In my case it was more to do with the fact that my iPod touch downloaded an update file onto the device which filled nearly 1/3 of the available space on the file system. This is despite me turning off all of the update options in settings. According to all of the forums I checked there's no way to get rid of this file without jail breaking.
I didn't want to update my device but in the end it was the easiest way to get all of my storage space back. The process might be slick, but apple are definitely pushing you to do it.
We could be close to this with the MinIon sequencer from Oxford Nanopore.
Less than $1000, disposable and about the size of a USB stick. Connect it to your computer, drop a sample into a hole in the top and a sequence file starts building up on your hard drive.
It's due to be released in a couple of months when we'll see if this is as good as it sounds.
If you watch the video in the Supplemental data you'll see that the referee comments relate to the referees who reviewed a funding application for the project which was rejected, rather than the reviewers of the final paper.
Which is well and good but unless you have a certificate authority which only ever grants certificates to people who are not part of the ISP or the music industry, it's more or less useless for this purpose.
I don't see how that follows at all. The point about a signing authority is that as long as you trust the authority then you can check that a given site certificate really belongs to that site. It's not sufficient to substitute another site's certificate, even if it's one signed by the same authority.
To compromise the system then CertsRUs would have to issue a signed certificate for thepriatebay.org to the RIAA. Whilst the tinfoil hat bridge may choose to believe that this might happen I can't see it. As soon as this was discovered (and the signatures from the RIAA certificate for thepiratebay.org and the real cert for that site would differ, so they would be disovered) then CertsRUs would rapidly be removed from the list of trusted signing authorities for a vast chunk of the internet, at which point their business goes down a hole.
If you RTFA, you'll see that the reason that they wanted to do the no password for signed packages was because if you always have to type in your password to install something, after awhile you just get in the habit of typing in your password whenever that little window pops up.
Actually the reason for this is that there is a more fundamental rewrite of the DeviceKit and PackageKit systems in Fedora underway which will eventually allow more flexible allocation of system admin privileges to different classes of user. This is a good thing.
However - when F12 was released this rewrite was only partially complete. The backend systems were pretty much all in place but the front end which allows the editing of rules and the assignment of roles had not been written. Fedora was therefore shipped with a default set of rules.
Under the new system the previous behaviour of asking for the root password, but allowing the option to not be asked for it again in future had been removed (for fear of creating a 'make it up as you go along' security policy). The decision therefore had to be made to either allow console (not remote) users to install signed packages with no authentication required, or to require the root password for every install. The developers chose the first option. This has now been changed to the second option.
I'm kind of ambivalent about the light this sheds on Fedora. It's a bad thing to have happened, but it was sorted out quickly and there is now much discussion about setting up a firmer security policy so this won't happen again. Mistakes happen, but as long as they are spotted and corrected then we should all just move along.
It depends when you last jailbroke your iPhone. I did a jailbreak early on. I installed openSSH and changed the default password. I then found out that the phone entered an infinite loop of restarting the home screen and had to be forcibly restored.
The problem appears to be that the passwd binary on the phone is (deliberately?) broken so it generates incorrect hashes for the password entered. If you actually want to change your password then you need to jump through some hoops to change it without using the usual passwd command.
What things can OS X do better, than no other OS can do?
Can't speak for anyone else, but in my case my reason for having an OSX laptop is that hibernate/suspend works better than on any other laptop I've ever seen. It's quick and I never have to mess about with restarting services/programs/networks when it restarts. That alone is enough to get me to use it.
I was in a team handing out CDs in the UK and we spent the morning honing our approach tactics to not scare people off. Some people will never stop for someone in a bright green t-shirt handing out CDs, but plenty of others could be persuaded.
What we found was:
* "Have some free software" = FAIL
You can just see the alarm bells going off in their heads, and frankly I don't blame them.
* Hide the CDs under a leaflet!
If you try to give people a CD they often blank you. If you give them a leaflet wrapped around the CDs they'll more often take it. Once they had it in their hand then they usually stop to ask what all this other stuff is.
* Talk about software freedom day first
Don't say you're handing out CDs, say you're promoting an international event - then let them have the discs.
* Hold a balloon.
Don't ask me why, but I got much higher take up from people when holding a balloon when handing out CDs. Maybe I was less threatning that way? We also found that having a load of balloons on the stall brought kids over and you could talk to their parents whilst they were there.
