The article failed to mention the fact that the Chang'e 3 turned off all propulsion systems at the height of 3 meters above surface, then let it drop like a rock and risk damage to high tech equipments just to reduce dust.
You do realize that's about the equivalent of dropping 'high tech equipments' from eighteen inches on Earth, right? My girlfriend has dropped the netbook further than that on many occasions.
No, they've been put there by the people who get to choose who's on the ballot, mostly by throwing tons of money to ensure one of their kind of people wins. You can hardly blame the voters when they're given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
American companies CANT say no to the government, because they get shutdown. dont you remember lavabit?
Yeah, right. The US government would totally have shut down IBM (or Google, Microsoft, Apple... etc, etc, etc) for not co-operating with a law that probably wouldn't even stand up in court.
Nah, they use it because managers get fat bonuses for 'cost reduction', and have moved on to another job before people discover what a disaster it was.
the reason was : what would happen if malloc fails. The answer : possibly all hell will break loose.
No, you get a null pointer and you crash. Which is almost certainly what you want to do, because, if malloc fails, you're unable to do anything that requires allocating memory. Which is just about anything other than crashing.
You could try to do a clean shutdown, but then, say, some cleanup code tries to allocate a string to write persistent data to a database, fails, and writes garbage into the database instead.
Even "daily" might not be enough for a messaging app that needs to check whether you received new e-mail or whatever since you last booted your device, or an online trading app that needs to check whether you've been outbid on your auctions since you last booted your device.
If I just booted my device, odds are I want to use it to... you know... do something... and not have to wait for all this crapware to phone home before it becomes usable.
Boot time is the absolute worst time for just about any non-OS app to start up, and the reason we use the Linux netbook a lot more than the Android tablet when we want to look something up on the web.
Yeah, it would be awful if congress were to, say, spend enough time to rationally examine energy policy, and pass laws to encourage responsible nuclear power in addition to renewables.
Yeah, because that would totally happen.
In the real world, they would pass a 2,000 page Affordable Energy Act that no-one had read, full of pork for hamster farmers.
If you don't trust the app dev to correctly disclose what permissions they need then walk away.
They don't 'correctly disclose what permissions they need', they 'disclose what permissions they want'. Most apps I go to download want vastly more permissions than any sane person would ever give them.
Here's an idea: maybe the app maker should only ask for the permissions they actually need to make the app run, and not ask for every damn permission in the operating system?
No, that picture slideshow app does not need my GPS location or to be able to send text messages, and sure as hell shouldn't crash if I deny them.
Every time I turn my Android tablet on, I get a bunch of alerts saying some app that should be local to the tablet is demanding new permissions that I never gave it before, to do things I wouldn't even think of letting it do. Screw 'em.
For example, if an app store doesn't launch at boot, then you won't get notified about security updates to your existing apps until you happen to look for new apps, which might not be for weeks.
Oh, the horror.
I'd much rather it hogs the CPU and wireless LAN for ten minutes at startup when I only wanted to use the tablet brielfy to check something on the web.
Android is even worse than Windows for horrifically slow startup times due to installed crapware that believes updating itself is more important than whatever I want to do.
Before I switched to FreeBSD, Linux always seemed to have headaches with shared library problems, with some apps not working with some versions of shared libraries and a general nuisance being made with multiple versions of shared libraries being around.
I think you're thinking of Windows. Linux works because it can have multiple versions of the same library, and minor versions are compatible, so you only need one copy of each major version to remain compatible with old software.
Given the size of storage generally available now, is it really so bad to have statically linked binaries?
Uh, yes. Do you really want to have to download a new copy of every single application on the system when there's a security fix for the standard C library?
That said, Windows isn't much better off when every program has its own copy of zlib.dll and you have to update fifty of them when a new security fix is released.
Building infrastructure to handle peak power is economically inefficient. By giving an incentive for consumers to reduce power consumption during peak times, you avoid the cost of building infrastructure that sits idle most of the time.
