Comment symptomatic relief (Score 1) 102
They're treating the symptoms of the problem, not the cause. This is usually a bad idea.
Comment click-bait? (Score 5, Insightful) 628
No, this is not clickbait.
Normal, mentally-healthy humans have a lot of empathy - otherwise we're psychopaths. Sure, the amount of empathy varies - mainly as a function of whether the animal in question tends to act human-like. We should embrace this, not cynically write it off - empathy *IS* humanity.
Yes, that also means that anyone who is intelligent and reflective will be uncomfortable with eating meat, concerned how the animal died, and of course what kind of animal it was. This is basically orthogonal to issues of environmental or ecological impact.
Comment unlocked doors (Score 2) 195
These systems are the moral equivalent of leaving your door not just unlocked but ajar. It doesn't change the morality of anyone trespassing to steal or destroy, but it does make the owner much more culpable. We do not face a threat to our cyber-infrastructure, but rather have irresponsibly left the infrastructure unprotected, and should not be surprised that people of varying motives might take advantage.
We do not need a cyber-infrastructure police force, unless they're actually tiger teams who publicly shame the idiots who leave their systems unprotected...
23-Year-Old X11 Server Security Vulnerability Discovered 213
An anonymous reader writes "The recent report of X11/X.Org security in bad shape rings more truth today. The X.Org Foundation announced today that they've found a X11 security issue that dates back to 1991. The issue is a possible stack buffer overflow that could lead to privilege escalation to root and affects all versions of the X Server back to X11R5. After the vulnerability being in the code-base for 23 years, it was finally uncovered via the automated cppcheck static analysis utility."
There's a scanf used when loading BDF fonts that can overflow using a carefully crafted font. Watch out for those obsolete early-90s bitmap fonts.
Comment The stupid thing is (Score 2) 341
The really really stupid thing is that desktop isn't even the reason why Linux. Obviously no server needs dbus let alone kdbus, and plenty of desktops don't either. Yes, it's amusing that I get a popup when I plug in a USB stick, but is that essential functionality? Sure, some very simple form of event multicast would be good, but is this it?
Everything LP touches seems to epitomize rebellion against, or ignorance of, the *nix/OSS philosophy (you know, modularity, loosely joined, liberal-in-what-you-accept, etc). systemd is the USSR of rc systems. pulse only remains because apps can still bypass it.
Apple Again Seeks Ban On 20+ Samsung Devices In US 235
An anonymous reader notes that Apple has renewed its patent attack against Samsung, asking U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Koh to prohibit Samsung from selling over 20 different phones and tablets. Apple made a similar request after it won a $1 billion judgment in 2012, but Koh did not allow it. An Appeals court later ruled that Apple could resubmit its request if it focused on the specific features at the center of the 2012 verdict, and that's what we're seeing today. Apple's filing said, "Samsung’s claim that it has discontinued selling the particular models found to infringe or design around Apple's patents in no way diminishes Apple’s need for injunctive relief. ... Because Samsung frequently brings new products to market, an injunction is important to providing Apple the relief it needs to combat any future infringement by Samsung through products not more than colorably different from those already found to infringe."
Comment this is idiotic. (Score 2, Insightful) 201
the proliferation of distros is just stupid - people don't seem to understand what "distro" means, or why they should be offering addons to an existing distro, rather than pretending that they are building a new OS.
the ONLY value a distro offers is in establishing a particular set of versions, with a modicum of consistency of config and hopefully some testing. none of them offer anything significant that is also distinctive - just slightly different versions of the same packages maintained by others and used by all the other distros. yes, apt vs rpm, so what? they're functionally equivalent.
the real point is really a matter of software engineering: forking a distro is bad, since it increases the friction experienced by source-code changes. streamOS (sic) people may be dilligent and honestly propagate their changes upstream, but fundamentally, they should really just be running an apt repo containing their trivially modded packages. sure, that may mean a different kernel, big whoopie (very little of user-space is sensitive to anything but huge kernel changes.)
but yeah: it wouldn't be very sexy to say "I've got a repo of 37 tweaked packages I call a brand new whizzy *OS*".
Under the Hood of SteamOS 201
jones_supa writes "SteamOS has been further inspected to see what kind of technical solutions it uses. The Debian-based OS uses Linux 3.10, shipping with a heap of patches applied, with the most focus being on real-time-like features. The kernel is also using aufs and they seem to be sitting on some bug fixes for upstream on top of that. The kernel is not using the new Intel P-State driver, with the reported reason being, 'it causes issues with sound being choppy during BigPicture trailer video playback.' SteamOS is using SysVinit as its init system. The desktop is backed by X.Org server 1.12.4 and a custom desktop compositor which seems to be a 4,200-line patch on xcompmgr. Catalyst and Mesa components can be found on the system, but so far only NVIDIA is officially supported. The system boots into Big Picture Mode, but the user can drop into a GNOME desktop. Responsible for a great deal of the kernel changes, SteamOS compositor work, and other SteamOS code is Pierre-Loup A. Griffais, a.k.a. 'Plagman'. He was a NVIDIA employee dealing with their Linux support. Another Valve employee doing lots of the SteamOS system-level work is John Vert, who up until last year was a Microsoft employee since 1991. There's also other former Microsoft employees on Valve's Linux team, like Mike Sartain."
