Re: Bring back the good 'ole days
Unfortunately, Nokia and other manufacturers have had similar bugs in SMS, like the stuff in this The Register article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/21/sms_of_death_explained/
1979 publicly visible posts • joined 18 May 2007
At one point Mandrake, later renamed Mandriva (for trademark reasons) was a really good desktop distribution, perhaps the best if you liked KDE. I used it at home. But they had financial missteps and also managed to annoy their community with the for-pay Club whose benefits did not meet the expectations of many who signed up. I myself switched to OpenSUSE some years ago when it became clear Mandriva was going nowhere (tried also Mageia, but for whatever reason I could not get its early versions to work on my machine). But mostly I have good memories of the distribution. Some ideas and software from it still live on in others.
An "f" (MUSICAL SYMBOL FORTE) does look a lot like an "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f WITH HOOK) and both have more than a passing resemblance to the "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f), but they are all unique CHARACTERS even though the GLYPHS for these may be indistinguishable from each other, depending on font, styling etc.
Not to mention that there is a separate code point for "å" (a-ring) and the symbol for the ångström unit, although these are really the same character originally. All of which makes Unicode the Phishermans Friend. Ironically, originally Unicode tried to cram all the code points to 16 bits by "unifying" Asian letters that look the same. It is incomprehensible that "å" the letter and "å" the unit name, and many similar cases were not unified.
I've always preferred sites that allow you to create the question and answer yourself
Agreed. I have long wondered why there are prepared questions at all. When you write the question yourself, it can be made to relate to a personally memorable event or fact, which is easier to remember and far less likely to be discoverable by an attacker than something like mother's maiden name.
Do you recompile all of the libraries going into GCC/etc. from source? Do you recompile all the compilers from source? Do you trust the underlying OS?
When the source is available, there is a verification method for the toolchain: Diverse double compiling, described by David A. Wheeler here: http://www.dwheeler.com/trusting-trust/
The general idea is to use multiple independently developed compilers as a cross-check. It is not plausible that they are all subverted the same way.
Note that this verification is possible only if the source is available, giving open source an edge in trustworthiness.
Poor old Sailfish - started as Nokia's great hope, now bedrock for Finland's historic foe.
Aren't you exaggerating a bit the historical significance of smartphone operatng systems?
Anyway, too bad Sailfish hasn't exacly made it even here in Finland. The only Jolla:s I have seen have been in the hands of certified Linux fanatics. Lumia:s are fare more common. (I have one, so the NSA probably knows -or could easily find out- all my movements).
The Elbrus 4c used in the PCs and servers is said to support two instruction sets: very long instruction word and SPARC. It's also said to be capable of x86 emulation, and to run Linux natively, after one performs binary translation.
This is confusing... what is the real instruction set in it, homegrown, SPARC, x86 or ARM? After googling links for Elbrus 4c (hampered by my lack of Russian skillz), the most likely answer seems the homegrown VLIW, with some emulation support for x86. Sounds just like the plan that worked so splendidly for Intel Itanium... The native VLIW code might not be too slow, despite the low clock speed, provided there is a good compiler, but then all software has to be ported, so it is likely most users (if any...) will use it as a slow x86 replacement.
Elbrus by the way seems to also have been the name for a line of Soviet mainframes.
2) Memory limitations. The symphony is over an hour long, so can't be crammed into 48k of memory, especially in BASIC.
If a sufficiently large supply of Sinclair Spectrums can be assumed, the memory problem could be solved by using a number of them for storage. Some Spectrums act as "conductors" that issue playing commands to the "orchestra". When conductor #1 reaches the end of the score in its memory, it "passes the baton" to conductor #2 which continues where the first left off, and so on....
We won't get them back for two weeks due to the distances involved and the 1Kbps bandwidth for data transmission.
Bah, that is still faster than my first dial-up modem that ran at 300 bps. I managed to edit with Emacs through it, although some patience was needed, and an optimized /etc/termcap.
This becomes less of an issue if the train is in a tube or tunnel (the proposed track between Tokyo and Nagoya is 80% underground!)
They should dig it all the way, and also evacuate (as far as practical) the air from the tunnel. That would allow it to go even faster (1000km/h ?).
You cannot be compelled, as an EU citizen, to break EU law in order that a DIFFERENT US company satisfy a US court order.
In theory. In practice, if a senior guy from the parent company, say Twitter (US) comes to Ireland and tells an IT guy working at Twitter (Ireland) to hand the data or clear his desk, how many have the balls to resist the order?
