Posts by John Savard 2460 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
If Google's additions to the Linux kernel were so designed as to be only relevant to Android systems, then they would indeed cause bloat to the kernel, which should be avoided.
However, this should have been addressed in a diplomatic manner, giving Google an opportunity to resolve the issue. Perhaps there would have been a way of making the Android-related code an optional extension to the Linux kernel, for example.
If people find stuff from Google's Android useful, it may indeed happen that Linux will become history, and Android will replaice it. Is this spat with Google worth risking that possibility?
Buffer overflows are a potential hazard in Linux and BSD as well as in Microsoft Windows.
In IBM's mainframe operating systems, and in VMS, they're much less of an issue, because text files on disks are organized as a length code followed by the characters in a record, instead of characters followed by a carriage return, line feed, or both. So if the length code is one byte long, for example, it's impossible for a 256-byte buffer to be overflowed from a disk file.
And the other I/O routines in those operating systems are designed to follow the same model. So the driver software takes care of buffer overflow, and applications programmers only have to follow the correct calling sequences for the routines they use; they don't have to spend extra cycles checking for overflow themselves.
For Linux, this late in the game, to shift gears and change from a Unix model to a traditional mainframe OS model, though, would seem highly impractical, I admit. And a new OS project would likely never get very far in terms of adoption.
would be better. I would think that a quad-core version with more RAM would not be a lot more expensive, and, as noted, it has a decent graphics chipset.
While this specific system is expensive for its CPU power, presumably the touchscreen hardware does cost money - so the premium for it would be easier to accept on a more upscale system.
...was used for a satirical video about those CDs with thousands of fonts on them. I suppose it's a great example of a tantrum.
It is true that a Tablet Mac would have been a useful product; if Apple had made a Tablet Mac with multitouch extensions to OS X, it could indeed have been a major item.
But while the iPhone 10" does underwhelm me, hey, it does also double as an eBook reader. That is something useful. Except not anywhere but in the U.S., as I've learned from the Register. And the video seemed to have one thing wrong: I thought you could make phone calls with it. Perhaps I was mistaken.
It should be impossible for this to happen - and yet it should be possible to run any application on the iPhone like on a real computer. Just as regular computers should be safe from dialer malware.
It's really quite simple. One computer runs applications. A separate CPU handles telephony. So, with a computer with a dial-up modem - whenever you want to connect to a BBS or dial-up Internet, you have to dial the number on a separate telephone keypad that plugs into your modem - it cannot be commanded to dial out by the computer or software.
With a device like the iPhone, but more versatile, you have one physical button to switch from computer mode to phone mode - in phone mode, you're talking to a cell phone with a built-in browser and its own plug-in application format, protected by encryption; when not on the phone, you can be in computer mode, and play games and even write your own programs. In that scenario, the "phone mode" can be more locked down than the iPhone without limiting the versatility of the device, and the "computer mode" can be wide open, because the computer CPU has no access to the telephony capabilities.
Is this rocket science or what?
The fact that the Internet is so useful and convenient that lots of people will turn there first for everything they can get there, rather than turning on the telly or stopping in at a store to buy the daily newspaper is why the newspapers are getting their foot in the door first with free, and waiting until they either find a business model or go bankrupt, whichever comes first.
They're working on the assumption that if they didn't give away the crown jewels on the web, somebody else would come in with a second-rate web newspaper - and that would kill them just as dead. So they're warding off competition while frantically looking for a business model.
That's the "gun" they see pointed at their heads.
Breaking an asteroid into pieces is not the right way to deal with it. Instead, one would dig a hole in the asteroid, put the nuke in there, so that it would vaporize part of the asteroid, ejecting the results out of the top of the hole. The principle is the same as a rocket engine, but with much more energy involved, since an asteroid is much heavier than your ordinary spaceship.
The United States should put an end to China's imposition of its values on Tibetan people, whose culture was negatively impacted by the Cultural Revolution.
A preemptive strike as soon as possible - before China obtains a second-strike capability - is Tibet's only real hope. Of course, it may already be too late, in which case, the United States' failure to act promptly after the collapse of the Soviet Union opened a window of opportunity is responsible for the continued agony of Tibet and the possible ultimate annihilation of its culture.
