"While HP describes the backdoors as being usable only with permission of the customer, that restriction is part of HP's own customer-service rules - not a limitation built in to limit use of backdoors."
i.e. there is not actually any kind of technical restriction on the use of the backdoor, there is no actual customer control over it. When they say 'we can only use it with the customer's permission' what they mean is 'we told our reps only to use it with the customer's permission and we hope they do what we say, and no-one else finds it, so now...oops'.
Card hasn't just 'expressed an opinion' on homosexuality (or specifically, homosexual behaviour), he has advocated that it should be made illegal, those engaging in it should be punished by the state, and the government should be overthrown 'by any means necessary' in order to achieve this.
It depends what you mean by 'tolerance'. So far as I'm aware, no-one's called for OSC to be thrown in jail. People have just loudly disagreed with what he says, and advocated not giving money to him. That's a fairly big distinction, and one most beautifully pinpointed by the A.V. Club article on the topic:
As a gay person, am I willing to 'tolerate' people who believe that being gay is wrong or whatever? Sure. I don't want OSC sent to prison for thought crimes. Am I willing to 'tolerate' people advocating that homosexual activity be criminalized and I be thrown in prison? Well, it depends what you mean by 'tolerate'. I wouldn't want to forcibly prevent him from expressing his opinion, but I certainly don't think anyone should 'tolerate' it actually happening, or any form of violent revolution to cause it to happen, as OSC has advocated (see above). Am I likely to spend money on his stuff? Nooooope.
"Besides, OSC's SF books have nothing to do with his views on a totally orthogonal societal issue."
Um. Perhaps you haven't read his books closely enough. All of OSC's fiction is very deeply tied into his views on 'societal issues'; that's basically what he writes about. It's least obvious in Ender's Game, but he has, for instance, written an *entire series of SF books* which was a retelling of the Book of Mormon.
All Nippon has the single best incident rate of any airline. So that might be why. (Certainly would tend to blow another hole in the article's theory, though.)
"You're just replacing pilots with software engineers. Good job. Software engineers make many less bugs than pilots, right?"
Good news! With manual control of all modern airliners you have *both* a pilot *and* a software engineer in the loop, since they're all fly-by-wire now. Everyone should feel real safe.
See above discussion. That sole line was added by someone from a Japanese IP address (Japan and Korea are not on the friendliest of terms in all ways...), had no references, and was removed.
"Let me spell it out. Gandhi_2 is making fun of our western tendency to be so hyper-sensitive to cultural issues that mentioning, or even noticing, that someone is from another culture or genetic group is likely to elicit a charge of racism from someone."
I think the reason people are having trouble getting Gandhi_2's joke is that that trend has rarely been a 'problem' on Slashdot.
"This is where political correctness, multiculturalism and the notion that there is no absolute truth break down in the real world. It is not racist to point out that a strict adherence to a cultural norm is "a bad thing." Must we also accept honor killings and female genital mutilation as those seem to be culture based."
I don't think anyone said that was racist, and neither "political correctness, multiculturalism [nor] the notion that there is no absolute truth" require one to condemn either of those things. What a 'politically correct, multicultural' person might suggest is that in order to succeed in reducing honor killings and female genital mutilation, it would be a good idea to understand the cultural context of those practices rather than simply dismissing them as barbaric and declaring that They Shall No Longer Happen, since that approach tends to work poorly.
Right, that was my immediate reaction. The summary's "You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S." seems to have been written by someone who's never heard of the U.S. military...
OK, an airline isn't a military institution, but still. The 'chain of command' theory of management is hardly unique to Asia.
Yeah, my number is one digit off from some company's support line, I get their calls all the time. I've been tempted to start messing with them but never have, yet...
Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?
on
Fedora 19 Released
·
· Score: 1
"I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?
Gingerbread? Honeycomb?"
Well, no. There's a very superficial similarity, but in practice the difference is huge. On Android there is a top panel with icons in it, but you're not expected to actually touch those icons. They're purely indicators. They'd be terrible touch targets; far too small.
In GNOME 3 the stuff on the top panel isn't just informational, it is a bunch of targets you're actually supposed to use. You click on the network icon to configure the network, you click on your user name to get the User menu, etc etc. This would make a terrible tablet UI; those elements are far too tiny to be viable targets for finger touching.
"Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user.""
Here is the design document for the overview: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design#Activities_Overview . Here is the reasoning for the application picker design: "This enables new applications to be launched and open applications to be switched to. The avoidance of exclusive application categories and nested sub-menus is a distinct advantage of application launching in the shell compared with the GNOME 2 desktop. Users do not have to guess which category an application is in, and the motor control demands of the application picker are lower than those of menus. The application picker also utilises spatial memory, making it quick and easy to relocate applications." Nothing at all about tablets. (The key point is the thing about 'motor control demands': IIRC, the GNOME team did some usability testing on GNOME 2, and found testers often made errors in launching applications through nested menus, especially when using touchpads, because of how close items are together and how easy it is to move the pointer a bit wrongly and lose your spot in the menus).
"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are."
It just isn't. I don't know why you're so determined to believe something to be the case which is not, in fact, the case. It's not like the Shell design is some kind of huge top secret, the files are right there on the Wiki. You can go and look at them. If it was 'mobile inspired', they would say so. It just isn't. This is a plain fact, it isn't up for debate.
"Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing."
He keeps saying the same thing because it's true. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time accepting that. Why would we lie about it? If GNOME Shell was 'mobile inspired' I'd say it was. I don't see what mileage there'd be in lying about it.
"But......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways!"
I don't know why you keep trying to lump us together, we are not the same thing at all. As I've said a thousand times, I like to talk about GNOME 3 because I like GNOME 3, I think it gets an unfair rap around here. It's entirely a personal choice, and has nothing to do with Fedora in particular. I was using GNOME Shell (the very early versions) before I ever used Fedora, on Mandriva, which is generally considered a KDE-native distro.
What I meant by the 'keep them in mind, kinda' thing was this single bit from the design document I linked above:
"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind"
That's it, that's all it has to say about 'tablets'. It's the last bullet point in a six bullet point list of 'Goals and advantages'. If you think that makes it 'mobile inspired', well, I dunno what to say.
Oh, sorry, I thought we were just talking about the display resolution, didn't realize we were discussing the MBP Retina specifically in terms of that whole system. We do try reasonably hard to make Fedora run as well as possible on Macs, though there is unfortunately a bug in F19 which makes the install a bit harder than it needs to be on Macs:
It needs a bit more testing to confirm, but it looks like a late change we put in to re-use existing EFI system partitions instead of always creating a new one rather screwed up Macs, and you'll have to use custom partitioning to get a working install on one:/
But aside from that bug we do try to have all the right stuff in place for Mac support, and Fedora is probably one of the better distros for installing on Macs. Nowhere near perfect, but probably one of the better choices.
I'm no expert in the field (I've never run RHEL or OEL) but from what I understand, they clone each RHEL release, then provide it with a choice of a kernel that matches the RHEL kernel or Oracle's own kernel that has some stuff they think is good in it.
"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."
Re:Tablet UI from "New Generation" of programmers?
on
Fedora 19 Released
·
· Score: 1
The design of GNOME 3 has very little to do with tablets, I really don't know where that meme came from. You can read through the whole design document and about all it says about tablets is 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'. I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?
It was designed for computers, pure and simple. You're perfectly free not to like it, but it doesn't have anything to do with tablets.
That's not my job description, that's a (jokey) job description I wrote for a position we were hiring for. Why would I write a hiring notice for my own position?
You can bold the word 'publicise' as much as you like, but this thread is not a 'community-focused [QA] event', and I ain't on the clock.
It's not "effectively" a fork of GNOME 2, it *is* a fork of GNOME 2. That's its raison d'etre. It's somewhat buggy, though, due to the trickiness of integrating with newer underlying stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing you're missing is this part:
"While HP describes the backdoors as being usable only with permission of the customer, that restriction is part of HP's own customer-service rules - not a limitation built in to limit use of backdoors."
i.e. there is not actually any kind of technical restriction on the use of the backdoor, there is no actual customer control over it. When they say 'we can only use it with the customer's permission' what they mean is 'we told our reps only to use it with the customer's permission and we hope they do what we say, and no-one else finds it, so now...oops'.
