There is only one good explanation for this and that is storing the passwords either plaintext, or in a reversible encryption.
Why do I think that? Hashing a 64K bytes long password will give the same hash size as hashing a 4 byte one. Since they must store some representation of your password somewhere, they will run into space and performance trouble if they have to store long passwords. Imagine having to store 500 million passwords that can be 64K each. That's a whole lot more space to reserve (yes, even 4 byte passwords need that reserved, you never know in advance how big a password is going to be) than 16 bytes. 32 Terabytes of password storage vs. 8GByte that you need for 16 bytes and 500M passwords. For a typical hash using a 16 byte salt, you'd need less than 64 bytes per password. That would give you 32Gbyte of database for 500M users. I'd say that's a significant difference, especially since you want those passwords available all over your datacenters (think replication and synchronisation over WAN links, you easily have more than 10 of those databases on fast storage worldwide). That's a difference that is big enough to warrant a serious limit on password size if you choose to not hash it, but use plaintext or reversible encryption. The only other valid reasons I can think of for requiring a maximum size is the workload you give your browser, the internet in uploading the POST request and their servers in calculating the hash. Since I very much doubt that will be the reason and significance for 16 vs 256 bytes is negligible in terms of load, I can't see any other reason than plain text or reversible encryption.
For those of you that didn't get what all this means:
Hotmail and MSN are most likely storing your password in a way that hackers can trivially get to read it if they get hacked. You may want to use a unique password, or avoid their service completely.
Developers for both Unity and Gnome3 seem to be more autistic than rainman himself when it comes to user acceptance and usability. Shitfits have been tried and didn't even get a reaction other than "I don't see your problem. Until the very last user leaves gnome and Ubuntu, Unity and the gnome3 shell will be the default for those.
There are a bazillion other ways you can exercise your freedom of speech other than posting on Facebook. Could you please give arguments why denying someone to use Facebook and not censoring them any other way would be a violation of freedom of speech?
Deleting an entire profile may be excessive, but being ordered to at least delete any reference to a crime so the victims will not be constantly reminded sounds like a valid thing to demand by a judge.
You can look at peak numbers, but what good is it if one percent of your population "knows science" if the rest lives in trailers unable to read or do simple calculations? You'll end up in a world where religion takes over and people will want creationism to be taught, or sharia to replace the law. Conflicts will get resolved by force and health care will only be available to the rich. You need people to learn this stuff, whether they'll be extremely good at it or not. Even if they won't be using a lot of it in their daily use, they will be able to tell fairy tales from reality. This will enable to trust people that know their stuff to make proper decisions, also known as "democracy". Education has a lot more purpose than creating genius, those tend to create themselves regardless of education anyway.
If MS "sponsorship" of these chipsets is the case, it will probably come out. If it comes out, they will have to pay massive amounts of money to the EU and lose very lucrative contracts due to being a repeat offender. Would they really risk that? It would cost them billions this time, because previous fines obviously wouldn't have been high enough to deter them. Personally, I'm not so sure whether this is actually happening or not. They have the reputation, but it's a high risk strategy so it may very well be not the case, since they stand to lose an awful lot of money if it'd come out they did this.
A scenario in which Linux/Android support is added later for this or the next iteration of the same architecture sounds more plausible, for both AMD and Intel. Time to market is crucial here, so (initial) focussing on the OS that is going to sell the most chips isn't such a bad strategy. You can't have your complete development team write both the Windows and the Xwindows support drivers in the same time it takes to write just the Windows drivers for the GFX part of the chip. The same applies to other peripherals. Even if you can use large chunks of code from previous hardware generations, there still is development, test and packaging work to be done. Unless a large Linux/Android vendor is going to commit to a large purchase order (Acer, Dell or HP perhaps?) the commercial incentive to push for Linux drivers is relatively low. Someone in the FOSS will port the chipset, with rudimentary functionality probably, and AMD will probably have the open source driver team include it in a later release of their "generic" open source schedule.
