The idea of separating format and content is beyond most users of word processing software. That is why the fight is MS Office vs. OpenOffice instead of talking about what Latex interface everyone uses.
Styles have the same sort of issue. I know how to use them, and the style toolbar introduced in Word 2003 was a major improvement to how I interact with a word processor. Sadly, I almost never come across another document where styles have been applied thoughtfully. I wrote my last book with careful style-oriented formatting, and every editor and reviewer it passed through destroyed some portion of that while collecting up feedback. Made me feel like the only person on earth who actually pays attention to rogue style additions.
Agreed on most of this, but I don't see much value for remote wiping software on a system that's secured properly with encryption. If an attacker can get as far as booting the drive to where the remote wipe feature kicks in, they've already made it too far. Having remote wiping on a phone makes more sense because there isn't much available for boot time security on those.
VirtualBox provides the VBoxManage tool for automating operations. It works perfectly fine for this sort of thing. One of my small servers at home is running 28 VMs with all management happening through the command line, and that hasn't even gotten close to whatever the upper limit is. You certainly can run a classroom worth of VMs on a modestly sized box.
The only major management feature that's much easier on VMWare than VirtualBox is moving VMs to new systems. That is very useful for large production VM deployments, but it doesn't sound necessary for this situation.
I use VirtualBox because there is an open source release that works across multiple platforms. VMWare is all closed, and Xen only works on UNIX-ish systems. Students in particular can benefit from running a VM copy of Linux on another host OS, because it provides a way to get familiar with the software on either a Windows or Mac laptop (which they probably own already). That requirement rules out Xen as a good example. And if you're going to introduce students to open source software via Linux, it's nice if you can present that lesson on an open source stack too.
If only some cars were capable of picking up handicapped drivers, but were otherwise more expensive to operate (i.e. higher fuel costs due to a larger size), the cab companies wouldn't use them. Also, the lack of a good city-wide dispatch system means handicapped people would have trouble finding a special cab if not all taxis could handle them. It's easily possible to provide a special type of service to those who need handicapped riding accommodations. But the profit motive in the current system means it won't happen unless it's pushed as a hard requirement. And the high price of obtaining a taxi medallion keeps all the owners very oriented toward turning a profit.
The size of the US means that we have a large number of tractor-trailers on the road along with regular cars, especially on the highways (where crashes are the most dangerous). Since decreasing the size of the average car would make a trailer accident much more dangerous, many people want to have a larger vehicle for legitimate protection reasons. Shrinking typical consumer cars doesn't change the worse-case risk that has lead toward large cars at all.
Did the owner of the domain with your name buy it only because your name gave it value? If not, your case and this one are completely different. Fame doesn't have anything to do with it beyond that famous names are likely to be worth pulling this scam. Look at the rules here. This case sure looks like this one to me:
Circumstances indicating that the domain name was registered or acquired primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of the domain name registrant's out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name.
I can't believe how many people here have suddenly taken the side of someone I consider a domain squatter. Registering the name of a famous purpose for the primary purpose of holding it hostage is a douchebag move. In this case the ronpaul.com site did just enough work that it doesn't fall into the "primarily for the purpose" category here. I can't blame Paul for accusing them of violating the rules though. They certainly did not follow the spirit of the domain registration rules, even though a strict reading leaves them clean.
Actually the mailing list alone could easily be worth than $250k.
But if you're Ron Paul, you already have a giant mailing list of supporters. It could easily be the case that the ronpaul.com mailing list doesn't have anyone who isn't already known to the campaign.
MariaDB is taking the MySQL code via the GPL and then building on top of it with new code. Those changes are all having their copyright assigned to MariaDB, and in some cases the GPL will also require a public release. Eventually MariaDB is expected to have a non-trivial set of improvements, and the copyright ownership of all the new code will be to MariaDB. That allows selling the combination of GPL core plus some explicitly owned private code, the exact same way MySQL was sold to Sun.
This is the same scam that let Monty cash out once already, using the work of open source contributors who assigned their copyright to his original company. No reason he can't do it again, if people are gullible enough to fall for it twice.
