I seem to recall news stories about the Texan state government attempting to ban feminine hygiene products in the capitol after a bonch of women got understandably upset over that same government trying to shut down many options for women's reproductive care in the state...
That only applies to the Pro line (which is selling pretty fast). The RT line, with the ARM chips (like what this whole story is about) are not doing so well.
The thing that baffles me is the amount of effort MS wasted on locking out the 8.0 jailbreak. They could have put that to *so* much more productive uses. Why do something so blatantly anti-user in a product already struggling?
Cost to get to the sun isn't too bad; you don't need the fuel to create a stable orbit, and you're "falling" into the biggest gravity well around. Still, you have a point about the cost of launching something with so much mass.
For what it's worth, Eve Online is a popular, well-funded, and long-running MMO that plays nothing *at all* like WoW. It also plays nothing like FF, of course. In fact, I can't think of any game it really does play like... it's a space game, but it's nothing like Elite or Descent or Homeworld or SoaSE or... yeah. It's its own thing. But it's fun!
Subscription required, but if you make enough in-game money you can effectively pay that to other people to get them to buy your subscription for you. There are trials available, of course.
Wow, that really is a nice-looking phone. Somebody earlier said it was also available with a 1920x1080 screen but otherwise the same specs for $100 less; at $500 that's a top-notch piece of hardware that kinda makes me wish I was in the market for a new phone.
Sure, but a smartphone will last plenty long enough under those conditions. Turn off automatic sync and background processes ("battery saver" mode) and I can get three weeks on my phone, assuming I leave it idle (calls and SMS will still go through). I have a dedicated (and better) camera for photography needs. There's nothing else I need the phone for, and data signal tends to suck in the mountains anyhow (around here, I can only get EDGE except in more popular areas like big ski resorts).
It's squarely in middle of the "high-end" smartphone range. Yeah, it's expensive "for a phone". It's even "an expensive smartphone". But it's not at all unreasonable for a smartphone, and it's a bit less than than some smartphones with significantly lower specs.
If you ignore them, then you give them the initiative. They will use that initiative to sway the gullible and the corrupt, and increase their voting bloc. If you don't smack them down when they present their "alternative theories" than they will pander to people's ego and self-importance, their desire for validation regardless of validity, and their preference for a simple and comforting deity in place of a complicated and uncaring universe. Science is unconcerned with validating people's beliefs and comforting their sorrows, and relatively few people are more interested in discovering a potentially unhappy truth than in being told a happy fantasy is true. If you don't refute their claims, they will claim "science cannot refute us! They don't know the truth, only we do!" and they will shout it from the rooftops.
"Tell me, Mr. Darwin, which of your ancestors do you believe was an ape?"
Old example, but a classic and the same kind of "thinking" that fundamentalists still use today. It's not a strawman.
In fairness, macroevolution is an interesting field of study, for all that it's driven by the same process (just on a greater level) as microevolution. The line is often drawn at speciation - that is, when genetic communities of common ancestry can no longer produce viable offspring with members of the other community but can do so within their own community - except that we've actually observed speciation in the lab. At that point the goalposts get moved, to require such significant and obvious changes (such as sea-dwellers becoming land-dwellers, as if this happened over the course of a few generations instead of millions of years) that "a dog giving birth to a pig" is actually relatively generous of of the GP.
Hey now! Let's not forget incest, screwing your wife's servants, murdering people for various evils such as being gay, and (let's not forget the New Testament) wives being subservient to their husbands, literally "as the Church serves Christ our Lord". I think if I ever even hinted I should have the equivalent of divine authority over my household, my girlfriend might stab me. Can't say she'd be wrong to, either.
If it wasn't for the semi-crippled OS, I'd agree. Android with traditional PC peripherals isn't a great experience, either in terms of the OS (things like full-screen-only apps and a swipe-oriented UI) or apps (relatively small finger movements on a touchscreen translate to significant mouse movements on a big display, and many apps will have very poor support for non-touch input).
On the other hand, simply in terms of the hardware, this thing is a more-than-adequate replacement for a PC. Even given the differences in actual operations per clock cycle between Krait ARMv7 chips and something like Core i7 x64 chips, 4x 2.5GHz is a crapload of computing power. 3GB of RAM (presumably because the CPU is still only 32 bit) is a weak spot, and the GPU still really can't compete with desktop GPUs (although it might compare reasonably with Intel's integrated graphics? Which would be fair since it's itself integrated). For most purposes, though, it's a machine with good-to-fantastic specs.
