There's this entire class of Linux issues that result from a lack of defensive programming prioritizing user feedback and good error logging. When you've gone several years with these nagging screen saver issues that keep popping up, with two different work arounds involving fixing permissions on files that are in unexpected states, at some point user focused development would say "hey, how about we present the user with more information about what goes wrong in these cases" or "why don't we log more info about the common issues we've seen in the field when this occurs." Instead, Canonical's idea of being user focused is to add new whiz-bang features every release. News flash: you got all the main features people wanted as of Feisty. This is why your top ranked Brainstorm requests are for bug fixes and cleanup of existing features, not introduction of new ones.
9.04 was not a LTS version; 8.04 and 10.04 are. However, had you said "8.04 is still of bugs that nobody gives a damn about", then the rest of your comments would be correct. The biggest question in my mind is why in the world they don't use the LTS versions to at least put on a facade of stabilization focus for. As an example of the ridiculous changes introduced into the last LTS, 8.04 introduced PulseAudio in a very buggy form, making that LTS unsuitable to use for anyone who needed sound during its entire lifetime. It shipped unstable, and the necessary bug fixes to make it stable I ran into were all "fixed in next release" and not backported. I rolled forward into 8.10 and 9.04 while they were in beta, because they were still better than 8.04 "stable". Now we get this LTS with Canonical worrying about worthless crap like the MeMenu as a major feature.
How about Mother Teresa, Gandi, and some other people? Maybe some Jewish people who were persecuted by Hitler? Gays? I'm sure there are people out of bounds they wouldn't mock. hmm They mock the Jewish boy - but only by a kid everybody hates. So that doesn't count I don't think.
Mother Teresa was called out by name in one of the songs in their movie. Gandhi has appeared twice, and they even put him in Hell (because he's not a Mormon, and everyone but the Mormons go to Hell you see). The Major Boobage episode featured a whole section spoofing Anne Frank's Diary, with Cartman being trapped in his attic due to persecution for having a cat. The fourth episode of the show, Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride spoofed being gay in general, and that goes on quite regularly still--Mr. Slave and D-Yikes! come to mind.
Sierra, a commercial enterprise that turns out to be of little historical significance
Uh, what? Sierra reinvented the entire adventure game genre with graphics starting with "Mystery House" , in the process providing a model for how to build a gaming business from plastic bag distribution to giant company. And their Sierra On-line modem-based gaming service was one of the very first places you could play the sort of graphical multi-player games that everyone now takes for granted. Oh, and since "Hackers" was released, they invented the internet MMORPG too. And then there's the whole saga around the IBM PCjr and King's Quest...
Exactly, take a look at the list of potential exploits just from the limited access the crappy UPnP port forwarding configuration has exposed. If there were an easy to use tool for making larger firewall changes introduced to the world, it's guaranteed that there will be hundreds if not many thousands of exploited machines using it for every person who benefits from the feature. The limited stealthiness provided by the standard hardware NAT firewall most people have for their always on DSL/Cable/Fiber installs is the only thing saving them from being hacked within minutes of hooking a new PC up. This is why the idea of easier firewall configuration is dead in the water--the fact that it's hard keeps people who aren't qualified to make these changes from destroying their own security any worse than they already do.
All non-trivial software nowadays is built with an enormous reliance on some set of shared libraries. As time marches on, those libraries will diverge from the ones the software originally compiled against. Eventually, some API will drift enough that code stops working, and that's where the most difficult to avoid bit rot comes from.
Yes, you can keep code going without rot forever if you can completely freeze the build/deployment environment. But that's rarely practical. Eventually you will need a newer OS, which is going to ship with a new set of libraries, because the old one won't run on newer hardware for example. And that's where having the source and being able to rebuild the code yourself is potentially valuable, if you have the right skills to be able to fix this class of problem.
Apple has been a closed platform pretty much since the very beginning.
You mean the Macintosh platform has been a closed platform since the beginning. Apple's first platform, the Apple I, was so open it came with source code and schematics.
