We have no interest in him yet we're willing to make the totally unprecedented move that defies all international convention and precedence on the issue of embassies of revoking the Ecuadorian right to an embassy in our country?
The totally unprecedented move which defies international convention is the Ecuador government's decision to grant asylum to a person accused of several crimes, one being a breach of bail; and the other one being rape. The Vienna Convention and international law do not allow embassies to be used for this purpose.
That is why I suspect the Ecuador government will feel compelled to change their mind about this matter and expel Assange from their embassy first.
Why don't we just let Ecuador fly him to Ecuador and let Sweden/Ecuador sort it out through their own channels?
Because that would be conspiring to allow a person facing allegations of criminal conduct to escape justice, and as such would severely damage the UK's international reputation.
Again, this is rather forceful language - "no matter what"? are you sure about that? are you sure that he wont manage to get to Ecuador and 30 years down the line when global geopolitics have changed and anything Assange has done wrong is forgotten the charges are dropped?
It's nothing to do with global geopolitics. It's a rape accusation. I am not sure how you think this is supposed to work. Can you outline the conditions generally where the police should be denied the right to question people over suspicion of involvement in crime ?
The Libyan government surrounded the UK embassy in Tripoli. I think it is pretty obvious that had the UK acted against the Libyan embassy, any action would have been echoed in Tripoli. To arrest and prosecute the a Libyan would have endangered the lives of the UK embassy staff in Tripoli. It's a shitty situation, but nothing like as simple as you suggest.
Pinochet's extradition was refused on health grounds and other legal technical matters, and there was a long period of legal to/froing. Yes that is terribly "convenient" and my instinct would have been that the old bastard should have been sent back to serve time anyway. But Assange's case is rather more simple. He is faced with allegations of rape; the courts have found that those allegations are credible and that the extradition warrant against him is valid.
Because the police don't have the authority to interview, or potentially charge, anyone outside of their jurisdiction unless a specific international treaty is made for this purpose (ie Lockerbie bombing trial).
The UK laid siege to the Libyan embassy. The Libyan government laid siege to the UK embassy in Tripoli. Obviously, if the UK had arrested anyone who left the embassy the Libyans would have responded in kind. In the end the choice was either to do a deal with the Libyans or see a UK diplomat imprisoned by the Libyan junta.
The 1987 legislation doesn't change the realpolitik here. In any case international law always had provision for the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges.
I doubt there will be any siege or any withdrawal of privileges. This matter will drag on for a few months with Assange essentially under house arrest within the embassy, unable to leave. I suspect the Ecuador government will back down.
Look, this obsession with real time kernels and OS cores is nonsense. Apple built their product line on a *BSD core, they polished and optimized the phone and created the market leader. The OS kernel is not the defining characteristic of the user experience. What matters is attention to detail, UI and software design.
BTW real-time kernels do not excel at optimizing performance. Their design objective is to sacrifice overall performance by maximizing performance for certain specific tasks. If you can't build a decent, smooth and responsive UI on today's 1Ghz dual-core CPU cores with an off the shelf modern OS kernel (of any kind) you are, quite obviously, doing it wrong.
Apple are not going to release a "cheap" anything. If Apple is about anything, it is about exclusivity and brand prestige. They are happy to make money cornering a small part of the market.
ARM processors in notebooks will potentially supplant x86 in that chromebook/netbook consumer sector you disparagingly referred to, for people doing Internet and basic office activities etc. They won't do for games, development, oil/gas/seismic/etc, CAD, or anything else that requires serious CPU throughput.
ZFS is intended to use cheap, recent hardware to deliver high performance. The idea is that you'll build a box with gobs of RAM, SSDs and CPUs and save significant amounts of money compared to buying a similarly specced storage box from one of the major enterprise storage vendors.
I agree that ZFS on a SAN doesn't make sense, but that seems to be to have been the intention; ZFS wasn't aiming to work with your SAN, it is aiming to replace it, and I'm sure had the guys at Sun remained in control SAN features would have been added to it. That's why NetApp brought them to court.
