The basic gist of it as far as I can work out is that, generally speaking, most card readers present the cards to a PC as a standard block device. This is nice because it means you don't have to have special drivers for the device, but it does also mean that these devices are limited to the commands which are supported by standard block devices(which doesn't include the low level format required to undo this). If you have a reader which presents the card to the PC as exactly what it is and have all the appropriate drivers you can undo this easily though those are few and far between.
That said, the TLDR version of this story is that a phone vendor stuck an internal SD card slot deep inside the phone which is designed for use by OEMs, stuck a big yellow sticker over it saying that you'll void the warranty if you use the slot, and when someone stuck a card in that slot, odd things happened. Colour me surprised. It wouldn't even be a story if anyone but Microsoft did it.
He was targeted for fraud because of his wealth(thinking that people want to get hold of your money is not paranoia but simple economics). Believing that someone from Honduras is trying to kill you is generally paranoid unless you've got some Hondurans in your will, or have made some real enemies. Assassination is difficult and expensive, people just don't do that shit.
Of course his paranoia isn't really the issue here as much as the fact that he was willing to pay these two idiots 160 grand a month to protect him from said assassination. Obviously this guy either has diminished capacity in some way or this isn't the whole story. If I had 160 large to throw around for my protection and I thought someone was trying to kill me I'd be more likely to spend it on a security detail.
Because every single JVM I've ever worked with is a bloated monstrosity. The thing is that there's nothing fundamental to Java which requires the JVM to be that way, and for brief periods of time JVM's which didn't suck have existed. They just all seem to die.
Java isn't exactly bloated, most interpreted languages be they byte code or scripted require as much in the way of space and resources.
It's not exactly over engineered either, and a lot of what made it seem that way has been fixed. JEE no longer requires you to write an interface multiple times, and most of the stupidity with things like IO have been abstracted away(as they always should have been in the first place).
Java certainly has a few legacy issues from being the first byte code language and having made a few false assumptions, and J2EE was a monstrosity, but it's not actually all that bad in recent versions.
The biggest issue with Java is just that all the free VM's including Sun's suck.
One of the reasons sun failed was that despite the fact that they came up with all the Java standards, the reference implementation and industry leader for most of them elsewhere. In this specific instance we're mostly talking about Tomcat as a servlet container which just destroyed anything Sun had until the very end. There was really no reason to pay either licensing or when they went open source support fees to Sun because their product implementations sucked.
Not that Oracle aren't a bunch of bastards(they are, always have been, and always will be), but Sun's relationship with the ASF was very much against their own interests, Oracle will very much be looking to put their implementation of the next JEE container as the go to standard so they can get some money out of it.
If you had enough data you could absolutely determine what side a dice will land on, the fact that determining those factors is outside the realm of any current technology we have and that no human being would be able to throw accurately enough to take advantage of them doesn't mean it couldn't be done. If you could calculate all the force which act, you could predict the result. The prediction isn't meaningful, but you could still do it.
I'll agree on most things. Oracle has been incredibly tight lipped on all sorts of things since they started the Sun acquisition, much to the detriment of the things they have since acquired.
OSX though isn't really their fault. I'm fairly convinced that Apple pretty much just sprung that on them, and without knowing whether Apple will provide them with the source of what the current version or publish(even under an NDA) the APIs that it uses to actually access the Apple GUI, it's just not a decision they can make. Lord Steve is engaged in a war with anything which doesn't fit into his vision of what the world should be, and it's entirely likely that, for whatever insane reason, he actually wants to kill Java on Apple platforms, if I were an OSX developer I'd be a lot more concerned about what Lord Steve is planning than on what Oracle is going to do.
Sun lost for a number of reasons, not least of which was continuing to charge SPARC prices for standard x86 servers.
As far as Java went their biggest issue was the fact that while they came up with all the standards, their implementations sucked, and so no one bought their servers. Even their JVM implementation was worse than some of their competition. They tried to do something about this by following the same model they used with OpenOffice, trying to take advantage of free development from the open source community while selling premium supported editions, and Glassfish is actually now probably one of the best complete JEE containers available, but it was just too late.
