Posts by Tom 38

Ok, but why not run FreeBSD directly?

On servers, its awesome. Most every bit of hardware you will want is well supported and has great drivers.

On consumer kit like laptops, not so much. We lag behind with things that are primarily Linux driven by manufacturer choices. As an example, DRM support (that's Direct Rendering Manager, not any encryption malarky) lags behind Linux, so Intel graphics are really only supported up to Ivy Bridge.

This is because everything that Intel will push to the linux kernel has to be ported to FreeBSD, and there is a very small team of people (led by the awesome Juan-Sebastien Pedron) competent enough and with enough free time to actually do it. On Linux, there are teams of Intel employed software engineers doing this. Also, for a long time no-one in the Linux world could agree how the kernel interfaces should work for DRM; when there is that uncertainty, or it changes every year to a new system, it is disheartening to pour immense amounts of effort in to porting it.

Even when you have a consumer device manufacturer who does port stuff themselves, like nvidia who produce excellent closed source BSD drivers for their discrete cards, often there are rough edges, like missing CUDA or Optimus support.

I don't mean to be down on Intel, their server support is reasonable for chipsets and network drivers. (Its only "reasonable" because there is one guy for *BSD NIC drivers, and a team for Linux NIC drivers, and last I read Jack doesn't even get access to the cool test hardware, he has to borrow it from the Linux team..)

Re: Who is the thief?

Yeah, that's basically the definition of open source.

Do you really want to see physical searches before you are allowed on a train? Can you imagine the chaos at rush hour if that were implemented? Or the same at the entrance to bus stations and airports?

I don't disagree, but last time I went on the Shanghai metro, I went through a metal detector, my bag went through an x-ray machine and there was scope for me to be frisked. I'm fairly sure they weren't doing it at every station, and the next morning I was just waved on through, but clearly it is possible if citizens can't don't object.

Re: don't look at them.

As part of an investigation I was asked to carry out a few years ago I had to spend half a day retracing the browsing habits of an employee. A full morning of having to go through and categorise someone elses porn habits including a site that I didn't bother trying to get past the big "FBI has impounded this web page, it is a criminal offence to go any further" splash page.

There's not enough money in the world to make me do that, CP being a strict liability offence. FBI might have shut some of them down, but even the remotest risk of possessing content like that, even if ordered to do it to examine someone else's habits would have me going to the boss man and saying "No more - if *you* want to see what he was looking at, here are the URLs".

Re: You What?

These are all interesting data points guys, I can feel the synergy flowing through the project. Lets kick all the negativity in to the long grass and align ourselves to the big picture.

Re: teaching computing to kiddies.

They might even tempt some users back from Linux

I booted in to windows the other day, I wanted to update it to Windows 10 before it was no longer free (hey, I might not use it at all, but if I do need to use it, I don't want to have to pay again for the latest version). It did all its update perfectly happy, rebooted and now won't boot back up. Spent two hours trying different "rescue" options, none of them fixed anything, so I gave up and booted linux to play some TF2.

I don't think I can be tempted back now, even though I need to fire up a VM to book holiday (*20* different ActiveX plugins required!) or get my payslips (this is an awesome one, it only works in two versions of IE. I don't know if they are being deliberately ironic or just daft, but ADP have the temerity to call their IE-only portal "myfreedom"...)

Re: I looked into this a while back

He's now worth 4.5 billion according to Forbes but a figure as low as 2 billion is plausible.

He purposefully over-inflates estimates of his net worth. In 2005, he was claiming a net worth of $5-6 billion, but the a NYT journo got the inside track from 3 different sources with direct knowledge of his finances that it was actually $150-250 million dollars.

Trump got irate at this, sued the reporter (for $5 billion!) and lost, and then lost the appeal as well. His net worth is important because by inflating it he can access more favourable loans (how happy would you be lending $1bn dollars to someone worth $150m vs someone worth $10bn?). OTOH, it's largely irrelevant because he has shown (four times!) that when he gets a loan wrong, he's more than happy to let the company go in to chapter 11 and buy the assets at a discount.

Some people think Trump is this amazing property developer, whilst in fact most of his income comes from branding deals to put his name on buildings - its all one big shell game.

Re: Because data protection

Me: "You're my bank - you've called me on the number i've given you. I want to know *YOU'RE* who you say you are before I give out any personal information! Can *you* confirm *my* address?"

Bank monkey: *silence*

I think more of us are doing this, because last time I did this, HSBC refused to give me my information, but said I could call back to the telephone banking service, authenticate with that and then gave me a number to give to the CSR so that I would be transferred back to them, which seemed an acceptable compromise.