Counting on your fingers/toes presumes a binary state for each and starting at zero. If you're going to allow cheating, why stop at three? You can theoretically add an infinite number of finger positions that each represent a different value, based on what angle you hold them at. I count about six angles I could easily distinguish among given enough muscle control and patience, mainly limited by the range of motion of my thumb, which makes for counting up to 60 million. But who has that kind of time?
As for saying you don't have to represent zero, you can presume whatever offset you like if you're allowing that trick. Why not say counting starts at 10 and you can count to 1032? And representing a value with "no hands up" isn't counting with your just your fingers anymore. Allow counting using any part of your body and then...well let's just say there's a YouPorn video you don't want to watch covering that.
Unless you have more than 10 fingers, you can only count to 1023 with them, not 1025. It's 2^10 - 1, not +1. Since the person you were mocking didn't catch this error either, I hope the both of you will be vacating my lawn now.
That still doesn't make me optimistic about this movie getting made by him. Your comments about Whedon getting played by the movie executives seem quite familiar, given how he was assigned to Wonder Woman, got all worked up over it, and here we are five years later with no sign of a movie.
It looks like the bet they're making is that including Facebook and Twitter support is a complete replacement for the traditional IM client. I'm not so sure that decision is so terrible from a marketing perspective. The trend I'm seeing is that old school IM clients just aren't as popular among less serious users nowadays; I get Facebook messages from all sorts of people I know would never bother getting a "real" IM account, or who have never figured out they already have one via Gmail.
Ultimately the real limitations of this phone aren't going to apparent until the matching data plan is announced. How much it will cost to download all the Twilight ringtones and background images that will obviously be introduced for this phone? These are the important questions. So far we already know that updates from some sites are put into 15 minute batches, presumably to same on network bandwidth, which doesn't bode well.
I can't accept the "superior" claim on the keyboard given how limited it is. I gave a Macbook a serious try as my primary PC for a few months, only to give up because I really do need more of the keys provided on a standard PC keyboard. Dedicated page up/down, home/end, and insert/delete--not just the backspace. After 25 years of having those keys available for navigation when I type, not having them is a deal breaker for me.
That doesn't mean I'm happy with a Dell either. To get a reasonable screen quality and good quality full-size keyboard, I'm using a Thinkpad. That's a more fair comparison point, quality and price-wise, than Apple vs. Dell.
In We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the short story that "Total Recall" was inspired by, the structure of the plot is a bit different. At the point where Quaid begins heading toward Mars in the movie, in the story he instead returns to Rekal to have things sorted out--only to end with a second twist. So the basic question of "was the story written like that?" doesn't really apply. However, the fact that it's impossible to know for sure whether the whole thing was a particularly good implanted memory or actual events, that sort of ambiguity is certainly in the spirit of Dick's work. The best of the film translations are true to that element even when it goes "off-story" as it were. The whole debate over whether Deckard is a replicant or not in "Blade Runner" falls into the same category--that's unique to the film, introduced by Ridley Scott, Deckard is clearly just a regular guy in the novel. But having such uncertainty about what's real and what isn't, that's such a fundamental element to Dick's writing that it feels like part of the canon anyway.
Larry Ellison has already stated that he estimates Oracle was making about as much money from Java technology as Sun was. So whether or not the Java business was profitable for Sun, Oracle already knows how to productize it into profit, particularly after their purchase of BEA Weblogic. They paid 8.5B for BEA just to have a leading Java enterprise stack; do you really think they'd have fired Gosling when they consider Java that strategic?
You know how sometimes tech jobs request things like "Java: 15 years experience" that leave you screaming at the HR people that the language wasn't even released until 1996? While you're busy crying about that, James Gosling is going to laugh at you and take that job.
I ignored the rest of your post because it started with a faulty premise as a component to "the root of the problem", that properly motivated people would always be able to fund themselves as individuals. That's trivially easy to disprove, and it made the progression of your comments from there questionable.
