Posts by MacroRodent 1979 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
I wonder if traditional film cameras could be seen as more trustworthy? Of course, one could try to doctor the film by first making a doctored video, then transferring that to film, but an expert would very probably detect this, especially if he can examine both the film and the camera that it was allegedly shot with. The imperfections of cameras leave fingerprints. Besides it would make the faking much more laborious.
I recall one of the Burroughs' Mars books I read as a schoolboy set much of the adventure on one of the Martian moons, I forget which. They were already known to be very small, so to get his story going, Burroughs invented a law of nature that caused everything approaching the moon to shrink appropriately.
Let's see what happens to the Japanese probe...
Not only technology. 20th century European authors and composers had lots of trouble getting any royalties from the U.S. Famously the first paperback edition of the Lord of the Rings was published in the U.S without paying anything to Tolkien, and it wasn't even illegal back then!
> with tons of open source code out there. In the battle between Google and Oracle all those open source projects are the ones that will get hurt.
Why would that happen? As far as I know, Oracle has never threatened to go after open source projects that use Java as provided by Oracle, IBM, or now the OpenJDK (which is the official open source Java implementation). Google got into trouble because of their Java implementation that Oracle did not like, not their Java code itself.
There are reasons to dislike Java, but fear that it may disappear is not one of them. It is the new COBOL...
Unless they supply (or promise to supply) the source for the Linux kernel they ship at the same time as distributing the binary product to anyone outside Microsoft, they will be technically in violation of the GPL. In practice there is a lot of leeway, because those with copyrights in Linux aren't jumping in to sue every time there is change to do so. But I am sure Microsoft will be watched more closely than say some random router manufacturer.
@Kristian Walsh Yes, I do realise there is much more to rendering many scripts correctly than merely displaying the characters. But this discussion was more in the context of "can I show the poop emoji in a terminal window". But thanks for the lesson anyway. I wonder if there even can be such a thing as a Devanagari terminal window?
> Can you bundle Linux with Windows with their existing licenses?
As I understand it, there is no problem, if the kernel is provided as a separate executable (which I think it is in this case, because it is run inside a virtual machine), and Microsoft provides (or offers to provide on demand) the full sources for the kernel version in question, including any customizations they may have made.
(Disclaimer:I'm not a lawyer, consult one if a correct answer really matters to you).
As Linux terminal emulators have supported UTF-8 (i.e. Unicode) for a decade or more, emojis work just fine, provided you have installed and selected a font that includes them. (My Linux Mint installation appears to have that by default).
Microsoft again playing catch-up...
That said, as turns out, Assange was an idiot for not going to Sweden earlier.
Exactly. He would probably have been cleared, and I suspect there would have been a good change of him getting asylum status in Sweden. At the time he still had some freedom fighter reputation left.
> For orphaned Windows Phone users, the idea of a Microsoft Mobile Experience is more reminiscent of an David Attenborough nature documentary: "Look at the pretty thing, oh dear – it's dead now."
Heh. The other day I dug up from the drawer and turned on my Windows 10 phone, and let it update itself. After that the Windows Store stopped working in an interesting way. Blurry images move on the (perhaps an over-magnified version of the showcase banner), and nothing can be done. Seems several other people have the problem too (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/mobiledevices/forum/all/windows-10-mobile-store-displays-ghostly-screens/a99be0eb-7875-4689-8301-7b6958adceaa)
The pretty thing is indeed dead. - Except the problem does not affect my other, WP 8.1 based Lumia, confirming how big step backwards WP10 was.
Some of the verboten items make sense but I cannot figure out why they want to outlaw satin caps and bonnets? Not too long ago, a respectable woman wasn't dressed properly for public places, even in Western countries, unless she wore some headgear. As you can see on old photos, bonnets were common.
At least one thing is clear: interfering with the election was the most effective operation Moscow ever launched against the U.S. It does not even matter if it actually affected the election outcome or not. The resulting ruckus has helped paralyse Washington and increase internal divisions.
Even before bendy screens, the only mobile phones I have had mechanical problems with are those that fold: some old Nokia clamshell, and the N97 mini which I would have loved to keep on using, but the buttons and the touch features of the screen side stopped working, which made it unusable (some connection problem probably).
Of course, from a rational point of view Russia has no need to expand, you are right there. But nationalism is not rational, and autocratic leaders have always loved empire-building.
The sanctions you mention are a direct reaction to an actual case of Russian expansionism.
> The reds aren't coming over the hill for us because they cannot possibly win.
Depends on the definition of "us" (which to me seems to have become less defined under the reign of Trump). I agree Russia is not going to attack U.S or the Western Europe directly, but it is constantly looking for ways to restore the old empire.
> "the solution to pollution is dilution"
Works for small amounts of pollution, but not in the long run, as we have painfully learned with the atmosphere (and I don't mean just the CO2 problem, but also fluorocarbons and the acid rain problem). The ocean is also a biological system, which sometimes reverses your dilution (just ask the inhabitants of Minamata).