Are you sure that is correct ? I'd have thought the license is very relevant. The question of whether or not something is a kernel module, or dynamically linked or whatever, is extraneous to the important question which is whether or not a derived work is being created and therefore whether or not the license can be satisfied.
By distributing a kernel module, you are distributing a derived work in a way that cannot simultaneously satisfy the requirements of both the CDDL and the GPL. That's why you'll never see these ZFS or dtrace modules included as part of a distribution. Which is a major hamper on the development of this work, since it is the major distribution vendors and other major firms (HP, IBM and so on) who fund the lion's share of the effort
The guys who are distributing binary packages of these components are running the very real risk that Oracle will sue them. Sun licensed these components under the CDDL rather than the GPL for a damn good reason, they did not want to allow Linux to cherry pick the best bits and then use them to defeat Solaris in the marketplace.
--Probably not. The Telegraph is a UK publication, and the title seems deliberately designed NOT to call out Airbus. See #3...
It may not be something which is immediately obvious, but there is a faction of the conservative right in the UK (for whom the Telegraph would be the tribune of choice) whose outlook is Atlanticist, rather than European; this view brings with it a hostility to all things French (even though Airbus' owner EADS does a lot of job-creating business in the UK) and this article does read a little bit like something those guys might come up with.
Even if we assume that the accident would have been avoided had the control stick behaviour incorporated feedback, it remains the case that this possibility did not occur to the regulatory authorities in either the USA or the UK, despite the fact that it is fairly well known that Boeing would have well-placed friends in high places within the US Government who surely would have had no problems using this idea as a pretext to cast doubt over the safety of the aircraft. As such, all of this sounds a bit like closing the door after the horse has bolted..
A process can guarantee that it is allocated CPU time by using one of the kernel's real-time scheduling policies (SCHED_FIFO/SCHED_RR). These are scheduled independently and ahead of any non-realtime processes.
This is not, however, a substitute for good design. If the system has been designed properly, it will mostly work fine without having to use the real time scheduler (but may need it to ensure that all of the tight spots are covered). If the system contains a lot of processes all competing for CPU at the same time, the scheduler is simply a way of robbing Peter to pay Paul; something is going to suffer; the scheduler cannot change that reality. The design has to therefore be clear that some processes will be treated well and some will be treated badly.
With this in mind, the distinction between Linux and a true RTOS small enough that it no longer matters. Which is why the old school RTOSes are fading away into niche markets where those microseconds really do matter, eg avionics etc.
Look at what is dominating the market at the moment. Apple's iOS is almost certainly closely related to OSX with its BSD lineage. Android is, as everyone knows, Linux with some tweaks. Nobody complains that these platforms are not responsive. The reality is that the hardware has caught up to the point where it is plainly no longer necessary for the OS to be frugal about RAM and CPU cycles.
In that context, the claim that an RTOS is required seems like a straightforward case of premature optimization.
A møøse once bit my sister.. no realli! She was Karving her initials on the moose with the sharpened end of an interspace toothbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian movies: "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"...
Yeah I was about to say "non-x86" until I remembered that Itanium was in there. I've never used an Itanium box but I had guessed that it wouldn't be conceptually completely divorced from the x86.
I've not done a massive amount of work at the low level on x86 but from what I've seen it's massively more complicated than ARM, especially all the addressing mode silliness. But of course none of that should matter. Keeping an OS portable across architectures is not as hard these days as it might once have been.
On the contrary, Windows NT ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Dec Alpha back in the day.
Even after Microsoft dropped support for non-Intel architectures with Windows 2000, it was rumoured that they maintained the ports to ensure that they did not break portability.
Spoon feeding some government sponsored syllabus is not going to achieve that.
The funny thing is that the experience the Raspberry Pi draws its inspiration from (the BBC Micro) practically was a spoon-fed government syllabus. The BBC (a government body) specified the computer, and the education authorities were all encouraged to purchase BBC machines for the schools they were in charge of.
The "ridiculous branches" are all accountable to politicians, who do indeed have the power to stop this. That they choose not to do so, and that the population choose not to become agitated over it, is a matter which is nothing to do with the size of the government. The fact that the USA has reached a political equilibrium centred around two large parties who differ on principles but are substantially similar in practice and implementation is symptomatic of your real core problem here, which is a system of government that is increasingly logjammed. Americans still aren't debating, as far as I can tell, the reasons for that problem and how it may be solved.