At no point did I suggest I was in favor of the current legislation, or that I was any less frustrated than you with the difficulties involved in obtaining personal health insurance (I've been self-employed for much of my life and my political views lean toward libertarian, FYI). But you can't work out a solution to that problem without directly confronting the fact that sometimes, even the best attempt at individually funded health care is going to prove wildly underbudgeted in practice. You just can't manage individual risk and bound expected spending without drawing a line and saying it's OK to let people die once they've gone overbudget.
It might be possible to do better than the new bill by focusing simply on expanding availability of group coverage outside of large employers and improving the tax implications of doing so. I don't believe that was ever a realistic goal though--there are so few people in that situation that the lawmakers involved were never going to consider reform for them important.
You've picked a particularly poor demographic to make this comment toward. Are you suggesting the approximately 20% of diabetics suffering from a serious issue like Diabetic neuropathy, which often leaves one too sick to work for some period (perhaps permanently), are entirely at fault for their problems if they can't pay for their health care?
Your perspective is typical of a lucky person who has never been unable to work for a significant period of time due to medical issues. Even the best individual attempt to provide for savings, planning, and budgeting for medical expenses over a lifetime can get smashed in an instant of accident or disease.
There's already a Rock Band challenge available where you have to play all but one of the songs from Rush's "Moving Pictures" (no YYZ so a band singer won't get bored). If you can get through that on the drums at a higher level, playing all of "The Wall" is like taking a nap.
Of course, all these will seem easy compared to the musical complexity coming this June with Rock Band: Green Day. (sigh)
Let's see...they're releasing a sequel to a huge hit game, where if they just published it they're guaranteed to make a bundle. But then they changed something that makes every crank on the Internet do nothing but tell people they shouldn't buy it rather than getting excited about its release. Which part of that led you to have any faith there were not in fact utter morons?
I also enjoy that the implied "we've made this impossible to crack" gauntlet is making every DRM-cracking reverse engineer salivate at the thought of being the first one to do so. You can protect the data over the network with encryption, but it's going to get unencrypted before the game can use it, and that's where these things always fall apart at.
I inherited a Series 1 Tivo from a friend after its drive died and he was going to throw it away. Borrowed a similar unit from anoter friend, copied the drive using standard Linux tools, expanded to the new larger drive size; better than new, 80 hours instead of 30. Besides that failure, the Tivo worked from 2000 to 2009, and it's only retired now because it won't talk to any of the set top boxes I'd like it to anymore--and it won't tune over the air since the digital transition last year. Could fix the STB compatibility issue if I wanted to hack on it, just been too busy.
Several of my non-technical family members have Tivos and happily navigate the UI with only modest training. I write software for a living and I can barely make the Cabelco DVRs I've come across work like they're supposed to.
This is why I like my manual transmission: When the shit hits the fan, I just press as hard as I can on the clutch and brake while aiming at the softest object. As a bonus, if the clutch won't disengage, you can always use the shifter to rip the car out of gear.
I once had my shifter break off in my hand while downshifting for a turn along a busy street. After coming to a controlled stop in the middle of the road, best I could do given the situation, a police car came right behind me and yelled "move your car!" at me over his broadcast horn. Held up the remains of the shifter in my hand and yelled back "wish I could!".
In that case, your only chance is the brake overriding the gas (a process which should have been true from the beginning anyway).
The recommended workaround for this problem is actually to shift the car into neutral. The reason for the firmware upgrade is that most people will not think of that under pressure, and will instinctively slam on the break instead, which is of limited utility in some cases.
I don't think it's either a firmware or a pedal sensor bug alone--probably a bad combination of the two. The difficult bugs never have a single source.
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No, that problem goes back to 6.06.
