The 1000+ websites mentioned in the post are (supposedly) part of a "cold-calling investment scam using the name ‘Global Capital Wealth’". The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the federal corporate regulator, has ordered that their IP addresses be blocked, which also catches innocent websites co-hosted at those IP addresses.
The Australian Federal Police also asks ISPs to block websites listed by Interpol as containing “'worst of the worst' child pornography", apparently via DNS (news reports mention "domains" and "URLs"), but perhaps also at the IP level. Most ISPs have complied; at least one has refused.
[My take: There may be a case for corporate regulation bureaucrats to get some websites blocked, but only at DNS level and only in smaller numbers. Blocking extreme child porn sites via DNS would be next to useless, so I hope they also block at IP level.]
Gingrich says he'll use big monetary prizes to get private enterprises (Bigelow, SpaceX, Armadillo, etc) to build the infrastructure. (He carefully left that detail out while campaigning in Florida.) Mike Griffin and other long-time NASA people would prefer the existing approach: giving NASA lots of money to spend in the sponsoring politicians electorates. (Why was Mission Control in Houston, of all places? LBJ put it there to boost the local economy.)
The current init system is "simple and elegant"? The one with lots of shell scripts in/etc/init.d, and symbolic links in/etc/rc[0-7S].d to those links? Symbolic links with names like "K09dm" or "S51cups", where the first 3 characters are highly significant?
I disagree.
(Moreover, both upstart and systemd are significantly faster than the current system.)
RAGE Mobile, as id call it, is not a port of RAGE to iOS. It is a much smaller game using the same technology and the same setting. These distinctions matter...
Actually, FastMail have continued to improve things in lots of small ways. They may not have rewritten their web UI again... but they have kept tweaking an already-excellent system.
The FastMail team have an extraordinarily high level of clue. No wonder Opera got out their chequebook...
Good news: web pages do require approval (through a permission dialog) to access address books. The extension's author says:
[T]here are two APIs. The internal “importer” API, which can only be accessed by [Firefox] extensions, allows you to perform arbitrary network and OS-level operations to get information into the system. The external “content” API, which can be accessed by any web page, allows you to request access to contact data (and then starts the “permission” dialog, where the user can choose what access to grant).
This website seems to be the place to find out more.
Firefox does not support RT Fact (RT = Ray Trace, BTW) or XML3D.
The HTML5 designers, following Mozilla's lead, are specifyng WebGL, which is a JavaScript API for OpenGL ES 2.0, the current version of OpenGL for Embeeded Systems.
Senator X used Parliamentary Privilege in exactly the way it is meant to be used: to start a discussion about something that the regular institutions may not be handling properly.
Note the word "start". Things a parliamentarian says under privilege are not authoritative -- in fact, they're usually trite, and often wrong -- but sometimes they initiate very useful public debates.
The Qt designers don't just create widgets etc, they design components that are easy to program with. As part of this, they avoid stuff that requires the tricky/ugly parts of C++. For instance, you rarely need to explicitly delete objects, because their libraries use reference counting to automagically delete objects at the earliest appropriate time.
So it is easy for any good programmer to learn enough C++ to use Qt effectively.
(Actually, Qt uses an extended version of C++, implemented via a preprocessor. The extensions provide "signals" (like no-op methods) and "slots" (methods which can be connected to signals), plus a limited-and-very-useful facility for run-time widget class information. As usual with Qt, these facilities are just extensive enough make it easy to do the things most people want to do, rather than trying to provide everything that anyone might want.)
The FA is not about licenses in general. Instead, ESR makes a fairly narrow point about the long term economic efficiency of producing software. Assume for the sake of argument that the Free/Open-Source approach to development is superior to closed-source approaches. (Most of us, including ESR, think this is true.) In this case, he argues, the GPL has no economic advantages for software production over less restrictive licenses, though it is useful as a
... signaling behavior, like wearing a crucifix or yarmulke or pentagram - it helps build trust groups. But it has costs, too â" it creates a lot of needless fear from potential allies and users who suspect they wonâ(TM)t be able to control their exposure if they let it in.
He goes on to say
So the correct question to ask is this: Is the GPLâ(TM)s utility as a form of in-group signaling worth the degree to which fear and uncertainty about it slows down open-source adoption? Increasingly I think the answer is âoenoâ.
There's some useful discussion in the comments, but you'll probably have to wait until the slashdotting dies down before you can read them.
AFAICT, ISPs in the U.S. have been relying on the average bandwidth per user being fairly low. They knew that a few people would be downloading distros and other large files, but lots of their customers would only use email or read blogs. Some ISPs trusted this business model so much that they even started using "no bandwidth caps" as a marketing point. The other ISPs then felt forced to follow the same policy.
Long story short: they bet their businesses on internet usage patterns staying relatively stable.
Of course, internet technology keeps improving, and hence usage patterns keep changing. Internet video is now big (and still growing fast), and people can now (legally!) get their music, films and TV over the internet.
So the ISPs have lost that bet.
What happens next? I expect the ISPs to increase their prices and/or introduce bandwidth limits and/or go out of business.