People in developing nations, or the not-so-lucky-ones in nations-on-the-decline could be getting a phone with smartphone features for the price of a burn phone. This means that the burn phone will get either smarter with shorter battery life, or the smart phones will have to get cheaper, including their ecosystem after purchase. Yes, data plans are ridiculously overpriced, since those are the new cash cows of the providers, but that won't last once 4G and WiFi will start to "blend" and people will be using guests and their own land lines for data so much that the telcos won't have a choice but to start offering data plans at reasonable rates again.
All you have to do in the BMW is to tell te computer "This is a blank key, please put one of the legible, unencrypted 10 passwords you have in you on the blank key". The other keys already issued would still work and you could even program keys with them as well, just not using the car itself.
I hear the next version is going to be called "ceiling cat" and feature an iKitty picture editing program so you can put captions on cat pictures to replace iMovie.
What if the cause was actually a hack, but they didn't notice it? Corrupted routing tables don't occur all by themselves and single routing tables taking a whole provider down doesn't happen that often either. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of *a* hack just jet.
You don't get to say what gets tested and what sort of evidence you want to try to recover. That means that someone in the "chain of events" before you already makes the decision if they think it will "help the case" if some test gets done. Depending on what their interpretation of "helping the case" is, things either get tested fair and balanced, with the possibility that a lot of community money gets spent without a conviction, or as little money as possible gets spent, with unknown consequences for justice and crime solve ratings. This may shift the "blame" away from the actual labs, but it doesn't mean that there isn't any improvement in the process possible.
It is not about software, but about hardware. Apple requires you to buy a chip from them to "identify" your accessory as "runs with iphone" if you want it to do anything more than plain audio out. That is what the OP is talking about.
Considering this, I'd be looking for some iphone/ipod dock that has all the buttons you want and is certified. Rip that out of it's enclosure, connect your own buttons to it and you'll have your interface. No need to reinvent the wheel here, just adjust the packaging to your needs.
They claimed the community was moving, not the site itself. There may be an issue calling it the "wikitravel community" because the wikitravel name is trademarked, but they never claimed the site itself was moving. It may appear that way, and that may or may not be illegal and probably would be confusing at least, but that's up to a judge and/or jury to decide. To say the least, it's not very nice to the owners to (ab)use the website and mailing platform of wikitravel to inform people that you are forking the site, but if it's illegal, I wouldn't know. After all, it's community driven and all content is "free", so if a community decides to do something, the company providing the infrastructure is more or less powerless if that community decides to use the infrastructure in a way that their business plan did not count on.
I think that it all boils down to the fact that Internet Brands did nothing more than facilitate infrastructure to a community and the community decides to move on and leave Internet Brands. The fact that they used a trademarked name may or may not be illegal, but I don't think that (ab)using the infrastructure that IB provided them to announce the move is illegal, given the spirit of this and other agreements alike.
Probably, in numbers, the amount of devices still sold with Android 2.2 and 2.3 is still higher than the amount of devices sold with 4.X. Even tablets are usually sold with either 2.X or 4.X, not with 3.0. So no, it doesn't make sense, new devices are being sold in the millions with known vulnerable software on them.
I take it you still run your desktop PC without upgrades as well? Wait for the first "real" android virus. There will be public outrage that vendors didn't offer upgrades to prevent this. Sure, lots of people don't want to upgrade, because if they would be interested in that, they'd buy an iPhone. Market share for people that want decent support for their devices OS that doesn't involve DIY is very low for Android. If Android would offer this, there would be a lot more competition with iOS devices than there is now.
Cyanogenmod is available for maybe 25% of android devices sold in models, probably less than 10% in number. For my android device, there are severe trouble with the phone/wifi firmware (wifi sometimes doesn't work when you have a SIM inserted) and camera (not supported by native camera app). There is no support for that from the CM team since it's an unofficial port and obviously, the hardware vendor and telco don't support it either.
Apple supports firmware updates including full hardware support for about 3 years at least. You may not always get all new features, but at least you get the security updates. Google does not mandate any such term from their vendors, they are fine with "fire and forget". In practice, this makes devices with the same quality and features in hardware less worth if they're not running iOS. You may not want to spend iOS money on a device, but if you have to add in the security risk and frustration about the lack of support and McGyvering you will probably be subjected to, the price difference may suddenly not be that big anymore.
