Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Depends on country (Score 1) 993

People flash their high beams like mad if they think you're not moving fast enough. They also put on the blinker, but the high beams come first.

Depends on the country. In Germany, being aggressive *IS* fine-able.
In Switzerland it could be considered impolite.
In southern France, that's the normal behaviour.

Comment It's enforced (Score 2) 993

Having had the opportunity to drive in a few countries in Europe, it's interesting to see how much easier it is there because people actually know the laws and follow them.

Maybe because it's enforced here in Europe ?
To get a driver's license, one need not only to pass practical driving exams, but also to pass a theoretical exams about the laws. You are required to register to a few theory courses for it. (All paying, that's why some people consider that driver's licenses are trying to scam as much money out of people as possible).
While it's not as difficult as a real school's exam, that still involves at least grasping the basics of the law.
There *are* people failing it. In some countries: fail 3 times in a row, and the local department of transport will politely offer you to put you in contact with professional psychologists if you like (repeated failure might be stress-management related. But might be also an opportunity to catch learning disabilities in a few people, instead of having them repeat the exam 20x until they eventually pass it by random chance and then allow such people on the street).

In comparison, when I was visiting the states, I was baffled at how stupidly trivial it is to get a drivers license.
Which of course makes sense in a country that is so much over reliant on cars. When even "go get groceries at the block's corner's store" means a 15 minutes drive, because the "block" consist of a several mile long succession of 2-store houses, then NOT having a drivers license is basically being completely unable to function in society. Add to the fact that driver's licenses function as photo ID and thus basically anyone is required to have one, so you can't easily fail people. (Unlike here in European countries which all have proper ID Cards. Due to a VERY HIGH level of standardisation, a driver's license is acceptable and can be used as a substitute for ID Card when in a rush. But still, european countries have a photo ID card that is issued to everybody, without needing to pass an exam or to pass a bank's credit card financial history check).

But yeah, basically:
- in europe, to be allowed to drive, you need to positively prove that you aren't going to pose a significant danger to the other drivers.
- in US, to be allowed to drive, you need to approximately qualify as 'human being' (more or less). (Corporal Nobby Nobbs would probably qualify too).

Even driving on the Peripherique around Paris is a walk in the park compared to dealing with a lot of highways here in the U.S.

yet, north European (Germans) find that the French drive badly.
(and the opposite is true in the Balkan, probably US-ians will find driving there too much dangerous for them).

Comment Still choice (Score 1) 993

but that GNOME is sufficiently important to drive systemd uptake

You still get the choice between:

- keeping GNOME and SystemD.
- throwing away GNOME + SystemD, and switching to KDE, or LXDE, or XFCE, or Unity, or Enlightment, or MATE (or even a mix of Cinamon that relies on gnomelibs that are systemd-free).

(Though probably given that - no matter how much you refuse to believe - systemd *IS* actually useful and *DOES* help solving real-world needs, probably KDE is going to start using it some time in the future, too.
On the other hand, KDE being KDE and being much about choice, KDE will probably go the "phonon" route: they'll probably make a new module in kdelibs called "libkde-systemk" which is a very simple API and high level abstraction of the few features they need, and which can use systemd as a back-end, but could also use systembsd, other backend or even whatever could produce the same functionality under Mac OS X [Launchd] and Windows [huh...?] )

GNOME is *NOT* a absolute requirement for Linux.
And several distros *DID* switch away from it (but not on the grounds of systemd. Mostly because they didn't like the direction Gnome 3 was heading):
- Gnome2 got forked into MATE and had quite some success.
- Ubuntu created their own Unity.
- Mint started their Cinnamon fork of Gnom3
- Some distro switched to XFCE to have a "Gnomish look" but less resource requirement than Gnome 2/3
etc.

Now in fact if you look at it closely:
- Yes, Fedora *IS* a GNOME-based distribution, and they also use SystemD, but...

- openSUSE has been systemd-powered for the past 4 releases (~3 years ago, ~1.5 year after the systemd launch) . Yet, opensuse *IS NOT* a GNOME-based distro. KDE has always been the default, although suse has always made the effort to support both KDE and Gnome as first-class DE making effort to customise and integrate them both.
- ubuntu did switch from Gnome to Unity... but they are switching from Upstart to systemd. ...etc...

Apparently, systemd might be useful enough that even distros that DO NOT depend on Gnome3, STILL decide to pick it up.
The only remaining practical questions are:
- how much until it becomes stable and mature enough (opensuse is showing signs that this is soon)
- how long will it stay before "let's change everything" madness strikes again.

