Re: Who said it was natural?

And they'd be aiming for something, say, the size of a small moon?

Re: Bad idea

"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

-- Scotty

Re: just 'cause

Read silent_count's message again: He never said he was talking about a profit tax. Import duties, for example, would fit his bill.

Now, if you want to argue this runs afoul of all sorts of trade agreements, then you might have a point.

Re: Another technique

The tricky bit is avoiding false positives -- read: pissed-off customers.

Re: Cutting it?

You did bring your lightsaber, right?

Re: But hang on

11 year cycle. Distance between min and max is a half-cycle.

11/2 = 5.5.

2013 ish + 5.5 = 2018 ish

Re: Bleeding obvious

I wants me some of that ceramic! I think you've just invented Puppeteer Hull Metal.

Re: Minimum?

Different time scales of minimum and maximum.

NASA is talking about the maximum of the current 11-year cycle. The people who argue we're moving into a protracted minimum mean that the current and several following 11-year cycles would be much weaker than usual, some perhaps to the point of being undetectable.

In other words, NASA is saying "This is maximum of the decade", the minimists are saying "These maxima will be the smallest maxima of the millennium". These two statements do not contradict each other.

Now whether the minimists are correct and whether such a minimum would have effects on the climate, is a matter of some controversy.

Re: Somebody PLEASE!!!!

For a Photoshop-only situation, that may work. Although, as close as I can figure it out, Gimp is still missing some features that my graphics friends consider indispensable, such as a seamless PDF process.

And Gimp is comparatively mature. Any studio is also going to want Illustrator & InDesign & friends. Good luck finding adequate competition there.

Somebody like me on the other hand, who just needs to occasionally slap a bitmap into submission, I've switched to Gimp years ago and never looked back. So this is going to be a serious case of YMMV, but I suspect the majority of the professional CS users will be stuck like a yacht in the middle of the Sahara.

Re: There is more to Linux than Ubuntu

@Steve Davies 3: So it is, and yes, you caught me skipping subheadings. The flimsy excuse is that my RSS reader seems to encourage that, but it's a flimsy excuse.

I'm still confused as to the relevance of the particular objections given to the article at hand, though.

Re: There is more to Linux than Ubuntu

I'm sorry to hear life's so frustrating to you, but would you mind explaining what relevance your opinion of Ubuntu has to the article?

Re: Email account password probably "very important"

In the sense you mean you always only have a single password. Even if your partner had eidetic memory, that wouldn't stop a crook from using the password reset feature.

Re: Proper backronyms required

Maybe because they already have a REHAB?

Re: Oh FFS

It's a lot worse than that. On a system the size of PayPal's (or even on a system a tenth that size, for that matter), there should be a framework in place that does this stuff for you, will ye or nil ye. The art of programming in the large is making sure that is easier to do things right than to do them wrong.

So either somebody broke out of the framework and this wasn't picked up in QA or there isn't an adequate framework. Either way, they have a structural problem.

You better know exactly at what frequency those alarms operate. A quick scan of the paper says that if the actual frequency is off by 10% from the design frequency of the cloak, the cloak's pretty much useless.

Re: Wot no checksums?

The price of bandwidth doesn't enter into it. The equipment on Mars and on Earth, the distance between the planets and the position of the Sun fix the maximum total bandwidth.

If you really want round-the-Sun radio coverage, you shouldn't be looking at error codes, but at some relay satellites in Earth's orbit around the Sun, but lagging or leading Earth by a significant amount. Then between Earth and the satellites, one should always have line of sight to Mars.

Re: Wot no checksums?

All forms of error correcting code have a price in bandwidth and the more correction you need, the more you pay. There comes a point where it doesn't make sense anymore.

Re: Useful Service Pack

Just to the 'just out of interest' portion of your post: Take a look at apt-cacher or apt-cacher-ng.

Re: small cells?

@AC15:47: "I just feel sorry for the land-locked population of luxembourg who get many countries to roam with."

Try Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog one of these days. Half of the town is Dutch, the other half is Belgian. On some roads, you cross the border a dozen times in a couple of hundred meters. Great fun watching your satnav go gaga as it can't keep up with the 'Welcome in ...' messages.

Re: Of the things I'd like to see in the next...

I just checked: It's gnome-system-monitor under Unity. Mostly I do ps auxg | grep commandname and then kill, though; that works under any desktop system, including the 80x24 variety. :-)

Re: Question

I'm not sure what qualifies as a button in your book, but the download for the Kubuntu version (with KDE rather than Unity) is right there on the website. Adding the stock GNOME manager on a Unity install is one extra package and if you really want, you can set up your system so that you can select a different desktop every time you log in.

