Most ISPs don't change your IP on a regular basis anyway, so IP-based tracking narrows you down to a residential connection already. IPv6 is actually better in this regard because most implementation (yes, including Windows) let you keep a single static IP (or more than one) that you use for publicly advertised services but then regularly cycle IPs for outbound connections. This is something that most network stacks let you tune, but at the extreme case you can use a new IP for every new outbound connection (I think the default is a new one every 2 hours for most systems). This doesn't help much if you're the only user on a residential connection, but it makes tracking a lot harder if that's on something like a university campus.
The JVM nearly solves a problem that was solved by the IBM/360 in 1960? That's... great.
The problem was solved by making the ISA independent of the microarchitecture. That wasn't just solved, it was an industry-wide convention by the time Java appeared.
A candidate in the primaries had public speaking coaching?!?! And then had more when he was running for President?!? That's borderline unconstitutional, quick someone alert the press!
Even before that, my carrier has started allowing included minutes (and texts and data) to be used in several other countries without incurring a roaming charge. The EU is just nudging it along a bit. The smarter carriers know that roaming charges just piss off their customers and they're running out of space to cut prices for domestic calls so need something else to wave as proof that they're cheaper than the competition.
Why try to enforce it on the supply side when you can do it on the demand side. Require that all software that your organisation purchases be under an open source license. That way, you have the rights to go to any company you like for extended support. There are lots of options, ranging from in-house support through small businesses with a dozen or so coders up to behemoths like IBM.
Apple would have continued to ship Rosetta, but IBM bought Transitive (from whom it was licensed) and was still annoyed at the publicity that Apple had given them in the switch from PowerPC to Intel, so decided to return the favour and refused to license Rosetta for a new version of OS X. Apple tried to spin this in a positive way ('look how hip we are, stopping supporting that old crap!') but it didn't really work.
I only stopped using a 1200MHz P3 a couple of years ago. It was nice because it was the newest machine I owned that you could get deterministic CPU timing results out of. Building LLVM on it was a pain (over an hour), but 4 of them would be quite reasonable. My NAS / media centre box is currently using an AMD E-350, which is a dual-core 1.6GHz part - I think this would probably be faster. If it has a well-supported GPU and a decent collection of SATA ports, I might be tempted...
Yes they do. But hardly anyone makes ARM chips that draw 5W (nVidia is the only one that comes to mind). Most are 1-2W under load, with the slower ones closer to 250mW.
We're just about to open source our MIPS IV implementation (I'll post something to Slashdot when it's done - lots of legal paperwork for creating a community interest company to coordinate it and so on). It's written in Bluespec, which is a high-level HDL and very easy to modify (we've been setting an exercise to replace the branch predictor[1] in it to students for a couple of years now and they're able to in a couple of hours and get the required prediction rates).
MIPS IV is nice, because it's a 64-bit ISA that's over 20 years old (the magic number for patents). FreeBSD 10 runs on it out of the box with the BERI kernel config on the Altera DE4 boards and in simulation and 10.1 should include a kernel config for the NetFPGA 10G board. These boards are pretty expensive, but we have a couple of configurations that will let it run on smaller FPGAs. Removing the FPU makes it a lot smaller and you can also build a microcontroller variant (simple static branch predictor, no MMU) that's even smaller. The simulator is slow, but just about useable (it takes about an hour to boot to single user mode, but it's enough for testing).
It's only in the last couple of years that FPGAs have become interesting for this kind of thing. There are a few high-level HDLs appearing, because hardware is sufficiently complex that the traditional approach of throwing it all away and starting again every CPU revision is increasingly impractical. The devices themselves are now fast enough that they're useable for prototyping and getting a reasonable feel for behaviour. We can get 100-200MHz with 4 cores in a single FPGA with the latest generation - not competitive with an ASIC, but fast enough that you can actually use them. I gave a demo that ended up being more compelling than I expected because I was showing people some things running on the UART console and I'd left the network cable connected so the screen kept being spammed with messages about invalid ssh connection attempts. Nothing I was doing said 'this is a real computer' quite as much as people on the Internet trying to attack it...
