In the case of the mouse problems I've found with every single system I've tried to install a post Ubuntu 10.04.1 system on -- the bug has been around for over a year. Well over a year.
The symptom is simple: If you install 10.04.2 or later, the mouse will randomly stop working, regardless of which desktop you run. Near as I can tell, it's a more pervasive problem with USB wireless devices that can report on their battery life, but it's also been an issue with an Acer laptop trackpad.
I'm actually surprised no one else has reported the problem, because it's a problem on every system I've installed newer releases on. At first I thought it was just my old Logitech Trackball being dropped from the supported/recognized hardware list, but since then I've realized it affects other devices as well, so it's not just my main system's device that's an issue.
I also had the same problem installing on an older Compaq-branded laptop. WIthin five minutes the trackpad stopped working.
Oddly enough, a physically wired "standard" mouse has never caused a problem on any system I've installed. Only wireless and trackpad devices. And as I mentioned, the problem does not surface with a pure Debian 6 install-and-update, so it's something that was introduced by Canonical themselves.
To be fair, the Taliban didn't exactly have to lock down a lot of internet customers. It's not like your average Afghan citizen is likely to have a computer or internet access, unless they're well paid and living in a major city. Egypt, on the other hand, is pretty well infused with technology across the country.
Santorum and Toews must just be drooling with envy at the idea of blocking access to naked nipples. After all, we all know that the end of the world will be caused not by fanatics with nuclear or biological weapons, or Monsanto's "technology" resulting in a single-strain-destruction famine, but from nudity.
After all, nudity can lead to thoughts about sex. And we just can't have that!
One of the big reasons mil-spec software and equipment costs so much is it has to be designed to function no matter what happens. In no other industry is there a requirement for a monitor to take a.50 caliber shell and keep running, for example, or for hard drives to survive multi-story drops while running (which is what happens when a ship crashes down a wave.)
I am absolutely stunned that reactors aren't designed to the same stringent "failure is not an option" standard, given the consequences of a failure. It can and should be done if you're going to risk meltdowns. Every possibility you can think of needs to be accounted for.
After all, we're not talking about just poisoning the people around a failed facility -- we're talking about the possibility of leaving kilometers of land completely uninhabitable for decades.
But I won't install it again, because there are bugs introduced in the Ubuntu patches which are not an issue with the base Debian build.
So come the next box, I'll be trying different distros again.
I'm rather disappointed to report that every major distro has let me down on updates and patches over the years. I really have to question the value of a "maintenance service" if the maintenance introduces bugs instead of fixing them. (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and now Ubuntu have all done this at one time or other.)
ENGLISH is the language of computer technologists around the world, even overseas. I have yet to meet a developer that doesn't speak English, despite working with HUNDREDS of people from overseas. Maybe it's a job requirement, but if so, I'm ok with that -- it's not prejudice driving the use of English, but the need for a common language of technology.
I think far more important than price is the idea of a virtual VCR where you can watch what you want, when you want, with far fewer ads than "traditional" channel-based TV.
My exposure to DirecTiVO broke my TV habit. When I moved back to Canada, I shifted to torrents. But I will NOT go back to watching shows on the schedule set by some arbitrary board of assholes.
Of course if you've never worked with a document description language like Tex, you probably won't grasp the significance of that statement.
I like the C++ object model Qt uses. It reminds me of the "Elements" environment from the company formerly known as Neuron Data. I was surprised to hear they're still around, and there are still production applications written with it that need maintenance and updates because they're not ready to be retired yet.
But Qt is brought up to date with modern C++ features like template programming; I don't know if Elements has been similarly reworked. GTK is a pretty nice layer as well, but it's a portable graphics layer rather than a graphics abstraction like Qt or Elements. You can write custom widgets in Qt or Elements and have them work on multiple platforms, sort of like Java/Swing for C++. I'm not so sure about how to do so with GTK.
It was refreshing to see them being honest that it's not really going to be ready for production use until 5.2 or thereabouts.