There is an even larger volume of rock to dig the waste in, and we can make sure the waste stays there until no longer harmful. Unlike the sea, the rock does not flow around, at least not on the time scales we are talking about (around 100 000 years, geologically an eye-blink).
> The reasons for not doing it are mostly political rather than scientific.
Really? Seawater is famously corrosive. The waste is more likely to stay put if the canisters are buried in solid rock. But the reasons why this does not progress either (in most places except Finland) are mostly political... not in my backyard etc.
> Do you believe they developed it without looking at Postgres code - and maybe even reusing some? They don't distribute it, so they're covered....
There would be no license problems even if they distributed something derived from Postgresql code. It is covered by a BSD-style liberal license (https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/).
> "WebAssembly has been designed to scale from tiny devices to large server farms or CDNs; is much more language-agnostic than Java; and has a much smaller implementation footprint."
Hmm, Java does scale: is used on anything from mobiles to big iron. And WebAssembly will no longer have smaller footprint after it has caught up with JVM features...
> Or ANDF
Exactly: This sounds just like ANDF warmed over. I guess the major difference is in licensing. ANDF was specified in the days of the "Open Software Foundation", where "open" meant "anyone can license this for the same fee". Linux, and Free and Open Source software ate that particular lunch long ago.
Or Linus on Linux ?
The team Linux is "lording over" isn't exactly small these days, and he is also no more such a critical resource many people think he is. Recall he took a longer leave last year, and his "lieutenants" kept things chugging along.
Samsung's Tizen didn't maintain compatibility and so hasn't really gone anywhere.
If both Samsung and Huawei started pushing Tizen, it could become the new standard with surprising speed! between them these companies are responsible for about third of the mobile phone sales.
I think it just did gif and that was it... or am I senile already?
GIF and X bitmaps. The latter was a textual image format common on the X11 window system at the time, really like a C header file that contains the bits in an initialized array, and #define:s giving the dimensions. So you could #include the file in your C program, and pass the array to a X11 drawing routine!
Article: OpenAI says it is withholding portions of the software to prevent it being abused to automatically churn out the equivalent of deep fake videos for the written word
Judging by the samples, a very, very premature concern. A human would do a much better job of faking someone's writing. In fact, this "AI" is very far from fooling anyone who reads more than a few paragraphs of the output.
One often gets into similar situations in Finland. I would say a camera as typically installed has more problems than a human in the driver's seat. The combination of two eyes and head movement makes it easier to separate the snow from the real scene. But ultimately one must drive slover and remember that in snow, a car starts behaving more like a boat. Turning the wheel or braking has a delayed effect.
Actually, a couple of years ago, when first learning about Docker, I encountered various documents online warning that one should not rely on Docker providing any tight security isolation, due to the way it was implemented. In any case security was not the purpose of Docker. It was just meant to provide a self-contained service, to get rid of dependency Hell.
I sort of assumed security was fixed later (have not followed closely) as Docker became popular, but apparently not.
Speaking of paper sizes, I remember the first released version of OpenOffice could not actually print (the relevant module probably contained some 3.party code that could not be open-sourced, and needed a rewrite). Of course, that was fixed soon, but it was a case or "release early" taken a bit too far.
By 32-bit compiler, I mean a compiler natively running on a 32-processor, or cross-compiling code for 32-bit processor. On such compilers, "int" and "long" are the same size, at least in all compilers I have used or heard of. (Nothing in the language spec prevents this), On 16-bit systems like the PDP-11 on which C was first implemented, "int" is 16-bit and "long" is 32 bit. Logically, one would have expected "long" to become 64-bit when going to 32-bit processors, but for some reason this was not done. (Probably some backward-compatibility concerns even back then).
The integer size assignment normally used on Linux and Unix systems on 64-bit systems is called LP64, and was chosen by some unix guru cabal back when 64-bit CPUs stated appearing, see http://www.unix.org/version2/whatsnew/lp64_wp.html
Well, actually native 64 bit code ensures 32 bit cleanliness.
Not quite, I'm afraid. On 64-bit C compilers in Linux, "long" is a 64-bit type. On 32-bit compilers it is a 32-bit type. A developer working only on 64-bit systems will soon assume the 64-bit "long", instead of laboriously writing "long long" which would have the same 64-bit size on both systems.
(I believe 64-bit Windows handles this differently, and keeps "long" 32-bit for just-in-case backward-compatibility, which I think is wimpy).
> Still clinging on to your 32-bit Linux installation? The team warns that after this version there will be no more Linux x86 builds.
No surprise there, major Linux distributions have dropped (or soon will drop) 32-bit builds as well. I expect soon popular software will be so full of "all the world's 64-bit" assumptions that keeping compatibility with 32-bit gets too laborious. Bit like porting software from 32-bit Unix computers to MS-DOS was a major pain back in the past.
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