And guess who maintains all the systems that the wealthy depend upon?
The people who are better off than the starving masses (though not as well off as the elite) and so have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Do people want 3 hours less time in the air, or to arrive 3 hours earlier? Normally it's the second that matters (if speed matters at all) and that's down to how the schedules line up. If you can wait 6 hours before leaving home / the office and then only get to your destination 3 hours later then that's a saving for some people, but not that many.
How many of those passengers are willing to pay 2-4 times the price of a first-class ticket on a slower plane to save a few hours? If you're flying first class, then flying is actually quite a pleasant experience, so if I could afford to fly first class then I'd want a compelling reason to spend less time in the air.
This will be no doubt out of my price range, but for those who can afford it it's a big gain in productivity.
Is it as big a gain in productivity as booking a nice seat in first class and paying for WiFi on the plane, so that you've got a comfortable environment to work in and can keep in touch and have a decent sleep before you land? Because that's what it's going to be competing with.
Because being homeless in the US is better than being homeless anywhere else.
Right, because homeless people are the ones who are most able to move between continents in search of somewhere comfortable to live, I'm sure that they all chose to be in the USA and not somewhere else.
I've been on the trains in Paris and some are so overcrowded it is simply unsafe, a miserable experience that some people face every day.
I've also been on the Paris Metro and I didn't find it crowded (though this was, most recently, two years ago). Of course, as with the Tokyo, London, and New York equivalents, I avoided it at rush hour. If more employers would stagger their working days 8-11 start, 4-7 finish, then this congestion would go away.
It was jokingly stated as Amazon's business model back in the first dot-com boom, but others have used it since. The serious idea behind it is that you start making a small loss on each sale to increase the volume that you're shipping and, as your volume increases, your per-unit costs go down. Eventually that small loss per sale becomes a small profit per sale multiplied by a really huge volume, and then you're raking in cash. Of course, if your volume doesn't grow enough or you can't lower your costs enough, then it's just a good way of losing a lot of money.
When I stayed in Minneapolis, the hotel was about 20 minutes walk (covered by a bus service) from the light rail, which went straight to the airport. The hotel web site didn't include walking directions or time estimation and the people behind the desk seemed as if the idea that someone might walk from the station hadn't occurred to them. On the way back it took a bit longer because it was the middle of a thunderstorm and so I took the SkyWay (which would be really convenient if it didn't mostly shut down in the evenings). I got the impression that the public transport there was pretty reasonable, but most people didn't even think about using it (the SkyWay seemed fairly popular though - I recognised the familiar expression of annoyance at tourists walking too slowly or on the wrong side on a lot of faces).
Part of the problem there is the US obsession with zoning, to ensure that the places people work, live, and shop are all as far apart as possible. In towns where I've lived, that 40 minute walk will get you all of the way from home to the supermarket. The bus can easily get it down to 20 minutes, including a 10-minute wait. Walking to the shops and taking the bus back is fairly common (though in the city where I currently live, it's flat and everyone cycles, so bus use is a bit rarer).
You forgot the CalTrain, which would be really nice except for the fact that it's really slow (an hour from San Francisco to San Jose? Really? It averages about 60km/hour, which is just embarrassing for a train) and that it is really infrequent. I've taken it quite a few times now, but no one that I know who lives in the Bay Area would choose it for a regular commute. It's also part of the general lack of joined-up thinking in most public transport systems: why do the local bus / light rail systems in most of the Bay Area not have stops at the CalTrain stops? Most of them have big parking lots and occasionally taxi ranks: there's no expectation that you'll be able to do your entire journey with public transport.
When the last Java plugin zero-day came out, I went to disable Java and then remembered that I'd done it the last time. I have not once noticed during browsing that a site has failed to work because it needs Java.
Then again, its kind of refreshing that the government is at least being honest about the purpose of the program. If it was in the US it would be called PINKUNICORN or some other absurd backcronym created purely to sound "nice" in print without giving away its sinister underpinnings
The government calls it the Communications Data Bill, Snoopers' Charter is the name given to it by the press.