Doing what they did was a huge gamble, it was always either going to completely destroy them or make them successful beyond their wildest dreams, unfortunately for SUN, the GFC happened right in the middle of their grand experiment and wiped them off the face of the earth.
The biggest issue with your statement however is that Oracle doesn't actually need Java to make any money at all, what they need is for Java to remain a serious contender to.NET. They need this for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because despite all their middle ware and acquisitions, their Database is still their bread and butter, and SQL Server is getting awfully close to parity for most use cases. Java is the glue that holds their stack together, and its survival is vital to their success.
That said, there isn't necessarily anything wrong with this particular move. The JVM is one of Java's major weaknesses at the moment, and if Oracle supports OpenJDK and gets a decent product out there, and then creates an enterprise ready version for a reasonable charge, Java could get better, not worse.
They've done a few things, they're a lot less anti-competitive now, product pricing is a bit less opaque and crazy. Mostly though what's happened is that everyone else is getting more and more evil.
The thing about Microsoft is that they want money, as much of it as they can get, and that's really just about it. They don't really care about anything else. They're not recording your every move, they're not trying to prevent you from doing things with your computer(at least not when they can help it), they just want cash. Greed is a kind of evil which is predictable and easy to deal with. Some of the all out crazy which Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have been throwing around lately is a lot scarier.
The thing about google's wifi capturing is not so much what they did, it's that they did it in the first place.
It indicates that essentially speaking there's no one in that company stopping people from doing bad things. There's no rational way that something like that should have been able to occur on the scale that it did. You can't offload a whole bunch of unexpected data without someone noticing and asking why. Anyone with half a brain would know that capturing that stuff was going to get them in the shit, and anyone with half a brain should have shut down the whole program till it got sorted once they knew. Google knew they were capturing that data, and they should have known it was the wrong thing to do. Either their sense of ethics is so off that they thought it was ok, or it was malicious, neither option is all that great. I know Slashdot is a giant google love fest, but the old google has been gone for a long time now. Read some of the things their CEO has said about privacy and tell me they're still the good guys.
Yes actually, Microsoft are actually one of the good guys these days.
True, a lot of that has to do with other companies becoming a lot more evil, but some of it has to do with them becoming more good?
Seriously, take a step back, and think about it. Which is worse, anti-competitive behavior or driving around capturing everyone's network traffic, logging their every move, and generally being batshit crazy? Steve Balmer may be a knob, but have you been listening to Eric Schmidt lately? Oracle aren't even in the running for having a soul they were always worse than Microsoft, Lord Steve has the god complex from hell, Sun is gone, and Novell have been treating their customers like dirt for decades.
I'm not saying Microsoft are angels or anything, but as far as big software companies go, the only one I can think of that isn't more evil than Microsoft these days is IBM, and they're not all that much less evil.
To be honest, I'm not necessarily against this sort of regulation so long as the provision exists for parents to override the decision. If they make it illegal for minors to play violent video games then that's a problem, but requiring them to have an adult present in order to purchase it isn't really a problem. It gives the parents a bit of help in dealing with these sorts of things before the money has been spent.
That said, I wasn't aware that the ESRB rating system was really having that many problems. I certainly remember a time when it wasn't enforced all that well, but I remember not being able to buy certain games when I was under 18 and that was a while back. Has they gotten slack again since then?
Well, that probably is the same word, the Chinese and Japanese imperial families were rather close back in the day, however it originated in China, both in real terms, and in terms of its entry into the English language.
We've already gone past the kind of detail you're likely to get out of the kind of 35mm film you used to buy and get developed down the local shop(though . However, medium format film has a dramatically larger surface area and large format film is substantially higher than that.
Large format film is 4 inches by 5 inches for a single frame, which if you take a minute to think about it is pretty damned high quality, if somewhat impractical for regular use.