Canada seems to be cursed this way by having its tech giants implode
Fortunately RIM does seem to be imploding instead of exploding as NorTel did when raped by abusive foreign "management" that was supposed to be leading the company, not taking it for every last "early termination" option they could.
Plain and simple: to prevent fraud and impersonation.
With a physical component, there is a 1:1 relationship between the phone and the account, give or take some swapping around. So you know who owns the SIM and who is to be billed.
If you use software/configuration downloads, there's a significant potential for phone fraud, with people "hacking" your ID info and using it to get "free calls" at your expense.
My understanding of the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the training material of the Osceola Criminal Justice Academy in Florida circa 1990-95 was that the constitution is binding upon every legal entity in the United States from federal government right on down to the individual. It is the definition of the fundamental rights of every person in the country, not just citizens, but even visitors.
Corporations are most certainly not exempt from abiding by the constitution. Not unless there has a sudden redefinition of what the constitution actually is: The definition of a country.
There is nothing so difficult for a family as having Grandma or Grandpa's license taken away, no matter how dangerous a driver they've become due to their infirmities. It's so difficult to tell someone "You can't drive any more" that many families just spend the remaining years of their elder family's life fretting and worrying that they're going to kill someone, maybe including themselves.
At least with automation, some of those people will still be able to get around. But I know of many elderly people that I'd much rather see replaced by Google's current crop of robots than their blind, shaky, memory-failing and uncoordinated arses.
But what you need in the US is some speedier way for the legal authorities (i.e. judges) to make a statement about such abuses of law before a multi-year lawsuit backed by the ACLU or a similar organization.
While in Canada our media immediately asked respected legal authorities for their opinion, published them, and made it clear to the entire country that such behaviour would be illegal under our existing legislation, nothing of the kind has happened in the US.
No one with authority in the US seems to be willing to stick their neck out and make public statements of interpretation of the existing laws; they're content to wait for a multi-year lawsuit to clarify the issue (and there will eventually be one.)
Precisely the point. There are existing laws which make the request for account passwords illegal, including the fifth amendment and that pesky little clause about search and seizure.
The problem is, the way the US handles enforcement of such laws means that the corporations will continue to get away with it until the ACLU or EFF or someone else helps a citizen file a lawsuit over the issue.
After several years of fighting, the judge(s) will eventually declare that the corporations actions were illegal, someone will get their willie slapped, and things will go back to "normal".
But not until you've put up with YEARS of abuse of your rights as citizens.
Automated cars are also unlikely to rip along at 80-90 kph in a 50 zone like the psycho-cabbie who nearly ran me down on my wake-up walk half an hour ago, too.
I'd have to disagree on your point about JEE. The problem with JEE is only that, like C++, it's powerful and flexible enough to be easily abused. Which isn't surprising, since it's an integration of core concepts and technologies from such a wide variety of transaction processing tools and environments first, and a web service provider second.
i.e. JEE was designed to replace software stacks like Encina and Tuxedo, including the integration of various messaging protocols. Although it supports web development, that was NOT the focus of the effort when it was created -- integrating the existing enterprise systems with one software stack was.
And when you're tying together that many pieces of technology in a manner flexible enough to be useful, that means you're keeping things flexible enough for incompetent or uneducated programmers to seriously screw things up.
But that doesn't make the tool itself bad -- it just helps highlight who qualifies as "competent" and who qualifies as "firing material."
The reason is the "silent majority" may disapprove, but they don't disapprove strongly enough to do anything about it. In fact, here's their likely response to your whole post:
This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.
Even back in the fall of 1986 at University of Saskatchewan in my graphics class, the algorithms we started with were presented as floating point algorithms. We were then shown the integer variants on those algorithms, which we were told bluntly were used only because they were faster than floating point emulation.
So they got a patent for doing something that we were told not to do purely for performance reasons, not for any reason of logic or functionality. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind this whole patent should be overturned.
