Maybe 75% of Yahoo's workforce want to work for another company.
Anyway, I understand why they should mandate using their own mail application and search engine. They'll discover quickly if those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.
But many people add mics to their desktops to use Skype and the like. Most desktops are not bought by people who know anything about security and even when there is an IT department, they still make conference calls with their computers and need a mic.
Anyway, maybe Vinge's Blight will take over the world with an audio malware;-)
Sometimes I had the instinct of touching the buttons of a dialog without of reaching for the touchpad. Moving a finger to the screen is faster than aiming the mouse/touchpad and clicking. Maybe scrolling isn't, as I'd have to keep the arm raised for a longer time and rolling the mouse wheel or a two finger swipe on the touchpad are much more comfortable. Maybe there are no other useful use case for touch on laptops (is pinch to zoom common?) but maybe as a web developer I better have a touchscreen if people using Win8 gets addicted to touching things inside their browsers.
Maybe, maybe... Many unknown unknowns with a technology which is new on this class of computing devices.
I just run top and sorted by memory usage. I see firefox (with 10 tabs open), thunderbird, emacs, skype, nautilus, dropbox, Xorg followed by many other system applications. I have mysql and postgresql running by the don't make it into the top 50 or something. If I had a ruby on rails application running, or cassandra, they'd be in the top 10. I can run all of these quite comfortably together on my 4 GB laptop, unless something gets unexpectedly too big and I have to kill it. But I'm always a little on swap. I know that if I start Eclipse I have to close something else. IntelliJ is much more RAM friendly but luckily my job doesn't involve stuff for which I need an IDE. emacs is really enough. Even vim would do.
What I can't run in 4 GB is all of the above plus more than one VM. Actually if the VM is not a headless Linux server or a WinXP client I can't run it unless I close some of the applications I keep open all the time. The free Win7 and Win8 VMs from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads tend to use a lot of RAM and if one does web development it nice to have a couple of them open for testing on IE. That's less and less important because all of my customers moved to Firefox or Chrome over the years but some of *their* customers are still on IE, which is getting more standard. (BTW, I used to run this laptop with Windows and a virtualized Linux development server, but as my job is to develop for Linux servers and web browsers I decided to go the other way round and I'm perfectly happy with that.)
Furthermore there are occasional memory hogs. A sample program from a Coursera big data course (don't remember which one) required 2 GB of RAM to process some sample csv file for an assignment. Those were program and data provided by the teacher and there was nothing I could do about it. Plus I do occasional video editing. Extra RAM is always handy.
Because of those memory constraints (and end of support) I'm looking for a new laptop and I'm not considering anything that can't be upgraded at 16 GB minimum. I like the internals of HP's new Zbook 15 (fully user serviceable parts, up to 32 GB RAM, up to two disks, etc). I don't like some of its exteriors: the keyboard with small arrow keys and the number pad which turns it into an interface for left handed people (the touchpad is placed to the very left, which is common but inappropriate for 90% of the population). I definitely prefer the keyboard arrangement of their Elitebook 850 g1 (about the same width and no numberpad), which stops at 16 GB and is a weaker machine in many other ways. Actually I prefer the case of my current nc8430, which has a better keyboard (more key travel) and a 16:10 screen (the zbook has to be wider to raise to the same screen height). My Core 2 Duo is still good enough for my job, disk speed (or lack of, compared to SSDs) is not a problem but obviously everybody welcomes a faster machine, me too. However the limited memory is definitely becoming a problem.
This made me think about the laptop market. It seems to me that manufactures are ignoring the call for 16:10 screens. Only one of them still sells laptops with those screens and it's doing well. You know who it is. All the others give us shorter screens for the same width. Add ten years old 1366x768 resolutions and one wonders why they are surprised to see the market crash. They can't really compete on price with tablets, they must compete on quality.
Yes. In my (little) direct experience with Asian politics Asia was always made of "countries and territories", not stating which one is what. Other areas of the world are made only of countries. Region is another safe choice.
