We don't understand the mechanics involved, and we didn't really need to in order to build safe containment vessel floors that can hold an ugly puddle of radioactive sludge.
So we did build such containment vessels? Then why did the Fukushima accident happen at all? The tsunami didn't breach the containment. It only shut down all the generators. Your language implies that nuclear powerplants are "run-away safe", i.e. if anything really bad happens, there's always the "safe" containment to contain it all, because "we" built it so it can contain the molten reactor core. But no existing plants really have that capability.
The/proc interface is a mess from the format point of view: there is no standard; each file can use his own formatting.
That doesn't matter much in this case; the/proc filesystem is very hardware-dependent and highly system-specific anyway, and the files are mostly read-only. There's generally exactly one program or library/API that reads a particular/proc file, and that program/API is how everything else in the system gets that piece of information; this is not like generic "configuration files" in userspace which would potentially be read AND WRITTEN by dozens of processes.
I good reason is the future possibility to manage kernel features in a more formal way than with the/proc or/sys interfaces.
What's wrong with/proc and/sys for kernel and hardware configuration tasks? It's easy and twekable, you can poke around in it without writing a program first, and it conforms to "everything is a file".
It has taken about a decade to bring a standard IPC protocol to Linux. I mean a protocol that truly work between applications from different team of developers.It's now time to use it from a wider audience. Making it part of the kernel not only make it a bit more fast, but it clearly make it a more appealing choice for applications that need IPC.
IPC is between processes, not between a process and the kernel.
It indirectly shows that you didn't read the actual article. What this "PC Plus" actually provides is the ability to run Android Apps. It seems to be a Dalvik runtime environment and some supporting libs pre-installed on Win8.1 PCs and laptops.
Which negates what I said -- how? Why didn't they provide the ability to run Linux desktop apps instead?
Who the fuck wants this? Sure, Windows sucks but why would cramming a shitty OEM version of Android make things better?
It indirectly shows the sorry state of Linux desktops as a commercially viable alternative to Windows -- apparently companies perceive that as so much a can of worms that they choose Android over it, which was never meant to be a desktop OS.
If you use commodity hardware you could have two CPUs from different manufacturers and compare outputs. Back in the 80s that sort of thing was popular in critical systems. Buy a 68000 CPU from two different sources, preferably from different continents and with each being a unique design. Run the same code on both, and if their outputs don't match for some reason one is faulty. This of course assumes that both don't have identical back-doors.
That sounds more like a method for finding normal (unintentional) CPU bugs, not backdoors, because the latter would be designed to not alter the regular behavior of the processor.
If you can genetically engineer cancer-killing T-cells, couldn't you just inject those into healthy patients (i.e. all the rest of us) as well, as a sort of immunization, just like you can get vaccination against influenza or tetanus?
They specifically state they are targeting lead-acid and lithium-ion.
Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.
And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).
AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.
Yes! Let's watch him do to Microsoft what he did to Nokia!
He did what he did to Nokia because he was a trojan horse there. As CEO of MS, he would be his his true self, not a trojan horse, so there's nothing to suggest that he would do similar things there as he did at Nokia.
At least you can now watch Channe9/MSDN videos on a Linux box. I think there was a time when they wanted you to use S*lv*rl*ght to watch their stuff. They're not providing ogv or webm streams, but oh well...
The point for length of punishment is to completely disconnect the person from their previous life and then rehabilitate them by rebuilding it.
Now that's an outlandish and self-serving explanation if I ever heard one. Why are people convicted to prison sentences if they cause deadly car accidents? To disconnect them from their previous life? Why are they allowed to move back to their family after their release then? Prison sentences are always about revenge too. That's just how these things work. The bereaved wouldn't accept anything else. If the whole point of the justice system was to convert criminals into better people, many murderers, especially second-degree murderers, would not be imprisoned at all. There are many murders that happen under special circumstances, where it's highly likely that the offender wouldn't do it again no matter what conviction he receives or doesn't receive. Putting him in prison will, if anything, worsen his prognosis
The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on
Palm did the same thing before Apple and was very successful with it. Apple did not invent or was the first to succeed with the app store either. The iPhone was simply an evolution from previous platforms.
