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Comment What's the point? (Score 1) 123

First of all, touchscreen is a horrible interface in a car. But leaving that aside, capacitive touch screens are dirt cheap. You can get replacement units (glass and touch sensors) for Chinese Android phones for a few bucks on Alibaba. So there's utterly no reason to prefer an inferior technology for the sake of price.

Comment Re:Not news (Score 1) 239

If you bothered to read the story, the problem is that the result is not correct to 1 ULP. Even for small inputs it has significant errors and the worst case has only 4 bits correct (so, roughly 2^49 ULP error). As for deprecation, you're right and wrong. It's not officially deprecated, but it's slower than computing sin correctly in software, and between the performance issue and the fact that experts in the field have known about this bug for a long time, nobody with a clue uses the FSIN instruction.

Comment There is a real problem (Score 5, Informative) 345

Ext 2/3/4 and any filesystem that records file ownership (especially numeric uids/gids) is not suitable for storage that's not associated with a particular system's user account database (/etc/passwd or otherwise). Linux could attempt to support such usage by virtualizing/remapping uids for "external" ext2/3/4-formatted drives, but it doesn't. Instead, you have a situation where file ownership is just silently wrong when you plug the drive into a different computer. So removing support is a big hammer, but I see how they could see it as a justifiable one when the status quo is broken like this.

Comment Why?? (Score 1) 109

Why is anyone still making devices with sub-300-dpi screens? Especially when you're trying to launch a new OS -- this is the best way to make your OS look like crap, even if it's otherwise great. Price is definitely not a show-stopper here; the ASUS ZenFone has a high-end screen in the ~$200 range, and cheap Chinese phones like Zopo have had them for a long time at much lower prices. If they're really worried about cost, scrap the 5 MP camera which is a complete joke when your screen is 0.4 MP...

Comment Re:Overpriced at $0.60 (Score 3, Insightful) 89

Toy microscopes don't work at all. Their focus knobs are loose so that you constantly lose focus while trying to see the sample, and they only have one focus knob which makes it essentially impossible to focus to begin with (real microscopes have coarse and fine knobs). And the magnification rating is always fake. If they advertise 400x, expect resolving power so poor that they're essentially 20x or less. I once got one of these pieces of junk and ended up going back to eBay for a $80 vintage Bausch and Lomb scope which I'm very happy with, but sadly I think that was a rare find and I just got lucky.

Comment Re:Famous last words (Score 2, Insightful) 179

"Climate change" is not a "downgrade" to global warming. It's simply better wording to avoid denial from idiots who don't understand math (i.e. means) and say "wow it's really cold this winter, global warming is bs!" Nothing has changed; we still know the mean temperature is increasing and that the increase is caused by human activity. But the new wording is less susceptible to idiotic misinterpretation.

Comment Re:Opensource and web services keys (Score 1) 109

If your FOSS application interacts with a web-based service that requires an API key, the correct way to implement it is to instead have it interact with your own servers, and in turn have your servers interact with the web service via the API key. You should of course then publish the source to the server-side part of your application as well, and advanced users can then (if they really want to) setup their own server, with their own API key for the web service; this also protects users from the possibility that you disappear and shtudown your server or let it rot.

Of course this design assumes it's a web service your users are accessing anonymously. If they have to login to their own accounts, then this model is usually wrong. They should never be providing their account credentials to you, and it can only work correctly with more advanced authentication methods that avoid the need for them to provide credentials to you, which the web service is unlikely to support.

Comment Re:Compared to Bionic (Score 1) 134

I really want to add a Bionic comparison, but in order to be comparing apples with apples (or non-apples with non-apples, pardon the pun) we need an x86 build of Bionic, or need to re-do all the other libcs' figures for arm. I've been looking for a way to build Bionic outside of the Android build system and use it on non-Android systems, and the gentoobionic repository at https://github.com/gentoobioni... looked promising, but I couldn't get it to work. It also may be much larger than the official Bionic.

If anyone is willing to help us figure out how to setup x86 Bionic for testing, please stop by the IRC channel (#musl on Freenode) or send a message to the mailing list.

Comment Re:Either gnu libc is hideously slow and bloated.. (Score 1) 134

Someone with mod points, please mod up the parent post. Even if you disagree with it, it's informative about one of the big issues in glibc that musl does differently: musl's snprintf and dprintf, for example, are async-signal-safe. Roland McGrath, who holds claim to being the "inventor" of dprintf and author of the original implementation in glibc, has stated that he intended for the function to be async-signal-safe or at least close to it, and that later introduction of dynamic allocation is a bug (which I later filed as #16060) that glibc should fix.

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