If imposing values on other cultures is wrong, then shouldn't we put a stop to the genuine examples of this?
It all depends what they're locking down. If they're getting rid of the domains of BitTorrent tracking sites, that's one thing. But if they're getting rid of domains used by viruses to take control of people's computers, that should be done as quickly as possible. There should be no botnets out there.
China running out of 10-inch LCDs, and now this. Apparently this new product will indeed be an enlarged iPod Touch, then, which is only good for running approved software, if it is at least partly an eBook reader.
It could still be true that if it isn't available in a cell phone version, Apple might have a more liberal policy on applications for it than for its companions, and actually allow applications that users can program themselves. I dearly hope so, even if I personally wouldn't be likely to buy one in any case, because I would like to see Apple make something useful.
Instead of a cool toy that could have been a useful and powerful tool, but which Apple has forced to be just a toy.
I was saddened by the fact that Avatar, a movie clearly based on unfortunate aspects of the interaction between American settlers and the indigenous people there, was being made now, while battles rage in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thus the entertainment industry should be making patriotic movies that make Americans feel more positive about their country at this time.
That any kind of a movie about justice - even one with Americans as the bad guys - is frigtening to the Chinese authorities, of course, is a sad commentary on the depth of their fear.
Parliament should take note of this, and go into emergency session to protect the rights of the British working man by passing new laws which forbid employers from interfering in the on-line activities of their employees - with exemptions for M. I. 5, M. I. 6, the Communications Research Establishment, and so on, but not for a mere rugby team.
Clearly, this would not have arisen if there weren't a market failure going on, and so legislation is clearly also needed to ensure that the player's labor union, and not the league or the team owners, is in the driver's seat. After all, Britain has a Labor government now; it's not as if Margaret Thatcher is still running things!
It must be about ten years now, if not more, since Cadbury Choco disappeared from the stores here, and the only choice for powder to make cold chocolate milk (for hot chocolate, one can still get Fry's Cocoa) is Nestle's Quik. (There was a brief period when Hershey's also made a powder that was on our store shelves, now that I think of it.)
Cadbury chocolate bars, however, are still readily available in Canada. I am saddened to hear of this news, the more so with the information contained in these comments.
Failure on the part of the police to take the swiftest possible action against terrorists could cost the United Kingdom far more dearly, as it might mean that thousands of Britons are killed in a terrorist act that could have been prevented. Compared to lives lost in a terrorist attack, money lost in a lawsuit is a mere trifle - as if, of course, a terrorism suspect is in a position to sue anyone.
I would think that the net result of this could be the UK's departure from the European Community, if the price of membership is anything which could compromise, in any way, its ability to defend itself against terror.
I know that Windows 3.1 was not widely deployed when it first came out, as for quite some time people continued to use DOS. And it was a dot release, so perhaps it is considered to be the equivalent of SP1 for Windows 3.0. Or maybe only Windows 3.11 was widely deployed, because it had Internet connectivity built in (Windows 3.1 required that a third-party Winsock be added.)
One could even note that the most popular early releases of MS-DOS were 1.1, 2.1, and 3.3 in that case. And there was the data compression fiasco that affected MS-DOS 6.2.
However, I think that MS-DOS 5.0 managed to achieve wide-scale deployment without a dot release.
Altera has a unique strength in the FPGA field, in that it has "antifuse" technology; links that can be programmed to open a circuit, rather than break one. This allows an FPGA to be more efficiently structured around smaller pieces.
The FPGAs from Lattice Semiconductor and Altera are programmed by means of on-chip flash memory.
Xilinx, however, has a different unique technolgy: on-chip RAM is used to contain the programming for the FPGA. This is such an obvious advantage when programs will be changed frequently that their technology would seem to be the only candidate for HPC applications. This doesn't rule out buying another FPGA company, and licensing crucial elements of the technology from Xilinx, of course.
All Yahoo! stated was that it was working together with Google to fight against hacking. There may well be a lack of evidence of any involvement of collusion by the Chinese government in the hacking, but it is not seriously disputed that the attacks took place.
Doubtless, Yahoo! will issue a clarification that will make this sufficiently clear that its local partner can admit its error without losing face.
There could be another disaster for Apple besides this announcement being of some minor product.