Android vendors get away with putting on their own "improved" UI, which usually isn't that much of an improvement, but makes it harder for people to switch phone because the UI is different. There's no signature "it works this way and looks that way" OS on Android phones, making it harder to market them.
If Google wants to really get ahead, for Android 5 they should mandate 3 years upgrade support from vendors and telco's (within 1 month after general release) and no customization apart from optional addons that can be switched off by the user. People that spend a lot of money on a device or a "sponsored" telco deal should be able to enjoy their device a whole lot better and marketing the devices would be a lot easier as well, making it more justifiable to pay top dollar for such a device.
GM cars are made of a lot of parts that are assembled in the USA, just like Toyota's or whatever other brand you can buy there. Nobody mass produces entire cars in the west anymore, it's all assembly of cheap eastern made parts these days.
The Dutch MPS is relatively powerless and the current one hasn't done a lot to impress. Sure, compared to such wonders of freedom like the former USSR, the former GDR or the current USA, Dutch politicians may appear almost saint-like, but they were in fact in favor of ACTA, the second Gulf War and plenty of other things that/. was outraged about in the recent past. If anything, proving loyalty to the EU and the NATO allies seems to be more important than a lot of the public news stories teh goggles come up with. I guess that's what you get with politicians, no matter where you live.
Do you have any idea how much money makes on selling content and software? About 6 Billion in revenue in 2011 out of a total of 35 Billion, up from 4.2Billion in 2010. ( http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/business-matters-itunes-global-revenue-was-1005988552.story ). That's almost 20% of total revenue. I am fairly certain Steve's anouncement of the iTunes store was something that could be summarized to "we are going to revolutionize the way you purchase content" and not "we thought we'd offer you a service to put songs and apps on your apple devices, since the media creators and app creators are such nice people and we want to help them out." Apple has a very healthy profit margin on their app store and even if they only rake in 10% of their revenue as profit, it's still 600 Million for 2011. The hook to sell was the combination of hardware, software and content. If you control the entire chain, you get to tell the shots and your competitors will have to scramble to pick up the crumbs that you leave them.
You are talking about current Linux users and application suppliers that seem to not bother about ABI stability. If you want to get the other 95+ percent of people that use desktop computers using your product, you may want to look at their needs and not solely at the needs of the few you are catering for already.
Diversity is good for an ecosystem, evolution depends on it. However, too much instability and chaos and evolution loses because most of the deviations are too crippled to grow into something useful, even if they have some very good mutations. This is true for the development of the organisms themselves, but also for people wanting to "farm" these organisms.
Large corporations making enterprise software don't want to bother with supporting variations that rather quickly run in to thousands of different possible software combinations that require adaptation in their product or service to make it work. Why do you think Oracle is only supporting a few Linux distributions for it's RDBMS? It's not just because they want to promote their own distribution, but because it simply is a pain in the behind to have to support someone's Arch or Gentoo box and finding out after dozens of expensive analysis by actual expensive software debugging experts to find out some flag is set different during compile time, or a minor version of some library is used that has an obscure bug that only gets triggered in specific circumstances. Just a few of those cases and your profit model is out of the window. It's just way too risky.
Both MicroSoft and Apple have a tendency to announce well ahead if they want to retire some framework for binary compatibility so application developers can adapt their product to the new alternative way ahead of time and still support older versions of their product for years to come. Windows is still offering most (if not all) 16bit windows ABIs in some form on some OSes still supported today. Apple took many years to kill "Classic" support, support for PPC cpus and legacy frameworks have been around for years before they stopped supporting anything but cocoa.
If you compiled an app for OSX or Windows XP 5 years ago using the then latest standards, chances that it will run without any modification or extra work on a freshly installed system with OSX 10.7 or Windows 7 are very high. Try that with a graphical application for a Linux desktop and at the very minimal, you'd probably be looking at installing "compat libs" if your distro supplies them at all. This is a support nightmare and a nuisance at the least for people able to deal with this sort of problem themselves. For Linux to make it to the desktop successfully this needs to change. Linux needs it's Visicalc, WordPerfect, Office, PhotoShop or similar "must have killer application" to get a decent share of desktop usage and making it hard for application makers to choose Linux for that isn't going to make that happen.
