Re:The question nobody wants to ask....
on
Perl 5.14 Released
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· Score: 1
# Compared to: print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a approx $b );
# Oh, great, now we need another obscure magic special variable to contain epsilon... # Perhaps $Ã would do? Our English users won't mind using character map...
But why not have something like print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a approx $b by $epsilon ); as a pretty intuitive abbreviation of print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a > ($b - $epsilon) && $a ($b + $epsilon) );
By some accounts the IRA quit after 9/11, when American donors suddenly decided that terrorism wasn't cool.
Which is a fine theory, except that the IRA stopped 'active operations' in 1997, before the 1998 Good Friday agreement was signed, effectively ending their military/terrorist campaign with a political settlement three years before 9/11.
And I was thinking about a snarky comment along the "is google not working then?" lines, but it's actually quite hard to find. Google seems to ignore the circumflex, even with quotes, i.e."^W", and the first few results for 'control W' all refer to the windows 'close window' shortcut...
and I have yet to see a system with Pulseaudio installed on it, that did not have a bunch of weird issues with audio.
Dell 530 desktop. Pulseaudio broken in 8.04,8.10 but has worked perfectly with zero issues since 9.04. eeePC netbook. Slight crackling on mute at 9.04, has worked perfectly since 10.04.
I guess some people still have various issues with pulseaudio but it's not broken for *everyone*.
However, the problem arises that anybody over 40 can't seem to work them,
Less of the 'anybody over 40' crap please. I'm 47, use them every day, and I'm twice as fast as the twenty-somethings who are too dumb to use the shortcuts (scan first item instead of pressing 'start', insert cash or card rather than selecting payment method first etc.).
At the last election McCain apparently believed in just about all the same government provided services as Obama, apart from some fairly minor disagreements about health policy and some fairly small (compared to total government expenditure) disagreements about amounts.
Either they are both socialists (they both want the government to provide roads, schools, some sort of welfare system including Medicare/Medicaid or similar) - in which case the term's pretty meaningless since it covers everyone except extreme libertarians.
Or neither of them are Socialists (according to normal world political standards McCain is right-wing, Obama is center-right).
Or you could always define Socialist as 'anyone who wants to provide a government service beyond the ones such as schools, roads, etc. etc. which I personally approve and deem to be 'non-Socialist'. That seems to be a common definition - but not really logically supportable in any way.
Re 'spread the wealth', did McCain support a flat amount tax system (i.e. everyone pays the same Dollar amount regardless)? Or any serious progress towards it? No? Then he also believes in the supposedly 'Socialist' concept of redistribution, i.e. 'spreading the wealth' (like every mainstream party, left or right, in every developed democratic nation).
I already get strange looks if I pay cash for anything over a ten in the shops (but then this is the UK, competing for the title of the most-surveilled population on the planet)
You must go in some strange shops then. £20 is nothing these days, I often pay for items up to about £30-40 in cash and never get 'strange looks'. Now if you tried to use a £50 note of course that *would* be suspicious!
(NB I don't know why, but slashdot sticks an 'A circumflex' in front of my GB pound signs.)
How can one possibly know that "Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy etc." without being a Google employee?
They would ask the court for google to be required to produce all relevant internal emails etc. so they could look for the "but the idiot users won't understand this and will just agree" smoking gun. It's called the 'discovery' stage of the lawsuit. That's not to say that I believe that such evidence exists or that the court would view such disclosures as reasonable, but that's how it works.
Also, this lawsuit makes multiple claims which do not necessarily fall together when one of them (the bad intent) is struck out.
I always find that the strap breaks before I lose* it or the battery runs out; I've ended up just keeping one loose* in my pocket. Maybe that's not a good idea and looks extra suspicious?
* Note that this post is particularly useful since it correctly illustrates the use of the words 'lose' and 'loose', which may be helpful to many slashdot posters.
The problem with current file system's is the need to change so many bits uselessly (eg Access time and Modify time) while doing absolutely nothing to the file.
The 'noatime' parameter has been available and widely used for Linux ext2/3/4 filesystems (particularly large data partitions) for years to prevent access time updates. Normally there would be no real gain from turning off modify time updating since you're typically updating other data in the same disc block anyhow (e.g. file size) when you modify the file. (Unless you've got some peculiar broken filesystem that updates modify times even when the file hasn't changed?)