Most MPs are already on the back benches. A fair number of those are in marginal seats and have a lot more to fear from their constituents than from the central party (if their local party likes them, they'll keep getting the party nomination and in a few cases recently MPs have switched parties or stood as independent candidates after falling out with the central party and kept their seats). Losing the support of a couple of hundred voters can easily lose an election, but being able to stand up and say 'I stood up for you, even against my own party' tends to go down pretty well with voter.
Do you really think there won't be an exception for the government to use secure communication?
Sure, for official government business. But what about communications within the Conservative party? Do you think that everyone at every level is going to be allowed unbreakable encryption for party use? What about for communications between MPs and their mistresses/corporate overlords/racist backers? Scandals become a lot easier if you can decrypt everything that MPs send and receive, and even easier if official business is all done encrypted but unofficial things are insecure.
It's very similar. WebAssembly is less closely tied to LLVM in its IR (which is a good thing, as LLVM IR changes over time quite significantly and maintaining compatibility with something that's almost LLVM IR is quite hard). Many of the people who worked on WebAssembly also worked on PNaCl, so have had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and not have to worry about backwards compatibility.
Why would you have heard of it? I've heard of it as a compiler writer, because the WebAssembly back end is currently being merged into LLVM, which will make it possible for all languages that LLVM can target to emit WebAssembly. It's basically the successor to PNaCl (heard of that?), but this time with cross-industry backing. Backers include Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple - that gives it a pretty good chance of appearing in all of the major browsers.
It was Hotmail, not Skype, and it ran on FreeBSD for a few years after the acquisition. Microsoft was, apparently, fairly happy with it, but it coincided with their attempts to push Windows NT into the server space and their customers kept asking 'If Windows NT is so good, why do you use UNIX to serve Hotmail?' THey tried to migrate to NT4 and it was a complete disaster, which was what led to a lot of the features in Windows 2000 Server. They successfully migrated it to 2000.
It sounds like they're expecting lots of large donors. For the FreeBSD Foundation, it would count as Platinum. Gold is $25,000-$49,999. The rates were set when the Foundation was new and getting anyone to donate more than a few hundred dollars was hard. They've had to add Platinum, Iridium and Uranium on top of that (a few years ago, a company - NetApp, I think, but I could be wrong - donated on the condition that they were able to say that they were the only donor in the top category, so had a category made specially for them, with the threshold set at double the largest donation from the previous year. They've since had to share the top spot, so it's been good for the Foundation).
The Linux Foundation gets much bigger donations by effectively selling access to senior developers. If you want someone in your company to have face-to-face time with Linus, then you have to add a lot of zeros to the end of your donation (and good luck getting your code into mainline Linux if you haven't done this). The BSDs run their developer summits as a meritocracy, so any contributors can attend, even if they haven't paid anything.
No, I wasn't aware of this. A quick search shows a number of sites to generate them, but I can't find a spec of what they contain. It would be nice if this could be standardised.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. With a trackpad, rolling my finger a little bit moves the cursor a tiny amount. With a trackpoint, there's an acceleration and deceleration component - you have to move the trackpoint to start the cursor moving and then move it back to stop the movement. This involves having to do two fine motor movements in quick succession for a fine cursor adjustment, whereas the trackpad requires only one.
Maybe you're using crappy trackpads, but it's very easy with the one on this laptop (MacBook Pro, retina display) for me to move the cursor by one pixel in any direction. With my old ThinkPad (R31, with a under quarter of the pixel density) I could just about move it 1-3 pixels, but had little control within that range.
I've heard this asserted, yet I've never seen a study that showed it (I've seen a couple that showed the reverse, but they didn't control for all factors so aren't definitive). I've also never seen any gamers begging for them because they give an advantage in aiming (which is usually a good hint that something is a good pointing device). A modern, high-resolution, large, multitouch trackpad provides better fine manipulation (try using a trackpoint to select an individual pixel on a ThinkPad) and faster large movements (the acceleration in the trackpoint means that the Fitts' Law curve is a different shape because you need to decelerate more to stop).