Of course, in a market which isn't heavily regulated by government, your customers just say 'what is this shit? I'm not paying you more for things because you refuse to build infrastructure, I'm taking my business to to your competitors.'
Or, in a power market that is heavily regulated, they buy a generator like the rest of the Third World.
But if you log out of xmbc you get to the desktop.
No, you get to a login screen.
There's no window manager or desktop running on that box, though you could log in to a desktop if you want. I don't ever have a reason to do so, myself.
As demand falls and production capacity rises, at some point money will become obsolete. We will become a post-employment society. There is no other logical outcome.
Well, yes, 'employment' is dying. Few of our ancestors were 'employed' and few of our descendants were 'employed'; it was basically an industrial-era phenomenon.
But, if you think money is going obsolete, you must be one of those commies^H^H^H^H^H'post-scarcity' nuts who thinks everyone will be happy once they have a Stalinist apartment block and a Trabant.
What efficiency gains? Airlines would be far more efficient if they could fly direct from A to B, rather than being funneled into narrow corridors. Pretty much since the advent of GPS, people have been trying to get rid of 'air traffic control' and replace it by direct communication between aircraft which know where they're going and where they want to go.
Slashdot Mirror
"The people who get to choose who's on the ballot" are the party members.
Who get a choice between half a dozen guys funded by the same special interests, and one outsider who has no chance, just for grins.
Anyhow, they wouldn't have needed to Turing complete machines.
They wouldn't have trusted it with a Turing-complete machine because it might have gained sentience and defected.
The article failed to mention the fact that the Chang'e 3 turned off all propulsion systems at the height of 3 meters above surface, then let it drop like a rock and risk damage to high tech equipments just to reduce dust.
You do realize that's about the equivalent of dropping 'high tech equipments' from eighteen inches on Earth, right? My girlfriend has dropped the netbook further than that on many occasions.
Your leaders, sir, have been put there by voters.
No, they've been put there by the people who get to choose who's on the ballot, mostly by throwing tons of money to ensure one of their kind of people wins. You can hardly blame the voters when they're given a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.
American companies CANT say no to the government, because they get shutdown. dont you remember lavabit?
Yeah, right. The US government would totally have shut down IBM (or Google, Microsoft, Apple... etc, etc, etc) for not co-operating with a law that probably wouldn't even stand up in court.
Nah, they use it because managers get fat bonuses for 'cost reduction', and have moved on to another job before people discover what a disaster it was.
the reason was : what would happen if malloc fails. The answer : possibly all hell will break loose.
No, you get a null pointer and you crash. Which is almost certainly what you want to do, because, if malloc fails, you're unable to do anything that requires allocating memory. Which is just about anything other than crashing.
You could try to do a clean shutdown, but then, say, some cleanup code tries to allocate a string to write persistent data to a database, fails, and writes garbage into the database instead.
In most cases, 'just crash' is the better choice.
That depends on whether "do something" includes "see if anything important has happened that I need to attend to".
If it does, I'll start up the apps I need to find out.
Even "daily" might not be enough for a messaging app that needs to check whether you received new e-mail or whatever since you last booted your device, or an online trading app that needs to check whether you've been outbid on your auctions since you last booted your device.
If I just booted my device, odds are I want to use it to... you know... do something... and not have to wait for all this crapware to phone home before it becomes usable.
Boot time is the absolute worst time for just about any non-OS app to start up, and the reason we use the Linux netbook a lot more than the Android tablet when we want to look something up on the web.
Depends on the regulation. They can help, and they can hurt. They can increase inventiveness or decrease it.
They only 'increase inventiveness' if you mean 'finding new ways to work around the regulations'.
Yeah, it would be awful if congress were to, say, spend enough time to rationally examine energy policy, and pass laws to encourage responsible nuclear power in addition to renewables.
Yeah, because that would totally happen.
In the real world, they would pass a 2,000 page Affordable Energy Act that no-one had read, full of pork for hamster farmers.
Why the ever loving' hell would you buy an Android device then?
Because you want a cheap phone? To, you know, make phone calls? And Android are the cheapest 'smart' phones?
