SpaceX will make $2.6 Billion do way cooler stuff than $4.2 Billion to Boeing. SpaceX is a young, hungry company that is on the forefront of multiple industries. Boeing, while still a great company, is older an no doubt bogged down in more levels of bureaucracy.

Perhaps. I suppose one reason is that SpaceX will be doing a very cutting edge design with little baggage to hold it back. Boeing will do a much more conservative design.

Then the two will be compared to each other to see how well they compare and to basically foster competition to make both designs better or lead to a Boeing-SpaceX collaboration to take the best parts of both.

Either way, it's a great decision to go both ways because SpaceX will do things Boeing will never think of, while Boeing will do things that SpaceX never even considered.

Stupid Slashdot can't even display UTF8 correctly. That was supposed to read "16um".

Thanks for nothing, "nerds" website. We're in 2014, get with the damn program instead of fucking about with your stupid beta layout.

/. displays Unicode just fine. And it has for over a decade.

The problem was back then people were abusing that functionality to screw with everything. If you google "site:slashdot.org erocS" that gives hints of what people were doing. If you don't get what that string is, try "5:erocS".

As a result, /. implemented a Unicode whitelist because they keep adding all sorts of stuff to Unicode.

He said they cannot read iMessage and FaceTime, and they are not reading your email. That is a very important distinction. It might be one he was hoping you would miss, and you did miss it, but he did not say they can't access your email.

It makes sense really because he'd be lying if he said he can't access your email.

Because using me.com or icloud.com email? Well damn, that's standard email and I'm fairly certain even if Apple uses SSL, it's standard IMAP or POP protocols, and it's delivered to Apple in plaintext unless you externally encrypt.

Because if Apple could come up with a way to handle email that comes in plaintext and somehow fail to be able to read it, then it's a technology Apple could make money on selling to privacy advocates.

iMessage/FaceTime are Apple-designed and encrypted with user keys and other stuff. It's possible to design a protocol where Apple couldn't recover it even under threat of contempt because at no time is it in plaintext at Apple.

But email? Anyone who sais they can't read it is lying, not just Apple. Short of applying encryption on your message, as far as Apple is concerned, SMTP delivers messages in the clear, optionally wrapped in encryption just for transport. But forwarding it on to the right mailbox etc., it's plain text.

Didn't the Australian government sort of recommend users to bypass Geo-IP blocks using VPNs and all that as a way to get cheaper content?

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

I haven't bought music through iTunes yet, so I'm hardly an expert, but it seems to me that if I were to PURCHASE music through a DOWNLOAD service, I would want to "download new purchases". It seems, then, that this would be the normal and expected setting - unless perhaps one expects to purchase on cell data service and then download later on wifi? in which case it would seem the better solution would be an option in the service to only download big files while connected on wifi, but I know Apple doesn't seem to care about little things like how much you spend (after all, you bought an Apple product, you want coolness!)

Well, there are two things.

First, there's a global "allow downloads over 3G" flag that's unset by default because well, you may not want to use your data connection.

Second, there's a "download purchases" flag that's dependent on iCloud.

The first controls whether or not you want to use your data connection for immediate download. So if you buy an app/book/tv show/movie/song, and you're on 3G, then it will queue it up for download later. If it's set, it will immediately download it.

The second is when you buy same SOMEWHERE ELSE. So if you use iTunes on your PC and buy an album, then all devices with the flag set (it's unset by default) will also automatically download the album and you'll have it at the ready. So you can buy a song/album/tv show/movie/book on your PC, take your device and it'll be there if the flag is set (and if it can download it - wifi or if enabled, 3G. After all, if you disallow 3G downloads, it would be a bug to download over 3G).

What happened here is Apple marked it as "purchased" and people who had the auto-download flag set started automatically downloading the album (over WiFi or if configured, 3G). And then complained because it worked as advertised.

Apple couldn't push it to you or force you to download it. They just marked it as if you bought it already. And that was something all download services have - they could add/remove stuff from your purchased list.

The only way Apple "pushed" it is if you had auto-download enabled in which case it worked as advertised - you "bought" the album "somewhere else" and it dutifully saw that it needs to get it.

The flag is off by default because you could easily find a smaller device filled full of purchases of anything.

As an embedded-systems guy, I'd _love_ to have a Unix-like where I could schedule events that were guaranteed-by-design to fire within some deadline of when they were scheduled. Then I could host my once-per-kHz hardware service routines on the same processor that was also running my device's web-server.

Minix's microkernel architecture seems like an ideal fit for that kind of use case. If there are any Minix devs reading this thread, how easy would it be for me to make a system like that using Minix?

Your requirements mean you want a Real Time operating system - one that guarantees execution of a interrupt or other thing within a fixed deadline.

If your deadline is a do-or-die thing, you have a hard-real-time requirement (i.e., it's a failure if you're late, period). if your deadline is more of a "well, please try not to, but under exceptional cases you can be a bit late" then it's firm real-time, and if it's "well, try not to be late, but it's OK if you are" then it's a soft real-time requirement.

