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Comment Re:HTTPS is not flawed (Score 1) 185

by dotancohen (#48017409) Attached to: Security Collapse In the HTTPS Market

Thanks. I did untrust the obvious ones, such as the Turkish and Chinese certs, however the list is long and I'd like to tighten the security a bit. Is there any way to see which certs I've actually _used_ so that I could start making informed decisions? Take for example "Trustis Limited". On what basis would I decide to keep or leave it.

I don't mean to be a pain, but you seem to be the only person who understands this subject. Even googling the subject does not return many useful links. Thanks.

Submission + - Online communications platform for political dissent? 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Now that most of the major tech players (Apple, Google, MS) are compromised, what online communications platforms are available for those who would like to initiate change in the US political system? Consider that the current state of encrypting email is not trivial and additionally that using encryption or Tor is considered grounds for enhanced surveillance. Technical proficiency should not be a prerequisite to initiate political change. So when the common man who considers "the blue E" as the internet asks how he can communicate with me about initiating changes in the US political system, what solutions can I provide to him? Should we restrict ourselves to the post office with 2-3 days' latency in communications and face-to-face meetings? One can see that those restrictions puts us at quite the disadvantage.

Submission + - From PHP 5 to 7 (halls-of-valhalla.org)

Submitted by halls-of-valhalla
halls-of-valhalla writes: Since around 2005 we've heard talk about PHP 6 development. There have even been books sold about it. But where is PHP 6? As of July of this year it was decided that there won't be one and that PHP will skip directly to PHP 7. Why is it skipping to the next major version, and what ever happened with PHP 6?

In 2005, work began on a project headed by Andrei Zmievski to bring native Unicode support to PHP by embedding the International Components for Unicode (ICU) library and internally representing strings as UTF-16. Because this project would lead to major internal and user-affecting changes, it was planned to be the next major PHP version (i.e. PHP 6) along with a few other features.

By using UTF-16 as default encoding, developers would need to convert the code and all input (e.g. data from requests, database, etc.) from one encoding to UTF-16 and back again. This conversion takes a lot of CPU time, memory (to store the much larger strings), and creates a higher complexity in the implementation due to the increased need to detect the proper encoding for the situation. In light of all of this and the relatively small gain, many contributors became unwilling to use "trunk" as their main development branch and instead either using the stable 5.2/5.3 branches or refusing to do development at all. This shortage of developers led to delays in the project.

After a vote in July of 2014, it was officially decided that the next major release would be called PHP 7. The primary reason for even considering the name is the widely-known existence of the previous failed attempt of a new major release, and the existence of numerous books and other resources which already referred to the previous PHP 6. To address potential confusion, there was an RFC (i.e. request for comments) and a vote on whether or not to reuse this name.

In the end it was decided to release PHP 7 as the next major version, arguing that the worst case scenario is that they needlessly skipped a version as opposed to the worst case of releasing it as PHP 6 which is widespread confusion in the community.

Read the full story here: Valhalla News — From PHP 5 to 7

Comment Re:SSDs will outpace platter drives (Score 1) 296

by dotancohen (#47869253) Attached to: WD Announces 8TB, 10TB Helium Hard Drives

In comparison, shortscreen monitors (often mislabeled as widescreen) are a trend which has no logical or technical underpinning.

You are holding it wrong. No, really.

I've got a longscreen monitor (widescreen turned 90 degrees). It fits 120+ characters on a line and shows 122 lines of code plus two additional lines for the VIM status line. The other widescreen monitor is running Firefox with the tabs on the side (Tree Style Tabs) and the KDE panel on the left side of the screen, not the bottom. This is the absolute best setup that I could imagine.

Just stop wasting the vertical space and make better use of the horizontal space. I was a 4:3 holdout for the longest time, now I love the widescreens.

Comment Re:Send Them Back To Hell (Score 1) 215

by dotancohen (#47846421) Attached to: New US Airstrikes In Iraq Intended to Protect Important Dam

Sending IS back to hell with airpower is easy when they are out in the open. But once Islamic State fighters retreat to towns like Fallujah it will be very difficult to twist them out of their holes. It will require house to house fighting and the towns will be more or less destroyed in the process with great cost to any civilians in the area. If the Shiite dominated Iraq Army does it there will be all kinds of payback. But I doubt they will step up. It will be up to mostly the US with help from the UK and some token help from a few other countries.

Colin Powell was right. We broke it, we bought it.

This is exactly what happened in Gaza the past few weeks, to weed out Hamas.

Comment Re:Perl: TMTOWTDI (Score 1) 729

That list comprehension is actually very much the reason why Python is terrific. C# programmers will be familiar with the idea from Linq.

for: This is a for loop
a,b,c,d: Each value of the iterator is itself composed of 4 values. In Python this is called a tuple, but you can think of it as an array if it helps. The first value is bound to a, the second to b, etc. Thus, the variables a,b,c, and d are defined in the loop body.
in: The next thing mentioned is the iterator
[x.q for x in y if x.z]+[x.r for x in y if x.z]: This iterator is a mess, let's look at it's parts, which are:
[x.q for x in y if x.z]
+
[x.r for x in y if x.z]:

[x.q for x in y if x.z]: y is an iterator. Return only the q property of each item in y, only if the z property is defined. This results in a list (another Python datatype which you can think of as an array) being return, of q properties.

[x.r for x in y if x.z]: y is an iterator. Return only the r property of each item in y, only if the z property is defined. This results in a list being return, of r properties.

+: Combine the list of q properties with the list of r properties.

Like learning another (human) language, it it incomprehensible at first. However, I'm no Pythonista and even for me it was very simple to figure out what this does.

Comment Re:Predators become Parasites? (Score 1) 85

by dotancohen (#47832463) Attached to: Giant Dinosaur Unearthed In Argentina

i'm guessing the fact that it was aquatic dissuaded the rats and ferrets. I'm not sure the size of the creature means the small parasites would ignore it, either.

I'm guessing leeches and little shrimp-like things and jesus that's disgusting. No wonder it's extinct. Good thing, too. You wouldn't want one of these wandering into your backyard to get into your garbage. It would give your dog a heart attack.

Thanks, now we know what was swimming around in the Death Star's garbage disposal. They've just unearthed a Dianoga!

Comment Re:sponsered phones. (Score 1) 116

by dotancohen (#47816695) Attached to: E-Books On a $20 Cell Phone

How is the modability of the Kindle firmware these days? I know earlier versions are relatively tamed at this point; but any time I see 'with offers' my loathing gland swells.

I bought the B&N Nook for $99 and rooted it. Works great, I use it to study with Ankidroid.

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