I'm working on the OpenJDK source tree through Mercurial. I couldn't be more satisfied. The tools are well structured, very easy to use, stable, fast and well documented. I don't miss any feature. Could anybody, who tried both and prefers Git, list some advantages of it over Mercurial? To me it just seems like a Git done right without the hype and too complex UI.
Distros like Damn Small Linux know a mode where all frequent writes go to a RAM disk. Current flash hardware (especially disks - lesser cheap usb sticks) is already a lot smarter at "wear levelling", but a standard distro genereates a whole lot of small writing activity. It would be nice if there was a out-of-the-box way to make a server distro like Ubuntu Server USB ready. My file server could shut down its 5 disks completly until I access the files over the network. This could save quite some energy (and disk lifetime).
Without seeming to flame (flame mode if you like), we've had experience of locked down platform with Apple's iPhone. Now Apple join Microsoft in having a locked down OS for media playback, nobody can feel smug or superior (apart from Linux users).
Linux users can feel superior for not being able to legally play HD Blu-ray titles or for not being able to buy HD video from iTunes??
Yes Linux users can use software employing AACS and BD+ hacks, but so can Mac OS X and Vista users - even on HDCP enabled hardware. So what's the advantage of Linux regarding this now again?
How great. A company takes a e-ink panel and wants to put it into a very small enclosing. There's no product yet, but this "innovative" and "great" idea, that only the geniuses at "Plastic Logic" could have.
There was no breakthrough in engineering, no battery issues or lag problems solved, no improvements in robustness - just the idea of putting a panel into a small case. Look at the promotion video on their website. Even the promotion model can't display its pages without massive horizontal errors. Page flipping is still slow as hell. No plan how they want secure electronic parts from bending. Nothing to see here, just a company thinking plastic logic. In my opinion a marketing stunt by a Cambridge drop-off to attract venture capital to spill out some good earnings for their initial staff.
This is going the way against "one size fits all". Microsoft's operating systems try to be compatible to a magnitude of hardware configurations in contrast to Apple forcing control over a very limited hardware range.
Microsoft's operating systems also come in different versions for different needs and budgets. The spot is supposed to make you think about exactly that point, without mentioning it specifically. It's against Apple's limited few sizes fit all dogma. I'm surprised that such few Slashdot readers have got the message yet. The spot was pretty clever, it makes people take about it what's it supposed to mean.
Sadly no commercial could make me switch back right now. Leopard is a fantastic platform to work with every day. I've never been more satisfied with a computing platform.
I had no idea you could identify a male pornstar from their facials. What an odd feature to include in a public photo app...
They probably fingerprint the angle, muzzle velocity, plane of rotation, and average amount per second after launch (time data from EXIF fields) of the male's seed.
To extract these parameters Google's patented algorithm needs on average only 2.6 pictures out of a sequence, which is excellent. The facial splash additionally contains information about the seed's viscosity which can be added to the fingerprint, to increase uniqueness of the data set in the case of overlapping results.
Spoken like someone who never worked on an embarrassingly parallel problem, and decided to really "speed things up" by creating as many threads as you could in order to make use of as many processors and cores as you can. Let the operating system handle the scheduling!
Spoken like someone having an attention span shorter than three sentences. I've written exactly that (thread pools would have been better). Going for 171 threads doesn't really "fucking slow things down", it's pretty bad style in comparison to thread pools and runnable objects (and slower), but better than no parallelization for the use case of a browser.
Theoretically the 171 thread solution could be much faster than an alternative thread pool one, if the former used smarter locking for asynchronous code. To make it short, it's hard to draw ultimate conclusions without seeing the code or doing thorough performance measurements, which the tester didn't do.
380 MB RAM is a lot, but don't forget about debugging code which may decrease this substantailly.
Why should 171 threads be a problem? Threads are pretty cheap today. Creation is fast and while asleep they use up almost no resources. It's a good sign that MS may be able to utilize current and future multicore CPUs.
Ok, thread pools and runnable objects might have been better style. 171 threads indicate that software engineering could not agree on a single Grand Central and every team is allowed to spawn as many threads as they want. But hey, threads are cheap - stil way better than Firefox' single process model.
I assume by commerical you mean proprietary. Any new hire has direct access to the corporate infrastructure because they need it to work. I have known someone to bring down a mission critical client system by-passing QC for a patch though negligence. How much more could someone malicious do?
That's a false assumption. I was rather talking about companies like Red Hat and novell. They have achieved a much greater level of security (no SSL mess, decent SELinux or AppArmor integration) while totally ignoring the 100% free fundamentalism. The whole point is security is not about 100% openness, but professionalism. Somebody has to actually audit the code. Just making everything open buys you nothing.
One very serious point to being "free" is that, if you are serious about security, you want as much of your software to be available for security audit as possible
You mean like the Debian OpenSSL patches, the community audited wide open security hole for mor than 1 1/2 years?
