Chris Burton who'd worked on Baby (and later led the team which rebuilt it); he had known Turing, as had another man I worked with later. Our team was led by Charlie Portman, who gets a credit in The Mythical Man Month. It's pretty amazing how close we are - two generations away - from the legendary figures who founded our industry, who built the first computers.
Chris was famous in our team because we had some new Mannesman Tally inkjet printers, which could only print ASCII, and we needed them to print bitmaps. The processor in the printers was one that no-one in the team had any experience of. So Chris took the datasheet for the printer, the datasheet for the processor, a dump of the printer ROM, and a square ruled pad home with him on the train, and came back in the morning on the train with code for a new ROM for the printer, written not in assembler but in the actual opcodes (hexadecimal), in pencil on the pad. We blew them into the ROM and it worked first time printing perfect bitmaps, no errors, no bugs to fix.
That's how good the first generation programmers were. I am still in awe of that. And he was a very modest man, very generous with his experience. I'm proud to have learned from him.
All I can see from my window is a flower-strewn meadow, a hill, a forest, a wind turbine, an orchard. And it's all mine.
Times Square? Black-top parking lot? You can keep them.
should genes be patentable, but it seems that we maybe have lost that one (sadly)
Actually, it's the same issue, since genes are information structures which are processed by the cell. Consequently, genes are software, and consequently are mathematics. The fact that we don't yet understand in detail the mechanisms by which the cell processes the information structures is irrelevant.
If you can't patent software because it is mathematics, then you can't patent genes because they are software.
printf("Hello World!\n");
Convince me where the math is in that.
Can a computer interpret it? If it can, then it's maths, because all a computer can do is manipulate symbols, which is maths. If, of course, it can't be interpreted by a computer, it may not be maths.
Truth is no defense against libel in the U.K.
An interesting attack on U.K. libel law might be for foreigners to sue various MPs for things they've said.
Wrong, on all points. Comprehensively.
I know that Slashdot is now primarily a place for the immature and ill-informed to run off at the mouth on topics of which they know little, but that was a particularly clueless contribution.
Because the permissions are too coarse grained. Weren't you paying attention? That's what this whole thread has been about!
This.
I don't, in general, mind apps knowing whether or not I'm in a call. I mind very much their knowing who I'm calling. That's exceedingly intrusive. It's the single thing which makes me most unhappy about Android at present - more and more apps are asking for this permission, and as it's an all or nothing thing, you either grant the permission or don't install the app. Generally, I don't install the app - because I don't want commercial companies building up a map of who calls who when. I particularly don't want them knowing who I call, or who calls me. But the problem is, even if you don't install the app, the chances are the person you're talking to has, so the owners of the app get to log your call anyway.
These tablets are being offered for sale at £549 (US $834.32) and £634 (US $963) respectively. The Kindle Fire HD costs from £159, the Google Nexus 10 costs from £319, while the Apple iPad costs from £399. Even if there were nothing else wrong with Windows RT, trying to sell tablets for between 150% and 350% of the price of the comparable market leaders was never going to work.
As it is, if you actually want a Windows RT tablet for some reason, you've got to know that there's going to be a huge fire-sale of these things, and soon. Why would anyone pay those prices?
Curiously enough I saw an idea to solve this problem this morning. It's a small bag lined with material opaque to radio waves (possibly lead foil or barium, I don't know). Whether this particular implementation works or is a tin-foil beanie, again I don't know. But the concept seems to me good. With modern phones like iPhones or my HTC One, the battery is non-removable, so it isn't easy for the user to verify that all radio transmission is in fact shut down - there could still be things like, for example, passive RFID. But if you had a radio-opaque bag in which you kept your phone, you could have a phone with you in case of emergencies, without the possibility of being tracked except when you were actively using it.