How does a shell script monitor for something crossing a threshold? You could have a file somewhere in/proc (or whatever) where blocking reads wait until it has crossed the threshold and then sends the notification. Only now you have to make sure that the priority of this shell script is high enough that it will always be scheduled to run before anything else that might allocate memory (and you need to ensure that your shell script interpreter won't allocate memory while running the parts of the script that are needed to create the file - trivial in a C program but basically impossible in shell).
Your in-kernel support now has to be a special-case file that supports both edge-triggered and level-triggered events, because the GUI task that prompts you to kill processes or resume processes once you've handled the OOM condition (Linux just kills a random process here, putting both policy and mechanism in the kernel and picking a particularly bad policy).
That's a lot of special-case logic in the kernel for one file. Or you can use a generic notification framework, such as notify(3), which allows you to get events via signals (if you want them asynchronously), via blocking kevent calls (if you want to integrate them with a generic event loop), or via a shared memory segment (if you want to poll for them) and also supports priority propagation, so the code in the VM layer is a single call saying 'deliver this event, it's really urgent'. The same logic is also used to send notifications at other watermarks, so (for example) NSCache instances can delete objects when memory starts to be a bit constrained.
Your solution is less flexible, doesn't really simplify the userspace portion (something that waits for a notify event and registers new swap sources and is carefully designed not to allocate memory is a dozen lines of C. It's a bit more if it wants to walk the process table and send SIGSTOP to processes that are using too much and send on another notification for the user, but only 30-40), and significantly complicates the kernel code. In other words, it sounds exactly like the solution I'd expect to see in Linux.
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And guess who maintains all the systems that the wealthy depend upon?
The people who are better off than the starving masses (though not as well off as the elite) and so have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Do people want 3 hours less time in the air, or to arrive 3 hours earlier? Normally it's the second that matters (if speed matters at all) and that's down to how the schedules line up. If you can wait 6 hours before leaving home / the office and then only get to your destination 3 hours later then that's a saving for some people, but not that many.
How many of those passengers are willing to pay 2-4 times the price of a first-class ticket on a slower plane to save a few hours? If you're flying first class, then flying is actually quite a pleasant experience, so if I could afford to fly first class then I'd want a compelling reason to spend less time in the air.
This will be no doubt out of my price range, but for those who can afford it it's a big gain in productivity.
Is it as big a gain in productivity as booking a nice seat in first class and paying for WiFi on the plane, so that you've got a comfortable environment to work in and can keep in touch and have a decent sleep before you land? Because that's what it's going to be competing with.
Because being homeless in the US is better than being homeless anywhere else.
Right, because homeless people are the ones who are most able to move between continents in search of somewhere comfortable to live, I'm sure that they all chose to be in the USA and not somewhere else.
I've been on the trains in Paris and some are so overcrowded it is simply unsafe, a miserable experience that some people face every day.
I've also been on the Paris Metro and I didn't find it crowded (though this was, most recently, two years ago). Of course, as with the Tokyo, London, and New York equivalents, I avoided it at rush hour. If more employers would stagger their working days 8-11 start, 4-7 finish, then this congestion would go away.
It was jokingly stated as Amazon's business model back in the first dot-com boom, but others have used it since. The serious idea behind it is that you start making a small loss on each sale to increase the volume that you're shipping and, as your volume increases, your per-unit costs go down. Eventually that small loss per sale becomes a small profit per sale multiplied by a really huge volume, and then you're raking in cash. Of course, if your volume doesn't grow enough or you can't lower your costs enough, then it's just a good way of losing a lot of money.
Hell, in the afternoons, I can drive and have some drinks at the bar with friends with that extra time before getting home
And how do you get home from the bar after a few drinks, if you've got a car with you?
