Gee...and here I thought the premise of this thread was that it was Apple haters, not Apple lovers, making the unfounded claims.
In any case, it was only 2-3 years ago that I gave up on them (and before your rabid fanboy mind starts making more unfounded claims...no, I wasn't using 15 year old hardware).
That's true. The 2 are correlated, but I suspect you have the causation backwards. It's not that the flaws affect us because we don't use Apple products, but rather that we don't use Apple products because the flaws affected us. At least that's the case for me. I actually gave Apple a shot for a few years, and the longer I did, the more I regretted it, so I'm done with them now.
In theory, that's a brilliant idea. However, you know the reality of an actual implementation would be an unsecured/poorly secured communications protocol resulting in some sick teenagers being able to remotely drive some unsuspecting kid out into the street.
To me, that doesn't seem to be so much a "rift" as it is that Cyanogen had a couple of players to pick from, and the one they liked best wanted an exclusive arrangement, so the other lost out. Not surprising they'd pick the one with more experience in that market over the one that is just getting started.
With all the constant trouble I, and many others had with the pre order system, I decided to ditch these guys. Their customer service was not great, and to screw up the most basic part of any business (taking peoples money), I decided my best bet was to just get raped by one of the big 4, and buy a contract phone.
Sadly, I was looking forward to this phone for quite a while, but I'm tired of the mistakes and gimmicks for what amounts to last years phone.
Yes it was unfortunate that they had some issues on the payment processing, and it did result in some people getting their phones out of sequence (later purchasers got it shipped before earlier purchasers), and they handled the PR of it pretty badly (posting nothing on facebook/g+/forums etc, and the only info coming out was from an employee posting on reddit).
But even so, the vast majority of people got their phones shipped by the date they were promised. For the most part everyone ended up alright. And I must say, the phone is incredible. Especially the battery life. I've actually made it through 2 whole days without charging, and that even included a bit of actual use. Other phones I've had, even if I never turned the screen on, I'd be lucky to make it 36 hours.
The only thing that has really disappointed me about the phone is the slow-mo video capture (60fps or 120fps). When you turn those on, the video quality becomes terrible. 720p 120fps looks like a really bad 480p video, and 1080p 60fps isn't much better. Some people think there may be a software fix, and I hope I'm wrong, but my guess is that even with the reduced resolution, it's just too many frames to push through the video processor and it has to choose a really low bitrate to keep up. The 4k video at 30fps, however, is great. Super high bitrate too (I think my tests came out at something like 60-70 Mpbs).
Even if you didn't get raped elsewhere, I think it was a bad move to bail out on your preorder, but since you also got raped in the process....doubly bad move on your part. You let emotions overrule logic.
I'd personally disagree that its a problem. In fact, one 16x9 still isn't wide enough. Two of them is ideal for me. The main monitor for my coding tool, and the 2nd monitor to have 2 web pages loaded side by side. In my main window, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the width is used for my actual code, and the rest used for other panel (project file list, debug panels, etc). If my 2nd monitor wasn't so wide, I either wouldn't have access to the extra panels, or I'd have to put them across the bottom (negating the advantage of making it taller).
Wrong. Amazon DOES charge the same price for everybody. They did experiment with different prices for different customers a few years back, but they got some bad media attention over it and discontinued it:
No, your local brick and mortar store is at a 15-30% disadvantage simply because they charge a lot more for most things.
It really depends on what you are talking about. Since having kids a few years back, I've been absolutely surprised how, at least 95% of the time, toys are cheaper at the local Toys R Us than they are at amazon or anyplace else online. And that's even if you include sales tax. And that doesn't even include the fact that TRU has 20% off coupons fairly often, and you get a couple % back if you have rewards card, and you can often find TRU gift cards 10-20% off (I don't see the same level of discounts on Amazon gift cards).
The two exceptions I've seen to that (ie: cheaper on amazon): 1) innotab games (which is sort of a toy, though falls more into the electronics category) 2) Thomas the Train wooden train cars
Other than those, I've only found a couple other random items cheaper on amazon. Everything else is cheaper at TRU
Which trivializes the use of "always" by shrinking the timespan, making the claim tautological. No one speaks English that way who is honestly trying to communicate.
Really? I think you might need a better grasp on usage of the word. Go look at the examples on OED, and you will see many example usages (even some from hundreds of years ago) where "always" does not work the way you seem to think it does.