What I personally find the real significant development is how they managed to get the genome so complete. They have developed a way go replicate from single strands of DNA, eliminating the need for double strands. Since apparently DNA tends to fall apart into single strands quite fast but the single strands last much longer, this means that a whole lot of DNA that we already have on file for various purposes is suddenly a whole lot more useful. We can now replicate much more damaged and incomplete DNA so we can get much more information out of samples that were considered "useless" until now.
My suggestion to look for an alternative VM was because of how Oracle deals with the vulnerabilities. It's not about how bad the VM is, because given all alternatives, it's one of the best out there in terms of features, stability and performance.
When you deal with large amounts of software, several platforms and millions of people using it, you are going to get bugs. Nasty, insecure, application breaking bugs. Given the same quality of code, what differentiates the good from the bad vendors, is how they deal with those bugs. Oracle seems to default to dealing with grave security problems by keeping the submitters and their end users in the dark and not fixing them for over 3 months, even though their release cycle is every three months. I consider that to be bad.
If this 0-day didn't get the exposure it got, we would all probably be still vulnerable to it for who knows how long. We know about this vulnerability, but Gowdiak reported more. There are more people like Gowdiak. Statistically speaking, chances are probably very close to 100% that Oracle is sitting on more known severe 0-day bugs that they haven't fixed for many many months.
If that is Oracle's policy, they have a dangerous VM and it will remain dangerous until they either change the policy, or it gets replaced by an alternative. That's why I think that people that choose to use Java for who knows what reason, should seriously consider looking at alternatives for the Oracle Java VM.
But what if all people in the jury were color blind and one that claimed to be able to see color, claimed that the evidence had blue paint on it? Would that still be the concept of the US law?
Sound with a frequency.187 Hz is moving air at a rate of 11.22 times per minute. For most humans, that is about the frequency of their breath. Unless you are on a respirator, you yourself are perfectly capable of doing this. Also, "throat singing" can be used to generate frequencies that can not be produced by just your vocal chords. That technique, however, is not nearly as common as breathing.
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There is only one good explanation for this and that is storing the passwords either plaintext, or in a reversible encryption.
Why do I think that? Hashing a 64K bytes long password will give the same hash size as hashing a 4 byte one. Since they must store some representation of your password somewhere, they will run into space and performance trouble if they have to store long passwords. Imagine having to store 500 million passwords that can be 64K each. That's a whole lot more space to reserve (yes, even 4 byte passwords need that reserved, you never know in advance how big a password is going to be) than 16 bytes. 32 Terabytes of password storage vs. 8GByte that you need for 16 bytes and 500M passwords. For a typical hash using a 16 byte salt, you'd need less than 64 bytes per password. That would give you 32Gbyte of database for 500M users. I'd say that's a significant difference, especially since you want those passwords available all over your datacenters (think replication and synchronisation over WAN links, you easily have more than 10 of those databases on fast storage worldwide). That's a difference that is big enough to warrant a serious limit on password size if you choose to not hash it, but use plaintext or reversible encryption. The only other valid reasons I can think of for requiring a maximum size is the workload you give your browser, the internet in uploading the POST request and their servers in calculating the hash. Since I very much doubt that will be the reason and significance for 16 vs 256 bytes is negligible in terms of load, I can't see any other reason than plain text or reversible encryption.
For those of you that didn't get what all this means:
Hotmail and MSN are most likely storing your password in a way that hackers can trivially get to read it if they get hacked. You may want to use a unique password, or avoid their service completely.
Take it out back and shoot it. If it's rabid, there is no cure.
Developers for both Unity and Gnome3 seem to be more autistic than rainman himself when it comes to user acceptance and usability. Shitfits have been tried and didn't even get a reaction other than "I don't see your problem. Until the very last user leaves gnome and Ubuntu, Unity and the gnome3 shell will be the default for those.
There are a bazillion other ways you can exercise your freedom of speech other than posting on Facebook. Could you please give arguments why denying someone to use Facebook and not censoring them any other way would be a violation of freedom of speech?
Deleting an entire profile may be excessive, but being ordered to at least delete any reference to a crime so the victims will not be constantly reminded sounds like a valid thing to demand by a judge.