It's worth adding that the USA has the smallest government of any Western country, in terms of the proportion of GDP which is government spending. That's even allowing for the fact that the USA's multiple interwoven layers of government (federal, state, county, city, in some cases each with their own executive, legislative and judicial branches) are substantially more burdensome in terms of overall bureaucracy than most Western countries.
"Freedom" is not a function of the size of the government. There is no reason why social programs and government regulation mean that the government must conduct this kind of monitoring and surveillance of its own citizens.
Er, Linux won't run in 16KB RAM. I don't think it ever did. Usually, embedded devices have a cache. Indeed RISC CPUs with their instruction throughput are more dependent on a cache than would otherwise be the case.
I'm an embedded developer by trade and I've seen projects using both glibc and uclibc. I'd gravitate towards uclibc on the basis that it is small, lightweight and easy for me to poke around in compared with the glibc behemoth; these things are all important. On the other hand, uclibc occasionally has some stupid bugs, like a leap year bug that was fixed recently, and which showed up about a year back.
Yeah, but he says "at least 80% of all crashes and hangs on my Mac" and then talks about how "iOS lives quite happily without Flash" but yeah, I'm sure he was referring to his browser and not to the whole machine.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of leaving a change in place because it renders subtle bugs in crappy code visible, but to an end user it looks like your change broke his web browser for no reason. If the reverse memcpy (not malloc, thanks gnasher719) was faster it would make sense, but Torvalds' testing showed that it appeared to be slower.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic, but if your OS is crashing or hanging due to Adobe Flash or any other user space application, then your OS is broken. Memory protection is not new.
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We have no interest in him yet we're willing to make the totally unprecedented move that defies all international convention and precedence on the issue of embassies of revoking the Ecuadorian right to an embassy in our country?
The totally unprecedented move which defies international convention is the Ecuador government's decision to grant asylum to a person accused of several crimes, one being a breach of bail; and the other one being rape. The Vienna Convention and international law do not allow embassies to be used for this purpose.
That is why I suspect the Ecuador government will feel compelled to change their mind about this matter and expel Assange from their embassy first.
Why don't we just let Ecuador fly him to Ecuador and let Sweden/Ecuador sort it out through their own channels?
Because that would be conspiring to allow a person facing allegations of criminal conduct to escape justice, and as such would severely damage the UK's international reputation.
Again, this is rather forceful language - "no matter what"? are you sure about that? are you sure that he wont manage to get to Ecuador and 30 years down the line when global geopolitics have changed and anything Assange has done wrong is forgotten the charges are dropped?
It's nothing to do with global geopolitics. It's a rape accusation. I am not sure how you think this is supposed to work. Can you outline the conditions generally where the police should be denied the right to question people over suspicion of involvement in crime ?
The Libyan government surrounded the UK embassy in Tripoli. I think it is pretty obvious that had the UK acted against the Libyan embassy, any action would have been echoed in Tripoli. To arrest and prosecute the a Libyan would have endangered the lives of the UK embassy staff in Tripoli. It's a shitty situation, but nothing like as simple as you suggest.
Pinochet's extradition was refused on health grounds and other legal technical matters, and there was a long period of legal to/froing. Yes that is terribly "convenient" and my instinct would have been that the old bastard should have been sent back to serve time anyway. But Assange's case is rather more simple. He is faced with allegations of rape; the courts have found that those allegations are credible and that the extradition warrant against him is valid.
Because the police don't have the authority to interview, or potentially charge, anyone outside of their jurisdiction unless a specific international treaty is made for this purpose (ie Lockerbie bombing trial).
The UK laid siege to the Libyan embassy. The Libyan government laid siege to the UK embassy in Tripoli. Obviously, if the UK had arrested anyone who left the embassy the Libyans would have responded in kind. In the end the choice was either to do a deal with the Libyans or see a UK diplomat imprisoned by the Libyan junta.
The 1987 legislation doesn't change the realpolitik here. In any case international law always had provision for the withdrawal of diplomatic privileges.