And it is still factually incorrect, since the Apple Watch is shown at the traditional 10:09 time for watch displays.
Well....now that I can't comment on. I'm not an apple fan, and don't pay attention to any of their advertising, so I wouldn't have a clue to the accuracy of the statement. I'm just speaking about the usage of the language in that particular instance, given the info that was presented there.
Right. But the headline said "is always", not "has always been". The word "is" denotes the present era. Currently any time you see it, it is 9:41. So to restate it:
It used to be that every time you saw it, it WAS always set to 9:42, but now, since the introduction of the iPad, it IS always set to 9:41.
I'm shocked, I tell you. Just absolutely shocked. *LOL*
I know you are trying to be funny, but to be serious, it's not as if this is a common thing for google as far as I'm aware. Google generally is one of the best at making things work cross browser. Usually when it's not, it's because the feature has no equivalent in other browser. Ex: google's desktop notifications or cloud print features...I'm not aware of any other browsers having something equivalent. If someone has a list of things that COULD be don'e across multiple browsers (preferably in a standardized way, but I'd even accept non-standard) and yet google didn't, I'd appreciate seeing it.
BBC basic was interpreted, not compiled (though there may have been compilers written for it since).
It was my original instinct to say the same (since nearly all basic languages are), but I looked it up on wikipedia before posting and found that there was indeed a compiler for it:
A Compiler for BBC BASIC V was produced by Paul Fellows, team leader of the Arthur OS development, and published initially by DABS Press.[citation needed] This was able to implement almost all of the language, with the obvious exception of the EVAL function – which inevitably required run-time programmatic interpretation. As evidence of its completeness, it was able to support in-line assembler syntax. The compiler itself was written in BBC BASIC. The compiler (running under the interpreter in the early development stages) was able to compile itself, and versions that were distributed were self-compiled object code.[original research?] Many applications initially written to run under the interpreter benefitted from the performance boost that this gave, putting BBC BASIC on a par with other languages for serious application development.
There's not a whole lot of info about it on wikipedia, and it doesn't even say when it was written (and there are no citations), so I have no idea if it was something recent or very old.
Actually, it is written for resource efficiency...specifically program size, which uses memory. The goal was to write a 1 line program, and in BBC Basic, that meant they were limited to 256 characters. Yes, maybe they could have wrote things with more verbose naming and had it compile to the same size, but the particular goal there was to write something big with little code. I think they accomplished it fairly well, and probably 95% (at least) of programmers would be hard pressed to replicate their results. I suspect the people capable of accomplishing that would be capable of similar accomplishments on an embedded platform, given the necessary experience with the particular hardware.
If anybody wrote code like that for me, they'd be made to sit on the naughty step and think very, very hard about what they'd done.
Unless, of course, you were developing for embedded hardware, where you are trying to do way too many things with way too few resources***. Then you'd give that programmer a promotion.
***Although those days are gradually coming to an end, as even the tiniest systems are getting more and more resources, and eventually they'll all join the rest of us, where readability, verifiability, and maintainability take top priority. But for now, they're not all quite there yet.
Apple clings so much to legacy hardware that the CPU clock speed of their new entry-level Mac mini is nearly the same as a decade ago.
That's not apple. That's the entire CPU industry in general. Clock speed, we are right around where we were a decade ago. And that has nothing to do with clinging, but rather what's realistically possible. CPU speed used to increase rapidly because it was the easy way to increase performance year after year. Then we started getting into diminishing returns....smaller improvements in performance even while power consumption and cooling requirements grew rapidly. So now they've learned they need to focus their improvements on both multi-core design as well as per-clock execution efficiency.
Apparently your reading comprehension isn't quite there. Did I say we've arrived at the panacea? No, I didn't even say anything remotely like that. What I was saying is that it's a lot better than it was before.
And I don't think your math is quite there either. 170 miles * 21 stops = 3570 miles. Over 2 days, that's 1785 miles per day. Even on the summer solstice, you have only 16 hours of daylight (unless you are up in northern canada). So even if we don't count time to eat, use the bathroom, and get gas, you must have been driving 111 MPH continuously. Even if I grant you the hour before sunrise and after sunset, that's still 99 MPH with no stops.
It'll get to that point eventually. Tesla's currently installing superchargers across the country. You can get a half charge in 170 mile charge in 30 minutes (and it's free)
That's not too bad. Having to stop for 30 minutes every couple hours is a bit less than desirable, but that's a significant improvement. If you plan your bathroom breaks and dinner around charging time, then several of those stops won't be so bad.