This is the largest reason why we can't move to SSD's, because computers don't yet come with enough RAM, and OS's like Windows and Linux throw data into the swap file continuously.
My moderately crappy 3+ year old Dell 530 desktop system has only 2Gb RAM and I've *never* seen it use any swap (running Ubuntu 10.4 at present). I only have a swap partition in case I want to use 'hibernate' (which is pretty much never).
I can have the following running with no swapping: Firefox (about 6 tabs), music player, Video rendering (standard def), DVD burner, CD ripper, OpenOffice.
I'm sure I *could* get it to swap if I added some more demanding applications, but I think the above shows that Linux at least does not require swap any more for most people's typical needs.
On the other hand, the way I see it is they are once again, illegally using one product to affect the users of another product.
It's probably not illegal for them to do this when the product they are 'drawing people away from' (XP) is produced by them rather than another company.
Yeh like that's a good idea. Yarrrr install me genuine Winderrs no scurvy vairuses gaaaaaranteed.
[Disclaimer: I have not attempted to pirate windows personally] Actually, popular software torrents on TPB are *very* unlikely to contain malware due to "community validation".
In fact most of Europe doesn't have caps... except the UK
I'm on Virgin cable ('Medium' Internet package) in the UK and I don't have a cap as such. I get reduced to 1/4 speed for 5 hrs if I download more than a given amount in specified peak hours, but there is no specific total cap (i.e. a point where I get cut off or have to pay more) per month.
To summarize: some people in the UK have caps. Other don't.
And BTW we are special, but no more autistic than your average slashdotter.
Just checked, ignoring £1 and £2 coins I've got 10 x 20p, 2 x 10p and 4 x 5p, fairly typically except I'd usually have a few 1p/2p coins and maybe a 50p. So 12 quarters doesn't sound at all unusual to me.
Blender is like the abusive boyfriend who keeps promising you that this time he won't hit you, that he's really changed this time--only to go right back to the same old abuse as soon as you take him back.
That's a pretty odious analogy. It's only a (free) piece of software. Those who don't like it pretty much *won't* go back.
Both obsolete, so it really is not "Working" any more without 625-line ability.
Depends what you mean by 'working'. I expect there's still a few 625 to 405 lines converter boxes around (I had one provided in a grotty rented flat in 1986). Maybe you even get one thrown in free if you buy this TV.
And when the analogue signal is turned off across the whole UK next year you'll still be able to use it if you get a freeview box with coax output and run the output of that through the 405 line converter box...
It is impossible to hide evidence of your public behavior, proper or improper, from your nosy neighbors. If you don't believe that, then you have never had truly nosy neighbors.
Nonsense. You can hide your public behaviour from your neighbours by doing it over the other side of the city, or in a different city altogether. Universal surveillance makes the whole world into a single nosy neighbourhood. Some people seem to like that just fine but it shouldn't be compulsory for the rest of us.
Yes, we need to audit how the information is created and used, so that we can protect ourselves from abuse,... You'd have to be very naive to believe there will be any effective auditing or controls given the current record of the police etc. for abusing the information they already have (selling information about celebs, using it to pursue private vendettas, manipulating politicians). The more information they collect, the more they will abuse it. The police in the UK are notorious for abusing the PNC and DVLA systems but this continues mostly unpunished.
Why should gathering and using evidence of where your car was in relation to a particular crime impinge on your "essential liberety" unless you're a criminal?
Oh, the old "If you haven't got anything to hide, you have nothing to fear" rubbish. Many people have things they wish quite legitimately to hide from employers, relatives, the press etc. not because they have done anything criminal but because they may suffer unfair consequences from the knowledge being public.
This will produce a whole new industry of police officers selling car tracking information to the press and other interested parties. "Polictian X's car was tracked driving through a well-known gay district" is just one example. Police using it to track love rivals is another. Yes, this sort of thing happens already, and yes the dodgy police are the root problem. But storing up huge new amounts of tracking information on everyone is just asking for it to be abused for political blackmail, public prurience and personal vendettas, all unrelated to any actual criminal acts. If the information does not exist it can't be abused in this way.
