FTFA, the app was previously rejected under the name "Jack Torrents". After the last developer guideline change, it was resubmitted as "IS Drive", hiding the fact that it was actually doing BitTorrent (from the article video, isoHunt and Mininova tabs have also been hidden along the name change, for example). That's why the app got approved...
Let me respectfully disagree. Their GUIs are more polished.
IMHO, their interface has become less intuitive since Win9x/Win2000.
Win9x/Win2000, GNOME, OS X have a coherent UI. That is less the case with WinXP, and Vista, Win7 are a mess from my point of view. And I probably lack experience with KDE to comment fairly, but I think that while it has coherent UI, it is too cluttered.
Wait wait wait, I have to specify the specific blocks to load now?
No you don't. GRUB will compute the blocks and store them in the MBR. It's "unreliable" because if the file to be loaded is physically moved/modified, the loader will be broken.
I've written a toy partition bootloader over a weekend which was able in around 400 bytes to load and execute any file on a FAT filesystem.
I bet you mean that you wrote a program to which you gave the path of a COM file that would in turn write the MBR so it would load and execute that file. And it happened to work with your BIOS and the files you tried it with (did you try with files physically located after 8GiB ? on an old broken BIOS ?) So what ? That's basically what LILO and GRUB stage 1 are doing.
And another for the MBR gave a menu of primary and extended partitions for keyboard selection.
Basically what the Debian mbr package does. That's chain-loading. (Could you really boot an extended partition ?)
What is the Grub project finding so difficult?
Go read the documention to get what features GRUB1 and GRUB2 have. GRUB is a shell, understand many filesystems, can boot a variety of OS (many of which are requiring multiple files being loaded at specific addresses), from a variety of devices (including netboot), does switch to protected mode, and much more. It happens that all these features are not fitting in the at most 446 bytes available in the MBR.
blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there
There's no allocation scheme nor some kind of magic number to identify the content in that zone, so there is no 'smart' way to write in that zone. You could check for zeroes, which is fine fine for a new disk, then ask the user if you find that the area has been previously written, but the user usually won't know and will only be confused.
The 'smart' thing to do is not only to not write in that area (as reported, GRUB stage 1.5 can be erased), but also to not write in the MBR as too many OSes will overwrite it (and therefore GRUB stage 1) on (re)installation.
I'm usually staying with the conventional "4 primary partitions that can be active" MBR, GRUB stage 1 in some Linux partition (usually a small/boot partition at the beginning of the disk to avoid most of the problems with old/buggy BIOSes), then directly stage2 from the partition instead of stage 1.5. However, the loading of stage 2 without stage 1.5 has been deprecated in GRUB2. IIRC it's because the block list needed was bigger than with the smaller GRUB1, and might not fit in the boot sector anymore.
Alas, that disposition can break on some old/buggy BIOSes but is much more resilient to software abuse (usually writing a standard boot sector and setting the active partition to the one where you installed GRUB fixes any such problems).
(I'm talking about GRUB stages from memory, feel free to correct me if I did some mistakes)
The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo.
Well, Guo is right, I just checked that 326ppi meant pixels of 78um* (and please don't use micron, its usage has been obsoleted more than 40 years ago).
However having horizontal and vertical resolution both multiplied by eight means that pixels are 64 times smaller than those on an iPhone 4.
And "typical computer screens" still usually have a resolution in the 100ppi range. With 10um* pixels, these nanoresonators have 2540ppi, so that's 25 times better, not 10. That also means pixels 645 times smaller.
The actual paper (if someone has a subscription to American Journal of Epidemiology Online)
So the most obvious difference is that they're talking about leisure time spent sitting. Also, it seems that the correlation is by means of "everything else being equal" (which is ok by itself, but the reporting is screwing about that). It doesn't mean that people with regular physical activity but sitting a lot have a higher mortality rate than people with lesser physical activity but sitting less, only that for the same level of activity, people sitting more in their leisure time have a higher mortality rate.
By the way, the route from San Francisco to LA alone is longer than the TGV from Paris to Bordeaux, which is about the longest of the French TGV routes.
I get about 400 miles / 650 Km for San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The Paris-Bordeaux TGV line is neither the longest one nor even high-speed on its full length.
The longest line would be Paris-Marseille : 470 miles / 750 Km, line which has been constructed in three phases :
Lets make sure that this discussion focuses on the fact that they presented it in Silverlight and not the open and saintly Flash format.
Nobody likes Adobe Flash (excepted for Apple bashing time). We now have HTML5. However Flash is an important legacy format that we can't yet ignore (especially when all major browsers don't support HTML5 yet). Silverlight became legacy before ever gaining significant marketshare. Why should we care ? Also, as pointed by blirp, it's not really cross-platforms.
Therefore, expect the same kind of off-topic threads that we get with paywalls or slashdotted links. No access to the material implies random off-topic discussions.
