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User: k8to

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Comments · 1,165

  1. Re:Priority inversion bug on Patching Software on Another Planet · · Score: 1

    The issue was simple.

    In VxWorks, when you create pipes for IPC, you get to choose what kind of semaphore you want, because people want the shortest deadlines possible (at least classically).

    JPL selected simple mutexes, which led the priority inversion.

    Pipes were, generally speaking, far less well exercised in the codebase at the time, and Wind River engineers explicitly advised the use of message queues which would offer the necessary functionality and would not have had the problem encountered.

  2. Re:no, thanks, Wayland, I need REAL networking on Clearing Up Wayland FUD, Misconceptions · · Score: 1

    There are solutions to these problems. xrpa is one of them.

    It doesn't look much like the X protocol, but that's fine.

  3. Re:Accessibility on Ask Slashdot: Dealing With a Fear of Technological Change? · · Score: 2

    That markup also makes the document more comprehensible to users of gui displays.

    No, really.

    The gui mail client markup is so catastrophically bad that the text mode stuff is much more understandable. People freuqently are impressed by the clarity I produce in mutt using vim as compared to all my outlook-weilding cavemen.

  4. Re:And if you run Lynx on Browser Choice May Affect Your Job Prospects · · Score: 1

    Are you at SUNYA?

    Btw, the economy may seem horrible in Upstate New York (because it is) but there are other parts of the country doing a lot better. Don't set your sights too low.

  5. Re:Strictly DRM on EA Responds To Its Appearance In the 'Worst Company In America' Poll · · Score: 1

    If you can't see that this is DRM, ask yourself:

    Is this game fundamentally multiplayer? (If you don't realize it isn't, you certainly haven't played it.)

    Once you realize there's actually almost nothing multiplayer about it, ask yourself why you can't just play offline.

    At this point, you realize it's DRM.

  6. Re:Strictly DRM on EA Responds To Its Appearance In the 'Worst Company In America' Poll · · Score: 1

    Yep, it's DRM.

    It's DRM that they can plausibly convince dupes that it's not because it theoretically has some utility value.

    Don't bee fooled, or be a fool.

  7. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck on PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack · · Score: 2

    You clearly didn't read my post, nor understand the issue.

    We didn't choose to do the smart thing, so our needs are irrelevant.

    I'm in regular contact with a larger percentage of large enterprise IT shops, probably over 20% of the total base of sizable IT departments, and I speak from the experience of what *they* choose.

    Meanwhile, if you need to deal with virtualization management at large scale, vmware is worse in terms of staff efficiency, because you can't do custom automation in a reasonable way.

    Your numbers are about optimization for some medium-sized business, and it may well be the right choice there, but that's just barely "enterprise".

  8. Re:Lesson: Licensing costs suck on PayPal To Replace VMware With OpenStack · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Enterprise customers have been using a wide variety of linux virtualization solutions for many years now. Virtuozzo, kvm-based systems, xen based systems and many others are the norm. It's only people who seem to have more money than sense who standardize on vmware.

    They're the new version of "let's store everything on netapps".

    FD: my company makes both these nonsense choices, but most of our customers don't anymore.

  9. Re:Corporate bill of rights on European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal · · Score: 1

    Straw man. I didn't claim that my choices mean those things.

    I claimed that my choices CLEARLY DELINEATE theft and copyright infringement.

    Meanwhile, I cannot choose not to copyright things (this is the correct spelling), as all creative works are copyright by default in the modern era.

    I can, however, choose what to do with my rights.

  10. Re:Corporate bill of rights on European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal · · Score: 1

    You have the straw man.

    Duplication is copyright infringement. Theft is removal. That was my point.

    You have yet ANOTHER straw man when you claim that I said duplication is always okay.

    Then you have ANOTHER straw man when you claim duplication is counterfeiting, which it's not. That's when you PASS OFF replicated physical items as if they are goods produced by someone else.

    So.. My score 0, for not saying anything insightful, but nothing wrong either. your score: -3.

  11. Re:Corporate bill of rights on European Human Rights Court Rejects Pirate Bay Founders' Appeal · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It seems you are suffering from a form of mind control where you believe that property and "intellectual property" are the same thing.

    Let's break this down. I am not going to give you access to take my things.

    I'm happy for you to make duplicates of any information I have. For example by hearing the words I speak or reading the words I type, and saying them later.

    I could have copyrighted various code I wrote on my own time in a way that denied access to others, but I've never done so.

    I could participate in the patent program at my workplace, but I do not do so, and encourage others not to do so.

    I don't own any "IP", so you are welcome to all of it.

    Granted, I'm not a writer, or a musician, or what have you, so this issue does not strike terribly close to home, but all I wanted to do was deconstruct your silly "let me steal your stuff" false equivalence that you attempted to draw.

  12. Re:No on SSH Password Gropers Are Now Trying High Ports · · Score: 1

    Yeah, I tend to notice them when they use a significant portion of my bandwidth.

  13. Re:Port knocking on 58,000 Security Camera Systems Critically Vulnerable To Attackers · · Score: 2

    Sure hope you:

    * Make it possible to disable or alter password expiry policies. This sort of thing just pushes people to put them on paper.
    * Do not use UPnP without customer authorization.