And, yes, I was heavily into computer graphics at the time. I even was a contributing publisher to a paper on the "Fast Line Clipping" algorithm, which really, in retrospect, was not so much an innovation as an example of a very advanced special case of loop and conditional unrolling that some of the more advanced modern compilers can probably to automatically at this present time. If you want to check out that crufty old article, you'll have a better chance of finding it by searching for Yang or Pospisil, the professor and grad student for the project; I was just a fourth year programmer at the time.
No, we didn't patent our algorithm. Back then the point of research and development was to learn and share, not to squat and sue.
Out of the box, every service I've installed on Linux listens to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) by default unless otherwise configured.
My former XP partition, on the other hand, was promiscuously listening to unfiltered, open to the public address lists for virtually every piece of software I'd installed that ran as a service. Including a number that had no God-damned business listening to the network in the first place!
Maybe the Windows 7 core is more secure than XP was, but only once was I ever hacked through an XP hole (the font issue a few months back), but I've fended off a number of attackers during the few weeks I had my box hooked up "naked" to the DSL without a firewall.
I hate to say it, but Microsoft is right -- the main security hole with their recent offerings is third party apps.
But that still gives Linux an edge on out-of-the-box security because for whatever reason, Linux versions of software start out configured in "secure" mode and you have to explicitly enable network access to the services.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike patent trolls, CSIRO actually creates technology through research.
They deserve payment, unlike most who file their claims through East Texas.
American customers aren't the only ones who'll be paying. Just the only ones who refused to without a lawsuit over the issue.
In the case of the mouse problems I've found with every single system I've tried to install a post Ubuntu 10.04.1 system on -- the bug has been around for over a year. Well over a year.
The symptom is simple: If you install 10.04.2 or later, the mouse will randomly stop working, regardless of which desktop you run. Near as I can tell, it's a more pervasive problem with USB wireless devices that can report on their battery life, but it's also been an issue with an Acer laptop trackpad.
I'm actually surprised no one else has reported the problem, because it's a problem on every system I've installed newer releases on. At first I thought it was just my old Logitech Trackball being dropped from the supported/recognized hardware list, but since then I've realized it affects other devices as well, so it's not just my main system's device that's an issue.
I also had the same problem installing on an older Compaq-branded laptop. WIthin five minutes the trackpad stopped working.
Oddly enough, a physically wired "standard" mouse has never caused a problem on any system I've installed. Only wireless and trackpad devices. And as I mentioned, the problem does not surface with a pure Debian 6 install-and-update, so it's something that was introduced by Canonical themselves.
To be fair, the Taliban didn't exactly have to lock down a lot of internet customers. It's not like your average Afghan citizen is likely to have a computer or internet access, unless they're well paid and living in a major city. Egypt, on the other hand, is pretty well infused with technology across the country.
Santorum and Toews must just be drooling with envy at the idea of blocking access to naked nipples. After all, we all know that the end of the world will be caused not by fanatics with nuclear or biological weapons, or Monsanto's "technology" resulting in a single-strain-destruction famine, but from nudity.
After all, nudity can lead to thoughts about sex. And we just can't have that!
One of the big reasons mil-spec software and equipment costs so much is it has to be designed to function no matter what happens. In no other industry is there a requirement for a monitor to take a .50 caliber shell and keep running, for example, or for hard drives to survive multi-story drops while running (which is what happens when a ship crashes down a wave.)
I am absolutely stunned that reactors aren't designed to the same stringent "failure is not an option" standard, given the consequences of a failure. It can and should be done if you're going to risk meltdowns. Every possibility you can think of needs to be accounted for.
After all, we're not talking about just poisoning the people around a failed facility -- we're talking about the possibility of leaving kilometers of land completely uninhabitable for decades.
I run Ubuntu. I like Ubuntu.
But I won't install it again, because there are bugs introduced in the Ubuntu patches which are not an issue with the base Debian build.
So come the next box, I'll be trying different distros again.
I'm rather disappointed to report that every major distro has let me down on updates and patches over the years. I really have to question the value of a "maintenance service" if the maintenance introduces bugs instead of fixing them. (RedHat, Mandrake, SuSe, and now Ubuntu have all done this at one time or other.)