Comment Get a clue... (Score 3, Insightful) 993

Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution

If so many distributions, including several major ones (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc.) are ALL switching to systemd (and before that to network manager and pulseaudio), and some of them since quite some time (openSUSE has been using it for 4 iterations) without switching back, and some are even eager to jump in as start using future project from the same source (Google has expressed interests in KDBUS), there might be 2 explanations:

- either Lennart is an Evil-Über-Wizard-Super-Mutant who is mastering the art of mass mind-control, and it forcing every distro to switch using hypnosis.

- or maybe, perhaps systemd is actually USEFUL, solves real-world problems (to the point that most distribution have decided to use it), and isn't as problematic as the detractor want you to believe (don't base your opinion on what the first beta was years ago). Some of purported evils of systemd have no base in reality (detractors tend to forget that systemd is not only PID1, but a whole constellation of helper softwares and daemons).
Systemd might have enough objective qualities, so that even if a very vocal minority doesn't agree with it, a silent majority has considered interesting enough to give it a try.

Also, online I hear a lot of people complaining about systemd and calling for boycott, but I see very few actual useful work:
- Gentoo *DID* write their own init system (OpenRC).
- Uselessd is an attempt at an alternative using as few components as possible.
- SystemBSD is an attempt to offer the same API but rewritten from scratch for BSD (so Gnome and other software which relies on systemd can run there).

But outside of there 3 exceptions, it's basically only people complaining and whining, and not much effort to actually avoid systemd and propose another alternative.

Comment Implanted Womb (Score 1) 120

Artificial wombs will follow. Soon women won't need men any more. Then the male geeks will go from having had a limited chance, to having zero hope of ever meeting a woman and having sex.

Technically, it's the other way around: If having a biological womb you've been born with isn't a requirement for human reproduction anymore, it's the *MEN* who don't need women any more.

The male geek could get implanted with the necessary womb to give birth to children without ever needing to meet a girl (and an advantage: in mammals, mixing male genetic material can give birth to both male and female offsprings (you have both X and Y sex chromosome to pick from) unlike when mixing female (only X available) ).

Now, if your point is having *intercourse* with a girl, that's a different set of problems (And I would suggest that you either start working on your social skill and start go out and socialize during hobbies where you can meet potential partners) (Or I suggest to move to a country where the paid-for alternative is considered as just another kind of job (with tax, social security and insurance) rather than a crime worthy of imprisonment).

Comment Mirror universe Obama... (Score 1) 575

Indeed, odds are low that actual shit will actually happen.

In fact, we could even spin your president's argument:

"When so few children are actually in danger at any given moment: predators, crooks, bullies and thieves needs to be able to take advantage of every government-sponsored backdoor to hack into computers to quickly find vulnerable children and potential targets to abuse/mug. It is worrisome to see companies ready to leave backdoors and giving ability to create exploits" -- Mirror universe Obama (The one with the evil goatee)

Comment Empty space (Score 1) 267

Yes some Persian and Arabic cartographers had accurately estimated the circumference of the globe but that doesn't mean it was universally known.

Greeks, too, have calculated the circumference of the globe (knowing distance between city and the height of the sun at midday on the same day).

The problem is not knowing how big the globe is. The problem is knowing what lies outside of the known parts.
Maybe it's only sea? That's what Columbus hoped.
But it turned out that there was a whole New-world continent hidden in-between.
Without a precise way to determine longitude (i.e.: without precise enough clocks), it's hard to tell how much one has travelled west-ward.

Perhaps all the circumference has been traversed, perhaps you've reached an unkown land half-way through.

And when the goal you advertised to your financial supporter was "finding an west route to India", you'd be all too eager to over-estimate the distance you've crossed and think you've reached the goal you've been paid for.

Comment Single point to replace (Score 1) 267

it just changes where the emissions come from - instead of the cars exhaust, it comes out of a big smokestack.

But then, that means you only have 1 point to change.

Want to lower the emission of you electricity production? You "just" replace the power plant with something else.
Then all the electric car can already run on the new system.

Want to lower the emission of your distributed cars exhaust? Now instead of changing 1 power plant, you need to change every single gaz-powered car.
A tiny bit more complex problem.

Not only have you moved around the emission, by centralizing you've abstracted them making future removal easier, and current car already compatible with future evolutions.

And that's just taking into account the US number about coal-based electricity production. Other countries (random example: Switzerland, Germany, Iceland, France ... ) my burn less coal and either count on renewable energy or nuclear energy (has its own set of problems, but CO2 and global warming arent among them).

Comment Addendum (Score 1) 318

check which fields emitted by a DHCP server will end up in an environment variable during the call of these helper scripts.

Found elsewhere:
NetworkManager, when calling dhcp trigger scripts fills these two variable:
DHCP4_FILENAME and DHCP4_DOMAIN_NAME
based on data received by the DHCP ACK.