Things we plan to do next year.
1) Have more software for Macs. Maybe we hit an unusual demographic but we had lots of Mac users stop and talk to us and neither of the discs we had (OpenDisk and Ubuntu live CD) would work in a Mac. We'll add freeSmug next year.
2) Helium balloons and free sweets. Brings families over without any further sales pitch being required.
3) Free internet access. Not sure if we can arrange this but a big sign offering free internet access and a load of laptops with 3G dongles running linux. Would attract people over and let them try linux out at the same time.
I've done these events for the last three years and we've had a good reaction from the public each year. I'd stronly encourage people to get involved next year as it's a great way to talk to people about why they might want to use free software and what's available.
Please tell that to the slashdot maintainers. The site currently looks like crap in Safari 4 (did so as well in Safari 3), with colored dots (friend / foe / blabla) and strange widgets all over the place. The "Reply to this" button is also rendered broken, and i don't know what else as well. WTF is going on with/. at the moment? Huge public beta test?
That was annoying the hell out of me too. I found that if I add http://c.fsdn.com/sd/cs_sic_controls_new.png to my adblock list then the random graphics disappear (as do some other bits, but I'll live with that).
How did this not get picked up and fixed already on a site this big??
I suggest you try playing a 20 second clip from the middle of a commercial DVD sometime to see how practical it is. Thanks to the inclusion of unskippable logos, trailers and informative films telling you how downloading music is stealing and makes you a criminal, it takes forever to actually get to the content. Whoever came up with the idea of locking DVD player controls should be made to try to start up Toy Story for an audience of 100 impatient toddlers and see how good an idea it seems then.
We could insist that all educational DVD players don't implement these controls, but then that would break the DMCA and we're back to square one.
On the evil scale I don't think this move by Google comes close to what Phorm is trying to do. Tracking your behaviour across multiple sites is kind of creepy, but in Google's case it will be limited to their partner sites. Opting out would simply be a matter of deleting the Google cookie at the end of each session. Were they to do this I'm sure that a 'Don't track me bro' firefox extension would quickly appear.
Phorm is much worse. They intercept your connection at your ISP and they process everything you do. All web sites (whether they want their users to be tracked or not), all emails, IRC, newsgroups, everything which isn't encrypted. They use the tracking cookie mainly to let affiliates serve out (in)appropriate ads, but they could do their tracking with no help from you at all. They are also able to track you over multiple devices, and to opt out you have to set a cookie on your own machine, so if you use a new device or clear out your cookies you've just opted in again. This is evil on a whole different level.
In ten years, this thing will be useless, because we will be able to reprogram somatic cells to do all the work.
Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.
We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.
At a web message board I setup, I used some popular software and was getting a ton of spam bots. So I added a simple "are you a human" question--no captcha or anything, just another checkbox to check... Not 1 single piece of spam. Same principle: the bots aren't that smart--you avoid the norms even by a little, and you're okay.
I've had the opposite experience. I run a website for a small choir and we have a contact form on there. This is something I wrote myself, not some popular package, and it's very tightly tied down so that the worst which can happen is that an attacker can send more junk to me.
Over the last year I've had at least two repeated and persistent attacks against this script. They were random bits of text with a random URL (not working or registered) at the end. After playing cat and mouse changing field names and blocking certain phrases which kept reoccurring I only managed to stop it in the end when I completely blocked the ability to include URLs in any message (which I didn't really want to have to do). We are a very small site and none of the attacks ever worked - but someone spent a considerable amount of time trying to break our site.
The moral is that noone is safe and it's just the luck of the draw if someone decides to focus their attention on you.
They own all the copyright to the MySql code and as such they can do what they like with it.
The fact that they distribute some of their code under the GPL puts conditions on what *you* can do with it. But they aren't bound by those conditions.
I believe it's slower because RPM has finer-grained package management (which is probably useless to most people). Someone can correct me on this, but I think RPM's dependencies are handled by file name, rather than by package name. The dependency checks tend to take longer, consequently.
Dependencies in rpm can either be on a package name or a file - the packager can choose which makes more sense.
The main thing which makes yum seem slower than apt is that by default yum checks the server for an updated package list each time it is run, whereas apt has separate update and upgrade steps. If you run yum with -C (to force it to run from cache), it's about the same speed as apt-get.