Communities where maintainers know each other by nothing else than email can easily be infiltrated by "hostile" talent. They offer high quality contributions, seem to spend very much time discussion patches with much professionalism and politeness. In the end it might be just the made up personality Jon Doe of some organization X waiting to place just this one unsuspicious line within the code.
When using commercial code, organization X needs much more than a diligent virtual personality but direct access to the corporate infrastructure.
Yes, and Siemens used to have close ties to the biggest german intelligence agency: BND. Siemens used to manufacture massive phone switches, where they provided the BND with backdoors to a remote "maintenance" shell sold all over the world.
So good luck with putting one of these new machines into your super secret intelligence facility.
Firefox 3's hunger for data really gets on my nerve. I don't want every bit of my browsing history appear for every letter I type in. Firefox 3 can be quite a privacy nightmare, if a guest just wants to check something on the net for 2 seconds. I don't want a browser forcing me to tell everybody to please use the guest account for 20 seconds of browsing just to have adequate privacy. I have really learned to like Safari. It's just bare bones: tabs, a search field, a private browsing mode, and ultra fast rendering. Nothing else. Perfect! If Firefox 2 is going to start nagging soon, it's time to let Firefox go completly.
When do people finally realize that self signed certificates don't work? If I share your WLAN access in a public cafe it's really no big deal to play man in the middle and exchange the presented certificate for my own. Ok, it's more work than without, but not much (about 5 minutes). The only case where self-signed certificates can be secure is when you manually verify the validity of a certificate beforehand and save it in your cert store. If your first check of a certificate's validity happens to be while I'm attacking you (maybe because you are visiting the site for the first time) you will "verify" my hacked one. And don't tell me about hashes on webpages. Maybe 1 in 1000000 users checks this once in a while for pure curiosity, but not more.
wtf? I thought you weren't allowed to actually "sell" Ubuntu for money? (Besides, of course, ordering the cd from Ubuntu for like $1)
Break out the beer folks, this one's gotta be good.
Absolutely nothing in the GPL states that you couldn't sell it (as long as you include the source code). So keep your beer and actually read the terms you are talking about next time.
This is a very clever separation of concerns. You put the burden of mass bulk traffic onto the shoulders of a huge crowd covered by bullet proof plausible deniability. But the actual acts of infringement - the provision of copyrighted material (through URLs) - can be delivered from low bandwidth servers in banana states.
Priotizing bandwith with the Linux kernel's de-facto standard shaper HTB is not the correct approach if you care about latency. Nevertheless 95% of the internet's advise points exactly into that direction. What most people don't know, Linux already includes a shaper being able to make realtime scheduling guarantees: HSFC. It is a little bit more complicated to setup, but my box is able to give me 15 ms VoIP delays in parallel on a congested line (2000+ bittorrent peers).
The whole thing is a marketing campaign by Via. Surprise!! The board is going to run and run....
Nice idea, but shouldn't make it to Slashdot's front page.
this is reverse psychology! Hide some nonsense behind CRTL+C and the people point at you laughing about hiding such nonsense.
Give 'em nothing but black bars and they will be afraid what terrible things are behind them and shout for more transparency.
I'm still amazed sometimes how the google guys map the surface of a more or less flat thing like our world onto a ball. It confused me at first, but then I realized how smart that was. Instead of scrolling from east to west and the whole way back I can just turn the ball across the western border and be instantly there. I have been told that also most pilots also assume our world to be a ball when doing navigation as it supposed to make math easier.
and make copies for his family members. After all it is possible that unsatisfied sexual desires were partial reasons for his death. The family has a right to know. Also dig up his MMOG chat logs were he used to be a great hero instead of this promising CS major No. 374229.
Even mentioning funeral costs is hypocrisy. You WONT have any additional proofs for an accident if you find NOTHING indicating a suicide on his computer. It more seems like a desperate try of affecting to be reasonable while preparing to rip apart his always intended private parts.
Its audience are the masses, and for those it's a very easy to use and convenient tool. If you need pro features, because your blog is so sophisticated, choose a pro service provider instead and stop whining!
Sounds like targeted fud. Why else would one cite a six year old story about a "security flaw"?
Balmer is a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur of the past. He's still playing an aggressive dominance card of leadership, but his ship has started sinking very slowly a long time ago. His style of management is imperious and ignorant. This used to be the way to go, when Microsoft was a aggressive and flexible shop going for world domination - not by being better, but being faster, and by _setting_ standards instead of waiting for them to evolve. Those times are long gone. Microsoft is a moloch. Vista didn't set any standard for anything. Apple did on the desktop and Google and others did in the web. And still there we have yelling Balmer as commander in chief shouting at those who could know better instead of listening and comprehending what is really going on.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm working on the OpenJDK source tree through Mercurial. I couldn't be more satisfied. The tools are well structured, very easy to use, stable, fast and well documented. I don't miss any feature. Could anybody, who tried both and prefers Git, list some advantages of it over Mercurial? To me it just seems like a Git done right without the hype and too complex UI.