Slashdot ate my code because of an unquoted <
I wrote: gcc's overflow checker evaluates (buf + len < buf) as false and optimizes it away paving the way to attacks.
Obviously there is an example in the first page of the paper. What follows is mostly a direct quote from there.
char *buf =...;
char *buf_end =...;
unsigned int len =...;
if (buf + len >= buf_end)
return;/* len too large */
if (buf + len < buf)
return;/* underflow, buf+len wrapped around */ /* write to buf[0..len-1] */
They say they found this code in Chromium, Linux and Python. This code works on flat address spaces but fails on segmented architectures. The C standard states that overflowed pointers are undefined, so gcc assumes that no pointer overflow occurs on any architecture. It's overflow checker evaluates (buf + len
I suggest that everybody read the paper. It contains many examples of normal looking code that's actually wrong.
I must say you're right: this is one of those cases when slower is safer. Nevertheless I never got hit by a car but I risked many collisions with slower traffic on bicycle roads, mostly kids or dogs even if I'm super careful approaching them. Pedestrians and adults usually keep their line and don't start zigzaging at the very moment you're overtaking them. Cars too. This is probably what biases me, plus the time factor.
It seems there are many Geeks around. Adblock usage was 9.2% overall in US and Europe in 2012. See this PDF link for details. Well, maybe there aren't so many geeks but they install Adblock on the computers of friends.
Given the speed and travelled distance difference between cars and bicycles maybe per-hour accidents would be a better metric.
Thumbs up for separating bikes from everything else, cars and pedestrians. Bike lanes on sidewalks in city centers are slow and dangerous because of pedestrians. I always prefer to share the road with cars: they're more predictable and I get home sooner.
Michael Powell [...] is pushing for 'usage-based internet access' which he says is good for consumers who are 'accustomed to paying for what they use'.
Customers are used to many bad things they would be happy to do without, from flat tires to friends dying. Let's stop their Internet connection at random for a random amount of time (no less than 30 minutes). This is to make them stay in touch with the harsh reality of the world. They should thank us.
Mmm, I love uncapped data plans but in this case AC maybe made a bad deal. I assume those are monthly quotas:
2 Mbps times 60 seconds, times 60 minutes, times 24 hours, times 30 days is 5.184.000.000.000 bits transferred.
1 TB is 1.000.000.000.000 bytes, 8.000.000.000.000 bits which is larger than the number of bits above. Furthermore you have a 50 times faster connection.
Yes, in theory you can run out of your quota in less than if you transfer at full speed, but I'll be surprised if you find 1 TB of movies to download every day.
Actually "less seats" increases capacity: you can fit more people in a given space if they stand. Maybe you were hinting about smaller seats or more closely spaced? Anyway, we have these articulated carts in Milan since a few years ago and they are much more comfortable. They can accommodate a little more people because of the space where walls were, but not that much. They're also a time saver because you can walk inside the train to the exit closer to where you have to go when the train stops. Sometimes a few seconds matter. But the real great thing is that people can spread evenly over the train instead of getting stuffed in two or three overcrowded carts at the center of the train, where most people wait on the platform.
Seconded. Btw, I shamelessly posted a link on fb this morning, maybe 4 hours ago. It worked. I don't want to waste my time checking if it still works now. My daily posting allowance has been already spent between fb and/.:-)
For me it's the menu at the top and the launcher at the left. I can't stand any of them. I always merged Gnome 2's top bar in the bottom one on any fresh install, deleted the parts of them that I don't use and thank's god Gnome 2 has no launcher/docker. The app menu or ALT-F2 are good enough. I'm working on 12.04 with fallback mode (I think it's called like that) and obviously I deinstalled the packages for the global menu. My screen is tall enough to handle per app menus (still a 16:10). The compiz cube is great for handling workspaces and it gives a good cognitive methaphor of what a workspace is, instead of just materializing windows out of nowhere. I rotate the cube with CRTL-ALT-arrow, ALT-tab works as expected so I use the touchpad very little.