(I live in Australia, where the ISPs always had usage caps, so my interest is purely intellectual.)
For once, I disagree with Ars Technica. In Python, integers automagically overflow into "long integers" (ie., BigNums). Therefore you can only compile integer operations into low-level opcodes (x86, LLVM, etc) if you somehow know beforehand that the no BigNums are involved and overflow is impossible. In general, you have to compile Python into calls on a python-specific run-time library instead of opcodes. (You can still produce code that runs much faster than CPython's stack-based bytecodes by using a register-based VM and by pushing type-based dispatch as early as possible.)
IMO, trying to generate language-neutral machine/LLVM code is a bad idea. The Parrot team seem to agree: Parrot byte-code will strongly reflect the source language; their aim is not language-neutrality but inter-language operability.
It was only on after reading the comments at Phoronix that I noticed the benchmarks used 64-bit (x86-64) kernels, not x86 as I had initially assumed. Maybe the use of kernel and compiler code that gets less testing than x86 is related to the odd performance quirks Phoronix found?
Given the huge number of Free/Open-Source games out there, it's natural that many of them suck. (And that's not counting the ones that were never finished.) It's also natural that commercial games win on immersive 3D graphics and other things that require big development teams. But there are some FOSS games that are absolutely terrific, and Wesnoth is one of them.
Many of the good things about Wesnoth are fairly obvious: quality music, good graphics, good in-game tutorials etc. Others are not so obvious: extensive playtesting, carefully tweaked scenarios. And one design choice that may look strange to modern console gamers turns out to be extremely clever: the hexagonal map and the lack of long-range attacks makes it relatively easy to write a superb AI.
Wesnoth has another unusual accomplishment: narrativist elements and hex maps in the same game.
CP/M took lots of inspiration from RT-11. DEC's command-language interpreters used "/" to denote options. (BTW, the CLI did this sort of parsing, not the command itself.) When the microcomputer took off, DEC was very popular so command syntaxes like "delete/confirm *.txt" or even "pip goodname.c=badname.c/r" seemed natural.
When directory-structured filesystems for microcomputers first appeared, there were two popular syntaxes for pathnames. Unix uses good old "dir1/dir2/file". DEC's high-end OSes used "[dir1.dir2]file" -- yuck. Apparently "dir1\dir2\file" was the closest anyone could get to the Unix syntax without introducing backward compatibility problems. I for one would have preferred the loss of backward compatibility.
I can't help wondering if Diebold's ATM software developers are using the Voting Machines division as a dumping ground for incompetents... something like the B Ark in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. How else can you explain an editable log (facepalm) on a voting machine?!
Another point: the company is trying to produce machines that they think county-level election officials will buy. Trying to produce a good electronic voting system would result in a very different system.
Slashdot Mirror
The "writeup on NFTables" linked in the submission is very outdated. LWN's article from two months ago is a lot more useful. See also this this brief news item (“not ready to replace iptables yet”) and the nftables web page.
I though WA stood for Washington state, not Washington DC. (I'm Australian, so I could be wrong.)
Or did someone get confused by "WaPo", a common abbreviation for The Washington Post?
The 1000+ websites mentioned in the post are (supposedly) part of a "cold-calling investment scam using the name ‘Global Capital Wealth’". The Australian Securities and Investment Commission, the federal corporate regulator, has ordered that their IP addresses be blocked, which also catches innocent websites co-hosted at those IP addresses.
The Australian Federal Police also asks ISPs to block websites listed by Interpol as containing “'worst of the worst' child pornography", apparently via DNS (news reports mention "domains" and "URLs"), but perhaps also at the IP level. Most ISPs have complied; at least one has refused.
[My take: There may be a case for corporate regulation bureaucrats to get some websites blocked, but only at DNS level and only in smaller numbers. Blocking extreme child porn sites via DNS would be next to useless, so I hope they also block at IP level.]
Gingrich says he'll use big monetary prizes to get private enterprises (Bigelow, SpaceX, Armadillo, etc) to build the infrastructure. (He carefully left that detail out while campaigning in Florida.) Mike Griffin and other long-time NASA people would prefer the existing approach: giving NASA lots of money to spend in the sponsoring politicians electorates. (Why was Mission Control in Houston, of all places? LBJ put it there to boost the local economy.)
The current init system is "simple and elegant"? The one with lots of shell scripts in /etc/init.d, and symbolic links in /etc/rc[0-7S].d to those links? Symbolic links with names like "K09dm" or "S51cups", where the first 3 characters are highly significant?
I disagree.
(Moreover, both upstart and systemd are significantly faster than the current system.)
That should be "bunfight" (an old idiom), not "bumfight" (NTTAWT).
RAGE Mobile, as id call it, is not a port of RAGE to iOS. It is a much smaller game using the same technology and the same setting. These distinctions matter ...
Pearson have a page for the book at http://pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/Linux-Kernel-Development/9780672329463.page
However, if you think about installing your game on a friend's PC or sharing it with others then please don't do it, okay?
(emphasis added)
..., well, it works for me
The FastMail team have an extraordinarily high level of clue. No wonder Opera got out their chequebook ...
This website seems to be the place to find out more.