Comment Re:Difficult to do really well on a PC (Score 1) 90
can you give examples? perhaps you mean that implementing brain-inspired special-function processors is best done in hardware - if you want a widget that detects pictures of cats or something. study/understanding is not often rate/scale-limited.
Bitcoin Tops $1,000 For the First Time 371
An anonymous reader writes with this bit from The Next Web "Bitcoin hit a new milestone today, passing the $1,000 mark for the first time. The virtual currency is currently trading above the four-digit figure, with its highest at $1,030 on Mt. Gox, one of the largest exchanges. Last week, Bitcoin's high for the day was $632. That means its trading value has surged 62.83 percent in a week, assuming we're looking at just its high points. That figure could of course rise even further if Bitcoin continues to push further up throughout the day."
Comment it's the price, stupid. (Score 2) 810
My daily commute is less than 10km, and I would love to have and affordable, safe, less-consumptive/polluting vehicle. I would be very tempted by a car-like EV that was very small and light with range 50km if it cost something like $5-7k. (for $10k I can get a small used ICE that burns absurdly little gas.) It has to be able to take me up a decent-sized hill at 50 kph, though. An in-town EV could make a lot of sense, market-wise, but I think it should be purposed-designed, not just an ICE vehicle with a the engine swapped out.
Otherwise, the problem is that EV or hybrids try to deliver long range and highway performance and wind up simply being too expensive. Hybrids in particular wind up carrying so much extra weight that you can usually do better pure EV *xor* ICE. It doesn't make sense to pretend that the technology supports non-premium EVs yet (Tesla is great, but it's a sports car at sports car prices.) In some sense, the problem is that petroleum ICE sets a high bar of energy density. I often wonder if there's a place for an EV that has an optional IDE add-in module for range (maybe fuel cell some day, maybe petroleum+turbine today or just a conventional diesel.)
Electric Cars: Drivers Love 'Em, So Why Are Sales Still Low? 810
cartechboy writes "The electric car challenge is what insiders call "getting butts in seats" — and a lot of butts today still belong to humans who are not yet buying electric cars. The big question is: Why? Surveys show drivers are interested in electric cars--and that they love them once they drive them. EVs also cost less to maintain (though more to buy in the first place) and many experts say they're simply nicer to drive. So what's the problem? Disinterested dealers, uneven distribution, limited supplies, and media bias are some potential challenges. Or maybe it's just lousy marketing--casting electric cars as a moral imperative or a duty, like medicine you have to take."
Comment We can build bigger than we can use. (Score 1) 118
I'm not saying that lagging software is a problem: it's not. The problem is that there are so few real needs that justify the top, say, 10 computers. Most of the top500 are large not because they need to be - that is, that they'll be running one large job, but rather because it makes you look cool if you have a big computer/cock.
Most science is done at very modest (relative to top-of-the-list) sizes: say, under a few hundred cores. OK, maybe a few thousand. These days, a thousand cores will take less than 32u, and yes, could stand beside your desk, though you'd need more than one normal office circuit and some pretty decent airflow. I think people lose touch with the fact that our ability to build very big machines, cheaply, filled with extremely fast cores. You read all that whinging about how we hit the clock scaling (dennard) wall around the P4 and life has been hell ever since - bullshit! Today's cores are lots faster, and you get a boatload more of them for the same dollar and watt. And that's if you stick with completely conventional x86_64/openmp/mpi tech, not delving into proprietary stuff like Cuda.
People who watch the top of top500 closely are addicts of hero-numbers and hero-facilities. The fact is you can buy whatever position you want: just pay up. Certainly it's impressive how much effort goes into a top10 facility, but we should always be asking: what whole-machine job is going to run on it? IMO, the sweet spot for HPC is a few tens of racks - easy to find space, easy to manage, can provide enough resources for hundreds of researchers.
MenuetOS, an OS Written Entirely In Assembly Language, Inches Towards 1.0 372
angry tapir writes "MenuetOS is an open source, GUI-equipped, x86 operating system written entirely in assembly language that can fit on a floppy disk (if you can find one). I originally spoke to its developers in 2009. Recently I had a chance to catch up with them to chat about what's changed and what needs to be done before the OS hits version 1.0 after 13 years of work. The system's creator, Ville Turjanmaa, says, 'Timeframe is secondary. It's more important is to have a complete and working set of features and applications. Sometimes a specific time limit rushes application development to the point of delivering incomplete code, which we want to avoid. ... We support USB devices, such [as] storages, printers, webcams and digital TV tuners, and have basic network clients and servers. So before 1.0 we need to improve the existing code and make sure everything is working fine. ... The main thing for 1.0 is to have all application groups available'"
Comment Just a stunt. (Score 1) 54
Amazon makes a killing renting computers. Certain kinds of enterprises really want to pay extra for the privilege of outsourcing some of their IT to Amazon - sometimes it really makes sense and sometimes they're just fooling themselves.
People who do HPC usually do a lot of HPC, and so owning/operating the hardware is a simple matter of not handing that fat profit to Amazon. Most HPC takes place in consortia or other arrangements where a large cluster can be scheduled to efficiently interleave bursty usage patterns. That is, of course, precisely what Amazon does, though it tunes mainly for commercial (netflix, etc) workloads - significantly different from computational ones. (Real HPC clusters often don't have UPS, for instance, and almost always have higher-performance, high-bisection, flat/uniform networks, since inter-node traffic dominates.)
