Posts by John D. Blair 23 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Apr 2008
We actually do celebrate Yuri's Night here in the U. S. of A. I attended what can only be properly described as a nerd rave in a tent at Moffett Field, home of NASA Ame's Research Center. DJs, flashing lights, scientific and artsy displays, re-purposed Burning Man projects, and I suspect a few mind altering substances - all the hallmarks of a Bay Area party :)
1000 times yes.
When Linux was young it was great to know that a stable ABI would not be maintained at the expense of a broken design just for the sake of compatibility. Now that Linux is 25 years old its well past the time it should have provided a stable driver interface. The notion that VMWare has to rebuild its drivers from source whenever I update the kernel is an abomination.
Because if it didn't start here, but "out there, somewhere" then there's a high probability life, as we know it, exists on any planet with a similar climate.
If it only started here then the rare conditions that led to life have to happen in more than one place for life to exist in more than one place. If life spreads around the universe it only has to happen once in the lifetime of the universe.
Look, asshole AC, I did read all the requirements, and I acknowledged in my post that "I get why that was a security requirement to allowing my device access to the email."
Accessing my corporate email required me to allow my email app access to administrator privs on my table, and the very first one on the list is "Erase all data: Erase the tablet's data without warning by performing a factory data reset."
That's pretty clear to me. Factory. Data. Reset.
You're right its only the email app that gets the right, but that right is pretty sweeping.
I know this isn't exactly the same thing, but I want to relate this story.
I tried setting up the Exchange connector for the email app on my Nexus 7. I entered the appropriate hostname and my credentials and it looked like things were going to work. Then it popped up a notice that said to proceed I had to agree to allow the IT department of my company the ability to remote-wipe my own device. I get why that was a security requirement to allowing my device access to the email, but it was a deal-breaker. I don't trust my IT department not to accidentally wipe my own device. I went back to using the clunky HTTP interface that works badly on a normal PC.
The article fails to mention that you don't actually need to install special man-in-the-middle hardware such as a rogue wifi AP or ethernet router. You can use ARP spoofing to perform man-in-the-middle attacks as long as you have access to the same subnet as the target.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARP_Spoofing
I think it has to achieve better-than-break-even performance or you could use an electric ion drive powered from the solar panels. However, perhaps I'm missing something about propellant mass savings due to the high-energy exhaust from the fusion drive (since f = m * a, more acceleration would require less mass).
Even if it has to achieve break-even, harvesting the energy would be significantly easier than terrestrial power generation: just aim it out the back. No need to absorb the heat w/o destroying the containment vessel, generate steam, etc.
I have to quibble with this.
Side-effects refer to effects a method or function has other than its return value. A common best practice is to eliminate all side effects b/c it makes the code a lot easier to test.
Of course, at some point your code has to have side effects - it has to draw on the screen, or send packets, or whatever the point of the program is. However, the core of the program can still operate "without side effects."
You overlook the growing number of IT shops who move applications into servers hosted by Rackspace, Amazon, etc. I don't want to bother with buying computing hardware from suppliers and plugging them in either - I lease computing services as needed. Because OCP will help Amazon build better datacenters it helps me and more and more other people every day.
Of course we still need some hardware, for running back-office applications, but I'm confident we'll still be able to buy cheap hardware for mail servers, Quickbooks, etc.
I realize my view is skewed towards small companies or small engineering organizations in larger companies, and there's a whole world out there of purpose-built datacenters and there's a whole other world out there, but you can't just ignore AWS-style hosted compute services in your OCP analysis.
This is the same security model for Java, if it wants to save a file in your sandbox, or save an application preference. The former prompts the user for permission... I don't remember specifically if saving application prefs requires user approval.
This is not to say this was a necessarily good, or easy to understand policy when it was introduced in Java. However, I'm sure Google's developers (correctly) figure as long as they do no worse they're meeting the status quo expectation.
Web applications will be storing data on user's machines, whether in a sandbox, gears, or some magic lockbox of the future. The faster the developers can all agree on the same method the better, so we can focus effort (and education) on this single point.