No difference from the SSBs, or no difference from the fruit juice?
Neither. Read that sentence again, and I think it's pretty clear they are comparing all 4 to a baseline level (not sure what that is or how they get it). Think of it like: basline = x carbonated SSBs = x-1 fruit juice = x + 1 non-carbonated SSBs = x diet carbonated SSBs = x
And just to be certain I am interpreting it right, I took the 15 seconds (literally, that's how long it took me) that you couldn't to click the link, skim the 1 page summary, and find: "No significant associations were observed between consumption of diet sodas or noncarbonated SSBs and telomere length."
It will, right after the industry gets away from this asinine idea that people want to hold a book up to the side of their head to have a conversation.
It's as if, after all these years, the n-gage lives on.
You are right, they are not the same thing. However, some pieces of hardware have no firmware instanlled and require the driver to upload it on boot. I have no idea if that's how nvidia cards work, but I know that years ago when I was using hauppauge analog tv capture cards, this was exactly the case. Instead of flashing the firmware to the card, it just gets loaded every time you reboot. In these cases, people passionate about open source are probably going to want to use open source firmware to go with their open source driver. Or perhaps using the closed source firmware with the open source driver isn't even an option. I really don't know.
Do your new hires routinely circumvent 2 layers of security mechanisms just to alter the values of Integer objects? Sounds like you have some shitty new hires. What you really should be teaching them is that, if they have an Integer object with a value of 2 and they want it to be 3, then rather than use the reflection API to bypass private and final modifiers and turning off the accessibility restructions, they could just do "new Integer(3)" or "Integer.valueOf(3)" and be done with it.
I'm sure as hell glad I don't have your shitty new hires working with me. Nor your stupid ass teaching/hiring my coworkers.
OK, if autoboxing is crap, then you should just consider it invalid to assign a primitive type to an object type. Thus I guess you made a coding error when you wrote the code that did autoboxing. Shame on you.
Now, back here in the real world, you went OUT OF YOUR WAY, even going so far as to explicitly circumvent 2 levels of security measure, just to FORCE the problem to occur. That's like claiming the scissors you bought are unsafe because they made you go blind when you jammed them into your eyes.
Sorry, but the autoboxing is completely safe unless you take explicit measure to attempt to make it unsafe. Don't go whining just because the language didn't protect you from yourself. It actually tried, but you told it not to. If you can't trust yourself not to be an idiot, then just run all of your code with an appropriate security profile in place and you'll be all set.
I'm not sure Id say this is "due to the nonsensical autoboxing syntactic sugar". This only works because you "hacked" the system.
1) You aren't allowed to modify the value of an Integer object, as the value is both private and final. You worked around that by using reflection to get at the object's variables in the roundabout way. 2) Even then, you wouldn't be allowed to modify it because of security restrictions. However, you also explicitly turned off the security restrictions. 3) The only reason you were even able to turn off the security restrictions is because you were running in an unmanaged environment. In that situation, it is assumed you have full access to do pretty much anything you'd like. However, if you were running in any sort of managed environment with a security manager installed, you wouldn't have been able to do that.
This is really not much different than C++, where it's assumed you have full access to everything. You can take a const, get a const pointer to it, cast that to a non-const pointer, and then modify it. Even if that constant value were stored in a non-writable code page, you could make the code page writable if you were running in an environment that allowed you to alter those permissions. I haven't done such a thing in a VERY long time, so I'm not sure if Admin access under windows these days gives you that level of access, but I'm almost certain linux root level would allow it.
I think all 3 of those were the same degree of closeness, just difference camera angles and zoom.
If you look at the shot at 0:52, you can really see there are only 2 ledges in the volcano. There is the really close one at the very edge of the lava, which you later see getting splashed with lava continuously, and at one point even see a piece breaking off. These guys clearly did not go to that one. Then there is another rim which is probably 80-90% of the way down. That's the one I'm pretty certain they filmed themselves standing on. According to their blog (http://www.stormchaser.ca/News.html) they repelled 1200 feet down to get there. So if my estimate of 80-90% is correct, then they are 100-300 feet above the lava surface at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee...and here I thought the premise of this thread was that it was Apple haters, not Apple lovers, making the unfounded claims.