Assumption - I am running a browser in a VM. The exploit can tell an attacker about anything else inside that VM but cannot "see" outside it.
Actually, the isolation breaks down because the CPU cache is shared by the VM, the host OS and other VM:s. What gets difficult is cache-mapping keystrokes that do not go into the VM running the snooper, but I would not be surprised if some really smart boffin finds a way around this, too.
The strongest AM stations I hear on a regular radio in Helsinki seem to be all in Russian. I am not sure if their signal is strong enough for a simple chrystal radio. Perhaps with a good outdoor antenna. The old Helsinki station could be received with just a couple of meters of wire indoors.
Here in Finland, the experimental DAB broadcasts were stopped 10 years ago, since nobody was interested. No wonder. FM is good enough, and the receivers are practically free.
What irks me is they also stopped the last remaining AM transmitter near Helsinki. Now I cannot build a crystal radio with my kid... :-(
People seem to be forgetting that Apache had a DoS based on the range header back in 2011 as well. Windows isn't the only one that has issues.
You mean this: https://httpd.apache.org/security/CVE-2011-3192.txt
That bug killed only the user-level Apache server program, not the OS it was running on, and did not lead to any remote exploit. So it was much less serious, thanks to keeping the http server out of the kernel.
So this too is larger than its predecessor.
The other day I was looking at a shop what was on offer in case I need to replace my Nokia Lumia 710 (mostly works well, but the browser is dated and is starting to have problems with modern web sites, and the camera is not too great), and was baffled by the large size of the phones, no matter which vendor.
I need my mobile phone to be mobile. The 710 is about the largest size that comfortably fits into my trousers' pocket, and it also has a nicely rounded shape. But all new phones with comparable features are larger, and many have sharp corners or edges. Are they really mobiles? I really would like to have a modern phone in a Lumia 710-shaped shell. Maybe I have to wait until the big size fashion passes.
" eventually going to take humans on the surface of Mars "
One problem here is that taking humans to Mars will almost certainly contaminate it with Earth microbes. (Where do the astronauts put their poo? They will certainly not take it back to Earth, for cost reasons). It would be safer to look for life with probes, which are easier to sterilize (and don't poo).
"You upgrade RHEL by nuking and installing from scratch."
Uh? This may be needed on major version jumps, but minor ones like 7.0-> 7.1 are upgraded in place.
Anyway, in corporate environments, IT doesn't want to hear anything about rolling releases in either Windows or Linux. Systems and in-house apps standardize on, say Windows 7 and RHEL5 for years, and major upgrading (apart from "patches") is done only when the disadvantages of sticking with the old start being painfully obvious. If Microsoft thinks they can dispense with clear versioning, then they will have trouble with the corporate market.
doesn't share lingusitic or cultural traits with the three Scandinavian countries
Linguistically? no, Finnish is not related to any Germanic language, but note that about 5% of Finnish citizens have Swedish as their mother tongue, and the language has an official status here. Culturally, Finland is very similar to Scandinavian countries because of the long shared history. After all, for hundreds of years Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden. We also have the same majority religion (Lutheran).
So the connection of Finland with Scandinavia is much more than "just happens to be in the neighbourhood".
Finland is said to enjoy strong legal protection over government surveillance of data, particularly when compared to neighbouring Sweden.
That is the current situation, but in a fit of incomprehensible me-tooism, officials now want to change that and allow mass surveillance of the net. Pure stupidity. It would not really help with security (baddies can always find a way around such wiretapping when aware of it), and would remove one competitive advantage in the data centre business.
If you compress your program files, however, the whole file needs to be read and decompressed before the handful of pages you were interested in can actually be used.
Not necessarily. If using a transparently compressing file system along the lines of DoubleSpace, a file consists of a number of compressed blocks. You can access randomly something within the file, and the file system figures out which compressed block holds the data you are interested in, and uncompresses only that. DoubleSpace actually worked at the level of blocks, not files, in order to support an unchanged FAT file system on top of it. What FAT thought of as an allocation block was compressed and stored in from 1 to 8 (or was it 1 to 16) smaller blocks, depending on how much the block could be compressed.
There's another 1.5GB to 2.5GB to be saved with compression of system files, but Microsoft says it won't put the squeeze on unless it can be done “ without compromising human-perceivable system responsiveness.”