There's this entire class of Linux issues that result from a lack of defensive programming prioritizing user feedback and good error logging. When you've gone several years with these nagging screen saver issues that keep popping up, with two different work arounds involving fixing permissions on files that are in unexpected states, at some point user focused development would say "hey, how about we present the user with more information about what goes wrong in these cases" or "why don't we log more info about the common issues we've seen in the field when this occurs." Instead, Canonical's idea of being user focused is to add new whiz-bang features every release. News flash: you got all the main features people wanted as of Feisty. This is why your top ranked Brainstorm requests are for bug fixes and cleanup of existing features, not introduction of new ones.
9.04 was not a LTS version; 8.04 and 10.04 are. However, had you said "8.04 is still of bugs that nobody gives a damn about", then the rest of your comments would be correct. The biggest question in my mind is why in the world they don't use the LTS versions to at least put on a facade of stabilization focus for. As an example of the ridiculous changes introduced into the last LTS, 8.04 introduced PulseAudio in a very buggy form, making that LTS unsuitable to use for anyone who needed sound during its entire lifetime. It shipped unstable, and the necessary bug fixes to make it stable I ran into were all "fixed in next release" and not backported. I rolled forward into 8.10 and 9.04 while they were in beta, because they were still better than 8.04 "stable". Now we get this LTS with Canonical worrying about worthless crap like the MeMenu as a major feature.
How about Mother Teresa, Gandi, and some other people? Maybe some Jewish people who were persecuted by Hitler? Gays? I'm sure there are people out of bounds they wouldn't mock. hmm They mock the Jewish boy - but only by a kid everybody hates. So that doesn't count I don't think.
Mother Teresa was called out by name in one of the songs in their movie. Gandhi has appeared twice, and they even put him in Hell (because he's not a Mormon, and everyone but the Mormons go to Hell you see). The Major Boobage episode featured a whole section spoofing Anne Frank's Diary, with Cartman being trapped in his attic due to persecution for having a cat. The fourth episode of the show, Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride spoofed being gay in general, and that goes on quite regularly still--Mr. Slave and D-Yikes! come to mind.
Sierra, a commercial enterprise that turns out to be of little historical significance
Uh, what? Sierra reinvented the entire adventure game genre with graphics starting with "Mystery House" , in the process providing a model for how to build a gaming business from plastic bag distribution to giant company. And their Sierra On-line modem-based gaming service was one of the very first places you could play the sort of graphical multi-player games that everyone now takes for granted. Oh, and since "Hackers" was released, they invented the internet MMORPG too. And then there's the whole saga around the IBM PCjr and King's Quest...
Exactly, take a look at the list of potential exploits just from the limited access the crappy UPnP port forwarding configuration has exposed. If there were an easy to use tool for making larger firewall changes introduced to the world, it's guaranteed that there will be hundreds if not many thousands of exploited machines using it for every person who benefits from the feature. The limited stealthiness provided by the standard hardware NAT firewall most people have for their always on DSL/Cable/Fiber installs is the only thing saving them from being hacked within minutes of hooking a new PC up. This is why the idea of easier firewall configuration is dead in the water--the fact that it's hard keeps people who aren't qualified to make these changes from destroying their own security any worse than they already do.
All non-trivial software nowadays is built with an enormous reliance on some set of shared libraries. As time marches on, those libraries will diverge from the ones the software originally compiled against. Eventually, some API will drift enough that code stops working, and that's where the most difficult to avoid bit rot comes from.
Yes, you can keep code going without rot forever if you can completely freeze the build/deployment environment. But that's rarely practical. Eventually you will need a newer OS, which is going to ship with a new set of libraries, because the old one won't run on newer hardware for example. And that's where having the source and being able to rebuild the code yourself is potentially valuable, if you have the right skills to be able to fix this class of problem.
Is it on-topic to point out that I can't see that comparison chart because the Java in my web browser is broken again?
Apple has been a closed platform pretty much since the very beginning.
You mean the Macintosh platform has been a closed platform since the beginning. Apple's first platform, the Apple I, was so open it came with source code and schematics.