In any case, it was only 2-3 years ago that I gave up on them (and before your rabid fanboy mind starts making more unfounded claims...no, I wasn't using 15 year old hardware).
That's true. The 2 are correlated, but I suspect you have the causation backwards. It's not that the flaws affect us because we don't use Apple products, but rather that we don't use Apple products because the flaws affected us. At least that's the case for me. I actually gave Apple a shot for a few years, and the longer I did, the more I regretted it, so I'm done with them now.
In theory, that's a brilliant idea. However, you know the reality of an actual implementation would be an unsecured/poorly secured communications protocol resulting in some sick teenagers being able to remotely drive some unsuspecting kid out into the street.
To me, that doesn't seem to be so much a "rift" as it is that Cyanogen had a couple of players to pick from, and the one they liked best wanted an exclusive arrangement, so the other lost out. Not surprising they'd pick the one with more experience in that market over the one that is just getting started.
With all the constant trouble I, and many others had with the pre order system, I decided to ditch these guys. Their customer service was not great, and to screw up the most basic part of any business (taking peoples money), I decided my best bet was to just get raped by one of the big 4, and buy a contract phone.
Sadly, I was looking forward to this phone for quite a while, but I'm tired of the mistakes and gimmicks for what amounts to last years phone.
Yes it was unfortunate that they had some issues on the payment processing, and it did result in some people getting their phones out of sequence (later purchasers got it shipped before earlier purchasers), and they handled the PR of it pretty badly (posting nothing on facebook/g+/forums etc, and the only info coming out was from an employee posting on reddit).
But even so, the vast majority of people got their phones shipped by the date they were promised. For the most part everyone ended up alright. And I must say, the phone is incredible. Especially the battery life. I've actually made it through 2 whole days without charging, and that even included a bit of actual use. Other phones I've had, even if I never turned the screen on, I'd be lucky to make it 36 hours.
The only thing that has really disappointed me about the phone is the slow-mo video capture (60fps or 120fps). When you turn those on, the video quality becomes terrible. 720p 120fps looks like a really bad 480p video, and 1080p 60fps isn't much better. Some people think there may be a software fix, and I hope I'm wrong, but my guess is that even with the reduced resolution, it's just too many frames to push through the video processor and it has to choose a really low bitrate to keep up. The 4k video at 30fps, however, is great. Super high bitrate too (I think my tests came out at something like 60-70 Mpbs).
Even if you didn't get raped elsewhere, I think it was a bad move to bail out on your preorder, but since you also got raped in the process....doubly bad move on your part. You let emotions overrule logic.
I'd personally disagree that its a problem. In fact, one 16x9 still isn't wide enough. Two of them is ideal for me. The main monitor for my coding tool, and the 2nd monitor to have 2 web pages loaded side by side. In my main window, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the width is used for my actual code, and the rest used for other panel (project file list, debug panels, etc). If my 2nd monitor wasn't so wide, I either wouldn't have access to the extra panels, or I'd have to put them across the bottom (negating the advantage of making it taller).
Wrong. Amazon DOES charge the same price for everybody. They did experiment with different prices for different customers a few years back, but they got some bad media attention over it and discontinued it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
No, your local brick and mortar store is at a 15-30% disadvantage simply because they charge a lot more for most things.
It really depends on what you are talking about. Since having kids a few years back, I've been absolutely surprised how, at least 95% of the time, toys are cheaper at the local Toys R Us than they are at amazon or anyplace else online. And that's even if you include sales tax. And that doesn't even include the fact that TRU has 20% off coupons fairly often, and you get a couple % back if you have rewards card, and you can often find TRU gift cards 10-20% off (I don't see the same level of discounts on Amazon gift cards).
The two exceptions I've seen to that (ie: cheaper on amazon):
1) innotab games (which is sort of a toy, though falls more into the electronics category)
2) Thomas the Train wooden train cars
Other than those, I've only found a couple other random items cheaper on amazon. Everything else is cheaper at TRU
'The word "is" denotes the present era.'
Which trivializes the use of "always" by shrinking the timespan, making the claim tautological. No one speaks English that way who is honestly trying to communicate.
Really? I think you might need a better grasp on usage of the word. Go look at the examples on OED, and you will see many example usages (even some from hundreds of years ago) where "always" does not work the way you seem to think it does.
And it is still factually incorrect, since the Apple Watch is shown at the traditional 10:09 time for watch displays.