Your comment is based on the misconception that unauthorized downloading of copyright material *is* a crime. In most cases and most jurisdictions, it is a civil wrong, not a crime, and law enforcement has no role in investigating or prosecuting civil matters (the concept of prosecution does not even exist for civil matters).
e.g. this But from the point of view of law enforcement, publishing a link to a movie for illegal download is no different than pointing users to readily available pedo-pornographic material, as in both cases the search engine is an accomplice in unlawful act. is completely wrong, because of the civil/criminal distinction. In the unauthorized download case it is entirely up to the copyright holder to decide if they wish to pursue the matter and bring a civil suit if necessary; in many cases they even choose to make their material available freely (e.g. via youtube) and so it's not actually possible for a linker to determine what is and is not authorized. In the other case the material is (generally) definitively illegal and it is the job of law enforcement to investigate etc.
Carpooling is annoying to deal with - need to leave work because your child is sick?
Unless you have a particularly unhealthy child, the fuel money you save from carpooling should easily pay for the occasional taxi for such instances and similar.
Park and ride can work *if it's done right* -e.g. in the city where I live there's a modern partly segregated tram system serving four different park&rides, which runs every 5 mins and takes about 15-30 mins to get into the heart of the city, where parking is difficult/expensive/time consuming. The tram fare (including the P&R parking) is quite a bit less than the city parking costs.
Redhat is fully compliant with the GPL before and after this change and is still releasing its changes, just in a format that is less convenient to Oracle. What you seem to be implying is that they should be happily doing extra things *beyond* what the GPL requires, effectively just to make their competitors more profitable, which is a bit bizarre. However, there was nothing 'scummy' about what Oracle was doing, they were fully entitled to do what they do and are also compliant with the GPL. They will just have to do a bit more work themselves now.
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# Compared to:
print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a approx $b );
# Oh, great, now we need another obscure magic special variable to contain epsilon...
# Perhaps $Ã would do? Our English users won't mind using character map...
But why not have something like
print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a approx $b by $epsilon );
as a pretty intuitive abbreviation of
print "$a is approx $b\n" if ( $a > ($b - $epsilon) && $a ($b + $epsilon) );
By some accounts the IRA quit after 9/11, when American donors suddenly decided that terrorism wasn't cool.
Which is a fine theory, except that the IRA stopped 'active operations' in 1997, before the 1998 Good Friday agreement was signed, effectively ending their military/terrorist campaign with a political settlement three years before 9/11.
And I was thinking about a snarky comment along the "is google not working then?" lines, but it's actually quite hard to find. Google seems to ignore the circumflex, even with quotes, i.e."^W", and the first few results for 'control W' all refer to the windows 'close window' shortcut...
and I have yet to see a system with Pulseaudio installed on it, that did not have a bunch of weird issues with audio.
Dell 530 desktop. Pulseaudio broken in 8.04,8.10 but has worked perfectly with zero issues since 9.04.
eeePC netbook. Slight crackling on mute at 9.04, has worked perfectly since 10.04.
I guess some people still have various issues with pulseaudio but it's not broken for *everyone*.
However, the problem arises that anybody over 40 can't seem to work them,
Less of the 'anybody over 40' crap please.
I'm 47, use them every day, and I'm twice as fast as the twenty-somethings who are too dumb to use the shortcuts (scan first item instead of pressing 'start', insert cash or card rather than selecting payment method first etc.).
Obama IS a socialist.
At the last election McCain apparently believed in just about all the same government provided services as Obama, apart from some fairly minor disagreements about health policy and some fairly small (compared to total government expenditure) disagreements about amounts.
Either they are both socialists (they both want the government to provide roads, schools, some sort of welfare system including Medicare/Medicaid or similar) - in which case the term's pretty meaningless since it covers everyone except extreme libertarians.
Or neither of them are Socialists (according to normal world political standards McCain is right-wing, Obama is center-right).
Or you could always define Socialist as 'anyone who wants to provide a government service beyond the ones such as schools, roads, etc. etc. which I personally approve and deem to be 'non-Socialist'. That seems to be a common definition - but not really logically supportable in any way.