Counting on your fingers/toes presumes a binary state for each and starting at zero. If you're going to allow cheating, why stop at three? You can theoretically add an infinite number of finger positions that each represent a different value, based on what angle you hold them at. I count about six angles I could easily distinguish among given enough muscle control and patience, mainly limited by the range of motion of my thumb, which makes for counting up to 60 million. But who has that kind of time?
As for saying you don't have to represent zero, you can presume whatever offset you like if you're allowing that trick. Why not say counting starts at 10 and you can count to 1032? And representing a value with "no hands up" isn't counting with your just your fingers anymore. Allow counting using any part of your body and then...well let's just say there's a YouPorn video you don't want to watch covering that.
Unless you have more than 10 fingers, you can only count to 1023 with them, not 1025. It's 2^10 - 1, not +1. Since the person you were mocking didn't catch this error either, I hope the both of you will be vacating my lawn now.
You don't seem to be aware that Downey's contract already requires him to be in the Avengers.
That still doesn't make me optimistic about this movie getting made by him. Your comments about Whedon getting played by the movie executives seem quite familiar, given how he was assigned to Wonder Woman, got all worked up over it, and here we are five years later with no sign of a movie.
It looks like the bet they're making is that including Facebook and Twitter support is a complete replacement for the traditional IM client. I'm not so sure that decision is so terrible from a marketing perspective. The trend I'm seeing is that old school IM clients just aren't as popular among less serious users nowadays; I get Facebook messages from all sorts of people I know would never bother getting a "real" IM account, or who have never figured out they already have one via Gmail.
Ultimately the real limitations of this phone aren't going to apparent until the matching data plan is announced. How much it will cost to download all the Twilight ringtones and background images that will obviously be introduced for this phone? These are the important questions. So far we already know that updates from some sites are put into 15 minute batches, presumably to same on network bandwidth, which doesn't bode well.
and the keyboard and screen are superior
I can't accept the "superior" claim on the keyboard given how limited it is. I gave a Macbook a serious try as my primary PC for a few months, only to give up because I really do need more of the keys provided on a standard PC keyboard. Dedicated page up/down, home/end, and insert/delete--not just the backspace. After 25 years of having those keys available for navigation when I type, not having them is a deal breaker for me.
That doesn't mean I'm happy with a Dell either. To get a reasonable screen quality and good quality full-size keyboard, I'm using a Thinkpad. That's a more fair comparison point, quality and price-wise, than Apple vs. Dell.
In We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, the short story that "Total Recall" was inspired by, the structure of the plot is a bit different. At the point where Quaid begins heading toward Mars in the movie, in the story he instead returns to Rekal to have things sorted out--only to end with a second twist. So the basic question of "was the story written like that?" doesn't really apply. However, the fact that it's impossible to know for sure whether the whole thing was a particularly good implanted memory or actual events, that sort of ambiguity is certainly in the spirit of Dick's work. The best of the film translations are true to that element even when it goes "off-story" as it were. The whole debate over whether Deckard is a replicant or not in "Blade Runner" falls into the same category--that's unique to the film, introduced by Ridley Scott, Deckard is clearly just a regular guy in the novel. But having such uncertainty about what's real and what isn't, that's such a fundamental element to Dick's writing that it feels like part of the canon anyway.
Larry Ellison has already stated that he estimates Oracle was making about as much money from Java technology as Sun was. So whether or not the Java business was profitable for Sun, Oracle already knows how to productize it into profit, particularly after their purchase of BEA Weblogic. They paid 8.5B for BEA just to have a leading Java enterprise stack; do you really think they'd have fired Gosling when they consider Java that strategic?
You know how sometimes tech jobs request things like "Java: 15 years experience" that leave you screaming at the HR people that the language wasn't even released until 1996? While you're busy crying about that, James Gosling is going to laugh at you and take that job.
I ignored the rest of your post because it started with a faulty premise as a component to "the root of the problem", that properly motivated people would always be able to fund themselves as individuals. That's trivially easy to disprove, and it made the progression of your comments from there questionable.
