"I felt like a punk ..."
Attributing the quote would be good form. Looks like that came from William Gibson's "Hackers".
1975 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
Given the Missy/Master gender discussions in "The Doctor Falls", this should really have not surprised anyone. The interplay of the two incarnations of the master was really the most delicious acting I have ever seen in Dr Who.
I got into Dr Who a few years ago, at the tender age of about 52 (my Missy found some disks for our son to watch, and we were all hooked- in Finland, the Doctor was not on TV when I was a child). Probably a heretical opinion here, but I find the "new" episodes better than the classic ones, which frankly are quite dated, and not just because of their cardboard sets and primitive special effects. The acting is usually better in the new ones, which makes the totally implausible stories fly.
Eagerly looking forward to seeing where the thirteenth Doctor takes us.
That is precisely how clandestine communications were conducted before the internet. Various embellishments were also widely known and used, like photographically shrinking the message onto a tiny piece of film, and putting it under the stamp. Of course, counter-intelligence agents learned to look for these tricks.
Just use a "standard" deployment of LTS with specific packages,
Exactly! Unless your needs are very special, and you have immense technical talent at your disposal, do not even think about a making custom distro, or even basing your work on some less-known existing distro. Let Red Hat, Ubuntu or Suse deal with the base OS. (If on shoestring, just use CentOS. You essentially get the reliability and utterlly boring predictability of Red Hat Enterprise for free...).
>So you deliberately create a slightly larger hazard in the road on either side leading up to the crossing. That way, no-one can actually reach the crossing unless they are also able to cross it.
> (Or has some sociopath got a patent on that idea...)
Hardly. It would just be a slightly larger speed bump. I have also sometimes seen horizontal striped bars hanging from chains before unusually low bridges or underpasses, in the hope that the driver of a tall vehicle would at least hear the CLONK, before hitting the bridge....
>I'm guessing you're not old enough to understand what the crux of the problem was.
Actually, I am, even fixed a couple of minor Y2K bugs back then. And after Y2K, I have seen applications again start assuming 2-digit years, just for convenience, only difference being they are now 20xx dates. Memory usage isn't really the problem, but the laziness of developers and users...
Besides, many Y2K fixes were really hacks that assumed 20xx after some cut-off year. They run into trouble even before 2100!
NO. NT 4 had the 1st version of NTFS (.sys) which blew up regular and often.
Actually, Windows NT 3.1 already had NTFS, it was one of the headline "New Technology" features. The consumer Windows 3.1 (no NT) used FAT, because it still ran on top of MS-DOS, which at that time didn't even support long file names.
> Try this library link:
OK, I stand corrected and humiliated. Got to reserve that one via the Helmet system... But common it isn't, the only Finnish copy I have come across was in the bookshelf of an old farmhouse, where it probably was acquired pre-war. Sitting there next to an edition of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", an almost equally infamous book.
>Put a Project Orion craft outside the magnetosphere and said radiation wouldn't be a problem
Trouble is, you would need dozens of ordinary rocket launches to deliver the little nuclear bombs to your bomb-powered interplanetary ship. They would probably cause a of concern and protest, to put it mildly. I fear this idea will not fly, until you can manufacture the bomblets off-Earth.
Interesting and mind-boggling question. I would propose that the energy did in fact not come out of the holes, but from the space-time itself, which got whipped around by the orbiting holes. Aren't black holes nothing but holes punched into space-time?
I really would love to hear an explanation from someone who really understands this stuff.
systemd
-free Devuan hits stable 1.0.0 status
And the choke point is controlled by whom, exactly?
Systemd is licensed with LGPL. So anytime the current developer tries to act up, and annoys enough users, it gets forked. Just like happened with Xfree86, MySQL, and OpenOffice, among others. That is one of the reasons for the existence of GPL and other free software licenses: Nobody has a chokehold.
It is also the case that fuzzing is no panacea. Nevertheless, it often does uncover interesting results. I have used a form of fuzzing to test a cross compiler I worked on. One more tool in the toolkit, but a wise tester should use others as well.
Could someone explain how holograms would make sense in small devices? Real holograms don't "project" anything, they are more like windows that show the apparent 3D object, but this image cannot be larger than the substrate of the hologram itself. There are other ways to create 3D images that can be viewed without glasses from different angles, but these involve lighting up "voxels" in some medium, like mist or a translucent block, and these are not holograms.
Yeah, but ... Ever try to hop swap an ST-506?