From what I've understood, it is a buffer overflow in the way.lnk are handled that has been exploited.
It doesn't require autorun, just the reading of the.lnk (which happens when you're displaying the.lnk in the explorer)
The flaw has been discovered from Stuxnet, a virus that happens to target specific systems, but is in no way limited to these systems.
By the way, does anyone know if it is possible to put a noexec on USB keys like you can on unices ? Although it wouldn't help about this flaw, it is usually better practice (as long as you're not using portable apps).
And show them the faults in the system that collected the evidence, and the proponents deny that.
Straw man. You will have to prove that. I've read nobody here denying that mistakes happen. People are denying that these mistakes have consequences.
By your logic, as operating systems all have bugs, computers do not exist. (Sorry, not a car analogy)
What I found most fascinating in the summary[...]
... isn't in the summary anymore. Do you really need to go by faulty generalizations from notoriously inaccurate Slashdot summaries to discredit yourself ?
calling them mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers,
Ok. You mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger !
(BTW can someone translate me that in French ? Seems like someone making circles with his fist in the air, while vociferating insults. Is that accurate ?)
Slashdot Mirror
This time it's gonna be different, trust me.
FTFA, the app was previously rejected under the name "Jack Torrents".
After the last developer guideline change, it was resubmitted as "IS Drive", hiding the fact that it was actually doing BitTorrent (from the article video, isoHunt and Mininova tabs have also been hidden along the name change, for example).
That's why the app got approved...
Next month or so we will get a headline of "Thief thief Thief thief thief thief Thief thief", and none of these words will be about actual theft of tangible property.
[Actual thieves] compare [developing malware kits] to Kalashnikov gun manufacturing ('we make the weapon, it’s not up to us how it’s used')
And therefore gun manufacturers are also actual serial killers.
Well, I suppose he meant "the US smartphone market" (because, you know, the remaining of the "world" is irrelevant).
Maildir.
And if you have an e-mail client that don't support it, use an IMAP server to feed your client. /thread
I thought from the name the thing was controlled by a parrot.
Originally it was, but during the long beta the parrot ceased to be.
No, no, he's uh,... he's resting!
Ron Miller: Could Apple's announcement about Ping [...] be Apple's social networking trojan horse?
CmdrTaco: Of course it is.
Ah, the great and definitive insights of CmdrTaco ;)
CmdrTaco: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
By the way, it's not. Ping maybe, but Apple's annoucement about Ping, definitely not.
Their GUI's are usually more intuitive than OSS
Let me respectfully disagree. Their GUIs are more polished.
IMHO, their interface has become less intuitive since Win9x/Win2000.
Win9x/Win2000, GNOME, OS X have a coherent UI. That is less the case with WinXP, and Vista, Win7 are a mess from my point of view. And I probably lack experience with KDE to comment fairly, but I think that while it has coherent UI, it is too cluttered.
Wait wait wait, I have to specify the specific blocks to load now?
No you don't. GRUB will compute the blocks and store them in the MBR. It's "unreliable" because if the file to be loaded is physically moved/modified, the loader will be broken.
I've written a toy partition bootloader over a weekend which was able in around 400 bytes to load and execute any file on a FAT filesystem.
I bet you mean that you wrote a program to which you gave the path of a COM file that would in turn write the MBR so it would load and execute that file. And it happened to work with your BIOS and the files you tried it with (did you try with files physically located after 8GiB ? on an old broken BIOS ?)
So what ? That's basically what LILO and GRUB stage 1 are doing.
And another for the MBR gave a menu of primary and extended partitions for keyboard selection.
Basically what the Debian mbr package does. That's chain-loading. (Could you really boot an extended partition ?)
What is the Grub project finding so difficult?
Go read the documention to get what features GRUB1 and GRUB2 have.
GRUB is a shell, understand many filesystems, can boot a variety of OS (many of which are requiring multiple files being loaded at specific addresses), from a variety of devices (including netboot), does switch to protected mode, and much more.
It happens that all these features are not fitting in the at most 446 bytes available in the MBR.
It's also called "GRUB with blocklists"
You can find more here,
and in my other post
blindly overwriting hard disk content between the MBR and the first partition destroying information already stored there
There's no allocation scheme nor some kind of magic number to identify the content in that zone, so there is no 'smart' way to write in that zone. You could check for zeroes, which is fine fine for a new disk, then ask the user if you find that the area has been previously written, but the user usually won't know and will only be confused.
The 'smart' thing to do is not only to not write in that area (as reported, GRUB stage 1.5 can be erased), but also to not write in the MBR as too many OSes will overwrite it (and therefore GRUB stage 1) on (re)installation.
I'm usually staying with the conventional "4 primary partitions that can be active" MBR, GRUB stage 1 in some Linux partition (usually a small /boot partition at the beginning of the disk to avoid most of the problems with old/buggy BIOSes), then directly stage2 from the partition instead of stage 1.5. However, the loading of stage 2 without stage 1.5 has been deprecated in GRUB2. IIRC it's because the block list needed was bigger than with the smaller GRUB1, and might not fit in the boot sector anymore.