The CPU on any of these boards is probably adequate for most tasks. The big difference between Intel and most ARM SoCs for open source development? The GPU drivers. Intel releases documentation and code for their drivers. Most ARM SoC makers release blob drivers that work with a specific windowing system and kernel version. Trying to get X.org running on one that only provides Android drivers, or trying to get any non-Linux OS running on them with acceleration is painful.
Is the point to give the users something useful? I assumed it was to give the devs something to debug. Asking the user to transcribe a kernel stack trace is not likely to happen, but a QR code that encodes a bit of text saying 'please email to crash@linux.org' followed by the stack trace would mean that you'd actually get something vaguely useful in some cases, rather than the user just shrugging and power cycling the box.
And this is actually a fairly small amount of money. The UK government spends some number of hundreds of millions a year in license fees for Microsoft. I'd love to see that money spent in the UK, rather than being shipped to the US. It would do a lot more than all of the government's other initiatives to improve the state of the tech industry in the UK.
I actually think that it would be an easier sell if you went for the wider context, where the state-recognised mechanism did not in any way imply a sexual relationship. If two guys who are just housemates want to have the same legal protection, it's fine. It shouldn't offend the Christian right, because it's a purely legal arrangement that is not in any way like a marriage. And then, if the same legal framework were used for marriages, then, well, that's just a simplification of the legal code.
Okay, so how do you do it? I'm running 4.4, with the stock calendar app. I don't have a Google Calendar account sync'd with it, I want to just subscribe to a calendar. I've found lots of forum posts saying you can't - you have to add it to your Google Calendar and then let it sync indirectly. So, since you can do it, how about sharing the mechanism? To make it more concrete, here's a calendar URL that I want to subscribe to from my phone: webcal://www.talks.cam.ac.uk/show/ics/6330
Step by step instructions please, since apparently it's easy...
I don't see why the same legal instrument couldn't apply to both traditional married couples and hippy communes. The same set of issues apply: shared assets, being treated as a single entity for tax purposes, and having automatic power of attorney in case of incapacitation.
I'd have thought Amazon would be a natural choice, especially for funding the Android port of Firefox. Amazon has its own Android distribution (and app store) that has none of the Google additions. In recent versions, Google has stopped developing the AOSP web browser in favour of Chrome, leaving a gap for an independent web browser that Amazon can bundle.
These economies work differently for a government. When you're spending am amount measured in hundreds of millions a year on software, then you don't complain that an open source program misses some features you need, you just ask for them and either your supplier provides them or you get a new supplier. You don't have to worry that you can't open MS document formats correctly, because you are the one defining what the interchange format is. If other companies buy MS products and they can't open the documents that you send them, or you can't open the ones that they send you, then that's their problem, not yours.
Why do you think switching to linux would be much more simpler?
I'd have said FreeBSD not Linux, but the question still remains. For an answer, how about £5.5M? To put that in perspective, the annual budget of the FreeBSD Foundation is about a tenth that, which funds new development work, subsidises some conferences and so on. The UK government is paying £5.5 just for security updates. I can point you at several companies who'd be happy to provide extended support for a particular branch of FreeBSD for a fraction of that cost and an even bigger number who'd do it for Linux. £5.5M, even including overheads, will pay for 50 developers working full time. Let's assume that there's a lot of overheads, shareholder profits, and so on and call it 20. Do you really think it takes 20 developers to backport security fixes for Windows? Oh, and if they were running FreeBSD then I can point them at a couple of UK companies who would happily take half that money, provide the same support, and keep the money in the local economy. Want to take a guess about where Microsoft will be spending that £5.5M?
Sounds like the USA sucks for phones. In the UK, I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan. I top up £10 every few months and pay 3p/min for calls (about 5), 2p/text (about 3.3) and 1p/MB for data (about 1.6). Most of the time I'm near WiFi if I want to do something online, so I rarely turn on the mobile data for my phone, and when I do I rarely use more than 5-10MB. Aren't there any carriers in the US that do pay-as-you-go data, so if you don't use any you don't pay for any?
Almost all of the apps I have installed on my Android phone are from F-Droid. I tried setting it up without a Google account at all, but there was one app (irritatingly, my Internet banking one) that required a Play Store account. I also have the Amazon AppStore installed for its free app of the day thing (it was NeoCal a few days ago, which is a really nice calculator app, but I use a calculator so rarely that I'd probably never have bought it).
