Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:O RLY? (Score 1) 374

"Let me put it this way: if this software is such an obvious 'polished turd', why haven't *you* coded up a replacement?"

systemd *is* the replacement. And all these years later, I still without any hesitation prefer the thing it replaced...which I still use.

You prefer Upstart? That's what systemd replaced on both Red Hat distributions and Ubuntu.

Comment Re:Wayland was the "main stream" (Score 1) 374

Wayland is on its way to being mainstream. Canonical switched to developing their alternative, Mir, after initially supporting Wayland. Unity was Canonical's alternative to the more mainstream GNOME 3. Canonical just announced they'll be moving from Unity to GNOME 3. BTW, the Ubuntu GNOME is how I've been installing Ubuntu for quite a few years since I never cared for Unity. Upstart was a project that started at Canonical and became mainstream for several years. Even Red Hat used upstart until they replaced it with systemd, which subsequently become mainstream. Canonical has been using systemd for a while now. Canonical sometimes works well with others and sometimes doesn't and they're not the only company that tries to throw their weight around.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 1) 401

You're right, in a pedantic sort of way. It's an easily human readable translation of machine code. But in a practical sort of way, you can program in it, thus it can be considered a "language".

You have completely missed the point. I didn't says that there is no assembly language, but that there is not a single language called "Assembly." Practically, x86 assembly language is completely different from ARM assembly language. It makes no more sense to talk about "Assembly" as a single language than to talk about "Natural Language" as a single language. Someone who speaks Mandarin cannot communicate with someone who speaks Italian just because those are both natural languages.

Comment Re:This again? (Score 5, Informative) 401

"Assembly" is not a programming language. Rather, there is at least one "assembly language" for each CPU instruction set. More importantly, compilers rarely produce any kind of assembly language any more, though there are various types of intermediate representations used by interpreters and compilers. Every CPU executes instructions in a machine language. There are several such languages in common use, most importantly those understood by the x86 and ARM families.

Comment Re:It could be worse.... (Score 1) 167

Regardless of the politics, they ARE people. We should not dehumanize them. While the actions of North Korea may puzzle us, it would be better understood once one realizes that THEY lost over 500,000 fighting us in the 1950s, which pales in comparison to what is happening in Syria right now.

I would hope there can be peace between US and THEM ... While we ridicule them, they have a deep resentment that can be weighed in human lives.

##

Who dehumanized whom? Many Koreans, Americans and people of other nationalities died in the war that paused over six decades ago. It was a terrible war that resulted in a stalemate in which nobody ended up looking good. The Soviets and Chinese supported one brutal dictatorship and the US/UN supported another. However, the South Koreans, Americans and everyone else has moved on. The South Koreans have thrown off their dictators and even tried to build economic ties with the North. What deserves ridicule is the perpetually provocative stance of the North Korean government, calculated to get attention and more appeasement deals. Ridiculing ludicrous claims about targeting the White House does not dehumanize the North Korean people who can't question anything they're told whether they want to or not.

Comment Re:Devices should be de-brickable (Score 1) 170

Yes, yes, that's all very clever of you, except for the fact that iPhones do have that. You can reset the firmware, or all the internal storage, from a plugged-in computer. Almost every single byte of internal flash can be rewritten by Apple, or, hell, by an end user with iTunes. (I think the only parts that can't be overwritten are the parts that allow the phone to enter recovery.)

These 'bricked' phones? They enter recovery mode just fine, and all their internal memory can be rewritten just fine. Everything works fine there.

The problem here is that the current time, of course, is not part of a system recovery, because the damn current time is not saved to the phone's flash memory. How would that even work?

The clock in an iPhone operates the same way the clock in a PC operates, in a separate very low-power clock-tracking chip that runs off a battery. (Which in this case is the device battery.) There is absolutely no way to alter this from outside the device, and, really, no device has even needed such an ability before. iOS just has a really stupid bug.

And the way the iPhone is designed does not allow easy removal of the battery, which, really, is the problem here. If Android had this problem, it would be laughed off, 'Just unplug the battery, that will fix it'. But you can't do that with an iPhone.

I suspect that, within days, Apple will have produced a iOS update that can be put on the device (Even after it has been 'bricked'.) that either checks the time and fixes it, or just doesn't have whatever bug is causing this in the first place. (In fact, it should be possible to put a tiny image on there whose sole purpose is to change the clock, and then put the *original* image back.)

Comment Re:Javascript? lol! (Score 1) 136

Is there anything about Javascript that isn't shitty and broken? Can we please just take this language behind the barn, shoot it and move on with our lives?

As terrible as the language called "Javascript" may be, this isn't an example of that. It's an example of a poor implementation of one standard library function in one implementation of the language. It seems the problem was fairly easily fixed. Javascript code doesn't need to be changed to use the better PRNG so it would be very foolish to abandon Javascript just because of the past poor PRNG.

Slashdot Top Deals

Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.

Working...