For example, for the CPU it's common that I have more RAM than I can access at any one time at top speed.
No, no it isn't, and it hasn't been since the Amiga.
There is no PC where it is common to have different speeds of memory.
Maybe not on desktops, but it definitely exists in servers, where it's referred to as NUMA.
Not even today's Linux. How many distros actually have AppArmor/SELinux enabled?
The actual evidence is a little more mixed. From Wikipedia:
Most studies support a link between adult criminality and testosterone, although the relationship is modest if examined separately for each sex. Nearly all studies of juvenile delinquency and testosterone are not significant. Most studies have also found testosterone to be associated with behaviors or personality traits linked with criminality such as antisocial behavior and alcoholism. Many studies have also been done on the relationship between more general aggressive behavior/feelings and testosterone. About half the studies have found a relationship and about half no relationship.[72]
It has been empirically shown that boys who had a history of high physical aggression, from age 6 to 12, were found to have lower testosterone levels at age 13 compared with boys with no history of high physical aggression. The former were also failing in school and were unpopular with their peers. Both concurrent and longitudinal analyses indicate that testosterone levels were positively associated with social success rather than with physical aggression.[76]
So, testosterone may be linked to antisocial behaviour, alcoholism and/or social success (in minors), but the jury is still out on aggression.
As a result of its questionable status with regard to copyright restrictions and other potential legal issues, the TrueCrypt License is not considered "free" by several major Linux distributions and is therefore not included in Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, or Gentoo.
While this is true of the others, it is not true of Gentoo. Gentoo's policy seems to be that while the base system should not depend on non-FOSS components, having them present in the main tree is fine. (This might be partly because it's pretty easy to filter which licenses you want on your system using ACCEPT_LICENSE.)
Do you honestly think installing your own OS image is enough ? You can embed malware in the bios.
Would you like me to post a proof of concept ?
I won't buy a Lenovo after this incident. No way. Done.
You don't need to. Their business-grade lines (e.g. Thinkpads) include remote administration tools that basically let you do whatever you want to the laptop over Ethernet without turning it on. You can disable it in the BIOS/UEFI, but it's enabled by default.
Generics, as done in some languages, are excellent. Java is not one of those languages, primarily due to how it handles type erasure. Requiring the programmer to use an explicitly boxed type (Integer instead of int) is also rather clumsy, as is the lack of inference for type parameters.
IMO, C#'s implementation of generics is considerably better.
The other half is of course managed languages, but really slimming down C# to work on a RP doesn't seem impractical - just something that MS hasn't had a reason to focus on.
Or if you're impatient, you could just use D - the syntax is virtually identical to C#, but you get the performance of native code. I actually wrote some patches for buildroot a while back that added support for gdc, which make it pretty easy to compile a suitable toolchain for using D on a Raspberry Pi.
I frequently work with people who are terrified to touch anything related to kernel.
It's more than that - people (inexperienced developers in particular) are terrified to break outside of their encapsulated environment. They instinctively assume the standard libraries are flawless and bug-free, and that they don't have to worry about how they work, which is a useful approximation until that's no longer the case. The idea of looking at the source for said library to understand it better simply doesn't occur to them, or they overestimate its complexity. (To be fair, this is a view strongly encouraged by closed source software, which is a black box to even those interested in the internals.)
The kernel is different from userspace because it doesn't have the same protections and isolation. In userspace, (un)locking the wrong mutex gets you an exception with a nice message or a well defined error code. Do the same thing in the kernel and you get an oops with the stack trace pointing to a BUG_ON() assertion with some confusing looking code. It's the very opposite of the encapsulated environment presented by many userspace languages - misusing the mutex results in the developer being forced to look at the workings of it. Once you become used to that, your skill at working with complex systems develops rapidly.
It might be something a college student might be able to devote time and effort to. Obviously, it won't pay directly, but after graduating, being able to point to a module in the kernel with one's name on it is a good way to find jobs.
I'll second this. I'm a college* student who's currently picking up kernel programming for this exact reason. (Also, I find file system design interesting.) Whether or not it will help my employability remains to be seen, but it only takes the perception of utility to result in an increase in development.
* called university here
That's a terrible idea. It's not Ubuntu vs Mint vs Fedora, it's Ubuntu vs Debian vs Gentoo vs Arch - there's a massive spectrum of distros in terms of ease of use, stability, customizability, etc. There is no one size fits all solution - a rock solid production system is going to be completely different to a bleeding edge development system.
Separating distros from upstream projects is also important because the upstream projects rely on distros adopting their latest software at different times to maintain stability. Users of bleeding edge distros like Arch effectively test the software for users of more conservative distros like Debian.
It's also worth noting that Kubuntu is probably one of the worst KDE-based distros - IIRC, the 4.0 release mess was exacerbated by their maintainers configuring things poorly. And let's not forget that KDE is leaning towards using systemd internally... (I use systemd myself, but I think the idea of forcing it upon users is ludicrous.)
It would be fine if they were simply removing OC support on new cards. The problem is that they are removing a feature from a product that has already been sold, and even used as an advertising point by some manufacturers. This is no different to Sony removing OtherOS from the PS3.
It's poor style to not indent the inner for, because C family languages do allow one line for-statements, which the body is replaced by a single semi-colon. Someone skimming over the code could easily interpret it as such.
Wayland is a replacement for the X window server. (X is the software the sits between your graphics drivers and your desktop environment.) X is ancient at this point and has fundamental issues with its design that mean security issues which can't be fixed without breaking backward compatibility. X has a lot of features that it is required to support to maintain backward compatibility that no one uses any more - modern systems work by just pushing blocks of pixels to it. Wayland only supports this method of operation, so it's much simpler than X. Wayland's main developers are ex-X developers who are intimately familiar with the problem's X has (see Daniel Stone's talk on youtube for more info).
Wayland has been somewhat controversial because it does not have support for network transparency, unlike X. However, most modern apps don't use X in a network transparent way, and X network transparency is actually slower than VNC. The Wayland developers have advocated an approach similar to VNC for network transparency, but AFAIK there's no major implementation of it yet, so it remains controversial (even though almost no one is actually using it right now).
For the past 10 years we've been buying computers and phones loaded with useless crapware. Why should now be any different, and also what makes you think any other company is any different?
Unfortunately they come back when you do an OS upgrade because the apps themselves are part of the OS image.
That's how it's different. If you get a new computer loaded with crapware, you can still uninstall it within Windows, or just reinstall the OS entirely if you wish.
With the Android crapware, you can't uninstall them, and if the phone has a locked bootloader, you can't replace the OS either.
It's very much a question of how much control you have over what runs on your device.
That's not going to work out, people.
Why not? To take the US as an example, the per capita GDP has increased more than three-fold since the 1950s. That means that it should easily be possible for a population with a 40/90 productive lifespan to sustain itself.
Of course, this assumes that the increased productivity has translated directly to increased wealth for the average person. But that not being the case means you have a wealth distribution problem, not one of resource constraints.
Get hold of portable property. -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"