The biggest limitation with iOS for me though is it's lack of some decent equivalent of OSMAnd - a map app that lets me download entire countries worth of vector maps and can do offline navigation, so I won't run up huge bills using it when abroad.
I've never owned a Windows Phone device (or a Windows-not-phone device, for that matter), but I've got a few friends at MSR and played a bit with them. The UI seemed nice, but it's hard to judge that sort of thing without a period of extended use. This criticism just made me laugh though:
The calender app is ridiculously limited and confusing
I have an Android phone, and there is no way from the stock calendar app to subscribe to a calendar from a link. The recommended way of doing this is to sync the device with your Google calendar and then have that sync with the remote calendar. I spent two hours trying to find documentation for how to get the calendar to just pull a.ics file from http and import it, because I couldn't believe that in 2014 anyone would ship a phone without this basic functionality.
as are most of the standard apps
As another example, the contacts app in Android has a 'me' vCard, but no mechanism for telling it that a contact already on your phone is you. Again, basic functionality that's missing. If you keep your address book sync'd by CalDav (or some other mechanism) then you most likely already have an entry for yourself, but the suggested way of doing this is to copy the data to a different card.
The entire mobile phone ecosystem is a clusterfuck at the moment. Microsoft shouldn't have a chance with two established players, but they both seem intent on producing utter crap.
For things involving the press, there is a question of public interest that can (sometimes) override the normal rights to privacy. For example, if the press discovers someone is a closet homosexual and decides to print it on the front page then that (depending on your jurisdiction) can be considered an invasion of privacy. If, however, that person is a fundamentalist politician arguing against gay rights, then you can probably justify in court that it was in the public interest to know that this had some baring on his motivation. There are lots of other examples (probably lots of better ones, but it's first thing in the morning and I haven't had coffee yet). In all of the cases, once you are in a position of power (political, financial, religious, whatever) then some things that a normal person can do without problems, because they can't affect the lives of anyone else, move into the realms of public interest.
being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel
That's not a significant problem for use, it's much more of an issue for transport. Gas and oil can be transported long distances through pipes, with just the occasional pump along the way to give it a boost. Wood has to be stacked onto trucks and then transported along roads or railways. You can't just turn on a tap in a house and have wood come out, so everyone needs a wood shed or equivalent to store it, taking up a lot of space.
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Most ISPs don't change your IP on a regular basis anyway, so IP-based tracking narrows you down to a residential connection already. IPv6 is actually better in this regard because most implementation (yes, including Windows) let you keep a single static IP (or more than one) that you use for publicly advertised services but then regularly cycle IPs for outbound connections. This is something that most network stacks let you tune, but at the extreme case you can use a new IP for every new outbound connection (I think the default is a new one every 2 hours for most systems). This doesn't help much if you're the only user on a residential connection, but it makes tracking a lot harder if that's on something like a university campus.
That was fixed, what, five years ago? Please find a new troll.
The problem was solved by making the ISA independent of the microarchitecture. That wasn't just solved, it was an industry-wide convention by the time Java appeared.
A candidate in the primaries had public speaking coaching?!?! And then had more when he was running for President?!? That's borderline unconstitutional, quick someone alert the press!
Even before that, my carrier has started allowing included minutes (and texts and data) to be used in several other countries without incurring a roaming charge. The EU is just nudging it along a bit. The smarter carriers know that roaming charges just piss off their customers and they're running out of space to cut prices for domestic calls so need something else to wave as proof that they're cheaper than the competition.
Why try to enforce it on the supply side when you can do it on the demand side. Require that all software that your organisation purchases be under an open source license. That way, you have the rights to go to any company you like for extended support. There are lots of options, ranging from in-house support through small businesses with a dozen or so coders up to behemoths like IBM.
Apple would have continued to ship Rosetta, but IBM bought Transitive (from whom it was licensed) and was still annoyed at the publicity that Apple had given them in the switch from PowerPC to Intel, so decided to return the favour and refused to license Rosetta for a new version of OS X. Apple tried to spin this in a positive way ('look how hip we are, stopping supporting that old crap!') but it didn't really work.