Alas, that disposition can break on some old/buggy BIOSes but is much more resilient to software abuse (usually writing a standard boot sector and setting the active partition to the one where you installed GRUB fixes any such problems).
(I'm talking about GRUB stages from memory, feel free to correct me if I did some mistakes)
The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo.
Well, Guo is right, I just checked that 326ppi meant pixels of 78um* (and please don't use micron, its usage has been obsoleted more than 40 years ago).
However having horizontal and vertical resolution both multiplied by eight means that pixels are 64 times smaller than those on an iPhone 4.
And "typical computer screens" still usually have a resolution in the 100ppi range. With 10um* pixels, these nanoresonators have 2540ppi, so that's 25 times better, not 10. That also means pixels 645 times smaller.
FYI, wikipedia has a list of diplays by pixel density.
(*) Slashcode is eating both the micro sign and the HTML µ representation !
Of course with reposts of reposts the story can get a little inaccurate...
So the most obvious difference is that they're talking about leisure time spent sitting.
Also, it seems that the correlation is by means of "everything else being equal" (which is ok by itself, but the reporting is screwing about that). It doesn't mean that people with regular physical activity but sitting a lot have a higher mortality rate than people with lesser physical activity but sitting less, only that for the same level of activity, people sitting more in their leisure time have a higher mortality rate.
Try here instead ;)
(was featured right here in june)
after doing a quick google search i think this app is nowhere to be found
After doing my own quick google search I found a mirror of it on the first page of results here.
Microsoft Claims 'We Love Open Source'
... with salt and well cooked.
(Tribute to MC Solaar : translation of the song "Bouge de là")
Do you mean 1998.999967217864781687?
--
My 0.02 cents
Well, that's where your 0.02 cents come handy as:
1998.999967217864781687 + 0.0002 = 1999.
By the way, the route from San Francisco to LA alone is longer than the TGV from Paris to Bordeaux, which is about the longest of the French TGV routes.
I get about 400 miles / 650 Km for San Francisco to Los Angeles.
The Paris-Bordeaux TGV line is neither the longest one nor even high-speed on its full length.
The longest line would be Paris-Marseille : 470 miles / 750 Km, line which has been constructed in three phases :
Maps :
Anonymous Coward (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a problem with the patent system, not with software patents themselves.
Boiling frogs, don't you love them ?
Lets make sure that this discussion focuses on the fact that they presented it in Silverlight and not the open and saintly Flash format.
Nobody likes Adobe Flash (excepted for Apple bashing time).
We now have HTML5.
However Flash is an important legacy format that we can't yet ignore (especially when all major browsers don't support HTML5 yet).
Silverlight became legacy before ever gaining significant marketshare. Why should we care ? Also, as pointed by blirp, it's not really cross-platforms.
Therefore, expect the same kind of off-topic threads that we get with paywalls or slashdotted links. No access to the material implies random off-topic discussions.
From what I've understood, it is a buffer overflow in the way .lnk are handled that has been exploited.
It doesn't require autorun, just the reading of the .lnk (which happens when you're displaying the .lnk in the explorer)
The flaw has been discovered from Stuxnet, a virus that happens to target specific systems, but is in no way limited to these systems.
By the way, does anyone know if it is possible to put a noexec on USB keys like you can on unices ? Although it wouldn't help about this flaw, it is usually better practice (as long as you're not using portable apps).
Big secret nobody knows about because nobody subscribes except those of us who appreciate Slashdot.
Just so you know, non-suscribing registered users (like me) get the following sentence on top of the front page for the full 30 minutes :
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
So everyone knows. Some just like to pretend to ignore it.
And show them the faults in the system that collected the evidence, and the proponents deny that.
Straw man. You will have to prove that. I've read nobody here denying that mistakes happen. People are denying that these mistakes have consequences.
By your logic, as operating systems all have bugs, computers do not exist. (Sorry, not a car analogy)
What I found most fascinating in the summary[...]
... isn't in the summary anymore. Do you really need to go by faulty generalizations from notoriously inaccurate Slashdot summaries to discredit yourself ?
calling them mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers,
Ok. You mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger !
(BTW can someone translate me that in French ? Seems like someone making circles with his fist in the air, while vociferating insults. Is that accurate ?)
[...] the self-righteous goody-goody people in our society who pretend to never drink, never screw, never do anything wrong at all [...]
You had an empty set. Corrected for you.
Also note how it's Windows XP they're displaying.
You are familiar with WINDOWS and do not want to learn new programs for email, word processing etc
Does that mean that Dell is willing to sell them Windows XP so they don't have to learn Windows 7 ?
BTW, people using OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird etc don't have to learn new programs.