Sometimes people use their phones closer than 1' from their eyes, especially when trying to see detail (i.e. the times when high resolution helps). With that said, I really don't see any use for 538PPI. That thing has the resolution of my 27" monitor! Yeah, I'd like the monitor's resolution to be higher, I guess, but it's not needed. Meanwhile, that's 4x the resolution of my still-somewhat-large (4.8") phone. Now, I *would* like the phone's resolution to be a bit higher (it's just over 300PPI, but text vanishes into jumbled pixels before it gets too small to read) but most of the time I don't need it and probably wouldn't notice... aside from the higher power draw and worse framerates in games.
Um... that's not even vaguely what "cold fusion" means. All the current large-scale reactor projects are "hot fusion". In fact, that's one of the main problems they're having: achieving fusion in the short term isn't too hard, but containing the plasmas that are generated is!
Nothing much... but anybody who thinks kids need (or even will benefit from) porn blocking has their head shoved so far up their puritan ass they could offer a whole new camera angle for porn if they wore Google Glass. Most kids learn (a flawed version of) what sex is long before they're old enough for it themselves. Some of them develop weird ideas about it, but those ideas near-universally come down to "ew, gross!" and stay that way until they get old enough for hormones to kick in. At that point, a porn filter is worse than useless, unless your goal is to teach your kids how to flout parental authority. There are so incredibly many ways to get around such things, all you're doing (and I use "you" generally here, not directed to anybody in particular) is telling the kids that there's something interesting to see there.
Good parenting will have kids knowing what they need to know about sex before the lack of that knowledge can hurt them, and will produce kids who trust their parents to guide them well. Bad parenting will keep kids in the dark, forcing them to "learn" from other kids and go around their parents instead of going to them. You may think you're protecting them, but all you're doing is forcing them to learn from people (even) less trustworthy than yourselves.
Just like the Chinese have been able to undercut the price on SpaceX rockets?
Not saying that just because *one* of Musk's companies managed to make something (in the USA!) for less than the Chinese or Russians could manage means that *all* of his companies will have the same fortune, but there's a lot of engineering knowledge that goes into making a Tesla. Yeah, cheap knockoffs - things that don't have anywhere near the specs - will probably appear, but they won't have much penetration outside of Asia.
Tesla doesn't just "make electric luxury cars". They make electric cars that have both more range *and* more efficiency than anything which can reasonably be called a competitor (i.e highway-safe enclosed multi-passenger vehicle). I don't have a clue how they manage to beat the others so handily on efficiency, but it's a critical factor for an electric car. A gasoline car with low fuel economy can just use a bigger tank, but that strategy breaks down with batteries much earlier.
Unix-style file permissions let you implement ACLs just fine, if you're willing to create enough security principals (usually groups). It is, as I said, clumsy. Also, Unix-style file permissions are essentially a simple ACL that just has a hardcoded number of entries in it. It's fair to call that not a "true" ACL if you want, but again, you *can* implement a true ACL system using those privileges, if you're willing to accept the required number of groups.
Uh, what? It's trivially easy to have multiple C/C++ libraries, even including libc itself, present and in use on one machine. It's a pain in the ass to do so with Java.
Random (Windows) example: old game that requires some long-dead version of MSVC that doesn't ship on modern Windows versions? Grab the relevant msvcrt.dll from an older machine and drop it into the program's install folder. Quick, simple, successful.
Well no, you don't statically link glibc (unless you're willing to open-source your own code, which most are not). There are other libc options, some of which can be incorporated into proprietary code on Linux. Some are less mature than glibc, but then, there are many people who disagree with some of the implementation decisions in glibc and prefer to use a different library anyhow.
Not all companies have that glass ceiling, actually. The really big tech companies often have extremely senior non-management technical roles (common titles are things like "distinguished engineer" and "technical fellow" and the like, sometimes with "senior" variants thereof). In terms of pay scale and location in the org chart, these folks are usually somewhere between the upper end of middle management and VPs. They will frequently work in areas where they *influence* large teams of people - for example, they may be architects, or have an advisory position to an entire product team - but the work they do is largely at their own discretion and nobody reports to them. I know a guy who worked for Microsoft's Windows team in such a role; when I asked what area he worked on his response was, quote, "whatever I want to". Somebody who can solve the sticky problems, who can do the things the less-experienced don't even know is possible and get it to work within the time they expected it to take, are very valuable. Sometimes that's even solving problems that other engineers didn't realize *were* problems, like scalability issues that had never yet shown up in testing because the thing wasn't ready to test at scale yet.