Firefox does not support RT Fact (RT = Ray Trace, BTW) or XML3D.
The HTML5 designers, following Mozilla's lead, are specifyng WebGL, which is a JavaScript API for OpenGL ES 2.0, the current version of OpenGL for Embeeded Systems.
Senator X used Parliamentary Privilege in exactly the way it is meant to be used: to start a discussion about something that the regular institutions may not be handling properly. Note the word "start". Things a parliamentarian says under privilege are not authoritative -- in fact, they're usually trite, and often wrong -- but sometimes they initiate very useful public debates.
The Qt designers don't just create widgets etc, they design components that are easy to program with. As part of this, they avoid stuff that requires the tricky/ugly parts of C++. For instance, you rarely need to explicitly delete objects, because their libraries use reference counting to automagically delete objects at the earliest appropriate time.
So it is easy for any good programmer to learn enough C++ to use Qt effectively.
(Actually, Qt uses an extended version of C++, implemented via a preprocessor. The extensions provide "signals" (like no-op methods) and "slots" (methods which can be connected to signals), plus a limited-and-very-useful facility for run-time widget class information. As usual with Qt, these facilities are just extensive enough make it easy to do the things most people want to do, rather than trying to provide everything that anyone might want.)
I use and recommend the free version of Foxit reader.
Thank you, Tackhead!
Yep. Procedures that senior officials spent weeks designing defeated because someone way down the hierarchy saw a chance to make a few hundred bucks.
There's a lesson in here somewhere.
He goes on to say
There's some useful discussion in the comments, but you'll probably have to wait until the slashdotting dies down before you can read them.
AFAICT, ISPs in the U.S. have been relying on the average bandwidth per user being fairly low. They knew that a few people would be downloading distros and other large files, but lots of their customers would only use email or read blogs. Some ISPs trusted this business model so much that they even started using "no bandwidth caps" as a marketing point. The other ISPs then felt forced to follow the same policy.
Long story short: they bet their businesses on internet usage patterns staying relatively stable.
Of course, internet technology keeps improving, and hence usage patterns keep changing. Internet video is now big (and still growing fast), and people can now (legally!) get their music, films and TV over the internet.
So the ISPs have lost that bet.
What happens next? I expect the ISPs to increase their prices and/or introduce bandwidth limits and/or go out of business.
(I live in Australia, where the ISPs always had usage caps, so my interest is purely intellectual.)
For once, I disagree with Ars Technica. In Python, integers automagically overflow into "long integers" (ie., BigNums). Therefore you can only compile integer operations into low-level opcodes (x86, LLVM, etc) if you somehow know beforehand that the no BigNums are involved and overflow is impossible. In general, you have to compile Python into calls on a python-specific run-time library instead of opcodes. (You can still produce code that runs much faster than CPython's stack-based bytecodes by using a register-based VM and by pushing type-based dispatch as early as possible.)
IMO, trying to generate language-neutral machine/LLVM code is a bad idea. The Parrot team seem to agree: Parrot byte-code will strongly reflect the source language; their aim is not language-neutrality but inter-language operability.
Great minds think alike! The Parrot team is already working on using LLVM for JIT code generation.
It was only on after reading the comments at Phoronix that I noticed the benchmarks used 64-bit (x86-64) kernels, not x86 as I had initially assumed. Maybe the use of kernel and compiler code that gets less testing than x86 is related to the odd performance quirks Phoronix found?
Given the huge number of Free/Open-Source games out there, it's natural that many of them suck. (And that's not counting the ones that were never finished.) It's also natural that commercial games win on immersive 3D graphics and other things that require big development teams. But there are some FOSS games that are absolutely terrific, and Wesnoth is one of them.
Many of the good things about Wesnoth are fairly obvious: quality music, good graphics, good in-game tutorials etc. Others are not so obvious: extensive playtesting, carefully tweaked scenarios. And one design choice that may look strange to modern console gamers turns out to be extremely clever: the hexagonal map and the lack of long-range attacks makes it relatively easy to write a superb AI.
Wesnoth has another unusual accomplishment: narrativist elements and hex maps in the same game.
CP/M took lots of inspiration from RT-11. DEC's command-language interpreters used "/" to denote options. (BTW, the CLI did this sort of parsing, not the command itself.) When the microcomputer took off, DEC was very popular so command syntaxes like "delete/confirm *.txt" or even "pip goodname.c=badname.c/r" seemed natural.
When directory-structured filesystems for microcomputers first appeared, there were two popular syntaxes for pathnames. Unix uses good old "dir1/dir2/file". DEC's high-end OSes used "[dir1.dir2]file" -- yuck. Apparently "dir1\dir2\file" was the closest anyone could get to the Unix syntax without introducing backward compatibility problems. I for one would have preferred the loss of backward compatibility.
I can't help wondering if Diebold's ATM software developers are using the Voting Machines division as a dumping ground for incompetents ... something like the B Ark in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. How else can you explain an editable log (facepalm) on a voting machine?!
Another point: the company is trying to produce machines that they think county-level election officials will buy. Trying to produce a good electronic voting system would result in a very different system.