Re 'spread the wealth', did McCain support a flat amount tax system (i.e. everyone pays the same Dollar amount regardless)? Or any serious progress towards it? No? Then he also believes in the supposedly 'Socialist' concept of redistribution, i.e. 'spreading the wealth' (like every mainstream party, left or right, in every developed democratic nation).
I already get strange looks if I pay cash for anything over a ten in the shops (but then this is the UK, competing for the title of the most-surveilled population on the planet)
You must go in some strange shops then. £20 is nothing these days, I often pay for items up to about £30-40 in cash and never get 'strange looks'. Now if you tried to use a £50 note of course that *would* be suspicious!
(NB I don't know why, but slashdot sticks an 'A circumflex' in front of my GB pound signs.)
How can one possibly know that "Google knew that most users would not understand that the privacy policy etc." without being a Google employee?
They would ask the court for google to be required to produce all relevant internal emails etc. so they could look for the "but the idiot users won't understand this and will just agree" smoking gun. It's called the 'discovery' stage of the lawsuit.
That's not to say that I believe that such evidence exists or that the court would view such disclosures as reasonable, but that's how it works.
Also, this lawsuit makes multiple claims which do not necessarily fall together when one of them (the bad intent) is struck out.
My 10.4 has all the functionality I need, and I can wait for the next LTS which, if I am not mistaken, is the next 11.10 in October.
Next LTS is 12.4 as per the 2 yearly sequence 8.4, 10.4, 12.4, 14.4 etc.
I always find that the strap breaks before I lose* it or the battery runs out; I've ended up just keeping one loose* in my pocket.
Maybe that's not a good idea and looks extra suspicious?
* Note that this post is particularly useful since it correctly illustrates the use of the words 'lose' and 'loose', which may be helpful to many slashdot posters.
The problem with current file system's is the need to change so many bits uselessly (eg Access time and Modify time) while doing absolutely nothing to the file.
The 'noatime' parameter has been available and widely used for Linux ext2/3/4 filesystems (particularly large data partitions) for years to prevent access time updates.
Normally there would be no real gain from turning off modify time updating since you're typically updating other data in the same disc block anyhow (e.g. file size) when you modify the file. (Unless you've got some peculiar broken filesystem that updates modify times even when the file hasn't changed?)
This is the largest reason why we can't move to SSD's, because computers don't yet come with enough RAM, and OS's like Windows and Linux throw data into the swap file continuously.
My moderately crappy 3+ year old Dell 530 desktop system has only 2Gb RAM and I've *never* seen it use any swap (running Ubuntu 10.4 at present). I only have a swap partition in case I want to use 'hibernate' (which is pretty much never).
I can have the following running with no swapping: Firefox (about 6 tabs), music player, Video rendering (standard def), DVD burner, CD ripper, OpenOffice.
I'm sure I *could* get it to swap if I added some more demanding applications, but I think the above shows that Linux at least does not require swap any more for most people's typical needs.
On the other hand, the way I see it is they are once again, illegally using one product to affect the users of another product.
It's probably not illegal for them to do this when the product they are 'drawing people away from' (XP) is produced by them rather than another company.
Yeh like that's a good idea. Yarrrr install me genuine Winderrs no scurvy vairuses gaaaaaranteed.
[Disclaimer: I have not attempted to pirate windows personally]
Actually, popular software torrents on TPB are *very* unlikely to contain malware due to "community validation".
In fact most of Europe doesn't have caps... except the UK
I'm on Virgin cable ('Medium' Internet package) in the UK and I don't have a cap as such. I get reduced to 1/4 speed for 5 hrs if I download more than a given amount in specified peak hours, but there is no specific total cap (i.e. a point where I get cut off or have to pay more) per month.
To summarize: some people in the UK have caps. Other don't.
And BTW we are special, but no more autistic than your average slashdotter.
Just checked, ignoring £1 and £2 coins I've got 10 x 20p, 2 x 10p and 4 x 5p, fairly typically except I'd usually have a few 1p/2p coins and maybe a 50p. So 12 quarters doesn't sound at all unusual to me.