Kowtow is a Chinese word actually. Formally it's kneeling and bowing your head to touch the floor three times.
It has a slightly different meaning in the UK context however as the concept of British subjects abasing themselves in such a way towards a foreign monarch was somewhat of a sensitive issue.
Essentially within the UK context it describes Tony Blair's relationship with George W Bush, nose planted firmly up arse.
I keep hoping this will actually get through, it might give us some sort of future after we run out of stuff to dig out of the ground. Tragically, the opposition, having an obsession with having zero debt and no actual policy of any significance(mind you the government doesn't have an awful lot of policy either) has decided that the NBN is going to be their issue of differentiation. If the current mob don't hold on long enough or make the cancellation policies in the contracts sufficiently horrendous, we probably won't see it in more than a few areas.
Note I didn't say that scripts weren't the right solution, at least for some problems, or that any of these things were actually likely to break, merely that they were brittle. Glass is fairly brittle, but that doesn't mean it's not the right solution for putting in windows, or that it's likely to break every day. The OP was merely arguing against the idea that shell scripts were brittle.
That said a hundred line shell script is one hell of a complicated beast, and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the 30k program probably not only reinvented the wheel a few hundred times but might possibly have reinvented wood. Even accounting for the fact that properly formatted C code has a lot of whitespace, 30k lines is an awful lot of logic, and it's not really all that uncommon for people try try and roll their own parsers rather than using any of the many readily available libraries.
Love that keyboard, don't much like the wireless though, had one previously and I find that the batteries don't last all that long and that the signals aren't sufficiently unique for a large office to have a bunch of them.
VIM on windows does the same thing, and I've seen plenty of Linux text editors who can't handle the carriage return and display the block for an unprintable character.
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The basic gist of it as far as I can work out is that, generally speaking, most card readers present the cards to a PC as a standard block device. This is nice because it means you don't have to have special drivers for the device, but it does also mean that these devices are limited to the commands which are supported by standard block devices(which doesn't include the low level format required to undo this). If you have a reader which presents the card to the PC as exactly what it is and have all the appropriate drivers you can undo this easily though those are few and far between.
That said, the TLDR version of this story is that a phone vendor stuck an internal SD card slot deep inside the phone which is designed for use by OEMs, stuck a big yellow sticker over it saying that you'll void the warranty if you use the slot, and when someone stuck a card in that slot, odd things happened. Colour me surprised. It wouldn't even be a story if anyone but Microsoft did it.
Not to mention that Android and iOS are part of the smart phone segment where there never was a Windows/Office/IE monoculture.
Agreed, the word order there was wrong.
Well technically saying "Do X or you'll be hurt" isn't a scam, it's extortion.
He was targeted for fraud because of his wealth(thinking that people want to get hold of your money is not paranoia but simple economics). Believing that someone from Honduras is trying to kill you is generally paranoid unless you've got some Hondurans in your will, or have made some real enemies. Assassination is difficult and expensive, people just don't do that shit.
Of course his paranoia isn't really the issue here as much as the fact that he was willing to pay these two idiots 160 grand a month to protect him from said assassination. Obviously this guy either has diminished capacity in some way or this isn't the whole story. If I had 160 large to throw around for my protection and I thought someone was trying to kill me I'd be more likely to spend it on a security detail.
Because every single JVM I've ever worked with is a bloated monstrosity. The thing is that there's nothing fundamental to Java which requires the JVM to be that way, and for brief periods of time JVM's which didn't suck have existed. They just all seem to die.
Well it's not J2EE anymore it's J6EE, but yes, that was pretty awful.
Java isn't exactly bloated, most interpreted languages be they byte code or scripted require as much in the way of space and resources.
It's not exactly over engineered either, and a lot of what made it seem that way has been fixed. JEE no longer requires you to write an interface multiple times, and most of the stupidity with things like IO have been abstracted away(as they always should have been in the first place).
Java certainly has a few legacy issues from being the first byte code language and having made a few false assumptions, and J2EE was a monstrosity, but it's not actually all that bad in recent versions.