Re: Transparency doesn't matter

So men, women and.....?

Gender is not binary.

Re: Easier

I really don't fancy flying in a plane with ejectable wings.

Re: Netflix

https://openconnect.netflix.com/software/

Re: I find this one a bit difficult to believe

Red next to black, jump the fuck back. Red next to yella, cuddly fella

Re: Rule 3: Functions should be curried.

seq_7_10_13_16_19 = map(partial(int.__add__, 4), range(3,18,3))

Much too ugly*:

seq_7_10_13_16_19 = [ val + 4 for val in range(3,18,3) ]

* but you are obviously illustrating the FP aspect of it... list comprehensions are about as functional as I like to go ;)

Re: Making data recovery difficult

Twiddling bits in the CPU is not the issue, it is that some flash memory controllers in older SSDs (notably older SandForce SF-2281) are dependent upon it being able to compress the content that is being sent to it to achieve high read/write speeds. Encrypted data should be largely indistinguishable from noise and thus be very poor to compress, resulting in a lower disk performance than if the content was being loaded in the clear.

CPU speed doesn't come into it.

The only way the election process can possibly be truly transparent is to do the whole thing by hand

Fairly certain you can rig an election with paper ballots too - substitute one box of votes for another box of votes during transit to the counting station.

Utter BS. Transistors have a lifetime, particularly the more they get squashed down and used. You replace your servers on a rolling 3-5 year cycle, because dealing with the shitty intermittent problems that older servers give you is not worth the time when a replacement server will be faster and use less power. If you have servers older than 5 years old, and they actually do real work, replace them now.

Re: I never liked them anyway...

Meh, that's just BS. Before hungryhouse and justeat came along, most of the takeaways, particularly the cheaper ones, round my way (East London) either didn't deliver at all or only accepted cash. Having a single payment processor for takeaways is a win for consumer trust, enabling more places to deliver to more people and employ more delivery drivers and staff.

Similarly, TopTable can be seen as a parasite on restaurants, or a way that allows them to maximise their covers on a slow tuesday.

PS: What's going on? What all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here!

Re: And the winners are...

Don't be daft, the winners here are Rohan Silva and his merry band of pick-axe sellers.

%STOCK_YOU_DONT_UNDERSTAND_CANUTE_RESPONSE%

Re: A little obvious

There is good rigorous evidence that shared family mealtimes improve a number of childhood outcomes.

Correlation or causation? Perhaps a subset of "Good parents" is "Parents who share mealtimes" - but that doesn't mean that the subset is also a superset. From your linked PDF:

As mentioned in the summary of the Musick and Meier study, one of the most common criticisms of family meal research is that it is difficult to isolate family mealtime benefits as distinct from other factors in the family environment.

and

Family dinners may be part and parcel of a broader package of practices, routines, and rituals that reflect parenting beliefs and priorities. Interventions aimed at increasing the frequency of family meals may be successful only if they can change the family habits that tend to go along with eating as a family

So cargo cult parenting, that is having shared mealtimes but not the other family habits that shared mealtimes often imply, doesn't necessarily help.

Re: Needs just a tweak.

On civil construction / arquitecture, normally, the project is sucessful when the building stands the test of time (aka doesn't fall due to structural flaws).

Perhaps software needs to learn a page or two from other industries.

I notice very few buildings go up in an Agile manner. They all seem to plan ahead on what is required, and seem to get agreement from all parties on what will be built before they even start anything.

Ah, we can dream.

This make me ask: why does the person who committed the code still have commit rights?

No-one has "commit rights" anymore, this is the purpose of git. Linux sees pull requests, and he can see pull requests from anyone.

Regardless, whoever this was should still have their metaphorical "commit bit". Just don't present code like that again - plus, Linus use of invective about the crap quality has ensured that this is widely discussed, and the reasons why Linus doesn't like that code disseminated, and he doesn't have to tell any other junior neophytes from the cult of GCC not to do similar in future.

Re: Capitalism at its worse.

Restore it from backup? Oh you forgot to back it up? TIME FOR A CLASS ACTION OF ONE.

The company is also offering "every single external contributor" a free, lifetime licence

Again, they are not obligated to do that.

In fact, they are.

They are re-licensing all their external contributors work, which is not legal. To make it legal, they are proposing to re-license it under their new terms, with the consideration being the "free" lifetime license, and hoping that no-one says "No", or worse, says "No" and sues them.

Without consideration, there would be no incentive for the contributors to accept the change of license.