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Comment Re:Short story: See to what Linus responds (Score 1) 641

Linus made this argument in a different forum yesterday (paraphrasing from memory): "Look, something has to be authoratitive when it comes to parameters. On a linux system, that's the kernel". Which is aribitrary, but not without merit.

No. This is the kernel command line we're talking about, after all. Its original intent is to be used to send options and information to the kernel and, by extension, kernel modules. The fact that user-space programs can read /proc/cmdline and get options passed in from the bootloader (e.g different menu entries) is frankly a hack. The least any user-space programmer should do is make sure their chosen strings don't clash with already-existing parameters. Re-using the "debug" flag is inappropriate, even if it didn't flood dmesg and hang the system.

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Linus Torvalds Admits He's Been Asked To Insert Backdoor Into Linux 576

darthcamaro writes "At the Linuxcon conference in New Orleans today, Linus Torvalds joined fellow kernel developers in answering a barrage of questions about Linux development. One question he was asked was whether a government agency had ever asked about inserting a back-door into Linux. Torvalds responded 'no' while shaking his head 'yes,' as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter. Torvalds also admitted that while he as a full life outside of Linux he couldn't imagine his life without it. 'I don't see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux,' Torvalds said. 'I couldn't imagine filling the void in my life if I didn't have Linux.'"

Comment Re:No updates in 6 years? (Score 5, Informative) 197

It consists of an inherently lossy encoding in the frequency domain (like MP3) plus an encoding of the difference between the lossily encoded audio and the original.

While a few other lossless formats do this (mostly for backward-compatibility), FLAC does not convert the audio into the frequency domain. It either uses a polynomial or linear function: http://xiph.org/flac/documentation_format_overview.html

Comment Re:try hardkernel stuff instead (Score 2) 142

Those hardkernel boards sure are interesting but lack the GPIO of these boards. I think a better comparison is to the Cubieboard. It also has a 1 GHz Cortex-A8 with lots of GPIO pins, but has 1 GB of RAM, 4 GB of flash and a SATA port. It's also a bit more expensive, but I'm pretty sure TI has been subsidising the Beagle boards.

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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