Well....now that I can't comment on. I'm not an apple fan, and don't pay attention to any of their advertising, so I wouldn't have a clue to the accuracy of the statement. I'm just speaking about the usage of the language in that particular instance, given the info that was presented there.
Right. But the headline said "is always", not "has always been". The word "is" denotes the present era. Currently any time you see it, it is 9:41. So to restate it:
It used to be that every time you saw it, it WAS always set to 9:42, but now, since the introduction of the iPad, it IS always set to 9:41.
A Google website only working with Chrome.
I'm shocked, I tell you. Just absolutely shocked. *LOL*
I know you are trying to be funny, but to be serious, it's not as if this is a common thing for google as far as I'm aware. Google generally is one of the best at making things work cross browser. Usually when it's not, it's because the feature has no equivalent in other browser. Ex: google's desktop notifications or cloud print features...I'm not aware of any other browsers having something equivalent. If someone has a list of things that COULD be don'e across multiple browsers (preferably in a standardized way, but I'd even accept non-standard) and yet google didn't, I'd appreciate seeing it.
BBC basic was interpreted, not compiled (though there may have been compilers written for it since).
It was my original instinct to say the same (since nearly all basic languages are), but I looked it up on wikipedia before posting and found that there was indeed a compiler for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
A Compiler for BBC BASIC V was produced by Paul Fellows, team leader of the Arthur OS development, and published initially by DABS Press.[citation needed] This was able to implement almost all of the language, with the obvious exception of the EVAL function – which inevitably required run-time programmatic interpretation. As evidence of its completeness, it was able to support in-line assembler syntax. The compiler itself was written in BBC BASIC. The compiler (running under the interpreter in the early development stages) was able to compile itself, and versions that were distributed were self-compiled object code.[original research?] Many applications initially written to run under the interpreter benefitted from the performance boost that this gave, putting BBC BASIC on a par with other languages for serious application development.
There's not a whole lot of info about it on wikipedia, and it doesn't even say when it was written (and there are no citations), so I have no idea if it was something recent or very old.
Actually, it is written for resource efficiency...specifically program size, which uses memory. The goal was to write a 1 line program, and in BBC Basic, that meant they were limited to 256 characters. Yes, maybe they could have wrote things with more verbose naming and had it compile to the same size, but the particular goal there was to write something big with little code. I think they accomplished it fairly well, and probably 95% (at least) of programmers would be hard pressed to replicate their results. I suspect the people capable of accomplishing that would be capable of similar accomplishments on an embedded platform, given the necessary experience with the particular hardware.
If anybody wrote code like that for me, they'd be made to sit on the naughty step and think very, very hard about what they'd done.
Unless, of course, you were developing for embedded hardware, where you are trying to do way too many things with way too few resources***. Then you'd give that programmer a promotion.
***Although those days are gradually coming to an end, as even the tiniest systems are getting more and more resources, and eventually they'll all join the rest of us, where readability, verifiability, and maintainability take top priority. But for now, they're not all quite there yet.
Apple clings so much to legacy hardware that the CPU clock speed of their new entry-level Mac mini is nearly the same as a decade ago.
That's not apple. That's the entire CPU industry in general. Clock speed, we are right around where we were a decade ago. And that has nothing to do with clinging, but rather what's realistically possible. CPU speed used to increase rapidly because it was the easy way to increase performance year after year. Then we started getting into diminishing returns....smaller improvements in performance even while power consumption and cooling requirements grew rapidly. So now they've learned they need to focus their improvements on both multi-core design as well as per-clock execution efficiency.
Apparently your reading comprehension isn't quite there. Did I say we've arrived at the panacea? No, I didn't even say anything remotely like that. What I was saying is that it's a lot better than it was before.
And I don't think your math is quite there either. 170 miles * 21 stops = 3570 miles. Over 2 days, that's 1785 miles per day. Even on the summer solstice, you have only 16 hours of daylight (unless you are up in northern canada). So even if we don't count time to eat, use the bathroom, and get gas, you must have been driving 111 MPH continuously. Even if I grant you the hour before sunrise and after sunset, that's still 99 MPH with no stops.
It'll get to that point eventually. Tesla's currently installing superchargers across the country. You can get a half charge in 170 mile charge in 30 minutes (and it's free)
http://www.teslamotors.com/sup...