I only stopped using a 1200MHz P3 a couple of years ago. It was nice because it was the newest machine I owned that you could get deterministic CPU timing results out of. Building LLVM on it was a pain (over an hour), but 4 of them would be quite reasonable. My NAS / media centre box is currently using an AMD E-350, which is a dual-core 1.6GHz part - I think this would probably be faster. If it has a well-supported GPU and a decent collection of SATA ports, I might be tempted...
Yes they do. But hardly anyone makes ARM chips that draw 5W (nVidia is the only one that comes to mind). Most are 1-2W under load, with the slower ones closer to 250mW.
MIPS IV is nice, because it's a 64-bit ISA that's over 20 years old (the magic number for patents). FreeBSD 10 runs on it out of the box with the BERI kernel config on the Altera DE4 boards and in simulation and 10.1 should include a kernel config for the NetFPGA 10G board. These boards are pretty expensive, but we have a couple of configurations that will let it run on smaller FPGAs. Removing the FPU makes it a lot smaller and you can also build a microcontroller variant (simple static branch predictor, no MMU) that's even smaller. The simulator is slow, but just about useable (it takes about an hour to boot to single user mode, but it's enough for testing).
It's only in the last couple of years that FPGAs have become interesting for this kind of thing. There are a few high-level HDLs appearing, because hardware is sufficiently complex that the traditional approach of throwing it all away and starting again every CPU revision is increasingly impractical. The devices themselves are now fast enough that they're useable for prototyping and getting a reasonable feel for behaviour. We can get 100-200MHz with 4 cores in a single FPGA with the latest generation - not competitive with an ASIC, but fast enough that you can actually use them. I gave a demo that ended up being more compelling than I expected because I was showing people some things running on the UART console and I'd left the network cable connected so the screen kept being spammed with messages about invalid ssh connection attempts. Nothing I was doing said 'this is a real computer' quite as much as people on the Internet trying to attack it...
The CPU on any of these boards is probably adequate for most tasks. The big difference between Intel and most ARM SoCs for open source development? The GPU drivers. Intel releases documentation and code for their drivers. Most ARM SoC makers release blob drivers that work with a specific windowing system and kernel version. Trying to get X.org running on one that only provides Android drivers, or trying to get any non-Linux OS running on them with acceleration is painful.
Is the point to give the users something useful? I assumed it was to give the devs something to debug. Asking the user to transcribe a kernel stack trace is not likely to happen, but a QR code that encodes a bit of text saying 'please email to crash@linux.org' followed by the stack trace would mean that you'd actually get something vaguely useful in some cases, rather than the user just shrugging and power cycling the box.
And this is actually a fairly small amount of money. The UK government spends some number of hundreds of millions a year in license fees for Microsoft. I'd love to see that money spent in the UK, rather than being shipped to the US. It would do a lot more than all of the government's other initiatives to improve the state of the tech industry in the UK.
The stock price has dropped quite a bit in the last few days, but it's still above the average for the last year and a lot higher than it was this time last year. It's hard to draw intelligent conclusions from the Facebook stock price, it's better to use it as a source of entropy for your random number generator...
I actually think that it would be an easier sell if you went for the wider context, where the state-recognised mechanism did not in any way imply a sexual relationship. If two guys who are just housemates want to have the same legal protection, it's fine. It shouldn't offend the Christian right, because it's a purely legal arrangement that is not in any way like a marriage. And then, if the same legal framework were used for marriages, then, well, that's just a simplification of the legal code.
Step by step instructions please, since apparently it's easy...
I don't see why the same legal instrument couldn't apply to both traditional married couples and hippy communes. The same set of issues apply: shared assets, being treated as a single entity for tax purposes, and having automatic power of attorney in case of incapacitation.
I'd have thought Amazon would be a natural choice, especially for funding the Android port of Firefox. Amazon has its own Android distribution (and app store) that has none of the Google additions. In recent versions, Google has stopped developing the AOSP web browser in favour of Chrome, leaving a gap for an independent web browser that Amazon can bundle.