It's so rare you get to make a molecular-biology related pun, you have to take every opportunity you get, even if they are that bad. I'm sorry.
It's not that rare - heck the Northen blot itself is a pun:
Southern Blot - developed by Ed Southern
Northern Blot - see what they did there...
Western Blot - yes, yes - very funny. Now get back to work.
Re:Did the "people picker" in GDM ever get fixed?
on
GNOME 2.24 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It always was optional, just open up gdmsetup and turn it off.
gdmsetup has gone from recent releases. GDM is undergoing some fairly major changes and the developers haven't got round to reimplementing the preferences. You can make some changes by directly editing custom.conf, but the documentation is a bit sparse right now. Things which used to be easy (like turning off the people picker are currently difficult or not possible. Things are likely to improve soon but I don't know if they're sorted in the 2.24 release.
Perhaps we can get Canonical to complain about Awesomebar. If it weren't for hideunvisited and oldbar extensions I'd have ditched FF or stayed with 2.0 but the devs just don't care no matter how many users complain.
I would venture to suggest that the difference is that there was little to no support from the userbase for adding in the EULA. A lot of people (but admittedly not all) quite like the Awesomebar. Heck, I think it's the best thing about FF3.
If you travel less than 50 miles a day you should look into buying a bicycle.
Oh sure. 4 hours brisk cycling (in all weathers) is what everyone needs to add to their daily routine. I often cycle to work which is a 27 mile roundtrip, but I sure as hell wouldn't want it to be any further, and I'm not doing it unless the weather's good.
Mind you - 50 miles driving from a 1 square metre solar panel. Really? Available energy at the earth's surface is about 1kW/m2. Photovoltaic cells are about 10% efficient so that's 0.1kW/m2. That means that after 8 hours of direct sun you've got 0.8kWh to play with. I strongly suspect that you're not going to move a full size car 50 miles on 0.8kWh...
I'd go with D. Be interested that they've managed to do this, but don't fear for the future of humanity, or invest your life savings in this revolutionary technology.
The molecule they've constructed, although it has a similar structure to DNA, isn't the same as the DNA you'd find in our cells. Even if you put this stuff into a cell it wouldn't be able to replicate and probably wouldn't have any adverse effects (no more so than sticking any other random chemical into a cell).
The potential application of this technology is using DNA as a data storage medium. People have been thinking about this for ages, but noone has done anything really practical with it. DNA has some nice properties related to storage (high density, ease of reproduction, built in error correction etc.) but reading and writing information has never really been practical.
The variant this group have made is a slightly more stable form of DNA, which could be useful, but doesn't help with the really big problems we already had when using DNA to store information.
Interesting - but probably not much more than that...
Slashdot Mirror
In my case it was more to do with the fact that my iPod touch downloaded an update file onto the device which filled nearly 1/3 of the available space on the file system. This is despite me turning off all of the update options in settings. According to all of the forums I checked there's no way to get rid of this file without jail breaking.
I didn't want to update my device but in the end it was the easiest way to get all of my storage space back. The process might be slick, but apple are definitely pushing you to do it.
We could be close to this with the MinIon sequencer from Oxford Nanopore.
Less than $1000, disposable and about the size of a USB stick. Connect it to your computer, drop a sample into a hole in the top and a sequence file starts building up on your hard drive.
It's due to be released in a couple of months when we'll see if this is as good as it sounds.
I was wondering how they decided who would get first-author rights on the paper (very important in the biological sciences)?
I suspect Blackawton P.S (the first author) is Blackawton Primary School rather than a person.
If you watch the video in the Supplemental data you'll see that the referee comments relate to the referees who reviewed a funding application for the project which was rejected, rather than the reviewers of the final paper.
I don't see how that follows at all. The point about a signing authority is that as long as you trust the authority then you can check that a given site certificate really belongs to that site. It's not sufficient to substitute another site's certificate, even if it's one signed by the same authority.
To compromise the system then CertsRUs would have to issue a signed certificate for thepriatebay.org to the RIAA. Whilst the tinfoil hat bridge may choose to believe that this might happen I can't see it. As soon as this was discovered (and the signatures from the RIAA certificate for thepiratebay.org and the real cert for that site would differ, so they would be disovered) then CertsRUs would rapidly be removed from the list of trusted signing authorities for a vast chunk of the internet, at which point their business goes down a hole.