UTF-8? For what?
ENGLISH is the language of computer technologists around the world, even overseas. I have yet to meet a developer that doesn't speak English, despite working with HUNDREDS of people from overseas. Maybe it's a job requirement, but if so, I'm ok with that -- it's not prejudice driving the use of English, but the need for a common language of technology.
True, but it also means that 600,000 Mac users were dumb enough to click "Ok, install" on bogus software. Not a good sign of intelligence... :P
I think far more important than price is the idea of a virtual VCR where you can watch what you want, when you want, with far fewer ads than "traditional" channel-based TV.
My exposure to DirecTiVO broke my TV habit. When I moved back to Canada, I shifted to torrents. But I will NOT go back to watching shows on the schedule set by some arbitrary board of assholes.
Of course if you've never worked with a document description language like Tex, you probably won't grasp the significance of that statement.
I like the C++ object model Qt uses. It reminds me of the "Elements" environment from the company formerly known as Neuron Data. I was surprised to hear they're still around, and there are still production applications written with it that need maintenance and updates because they're not ready to be retired yet.
But Qt is brought up to date with modern C++ features like template programming; I don't know if Elements has been similarly reworked. GTK is a pretty nice layer as well, but it's a portable graphics layer rather than a graphics abstraction like Qt or Elements. You can write custom widgets in Qt or Elements and have them work on multiple platforms, sort of like Java/Swing for C++. I'm not so sure about how to do so with GTK.
It was refreshing to see them being honest that it's not really going to be ready for production use until 5.2 or thereabouts.
Now the ACLU has a case they can use to clarify that it's illegal to do this under current legislation and put a stop to the nonsense.
It's too bad it'll take so long for it to churn through the courts.
Presuming the ACLU, EFF, et. al. don't decide to wait for a "better" case, that is.
Fortunately RIM does seem to be imploding instead of exploding as NorTel did when raped by abusive foreign "management" that was supposed to be leading the company, not taking it for every last "early termination" option they could.
Plain and simple: to prevent fraud and impersonation.
With a physical component, there is a 1:1 relationship between the phone and the account, give or take some swapping around. So you know who owns the SIM and who is to be billed.
If you use software/configuration downloads, there's a significant potential for phone fraud, with people "hacking" your ID info and using it to get "free calls" at your expense.
I start the car. I move the shift lever to "R". I scream "Beep, beep, beep!" and stomp on the accelerator until the tires smoke....
It's a shame the episode won't be made. Nothing like stuffing creativity in a vault to protect it from ever being recognized.
I beg to differ.
My understanding of the Constitution of the United States as interpreted by the training material of the Osceola Criminal Justice Academy in Florida circa 1990-95 was that the constitution is binding upon every legal entity in the United States from federal government right on down to the individual. It is the definition of the fundamental rights of every person in the country, not just citizens, but even visitors.
Corporations are most certainly not exempt from abiding by the constitution. Not unless there has a sudden redefinition of what the constitution actually is: The definition of a country.
Here's the real problem:
Driver: Pull over here.
HAL: But why, Dave? It's another three miles to our destination.
Driver: Just pull over and park here for five minutes.
HAL: I can't do that, Dave.
Driver: Just pull the goddamn car over NOW! I need to pick up my drugs/that-hooker/???
HAL: That's illegal, Dave. Pulling over and locking the doors. Please wait for the authorities to arrive...
There is nothing so difficult for a family as having Grandma or Grandpa's license taken away, no matter how dangerous a driver they've become due to their infirmities. It's so difficult to tell someone "You can't drive any more" that many families just spend the remaining years of their elder family's life fretting and worrying that they're going to kill someone, maybe including themselves.
At least with automation, some of those people will still be able to get around. But I know of many elderly people that I'd much rather see replaced by Google's current crop of robots than their blind, shaky, memory-failing and uncoordinated arses.
But what you need in the US is some speedier way for the legal authorities (i.e. judges) to make a statement about such abuses of law before a multi-year lawsuit backed by the ACLU or a similar organization.