As I remember it, you could not even move it to a different PC while cold, and expect to read the old data. (Tried it with my first two PCs). Some data was visible, but most was unreadable. The controllers evidenly controlled the drive in slightly different ways.
Not putting all the electronics into the same box with the mechanics? Who could have thought of it?
Sigh.
Wonder if the original floppy drives would be prior art? They had very few smarts, the microcomputer had to control them in great detail, which was one reason why in the old times, floppies from different microcomputers usually had different incompatible physical formats.
Philips tried to redefine the C-cassettes as a digital format: Recording compressed audio digitally (some for of MPEG2-compression I think) on tape cartridges the same size as classic C-cassettes. This was supposed to be also backward-compatible: DCC recorders could play back (but not record) analogue cassettes, even though physically the cassettes looked quite different. The DCC cassette had a sliding tape protector, and was inserted only in one way, no flipping by the user needed. (It still had A and B sides, but switching between these was handled by the deck).
The sound quality was actually not bad, I owned a deck (probably still somewhere in the cellar) when they were in firesale mode. CD quality, as far as my ears could tell. But the format was harder to use than analogue cassettes. You could not just throw them in, and start recording, some formatting was needed. Also any dirt in the recording head killed it, and one way to get the head dirty quickly was to use the advertised compatibility feature and play back analogue tapes...
Also it had the problems of tape in seeking to a desired track. It could seek automatically, but it took time. The rival Sony MiniDisk did not have this problem, so it won, sort of.
Both formats were of course finally obsoleted by MP3 files on the Internet, and MP3 players.
> Putting a countdown in a computer window should count as a trivial and obvious extension, so not patentable.
Yes, in a rational intellectual property system it would. Unfortunately many existing software patents are of the form "implementing a <some well-known operation> using a computer".
if the deadlines mentioned above aren't met the social network's designated complaints-handler could be fined up to five million Euros, while the network itself could cop a fine of 50 million Euros.
Hard to picture anyone wanting that complaints handler job. Probably the only way to survive is to immediately take down anything complained about, which then causes its own problems.
either having both the device and the phone talking out through the firewall onto some suppliers server, or else custom building a load of hardware myself.
The first is unacceptable to me on security grounds, and the second is more hassle than I want to get into.
Sounds like a business opportunity for someone who can package the home automation server into a device for installing at your own location easily!
such as a near-immediate threat of ID theft and breaching of anything we would like to control such as Internet banking and Internet shopping
Actually there would be no effect on banks, they can encrypt the communications between them and the clients all they want, but as an organization a bank is already compelled to keep records, and provide them to investigators if ordered to do so by courts.
The law enforcement types are really only after end-to-end encryption between individual people, or people and shady organizations.
>Right now, for example, any CSS file in the head of an HTML document must be downloaded and rendered before a page can be displayed.
I don't quite get this. CSS files aren't rendered, instead they affect how the HTML is rendered. I suppose you could load them incrementally, but since each CSS file can override the previous, and there are also default rendering rules, wouldn't the effect be that of the the formatting of the page twitch and shudder strangely, until all CSS has been loaded and interpreted?
(Actually I have already seen that happen if the CSS for some reason loads slower than the page).
For me the reason has been than MS provided a pile of storage for free. (Due to various grandfathered offerings, it is currently 40Gb with no payments - will not apply to any latecomers, nyah nyah). But if MS starts being this evil to Linux OneDrive users, I guess I will reconsider.
Btw there also exist programs for using OneDrive without a browser on Linux to sync directories, but so far I have been too lazy to find out how well they work.
The downside is you then really *have* to learn about those configuration files and scripts, before getting anything done. Also to get beyond the spartan base system, you have to install lots of software from the "ports". This is fine for experienced users of unix-type systems, and for those with lots of motivation to become one, but for others the learning curve is a bit too steep. Installing NetBSD now is an experience similar to installing one of the first Linux distributions in early 1990's...
(Having said that, I might well give NetBSD 7.1 a go on one ten-year old PC I have at home, which currently has an old OpenSUSE Linux on it, and might not have the power to run the latest version so smoothly...).
And why would I do that?
For some embedded purposes, NetBSD can be a good choice. Among other things, it is generally leaner than Linux, and has liberal (non-GPL) license. But you probably do not want it on your desktop, unless you really love Ye Olde Unix style of doing things.
"Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft,"
So there were supposed to be recent updates? I have a Vista inside a VirtualBox VM on the personal Linux minilaptop I lug around (just in case a Windows is needed, but it has not actually seen much use), and updates stopped working on it over a year ago.