Distros like Damn Small Linux know a mode where all frequent writes go to a RAM disk. Current flash hardware (especially disks - lesser cheap usb sticks) is already a lot smarter at "wear levelling", but a standard distro genereates a whole lot of small writing activity. It would be nice if there was a out-of-the-box way to make a server distro like Ubuntu Server USB ready. My file server could shut down its 5 disks completly until I access the files over the network. This could save quite some energy (and disk lifetime).
Sadly I can't mod today.
Without seeming to flame (flame mode if you like), we've had experience of locked down platform with Apple's iPhone. Now Apple join Microsoft in having a locked down OS for media playback, nobody can feel smug or superior (apart from Linux users).
Linux users can feel superior for not being able to legally play HD Blu-ray titles or for not being able to buy HD video from iTunes??
Yes Linux users can use software employing AACS and BD+ hacks, but so can Mac OS X and Vista users - even on HDCP enabled hardware. So what's the advantage of Linux regarding this now again?
How great. A company takes a e-ink panel and wants to put it into a very small enclosing. There's no product yet, but this "innovative" and "great" idea, that only the geniuses at "Plastic Logic" could have.
There was no breakthrough in engineering, no battery issues or lag problems solved, no improvements in robustness - just the idea of putting a panel into a small case. Look at the promotion video on their website. Even the promotion model can't display its pages without massive horizontal errors. Page flipping is still slow as hell. No plan how they want secure electronic parts from bending. Nothing to see here, just a company thinking plastic logic. In my opinion a marketing stunt by a Cambridge drop-off to attract venture capital to spill out some good earnings for their initial staff.
I think we could work out a very profitable deal on your part.
-----------------
Stephen Pilgrim
Assistant Manager
RIAA campus solution recruitment
This is going the way against "one size fits all". Microsoft's operating systems try to be compatible to a magnitude of hardware configurations in contrast to Apple forcing control over a very limited hardware range.
Microsoft's operating systems also come in different versions for different needs and budgets. The spot is supposed to make you think about exactly that point, without mentioning it specifically. It's against Apple's limited few sizes fit all dogma. I'm surprised that such few Slashdot readers have got the message yet. The spot was pretty clever, it makes people take about it what's it supposed to mean.
Sadly no commercial could make me switch back right now. Leopard is a fantastic platform to work with every day. I've never been more satisfied with a computing platform.
I had no idea you could identify a male pornstar from their facials. What an odd feature to include in a public photo app...
They probably fingerprint the angle, muzzle velocity, plane of rotation, and average amount per second after launch (time data from EXIF fields) of the male's seed.
To extract these parameters Google's patented algorithm needs on average only 2.6 pictures out of a sequence, which is excellent. The facial splash additionally contains information about the seed's viscosity which can be added to the fingerprint, to increase uniqueness of the data set in the case of overlapping results.
Spoken like someone who never worked on an embarrassingly parallel problem, and decided to really "speed things up" by creating as many threads as you could in order to make use of as many processors and cores as you can. Let the operating system handle the scheduling!
Spoken like someone having an attention span shorter than three sentences. I've written exactly that (thread pools would have been better). Going for 171 threads doesn't really "fucking slow things down", it's pretty bad style in comparison to thread pools and runnable objects (and slower), but better than no parallelization for the use case of a browser.
Theoretically the 171 thread solution could be much faster than an alternative thread pool one, if the former used smarter locking for asynchronous code. To make it short, it's hard to draw ultimate conclusions without seeing the code or doing thorough performance measurements, which the tester didn't do.
380 MB RAM is a lot, but don't forget about debugging code which may decrease this substantailly.
Why should 171 threads be a problem? Threads are pretty cheap today. Creation is fast and while asleep they use up almost no resources. It's a good sign that MS may be able to utilize current and future multicore CPUs.
Ok, thread pools and runnable objects might have been better style. 171 threads indicate that software engineering could not agree on a single Grand Central and every team is allowed to spawn as many threads as they want. But hey, threads are cheap - stil way better than Firefox' single process model.
I assume by commerical you mean proprietary. Any new hire has direct access to the corporate infrastructure because they need it to work. I have known someone to bring down a mission critical client system by-passing QC for a patch though negligence. How much more could someone malicious do?
That's a false assumption. I was rather talking about companies like Red Hat and novell. They have achieved a much greater level of security (no SSL mess, decent SELinux or AppArmor integration) while totally ignoring the 100% free fundamentalism. The whole point is security is not about 100% openness, but professionalism. Somebody has to actually audit the code. Just making everything open buys you nothing.
