Posts by saif 109 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Feb 2010
By requiring every company that delivers private communications to be able to disclose these communications on demand, states force the vendor installation of exploitable vulnerabilities. End to end encryption becomes meaningless. Telegram, while appearing to resist this kind of exposure, is banned by authoritarian governments.
This is just moving money between insurance companies and lawyers. The healthcare provider, the flawed software vendor, the insecure operating system supplier, the person who used "nude80085" as password or responded to phishing email will go unpunished.
I am anticipating the usual triggered anti-canonical posters. But while security and robustness is essential for industrial environments, for the ordinary desktop linux user this is probably excessive. Like cheapskate, old fogey, junk PC recyclers, I like to get software that did the basics with best performance and reduced space requirements on any PC. Not expecting my browser software to need to be isolated from CAD software or have to worry about negotiating layers of interfaces so that my non snapped photoeditor can interact with my snapped word processor. If there was a mechanism to "unsquash" the snap (ok, gonna be complicated) would be great.
My daughter at Uni uses ChatGPT to help understand things that are not clear in lectures, and finds things often /appearing/ to be explained better. The interesting consequence is that she feels her writing style is more like ChatGPTs than it used to be. We are what we eat. When we count on artifical reality for input, our natural outputs become indistinguishable from artificially generated ones.
After decades of evolution of systems inevitably develops capabilities that can not easily be replicated in a modern, up-to-date , monolithic project, even as the legacy technology becomes obsolete. As any one associated with NHS IT knows, revolution always leads to (hopefully temporary) degradation of performance at greater expense than just evolution...outsourced contractors just have to make promises, charge big bucks, then complain the problem is with the legacy system, and finally deliver an inferior product. This product, without benefit of bedding in and evolving itself, is thrown away because it cant compete with decades of adaption to user needs.
I doubt that Chinese systems are invulnerable to western hacking, it is as important to spy on allies as potential enemies. Just call it normal procedure, call it intelligence sharing; some might believe sharing makes for a more peaceful world...possibly,
Health is precious. Paying taxes for the NHS gives us a right to demand healthcare, turning it into a state-funded cash-cow. This means that we are expected by vendors to pay huge amounts of money for anything. They charge 12 billion for NPfIT and deliver nothing. e-Noting procurement will cost our trust several hundred thousand pounds a year to rent, whereas systems exist that deliver greater functionality for little or no cost. The trouble is that IT systems are procured based on marketing hype and projected functionality, with progressively escalating costs once the foot is in the door. Too late, we find they deliver much less but handcuff the NHS to a system which it continues to bleed money into. Decisions are usually made by self-promoting quangos and fools with a track record of making bad decisions, the normal selection criteria for such posts.
I suspect the patches that protect Intel users may inadvertently also throttle AMD users in many scenarios. Certainly if the patches come from Intel themselves, then it is likely they would not consider performance optimisation for non-Intel processors a useful goal.
This is from the tweet...so Linux now uses Windows Defender, eh? I suppose he might have discovered it using pen-testing software in Linux on virtualised Windows machine. This illustrates, IMO, why you need OS diversity; so that each can point out the pimples on the other one's nose.
A lot of activity that an business whose model relies on Open Source will generate no income. Investors are largely interested not in ideology but profitability. I am sad. Unity 8/convergence got a lot of hate, but was the product of people putting time, money and brains into something that benefits the community, There was never going to be any money in that and one man's pocket cant bank roll this forever.
So, interface is Internet Explorer (the 3rd or 4th most secure browser), can not connect unless security at the base station is reduced and then proceeds to send all mission data (apart from the pilots name) to US.... Great. Should meet all the RAF's requirements for a utility.
I really have no objections to folk chucking a few quid towards the RPi foundation; they have done a good job. We all know any one can get 7" Touch screen LCD (£40), WiFi keyboard+trackpad (£16), SD Card (£8), Power supply unit (Combined 5V and 12V for £3) and Pi3 (£30) Short HDMI cable (£2) (including VAT and delivery) from Amazon, making for a much more useful kit. The bundlers bundle not to save customers money, but exchange convenience (of not having to shop around, burn the OS onto SD and get a nice box with everything neatly packed inside) for some cash. It is, however, much more fun to make the better bundle yourself.
There is a hackable SD card that works as an SD card in you camera, but can be connected to over WIFI...the thing runs linux, offers a webserver and can present a busybox shell and uses a microSD as storage, allowing the files to be delivered to your PC wirelessly...and also potentially could be scripted for more adventurous activities
https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=45820
Foreign is a political statement either to win votes at home or to influence other countries' foreign or domestic policies, and much of the money disappears in bureaucracy; UK foreign aid at least targets poorer nations like Bangladesh, Ethiopia etc.
http://indy100.independent.co.uk/article/the-five-biggest-recipients-of-foreign-aid-from-the-uk--lJhmZ1Ttig
US Foreign appears to be targeting mainly places they have bombed and Israel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid
It is unlikely that any aid actually benefits the nation, but ostensibly British foreign aid is allocated to generally specific beneficial projects, I would say
Pity the article did not even mention Ubuntu. Windows Continuum, takes idea (maybe) from Ubuntu convergence, and Intel is "broadly similar to ...Continuum". My personal take is that this Mir vs Wayland debate all over again. Intel is a Wayland fan and Mir hater. If Mir can deliver convergence already then it is important for hem to prove that Wayland can do the same.