One industry magazine web site speculated that, instead of being a Macintosh computer with the tablet form factor, it would instead be an overgrown iPhone, complete with the need to buy all software through the App Store.
Maybe some really die-hard Apple loyalists could stomach that, but I know my reaction would be to join the chorus bent on laughing the product - and Apple - out of the industry.
An intermediate possibility, that while the new product would not be locked down like the iPhone and iPod Touch, it would not be compatible with the Macintosh, would be another matter altogether. This would make it a more significant announcement. While foregoing compatibility would still be highly questionable, and fraught with risk, in that case Apple could, at least conceivably, offer new capabilities which justify the change.
In Malaysia, while non-Muslims are permitted to consume beverage alcohol, Muslims face criminal penalties if they do so.
Will Malaysians be required to identify their religious affiliation so that one of three alternate filtering strategies - one for Muslims, another for Christians, and yet another for Buddhists - will apply to their Internet traffic?
I remember reading that the flints used in cigarette lighters are made of "misch metal". This is what you get when you process rare earth ore into metal without bothering to do the difficult step of separating the different rare earth elements.
Does all our misch metal also come from Chinese mines, for the same environmental reasons? If not, maybe the real issue is that the difficult process of separating the elements is more cheaply done in China, or that the separation, not the mining, has the environmental problems.
Back in the days of phone dialers, the companies getting the money were in Belarus - and the phone companies had to forward the money to them, because of international treaties. Since the government of Belarus failed to act against those 900 numbers, I'm surprised the treaties weren't renegotiated - with telephone service to Belarus cut off until they joined the new treaty. Our governments need to be tougher when it comes to protecting their citizens.
I agree massively that announcing a new slate computer would not fit with the general subject area for today's announcement that they've announced ahead of time. Virtualization is important, it's a growing area, so it makes sense for Microsoft to make sure that its offerings in that area are competitive.
The way this article approaches the subject, though, it makes me think of a new Microsoft product that is more aimed at locking out the competition than providing improved capabilities. That only works when customers don't have alternatives. So if there is a Microsoft virtualization announcement today, it had better be a better one than the article's author is hoping for!
Even most of the new security measures brought in after 9/11 aren't "needed" in a sense, because the awareness of what a hijacked plane can do will make passengers and pilots behave differently.
One post noted that part of the cause for the paucity of successful terrorist attacks is that al-Qaeda is being kept busy. But there's another missing piece of the puzzle.
Now that al-Qaeda has shown us how it's done, it is not beyond a stretch of the imagination that some man, distraught because his wife has left him, will decide to go out with a bang. Without tight security, there could be enough such attempts for one to succeed.
The terrorists, when not kept busy, may look for other force multipliers becides airplanes. Some news stories questioned whether India did enough to investigate the possibility that Soviet agents, rather than Union Carbide, were really responsible for the Bhopal disaster. Deliberately causing something like that is very likely to be one possible plan they're investigating.
I think that a 1 GHz chip certainly has enough oomph to do plenty of useful work. Especially if it was running, say, Windows 3.1 instead of Windows 7. (Or even Windows 98, for that matter, it's so powerful.) Of course, that product is no longer available from Microsoft, but one can run a stripped-down version of Linux... or even a free clone of MS-DOS.
Ah. If it can't run Windows 7, then I suppose there's no real reason to use an x86 chip instead of, say, an ARM chip, or a PowerPC chip, or a bunch of other possibilities? That could be, but it seems like this particular performance and wattage spot isn't occupied by other architectures.
If Microsoft made a whole new operating system that wasn't upwards compatible... all it would have going for it is the Microsoft name.
People would no longer have a real reason not to consider switching to the Mac, or to Linux.
And so they could do that in droves, and Microsoft would be history. There's just no reason for Microsoft to bet the company like that. What new and exciting features could they add to a new operating system that was incompatible that couldn't be added to Windows instead?
This would level the playing field between Microsoft and Apple and LInux. Why level the playing field when you're winning?
This would mean that construction began in 2005. In 2003, it was already announced that Freedom Tower - or 1 World Trade Center - would be 1,776 feet high.
I find it to be somewhat in poor taste that they would go off and build something taller than that. But then, so was renaming Freedom Tower to have a more safe and innocuous name.