When I stayed in Minneapolis, the hotel was about 20 minutes walk (covered by a bus service) from the light rail, which went straight to the airport. The hotel web site didn't include walking directions or time estimation and the people behind the desk seemed as if the idea that someone might walk from the station hadn't occurred to them. On the way back it took a bit longer because it was the middle of a thunderstorm and so I took the SkyWay (which would be really convenient if it didn't mostly shut down in the evenings). I got the impression that the public transport there was pretty reasonable, but most people didn't even think about using it (the SkyWay seemed fairly popular though - I recognised the familiar expression of annoyance at tourists walking too slowly or on the wrong side on a lot of faces).
Part of the problem there is the US obsession with zoning, to ensure that the places people work, live, and shop are all as far apart as possible. In towns where I've lived, that 40 minute walk will get you all of the way from home to the supermarket. The bus can easily get it down to 20 minutes, including a 10-minute wait. Walking to the shops and taking the bus back is fairly common (though in the city where I currently live, it's flat and everyone cycles, so bus use is a bit rarer).
You forgot the CalTrain, which would be really nice except for the fact that it's really slow (an hour from San Francisco to San Jose? Really? It averages about 60km/hour, which is just embarrassing for a train) and that it is really infrequent. I've taken it quite a few times now, but no one that I know who lives in the Bay Area would choose it for a regular commute. It's also part of the general lack of joined-up thinking in most public transport systems: why do the local bus / light rail systems in most of the Bay Area not have stops at the CalTrain stops? Most of them have big parking lots and occasionally taxi ranks: there's no expectation that you'll be able to do your entire journey with public transport.
London isn't actually a separate country yet, though most of the rest of the UK wishes that it was.
When the last Java plugin zero-day came out, I went to disable Java and then remembered that I'd done it the last time. I have not once noticed during browsing that a site has failed to work because it needs Java.
Then again, its kind of refreshing that the government is at least being honest about the purpose of the program. If it was in the US it would be called PINKUNICORN or some other absurd backcronym created purely to sound "nice" in print without giving away its sinister underpinnings
The government calls it the Communications Data Bill, Snoopers' Charter is the name given to it by the press.
Most MPs are already on the back benches. A fair number of those are in marginal seats and have a lot more to fear from their constituents than from the central party (if their local party likes them, they'll keep getting the party nomination and in a few cases recently MPs have switched parties or stood as independent candidates after falling out with the central party and kept their seats). Losing the support of a couple of hundred voters can easily lose an election, but being able to stand up and say 'I stood up for you, even against my own party' tends to go down pretty well with voter.
Do you really think there won't be an exception for the government to use secure communication?
Sure, for official government business. But what about communications within the Conservative party? Do you think that everyone at every level is going to be allowed unbreakable encryption for party use? What about for communications between MPs and their mistresses/corporate overlords/racist backers? Scandals become a lot easier if you can decrypt everything that MPs send and receive, and even easier if official business is all done encrypted but unofficial things are insecure.
It's very similar. WebAssembly is less closely tied to LLVM in its IR (which is a good thing, as LLVM IR changes over time quite significantly and maintaining compatibility with something that's almost LLVM IR is quite hard). Many of the people who worked on WebAssembly also worked on PNaCl, so have had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and not have to worry about backwards compatibility.
Why would you have heard of it? I've heard of it as a compiler writer, because the WebAssembly back end is currently being merged into LLVM, which will make it possible for all languages that LLVM can target to emit WebAssembly. It's basically the successor to PNaCl (heard of that?), but this time with cross-industry backing. Backers include Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple - that gives it a pretty good chance of appearing in all of the major browsers.
It was Hotmail, not Skype, and it ran on FreeBSD for a few years after the acquisition. Microsoft was, apparently, fairly happy with it, but it coincided with their attempts to push Windows NT into the server space and their customers kept asking 'If Windows NT is so good, why do you use UNIX to serve Hotmail?' THey tried to migrate to NT4 and it was a complete disaster, which was what led to a lot of the features in Windows 2000 Server. They successfully migrated it to 2000.