Now, it's not necessarily easier to get those positions than it is to get a management position and continue moving up the ladder that way. However, down that path lies the loss of any time to do the stuff that's actually fun in software development: the coding a tool or feature and seeing it work, the (FINALLY!) fixing that damn bug, the refactoring some method to run in n*log(n) time instead of n^2, etc. Managers, especially once they have other managers reporting to them, don't have time for that stuff. If they're doing technical stuff at all, it's probably mentoring their newer employees and maybe doing some code reviews. More likely, they're spending their time in planning meetings and status meetings, 1-on-1 meetings with their underlings, meeting with managers from other teams to handle disputes, and so on.
If I ever went back into development (I do security consulting now; it's a different kind of fun but it's great work and I still get to cut code on a regular basis), I'd do it somewhere that has a real senior engineering career path.
Not sure where the "proper ACLs had to be bolted on" comes from, as ACLs predate even Unix, much less Linux. The Unix-style ACLs were well established when Linux, or even it's inpiration Minix, was first created. I'll readily grant the clumsiness of the 12-bit ACL system, though.
On *nix systems, file system objects *are* how processes, sockets, and so on are represented. Not sure about synch objects, but in general, Linux does in fact have access controls on most of the same types of things as NT, because those things are accessed using the file system, and are protected by the file system access controls. NT took a different route, making the entire file system be children of the common root (which also has devices, registry hivs, and so on) instead of using the unified root of the file system as the common root of all securable objects the way *nix does it.
These days, though things like SELinux, Linux actually has better support for the PoLP than NT does. That's not to say it's widely used to its full effect, but that's true on both platforms.
Don't get me wrong, I like the NT model. But I don't like it so much I'm going to just ignore the flaws in what you say.
Markov chaining and some clever guesses about rule generation bring that down immensely, but it is true that a *comprehensive* brute force rapidly becomes infeasible... except practically nobody uses completely random passwords at all (save for those generated and stored by tools) and the handful of people who do use them (in the sense that a normal password is used, i.e. memorized and entered without outside aid) will generally use ones shorter than 10 characters.
Still, you are right (although it's worth noting that throwing more compute units - be they EC2 instances or GPUs or whatever - at the problem is relatively cheap).
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall news stories about the Texan state government attempting to ban feminine hygiene products in the capitol after a bonch of women got understandably upset over that same government trying to shut down many options for women's reproductive care in the state...
That only applies to the Pro line (which is selling pretty fast). The RT line, with the ARM chips (like what this whole story is about) are not doing so well.
The thing that baffles me is the amount of effort MS wasted on locking out the 8.0 jailbreak. They could have put that to *so* much more productive uses. Why do something so blatantly anti-user in a product already struggling?
Cost to get to the sun isn't too bad; you don't need the fuel to create a stable orbit, and you're "falling" into the biggest gravity well around. Still, you have a point about the cost of launching something with so much mass.
For what it's worth, Eve Online is a popular, well-funded, and long-running MMO that plays nothing *at all* like WoW. It also plays nothing like FF, of course. In fact, I can't think of any game it really does play like... it's a space game, but it's nothing like Elite or Descent or Homeworld or SoaSE or... yeah. It's its own thing. But it's fun!
Subscription required, but if you make enough in-game money you can effectively pay that to other people to get them to buy your subscription for you. There are trials available, of course.
Well, both of the high-performance current-gen game consoles use AMD. On that basis alone, they're quite unlikely to go anywhere.
... in the e-waste bin, along with the other relics of the 90s?
Wow, that really is a nice-looking phone. Somebody earlier said it was also available with a 1920x1080 screen but otherwise the same specs for $100 less; at $500 that's a top-notch piece of hardware that kinda makes me wish I was in the market for a new phone.
Sure, but a smartphone will last plenty long enough under those conditions. Turn off automatic sync and background processes ("battery saver" mode) and I can get three weeks on my phone, assuming I leave it idle (calls and SMS will still go through). I have a dedicated (and better) camera for photography needs. There's nothing else I need the phone for, and data signal tends to suck in the mountains anyhow (around here, I can only get EDGE except in more popular areas like big ski resorts).
It's squarely in middle of the "high-end" smartphone range. Yeah, it's expensive "for a phone". It's even "an expensive smartphone". But it's not at all unreasonable for a smartphone, and it's a bit less than than some smartphones with significantly lower specs.
$290 including DHL express shipping from Soeul gets you a 27" 2560x1440, as of Nov 2012. It's awesome.