But yes, sometimes compiz breaks on updates and must be reconfigured, even without Unity. Annoying but it gets fixed soon and I go back to a DE I can work with.
Yeah, well, I think everybody agrees that Gnome 2 (replace with your favorite DE) was the only true DE and everything else was and will be much worse. Oh, doesn't everybody agree on that and somebody even dares to code his own GUI still now? O_o
Seriously, it's an unsolvable problem given the nature of open source and maybe it's not even a problem until somebody keeps coding a GUI that I can tweak into something I can accept to use. You see what's the problem?:-)
With a Mac or a PC you must surrender to Apple and MS. It's adapt or quit. With Linux you can somewhat find a good compromise with a little work. As somebody told me years ago "Linux is for the guys that want to spend a week customizing their desktop" and I do whenever some dev team thinks to be smart (hi Gnome 3 devs, hi Canonical!), or is it the other way around?;-)
Sanctioning Syria is a thing, sanctioning China is a totally different matter. Syria has few friends, China many more. In other words, you can sanction a country only if most of the rest of world agrees with you. Furthermore no country can let any foreign investor worry about being the next target.
They have a fixed maturity date and fixed interest rate at issue, China cannot "call in their loan", "jack up interest rates" or whatever else you imagine.
Not on already bought assets but new bonds are countinuously issued to pay interest and to fund new expenses. An investor can stop buying new bonds and that has the effect of "calling in their loan". Investors can agree that a country has a higher risk and ask for higher interest rates. No country issues new bonds in the blind without contacting the right rates. If it doesn't it won't be able to sell all the bonds it needs because investors will buy from someone else. The world is full of countries issuing bonds. And there are not only bonds.
if China started making demands, its bonds could be effectively deleted without touching the rest of the market.
If a country does that (a selective default) it's going to get a hard time selling bonds to anybody else, at least at the same interest rate. It's a matter of trust.
In the end, if you issue bonds it's because you need somebody's else help to pay your bills. You can't piss them off too much or they'll leave you without money once you spent everything they already gave you.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm, you're right and I didn't pay attention. Sorry.
Maybe 75% of Yahoo's workforce want to work for another company.
Anyway, I understand why they should mandate using their own mail application and search engine. They'll discover quickly if those products hurt and they have an incentive to make them better.
But many people add mics to their desktops to use Skype and the like. Most desktops are not bought by people who know anything about security and even when there is an IT department, they still make conference calls with their computers and need a mic.
Anyway, maybe Vinge's Blight will take over the world with an audio malware ;-)
+1 informative, I was about to post the same link.
Yes, this should be ranked above all the wars we had in history, combined.
No major problems with your teeth? Lucky you!
Sometimes I had the instinct of touching the buttons of a dialog without of reaching for the touchpad. Moving a finger to the screen is faster than aiming the mouse/touchpad and clicking. Maybe scrolling isn't, as I'd have to keep the arm raised for a longer time and rolling the mouse wheel or a two finger swipe on the touchpad are much more comfortable. Maybe there are no other useful use case for touch on laptops (is pinch to zoom common?) but maybe as a web developer I better have a touchscreen if people using Win8 gets addicted to touching things inside their browsers.
Maybe, maybe... Many unknown unknowns with a technology which is new on this class of computing devices.
I just run top and sorted by memory usage. I see firefox (with 10 tabs open), thunderbird, emacs, skype, nautilus, dropbox, Xorg followed by many other system applications. I have mysql and postgresql running by the don't make it into the top 50 or something. If I had a ruby on rails application running, or cassandra, they'd be in the top 10. I can run all of these quite comfortably together on my 4 GB laptop, unless something gets unexpectedly too big and I have to kill it. But I'm always a little on swap. I know that if I start Eclipse I have to close something else. IntelliJ is much more RAM friendly but luckily my job doesn't involve stuff for which I need an IDE. emacs is really enough. Even vim would do.