Many books are published by people who claim they have seen flying saucers. Since some people are gullible enough to think they have enough chance of being true as to be worth reading, such books are, in at least some cases, profitable to write.
So the authors copyright their books. The fact that a book is copyrighted doesn't mean anything about the truth of its content. Sadly, some books filled with nonsense are even published by reputable publishers.
Yes, Russia wants to involve other countries in this mission. So this proves they're not planning to get Apophis to smash into the Earth.
But, you fools, can't you see their obvious plot? They want to get the other nations to participate so that they can steal these other nations' superior asteroid-moving technology. Then, thus armed, they'll sneak around and send some other asteroid smashing into us!!!
The 21st Century began on January 1st, 2001, since the first century A.D. began with the year 1, as the article noted.
However, you never hear people talking about the 197th Decade. It's always the 'sixties. So that does include the years from 1960 to 1969 inclusive.
And, of course, while it may be amusing to note that we could estimate the date of the birth of Christ more accurately these days, I think we shall continue to celebrate New Years in accordance with the calendar we are actually using, rather than alternate calendars we might be using.
Multiple cap and trade pools, or taxes combined with subsidies, do make sense.
One umbrella cap and trade means energy will only be used by those who are able to pay the most for it. The result of that is that the price will rise, and so poor people will be left with inadequate home heating. So to take care of other market failures besides pollution, what we actually have to do is first use rationing for the essential uses of energy, and then with a cap and trade system for everything else, let the market take care of the non-essential uses.
Taxation has another problem; it may raise the price of energy to match the damage, but that only makes sense if the places experiencing the damage are the ones collecting the tax. Reimbursing the tropical countries affected by global warming was one of the other things left out at Copenhagen.
I'm just surprised they ever had internet access in China. Instead, one would have expected them to simply have their own network, with Internet access only available to top government and military officials, and - under tight controls - to senior researchers at top academic institutions.
I would have thought this scheme would still be useful if it applied to people flying to the UK from outside the European Union. Now, all we need is for every other country in the EU to adopt a similar scheme for people flying to their countries from outside the European Union, and the EU will be safer from terrorists.
Back in the days when Power PC chips were used in the Macintosh, I had thought that - notwithstanding their infamous 1984 advertisement - that IBM really ought to buy Apple. That would have given it a way to make personal computers that had real added value in them, compared to the price-sensitive PC clone market dominated by Microsoft and Intel... which basically turned IBM, the originator of the PC, into just another clone vendor.
Now, of course, it's too late for that, what with the Intel Mac.
I'm sorry, but I don't see why there should be one law for Google and another law for everyone else. What part of "All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher." didn't they understand?
They ought to have multiple threads per core; not two, like Intel's HyperThreading, but eight or more. Because if you don't have a long pipeline, that means you're not cutting the instructions into small enough pieces.
Without having to devise faster transistors, just keeping more of them busy, one could achieve a clock frequency that is four times higher by cutting the instructions into four times as many parts. Unless, of course, they took that as far as it could go back in the days of the Pentium 4.
The main problem is that Google is displaying advertising on the RapidShare site, and so if Microsoft is still doing that as well, no wonder it is still included in the suit. And, while it's true that people can just pop a Google ad banner on their site, with Google having to check what the site is for after the fact, now they must both know, having received their DMCA notices about the links. So they're making money off of copyright infringement.
The main reason we want to fight climate change is because of its devastating effects on people in the world's poor countries. It hurts us a little - invasive species in the south-western U.S., fires in Australia - but the main threat to the developed world is the long-range threat of a rising sea level, and the possibility of an ice age triggered by the Gulf Stream being switched off.
So any scheme that has the potential to encourage corrupt dictatorships to harm their poor (or, worse yet, ethnic and religious minorities) must indeed be safeguarded against that.
Including one's religious affiliation on a resume is simply not done.
However, it is definitely true that if someone is not a Muslim, but from part of the world where most people are... since one puts one's name on one's resume, one is identifying one's ethnic affiliation.
How do you send the message that one is not a terrorist, one does not support discriminating Jews and Christians based on their religion, that one supports the equality of women? For that matter, how does someone in that situation who is a Muslim do that?
Of course, if the Muslims had never been allowed in the country in the first place, this fellow wouldn't have that problem. But it's too late to fix that, since I really am against discrimination.
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