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Comment Re:I call BS (Score 1) 265

I believe you are correct.

I think the reason no store charges a credit card more than the cash price is because it will reduce sales. If you go to the store and see an object for $100 you might say "I don't have $100 cash on me right now, and if I use the credit card it will cost $105. So I will go away and come back tomorrow with $100 in cash." Then what happens is you either forget about it, purchase somewhere else, or realize you probably did not need the object anyway. The store has now lost an entire sale, which is a much bigger loss than paying the credit card companies cut.

People looking to buy gas probably will factor in the fact that they may run out of gas before they can acquire the cash, and thus will buy the gas anyway.

I think some other items like utilities where you pretty much have to buy from them will also offer discounts for cash.

Comment Re:Opinion are wortheless (Score 1) 1007

The best scientific minds, in their times said the world was flat and that everything revolved around the earth.

Sorry you are wrong. The earth was known to be a sphere long long ago. It way predates the knowledge that the center of mass of the system was not inside it.

Showing your complete ignorance of history and science does not help your argument one bit.

Comment Re:First taste of Mac OS X (Score 1) 305

It's an issue with their file system (HFS+), which has been made semi-case-sensitive. For example, you can do "mkdir tEsT\ dIrEcToRy" and you'll get a directory called "tEsT dIrEcToRy", maintaining the case that you types in. However, if you then type "rmdir 'Test Directory'" then it will delete it. Essentially, it's case-sensitive when writing but not case-sensitive when reading.

What it is doing is called "case-preserving". That's what Windows does too. It is always "case insensitive".

The problem with this is that the rule for whether two strings identify the same file is obscenely complex if you want full Unicode support (plus it will change as Unicode is updated). Most systems give up and only are "case insensitive" for a subset of possible case matches, such as only the ASCII letters. Not using the same rules in different places causes further problems. OS/X has a lot of problems by insisting on "normalization" of filenames, resulting in completely unexpected collisions and renames for files from Unix and Windows.

I think Unix has the best system: if the strings of bytes are different then they are different files. This moves all problems out of file system support and up to the application level where it is much easier to deal with.

Comment Re:First taste of Mac OS X (Score 1) 305

Since it considers different numbers of spaces to be different filenames, and considers greek and russian letters that look identical to latin ones to be different filenames, and lots of other things that are much easier to confuse, yes this is a good idea. At least it is consistent.

Comment Re:Open Source in commercial products (Score 4, Informative) 265

No, bash was NOT working as expected.

The expectation was that a bash shell function could be defined by starting an environment variable value with "() {". The purpose of the code was to do exactly that, no more and no less. Yes it did assume the string came from a trusted source and the idea is questionable, but that was not the hole.

The fact that the code could cause arbitrary commands in the value to be executed at startup was certainly not intended.

I think it is interesting that this bug was visible in source code for 20 years and until now nobody found it. This includes the black-hats. Not sure what this means...

Comment Re:Seems incorrect (Score 2) 80

I think this is more or less what is happening.

As opposed to how X works now, new drivers will pretty much support "use EGL to draw all over the screen". The window system is *atop* that, it uses EGL to take texturemaps of window contents and draw and compose them into the right places on the screen.

The application making those texturemaps uses EGL as well, to draw into the texture maps. This means the texture map is already in the correct graphics memory for the window system to use it and everything syncs up and you will get results that are close or equal to the speed you would get if you wrote a single program that drew an entire display of overlapping windows.

In X it was more like the window system was the bottom level and EGL would draw into a window. Compositing window managers that want to use EGL have to create a big fake window that covers the entire screen, and had to add a lot of other kludges to work around the millions of assumptions that a window and any changes to it's pixels was instantly visible on the screen.

Comment Re:The whole function exporting mechanism is a bug (Score 1) 208

That is an excellent idea. Somebody should mod this up!

The way bash is doing this is a ridculous hack and it is not suprising it is also a huge security hole.

You can set an envoronment variable in bash to a value that will cause recursively-called bash to think it is a function, white it is not a function in the bash that defined it. That is just stupid.

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