Most of the major antivirus products have had at least one big security vulnerability in the last two or three years. Norton had the best one, where a buffer overflow in their image scanning code (which ran in the kernel, WTF?) allowed you to run arbitrary code in the AV simply by sending someone an image via email. Even if the recipient never opened the mail, if their mail client downloaded it then the attacker had a kernel-level compromise. With this kind of track record, I find it hard to argue that AV is going to be a net win in security.
They did take back control. The small print said that they took back control on behalf of the Westminster Parliament, which had been consistently acting against their interests for decades, but that's not the point. I still don't understand the people who decided that voting to give Parliament more power was a protest vote against the establishment.
There was a survey about this particular one a little while ago. 97% of people were against it, if they knew about it or after they had the contents explained to them, but only around 10% even knew it was being proposed. I hope that the opposition parties make a lot of noise about it at the next election.
Often, but not always and it's difficult to find sources biased in opposite directions on all issues. Brexit is nice and easy in terms of bias: The Guardian and The Express are diametrically opposite in their biases, but the truth isn't in the middle, it's often perpendicular to the line between the both - they both cherry pick facts and pile on interpretation to the point where truth is nowhere to be found. If you look at anything involving copyright, then you'll find it very difficult to find a mainstream news source that will question the core assumptions, in spite of radical anti-capitalists like the Harvard Business School publishing numerous reports showing the harm that current copyright policy is doing to the economy.
In the last few months, The Daily Mash and The Rochdale Herald have had depressingly accurate news. The Guardian actually ran an article about a month ago that had exactly the same headline as The Daily Mash a year earlier (Unelectable Man Wins Election).
I'm using a news app that pulls in things from a load of sources and it's often difficult to tell the real news from the parody these days.
It's a group that controls access to people who are able to push code into the mainline kernel. If you don't pay your dues, then your patches probably won't be reviewed / upstreamed, and no one will take any care to avoid making KPI / KBI changes that completely break your work.
It would be nice to see XMPP have a resurgence. IRC is great at what it does, but XMPP has multi-user chat that's similar (not as capable, though) as well as offline message storage. I think there was a protocol extension called Jingle iirc that brought video chat to XMPP.
Jingle is a massive family of XMPP standards (technically, XEPs - XMPP Extension Proposals). It was, in fact, the third mechanism added to provide voice and video. SIP tunnelling over XMPP and the thing Apple added with iChat were both there first, but Google did its own thing and released Jingle.
This pretty much embodies the problems with XMPP:
They tried to be too impartial in the standards group and so you ended up with 3-4 competing XEPs that never achieved critical mass for any given feature.
They really liked overengineering things. Eventually, Personal Eventing over PubSub is supposed to subsume most of the other things, but implementing just the core PEP parts in the client and server is a huge undertaking.
They never backed a single permissively-licensed client library that implemented the important requirements in an extensible way. Jabber.org also changed their mind about the recommended server at least three times, so there was never a good reference platform.
I've been keeping an eye on Tox, which seems to have a better approach: they have a protocol and a reference implementation as a library, plus clients for all of the major platforms that use the library.
And it's probably true, when you're living in a society where the average person commits 7 crimes per day. Stop a random black person and you can probably find something that they're doing that's illegal. Don't stop a random white person and you won't find anything that they're doing that's illegal. Sample bias is a wonderful thing.
the USA has enshrined freedom of speech in its Constitution
No it hasn't. The USA has enshrined protections against the government infringing on free speech in its constitution. This originally meant the Federal government, but some later rulings have extended it to all layers of government. The USA also has certain laws that limit private ability to censor speech (for example, Common Carrier classification). There is nothing at all in the US constitution that says that if a private entity gains the power to effectively silence all dissenting speech they may not use it.
There's nothing saying that the owner of a printing press must permit anyone to use it, but unfortunately we've allowed privately owned, centralised platforms to grow to the extent where they can place quite effective limits on speech, yet are not bound by the first amendment.