I doubt there will be any siege or any withdrawal of privileges. This matter will drag on for a few months with Assange essentially under house arrest within the embassy, unable to leave. I suspect the Ecuador government will back down.
I'm at a loss as to why anyone would prioritize back-porting security fixes.
The device is intended for hobbyists, not mission critical internet-facing applications.
Look, this obsession with real time kernels and OS cores is nonsense. Apple built their product line on a *BSD core, they polished and optimized the phone and created the market leader. The OS kernel is not the defining characteristic of the user experience. What matters is attention to detail, UI and software design.
BTW real-time kernels do not excel at optimizing performance. Their design objective is to sacrifice overall performance by maximizing performance for certain specific tasks. If you can't build a decent, smooth and responsive UI on today's 1Ghz dual-core CPU cores with an off the shelf modern OS kernel (of any kind) you are, quite obviously, doing it wrong.
That's a bit simplistic. Corporation tax is part of the package. The other part involves a well educated, English speaking population.
A lot of the eastern European ex-soviet bloc states have very low rates of corporation tax, yet firms do not rush to set up there.
Apple are not going to release a "cheap" anything. If Apple is about anything, it is about exclusivity and brand prestige. They are happy to make money cornering a small part of the market.
ARM processors in notebooks will potentially supplant x86 in that chromebook/netbook consumer sector you disparagingly referred to, for people doing Internet and basic office activities etc. They won't do for games, development, oil/gas/seismic/etc, CAD, or anything else that requires serious CPU throughput.
ZFS is intended to use cheap, recent hardware to deliver high performance. The idea is that you'll build a box with gobs of RAM, SSDs and CPUs and save significant amounts of money compared to buying a similarly specced storage box from one of the major enterprise storage vendors.
I agree that ZFS on a SAN doesn't make sense, but that seems to be to have been the intention; ZFS wasn't aiming to work with your SAN, it is aiming to replace it, and I'm sure had the guys at Sun remained in control SAN features would have been added to it. That's why NetApp brought them to court.
Are you sure that is correct ? I'd have thought the license is very relevant. The question of whether or not something is a kernel module, or dynamically linked or whatever, is extraneous to the important question which is whether or not a derived work is being created and therefore whether or not the license can be satisfied.
By distributing a kernel module, you are distributing a derived work in a way that cannot simultaneously satisfy the requirements of both the CDDL and the GPL. That's why you'll never see these ZFS or dtrace modules included as part of a distribution. Which is a major hamper on the development of this work, since it is the major distribution vendors and other major firms (HP, IBM and so on) who fund the lion's share of the effort
The guys who are distributing binary packages of these components are running the very real risk that Oracle will sue them. Sun licensed these components under the CDDL rather than the GPL for a damn good reason, they did not want to allow Linux to cherry pick the best bits and then use them to defeat Solaris in the marketplace.
--Probably not. The Telegraph is a UK publication, and the title seems deliberately designed NOT to call out Airbus. See #3...
It may not be something which is immediately obvious, but there is a faction of the conservative right in the UK (for whom the Telegraph would be the tribune of choice) whose outlook is Atlanticist, rather than European; this view brings with it a hostility to all things French (even though Airbus' owner EADS does a lot of job-creating business in the UK) and this article does read a little bit like something those guys might come up with.
Even if we assume that the accident would have been avoided had the control stick behaviour incorporated feedback, it remains the case that this possibility did not occur to the regulatory authorities in either the USA or the UK, despite the fact that it is fairly well known that Boeing would have well-placed friends in high places within the US Government who surely would have had no problems using this idea as a pretext to cast doubt over the safety of the aircraft. As such, all of this sounds a bit like closing the door after the horse has bolted ..
A process can guarantee that it is allocated CPU time by using one of the kernel's real-time scheduling policies (SCHED_FIFO/SCHED_RR). These are scheduled independently and ahead of any non-realtime processes.