No. I owned a Palm Pilot. It was a very different device from an iPhone. There was nothing like the app store either. OTOH, all current smartphones, including Android and Windows Phone offerings, aren't very different devices from an iPhone. Even though those devices have developed several unique feature sets and UI paradigms, the basic way the whole package works is fundamentally similar to -- and can be traced back to -- the first iPhone.
and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.
Apple has always remained a small player in the smartphone market, so they neither "disrupted" nor "recreated" it.
That's not a valid line of reasoning. You can disrupt and recreate a market without subsequently dominating it for a long time. The available Android and Windows Phone devices are very competitive offerings. Still, as stated above, they're fundamentally similar to the original iPhone in many ways. As an indication you can just look at the way mobile browsers have developed. Until 2007 they were tiny, clunky apps that nobody used. After 2007, everybody scrambled to make their browser work like the iPhone's. There is a reason why e.g. Opera basically pulled their browser from the market and started laboring internally for one or two years. There is a reason why Microsoft essentially terminated their entire mobile OS line, which had been quite successful previously, and started working on a new one. There was a smartphone market before the initial iPhone, and then there was a very different smartphone market after the initial iPhone. That's what constitutes the market "disruption" and "recreation".
...cunt. I don't know why people revere this workplace bully so much.
He isn't "revered" for his being a "workplace bully", he is revered because of the change he affected -- which is probably more than almost all the other "workplace bullies" combined. There are millions of workplace bullies, but only one of them pulled off the -- in all likelihood -- greatest commercial comeback of the last 50 years, and initiated several breakthrough products in the process. All those attributes make the "workplace bully" attribute proportionally less relevant.
What you're describing, however, does fit the definition of innovation.
Palm, Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft didn't just invent these technologies, they brought them to market and had very successful products with them.
No. They produced entirely different devices and were (more or less) successful with those. The innovation in the original iPhone wasn't in any of the underlying technologies -- those had all been there before. The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on. All those things constitute innovations in themselves -- and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.
This is yet another example of the differences between Gates and Jobs. Gates went on stage and demo'ed their operating system. Jobs went out with his immaculately rehearsed script of things to do in the only order that they had managed to make work. Win95 blue screened when it hit a bad driver, while IOS (arguably a much more immature product when demonstrated) gave the illusion of being ready for consumers.
Absolutely. This is the difference between geeks/engineers, and people who know how to market things. Geeks and engineers in general don't even like the ability to market. They think it is "bells and Whistles" or "Madison Avenue". I suspect that like most good geeks, Gates went out cold, and tried to demo his products, probably the first time he'd seen them in action.
Haha. People here seem to have forgotten that Microsoft practically invented the term "vaporware" all by themselves. They were undisputed masters in that field. The "Cairo project" arguably existed for the sole purpose of shying customers away from NeXTStep, and was buried as soon as the latter was no longer thought to be a threat. And who remembers WinFS? They probably even shipped some developer previews of that before cancelling it.
In contrast to that, Jobs at Macworld 2007 only promised that Apple would deliver a device 6 months later which would work as could reasonably be inferred from the demo. And they did that. So technically Jobs wasn't even "lying" at that demo, the whole thing can essentially be seen as a somewhat more elaborate slide-show presentation which just happened to include a half-working prototype as well.
Why is this modded insightful? It makes the assumption that musicians must be computer savvy, otherwise they are branded as idiots. Sorry bud, but I am very glad that artists such as Johnny Cash, the Beatles, and the Ramones focused their time on art rather than worry to update their masters to a recent format. That's the job of the engineers.
In Albini's "use analog master recordings" world, future musicians would have to be "savvy" acquiring and operating decades-old, long obsolete tape machines. That's much more speculative than them being able to play back some form of uncompressed digital audio file on some kind of digital computer.
I'm honestly not super clear myself! But the DDX is, as I understand it, the in-Xorg portion of the graphics driver. So I guess it's not unreasonable that that component needs to know it's not got complete control of the hardware, as opposed to the Xorg-only case where it would have. Presumably it needs to proxy some operations through Mir (or Wayland, for XWayland) that it'd normally just set directly.