Concerns about MariaDB's long-term plans are appropriate too. Monty has setup his new company with contributor copyright assignment such that he can sell it off again, the same way he did with MySQL. If you actually taste the FUD here, you should be migrating away from both of these uncertain projects, not deciding which of them to use.
If you're developing kernel components, having a kernel that crashes cleanly can make development much easier. Being able to shut down your buggy kernel level program and then try again sure beats rebooting after a panic. Even though this isn't directly helpful to users of the system, making the test side of development easier can lead to the program evolving more quickly over time. The Hurd design has been filled with taking the side of various trade-offs that take longer, but are believed to be more powerful in the end.
Seriously, is it hard to google RMS Hurd before posting crap?
It takes a while when you have to fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back so you can then look at them using a local web browser. (Seriously!)
Google+ is second only to Facebook in active users
And Google+ is second to no one when it comes to counting incidental users as active ones! I have an "active" Google+ account attached to my work e-mail address now, because someone I do work with invited me to a Hangout once. People can't stay on the edge of Google's infrastructure for very long now before being likely to have a + account.
Perhaps he should stop using shitty email providers that don't support smtp/imap encryption then.
There is no reason his email has to be unencrypted. Mine sure as hell isn't.
Your incoming mail can easily be unencrypted for some number of hops between the sender and your ISP. There aren't that many SMTP systems that support transport encryption still. And I would wager the odds someone sending this sort of message is sending is originating via an unencrypted channel is even lower than average.
The VIC-20 was named for its VIC display chip. It uses character definitions instead of bits, which means code for it is unique to running on VIC-based systems. There's a completely different video chip in the C64, they're not at all alike.
The VIC20 doesn't have a bitmapped display mode. To show graphics you have to redefine the character set. The usual solution to that limitation was to throw RAM at the problem of holding the character definitions. I suspect it will be a lot more complicated than the C64 for the sort of code you're running.
Line drawing can have a lot of complexity to it beyond just picking the best of the usual approaches. A simple implemtnation of Bresenham's line algorithm may or may not be optimal given the system's other constraints. One common change is to recognize that horizontal and vertical lines are both common enough that they should get their own optimized code paths. If it's possible the code might run on a grey scale display one day, you might code in a way that later allows anti-aliasing. On a computer like the Apple ][, the odd mapping of video memory to the display can favor lookup table driven approaches. And on systems where the code has to run at a consistent speed on each loop to maintain vertical sync like the Atari 2600, you'll have to carefully modify the Bresenham approach, since the d>0 path has more computations than the other side. Those are just a few of the possibilities I remember from my 6502 coding days.
Even if a demoscener did, for example, rewrite BLAST, the result would be completely unmaintainable
So same as it is now?
Your comments about exact calculations in this context strike me as kind of funny. The whole reason BLAST exists is because it replaces an expensive search for an optimal match with a heuristic method. It is at its core cheating to optimize a process that wasn't running fast enough. And if you take a look at how the original Smith–Waterman algorithm has been sped up, you'll see that clever ways to cut the code down so it will run on specialized hardware are exactly what people in the industry do. There are a lot of problems in the medical space that the classic demo scene skills wouldn't apply to, but improving BLAST is exactly the sort of thing I would hire one of those guys to do.
Not just straight medication either. Vets also sell products like the Frontline flea control line at a profit. My vet is quite aware of how his prices compare to the Internet suppliers, and he'd be even more competitive if those retailers charged the same sales tax he does.
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The idea of separating format and content is beyond most users of word processing software. That is why the fight is MS Office vs. OpenOffice instead of talking about what Latex interface everyone uses.
Styles have the same sort of issue. I know how to use them, and the style toolbar introduced in Word 2003 was a major improvement to how I interact with a word processor. Sadly, I almost never come across another document where styles have been applied thoughtfully. I wrote my last book with careful style-oriented formatting, and every editor and reviewer it passed through destroyed some portion of that while collecting up feedback. Made me feel like the only person on earth who actually pays attention to rogue style additions.