So if a sever sets the domain name as "(){:;};rm -rf /", the laptop will be fried before even the script has a chance to check if that's actually a valid domain name.

(That's a bit like if an SQL injection could fry a server, because the php5 interpreter itself gets hijacked by it, before the php page had time to check and sanitize the inputs)

Though in the DHCP case, the DHCP client it self could do some preliminary input sanitization before handling the data out.

Comment Idea (Score 2) 318

I'm not the original poster, but my idea goes like this:

- very often, when a laptop gets an IP from DHCP, it will launch a collection of helper scripts (that will in turn set-up lots of other thing. Random example: firewalling rules for the new interface)
- check which fields emitted by a DHCP server will end up in an environment variable during the call of these helper scripts.
Very obvisouly, the IP address will be in an environment variable, but that's not going to work because you can't put arbitrary data in there.
What else? Assigned network name? Some other data field?

Some of these data could have arbitrary form.
So you set it to "(){:;};rm -rf /".
Even before the helper script has had time to receive the data and do the necessary sanity check on it, bash will interpret the whole content (because it begins with () ) including the rm.

Any piece of software that:
- at some point of time runs helper shell scripts
- can receive arbitrary data that is placed in ENV variable while calling the scripts
is at risk.

Because BASH itself forgot to do its own input sanitation. (it should only load the function definition. It should not blindy eval any ENV variable beginin with (), it should only interpret the curly craces right after the () and stop once the body of the function is finished. Not call anything else).

That a REALLY nasty exploit.

Comment To nitpick further (Score 1) 275

Now think about it this way:
yes, indeed a retro flector always bounces signal back to the source, no matter it its orientation is perfect.

BUT a better aligned retroflector offers a bigger cross-section: it will occupy a wider spot in the field-of-view of the laser.
A perfectly aligned retroflector will offer 100% of its surface exposed to a laser.
A 45 retroflector, will only offer a fraction ( cos(45) = sqrt(2)/2 ) of its surface.

So orientation *has* an incidence on the quality of the return signal.

But as you mention:
- so does size
- so does quality (lunokhod2 got covered by dust, to the point of the radiator malfunctionning and the isotope thermal generator overheating the rover, some of that dust could cover the retroflector a bit)

Comment What?! (Score 1) 93

Go look at the Mesa Matrix http://www.mesamatrix.net/ Nouveau supports more OpenGL features on their open source cards than AMD does.

Both Nvidia and AMD recent drivers (r600 and radeonsi) are 100% green on all OpenGL features that are currently officially supported (OpenGL 3.x)
They only have red spots for feature that are for OpenGL versions that aren't supported by mesa yet any way (OpenGL 4.x) - in other words, that's still getting worked on. And given the current pace of development, both cards will support all opengl 4.x feature with short time difference between each other.

(Note: the case of r300 is a bit different. It's an older card generation (The various Radeon 9600/9800/X) and actually lacks some features like unified shaders - unlike the nv50/nvc0/r600/radeonsi cards. So you'll never see 100% features support anyway. The hardware simply isn't there)

The problem aren't *features*. The problem is performance.

The only thing that's been holding the Nouveau cards back has been power management and even that's not a huge issue,

Except for the part that re-clocking is critical to get decent performance out of a card. And it doesn't work reliably yet. The usability is, according to current benchmark at phoronix, quite random.

That's not nouveau team's fault, though. Nvidia has started releasing documentation only very recently (and almost only about Tegra).
Without documentation Nouveau team has to reverse engineer almost everything, and that's not an easy task as shown by the actual realworld performance.

Nouveau has been also very rapid at making all features available to the newest generation of cards very quickly.

Except that real world test tend to show that the actual result will vary greatly between differnt cards.

I expect that by this time next year, they will have working OpenGL 4.2-4.3 support,

And probably the other drivers will have it too around the same time frame...
(You know, the whole point of Gallium being modular and parts being re-usable. Once Mesa starts supporting a feature for one card, getting the other to support is a lot easier: basically only upgrading the backend)

Whether Nvidia has posted meaningful contributions to the project or not is almost irrelevant. The reality is that open source Nvidia is coming and it's going to be great.

It *IS* relevant. Without any help from Nvidia, the work for Nouveau developer is much harder (as seen with the current problems regard re-clocking), and more bumpy accross the landscape of varied graphic cards.

As AMD provides documentations to the radeonsi/r600 developers (in addition to having some developer on their own payroll), it's much easy for them.
To the point that AMD considers the opensource driver as a valid alternative for older hardware whose support has been dropped in recent catalysts.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Here's something to think about: How come you never see a headline like `Psychic Wins Lottery.'" -- Comedian Jay Leno

Working...