Well..why would the Intel driver even be used when Xorg runs "hosted" as a Mir client? In that configuration, XMir should be the "driver", and any Intel driver code in Xorg should lie dormant. Or did this patch actually touch something other than Intel's Xorg driver?
Why does the Intel Xorg graphics driver have to know anything about XMir, which, as far as I understand it, is just an Xorg driver for running Xorg as a Mir client?
Or, they prosecute you for making your Russian wife mysteriously disappear. They make you into such a pariah that nobody will come to help you. Then they send you to jail after a very public trial that has nothing to do with your refusal to comply. And if you even tried to bring that up, you would sound like even more of a dangerously crazy person.
I'd wager that the fundamental flaw in HTTPS is that the government has the private keys direct from the CAs. The protocol is flawed in the key management (as most are).
That would only allow for "targeted" (MITM) attacks, rather than opportunistic (untargeted) decryption. And modern browsers perform certificate pinning for some well-known domain certificates, which means MITM against those servers would be detected. Unless the government has the keys for those domain certs as well...
Where did the good old Borg drone logo go that decorated MS stories on Slashdot in earlier years? Never would that one have been more fitting than here...
Slashdot Mirror
We don't understand the mechanics involved, and we didn't really need to in order to build safe containment vessel floors that can hold an ugly puddle of radioactive sludge.
So we did build such containment vessels? Then why did the Fukushima accident happen at all? The tsunami didn't breach the containment. It only shut down all the generators. Your language implies that nuclear powerplants are "run-away safe", i.e. if anything really bad happens, there's always the "safe" containment to contain it all, because "we" built it so it can contain the molten reactor core. But no existing plants really have that capability.
IPC is between processes, not between a process and the kernel.
What a weird thing to say. Kernel support has been present since the early (SysV) days of IPC. Do you think that was wrong?
The kernel provides the IPC mechanisms, but they're mostly used for communication between (userspace) processes, not between processes and the kernel.
The /proc interface is a mess from the format point of view: there is no standard; each file can use his own formatting.
That doesn't matter much in this case; the /proc filesystem is very hardware-dependent and highly system-specific anyway, and the files are mostly read-only. There's generally exactly one program or library/API that reads a particular /proc file, and that program/API is how everything else in the system gets that piece of information; this is not like generic "configuration files" in userspace which would potentially be read AND WRITTEN by dozens of processes.
I good reason is the future possibility to manage kernel features in a more formal way than with the /proc or /sys interfaces.
What's wrong with /proc and /sys for kernel and hardware configuration tasks? It's easy and twekable, you can poke around in it without writing a program first, and it conforms to "everything is a file".
It has taken about a decade to bring a standard IPC protocol to Linux. I mean a protocol that truly work between applications from different team of developers.It's now time to use it from a wider audience. Making it part of the kernel not only make it a bit more fast, but it clearly make it a more appealing choice for applications that need IPC.
IPC is between processes, not between a process and the kernel.
It indirectly shows that you didn't read the actual article. What this "PC Plus" actually provides is the ability to run Android Apps. It seems to be a Dalvik runtime environment and some supporting libs pre-installed on Win8.1 PCs and laptops.
Which negates what I said -- how? Why didn't they provide the ability to run Linux desktop apps instead?
Who the fuck wants this? Sure, Windows sucks but why would cramming a shitty OEM version of Android make things better?
It indirectly shows the sorry state of Linux desktops as a commercially viable alternative to Windows -- apparently companies perceive that as so much a can of worms that they choose Android over it, which was never meant to be a desktop OS.
If you use commodity hardware you could have two CPUs from different manufacturers and compare outputs. Back in the 80s that sort of thing was popular in critical systems. Buy a 68000 CPU from two different sources, preferably from different continents and with each being a unique design. Run the same code on both, and if their outputs don't match for some reason one is faulty. This of course assumes that both don't have identical back-doors.
That sounds more like a method for finding normal (unintentional) CPU bugs, not backdoors, because the latter would be designed to not alter the regular behavior of the processor.
If you can genetically engineer cancer-killing T-cells, couldn't you just inject those into healthy patients (i.e. all the rest of us) as well, as a sort of immunization, just like you can get vaccination against influenza or tetanus?