Agreed on most of this, but I don't see much value for remote wiping software on a system that's secured properly with encryption. If an attacker can get as far as booting the drive to where the remote wipe feature kicks in, they've already made it too far. Having remote wiping on a phone makes more sense because there isn't much available for boot time security on those.
VirtualBox provides the VBoxManage tool for automating operations. It works perfectly fine for this sort of thing. One of my small servers at home is running 28 VMs with all management happening through the command line, and that hasn't even gotten close to whatever the upper limit is. You certainly can run a classroom worth of VMs on a modestly sized box.
The only major management feature that's much easier on VMWare than VirtualBox is moving VMs to new systems. That is very useful for large production VM deployments, but it doesn't sound necessary for this situation.
I use VirtualBox because there is an open source release that works across multiple platforms. VMWare is all closed, and Xen only works on UNIX-ish systems. Students in particular can benefit from running a VM copy of Linux on another host OS, because it provides a way to get familiar with the software on either a Windows or Mac laptop (which they probably own already). That requirement rules out Xen as a good example. And if you're going to introduce students to open source software via Linux, it's nice if you can present that lesson on an open source stack too.
If only some cars were capable of picking up handicapped drivers, but were otherwise more expensive to operate (i.e. higher fuel costs due to a larger size), the cab companies wouldn't use them. Also, the lack of a good city-wide dispatch system means handicapped people would have trouble finding a special cab if not all taxis could handle them. It's easily possible to provide a special type of service to those who need handicapped riding accommodations. But the profit motive in the current system means it won't happen unless it's pushed as a hard requirement. And the high price of obtaining a taxi medallion keeps all the owners very oriented toward turning a profit.
The size of the US means that we have a large number of tractor-trailers on the road along with regular cars, especially on the highways (where crashes are the most dangerous). Since decreasing the size of the average car would make a trailer accident much more dangerous, many people want to have a larger vehicle for legitimate protection reasons. Shrinking typical consumer cars doesn't change the worse-case risk that has lead toward large cars at all.
The current version is only slightly preferable to being buggered with a cactus
They call that a ribbon now.
His problems really started after he took the steam tray.
Did the owner of the domain with your name buy it only because your name gave it value? If not, your case and this one are completely different. Fame doesn't have anything to do with it beyond that famous names are likely to be worth pulling this scam. Look at the rules here. This case sure looks like this one to me:
Circumstances indicating that the domain name was registered or acquired primarily for the purpose of selling, renting, or otherwise transferring the domain name registration to the complainant who is the owner of the trademark or service mark or to a competitor of that complainant, for valuable consideration in excess of the domain name registrant's out-of-pocket costs directly related to the domain name.
I can't believe how many people here have suddenly taken the side of someone I consider a domain squatter. Registering the name of a famous purpose for the primary purpose of holding it hostage is a douchebag move. In this case the ronpaul.com site did just enough work that it doesn't fall into the "primarily for the purpose" category here. I can't blame Paul for accusing them of violating the rules though. They certainly did not follow the spirit of the domain registration rules, even though a strict reading leaves them clean.
Actually the mailing list alone could easily be worth than $250k.
But if you're Ron Paul, you already have a giant mailing list of supporters. It could easily be the case that the ronpaul.com mailing list doesn't have anyone who isn't already known to the campaign.
Contrary to what this firm and many of the general public believe: IT is not a cash cow, nor is it glamorous work.
Ah ha...I see you aren't familiar with SAP then. Their IT based cash cow pulls in $20 billion a year.
MariaDB is taking the MySQL code via the GPL and then building on top of it with new code. Those changes are all having their copyright assigned to MariaDB, and in some cases the GPL will also require a public release. Eventually MariaDB is expected to have a non-trivial set of improvements, and the copyright ownership of all the new code will be to MariaDB. That allows selling the combination of GPL core plus some explicitly owned private code, the exact same way MySQL was sold to Sun.
