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User: vastabo

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  1. First do this:

    https://www.tech-recipes.com/r...

    Android (at least my moto x4) will still respond to the "Ok Google" hotword and prompt you to set up Google Assistant. You probably don't want that, so go into Settings > Apps > Google > Permissions and uncheck the microphone permission.

    Keep an eye on that; you know all of this runs afoul of their conversion strategy so they'll find an excuse to turn it back on or tie that permission to something you actually want to do.

    Honestly, I don't know if Google knows what it wants or why some people find this sort of thing objectionable.

  2. Re:Give me a damn web browser on Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation · · Score: 1

    Touche

  3. Re:Give me a damn web browser on Google Brings AmigaOS to Chrome Via Native Client Emulation · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is Google demonstrating that their platform for abstracting a client's hardware is robust and performant. I suspect that Amiga emulation is just because it's cool.

    Having this layer of abstraction protects Google from the machinations of software vendors who might want a piece of their action.

  4. Re:What's Missing on Google X Display Boss: Smartphones, Tablets, Apps Are "Mind-Numbing" · · Score: 1

    If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it.

    Looks like they used a Multics box at MIT. http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc

    Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools.

    Really?
    http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
    https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/iOS_Simulator_Guide/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator.html

    Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit

    Rather subjective. They do quite a bit more than Apple DOS or MS-DOS ever did.

    fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets

    Same as it ever was:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

    a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day

    Ever use a BBS back in the day?

    the world-changing technology the PC made possible

    The PC made computing accessible to commonfolk where it was previously the province of large institutions. Mobile continues this trend.

    With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since.

    We invented a new platform. Web Applications and APIs facilitated by cheap, commodity hardware have changed the nature of human communications and learning in the last 15 years.

    distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery

    Huh? None of those are proprietary. If a young person chose to learn about and use Haskell, I think they'd be well-equipped to learn quite a lot about how computers work.

  5. Re:Unity is hard on Shuttleworth On Ubuntu Community Drama · · Score: 1

    Because he's trying to make an interface for a convergence device where it no longer matters if you're running it on a phone, tablet, or desktop.

    You know, a Unified interface. It's a hard problem--you need only look at Windows 8 to see how badly it can go wrong. Apple started to move in that direction with Launchpad too, but I don't really know if they can make it work either. In the not-too-distant future, you'll be able to sync your computing environment between all your various devices and persist settings and whatnot through the cloud (like a very distributed home directory or roaming profile).

    Anyway, Mark Shuttleworth is trying to go where the puck will be, not where it is. And he's trying to do it with open source software. I wish him the best of luck.

  6. Re:Nice bunch of people on Meg Whitman Says HP Was Defrauded By Autonomy; HP Stock Plunges · · Score: 2

    It's amazing the kind of sociopathy one can rationalize by saying, "That's what corporations do."

  7. Ahh, progress! on Microsoft Launches New "Get the Facts" Campaign · · Score: 1

    First they ignore you, (IE6, "What other browsers?")
    then they laugh at you, (IE7, "LOL we got your tabs right here")
    then they fight you, <-----(You are here)
    then you win.

  8. Re:Cancer Patient might be an alien... on Cancer Patient Held At Airport For Missing Fingerprints · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No. No, they weren't.

  9. Re:We already have one on Do We Really Need a National Climate Service? · · Score: 2, Informative

    Did you miss the "Free data" link on the website http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/mpp/freedata.html? NCDC tries to limit the charging of "$$$$" to only commercial and private entities in order to help offset the enormous cost of ingesting, archiving, and processing one of the world's largest datasets; we're not fully funded by Congress.

    Charging for data is a touchy subject around here, though--the scientists, developers, customer service people, and management would all love to give away as much of our data as possible (and we give away a lot of it), but the money is always an issue.

  10. Re:Message to Virginia Fusion Center, from Anonymo on Slashdot Mentioned In Virginia Terrorism Report · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I Groovy'd it:

    println str.tokenize().collect({(char) Integer.parseInt(it, 16)})

    Not as good (it returns a list), but quick...

  11. Re:Looks like Python on Google App Engine Adds Java Support, Groovy Meta-Programming · · Score: 1

    Here is a writable closure for some KML:

    def kmlDocument = new groovy.xml.StreamingMarkupBuilder().bind{
        mkp.xmlDeclaration()
        mkp.declareNamespace('': 'http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2')
    kml{
    Document{
        Folder{
            name('*** stations')
            description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry')
            open('1')
            stationTypes.each({type ->
                Folder{
                    name(type[0])
                    description('Station Type: ' + type[0])
                    type[1].each({platform ->
                        Folder{
                            name(platform)
                            description('Platform: ' + platform)
                            stations[type[0] + platform].each({station ->
                                Placemark{
                                    name(station.name)
                                    description('http://some.place.on.teh.webs/qry/station?idtypeabbr=stnid&idvalue=' + station.stnidnum)
                                    styleUrl(station.getIcon())
                                    Point{
                                        coordinates(station.coord)
                                    }
    }})}})}})}}}} //lameness filter ate my whitespace; doesn't look like LISP in real life
    def f = new File('doc.kml')
    f.delete()
    f << kmlDocument

    The cool thing is that I get all this plus seamless Java integration (i.e. every class in the standard library -- GregorianCalendar, for instance), all my Java tools work, and I can replace lots and lots of boilerplate Java code with one and two liners of Groovy.  So:

    ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
    list.add("Blah");
    list.add("Blah");
    list.add("Blah");
    list.add("Blah");
    System.out.println(list);

    Becomes:

    def list = ["Blah","Blah","Blah","Blah"]
    println list

    And hey, with closures, if you want to do something like capitalize the first character of each string in that list it's really easy:

    println list.collect({
        it[0].toUpperCase() + it[1..it.length() - 1] //there's a better way to do this; I'm being pedantic
    })

    Which is not to say that Python couldn't do all that, but Groovy makes life for Java monkeys much easier.