They specifically state they are targeting lead-acid and lithium-ion.
Which is a different kind of disaster waiting to happen. Lead batteries provide about 40Wh of storage capacity per kg of lead. Germany has 40m households, and their average electricity consumption is 10 kWh per household per day. Which means that if, statistically, every household wanted to be able store one day of electricity consumption (which, arguably, isn't enough if you go 100% wind/solar, but anyway), you'd need 10 million tons of lead -- about one annual world production of lead, roughly as much as is contained in all car batteries worldwide combined.
And private households only consume 1/3rd or so of all the electricity produced in Germany (businesses and industry consume the other two 3rds).
AFAICT from this, the whole thing is a total non-starter. It will never scale up to any significant number of homes. A few percent of the households (mostly rich home owners) may do it, collect Government support and feel good about saving the environment. The overall effects will be inconsequential -- so much so that the whole project wasn't worth starting in the first place.
Yes! Let's watch him do to Microsoft what he did to Nokia!
He did what he did to Nokia because he was a trojan horse there. As CEO of MS, he would be his his true self, not a trojan horse, so there's nothing to suggest that he would do similar things there as he did at Nokia.
At least you can now watch Channe9/MSDN videos on a Linux box. I think there was a time when they wanted you to use S*lv*rl*ght to watch their stuff. They're not providing ogv or webm streams, but oh well...
The point for length of punishment is to completely disconnect the person from their previous life and then rehabilitate them by rebuilding it.
Now that's an outlandish and self-serving explanation if I ever heard one. Why are people convicted to prison sentences if they cause deadly car accidents? To disconnect them from their previous life? Why are they allowed to move back to their family after their release then? Prison sentences are always about revenge too. That's just how these things work. The bereaved wouldn't accept anything else. If the whole point of the justice system was to convert criminals into better people, many murderers, especially second-degree murderers, would not be imprisoned at all. There are many murders that happen under special circumstances, where it's highly likely that the offender wouldn't do it again no matter what conviction he receives or doesn't receive. Putting him in prison will, if anything, worsen his prognosis
Palm did the same thing before Apple and was very successful with it. Apple did not invent or was the first to succeed with the app store either. The iPhone was simply an evolution from previous platforms.
No. I owned a Palm Pilot. It was a very different device from an iPhone. There was nothing like the app store either. OTOH, all current smartphones, including Android and Windows Phone offerings, aren't very different devices from an iPhone. Even though those devices have developed several unique feature sets and UI paradigms, the basic way the whole package works is fundamentally similar to -- and can be traced back to -- the first iPhone.
Apple has always remained a small player in the smartphone market, so they neither "disrupted" nor "recreated" it.
That's not a valid line of reasoning. You can disrupt and recreate a market without subsequently dominating it for a long time. The available Android and Windows Phone devices are very competitive offerings. Still, as stated above, they're fundamentally similar to the original iPhone in many ways. As an indication you can just look at the way mobile browsers have developed. Until 2007 they were tiny, clunky apps that nobody used. After 2007, everybody scrambled to make their browser work like the iPhone's. There is a reason why e.g. Opera basically pulled their browser from the market and started laboring internally for one or two years. There is a reason why Microsoft essentially terminated their entire mobile OS line, which had been quite successful previously, and started working on a new one. There was a smartphone market before the initial iPhone, and then there was a very different smartphone market after the initial iPhone. That's what constitutes the market "disruption" and "recreation".
...cunt. I don't know why people revere this workplace bully so much.
He isn't "revered" for his being a "workplace bully", he is revered because of the change he affected -- which is probably more than almost all the other "workplace bullies" combined. There are millions of workplace bullies, but only one of them pulled off the -- in all likelihood -- greatest commercial comeback of the last 50 years, and initiated several breakthrough products in the process. All those attributes make the "workplace bully" attribute proportionally less relevant.
Neither does it mean "popularizing".
Palm, Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft didn't just invent these technologies, they brought them to market and had very successful products with them.