At no point did I suggest I was in favor of the current legislation, or that I was any less frustrated than you with the difficulties involved in obtaining personal health insurance (I've been self-employed for much of my life and my political views lean toward libertarian, FYI). But you can't work out a solution to that problem without directly confronting the fact that sometimes, even the best attempt at individually funded health care is going to prove wildly underbudgeted in practice. You just can't manage individual risk and bound expected spending without drawing a line and saying it's OK to let people die once they've gone overbudget.
It might be possible to do better than the new bill by focusing simply on expanding availability of group coverage outside of large employers and improving the tax implications of doing so. I don't believe that was ever a realistic goal though--there are so few people in that situation that the lawmakers involved were never going to consider reform for them important.
You've picked a particularly poor demographic to make this comment toward. Are you suggesting the approximately 20% of diabetics suffering from a serious issue like Diabetic neuropathy, which often leaves one too sick to work for some period (perhaps permanently), are entirely at fault for their problems if they can't pay for their health care?
Your perspective is typical of a lucky person who has never been unable to work for a significant period of time due to medical issues. Even the best individual attempt to provide for savings, planning, and budgeting for medical expenses over a lifetime can get smashed in an instant of accident or disease.
Maybe they should make a special guitar-controller with only three buttons.
I'm glad to see you had joined in on the joke I was making by the end here.
There's already a Rock Band challenge available where you have to play all but one of the songs from Rush's "Moving Pictures" (no YYZ so a band singer won't get bored). If you can get through that on the drums at a higher level, playing all of "The Wall" is like taking a nap.
Of course, all these will seem easy compared to the musical complexity coming this June with Rock Band: Green Day. (sigh)
If you think your respect for Slashdot is low now, wait until a bad dupe of this story is posted in a few days.
Unless Ubisoft are utter morons...
Let's see...they're releasing a sequel to a huge hit game, where if they just published it they're guaranteed to make a bundle. But then they changed something that makes every crank on the Internet do nothing but tell people they shouldn't buy it rather than getting excited about its release. Which part of that led you to have any faith there were not in fact utter morons?
I also enjoy that the implied "we've made this impossible to crack" gauntlet is making every DRM-cracking reverse engineer salivate at the thought of being the first one to do so. You can protect the data over the network with encryption, but it's going to get unencrypted before the game can use it, and that's where these things always fall apart at.
I inherited a Series 1 Tivo from a friend after its drive died and he was going to throw it away. Borrowed a similar unit from anoter friend, copied the drive using standard Linux tools, expanded to the new larger drive size; better than new, 80 hours instead of 30. Besides that failure, the Tivo worked from 2000 to 2009, and it's only retired now because it won't talk to any of the set top boxes I'd like it to anymore--and it won't tune over the air since the digital transition last year. Could fix the STB compatibility issue if I wanted to hack on it, just been too busy.
Several of my non-technical family members have Tivos and happily navigate the UI with only modest training. I write software for a living and I can barely make the Cabelco DVRs I've come across work like they're supposed to.
This is why I like my manual transmission: When the shit hits the fan, I just press as hard as I can on the clutch and brake while aiming at the softest object. As a bonus, if the clutch won't disengage, you can always use the shifter to rip the car out of gear.
I once had my shifter break off in my hand while downshifting for a turn along a busy street. After coming to a controlled stop in the middle of the road, best I could do given the situation, a police car came right behind me and yelled "move your car!" at me over his broadcast horn. Held up the remains of the shifter in my hand and yelled back "wish I could!".
In that case, your only chance is the brake overriding the gas (a process which should have been true from the beginning anyway).
The recommended workaround for this problem is actually to shift the car into neutral. The reason for the firmware upgrade is that most people will not think of that under pressure, and will instinctively slam on the break instead, which is of limited utility in some cases.
I don't think it's either a firmware or a pedal sensor bug alone--probably a bad combination of the two. The difficult bugs never have a single source.