Huh? Even in Pentium I days, compression&decompression was fast enough so that using "doublespace" or similar was feasible. What time the compressor took was more than made up by the reduction in disk I/O. (Personal experience, used doublespace to get most out of my 500Mb disk drive). Nowadays the gap between CPU and I/O speed is even larger, even on low-end gear, so this should be a no-brainer.
"Liquid water outside of Earth is very rare indeed, "
Not sure if we can say so any more. We now have strong evidence of three moons having ice-covered oceans (Europa, Ganymede and Enceladus), and there might be even more. Suppose we eventually find most of the liquid water in the solar system is not on Earth...
Several old sci-fi stories revolved around the idea that water is very rare outside Earth (like the TV series "V"(1983) where the aliens came to steal Earth's water). They seem quite dated now!
systemd
on Monday
>> enough large distros have decided in favour of it
>Err have they ?
>AIUI Debian haven't decided in favour of it, more like determined that they don't have the resources to fight it !
I never said _all_ large distros, just _enough_ of them. Including the most commercially significant Red Hat (and its derivatives), and SUSE/OpenSUSE, and now it seems also Ubuntu. Sure there will be non-systemd distributions, which is fine, in fact desirable, to avoid monoculture. But it is now clear that those who work with Linux in their day job (like me) just have to learn the ins and outs of systemd.
Once Microsoft decided they wanted to improve boot speed, some Linux people started worrying about it too, not wanting Windows to be able to boot faster than Linux.
Boot speed is important in many cases. Think cloud where you might set up a server very frequently. Or an embedded system where you want the device to start working as soon as possible after being turned on. (I just hate it how my shiny new flat-screen TV takes more time to become viewable than the old B/W valve-based TV from my childhood! - that at least had a good excuse for being slow: all the valves had to warm up first). Yes, SSD makes handling lots of small files more tolerable, but not having them in the first place is faster still. Another problem with traditional init is the large number of process launches that happen while processing the scripts. Process set-up eats CPU. Systemd avoids this, too.
(The logs and config may not be an issue with systemd if it has a decent text-mode viewing program - I honestly don't know!)
journalctl gives you pretty much what catting the log file gives. It also has various options for filtering the output, or printing in reverse. Still learning my way around systemd, but it clearly seems to be the future: enough large distros have decided in favour of it, so one either has to get used to it, or switch to some other OS (if you want BSD, you know where to find it), or some niche Linux distro. (No doubt holdouts will remain for a long time).
(where is the Borg icon?)
One theory I have read in some places blames the lack of Martian magnetic field, which allows particles from the Sun to blast away gases from the upper atmosphere. So the first step in terraforming Mars should be building a humoungous superconducting coil around the equator, and a big nuclear power plant to feed it :-)
The Gemalto hack is the product of poor use of cryptography that requires the private key exist somewhere other than on the SIM.
Remember that back when GSM was designed (1980's), mandaring public-key cryptography might not have been feasible. The first GSM phones had very little processing power. We are lucky to have any cryptography at all in the spec, some countries still force it turned off or weakaned in their networks.
The prof introduced us to the instruction set of the year old intel 8008 and we ran the code on an 8008 simulator running on a CDC 6400.
At the Helsinki University of Techonology we had an actual 8008 machine, very obsolete even then in mid 1980's, but still used for some student exercises. We were to write a little program by hand in hex, for and burn it into an EPROM chip, and run (the simple 8008 machine had no other storage devices). I must admit I cheated a bit: I used a 8080 assembler (running it inside a CP/M emulator in a PC, a set-up I already had around because of other interests), and avoided those instructions that were not available (the 8008 instructions were a sub-set of 8080).
Isn't the situation also a bit like "2010" where the astronauts&cosmonauts orbiting Jupiter are informed that a war has broken out between the countries.... (or something like that. Unlike "2001", I have seen "2010" only once; it is definitely not in the same league as the first film).
Many visual artists are just unable get the notion that in the online world, they cannot completely control what the viewer sees, even if they try their best (even if the display size and resolution happens to be exactly the same that the artist had, the colour rendering is off, unless you have a calibrated display!). That explains the obsession with Flash, which seems on the surface to do what they want. I know an artist, well-regarded in his field, whose web site is a huge Flash application that simulates a book, down to requiring navigation by "turning pages".
Yes, but unlike flash, Lego is the best thing in the world.
Sure! Except when you step on it. And especially if the brick is upside down. An event like this in my childhood caused me to learn just how thick the epidermis is under the foot. The brick sliced a neat sample of it.