    Otherwise, I wouldn't really trust you / want to use your things.

  14. Re:GNOME devs are so blind on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1

    Well, it's definitely distinguishable.

    Gnome has built, at the application layer, services which exist in ram, rather than loaded by library name. And they've done this in a way that does not have runtime versioning.

    They've basically re-created the pain of DDE/OLE.

    Granted, it's the same era of error with the same level of foolishness, but it's a slightly different problem.

    It's not like this has newly surfaced though. In early days of gnome (2), bringing up a gnome program without going through the "proper procedure" would result in it not being able to locate the runtime support of other processes, such as configuration management daemons. This meant that programs run could behave bizarrely and fail to work without any error emitted or any mistake on the part of the user. It all stems from assuming that the whole runtime environment is the one you imagine it to be without taking any steps to test for or create that environment, or deal with any problems your design choices have caused.

    In short, gnome (and kde) are rife with this kind of sloppy design and pretty much always have been. Acting as if it's some kind of new development is sort of missing the boat.

  15. Re:GNOME devs are so blind on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1

    Packaging is pretty independent from policies surrounding dynamic linkers and installations of soname objects.

    All unixes, once dynamic linking became prevalent, pretty much did not have this problem. Unixes which died not embrace dynamic linking also did not have this problem.

  16. Re:Hurricanes? on Wikimedia Moving Main Data Center To Ashburn, Virginia · · Score: 1

    No, we have volcanoes. See: http://www.nationalatlas.gov/dynamic/dyn_vol-ca.html

    Just because they haven't been active lately isn't any terribly good guarantee for volcano timescales.

    However we are completely lacking in hurricanes, also blizzards (unless you go pretty far up into the mountains), and tornados.

    The usual suspects like floods and fires we have, and more than the country's share of earthquakes. Also more than our share of infrastructure issues.

  17. Re:GNOME devs are so blind on SolusOS Forks Gnome 3 Fallback Mode · · Score: 1

    Wrong.

    DLL hell referred to a problem where all apps installed their private DLLs into shared system directories.

    This meant that apps would collide their dll files, and break each other.

    In UNIX/Linux, shared libraries (.so) always were installed with versioned filenames, so multiple versions of the same dll could be installed and the system could deal with it.

    Additionally, in UNIX/Linux, apps did not install libraries shared between projects on install. If building from source, you would simply build the dependencies first (separately), which meant there would be no collisions, though it did mean that installation took a bit more work.

    Thus, UNIX/Linux never had this problem of apps breaking each other on build and install. Sometimes, build and install might be trying, and there were a few libraries which did not do the versioning correctly (mostly libpng), but those were just bugs. In the meantime, those small number of bugs have been fixed.

  18. Totally new idea! on Meet "Ophelia," Dell's Plan To Reinvent Itself · · Score: 2

    It's a bird!
    It's a Sun Ray!
    It's an X Terminal!
    It's... It's... a failure.

  19. Re:the strength is where on Free Software Foundation Campaigning To Stop UEFI SecureBoot · · Score: 1

    Because of the wheel.

    You must not have been using PC platforms in 1997. The "intellimouse" was raved about and Microsoft added support for it in almost all their UI controls so it was an immediate hit. To compete, all the other mouse makers needed one too.

    The fact that the wheel is clickable at all is something some windows users aren't aware of (well, gamers know).

  20. Re:We, the FSF, like Secure Boot on Free Software Foundation Campaigning To Stop UEFI SecureBoot · · Score: 1

    While you're here.

    Would you folks mind providing a way to donate to this campaign only and not to FSF in general?

    I think this campaign is too late to be useful but no one has really raised the banner until now, so I'll put my chits in. However, FSF has raised the banner on several things in the past that I completely disagree with, so I'm unwilling to fund the organization in general.

  21. Re:Not a fractal of bad design on Python Creator Guido van Rossum Leaves Google For Dropbox · · Score: 1

    Way to go proving the author's point. The article is nuanced and clear. Your screed is content free and laughable.

  22. Re:The math doesn't work on Ask Slashdot: What Stands In the Way of a Truly Solar-Powered Airliner? · · Score: 1

    Well, considering that green means a sensible combination of renewable and efficient.. not so much.

  23. Why doesn't pakistan like US? on Stanford-NYU Report: Drone Attacks Illegal, Counterproductive · · Score: 1

    We shot up their villages and sent bombs etc. Isn't that good enough? What more do they want.

  24. Re:And on time on Torchlight 2 Release Date: 20 September · · Score: 1

    Yes, that's the generally accepted colloquial meaning of summer. Oh, you don't say? Most people don't believe that?

    Well I think the fault is entirely on the vast majority of buyers for making up their majority understanding of the term "summer".

    Surely, Steam and Runic intended to convey and release within the astronomical definition of summer all along, being very certain to indicate the steam announcement through June 20 were not on the cards. This is the most likely explanation.

  25. Re:A change in the way we talk about this is neede on Kentucky Lawmakers Shocked To Find Evolution In Biology Tests · · Score: 1

    Are you seriously challenging the validity of evolution as a response to the idea that it is not a religious topic?

    I think that says basically nothing about evolution, and everything about your extremely limited religion.