Blender is like the abusive boyfriend who keeps promising you that this time he won't hit you, that he's really changed this time--only to go right back to the same old abuse as soon as you take him back.
That's a pretty odious analogy. It's only a (free) piece of software. Those who don't like it pretty much *won't* go back.
But not so good if you were a cyclops *and* a pirate...
Both obsolete, so it really is not "Working" any more without 625-line ability.
Depends what you mean by 'working'. I expect there's still a few 625 to 405 lines converter boxes around (I had one provided in a grotty rented flat in 1986). Maybe you even get one thrown in free if you buy this TV.
And when the analogue signal is turned off across the whole UK next year you'll still be able to use it if you get a freeview box with coax output and run the output of that through the 405 line converter box...
with XP support ending some time next year.
2014 actually.
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?alpha=Windows+XP
It is impossible to hide evidence of your public behavior, proper or improper, from your nosy neighbors. If you don't believe that, then you have never had truly nosy neighbors.
Nonsense. You can hide your public behaviour from your neighbours by doing it over the other side of the city, or in a different city altogether. Universal surveillance makes the whole world into a single nosy neighbourhood. Some people seem to like that just fine but it shouldn't be compulsory for the rest of us.
Yes, we need to audit how the information is created and used, so that we can protect ourselves from abuse,...
You'd have to be very naive to believe there will be any effective auditing or controls given the current record of the police etc. for abusing the information they already have (selling information about celebs, using it to pursue private vendettas, manipulating politicians). The more information they collect, the more they will abuse it. The police in the UK are notorious for abusing the PNC and DVLA systems but this continues mostly unpunished.
Why should gathering and using evidence of where your car was in relation to a particular crime impinge on your "essential liberety" unless you're a criminal?
Oh, the old "If you haven't got anything to hide, you have nothing to fear" rubbish.
Many people have things they wish quite legitimately to hide from employers, relatives, the press etc. not because they have done anything criminal but because they may suffer unfair consequences from the knowledge being public.
This will produce a whole new industry of police officers selling car tracking information to the press and other interested parties. "Polictian X's car was tracked driving through a well-known gay district" is just one example. Police using it to track love rivals is another. Yes, this sort of thing happens already, and yes the dodgy police are the root problem.
But storing up huge new amounts of tracking information on everyone is just asking for it to be abused for political blackmail, public prurience and personal vendettas, all unrelated to any actual criminal acts. If the information does not exist it can't be abused in this way.
Your comment is based on the misconception that unauthorized downloading of copyright material *is* a crime. In most cases and most jurisdictions, it is a civil wrong, not a crime, and law enforcement has no role in investigating or prosecuting civil matters (the concept of prosecution does not even exist for civil matters).
e.g. this
But from the point of view of law enforcement, publishing a link to a movie for illegal download is no different than pointing users to readily available pedo-pornographic material, as in both cases the search engine is an accomplice in unlawful act.
is completely wrong, because of the civil/criminal distinction.
In the unauthorized download case it is entirely up to the copyright holder to decide if they wish to pursue the matter and bring a civil suit if necessary; in many cases they even choose to make their material available freely (e.g. via youtube) and so it's not actually possible for a linker to determine what is and is not authorized. In the other case the material is (generally) definitively illegal and it is the job of law enforcement to investigate etc.
Carpooling is annoying to deal with - need to leave work because your child is sick?
Unless you have a particularly unhealthy child, the fuel money you save from carpooling should easily pay for the occasional taxi for such instances and similar.
Park and ride can work *if it's done right* -e.g. in the city where I live there's a modern partly segregated tram system serving four different park&rides, which runs every 5 mins and takes about 15-30 mins to get into the heart of the city, where parking is difficult/expensive/time consuming. The tram fare (including the P&R parking) is quite a bit less than the city parking costs.
Redhat is fully compliant with the GPL before and after this change and is still releasing its changes, just in a format that is less convenient to Oracle. What you seem to be implying is that they should be happily doing extra things *beyond* what the GPL requires, effectively just to make their competitors more profitable, which is a bit bizarre.
However, there was nothing 'scummy' about what Oracle was doing, they were fully entitled to do what they do and are also compliant with the GPL. They will just have to do a bit more work themselves now.