Actually the reason for this is that there is a more fundamental rewrite of the DeviceKit and PackageKit systems in Fedora underway which will eventually allow more flexible allocation of system admin privileges to different classes of user. This is a good thing.
However - when F12 was released this rewrite was only partially complete. The backend systems were pretty much all in place but the front end which allows the editing of rules and the assignment of roles had not been written. Fedora was therefore shipped with a default set of rules.
Under the new system the previous behaviour of asking for the root password, but allowing the option to not be asked for it again in future had been removed (for fear of creating a 'make it up as you go along' security policy). The decision therefore had to be made to either allow console (not remote) users to install signed packages with no authentication required, or to require the root password for every install. The developers chose the first option. This has now been changed to the second option.
I'm kind of ambivalent about the light this sheds on Fedora. It's a bad thing to have happened, but it was sorted out quickly and there is now much discussion about setting up a firmer security policy so this won't happen again. Mistakes happen, but as long as they are spotted and corrected then we should all just move along.
It depends when you last jailbroke your iPhone. I did a jailbreak early on. I installed openSSH and changed the default password. I then found out that the phone entered an infinite loop of restarting the home screen and had to be forcibly restored.
The problem appears to be that the passwd binary on the phone is (deliberately?) broken so it generates incorrect hashes for the password entered. If you actually want to change your password then you need to jump through some hoops to change it without using the usual passwd command.
I think the Daily Mail may have some prior art on that topic...
Can't speak for anyone else, but in my case my reason for having an OSX laptop is that hibernate/suspend works better than on any other laptop I've ever seen. It's quick and I never have to mess about with restarting services/programs/networks when it restarts. That alone is enough to get me to use it.
Are you sure about that...?
I was in a team handing out CDs in the UK and we spent the morning honing our approach tactics to not scare people off. Some people will never stop for someone in a bright green t-shirt handing out CDs, but plenty of others could be persuaded.
What we found was:
* "Have some free software" = FAIL
You can just see the alarm bells going off in their heads, and frankly I don't blame them.
* Hide the CDs under a leaflet!
If you try to give people a CD they often blank you. If you give them a leaflet wrapped around the CDs they'll more often take it. Once they had it in their hand then they usually stop to ask what all this other stuff is.
* Talk about software freedom day first
Don't say you're handing out CDs, say you're promoting an international event - then let them have the discs.
* Hold a balloon.
Don't ask me why, but I got much higher take up from people when holding a balloon when handing out CDs. Maybe I was less threatning that way? We also found that having a load of balloons on the stall brought kids over and you could talk to their parents whilst they were there.
Things we plan to do next year.
1) Have more software for Macs. Maybe we hit an unusual demographic but we had lots of Mac users stop and talk to us and neither of the discs we had (OpenDisk and Ubuntu live CD) would work in a Mac. We'll add freeSmug next year.
2) Helium balloons and free sweets. Brings families over without any further sales pitch being required.
3) Free internet access. Not sure if we can arrange this but a big sign offering free internet access and a load of laptops with 3G dongles running linux. Would attract people over and let them try linux out at the same time.
I've done these events for the last three years and we've had a good reaction from the public each year. I'd stronly encourage people to get involved next year as it's a great way to talk to people about why they might want to use free software and what's available.
That was annoying the hell out of me too. I found that if I add http://c.fsdn.com/sd/cs_sic_controls_new.png to my adblock list then the random graphics disappear (as do some other bits, but I'll live with that).
How did this not get picked up and fixed already on a site this big??
I suggest you try playing a 20 second clip from the middle of a commercial DVD sometime to see how practical it is. Thanks to the inclusion of unskippable logos, trailers and informative films telling you how downloading music is stealing and makes you a criminal, it takes forever to actually get to the content. Whoever came up with the idea of locking DVD player controls should be made to try to start up Toy Story for an audience of 100 impatient toddlers and see how good an idea it seems then.
We could insist that all educational DVD players don't implement these controls, but then that would break the DMCA and we're back to square one.
On the evil scale I don't think this move by Google comes close to what Phorm is trying to do. Tracking your behaviour across multiple sites is kind of creepy, but in Google's case it will be limited to their partner sites. Opting out would simply be a matter of deleting the Google cookie at the end of each session. Were they to do this I'm sure that a 'Don't track me bro' firefox extension would quickly appear.