What I can't run in 4 GB is all of the above plus more than one VM. Actually if the VM is not a headless Linux server or a WinXP client I can't run it unless I close some of the applications I keep open all the time. The free Win7 and Win8 VMs from http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads tend to use a lot of RAM and if one does web development it nice to have a couple of them open for testing on IE. That's less and less important because all of my customers moved to Firefox or Chrome over the years but some of *their* customers are still on IE, which is getting more standard. (BTW, I used to run this laptop with Windows and a virtualized Linux development server, but as my job is to develop for Linux servers and web browsers I decided to go the other way round and I'm perfectly happy with that.)
Furthermore there are occasional memory hogs. A sample program from a Coursera big data course (don't remember which one) required 2 GB of RAM to process some sample csv file for an assignment. Those were program and data provided by the teacher and there was nothing I could do about it. Plus I do occasional video editing. Extra RAM is always handy.
Because of those memory constraints (and end of support) I'm looking for a new laptop and I'm not considering anything that can't be upgraded at 16 GB minimum. I like the internals of HP's new Zbook 15 (fully user serviceable parts, up to 32 GB RAM, up to two disks, etc). I don't like some of its exteriors: the keyboard with small arrow keys and the number pad which turns it into an interface for left handed people (the touchpad is placed to the very left, which is common but inappropriate for 90% of the population). I definitely prefer the keyboard arrangement of their Elitebook 850 g1 (about the same width and no numberpad), which stops at 16 GB and is a weaker machine in many other ways. Actually I prefer the case of my current nc8430, which has a better keyboard (more key travel) and a 16:10 screen (the zbook has to be wider to raise to the same screen height). My Core 2 Duo is still good enough for my job, disk speed (or lack of, compared to SSDs) is not a problem but obviously everybody welcomes a faster machine, me too. However the limited memory is definitely becoming a problem.
To learn new things? Learning is stuff that matters.
This made me think about the laptop market. It seems to me that manufactures are ignoring the call for 16:10 screens. Only one of them still sells laptops with those screens and it's doing well. You know who it is. All the others give us shorter screens for the same width. Add ten years old 1366x768 resolutions and one wonders why they are surprised to see the market crash. They can't really compete on price with tablets, they must compete on quality.
Yes. In my (little) direct experience with Asian politics Asia was always made of "countries and territories", not stating which one is what. Other areas of the world are made only of countries. Region is another safe choice.
+funny +chaos theory
Slashdot ate my code because of an unquoted <
I wrote: gcc's overflow checker evaluates (buf + len < buf) as false and optimizes it away paving the way to attacks.
Obviously there is an example in the first page of the paper. What follows is mostly a direct quote from there.
char *buf = ...; ...; ...; /* len too large */ /* underflow, buf+len wrapped around */
/* write to buf[0..len-1] */
char *buf_end =
unsigned int len =
if (buf + len >= buf_end)
return;
if (buf + len < buf)
return;
They say they found this code in Chromium, Linux and Python. This code works on flat address spaces but fails on segmented architectures. The C standard states that overflowed pointers are undefined, so gcc assumes that no pointer overflow occurs on any architecture. It's overflow checker evaluates (buf + len
I suggest that everybody read the paper. It contains many examples of normal looking code that's actually wrong.
I must say you're right: this is one of those cases when slower is safer. Nevertheless I never got hit by a car but I risked many collisions with slower traffic on bicycle roads, mostly kids or dogs even if I'm super careful approaching them. Pedestrians and adults usually keep their line and don't start zigzaging at the very moment you're overtaking them. Cars too. This is probably what biases me, plus the time factor.
It seems there are many Geeks around. Adblock usage was 9.2% overall in US and Europe in 2012. See this PDF link for details. Well, maybe there aren't so many geeks but they install Adblock on the computers of friends.
Given the speed and travelled distance difference between cars and bicycles maybe per-hour accidents would be a better metric.
Thumbs up for separating bikes from everything else, cars and pedestrians. Bike lanes on sidewalks in city centers are slow and dangerous because of pedestrians. I always prefer to share the road with cars: they're more predictable and I get home sooner.