BTW, I agree with your 'tinfoil' position: that switch should default to off. But, as long as the default position of the switch is the only issue, I'll live with it. (At some indefinite time in the future; for the time being I'm still on 12.04 LTS and when people ask my opinion, that's the version I recommend.)

Re: oh joy, more bloat

Hmm...might I suggest running an OS of the 2010s on hardware from at least the 2000s? My 5 year old laptop does these "couple of minutes" in an instant and I have more than a few applications installed...

Also, I appreciate that you don't like Unity. That's fine, this is Linux, you have a choice -- and XFCE is a good choice. But would you mind not confusing your opinions with objective truth? Some of us do like Unity; I think it's easily the best desktop I've used in years -- I don't give a hoot about desktop configurability and I love how it lets me keyboard everything while the stupid deskrodent gathers dust. So, you use XFCE, you're happy; I use Unity, I'm happy; now if only we could quit calling each other names and swearing in the process...

Re: Improvement, not perfection.

Sure, better is always possible and better is always good.

The problem with security relying on 'better' is that one single error, made one single time, is enough. Security by Perfect Human is a very dangerous illusion.

Of course, none of that is saying that we shouldn't always try to become better, you're 100% right there.

Re: It's about people, not technology

You're entirely right, but I find a theory that we can educate people into permanent flawless behavior amazingly optimistic. Certainly I am nowhere near clever enough to never make mistakes.

@AC15: It wouldn't be at all good against that. Which is exactly the point: Shamir is arguing that it is much easier to insert a virtual bug today than it was to insert a physical one back then.

Re: This should not be a surprise.

Collecting energy by burning straw men is even more efficient.

Exactly where did OP mention coal or oil? He may have meant that, or he may have been referring to solar, or, for all I know, to a secret scheme to build a 150 million km pipe and suck the heat right out of the sun...

Re: Not one to defend Apple but....

Errr, Pet Peeve, that is a vulnerability in sudo. Not a prob in some situations, a serious consideration in others.

Sudo has two advantages over iTunes, though: it's normally used by people who understand the consequences AND the problem is easily mitigated. (close window/lock screen/logout or some such when you go AFK).

You call 'em dumb adults, I call 'em non-specialists who expect things to not have dangerous hidden connections. And right they are.

Re: Open the pod bay doors HAL

Just so long as it is not the iPod bay doors...

Re: Has anyone considered what it *really* takes to go completely malware free?

Actually, the probability that your v1.0 of all that will be bug free is low enough that it would be safe to bet the rent there's a vulnerability there somewhere. Your actual protection stems not from all the mucking about, but from the fact that you created a one-off configuration and nobody can be bothered to crack it.

Re: There's a storm coming-

I'm not going to argue this is going to put MIcrosoft out of business, that would be more than slightly silly. But as for this forked crap you mention, if they get it working properly, I'd be willing to pay premium. Having a single device that can be a phone/tablet and a full-fat computer would be amazingly convenient.

Browsing under a VM isn't a guarantee. There's been far too many break-out vulnerabilities for that to be a trusted setup. Monitoring from a router would be better, as the attack surface of the router can be made much smaller than that of the regular machine. And, nastily enough, there's been root kits that survive an OS reinstall by hiding in the boot memory...

By and large, for most people, I suspect these days you know you're part of a botnet when your ISP calls you and tells you...

Re: It doesn't matter who's right anymore

Actually, it never mattered to start with. Both parties effectively agree that using a model S to drive from New York to Boston is an adventure. That, all by itself, is enough to condemn the vehicle to niche-market status.

Re: Appel one..

Isn't mass-market elitism fun?

Re: I woud rather

You got my upvote, but there's probably a lot of people who opine differently. So maybe sticking a 'Facebook off' switch under advanced search would be less unrealistic to wish for.

Re: Quite impressive in term of size but am I alone in wondering.

@John Smith 19: The SIMD thing _does_ just work. Out of the box, no prob.

It's when you insist that you want every last bit of performance from your hardware that things get difficult. Running a computer at a couple percent efficiency isn't hard and for many situations is plenty good enough. Running your home PC at anything approaching full throttle is an interesting engineering task. Running a million CPU super at efficiency is a serious challenge.

So, it's not that there aren't tools. There are and they do a decent job. But a team of specialists piling on the man-months can do better. So it becomes economics: is the cost of the specialists worth the additional performance? This is really no different from programs like Photoshop containing a few hand-coded pieces of assembly. The compiler is good, but sometimes it's worth it to do better.

Re: So it's partly the communcations overhead and the synchronosation that's the problem.