These economies work differently for a government. When you're spending am amount measured in hundreds of millions a year on software, then you don't complain that an open source program misses some features you need, you just ask for them and either your supplier provides them or you get a new supplier. You don't have to worry that you can't open MS document formats correctly, because you are the one defining what the interchange format is. If other companies buy MS products and they can't open the documents that you send them, or you can't open the ones that they send you, then that's their problem, not yours.
Why do you think switching to linux would be much more simpler?
I'd have said FreeBSD not Linux, but the question still remains. For an answer, how about £5.5M? To put that in perspective, the annual budget of the FreeBSD Foundation is about a tenth that, which funds new development work, subsidises some conferences and so on. The UK government is paying £5.5 just for security updates. I can point you at several companies who'd be happy to provide extended support for a particular branch of FreeBSD for a fraction of that cost and an even bigger number who'd do it for Linux. £5.5M, even including overheads, will pay for 50 developers working full time. Let's assume that there's a lot of overheads, shareholder profits, and so on and call it 20. Do you really think it takes 20 developers to backport security fixes for Windows? Oh, and if they were running FreeBSD then I can point them at a couple of UK companies who would happily take half that money, provide the same support, and keep the money in the local economy. Want to take a guess about where Microsoft will be spending that £5.5M?
Sounds like the USA sucks for phones. In the UK, I'm on a pay-as-you-go plan. I top up £10 every few months and pay 3p/min for calls (about 5), 2p/text (about 3.3) and 1p/MB for data (about 1.6). Most of the time I'm near WiFi if I want to do something online, so I rarely turn on the mobile data for my phone, and when I do I rarely use more than 5-10MB. Aren't there any carriers in the US that do pay-as-you-go data, so if you don't use any you don't pay for any?
Almost all of the apps I have installed on my Android phone are from F-Droid. I tried setting it up without a Google account at all, but there was one app (irritatingly, my Internet banking one) that required a Play Store account. I also have the Amazon AppStore installed for its free app of the day thing (it was NeoCal a few days ago, which is a really nice calculator app, but I use a calculator so rarely that I'd probably never have bought it).
The biggest limitation with iOS for me though is it's lack of some decent equivalent of OSMAnd - a map app that lets me download entire countries worth of vector maps and can do offline navigation, so I won't run up huge bills using it when abroad.
The calender app is ridiculously limited and confusing
I have an Android phone, and there is no way from the stock calendar app to subscribe to a calendar from a link. The recommended way of doing this is to sync the device with your Google calendar and then have that sync with the remote calendar. I spent two hours trying to find documentation for how to get the calendar to just pull a .ics file from http and import it, because I couldn't believe that in 2014 anyone would ship a phone without this basic functionality.
as are most of the standard apps
As another example, the contacts app in Android has a 'me' vCard, but no mechanism for telling it that a contact already on your phone is you. Again, basic functionality that's missing. If you keep your address book sync'd by CalDav (or some other mechanism) then you most likely already have an entry for yourself, but the suggested way of doing this is to copy the data to a different card.
The entire mobile phone ecosystem is a clusterfuck at the moment. Microsoft shouldn't have a chance with two established players, but they both seem intent on producing utter crap.
For things involving the press, there is a question of public interest that can (sometimes) override the normal rights to privacy. For example, if the press discovers someone is a closet homosexual and decides to print it on the front page then that (depending on your jurisdiction) can be considered an invasion of privacy. If, however, that person is a fundamentalist politician arguing against gay rights, then you can probably justify in court that it was in the public interest to know that this had some baring on his motivation. There are lots of other examples (probably lots of better ones, but it's first thing in the morning and I haven't had coffee yet). In all of the cases, once you are in a position of power (political, financial, religious, whatever) then some things that a normal person can do without problems, because they can't affect the lives of anyone else, move into the realms of public interest.
being solid, can't be used in any of the myriad applications that require liquid or gaseous fuel
That's not a significant problem for use, it's much more of an issue for transport. Gas and oil can be transported long distances through pipes, with just the occasional pump along the way to give it a boost. Wood has to be stacked onto trucks and then transported along roads or railways. You can't just turn on a tap in a house and have wood come out, so everyone needs a wood shed or equivalent to store it, taking up a lot of space.