If you ignore them, then you give them the initiative. They will use that initiative to sway the gullible and the corrupt, and increase their voting bloc. If you don't smack them down when they present their "alternative theories" than they will pander to people's ego and self-importance, their desire for validation regardless of validity, and their preference for a simple and comforting deity in place of a complicated and uncaring universe. Science is unconcerned with validating people's beliefs and comforting their sorrows, and relatively few people are more interested in discovering a potentially unhappy truth than in being told a happy fantasy is true. If you don't refute their claims, they will claim "science cannot refute us! They don't know the truth, only we do!" and they will shout it from the rooftops.
"Tell me, Mr. Darwin, which of your ancestors do you believe was an ape?"
Old example, but a classic and the same kind of "thinking" that fundamentalists still use today. It's not a strawman.
In fairness, macroevolution is an interesting field of study, for all that it's driven by the same process (just on a greater level) as microevolution. The line is often drawn at speciation - that is, when genetic communities of common ancestry can no longer produce viable offspring with members of the other community but can do so within their own community - except that we've actually observed speciation in the lab. At that point the goalposts get moved, to require such significant and obvious changes (such as sea-dwellers becoming land-dwellers, as if this happened over the course of a few generations instead of millions of years) that "a dog giving birth to a pig" is actually relatively generous of of the GP.
Hey now! Let's not forget incest, screwing your wife's servants, murdering people for various evils such as being gay, and (let's not forget the New Testament) wives being subservient to their husbands, literally "as the Church serves Christ our Lord". I think if I ever even hinted I should have the equivalent of divine authority over my household, my girlfriend might stab me. Can't say she'd be wrong to, either.
If it wasn't for the semi-crippled OS, I'd agree. Android with traditional PC peripherals isn't a great experience, either in terms of the OS (things like full-screen-only apps and a swipe-oriented UI) or apps (relatively small finger movements on a touchscreen translate to significant mouse movements on a big display, and many apps will have very poor support for non-touch input).
On the other hand, simply in terms of the hardware, this thing is a more-than-adequate replacement for a PC. Even given the differences in actual operations per clock cycle between Krait ARMv7 chips and something like Core i7 x64 chips, 4x 2.5GHz is a crapload of computing power. 3GB of RAM (presumably because the CPU is still only 32 bit) is a weak spot, and the GPU still really can't compete with desktop GPUs (although it might compare reasonably with Intel's integrated graphics? Which would be fair since it's itself integrated). For most purposes, though, it's a machine with good-to-fantastic specs.
Sometimes people use their phones closer than 1' from their eyes, especially when trying to see detail (i.e. the times when high resolution helps). With that said, I really don't see any use for 538PPI. That thing has the resolution of my 27" monitor! Yeah, I'd like the monitor's resolution to be higher, I guess, but it's not needed. Meanwhile, that's 4x the resolution of my still-somewhat-large (4.8") phone. Now, I *would* like the phone's resolution to be a bit higher (it's just over 300PPI, but text vanishes into jumbled pixels before it gets too small to read) but most of the time I don't need it and probably wouldn't notice... aside from the higher power draw and worse framerates in games.
Um... that's not even vaguely what "cold fusion" means. All the current large-scale reactor projects are "hot fusion". In fact, that's one of the main problems they're having: achieving fusion in the short term isn't too hard, but containing the plasmas that are generated is!
Nothing much... but anybody who thinks kids need (or even will benefit from) porn blocking has their head shoved so far up their puritan ass they could offer a whole new camera angle for porn if they wore Google Glass. Most kids learn (a flawed version of) what sex is long before they're old enough for it themselves. Some of them develop weird ideas about it, but those ideas near-universally come down to "ew, gross!" and stay that way until they get old enough for hormones to kick in. At that point, a porn filter is worse than useless, unless your goal is to teach your kids how to flout parental authority. There are so incredibly many ways to get around such things, all you're doing (and I use "you" generally here, not directed to anybody in particular) is telling the kids that there's something interesting to see there.
Good parenting will have kids knowing what they need to know about sex before the lack of that knowledge can hurt them, and will produce kids who trust their parents to guide them well. Bad parenting will keep kids in the dark, forcing them to "learn" from other kids and go around their parents instead of going to them. You may think you're protecting them, but all you're doing is forcing them to learn from people (even) less trustworthy than yourselves.
Just like the Chinese have been able to undercut the price on SpaceX rockets?
Not saying that just because *one* of Musk's companies managed to make something (in the USA!) for less than the Chinese or Russians could manage means that *all* of his companies will have the same fortune, but there's a lot of engineering knowledge that goes into making a Tesla. Yeah, cheap knockoffs - things that don't have anywhere near the specs - will probably appear, but they won't have much penetration outside of Asia.