Firefox OS is an OS. It's not Firefox the browser. That's why they called it Firefox OS, not Firefox.
Card hasn't just 'expressed an opinion' on homosexuality (or specifically, homosexual behaviour), he has advocated that it should be made illegal, those engaging in it should be punished by the state, and the government should be overthrown 'by any means necessary' in order to achieve this.
That is a horse of a different color.
"The book after Ender's game is called "Xenocide" for pete's sake!"
No, it's called Speaker for the Dead. Xenocide is the third one.
It depends what you mean by 'tolerance'. So far as I'm aware, no-one's called for OSC to be thrown in jail. People have just loudly disagreed with what he says, and advocated not giving money to him. That's a fairly big distinction, and one most beautifully pinpointed by the A.V. Club article on the topic:
http://www.avclub.com/articles/enders-game-author-orson-scott-card-issues-plea-fo,99915/
As a gay person, am I willing to 'tolerate' people who believe that being gay is wrong or whatever? Sure. I don't want OSC sent to prison for thought crimes. Am I willing to 'tolerate' people advocating that homosexual activity be criminalized and I be thrown in prison? Well, it depends what you mean by 'tolerate'. I wouldn't want to forcibly prevent him from expressing his opinion, but I certainly don't think anyone should 'tolerate' it actually happening, or any form of violent revolution to cause it to happen, as OSC has advocated (see above). Am I likely to spend money on his stuff? Nooooope.
"Besides, OSC's SF books have nothing to do with his views on a totally orthogonal societal issue."
Um. Perhaps you haven't read his books closely enough. All of OSC's fiction is very deeply tied into his views on 'societal issues'; that's basically what he writes about. It's least obvious in Ender's Game, but he has, for instance, written an *entire series of SF books* which was a retelling of the Book of Mormon.
Well, on the page someone linked earlier:
http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
All Nippon has the single best incident rate of any airline. So that might be why. (Certainly would tend to blow another hole in the article's theory, though.)
"You're just replacing pilots with software engineers. Good job. Software engineers make many less bugs than pilots, right?"
Good news! With manual control of all modern airliners you have *both* a pilot *and* a software engineer in the loop, since they're all fly-by-wire now. Everyone should feel real safe.
See above discussion. That sole line was added by someone from a Japanese IP address (Japan and Korea are not on the friendliest of terms in all ways...), had no references, and was removed.
So did English, until fairly recently: thee, thou, you.
Hell, it still does, sir.
Then try:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki#Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
His 16 year old, by all accounts entirely unobjectionable, son.
"Any local would have agreed since it was completely true"
No, they wouldn't. Don't co-opt the rest of your town into your racist idiocy.
"Let me spell it out. Gandhi_2 is making fun of our western tendency to be so hyper-sensitive to cultural issues that mentioning, or even noticing, that someone is from another culture or genetic group is likely to elicit a charge of racism from someone."
I think the reason people are having trouble getting Gandhi_2's joke is that that trend has rarely been a 'problem' on Slashdot.
Sigh. Require one *NOT* to condemn either of those things, I meant to write.
"This is where political correctness, multiculturalism and the notion that there is no absolute truth break down in the real world. It is not racist to point out that a strict adherence to a cultural norm is "a bad thing." Must we also accept honor killings and female genital mutilation as those seem to be culture based."
I don't think anyone said that was racist, and neither "political correctness, multiculturalism [nor] the notion that there is no absolute truth" require one to condemn either of those things. What a 'politically correct, multicultural' person might suggest is that in order to succeed in reducing honor killings and female genital mutilation, it would be a good idea to understand the cultural context of those practices rather than simply dismissing them as barbaric and declaring that They Shall No Longer Happen, since that approach tends to work poorly.
Right, that was my immediate reaction. The summary's "You are obliged to be deferential toward your elders and superiors in a way that would be unimaginable in the U.S." seems to have been written by someone who's never heard of the U.S. military...
OK, an airline isn't a military institution, but still. The 'chain of command' theory of management is hardly unique to Asia.
Unfortunately, there's been a setback in the schedule. They tested it on Slashdot and it exploded.
Yeah, my number is one digit off from some company's support line, I get their calls all the time. I've been tempted to start messing with them but never have, yet...