The biggest issue with Java is just that all the free VM's including Sun's suck.
It's a bit more complicated that that really.
One of the reasons sun failed was that despite the fact that they came up with all the Java standards, the reference implementation and industry leader for most of them elsewhere. In this specific instance we're mostly talking about Tomcat as a servlet container which just destroyed anything Sun had until the very end. There was really no reason to pay either licensing or when they went open source support fees to Sun because their product implementations sucked.
Not that Oracle aren't a bunch of bastards(they are, always have been, and always will be), but Sun's relationship with the ASF was very much against their own interests, Oracle will very much be looking to put their implementation of the next JEE container as the go to standard so they can get some money out of it.
If you had enough data you could absolutely determine what side a dice will land on, the fact that determining those factors is outside the realm of any current technology we have and that no human being would be able to throw accurately enough to take advantage of them doesn't mean it couldn't be done. If you could calculate all the force which act, you could predict the result. The prediction isn't meaningful, but you could still do it.
I'll agree on most things. Oracle has been incredibly tight lipped on all sorts of things since they started the Sun acquisition, much to the detriment of the things they have since acquired.
OSX though isn't really their fault. I'm fairly convinced that Apple pretty much just sprung that on them, and without knowing whether Apple will provide them with the source of what the current version or publish(even under an NDA) the APIs that it uses to actually access the Apple GUI, it's just not a decision they can make. Lord Steve is engaged in a war with anything which doesn't fit into his vision of what the world should be, and it's entirely likely that, for whatever insane reason, he actually wants to kill Java on Apple platforms, if I were an OSX developer I'd be a lot more concerned about what Lord Steve is planning than on what Oracle is going to do.
Sun lost for a number of reasons, not least of which was continuing to charge SPARC prices for standard x86 servers.
As far as Java went their biggest issue was the fact that while they came up with all the standards, their implementations sucked, and so no one bought their servers. Even their JVM implementation was worse than some of their competition. They tried to do something about this by following the same model they used with OpenOffice, trying to take advantage of free development from the open source community while selling premium supported editions, and Glassfish is actually now probably one of the best complete JEE containers available, but it was just too late.
Doing what they did was a huge gamble, it was always either going to completely destroy them or make them successful beyond their wildest dreams, unfortunately for SUN, the GFC happened right in the middle of their grand experiment and wiped them off the face of the earth.
The biggest issue with your statement however is that Oracle doesn't actually need Java to make any money at all, what they need is for Java to remain a serious contender to .NET. They need this for all sorts of reasons, but mostly because despite all their middle ware and acquisitions, their Database is still their bread and butter, and SQL Server is getting awfully close to parity for most use cases. Java is the glue that holds their stack together, and its survival is vital to their success.
That said, there isn't necessarily anything wrong with this particular move. The JVM is one of Java's major weaknesses at the moment, and if Oracle supports OpenJDK and gets a decent product out there, and then creates an enterprise ready version for a reasonable charge, Java could get better, not worse.
Westside story is not a parody, it might be ridiculous, but it's not a parody.
They've done a few things, they're a lot less anti-competitive now, product pricing is a bit less opaque and crazy. Mostly though what's happened is that everyone else is getting more and more evil.
The thing about Microsoft is that they want money, as much of it as they can get, and that's really just about it. They don't really care about anything else. They're not recording your every move, they're not trying to prevent you from doing things with your computer(at least not when they can help it), they just want cash. Greed is a kind of evil which is predictable and easy to deal with. Some of the all out crazy which Google, Apple, Facebook, etc have been throwing around lately is a lot scarier.
The thing about google's wifi capturing is not so much what they did, it's that they did it in the first place.