Spot on analysis, but I'd like to add this:
You can look at peak numbers, but what good is it if one percent of your population "knows science" if the rest lives in trailers unable to read or do simple calculations? You'll end up in a world where religion takes over and people will want creationism to be taught, or sharia to replace the law. Conflicts will get resolved by force and health care will only be available to the rich. You need people to learn this stuff, whether they'll be extremely good at it or not. Even if they won't be using a lot of it in their daily use, they will be able to tell fairy tales from reality. This will enable to trust people that know their stuff to make proper decisions, also known as "democracy". Education has a lot more purpose than creating genius, those tend to create themselves regardless of education anyway.
If MS "sponsorship" of these chipsets is the case, it will probably come out. If it comes out, they will have to pay massive amounts of money to the EU and lose very lucrative contracts due to being a repeat offender. Would they really risk that? It would cost them billions this time, because previous fines obviously wouldn't have been high enough to deter them. Personally, I'm not so sure whether this is actually happening or not. They have the reputation, but it's a high risk strategy so it may very well be not the case, since they stand to lose an awful lot of money if it'd come out they did this.
A scenario in which Linux/Android support is added later for this or the next iteration of the same architecture sounds more plausible, for both AMD and Intel. Time to market is crucial here, so (initial) focussing on the OS that is going to sell the most chips isn't such a bad strategy. You can't have your complete development team write both the Windows and the Xwindows support drivers in the same time it takes to write just the Windows drivers for the GFX part of the chip. The same applies to other peripherals. Even if you can use large chunks of code from previous hardware generations, there still is development, test and packaging work to be done. Unless a large Linux/Android vendor is going to commit to a large purchase order (Acer, Dell or HP perhaps?) the commercial incentive to push for Linux drivers is relatively low. Someone in the FOSS will port the chipset, with rudimentary functionality probably, and AMD will probably have the open source driver team include it in a later release of their "generic" open source schedule.
People in developing nations, or the not-so-lucky-ones in nations-on-the-decline could be getting a phone with smartphone features for the price of a burn phone. This means that the burn phone will get either smarter with shorter battery life, or the smart phones will have to get cheaper, including their ecosystem after purchase. Yes, data plans are ridiculously overpriced, since those are the new cash cows of the providers, but that won't last once 4G and WiFi will start to "blend" and people will be using guests and their own land lines for data so much that the telcos won't have a choice but to start offering data plans at reasonable rates again.
Living in the republic of Congo, most locals will probably want to know what the best way to prepare it's meat is.
All you have to do in the BMW is to tell te computer "This is a blank key, please put one of the legible, unencrypted 10 passwords you have in you on the blank key". The other keys already issued would still work and you could even program keys with them as well, just not using the car itself.
I hear the next version is going to be called "ceiling cat" and feature an iKitty picture editing program so you can put captions on cat pictures to replace iMovie.
What if the cause was actually a hack, but they didn't notice it? Corrupted routing tables don't occur all by themselves and single routing tables taking a whole provider down doesn't happen that often either. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of *a* hack just jet.
You don't get to say what gets tested and what sort of evidence you want to try to recover. That means that someone in the "chain of events" before you already makes the decision if they think it will "help the case" if some test gets done. Depending on what their interpretation of "helping the case" is, things either get tested fair and balanced, with the possibility that a lot of community money gets spent without a conviction, or as little money as possible gets spent, with unknown consequences for justice and crime solve ratings. This may shift the "blame" away from the actual labs, but it doesn't mean that there isn't any improvement in the process possible.
It is not about software, but about hardware. Apple requires you to buy a chip from them to "identify" your accessory as "runs with iphone" if you want it to do anything more than plain audio out. That is what the OP is talking about.
Considering this, I'd be looking for some iphone/ipod dock that has all the buttons you want and is certified. Rip that out of it's enclosure, connect your own buttons to it and you'll have your interface. No need to reinvent the wheel here, just adjust the packaging to your needs.
They claimed the community was moving, not the site itself. There may be an issue calling it the "wikitravel community" because the wikitravel name is trademarked, but they never claimed the site itself was moving. It may appear that way, and that may or may not be illegal and probably would be confusing at least, but that's up to a judge and/or jury to decide. To say the least, it's not very nice to the owners to (ab)use the website and mailing platform of wikitravel to inform people that you are forking the site, but if it's illegal, I wouldn't know. After all, it's community driven and all content is "free", so if a community decides to do something, the company providing the infrastructure is more or less powerless if that community decides to use the infrastructure in a way that their business plan did not count on.