Sure, you can do that (and I expect they have done just that). But, if your calculation cannot continue until you have received the new input values from the neighboring CPU, then it doesn't matter if the hardware is decoupled, your software will stall.

So, what you need is not just well-balanced hardware, but well-balanced software that plays precisely to the strengths and weaknesses of that hardware. That's tough.

Re: New western programming language to stop using Arabic Numerals.

RETURN I - I

Re: Which one?

The value of a peer reviewed journal is largely in its reputation. Obviously, the first issue of a publication of an obscure publisher won't have the best possible reputation. So the Reg author (apparently) asked BEST why they had picked this particular publication and the last paragraph is BESTs answer to that question.

As for your question of the stations, it is unfortunately a little more complicated. First of all, with that many stations, there are going to be errors in the database (for example, wrong value for the latitude), so your data is less accurate than it appears. Second and more importantly, many of these stations have seen their environments change substantially over their lifetime (what was farmland in the 1950s might be downtown today). This would change the recorded temperatures even if there were no global climate change. You have to compensate for those effects somehow to extract just the climate portion. It's a complicated and controversial subject.

Re: "A Slower Speed of Light"

Somebody read "Redshift Rendez Vous" (John Stith), eh?

(Fair warning: don't read for literary qualities. But it _is_ a wonderful view of Relativity.)

Re: No time to refactor

@redpola: Errr...Exactly what is the scenario we're going through here? I honestly don't understand. There's apparently some code that's already QAd, so you don't want me to change it --makes perfect sense--, but you _do_ want me add a feature to it? If that is the situation, why aren't the QA people kicking you?

Or if it not a feature I'm doing, but a bugfix, then by definition that code wasn't yet fully QAd. (If we're well down the QA process I do understand you want minimal intervention and I'll try my hardest to do just that, but I can't fix bugs without touching the code.)

Comments are excellent for the stuff the language doesn't do. That's always the broad overview (at each of function, class, and module level) and in some languages the type specifics of arguments and members. Design decisions are also very welcome ("We use linear search because there will never be more than 10 items.")

Comments are an annoying distraction when they duplicate the language. The next time I see /* add all the numbers */ or some such blather --never, ever properly punctuated or capitalized-- sitting above a for loop that does just that, I'm going to scream. Either tell me something interesting or let the code do the talking.

Re: No time to refactor

I'm not sure I understand this. Refactoring _saves_ time. When you're chasing a bug, or have to add functionality and find yourself searching for where on Earth to apply the change, you can spend half an hour thinking about that (and probably getting it wrong, triggering an extensive debugging session) or you can spend that half hour whacking that piece of the code back in shape and then spend 30 seconds applying the change (and probably getting it right on the first try).

You have to practice, a lot. You have to have good tests (and run them!) so you get instant feedback on each step. But then you will be faster, not slower, with refactoring.

Now, if you're brought in on a project that's already three miles down the hole, then half an hour isn't going to cut it, obviously. Although I think that if the powers-that-schedule are honest and count debugging time, schedule slippage and so on, you'll still find the refactoring bonanza is faster than trying to grin and bear it. But, that is admitting up front that you made a mess and a lot of people/teams/managers find that very hard to do. So, social reasons not to refactor, I get. But valid timing or technical reasons? I very much doubt it.

Re: Defeatable, if you know about it.

Sure, except I expect that in a lot of these cases, the voice on the recording has to be recognizable for the recording to work. ("We have little Johny, listen to him." only flies if you recognize little Johny) And I would be _really_ worried about that fan, unless it is powered by batteries or a guy huffing and puffing on a bicycle.

Anyhow, I'm 100% confident it is possible to defeat this technique under at least some circumstances, just as it is possible to avoid leaving fingerprints at least some of the time. Doesn't mean that it isn't a useful tool to have in the toolbox.

@ShelLuser

"Did you know that I have several electrical appliances which I can use both in Europe as well in the US ?"

No, I didn't know, but I'm hardly surprised. Any household that has electrical equipment bought in the last 20 years is likely to have such appliances. ...Which, I'm sure, the Met is well aware of...

All of that doesn't matter, though, as the whole point of such appliances is that they adapt to the grid at hand. They happily eat 50 Hz mains in Europe and equally happily eat 60 Hz in the US. So the buzz will be the local frequency. In fact, your appliances may well make life easier for the police, as at least the cheaper kind of these power supplies tend to spit out ferocious amounts of harmonics, making the buzz much easier to pick up.

Re: Last Post

Firing two opposing motors would only tell you how long the motors fired, not how much thrust they developed. By firing one motor and imparting delta-v you get a much more accurate picture.