If you cut the sex, it's going to be a really short series. If you cut the trademark Heinlein sophomore political commentary as well then there's nothing left other than introducing the word 'grok'. Which is probably for the best.
I get the three adaptations of that book mixed up, but from what I recall the most recent one was fairly faithful for about the first half, missed out some of the worst bits of the book, and then jammed on a terrible ending that completely missed the point of the novel and killed the story.
Sounds a bit unlikely. We buy them through the HE store in the UK, which comes with around a 10% discount and a three-year warranty. They'll replace any parts without quibble during that period. They'll also replace anything under the Sale of Goods Act / Consumer Rights Act if they'd claimed a longer life (for example, they'll replace batteries out of warranty if they haven't reached the advertised number of cycles).
If they were expected to fail after 24 months, then they'd be making a massive loss on these. They'll also sell a 3-year extended warranty to anyone, the cost of which just about covers one repair, so they'd be making a loss on those too if most people weren't needing any in-warranty repairs.
Literally everything else we accept as being a GUI widget of some kind was invented at Apple - drop down menus, contextual menus, desktop metaphor of files in folders, heirarchic folders, drag-and-drop, the clipboard, etc.
Overlapping windows is the other big one. Though it's worth noting that most of these were invented for the Lisa, not the Mac.
Email encryption is standardised. S/MIME is well supported by pretty much all mail clients (including Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird). The problem is that end-to-end encryption is basically incompatible with webmail. You need to provide your encryption keys to the mail client and if that client is running code provided by a third party that communicates with a third party server then you've lost already.
You may remember us. We're the people who were suggesting that California leave the USA because you won. We also took some blame for fake news that we claim let you win. Oh, and all of us donated heavily to your main political rival, allowing her to outspend you by a pretty large margin in the Presidential campaign.
Now that you remember who we are, we'd like to ask you a small favour. Please will you do something that helps maintain the balance of power in our favour, rather than that of the instruments of the surveillance state that will be under your control?
4MB wasn't really enough for OS/2. 8MB was really a minimum for it to be useful. And, back then, another 4MB of RAM cost 10-20% of the total cost of a decent computer.
I don't ever remember Windows 3.1 crashing on home computers
Perhaps the phrase 'general protection fault' will jog your memory.
Exactly. HP sent me a free TouchPad, which at least meant that I ported some libraries to run on it. I'd probably have done more if they hadn't killed the platform completely shortly afterwards. I got a Nokia 770s with a 60% (I think - maybe slightly more) discount from their open source developers' program when they were new and did a few things on that (although it didn't have enough RAM to be very useful - nice portable machine for running vim though).
I had a chat with a few of the developers at FOSDEM a few years ago. They were very proud of their new object model and IDL that they thought would make it easy for people to attach scripting languages and create bindings for other languages. It had never occurred to them that 'char*' is not enough type information for a useful binding to another language (is it for input, output, or both? Is it null terminated, or is it's length passed in another parameter? Is it actually an array of characters [and, if so, in what encoding] that should be mapped to a string object, or is it being used as a data buffer that should be mapped to an array or data object?).
They'd also never thought that data views might need to be implemented by some mechanism other than creating a view hierarchy that contains all of the possible children. For work, I maintain a small app for exploring traces from our experimental processor. It creates a table view with one row for each instruction (cycle number, binary encoding, disassembly, notes from whoever is debugging the trace, and so on). Our traces get quite big, and it's fairly common to have traces with a few hundred million entries. I wrote it on OS X and NSTableView in Cocoa and GNUstep (we run it on Mac, FreeBSD, and occasionally Linux) handles it fine. The E! equivalent would be likely to run out of RAM on anything other than our build servers (which all have 256+GB). Not exactly the ideal choice for a mobile platform.
Apple intentionally doesn't compete in large segments of the market. There is no budget iPhone. The 'cheap' iPhone is £379. New Android phones start at about £50 and you can get some pretty decent ones for £100-200. Apple provides good competition for the top 20% or so of the market, but that still leaves Android largely uncontested for 70-80% of the market.