This is the same scam that let Monty cash out once already, using the work of open source contributors who assigned their copyright to his original company. No reason he can't do it again, if people are gullible enough to fall for it twice.
Concerns about MariaDB's long-term plans are appropriate too. Monty has setup his new company with contributor copyright assignment such that he can sell it off again, the same way he did with MySQL. If you actually taste the FUD here, you should be migrating away from both of these uncertain projects, not deciding which of them to use.
If you're developing kernel components, having a kernel that crashes cleanly can make development much easier. Being able to shut down your buggy kernel level program and then try again sure beats rebooting after a panic. Even though this isn't directly helpful to users of the system, making the test side of development easier can lead to the program evolving more quickly over time. The Hurd design has been filled with taking the side of various trade-offs that take longer, but are believed to be more powerful in the end.
Seriously, is it hard to google RMS Hurd before posting crap?
It takes a while when you have to fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back so you can then look at them using a local web browser. (Seriously!)
Google+ is second only to Facebook in active users
And Google+ is second to no one when it comes to counting incidental users as active ones! I have an "active" Google+ account attached to my work e-mail address now, because someone I do work with invited me to a Hangout once. People can't stay on the edge of Google's infrastructure for very long now before being likely to have a + account.
"Mandriva", which sounds like the name of a night club for french gay vampires.
Still a better love story than Twi...actually, that's almost the same story.
Edison's electrified furniture was so good, it could handle an elephant!
Perhaps he should stop using shitty email providers that don't support smtp/imap encryption then.
There is no reason his email has to be unencrypted. Mine sure as hell isn't.
Your incoming mail can easily be unencrypted for some number of hops between the sender and your ISP. There aren't that many SMTP systems that support transport encryption still. And I would wager the odds someone sending this sort of message is sending is originating via an unencrypted channel is even lower than average.
Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi recently apologized to conspiracy theorists after realizing they were right all along about the financial side of things.
The VIC-20 was named for its VIC display chip. It uses character definitions instead of bits, which means code for it is unique to running on VIC-based systems. There's a completely different video chip in the C64, they're not at all alike.
The VIC20 doesn't have a bitmapped display mode. To show graphics you have to redefine the character set. The usual solution to that limitation was to throw RAM at the problem of holding the character definitions. I suspect it will be a lot more complicated than the C64 for the sort of code you're running.
Line drawing can have a lot of complexity to it beyond just picking the best of the usual approaches. A simple implemtnation of Bresenham's line algorithm may or may not be optimal given the system's other constraints. One common change is to recognize that horizontal and vertical lines are both common enough that they should get their own optimized code paths. If it's possible the code might run on a grey scale display one day, you might code in a way that later allows anti-aliasing. On a computer like the Apple ][, the odd mapping of video memory to the display can favor lookup table driven approaches. And on systems where the code has to run at a consistent speed on each loop to maintain vertical sync like the Atari 2600, you'll have to carefully modify the Bresenham approach, since the d>0 path has more computations than the other side. Those are just a few of the possibilities I remember from my 6502 coding days.
The worst part is that zip actually increased the size of the programs by a few bytes.
Of course it did. If it was possible to compress the program usefully and distribute a smaller version, he would have done that too!
Even if a demoscener did, for example, rewrite BLAST, the result would be completely unmaintainable
So same as it is now?
Your comments about exact calculations in this context strike me as kind of funny. The whole reason BLAST exists is because it replaces an expensive search for an optimal match with a heuristic method. It is at its core cheating to optimize a process that wasn't running fast enough. And if you take a look at how the original Smith–Waterman algorithm has been sped up, you'll see that clever ways to cut the code down so it will run on specialized hardware are exactly what people in the industry do. There are a lot of problems in the medical space that the classic demo scene skills wouldn't apply to, but improving BLAST is exactly the sort of thing I would hire one of those guys to do.
Not just straight medication either. Vets also sell products like the Frontline flea control line at a profit. My vet is quite aware of how his prices compare to the Internet suppliers, and he'd be even more competitive if those retailers charged the same sales tax he does.