I think that it all boils down to the fact that Internet Brands did nothing more than facilitate infrastructure to a community and the community decides to move on and leave Internet Brands. The fact that they used a trademarked name may or may not be illegal, but I don't think that (ab)using the infrastructure that IB provided them to announce the move is illegal, given the spirit of this and other agreements alike.
Probably, in numbers, the amount of devices still sold with Android 2.2 and 2.3 is still higher than the amount of devices sold with 4.X. Even tablets are usually sold with either 2.X or 4.X, not with 3.0. So no, it doesn't make sense, new devices are being sold in the millions with known vulnerable software on them.
I take it you still run your desktop PC without upgrades as well? Wait for the first "real" android virus. There will be public outrage that vendors didn't offer upgrades to prevent this. Sure, lots of people don't want to upgrade, because if they would be interested in that, they'd buy an iPhone. Market share for people that want decent support for their devices OS that doesn't involve DIY is very low for Android. If Android would offer this, there would be a lot more competition with iOS devices than there is now.
Cyanogenmod is available for maybe 25% of android devices sold in models, probably less than 10% in number. For my android device, there are severe trouble with the phone/wifi firmware (wifi sometimes doesn't work when you have a SIM inserted) and camera (not supported by native camera app). There is no support for that from the CM team since it's an unofficial port and obviously, the hardware vendor and telco don't support it either.
Apple supports firmware updates including full hardware support for about 3 years at least. You may not always get all new features, but at least you get the security updates. Google does not mandate any such term from their vendors, they are fine with "fire and forget". In practice, this makes devices with the same quality and features in hardware less worth if they're not running iOS. You may not want to spend iOS money on a device, but if you have to add in the security risk and frustration about the lack of support and McGyvering you will probably be subjected to, the price difference may suddenly not be that big anymore.
Android vendors get away with putting on their own "improved" UI, which usually isn't that much of an improvement, but makes it harder for people to switch phone because the UI is different. There's no signature "it works this way and looks that way" OS on Android phones, making it harder to market them.
If Google wants to really get ahead, for Android 5 they should mandate 3 years upgrade support from vendors and telco's (within 1 month after general release) and no customization apart from optional addons that can be switched off by the user. People that spend a lot of money on a device or a "sponsored" telco deal should be able to enjoy their device a whole lot better and marketing the devices would be a lot easier as well, making it more justifiable to pay top dollar for such a device.
GM cars are made of a lot of parts that are assembled in the USA, just like Toyota's or whatever other brand you can buy there. Nobody mass produces entire cars in the west anymore, it's all assembly of cheap eastern made parts these days.
The Dutch MPS is relatively powerless and the current one hasn't done a lot to impress. Sure, compared to such wonders of freedom like the former USSR, the former GDR or the current USA, Dutch politicians may appear almost saint-like, but they were in fact in favor of ACTA, the second Gulf War and plenty of other things that /. was outraged about in the recent past. If anything, proving loyalty to the EU and the NATO allies seems to be more important than a lot of the public news stories teh goggles come up with. I guess that's what you get with politicians, no matter where you live.
Do you have any idea how much money makes on selling content and software? About 6 Billion in revenue in 2011 out of a total of 35 Billion, up from 4.2Billion in 2010. ( http://www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/industry/digital-and-mobile/business-matters-itunes-global-revenue-was-1005988552.story ). That's almost 20% of total revenue. I am fairly certain Steve's anouncement of the iTunes store was something that could be summarized to "we are going to revolutionize the way you purchase content" and not "we thought we'd offer you a service to put songs and apps on your apple devices, since the media creators and app creators are such nice people and we want to help them out." Apple has a very healthy profit margin on their app store and even if they only rake in 10% of their revenue as profit, it's still 600 Million for 2011. The hook to sell was the combination of hardware, software and content. If you control the entire chain, you get to tell the shots and your competitors will have to scramble to pick up the crumbs that you leave them.
