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Submission + - AT&T To Match Google Fiber in Kansas City, Charge More If You Want Privacy (kansascity.com) 1

An anonymous reader writes: When Google Fiber started bringing gigabit internet to cities around the U.S., we wondered how the incumbent carriers would respond. Now we know: AT&T has announced they will match Google Fiber's gigabit offerings in Kansas City. Of course, there are some caveats. First, AT&T's rollout may stop as it fights the Obama administration over net neutrality. Not that it would be a nationwide rollout anyway: "AT&T does not plan to offer the ultra-fast Internet lines to every home in the market. Rather, he said the company would calculate where demand is strongest and the investment in stringing new cables promised a decent return."

There are also some interesting pricing concerns. The company plans to charge $70/month for gigabit service, but that's a subsidized price. Subsidized by what, you ask? Your privacy. AT&T says if you want to opt out of letting them track your browsing history, you'll have to pay $29 more per month. They say your information is used to serve targeted advertising, and includes any links you follow and search terms you enter.

Comment Re:Nonsense (Score 1) 411

I agree with you on the idea and behaviour of the control classes, but have generally found it handy to have some guarantees of well-formedness in the data objects.

Otherwise, every control object which uses the data object needs to verify every detail about the data object before it uses it - which leads to the duplication of validation code issue you were concerned about in the first place...

Comment Re:Nonsense (Score 1) 411

So if you are not doing your field validation at creation time, how do you enforce the "interface contract"?

Something somewhere has to verify that the address is a valid address, and the port is a valid port (why would you accept a socket request for port 67890?) - why allow a non-conformant data object to exist?

What domains have such wide-ranging field values that validated data is not a reasonable idea?

Comment Re:Nonsense (Score 1) 411

Data classes like this?

class TCPSocketAddress
{
private long ipaddress;
private int port;
 
string getAddress()
{
  return long2ip(ipaddress);
}
 
void setAddress(string addr)
{
  if (addr.matches("/^\d{1,3}.\d{1,3}.\d{1,3}.\d{1,3)$/")) ipaddress = ip2long(addr);
  else throw InvalidIPAddressException;
}
 
int getPort()
{
  return port;
}
 
void setPort(string addr)
{
  if (newport > 0 && newport < 65536) port = newport;
  else throw InvalidTCPPortException;
}
 
}

Comment Space bar? (Score 1) 4

In many PDF readers I have used, the space bar key works the way you've described - scrolling by one screenful.

I'm not on my usual PC, but I've just tested both Adobe Reader and the Firefox built-in PDF viewer, and both scroll by a screenful both for the space bar, as well as for the page-down key. Neither of them scrolled by the "page" size.

Comment Re:That's why nobody sensible wants them (Score 1) 223

Submission + - Interest Rates Have Gone Negative in Europe

HughPickens.com writes: Matthew Yglesias writes at Vox that something really weird that economists thought was impossible is happening now in Europe where interest rates have gone negative on a range of debt — mostly government bonds from countries like Denmark, Switzerland, and Germany but also corporate bonds from Nestlé and, briefly, Shell. As in you give the owner of a Nestlé bond 100 euros, and four years later Nestlé gives you back less than that. "In the most literal sense, negative interest rates are a simple case of supply and demand. A bond is a kind of tradable loan," says Yglesias. "If there isn't much demand for buying the bonds, the interest rate has to go up to make customers more willing to buy. If there's a lot of demand, the interest rate will fall."

But why would you want to buy a negative interest rate loan? The question itself seems absurd – the very idea that anyone should have to pay someone to keep their money safe rather than demand an interest payment for the use of their money is counter-intuitive. But according to Yglesias, very rich people and big companies need to do something with their money and most European banks only guarantee 100,000 euros.Plowing the money into negative-yielding government bonds can appeal to banks when the alternative is to pay even more to store cash on deposit. J.P. Morgan calculates there is currently 220 billion euros of bank reserves subject to negative interest rates, which looks set to grow exponentially because of the European Central Bank’s forthcoming colossal bond-buying program. "It may be the case that if governments push the negative interest rates thing too far the entire economy would become a cash based system," says Merryn Somerset Webb. "But that might take a while to get to."

Submission + - Systemd looking to assimilate Gummiboot UEFI Boot Manager (phoronix.com)

stoborrobots writes: Phoronix notes that "systemd developers are looking at integrating Gummiboot" .

Gummiboot is a bootloader manager — it loads and executes either EFI images or EFI-aware linux kernels.

Gummiboot is infrequently updated, but Kay Sievers recently added some new functionality.

Mattias Geniar also has some other notes from Lennart Poettering's recent FOSDEM talk about the state of systemd.

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