That's not too bad. Having to stop for 30 minutes every couple hours is a bit less than desirable, but that's a significant improvement. If you plan your bathroom breaks and dinner around charging time, then several of those stops won't be so bad.
No difference from the SSBs, or no difference from the fruit juice?
Neither. Read that sentence again, and I think it's pretty clear they are comparing all 4 to a baseline level (not sure what that is or how they get it). Think of it like:
basline = x
carbonated SSBs = x-1
fruit juice = x + 1
non-carbonated SSBs = x
diet carbonated SSBs = x
And just to be certain I am interpreting it right, I took the 15 seconds (literally, that's how long it took me) that you couldn't to click the link, skim the 1 page summary, and find: "No significant associations were observed between consumption of diet sodas or noncarbonated SSBs and telomere length."
It will, right after the industry gets away from this asinine idea that people want to hold a book up to the side of their head to have a conversation.
It's as if, after all these years, the n-gage lives on.
It's amazing
it's amazing
its amazing
It's amazing
It's amazing
WTF? Did I stumble onto the set of "The Bachelor" or something?
You are right, they are not the same thing. However, some pieces of hardware have no firmware instanlled and require the driver to upload it on boot. I have no idea if that's how nvidia cards work, but I know that years ago when I was using hauppauge analog tv capture cards, this was exactly the case. Instead of flashing the firmware to the card, it just gets loaded every time you reboot. In these cases, people passionate about open source are probably going to want to use open source firmware to go with their open source driver. Or perhaps using the closed source firmware with the open source driver isn't even an option. I really don't know.
Do your new hires routinely circumvent 2 layers of security mechanisms just to alter the values of Integer objects? Sounds like you have some shitty new hires. What you really should be teaching them is that, if they have an Integer object with a value of 2 and they want it to be 3, then rather than use the reflection API to bypass private and final modifiers and turning off the accessibility restructions, they could just do "new Integer(3)" or "Integer.valueOf(3)" and be done with it.
I'm sure as hell glad I don't have your shitty new hires working with me. Nor your stupid ass teaching/hiring my coworkers.
OK, if autoboxing is crap, then you should just consider it invalid to assign a primitive type to an object type. Thus I guess you made a coding error when you wrote the code that did autoboxing. Shame on you.
Now, back here in the real world, you went OUT OF YOUR WAY, even going so far as to explicitly circumvent 2 levels of security measure, just to FORCE the problem to occur. That's like claiming the scissors you bought are unsafe because they made you go blind when you jammed them into your eyes.
Sorry, but the autoboxing is completely safe unless you take explicit measure to attempt to make it unsafe. Don't go whining just because the language didn't protect you from yourself. It actually tried, but you told it not to. If you can't trust yourself not to be an idiot, then just run all of your code with an appropriate security profile in place and you'll be all set.
I'm not sure Id say this is "due to the nonsensical autoboxing syntactic sugar". This only works because you "hacked" the system.
1) You aren't allowed to modify the value of an Integer object, as the value is both private and final. You worked around that by using reflection to get at the object's variables in the roundabout way.
2) Even then, you wouldn't be allowed to modify it because of security restrictions. However, you also explicitly turned off the security restrictions.
3) The only reason you were even able to turn off the security restrictions is because you were running in an unmanaged environment. In that situation, it is assumed you have full access to do pretty much anything you'd like. However, if you were running in any sort of managed environment with a security manager installed, you wouldn't have been able to do that.
This is really not much different than C++, where it's assumed you have full access to everything. You can take a const, get a const pointer to it, cast that to a non-const pointer, and then modify it. Even if that constant value were stored in a non-writable code page, you could make the code page writable if you were running in an environment that allowed you to alter those permissions. I haven't done such a thing in a VERY long time, so I'm not sure if Admin access under windows these days gives you that level of access, but I'm almost certain linux root level would allow it.
I think all 3 of those were the same degree of closeness, just difference camera angles and zoom.
If you look at the shot at 0:52, you can really see there are only 2 ledges in the volcano. There is the really close one at the very edge of the lava, which you later see getting splashed with lava continuously, and at one point even see a piece breaking off. These guys clearly did not go to that one. Then there is another rim which is probably 80-90% of the way down. That's the one I'm pretty certain they filmed themselves standing on. According to their blog (http://www.stormchaser.ca/News.html) they repelled 1200 feet down to get there. So if my estimate of 80-90% is correct, then they are 100-300 feet above the lava surface at that point.