Can you even get 'dumb' phones any more?
Even if you could do that, app developers have had half a decade in which they never had any reason to do so.
And that attitude is why Android is becoming the new Windows.
'But, but, we can't add security and privacy features, because they would break SuperWhizzoWriter 1993!'
If you don't trust the app dev to correctly disclose what permissions they need then walk away.
They don't 'correctly disclose what permissions they need', they 'disclose what permissions they want'. Most apps I go to download want vastly more permissions than any sane person would ever give them.
Here's an idea: maybe the app maker should only ask for the permissions they actually need to make the app run, and not ask for every damn permission in the operating system?
No, that picture slideshow app does not need my GPS location or to be able to send text messages, and sure as hell shouldn't crash if I deny them.
Every time I turn my Android tablet on, I get a bunch of alerts saying some app that should be local to the tablet is demanding new permissions that I never gave it before, to do things I wouldn't even think of letting it do. Screw 'em.
For example, if an app store doesn't launch at boot, then you won't get notified about security updates to your existing apps until you happen to look for new apps, which might not be for weeks.
Oh, the horror.
I'd much rather it hogs the CPU and wireless LAN for ten minutes at startup when I only wanted to use the tablet brielfy to check something on the web.
Android is even worse than Windows for horrifically slow startup times due to installed crapware that believes updating itself is more important than whatever I want to do.
Before I switched to FreeBSD, Linux always seemed to have headaches with shared library problems, with some apps not working with some versions of shared libraries and a general nuisance being made with multiple versions of shared libraries being around.
I think you're thinking of Windows. Linux works because it can have multiple versions of the same library, and minor versions are compatible, so you only need one copy of each major version to remain compatible with old software.
Given the size of storage generally available now, is it really so bad to have statically linked binaries?
Uh, yes. Do you really want to have to download a new copy of every single application on the system when there's a security fix for the standard C library?
That said, Windows isn't much better off when every program has its own copy of zlib.dll and you have to update fifty of them when a new security fix is released.
Security is done by analyzing the machine code and only allowing "safe" operations.
Some of us didn't even believe that the first time we were told it was 'secure'.
Building infrastructure to handle peak power is economically inefficient. By giving an incentive for consumers to reduce power consumption during peak times, you avoid the cost of building infrastructure that sits idle most of the time.
Of course, in a market which isn't heavily regulated by government, your customers just say 'what is this shit? I'm not paying you more for things because you refuse to build infrastructure, I'm taking my business to to your competitors.'
Or, in a power market that is heavily regulated, they buy a generator like the rest of the Third World.
But if you log out of xmbc you get to the desktop.
No, you get to a login screen.
There's no window manager or desktop running on that box, though you could log in to a desktop if you want. I don't ever have a reason to do so, myself.
Most of the PC enthusiast/gaming magazines have what they call their "baseline" or "minimal" machines at around the $1300 level.
Spending $1300 to build a 'minimal' gaming machine. Ha-ha. You're funny.
I see no purpose for this distro. My applications require a DESKTOP environment. Why limit user’s options?
Because this is Valve's game console.
Just like my Xbmc front end boots into Xbmc, and not a desktop. Xbmc is all it's meant to do.
Anyone who thinks McDonalds' workers should earn more is free to leave them a tip next time they visit.
As demand falls and production capacity rises, at some point money will become obsolete. We will become a post-employment society. There is no other logical outcome.
Well, yes, 'employment' is dying. Few of our ancestors were 'employed' and few of our descendants were 'employed'; it was basically an industrial-era phenomenon.
But, if you think money is going obsolete, you must be one of those commies^H^H^H^H^H'post-scarcity' nuts who thinks everyone will be happy once they have a Stalinist apartment block and a Trabant.
What efficiency gains? Airlines would be far more efficient if they could fly direct from A to B, rather than being funneled into narrow corridors. Pretty much since the advent of GPS, people have been trying to get rid of 'air traffic control' and replace it by direct communication between aircraft which know where they're going and where they want to go.