This is not, however, a substitute for good design. If the system has been designed properly, it will mostly work fine without having to use the real time scheduler (but may need it to ensure that all of the tight spots are covered). If the system contains a lot of processes all competing for CPU at the same time, the scheduler is simply a way of robbing Peter to pay Paul; something is going to suffer; the scheduler cannot change that reality. The design has to therefore be clear that some processes will be treated well and some will be treated badly.
With this in mind, the distinction between Linux and a true RTOS small enough that it no longer matters. Which is why the old school RTOSes are fading away into niche markets where those microseconds really do matter, eg avionics etc.
Look at what is dominating the market at the moment. Apple's iOS is almost certainly closely related to OSX with its BSD lineage. Android is, as everyone knows, Linux with some tweaks. Nobody complains that these platforms are not responsive. The reality is that the hardware has caught up to the point where it is plainly no longer necessary for the OS to be frugal about RAM and CPU cycles.
In that context, the claim that an RTOS is required seems like a straightforward case of premature optimization.
Must be pinin' for debconf.
A møøse once bit my sister .. no realli! She was Karving her initials on the moose with the sharpened end of an interspace toothbrush given her by Svenge - her brother-in-law - an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian movies: "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"...
Yeah I was about to say "non-x86" until I remembered that Itanium was in there. I've never used an Itanium box but I had guessed that it wouldn't be conceptually completely divorced from the x86.
I've not done a massive amount of work at the low level on x86 but from what I've seen it's massively more complicated than ARM, especially all the addressing mode silliness. But of course none of that should matter. Keeping an OS portable across architectures is not as hard these days as it might once have been.
On the contrary, Windows NT ran on MIPS, PowerPC and Dec Alpha back in the day.
Even after Microsoft dropped support for non-Intel architectures with Windows 2000, it was rumoured that they maintained the ports to ensure that they did not break portability.
Spoon feeding some government sponsored syllabus is not going to achieve that.
The funny thing is that the experience the Raspberry Pi draws its inspiration from (the BBC Micro) practically was a spoon-fed government syllabus. The BBC (a government body) specified the computer, and the education authorities were all encouraged to purchase BBC machines for the schools they were in charge of.
It was a very good thing.
Piffle.
The "ridiculous branches" are all accountable to politicians, who do indeed have the power to stop this. That they choose not to do so, and that the population choose not to become agitated over it, is a matter which is nothing to do with the size of the government. The fact that the USA has reached a political equilibrium centred around two large parties who differ on principles but are substantially similar in practice and implementation is symptomatic of your real core problem here, which is a system of government that is increasingly logjammed. Americans still aren't debating, as far as I can tell, the reasons for that problem and how it may be solved.
It's worth adding that the USA has the smallest government of any Western country, in terms of the proportion of GDP which is government spending. That's even allowing for the fact that the USA's multiple interwoven layers of government (federal, state, county, city, in some cases each with their own executive, legislative and judicial branches) are substantially more burdensome in terms of overall bureaucracy than most Western countries.
"Freedom" is not a function of the size of the government. There is no reason why social programs and government regulation mean that the government must conduct this kind of monitoring and surveillance of its own citizens.
Er, Linux won't run in 16KB RAM. I don't think it ever did. Usually, embedded devices have a cache. Indeed RISC CPUs with their instruction throughput are more dependent on a cache than would otherwise be the case.
I'm an embedded developer by trade and I've seen projects using both glibc and uclibc. I'd gravitate towards uclibc on the basis that it is small, lightweight and easy for me to poke around in compared with the glibc behemoth; these things are all important. On the other hand, uclibc occasionally has some stupid bugs, like a leap year bug that was fixed recently, and which showed up about a year back.
Yeah, but he says "at least 80% of all crashes and hangs on my Mac" and then talks about how "iOS lives quite happily without Flash" but yeah, I'm sure he was referring to his browser and not to the whole machine.
I'm sympathetic to the idea of leaving a change in place because it renders subtle bugs in crappy code visible, but to an end user it looks like your change broke his web browser for no reason. If the reverse memcpy (not malloc, thanks gnasher719) was faster it would make sense, but Torvalds' testing showed that it appeared to be slower.
I hope I'm not being too pedantic, but if your OS is crashing or hanging due to Adobe Flash or any other user space application, then your OS is broken. Memory protection is not new.