No. They produced entirely different devices and were (more or less) successful with those. The innovation in the original iPhone wasn't in any of the underlying technologies -- those had all been there before. The innovation of the iPhone was in the overall design, the vertical integration of the touch screen with the new "physical" touch UI and the sensors, the unified co-design of hardware and software and applications and later the app store model and so on. All those things constitute innovations in themselves -- and they have since totally disrupted and recreated the entire smartphone market.
This is yet another example of the differences between Gates and Jobs. Gates went on stage and demo'ed their operating system. Jobs went out with his immaculately rehearsed script of things to do in the only order that they had managed to make work. Win95 blue screened when it hit a bad driver, while IOS (arguably a much more immature product when demonstrated) gave the illusion of being ready for consumers.
Absolutely. This is the difference between geeks/engineers, and people who know how to market things. Geeks and engineers in general don't even like the ability to market. They think it is "bells and Whistles" or "Madison Avenue". I suspect that like most good geeks, Gates went out cold, and tried to demo his products, probably the first time he'd seen them in action.
Haha. People here seem to have forgotten that Microsoft practically invented the term "vaporware" all by themselves. They were undisputed masters in that field. The "Cairo project" arguably existed for the sole purpose of shying customers away from NeXTStep, and was buried as soon as the latter was no longer thought to be a threat. And who remembers WinFS? They probably even shipped some developer previews of that before cancelling it.
In contrast to that, Jobs at Macworld 2007 only promised that Apple would deliver a device 6 months later which would work as could reasonably be inferred from the demo. And they did that. So technically Jobs wasn't even "lying" at that demo, the whole thing can essentially be seen as a somewhat more elaborate slide-show presentation which just happened to include a half-working prototype as well.
Gates wanted to make things useful, Jobs wanted to make them pretty. They both knew their audience, I suppose.
By the time the iPhone came out, Gates's/Ballmer's efforts to "make things useful" had culminated in something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQquVbbLgtE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=928W9niR0G0
Nuff said.
No backup?
Drive failure? Sounds more like a RAID1/5 thing. Someone should tell Linus about mdadm.
Why is this modded insightful? It makes the assumption that musicians must be computer savvy, otherwise they are branded as idiots. Sorry bud, but I am very glad that artists such as Johnny Cash, the Beatles, and the Ramones focused their time on art rather than worry to update their masters to a recent format. That's the job of the engineers.
In Albini's "use analog master recordings" world, future musicians would have to be "savvy" acquiring and operating decades-old, long obsolete tape machines. That's much more speculative than them being able to play back some form of uncompressed digital audio file on some kind of digital computer.
I'm honestly not super clear myself! But the DDX is, as I understand it, the in-Xorg portion of the graphics driver. So I guess it's not unreasonable that that component needs to know it's not got complete control of the hardware, as opposed to the Xorg-only case where it would have. Presumably it needs to proxy some operations through Mir (or Wayland, for XWayland) that it'd normally just set directly.
Well..why would the Intel driver even be used when Xorg runs "hosted" as a Mir client? In that configuration, XMir should be the "driver", and any Intel driver code in Xorg should lie dormant. Or did this patch actually touch something other than Intel's Xorg driver?
Quoting the first link:
When using XMir for running X11/X.Org applications atop a Mir display server, modified DDX drivers are still required.
Well, that just restates/confirms the layering problem I mentioned, without explaining it.
Why does the Intel Xorg graphics driver have to know anything about XMir, which, as far as I understand it, is just an Xorg driver for running Xorg as a Mir client?
Or, they prosecute you for making your Russian wife mysteriously disappear. They make you into such a pariah that nobody will come to help you. Then they send you to jail after a very public trial that has nothing to do with your refusal to comply. And if you even tried to bring that up, you would sound like even more of a dangerously crazy person.
Reiser himself led the cops to his wife's body...
I'd wager that the fundamental flaw in HTTPS is that the government has the private keys direct from the CAs. The protocol is flawed in the key management (as most are).
That would only allow for "targeted" (MITM) attacks, rather than opportunistic (untargeted) decryption. And modern browsers perform certificate pinning for some well-known domain certificates, which means MITM against those servers would be detected. Unless the government has the keys for those domain certs as well...
Where did the good old Borg drone logo go that decorated MS stories on Slashdot in earlier years? Never would that one have been more fitting than here...