It indicates that essentially speaking there's no one in that company stopping people from doing bad things. There's no rational way that something like that should have been able to occur on the scale that it did. You can't offload a whole bunch of unexpected data without someone noticing and asking why. Anyone with half a brain would know that capturing that stuff was going to get them in the shit, and anyone with half a brain should have shut down the whole program till it got sorted once they knew. Google knew they were capturing that data, and they should have known it was the wrong thing to do. Either their sense of ethics is so off that they thought it was ok, or it was malicious, neither option is all that great. I know Slashdot is a giant google love fest, but the old google has been gone for a long time now. Read some of the things their CEO has said about privacy and tell me they're still the good guys.
Yes actually, Microsoft are actually one of the good guys these days.
True, a lot of that has to do with other companies becoming a lot more evil, but some of it has to do with them becoming more good?
Seriously, take a step back, and think about it. Which is worse, anti-competitive behavior or driving around capturing everyone's network traffic, logging their every move, and generally being batshit crazy? Steve Balmer may be a knob, but have you been listening to Eric Schmidt lately? Oracle aren't even in the running for having a soul they were always worse than Microsoft, Lord Steve has the god complex from hell, Sun is gone, and Novell have been treating their customers like dirt for decades.
I'm not saying Microsoft are angels or anything, but as far as big software companies go, the only one I can think of that isn't more evil than Microsoft these days is IBM, and they're not all that much less evil.
To be honest, I'm not necessarily against this sort of regulation so long as the provision exists for parents to override the decision. If they make it illegal for minors to play violent video games then that's a problem, but requiring them to have an adult present in order to purchase it isn't really a problem. It gives the parents a bit of help in dealing with these sorts of things before the money has been spent.
That said, I wasn't aware that the ESRB rating system was really having that many problems. I certainly remember a time when it wasn't enforced all that well, but I remember not being able to buy certain games when I was under 18 and that was a while back. Has they gotten slack again since then?
Well, that probably is the same word, the Chinese and Japanese imperial families were rather close back in the day, however it originated in China, both in real terms, and in terms of its entry into the English language.
Depends what you mean by film.
We've already gone past the kind of detail you're likely to get out of the kind of 35mm film you used to buy and get developed down the local shop(though . However, medium format film has a dramatically larger surface area and large format film is substantially higher than that.
Large format film is 4 inches by 5 inches for a single frame, which if you take a minute to think about it is pretty damned high quality, if somewhat impractical for regular use.
Kowtow is a Chinese word actually. Formally it's kneeling and bowing your head to touch the floor three times.
It has a slightly different meaning in the UK context however as the concept of British subjects abasing themselves in such a way towards a foreign monarch was somewhat of a sensitive issue.
Essentially within the UK context it describes Tony Blair's relationship with George W Bush, nose planted firmly up arse.
As a more immediate example, we're having a conversation without communication right now.
I keep hoping this will actually get through, it might give us some sort of future after we run out of stuff to dig out of the ground. Tragically, the opposition, having an obsession with having zero debt and no actual policy of any significance(mind you the government doesn't have an awful lot of policy either) has decided that the NBN is going to be their issue of differentiation. If the current mob don't hold on long enough or make the cancellation policies in the contracts sufficiently horrendous, we probably won't see it in more than a few areas.
Note I didn't say that scripts weren't the right solution, at least for some problems, or that any of these things were actually likely to break, merely that they were brittle. Glass is fairly brittle, but that doesn't mean it's not the right solution for putting in windows, or that it's likely to break every day. The OP was merely arguing against the idea that shell scripts were brittle.
That said a hundred line shell script is one hell of a complicated beast, and I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the 30k program probably not only reinvented the wheel a few hundred times but might possibly have reinvented wood. Even accounting for the fact that properly formatted C code has a lot of whitespace, 30k lines is an awful lot of logic, and it's not really all that uncommon for people try try and roll their own parsers rather than using any of the many readily available libraries.
Love that keyboard, don't much like the wireless though, had one previously and I find that the batteries don't last all that long and that the signals aren't sufficiently unique for a large office to have a bunch of them.
VIM on windows does the same thing, and I've seen plenty of Linux text editors who can't handle the carriage return and display the block for an unprintable character.