Really? We're scared of Russia now? The Cold War ended because the Russian economy completely collapsed and still hasn't recovered to anything like the previous levels. Their GDP is under a tenth that of the USA or EU and has been declining steadily for years. Their GDP is slightly above that of Spain and well below that of Italy (two of the 'failing' economies in the EU, which are both a fraction of the size of Russia).
Mexico has an economy that is only about 20% smaller than that of Russia. Should we now be afraid of them? After all, they're a lot closer to the USA
China is at number 2 (3 if you count the EU as a single entity, even if you remove the UK), so they'd make a much more credible threat, but they aren't being touted as one because no one wants to offend a country with an economy that big.
It probably doesn't, but it does take time if you're doing speech recognition to get enough data in the buffer that you can begin recognising. If you can use the previous second or two of audio (for calibrating levels, if nothing else) then it's likely that you can respond faster.
It's not hard, as an adult who participates in multiple online communities. As a child, where there was only one online community that you felt that you belonged in, stopping posting on Slashdot would mean giving up most of your online social interaction. The bully has basically won if you do this.
Adaptive cruise control doesn't do much to take your attention away. You're still focussing on keeping the car in the lane, for example, so you'll notice if the car in front does something dangerous. When you add in lane following, the car is basically driving itself. If your attention wanders, nothing bad happens. Most of the time. Until you're in an unusual situation, and then it's suddenly very bad because you now have the added delay of having to switch your attention back to driving, which adds at least another half second to your response time. At 70mph, that's another 16 metres before you start to react.
While what you say is mostly true, it's more comfortable to walk on surfaces that have a small amount of give. The human walking motion is far less efficient than a wheel (obviously, or people would be able to walk as fast as they can cycle for the same amount of effort) and a big chunk of the wasted energy is in the backwards force. This is dissipated by heating the ground or your joints (and wearing away the cartilage in your knee, in particular).
It's very high if you compare them against hardware manufacturers. It's not so high if you compare them against software companies. If you take the combined per unit profit of Dell and Microsoft, for example, then it's in a similar ballpark.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of the major antivirus products have had at least one big security vulnerability in the last two or three years. Norton had the best one, where a buffer overflow in their image scanning code (which ran in the kernel, WTF?) allowed you to run arbitrary code in the AV simply by sending someone an image via email. Even if the recipient never opened the mail, if their mail client downloaded it then the attacker had a kernel-level compromise. With this kind of track record, I find it hard to argue that AV is going to be a net win in security.
They did take back control. The small print said that they took back control on behalf of the Westminster Parliament, which had been consistently acting against their interests for decades, but that's not the point. I still don't understand the people who decided that voting to give Parliament more power was a protest vote against the establishment.
There was a survey about this particular one a little while ago. 97% of people were against it, if they knew about it or after they had the contents explained to them, but only around 10% even knew it was being proposed. I hope that the opposition parties make a lot of noise about it at the next election.
Often, but not always and it's difficult to find sources biased in opposite directions on all issues. Brexit is nice and easy in terms of bias: The Guardian and The Express are diametrically opposite in their biases, but the truth isn't in the middle, it's often perpendicular to the line between the both - they both cherry pick facts and pile on interpretation to the point where truth is nowhere to be found. If you look at anything involving copyright, then you'll find it very difficult to find a mainstream news source that will question the core assumptions, in spite of radical anti-capitalists like the Harvard Business School publishing numerous reports showing the harm that current copyright policy is doing to the economy.
In the last few months, The Daily Mash and The Rochdale Herald have had depressingly accurate news. The Guardian actually ran an article about a month ago that had exactly the same headline as The Daily Mash a year earlier (Unelectable Man Wins Election).
I'm using a news app that pulls in things from a load of sources and it's often difficult to tell the real news from the parody these days.