Tesla doesn't just "make electric luxury cars". They make electric cars that have both more range *and* more efficiency than anything which can reasonably be called a competitor (i.e highway-safe enclosed multi-passenger vehicle). I don't have a clue how they manage to beat the others so handily on efficiency, but it's a critical factor for an electric car. A gasoline car with low fuel economy can just use a bigger tank, but that strategy breaks down with batteries much earlier.
Hardly "most" though many of the later ones did.
Unix-style file permissions let you implement ACLs just fine, if you're willing to create enough security principals (usually groups). It is, as I said, clumsy. Also, Unix-style file permissions are essentially a simple ACL that just has a hardcoded number of entries in it. It's fair to call that not a "true" ACL if you want, but again, you *can* implement a true ACL system using those privileges, if you're willing to accept the required number of groups.
Uh, what? It's trivially easy to have multiple C/C++ libraries, even including libc itself, present and in use on one machine. It's a pain in the ass to do so with Java.
Random (Windows) example: old game that requires some long-dead version of MSVC that doesn't ship on modern Windows versions? Grab the relevant msvcrt.dll from an older machine and drop it into the program's install folder. Quick, simple, successful.
Well no, you don't statically link glibc (unless you're willing to open-source your own code, which most are not). There are other libc options, some of which can be incorporated into proprietary code on Linux. Some are less mature than glibc, but then, there are many people who disagree with some of the implementation decisions in glibc and prefer to use a different library anyhow.
Not all companies have that glass ceiling, actually. The really big tech companies often have extremely senior non-management technical roles (common titles are things like "distinguished engineer" and "technical fellow" and the like, sometimes with "senior" variants thereof). In terms of pay scale and location in the org chart, these folks are usually somewhere between the upper end of middle management and VPs. They will frequently work in areas where they *influence* large teams of people - for example, they may be architects, or have an advisory position to an entire product team - but the work they do is largely at their own discretion and nobody reports to them. I know a guy who worked for Microsoft's Windows team in such a role; when I asked what area he worked on his response was, quote, "whatever I want to". Somebody who can solve the sticky problems, who can do the things the less-experienced don't even know is possible and get it to work within the time they expected it to take, are very valuable. Sometimes that's even solving problems that other engineers didn't realize *were* problems, like scalability issues that had never yet shown up in testing because the thing wasn't ready to test at scale yet.
Now, it's not necessarily easier to get those positions than it is to get a management position and continue moving up the ladder that way. However, down that path lies the loss of any time to do the stuff that's actually fun in software development: the coding a tool or feature and seeing it work, the (FINALLY!) fixing that damn bug, the refactoring some method to run in n*log(n) time instead of n^2, etc. Managers, especially once they have other managers reporting to them, don't have time for that stuff. If they're doing technical stuff at all, it's probably mentoring their newer employees and maybe doing some code reviews. More likely, they're spending their time in planning meetings and status meetings, 1-on-1 meetings with their underlings, meeting with managers from other teams to handle disputes, and so on.
If I ever went back into development (I do security consulting now; it's a different kind of fun but it's great work and I still get to cut code on a regular basis), I'd do it somewhere that has a real senior engineering career path.
Not sure where the "proper ACLs had to be bolted on" comes from, as ACLs predate even Unix, much less Linux. The Unix-style ACLs were well established when Linux, or even it's inpiration Minix, was first created. I'll readily grant the clumsiness of the 12-bit ACL system, though.
On *nix systems, file system objects *are* how processes, sockets, and so on are represented. Not sure about synch objects, but in general, Linux does in fact have access controls on most of the same types of things as NT, because those things are accessed using the file system, and are protected by the file system access controls. NT took a different route, making the entire file system be children of the common root (which also has devices, registry hivs, and so on) instead of using the unified root of the file system as the common root of all securable objects the way *nix does it.
These days, though things like SELinux, Linux actually has better support for the PoLP than NT does. That's not to say it's widely used to its full effect, but that's true on both platforms.
Don't get me wrong, I like the NT model. But I don't like it so much I'm going to just ignore the flaws in what you say.
Markov chaining and some clever guesses about rule generation bring that down immensely, but it is true that a *comprehensive* brute force rapidly becomes infeasible... except practically nobody uses completely random passwords at all (save for those generated and stored by tools) and the handful of people who do use them (in the sense that a normal password is used, i.e. memorized and entered without outside aid) will generally use ones shorter than 10 characters.
Still, you are right (although it's worth noting that throwing more compute units - be they EC2 instances or GPUs or whatever - at the problem is relatively cheap).