If the same launcher could be presented on Android as well as windows phones, then later find that android apps can work on Windows phones, then that Microsoft's browser is just skinned Chromium, and later find that Windows really runs a modified BSD Kernel, and then that Nadella and Linus were distant cousins, followed by the discovery that this was all plot by a branch of NSA, funded by the Chinese. Yeah...
And unencrypted verbal communications can be easily intercepted by any one in the same room. Ultimately what is required is a firewall at the universal ports not just at the the digital to analogue transformation layer...the interface between man and machine. We need the firewall between man and man. Speaking gibberish or Welsh might do it.
Presumably iMessage etc will not be viewed on the android device. Or once you have Facetime and iMessage and iTunes available on Android devices...one presumes there is no consumer need to have an iPhone. One might suspect that Apple's reason for allowing Android devices to connect with iPhones is to showcase how less effective Androidwear is on their iProducts compared with iWear.
When one is not trying to persuade people, sell something, it is easier to be honest and frank. When something of value has zero cost, it is not necessary to load your conversations with hype. What is clear is that enough credit goes to the huge community that supports Linux.
I guess the probability s that most people who will buy a windows PC for a Linux install, will probably want to try and dual boot. Certainly this was what i had in mind when I tried to install Linux variants (e.g. Ubuntu) on a some budget Lenovo E50 desktops. No amount of tweak and configuration/boot repair would allow Linux to boot....the UEFI boot order would always revert to Windows boot first, unless I crippled the windows boot altogether.
Energy obtained will not exceed, or even come remotely close to, the energy required to produce the lettuce. Waste produced will considerably exceed the digestible material generated. So the mass of the lettuce comes from 1) water and nitrogen from the astronauts urine and 2) CO2 they breath out. The only energy comes second hand from solar power converting light to electricity and back again. But most of the dry mass is cellulose which is indigestible to humans with normal gut organisms. Only way this could possibly work in long journeys if there was a composting sterilising facility, but even then realistically energy is better spent on earth and sending up dry, high energy, low residue foods, than creating a ecosystem in space. That is why The Starship Enterprise did not grow its own food, resorting instead to the replicator.
Sure Linux will run well on <1GB RAM...but it will run much better without KDE or Gnome Desktop Environment. Certainly a fully loaded hacker distro like Kali is perhaps not pre-configured for general purpose computing. I go Puppy Linux on my 12 year old laptop with 384MB RAM...with 20GB hard drive and certainly never leave home without bootable puppy on a stick
Romain lettuce is probably the least useful food source unless you have the gut bacteria to digest cellulose.. Of the mass of leaf, less than 2% is usable carbs and about the same amount of protein. Better would be perhaps algae. Sugarcane or potatoes probably even better but less practical. But more significantly, these plants presumably are not exposed to sunlight...instead one imagines solar power is used to charge batteries and then this is used to power lights shining on the plants...a terrific waste of energy to produce nearly no energy. If the earth's ecosystem is a good example...then one should be trying to cultivate phytoplankton and krill in fermentation chambers exposed to filtered sunlight.
This is a company that tries to make money supporting their distro. To do so it HAS TO attach its own "stamp"...its trademark. This is often incorporated within the distributed binaries. It also has to protect itself from liability from issues arising when someone else uses their derivative works.
The distro, by the rules of open source, is distributed with all the sources available.
Anyone can take advantage of the packaging, configuration etc that Ubuntu has done through developers it has paid, and thereby create their own distro, based on Ubuntu...but for Canonical to make any money out of this, it HAS TO ask that those that repackage Ubuntu into their flavours to remove that "stamp" that Ubuntu has applied. This constitutes a licensing agreement that is not contained within GPL and has to be by definition added later.
Nowhere does it remove rights of redistribution of the sources. Let's not forget that without Canonical, Linux would not have even the 1.5% penetration Linux has amongst the desktop user...
A recurring theme, where modern flight control systems control mechanical devices totally with software and electronics rather than using them to assist or resist mechanical actions. One suspects even if the pilots realised the plane was behaving unexpectedly, they would either have to trust the electronics to recover or probably not be able to anything about it in time anyway.
As Windows XP is possibly a lightweight(ish) modern Windows that can be virtualised easily and runs most modern Windows applications....as Macs go on the rise, the only access to Windows applications will be through virtual Windows, and they will probably use XP rather than Win 7+. Having said that, if the stats are generally derived from web usage I guess few people will run a browser on a virtualised PC.
There is already a reasonably intelligent fork of systemd that addresses much of the concerns while remaining largely compatible...uselessd. The difficulty is that for many tools systemd is becoming a dependency. This means that maintaining a fork of debian may also need to have forks of these tools too. What devuan lacks, and what systemd has is inertia.
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