"I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?
Gingerbread? Honeycomb?"
Well, no. There's a very superficial similarity, but in practice the difference is huge. On Android there is a top panel with icons in it, but you're not expected to actually touch those icons. They're purely indicators. They'd be terrible touch targets; far too small.
In GNOME 3 the stuff on the top panel isn't just informational, it is a bunch of targets you're actually supposed to use. You click on the network icon to configure the network, you click on your user name to get the User menu, etc etc. This would make a terrible tablet UI; those elements are far too tiny to be viable targets for finger touching.
"Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user.""
Here is the design document for the overview: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design#Activities_Overview . Here is the reasoning for the application picker design: "This enables new applications to be launched and open applications to be switched to. The avoidance of exclusive application categories and nested sub-menus is a distinct advantage of application launching in the shell compared with the GNOME 2 desktop. Users do not have to guess which category an application is in, and the motor control demands of the application picker are lower than those of menus. The application picker also utilises spatial memory, making it quick and easy to relocate applications." Nothing at all about tablets. (The key point is the thing about 'motor control demands': IIRC, the GNOME team did some usability testing on GNOME 2, and found testers often made errors in launching applications through nested menus, especially when using touchpads, because of how close items are together and how easy it is to move the pointer a bit wrongly and lose your spot in the menus).
"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are."
It just isn't. I don't know why you're so determined to believe something to be the case which is not, in fact, the case. It's not like the Shell design is some kind of huge top secret, the files are right there on the Wiki. You can go and look at them. If it was 'mobile inspired', they would say so. It just isn't. This is a plain fact, it isn't up for debate.
"Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing."
He keeps saying the same thing because it's true. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time accepting that. Why would we lie about it? If GNOME Shell was 'mobile inspired' I'd say it was. I don't see what mileage there'd be in lying about it.
"But ......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways!"
I don't know why you keep trying to lump us together, we are not the same thing at all. As I've said a thousand times, I like to talk about GNOME 3 because I like GNOME 3, I think it gets an unfair rap around here. It's entirely a personal choice, and has nothing to do with Fedora in particular. I was using GNOME Shell (the very early versions) before I ever used Fedora, on Mandriva, which is generally considered a KDE-native distro.
What I meant by the 'keep them in mind, kinda' thing was this single bit from the design document I linked above:
"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind"
That's it, that's all it has to say about 'tablets'. It's the last bullet point in a six bullet point list of 'Goals and advantages'. If you think that makes it 'mobile inspired', well, I dunno what to say.
Oh, sorry, I thought we were just talking about the display resolution, didn't realize we were discussing the MBP Retina specifically in terms of that whole system. We do try reasonably hard to make Fedora run as well as possible on Macs, though there is unfortunately a bug in F19 which makes the install a bit harder than it needs to be on Macs:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979205
It needs a bit more testing to confirm, but it looks like a late change we put in to re-use existing EFI system partitions instead of always creating a new one rather screwed up Macs, and you'll have to use custom partitioning to get a working install on one :/
But aside from that bug we do try to have all the right stuff in place for Mac support, and Fedora is probably one of the better distros for installing on Macs. Nowhere near perfect, but probably one of the better choices.
I'm no expert in the field (I've never run RHEL or OEL) but from what I understand, they clone each RHEL release, then provide it with a choice of a kernel that matches the RHEL kernel or Oracle's own kernel that has some stuff they think is good in it.
"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."
The design of GNOME 3 has very little to do with tablets, I really don't know where that meme came from. You can read through the whole design document and about all it says about tablets is 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'. I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?
It was designed for computers, pure and simple. You're perfectly free not to like it, but it doesn't have anything to do with tablets.
As it happens, I don't think I've called anyone a moron in this thread. (Might be a first!)
That's not my job description, that's a (jokey) job description I wrote for a position we were hiring for. Why would I write a hiring notice for my own position?
You can bold the word 'publicise' as much as you like, but this thread is not a 'community-focused [QA] event', and I ain't on the clock.
It's not "effectively" a fork of GNOME 2, it *is* a fork of GNOME 2. That's its raison d'etre. It's somewhat buggy, though, due to the trickiness of integrating with newer underlying stuff.