While in Canada our media immediately asked respected legal authorities for their opinion, published them, and made it clear to the entire country that such behaviour would be illegal under our existing legislation, nothing of the kind has happened in the US.
No one with authority in the US seems to be willing to stick their neck out and make public statements of interpretation of the existing laws; they're content to wait for a multi-year lawsuit to clarify the issue (and there will eventually be one.)
Precisely the point. There are existing laws which make the request for account passwords illegal, including the fifth amendment and that pesky little clause about search and seizure.
The problem is, the way the US handles enforcement of such laws means that the corporations will continue to get away with it until the ACLU or EFF or someone else helps a citizen file a lawsuit over the issue.
After several years of fighting, the judge(s) will eventually declare that the corporations actions were illegal, someone will get their willie slapped, and things will go back to "normal".
But not until you've put up with YEARS of abuse of your rights as citizens.
Had he said the same thing in the hallway, at worst he'd have been told to shut up.
But because he "spoke" through a computer, he deserves explulsion?
The school's policies are seriously screwed up.
Sorry, in the vernacular of the students, "seriously FUCKED up!"
Automated cars are also unlikely to rip along at 80-90 kph in a 50 zone like the psycho-cabbie who nearly ran me down on my wake-up walk half an hour ago, too.
I'd have to disagree on your point about JEE. The problem with JEE is only that, like C++, it's powerful and flexible enough to be easily abused. Which isn't surprising, since it's an integration of core concepts and technologies from such a wide variety of transaction processing tools and environments first, and a web service provider second.
i.e. JEE was designed to replace software stacks like Encina and Tuxedo, including the integration of various messaging protocols. Although it supports web development, that was NOT the focus of the effort when it was created -- integrating the existing enterprise systems with one software stack was.
And when you're tying together that many pieces of technology in a manner flexible enough to be useful, that means you're keeping things flexible enough for incompetent or uneducated programmers to seriously screw things up.
But that doesn't make the tool itself bad -- it just helps highlight who qualifies as "competent" and who qualifies as "firing material."
The reason is the "silent majority" may disapprove, but they don't disapprove strongly enough to do anything about it. In fact, here's their likely response to your whole post:
This is one of the stupidest patents I've ever heard of.
Even back in the fall of 1986 at University of Saskatchewan in my graphics class, the algorithms we started with were presented as floating point algorithms. We were then shown the integer variants on those algorithms, which we were told bluntly were used only because they were faster than floating point emulation.
So they got a patent for doing something that we were told not to do purely for performance reasons, not for any reason of logic or functionality. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind this whole patent should be overturned.
And, yes, I was heavily into computer graphics at the time. I even was a contributing publisher to a paper on the "Fast Line Clipping" algorithm, which really, in retrospect, was not so much an innovation as an example of a very advanced special case of loop and conditional unrolling that some of the more advanced modern compilers can probably to automatically at this present time. If you want to check out that crufty old article, you'll have a better chance of finding it by searching for Yang or Pospisil, the professor and grad student for the project; I was just a fourth year programmer at the time.
No, we didn't patent our algorithm. Back then the point of research and development was to learn and share, not to squat and sue.
Out of the box, every service I've installed on Linux listens to 127.0.0.1 (localhost) by default unless otherwise configured.
My former XP partition, on the other hand, was promiscuously listening to unfiltered, open to the public address lists for virtually every piece of software I'd installed that ran as a service. Including a number that had no God-damned business listening to the network in the first place!
Maybe the Windows 7 core is more secure than XP was, but only once was I ever hacked through an XP hole (the font issue a few months back), but I've fended off a number of attackers during the few weeks I had my box hooked up "naked" to the DSL without a firewall.
I hate to say it, but Microsoft is right -- the main security hole with their recent offerings is third party apps.
But that still gives Linux an edge on out-of-the-box security because for whatever reason, Linux versions of software start out configured in "secure" mode and you have to explicitly enable network access to the services.