Customers are used to many bad things they would be happy to do without, from flat tires to friends dying. Let's stop their Internet connection at random for a random amount of time (no less than 30 minutes). This is to make them stay in touch with the harsh reality of the world. They should thank us.
;-)
Mmm, I love uncapped data plans but in this case AC maybe made a bad deal. I assume those are monthly quotas:
2 Mbps times 60 seconds, times 60 minutes, times 24 hours, times 30 days is 5.184.000.000.000 bits transferred.
1 TB is 1.000.000.000.000 bytes, 8.000.000.000.000 bits which is larger than the number of bits above. Furthermore you have a 50 times faster connection.
Yes, in theory you can run out of your quota in less than if you transfer at full speed, but I'll be surprised if you find 1 TB of movies to download every day.
Actually "less seats" increases capacity: you can fit more people in a given space if they stand. Maybe you were hinting about smaller seats or more closely spaced? Anyway, we have these articulated carts in Milan since a few years ago and they are much more comfortable. They can accommodate a little more people because of the space where walls were, but not that much. They're also a time saver because you can walk inside the train to the exit closer to where you have to go when the train stops. Sometimes a few seconds matter. But the real great thing is that people can spread evenly over the train instead of getting stuffed in two or three overcrowded carts at the center of the train, where most people wait on the platform.
Seconded. Btw, I shamelessly posted a link on fb this morning, maybe 4 hours ago. It worked. I don't want to waste my time checking if it still works now. My daily posting allowance has been already spent between fb and /. :-)
For me it's the menu at the top and the launcher at the left. I can't stand any of them. I always merged Gnome 2's top bar in the bottom one on any fresh install, deleted the parts of them that I don't use and thank's god Gnome 2 has no launcher/docker. The app menu or ALT-F2 are good enough. I'm working on 12.04 with fallback mode (I think it's called like that) and obviously I deinstalled the packages for the global menu. My screen is tall enough to handle per app menus (still a 16:10). The compiz cube is great for handling workspaces and it gives a good cognitive methaphor of what a workspace is, instead of just materializing windows out of nowhere. I rotate the cube with CRTL-ALT-arrow, ALT-tab works as expected so I use the touchpad very little.
But yes, sometimes compiz breaks on updates and must be reconfigured, even without Unity. Annoying but it gets fixed soon and I go back to a DE I can work with.
Yeah, well, I think everybody agrees that Gnome 2 (replace with your favorite DE) was the only true DE and everything else was and will be much worse. Oh, doesn't everybody agree on that and somebody even dares to code his own GUI still now? O_o
Seriously, it's an unsolvable problem given the nature of open source and maybe it's not even a problem until somebody keeps coding a GUI that I can tweak into something I can accept to use. You see what's the problem? :-)
With a Mac or a PC you must surrender to Apple and MS. It's adapt or quit. With Linux you can somewhat find a good compromise with a little work. As somebody told me years ago "Linux is for the guys that want to spend a week customizing their desktop" and I do whenever some dev team thinks to be smart (hi Gnome 3 devs, hi Canonical!), or is it the other way around? ;-)
Sanctioning Syria is a thing, sanctioning China is a totally different matter. Syria has few friends, China many more. In other words, you can sanction a country only if most of the rest of world agrees with you. Furthermore no country can let any foreign investor worry about being the next target.
Not on already bought assets but new bonds are countinuously issued to pay interest and to fund new expenses. An investor can stop buying new bonds and that has the effect of "calling in their loan". Investors can agree that a country has a higher risk and ask for higher interest rates. No country issues new bonds in the blind without contacting the right rates. If it doesn't it won't be able to sell all the bonds it needs because investors will buy from someone else. The world is full of countries issuing bonds. And there are not only bonds.
If a country does that (a selective default) it's going to get a hard time selling bonds to anybody else, at least at the same interest rate. It's a matter of trust.
In the end, if you issue bonds it's because you need somebody's else help to pay your bills. You can't piss them off too much or they'll leave you without money once you spent everything they already gave you.