It's a group that controls access to people who are able to push code into the mainline kernel. If you don't pay your dues, then your patches probably won't be reviewed / upstreamed, and no one will take any care to avoid making KPI / KBI changes that completely break your work.
It would be nice to see XMPP have a resurgence. IRC is great at what it does, but XMPP has multi-user chat that's similar (not as capable, though) as well as offline message storage. I think there was a protocol extension called Jingle iirc that brought video chat to XMPP.
Jingle is a massive family of XMPP standards (technically, XEPs - XMPP Extension Proposals). It was, in fact, the third mechanism added to provide voice and video. SIP tunnelling over XMPP and the thing Apple added with iChat were both there first, but Google did its own thing and released Jingle.
This pretty much embodies the problems with XMPP:
I've been keeping an eye on Tox, which seems to have a better approach: they have a protocol and a reference implementation as a library, plus clients for all of the major platforms that use the library.
And it's probably true, when you're living in a society where the average person commits 7 crimes per day. Stop a random black person and you can probably find something that they're doing that's illegal. Don't stop a random white person and you won't find anything that they're doing that's illegal. Sample bias is a wonderful thing.
the USA has enshrined freedom of speech in its Constitution
No it hasn't. The USA has enshrined protections against the government infringing on free speech in its constitution. This originally meant the Federal government, but some later rulings have extended it to all layers of government. The USA also has certain laws that limit private ability to censor speech (for example, Common Carrier classification). There is nothing at all in the US constitution that says that if a private entity gains the power to effectively silence all dissenting speech they may not use it.
There's nothing saying that the owner of a printing press must permit anyone to use it, but unfortunately we've allowed privately owned, centralised platforms to grow to the extent where they can place quite effective limits on speech, yet are not bound by the first amendment.
If you cut the sex, it's going to be a really short series. If you cut the trademark Heinlein sophomore political commentary as well then there's nothing left other than introducing the word 'grok'. Which is probably for the best.
I get the three adaptations of that book mixed up, but from what I recall the most recent one was fairly faithful for about the first half, missed out some of the worst bits of the book, and then jammed on a terrible ending that completely missed the point of the novel and killed the story.
Sounds a bit unlikely. We buy them through the HE store in the UK, which comes with around a 10% discount and a three-year warranty. They'll replace any parts without quibble during that period. They'll also replace anything under the Sale of Goods Act / Consumer Rights Act if they'd claimed a longer life (for example, they'll replace batteries out of warranty if they haven't reached the advertised number of cycles).
If they were expected to fail after 24 months, then they'd be making a massive loss on these. They'll also sell a 3-year extended warranty to anyone, the cost of which just about covers one repair, so they'd be making a loss on those too if most people weren't needing any in-warranty repairs.
Literally everything else we accept as being a GUI widget of some kind was invented at Apple - drop down menus, contextual menus, desktop metaphor of files in folders, heirarchic folders, drag-and-drop, the clipboard, etc.
Overlapping windows is the other big one. Though it's worth noting that most of these were invented for the Lisa, not the Mac.
Email encryption is standardised. S/MIME is well supported by pretty much all mail clients (including Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird). The problem is that end-to-end encryption is basically incompatible with webmail. You need to provide your encryption keys to the mail client and if that client is running code provided by a third party that communicates with a third party server then you've lost already.
Dear Mr Trump,
You may remember us. We're the people who were suggesting that California leave the USA because you won. We also took some blame for fake news that we claim let you win. Oh, and all of us donated heavily to your main political rival, allowing her to outspend you by a pretty large margin in the Presidential campaign.
Now that you remember who we are, we'd like to ask you a small favour. Please will you do something that helps maintain the balance of power in our favour, rather than that of the instruments of the surveillance state that will be under your control?
Thanks,
A bunch of people that hate you
people upgraded to a PC with 4MB to run Doom
4MB wasn't really enough for OS/2. 8MB was really a minimum for it to be useful. And, back then, another 4MB of RAM cost 10-20% of the total cost of a decent computer.