You are talking about current Linux users and application suppliers that seem to not bother about ABI stability. If you want to get the other 95+ percent of people that use desktop computers using your product, you may want to look at their needs and not solely at the needs of the few you are catering for already.
Diversity is good for an ecosystem, evolution depends on it. However, too much instability and chaos and evolution loses because most of the deviations are too crippled to grow into something useful, even if they have some very good mutations. This is true for the development of the organisms themselves, but also for people wanting to "farm" these organisms.
Large corporations making enterprise software don't want to bother with supporting variations that rather quickly run in to thousands of different possible software combinations that require adaptation in their product or service to make it work. Why do you think Oracle is only supporting a few Linux distributions for it's RDBMS? It's not just because they want to promote their own distribution, but because it simply is a pain in the behind to have to support someone's Arch or Gentoo box and finding out after dozens of expensive analysis by actual expensive software debugging experts to find out some flag is set different during compile time, or a minor version of some library is used that has an obscure bug that only gets triggered in specific circumstances. Just a few of those cases and your profit model is out of the window. It's just way too risky.
Both MicroSoft and Apple have a tendency to announce well ahead if they want to retire some framework for binary compatibility so application developers can adapt their product to the new alternative way ahead of time and still support older versions of their product for years to come. Windows is still offering most (if not all) 16bit windows ABIs in some form on some OSes still supported today. Apple took many years to kill "Classic" support, support for PPC cpus and legacy frameworks have been around for years before they stopped supporting anything but cocoa.
If you compiled an app for OSX or Windows XP 5 years ago using the then latest standards, chances that it will run without any modification or extra work on a freshly installed system with OSX 10.7 or Windows 7 are very high. Try that with a graphical application for a Linux desktop and at the very minimal, you'd probably be looking at installing "compat libs" if your distro supplies them at all. This is a support nightmare and a nuisance at the least for people able to deal with this sort of problem themselves. For Linux to make it to the desktop successfully this needs to change. Linux needs it's Visicalc, WordPerfect, Office, PhotoShop or similar "must have killer application" to get a decent share of desktop usage and making it hard for application makers to choose Linux for that isn't going to make that happen.
What I personally find the real significant development is how they managed to get the genome so complete. They have developed a way go replicate from single strands of DNA, eliminating the need for double strands. Since apparently DNA tends to fall apart into single strands quite fast but the single strands last much longer, this means that a whole lot of DNA that we already have on file for various purposes is suddenly a whole lot more useful. We can now replicate much more damaged and incomplete DNA so we can get much more information out of samples that were considered "useless" until now.
My suggestion to look for an alternative VM was because of how Oracle deals with the vulnerabilities. It's not about how bad the VM is, because given all alternatives, it's one of the best out there in terms of features, stability and performance.
When you deal with large amounts of software, several platforms and millions of people using it, you are going to get bugs. Nasty, insecure, application breaking bugs. Given the same quality of code, what differentiates the good from the bad vendors, is how they deal with those bugs. Oracle seems to default to dealing with grave security problems by keeping the submitters and their end users in the dark and not fixing them for over 3 months, even though their release cycle is every three months. I consider that to be bad.
If this 0-day didn't get the exposure it got, we would all probably be still vulnerable to it for who knows how long. We know about this vulnerability, but Gowdiak reported more. There are more people like Gowdiak. Statistically speaking, chances are probably very close to 100% that Oracle is sitting on more known severe 0-day bugs that they haven't fixed for many many months.
If that is Oracle's policy, they have a dangerous VM and it will remain dangerous until they either change the policy, or it gets replaced by an alternative. That's why I think that people that choose to use Java for who knows what reason, should seriously consider looking at alternatives for the Oracle Java VM.
But what if all people in the jury were color blind and one that claimed to be able to see color, claimed that the evidence had blue paint on it? Would that still be the concept of the US law?
Sound with a frequency .187 Hz is moving air at a rate of 11.22 times per minute. For most humans, that is about the frequency of their breath. Unless you are on a respirator, you yourself are perfectly capable of doing this. Also, "throat singing" can be used to generate frequencies that can not be produced by just your vocal chords. That technique, however, is not nearly as common as breathing.