Phorm is much worse. They intercept your connection at your ISP and they process everything you do. All web sites (whether they want their users to be tracked or not), all emails, IRC, newsgroups, everything which isn't encrypted. They use the tracking cookie mainly to let affiliates serve out (in)appropriate ads, but they could do their tracking with no help from you at all. They are also able to track you over multiple devices, and to opt out you have to set a cookie on your own machine, so if you use a new device or clear out your cookies you've just opted in again. This is evil on a whole different level.
Actually I always liked http://www.mouse-potato.com/.
I'm amazed that that's a valid DNS entry...
Actually we can do this already but it's not really made it out of the lab and into the clinic yet.
We have very few clinical uses for stem cells at the moment, but it seems a fairly safe bet that in the timeframe it takes to develop these clinical applications we will also develop a reliable system for generating stem cells from our own somatic cells. I certainly wouldn't (and didn't) spend the money to store umbilical blood cells from my kids.
I've had the opposite experience. I run a website for a small choir and we have a contact form on there. This is something I wrote myself, not some popular package, and it's very tightly tied down so that the worst which can happen is that an attacker can send more junk to me.
Over the last year I've had at least two repeated and persistent attacks against this script. They were random bits of text with a random URL (not working or registered) at the end. After playing cat and mouse changing field names and blocking certain phrases which kept reoccurring I only managed to stop it in the end when I completely blocked the ability to include URLs in any message (which I didn't really want to have to do). We are a very small site and none of the attacks ever worked - but someone spent a considerable amount of time trying to break our site.
The moral is that noone is safe and it's just the luck of the draw if someone decides to focus their attention on you.
They own all the copyright to the MySql code and as such they can do what they like with it.
The fact that they distribute some of their code under the GPL puts conditions on what *you* can do with it. But they aren't bound by those conditions.
Dependencies in rpm can either be on a package name or a file - the packager can choose which makes more sense.
The main thing which makes yum seem slower than apt is that by default yum checks the server for an updated package list each time it is run, whereas apt has separate update and upgrade steps. If you run yum with -C (to force it to run from cache), it's about the same speed as apt-get.
It's not that rare - heck the Northen blot itself is a pun:
Southern Blot - developed by Ed Southern
Northern Blot - see what they did there...
Western Blot - yes, yes - very funny. Now get back to work.
gdmsetup has gone from recent releases. GDM is undergoing some fairly major changes and the developers haven't got round to reimplementing the preferences. You can make some changes by directly editing custom.conf, but the documentation is a bit sparse right now. Things which used to be easy (like turning off the people picker are currently difficult or not possible. Things are likely to improve soon but I don't know if they're sorted in the 2.24 release.
I would venture to suggest that the difference is that there was little to no support from the userbase for adding in the EULA. A lot of people (but admittedly not all) quite like the Awesomebar. Heck, I think it's the best thing about FF3.
I'm sorry Mr Wong - the answer should have been "Hmm, that's a hard one".
Oh sure. 4 hours brisk cycling (in all weathers) is what everyone needs to add to their daily routine. I often cycle to work which is a 27 mile roundtrip, but I sure as hell wouldn't want it to be any further, and I'm not doing it unless the weather's good.
Mind you - 50 miles driving from a 1 square metre solar panel. Really? Available energy at the earth's surface is about 1kW/m2. Photovoltaic cells are about 10% efficient so that's 0.1kW/m2. That means that after 8 hours of direct sun you've got 0.8kWh to play with. I strongly suspect that you're not going to move a full size car 50 miles on 0.8kWh...
I'd go with D. Be interested that they've managed to do this, but don't fear for the future of humanity, or invest your life savings in this revolutionary technology.
The molecule they've constructed, although it has a similar structure to DNA, isn't the same as the DNA you'd find in our cells. Even if you put this stuff into a cell it wouldn't be able to replicate and probably wouldn't have any adverse effects (no more so than sticking any other random chemical into a cell).
The potential application of this technology is using DNA as a data storage medium. People have been thinking about this for ages, but noone has done anything really practical with it. DNA has some nice properties related to storage (high density, ease of reproduction, built in error correction etc.) but reading and writing information has never really been practical.
The variant this group have made is a slightly more stable form of DNA, which could be useful, but doesn't help with the really big problems we already had when using DNA to store information.
Interesting - but probably not much more than that...