I don't ever remember Windows 3.1 crashing on home computers
Perhaps the phrase 'general protection fault' will jog your memory.
Exactly. HP sent me a free TouchPad, which at least meant that I ported some libraries to run on it. I'd probably have done more if they hadn't killed the platform completely shortly afterwards. I got a Nokia 770s with a 60% (I think - maybe slightly more) discount from their open source developers' program when they were new and did a few things on that (although it didn't have enough RAM to be very useful - nice portable machine for running vim though).
I had a chat with a few of the developers at FOSDEM a few years ago. They were very proud of their new object model and IDL that they thought would make it easy for people to attach scripting languages and create bindings for other languages. It had never occurred to them that 'char*' is not enough type information for a useful binding to another language (is it for input, output, or both? Is it null terminated, or is it's length passed in another parameter? Is it actually an array of characters [and, if so, in what encoding] that should be mapped to a string object, or is it being used as a data buffer that should be mapped to an array or data object?).
They'd also never thought that data views might need to be implemented by some mechanism other than creating a view hierarchy that contains all of the possible children. For work, I maintain a small app for exploring traces from our experimental processor. It creates a table view with one row for each instruction (cycle number, binary encoding, disassembly, notes from whoever is debugging the trace, and so on). Our traces get quite big, and it's fairly common to have traces with a few hundred million entries. I wrote it on OS X and NSTableView in Cocoa and GNUstep (we run it on Mac, FreeBSD, and occasionally Linux) handles it fine. The E! equivalent would be likely to run out of RAM on anything other than our build servers (which all have 256+GB). Not exactly the ideal choice for a mobile platform.
Apple intentionally doesn't compete in large segments of the market. There is no budget iPhone. The 'cheap' iPhone is £379. New Android phones start at about £50 and you can get some pretty decent ones for £100-200. Apple provides good competition for the top 20% or so of the market, but that still leaves Android largely uncontested for 70-80% of the market.
or a hard worker for Putin
Really? We're scared of Russia now? The Cold War ended because the Russian economy completely collapsed and still hasn't recovered to anything like the previous levels. Their GDP is under a tenth that of the USA or EU and has been declining steadily for years. Their GDP is slightly above that of Spain and well below that of Italy (two of the 'failing' economies in the EU, which are both a fraction of the size of Russia).
Mexico has an economy that is only about 20% smaller than that of Russia. Should we now be afraid of them? After all, they're a lot closer to the USA
China is at number 2 (3 if you count the EU as a single entity, even if you remove the UK), so they'd make a much more credible threat, but they aren't being touted as one because no one wants to offend a country with an economy that big.
It probably doesn't, but it does take time if you're doing speech recognition to get enough data in the buffer that you can begin recognising. If you can use the previous second or two of audio (for calibrating levels, if nothing else) then it's likely that you can respond faster.
It's not hard, as an adult who participates in multiple online communities. As a child, where there was only one online community that you felt that you belonged in, stopping posting on Slashdot would mean giving up most of your online social interaction. The bully has basically won if you do this.
Adaptive cruise control doesn't do much to take your attention away. You're still focussing on keeping the car in the lane, for example, so you'll notice if the car in front does something dangerous. When you add in lane following, the car is basically driving itself. If your attention wanders, nothing bad happens. Most of the time. Until you're in an unusual situation, and then it's suddenly very bad because you now have the added delay of having to switch your attention back to driving, which adds at least another half second to your response time. At 70mph, that's another 16 metres before you start to react.
While what you say is mostly true, it's more comfortable to walk on surfaces that have a small amount of give. The human walking motion is far less efficient than a wheel (obviously, or people would be able to walk as fast as they can cycle for the same amount of effort) and a big chunk of the wasted energy is in the backwards force. This is dissipated by heating the ground or your joints (and wearing away the cartilage in your knee, in particular).
It's very high if you compare them against hardware manufacturers. It's not so high if you compare them against software companies. If you take the combined per unit profit of Dell and Microsoft, for example, then it's in a similar ballpark.