(Note: general purpose OSes often do run tasks that do have hard or soft realtime requirements. E.g., responding to a keyboard is generally a soft-to-firm realtime requirement - the user types something and generally expects a prompt response or the system will seem "slow". A hard realtime requirement would be playing back audio where failure to prepare a new block of audio results in a pop/skip/burp of the audio. Or back in the old days, burning a CD. If you didn't keep the buffers full, you'd be out a disc).

Of course, a RTOS guarantees the deadline regardless of load.

And there are a few that are POSIX compliant - QNX for one. There's also RTLinux which runs Linux as a general task within a realtime framework. I'm not sure if RedHat still maintains it, but eCos was an RTOS as well.

And yes, RTOSes are capable of that - handling a 1kHz process plus a webserver at general processing - the RTOS knows it needs to service that task at 1kHz and will pre-empt the webserver as required.

And, your ISP isn't going to pay any attention to how you mark QoS in what you send out.

For IPv4, QoS simply means reordering packets so achieve low latency for applications that need it (VoIP, ssh), moderate priority for applications commonly used but transfer a lot of data (http, ftp), and low priority for packets used for stuff that could saturate both ends and cause issues with other applications (e.g., bittorrent, p2p)..

On IPv6, there is a QoS field, and you can bet once the switchover starts happening, you'll find ISPs charging by the QoS flag. I wouldn't be surprised if there was going to be a pay-by-the-packet scheme where high priority traffic gets billed separately from low priority "normal" traffic. Or that ISPs won't try to jitter or otherwise cause issues with low priority traffic to encourage use of the higher paying transport.

Ah, got you. Still needs appreciable power, but being a continuous load, that's not a major issue. The water makers on board are RO too, feeding and washing a couple of hundred (very) sweaty bodies. But for big fresh water requirements (hundreds of cu. m. ) we bring in non-potable water on one of the flotilla boats.

There is this part of the open source community that is quite willing to help - but requests that for their help, you are effectively losing control over your own work. That's why Apple dropped gcc. I think they can live without you.

No, the reason Apple invested a ton of money and development effort in LLVM (it started around 10.4/10.5 when the first Clang/LLVM compiler was offered as an alternative to gcc) was GPLv3.

Apple was paying very close attention to what the GPL was evolving into, decided they didn't particularly like the changes and decided it would be best to part ways. They saw that LLVM offered a reasonable alternative with a nice license, but was somewhat lacking, so Apple went and invested a LOT of effort into getting LLVM to a state where it could be used for production code. Including the creation of a C front end (Clang).

That's the reason they ditched gcc, and practically everything else. The GPLv3 was going to be an issue for Apple, so Apple ditched all the GPLv3 and soon-to-be GPLv3 code in their OS. It's why 10.6 shipped with a piss-poor SMB/CIFS stack because Apple had to rewrite it when they couldn't use Samba anymore (GPLv3).

The last commit Apple made to gcc was to support Grand Central Dispatch. That's it.

It's also why projects like FreeBSD have migrated away from gcc as well to LLVM - it's mature enough to switch out.

So you're tired of being fragmeat in arena shooters and diss the entire multiplayer gameplay because of it
That's awfully shortsighted. For me this spastic experience is the most exhilerating gameplay
I can sign up for and I have played these games online since quakeworld. Nothing beats a quick quake3 or ut99 game
Try Left 4 Dead 2 or the man vs machine mode in Team Fortress 2 if you want coop.

Nothing wrong with that. But if I'm going to spend my precious time playing a game, I want to enjoy it. Getting fragged in seconds may be fun the first 10 times or so, then it just becomes a drag and rapidly degrades into pointlessness and in the end, just means wasted time. I could've played Angry Birds in that same time and at least felt entertained rather than bored and annoyed (you can only sit at respawn screens and loading screens for so long).

Some people don't mine and can spend hours racking up deaths by the hundreds (I guess trying to see how many decimals the K/D ratio goes?). Most people find that a frustration and then move on. And if multiplayer doesn't appeal, then the single player side better or the game purchase was a waste.

What nonsense. I claimed that VR had the potential to correct for the limitations in current technology around "broadband" human interaction. Obviously more needs to be done in terms of capturing each persons 3d "image" to project into the VR space and so on. Why you find this offensive is beyond me. (And yes I didn't read the article, this is slashdot after all).

... , dying viruses release toxins ..." that quickly act on /. editors and make them forget the most basic biological facts.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to prove anything, I thought we were discussing ideas? Where I see the short term use case is in school of the air type environments. It's a long way off, but that doesn't mean it's not a good idea. But as I alluded to, I think the commercial environment is where you might see this hit earlier. Games will drive the tech, but economies of scale could see some new and interesting applications.

This doesn't surprise me.

Personally, I prefer to use the bus and catch up my reading when I go into town. Otherwise, I walk to the shops and back.