One very serious point to being "free" is that, if you are serious about security, you want as much of your software to be available for security audit as possible
You mean like the Debian OpenSSL patches, the community audited wide open security hole for mor than 1 1/2 years?
Communities where maintainers know each other by nothing else than email can easily be infiltrated by "hostile" talent. They offer high quality contributions, seem to spend very much time discussion patches with much professionalism and politeness. In the end it might be just the made up personality Jon Doe of some organization X waiting to place just this one unsuspicious line within the code.
When using commercial code, organization X needs much more than a diligent virtual personality but direct access to the corporate infrastructure.
So good luck with putting one of these new machines into your super secret intelligence facility.
Firefox 3's hunger for data really gets on my nerve. I don't want every bit of my browsing history appear for every letter I type in. Firefox 3 can be quite a privacy nightmare, if a guest just wants to check something on the net for 2 seconds.
I don't want a browser forcing me to tell everybody to please use the guest account for 20 seconds of browsing just to have adequate privacy.
I have really learned to like Safari. It's just bare bones: tabs, a search field, a private browsing mode, and ultra fast rendering. Nothing else. Perfect! If Firefox 2 is going to start nagging soon, it's time to let Firefox go completly.
When do people finally realize that self signed certificates don't work? If I share your WLAN access in a public cafe it's really no big deal to play man in the middle and exchange the presented certificate for my own. Ok, it's more work than without, but not much (about 5 minutes). The only case where self-signed certificates can be secure is when you manually verify the validity of a certificate beforehand and save it in your cert store. If your first check of a certificate's validity happens to be while I'm attacking you (maybe because you are visiting the site for the first time) you will "verify" my hacked one. And don't tell me about hashes on webpages. Maybe 1 in 1000000 users checks this once in a while for pure curiosity, but not more.
wtf? I thought you weren't allowed to actually "sell" Ubuntu for money? (Besides, of course, ordering the cd from Ubuntu for like $1)
Break out the beer folks, this one's gotta be good.
Absolutely nothing in the GPL states that you couldn't sell it (as long as you include the source code). So keep your beer and actually read the terms you are talking about next time.
This is a very clever separation of concerns. You put the burden of mass bulk traffic onto the shoulders of a huge crowd covered by bullet proof plausible deniability. But the actual acts of infringement - the provision of copyrighted material (through URLs) - can be delivered from low bandwidth servers in banana states.
Priotizing bandwith with the Linux kernel's de-facto standard shaper HTB is not the correct approach if you care about latency. Nevertheless 95% of the internet's advise points exactly into that direction. What most people don't know, Linux already includes a shaper being able to make realtime scheduling guarantees: HSFC. It is a little bit more complicated to setup, but my box is able to give me 15 ms VoIP delays in parallel on a congested line (2000+ bittorrent peers).
The whole thing is a marketing campaign by Via. Surprise!! The board is going to run and run....
Nice idea, but shouldn't make it to Slashdot's front page.
this is reverse psychology! Hide some nonsense behind CRTL+C and the people point at you laughing about hiding such nonsense. Give 'em nothing but black bars and they will be afraid what terrible things are behind them and shout for more transparency.
I'm still amazed sometimes how the google guys map the surface of a more or less flat thing like our world onto a ball. It confused me at first, but then I realized how smart that was. Instead of scrolling from east to west and the whole way back I can just turn the ball across the western border and be instantly there. I have been told that also most pilots also assume our world to be a ball when doing navigation as it supposed to make math easier.
and make copies for his family members. After all it is possible that unsatisfied sexual desires were partial reasons for his death. The family has a right to know. Also dig up his MMOG chat logs were he used to be a great hero instead of this promising CS major No. 374229. Even mentioning funeral costs is hypocrisy. You WONT have any additional proofs for an accident if you find NOTHING indicating a suicide on his computer. It more seems like a desperate try of affecting to be reasonable while preparing to rip apart his always intended private parts.
Its audience are the masses, and for those it's a very easy to use and convenient tool. If you need pro features, because your blog is so sophisticated, choose a pro service provider instead and stop whining! Sounds like targeted fud. Why else would one cite a six year old story about a "security flaw"?
Sy, I'd thought that there is a 1:1 relationship for this between German and English. On my mind was the equivalent to 'juggernaut'.
Balmer is a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur of the past. He's still playing an aggressive dominance card of leadership, but his ship has started sinking very slowly a long time ago. His style of management is imperious and ignorant. This used to be the way to go, when Microsoft was a aggressive and flexible shop going for world domination - not by being better, but being faster, and by _setting_ standards instead of waiting for them to evolve. Those times are long gone. Microsoft is a moloch. Vista didn't set any standard for anything. Apple did on the desktop and Google and others did in the web. And still there we have yelling Balmer as commander in chief shouting at those who could know better instead of listening and comprehending what is really going on.