It's sad that $50K is a "Gold" contribution
It sounds like they're expecting lots of large donors. For the FreeBSD Foundation, it would count as Platinum. Gold is $25,000-$49,999. The rates were set when the Foundation was new and getting anyone to donate more than a few hundred dollars was hard. They've had to add Platinum, Iridium and Uranium on top of that (a few years ago, a company - NetApp, I think, but I could be wrong - donated on the condition that they were able to say that they were the only donor in the top category, so had a category made specially for them, with the threshold set at double the largest donation from the previous year. They've since had to share the top spot, so it's been good for the Foundation).
The Linux Foundation gets much bigger donations by effectively selling access to senior developers. If you want someone in your company to have face-to-face time with Linus, then you have to add a lot of zeros to the end of your donation (and good luck getting your code into mainline Linux if you haven't done this). The BSDs run their developer summits as a meritocracy, so any contributors can attend, even if they haven't paid anything.
No, I wasn't aware of this. A quick search shows a number of sites to generate them, but I can't find a spec of what they contain. It would be nice if this could be standardised.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. With a trackpad, rolling my finger a little bit moves the cursor a tiny amount. With a trackpoint, there's an acceleration and deceleration component - you have to move the trackpoint to start the cursor moving and then move it back to stop the movement. This involves having to do two fine motor movements in quick succession for a fine cursor adjustment, whereas the trackpad requires only one.
Maybe you're using crappy trackpads, but it's very easy with the one on this laptop (MacBook Pro, retina display) for me to move the cursor by one pixel in any direction. With my old ThinkPad (R31, with a under quarter of the pixel density) I could just about move it 1-3 pixels, but had little control within that range.
nipple things are far superior to trackpads
I've heard this asserted, yet I've never seen a study that showed it (I've seen a couple that showed the reverse, but they didn't control for all factors so aren't definitive). I've also never seen any gamers begging for them because they give an advantage in aiming (which is usually a good hint that something is a good pointing device). A modern, high-resolution, large, multitouch trackpad provides better fine manipulation (try using a trackpoint to select an individual pixel on a ThinkPad) and faster large movements (the acceleration in the trackpoint means that the Fitts' Law curve is a different shape because you need to decelerate more to stop).
How does a shell script monitor for something crossing a threshold? You could have a file somewhere in /proc (or whatever) where blocking reads wait until it has crossed the threshold and then sends the notification. Only now you have to make sure that the priority of this shell script is high enough that it will always be scheduled to run before anything else that might allocate memory (and you need to ensure that your shell script interpreter won't allocate memory while running the parts of the script that are needed to create the file - trivial in a C program but basically impossible in shell).
Your in-kernel support now has to be a special-case file that supports both edge-triggered and level-triggered events, because the GUI task that prompts you to kill processes or resume processes once you've handled the OOM condition (Linux just kills a random process here, putting both policy and mechanism in the kernel and picking a particularly bad policy).
That's a lot of special-case logic in the kernel for one file. Or you can use a generic notification framework, such as notify(3), which allows you to get events via signals (if you want them asynchronously), via blocking kevent calls (if you want to integrate them with a generic event loop), or via a shared memory segment (if you want to poll for them) and also supports priority propagation, so the code in the VM layer is a single call saying 'deliver this event, it's really urgent'. The same logic is also used to send notifications at other watermarks, so (for example) NSCache instances can delete objects when memory starts to be a bit constrained.
Your solution is less flexible, doesn't really simplify the userspace portion (something that waits for a notify event and registers new swap sources and is carefully designed not to allocate memory is a dozen lines of C. It's a bit more if it wants to walk the process table and send SIGSTOP to processes that are using too much and send on another notification for the user, but only 30-40), and significantly complicates the kernel code. In other words, it sounds exactly like the solution I'd expect to see in Linux.