  12. Re:And so it begins on Apple Claims That Jail-Breaking Is Illegal · · Score: 1

    Nothing bad has happened

    Yet

  13. Re:charlatans on Plane Simple Truth · · Score: 3, Informative

    Can you really have a 28 valve engine? Wouldn't it be 6 cylinders * (2 intake valves + 2 exhaust valves) = 24 valves.

    Just askin'...

  14. Re:Hmm on Telco Immunity Goes To Full Debate · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You wouldn't have standing to sue unless you could prove: 1) That'd you'd been surveiled 2) That the surveillance had caused you harm--which, incidentally, is the point of the legislation in the first place.

  15. Re:A solution to all of this FUD... on James Hansen on the Warmest Year Brouhaha · · Score: 1

    How could someone like me, familiar with instrumentation, go out and gather data and submit it to the community for inclusion in reporting?

    Ah, but that community DOES exist! Sign up at http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/coop/

    And COOP observations are published at http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/IPS/ for free

    NCDC generally doesn't charge for data, just publications. There is no "bandwidth" toll.

  16. Re:What is World of Warcraft on World of Warcraft Hits 9 Million Users · · Score: 1

    It's a game you play on your iPhone.

  17. Re:Finish the job, please... on KOTOR Will Rise Again · · Score: 1

    Ask, and ye shall receive...
    http://www.team-gizka.org/
    They're making great progress, but don't ask for a release date.

  18. Re:Maybe a change to solaris eventually? on Mac OS X Kernel Source Now Closed · · Score: 1

    Do you have some kind of dartboard that you use to make these kinds of predictions?

  19. Re:Amazing complexity on The Economy of Online Crime · · Score: 4, Funny

    Now that's customer service worthy of a credit card company!

  20. Re:Another Distro? on Oracle Looks At Buying Novell · · Score: 1

    Have you ever written a device driver? There are so many different skills required that it baffles my mind . Let's see what you'll need (in no particular order):

    A working knowledge of C (I've been at it for several years and I wouldn't exactly call my code brilliant)
    A working knowledge of Linux's architecture (hey! there are books on the subject, depending on how fast you catch on, you could sorta understand it in a couple of months)
    A working knowledge of the subsystem you're working on (what does a wifi driver need to do? how does a sound card work?)
    Very specific knowledge of the particular device you want to support (good luck with this one--you'll being reading NDA-restricted docs if you're lucky, reverse-engineering windows drivers if you're not)
    Time to write this fantasical piece of code (it takes me an afternoon to talk to a PLC over an RS-232 port, but I'm not particularly bright).

    How about this--admittedly anecdotal, but somewhat relevant--I'm a 4th year CS major and I've been running Linux since 1997. I've been schooled in C, Linux architecture (nothing heavy), machine language (MIPS, not exactly relevant), and have a fairly good understanding what the magic box does and how it does it. I couldn't write a sound driver; it would take me months to even begin to try.

    And you want Joe Schmoe to bang out a driver with little more than "time and persitance" and the warm, fuzzy feeling of contributing to the great Open Source OS?

  21. Re:Winged Monkeys And Tap Dancing Midgets on The Pandemic vs. the IT Department · · Score: 1

    yes, but what if Jack Bauer gets the flu?

  22. Re:Aren't POS systems usually dumb terminals? on Major Retailer Chooses Linux for its Tills · · Score: 5, Informative

    4690 is Digital Research FlexOS with IBM's name on it; IBM didn't even bother to grep the help files for DR references or change "dredix" to "ibmedit" or something. I'm really not sure why they went with FlexOS either, but I'm sure they had their reasons.

    The registers CAN run Windows or OS/2 but 500MHz Celerons (or lower) tend to die. So, like you said, it tFTP boots a basic OS which includes a funny little Java Virtual Machine and some TCP/IP utilities (I think you can telnet into them, but I haven't tried). The JVM will load whatever frontend the vendor soaked you for (usually some kind of Java/XML type deal that pulls stuff from the database back on the store controller). We use a really god-aweful Swing app for display. The registers usually have uptimes in the 3 month range unless something bad happens on the store controller (like IBM Deskstar hard drives).

  23. Re:Apple Cloaking Devices working Properly on Apple Campus Missing From MSN Earth · · Score: 2, Funny

    I think you confused "Cloaking Devices" with "Reality Distortion Field." It's probably acting up since Steve switched to Intel.

  24. Re:Yeah about that standard library... on Stroustrup on the Future of C++ · · Score: 1

    The smart money says that your problem lies somewhere around -Djava.library.path="blahblahblah" arguments that you pass to the VM.

    Be aware that the minor version number in the path isn't always right if you pasted it from the comments Eclipse puts at the beginning of your code ex:
    org.eclipse.swt.win32_3.0.0 should be org.eclipse.swt.win32_3.0.2 (at least for me)

    Also, sometimes Eclipse gets kinda bitchy about that path (even when it's right). Try (temporarily) copying the SWT library to someplace else with a simpler path (ex: / or C:\)

  25. Re:Win Vs. Mac on Windows Journalist Takes On Tiger · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure the 'kill' utility from the Windows Resource Kit does what you're talking about. True, it should have been included with the OS, but Windows will nonetheless kill a process in a "preemptive" fashion.