Posts by The Bam 13 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jun 2015
Anyone who actually read Thompson's Turing Award paper would know that he did not include a Trojan in the C compiler. He merely discusses how he could have done it. That's the entire point of the paper: how can you trust the software you use? Still well worth reading today.
"To be fair, there has been plenty of warning. The plan was first mentioned in June 2020. "
It was mentioned in the sense of Arthur Dent being told about the new bypass. The mailing list I moderate (Evolution) learned about it a few days ago, with the warning that the change was due at the end of October, i.e. 2 weeks notice. It has since been put back another 2 weeks, but there is apparently no appeal. Some people are quite upset about this, as they feel the support for an email client should really be done by email and not some super-whizzo Web forum (even when said forum also supports email access, kind of, if you look at it sideways). There is some discussion regarding setting up an alternative list, with the attendant risk of fragmentation of the user community, but nothing has yet been decided.
Ironically, the support infrastructure for the Gnome lists, and Gnome in general I think, is provided by RedHat, but support for Fedora lists continues to use Mailman3 and people are perfectly happy with it. Hurray for consistency.
A possible stopgap would be for Google to require all OEMs to allow vanilla Android (without jumping through hoops) as an alternative to their bling-infested versions. Then leave it up to the users to choose which one they want. I've only ever had Nexus devices because I want Android, not Samsungdroid or HTCdroid.
I use my Kindle Voyage daily and have pretty much given up buying dead-tree books. However I do like the occasional physics or maths text along with the novels, and that's where the Kindle falls down. In theory a 300dpi display should be able to handle figures and formulae, but in practice it's a bit of a slog, largely because the slow refresh rate means it's quite hard to zoom and pan. AND reading most PDFs is a task only for masochists.
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