Comment Re:Minor Requests (Score 1) 292
Perhaps this is why the bc(1) page, which I haven't really read, describes it as "bc - An arbitrary precision calculator language", the source code might be funny too.
Comment Re:Minor Requests (Score 1) 292
GNU bc version 1.07.1 surprisingly gives three different answers.
> bc -l
obase=16
scale=40
0.456+0.0
.74B
0.456*1.0
.74BC
0.456/1.0
.74BC6A7EF9DB22D0E5604189374BC6A7EF
Comment Re:You know, at some point soon... (Score 1) 143
Already doing this, manually, in part as a protest of the price hiking practice, effectively nullifying it. Don't want to spend too much time on any specific streaming service anyway. Pausing all streaming services is helpful to concentrate on book reading too, for those of us daring to try to make a dent in the reading list.
What I'd really like to see happen though is for the content to become entirely disconnected from the distribution channels, i.e. streaming service brands, DVD & Blue-Ray manufacturers and sellers etc., so that we can get real competition for each level of the products and their delivery, rather than the current walled gardens (also known as vertical integration) where every streaming service put out seriously flawed player apps, for example (any competent software developer will understand). The barrier to market entry for new players is now artificially high, which further weakens the market and slows the rate of innovation.
We have much better competition in other markets, most notably perhaps in the mobile phone system. For digital content, though, few of the hard-earned lessons from making the other markets work properly have been applied so far.
Eventually the EU will fix this, too, as it always does. Maybe we then can actually deliver the full potential of the technology we developed, with full multi-lingual subtitle translations and optional dubbed audio of all content, without regional limitations.
Just about every day I notice to my dismay that some content on cable TV that might otherwise be worthy of my time has been dubbed and the original soundtrack deleted rather than kept as an option. I frequently switch off instead. The similar problem exists on eg. Netflix, who leaves out seasons from the European market, although they are available from Netflix for the U.S. market - it makes no sense. An example of this on Netflix is the series The Good Place, where only season one is available in the EU. Season 2, while available in the U.S. now, was briefly available in the EU, but removed for some unexplained reason. Perhaps Netflix has some reason for this, such as not wanting to dub or translate the subtitles for a number of languages, but given that I don't even care about the translation for most shows anyway, and I am hardly alone in this, just let customers pick content from any language or region as they see fit instead of reimplementing the tower of Babel in digital imprimatur form for audiovisual content.
The big picture is that this harms free movement in the EU by forming a kind of double cultural lock-in. You can't easily, in advance, familiarise yourself with a foreign language on a daily basis despite that the technology itself actually allows for it, and when you move to another region for studies or work, you are suddenly shut out from the content languages you know from before. It's all counter-productive, not to mention counter to the spirit of EU Fundamental Rights that include, in Article 45, the Freedom of movement and residence.
Comment Re: Public Admission of Stupidity (Score 1) 219
Hoofbeats. From clop-clop-clop at low speeds to a thunderous gallop at higher speed.
Only in urban areas, of course.
You're joking, of course. But back when motor cars made their debut in the U.S. and started to take market share from the horse carriages, some viewed it as a threat and fought for legislation that would have required motor cars to have horse shoes nailed to the car.
Comment Acquisition hinted by Web page HTML source (Score 4, Informative) 695
From mtgox.com:
<html> <head> <title>MtGox.com</title> </head> <body> <!-- put announce for mtgox acq here --> </body> </html>
Comment If only they had published it under GPLv3 (Score 1) 223
Had they published it under GPLv3 instead (Why Upgrade to GPLv3, by rms), I would have been interested and been playing witht the code. Now, not. Your loss, Alcatel-Lucent.
Comment Nonsense (Score 3, Insightful) 81
That suggestion makes no sense at all, considering that governments are paying to insert seurity bugs either by ordering the companies to do so or by infiltration of the developer team.
Comment Core War (Score 1) 87
Apparently the Core War game has becomre largely forgotten, or become better known under its commercial variant: anti-virus software.
Comment Re:KryoFlux - High Definition Flux Sampler for USB (Score 1) 375
KryoFlux looks very interesting, mod up please.
Comment Lesson not learned (Score 1) 1
From 1985 to 1988, the British government attempted to stop people from reading the autobiography Spycatcher, by Peter Wright, a senior intelligence officer with the MI5, the Security Service. The result was pretty much predictable: it was the Streisand effect many years before it became known as the Streisand effect. Which US newspaper will be the first to print a story like the one the Daily Mirror ran at the time, in response to the censorship?
Find the book and read it, it's interesting with plenty of geek material. More than 2 million copies have been sold.
Comment WikiLeaks hosts file for mirrors (Score 0, Offtopic) 383
Slightly off-topic: get your hosts file with IP-addresses for each of the WikiLeaks mirrors here:
WikiLeaks hosts file for mirrors
This is a complete list of IP addresses and host names for all WikiLeaks mirrors, in standard hosts file format. You can add the contents of the file to the hosts file already on your computer. The advantage of this is that you are no longer dependant on external DNS service providers in order to access WikiLeaks, as the file provides the necessary domain name to IP address mapping needed to access the sites.
Comment Re:Security? (Score 1) 154
Reverse engineer a simple CPU? That's so elementary.
Indeed it is. And why not emulate it at the bare metal level in JavaScript, while you're at it?
Comment Re:Emacs? WTF? (Score 1) 139
Well, you're in luck. The N900 comes with vi pre-installed. Personally, I prefer Emacs of course. After all, the N900 is much more powerful than the desktop computers that existed in the first 10-15 years of Emacs.
Comment perfect bomb triggers (Score 5, Interesting) 235
The new card allows German authorities to identify people with speed and accuracy, the government said.
Unfortunately, they will also make perfect bomb triggers, when the target walks by.
Comment Re:Finally, something to do with this phone (Score 3, Interesting) 139
Probably Mappero. or if you want to edit OpenStreetMap, OSM2GO. These are golden. The Nokia Maps application has one big plus, though: you can store complete maps for the whole world on the N900 device (free downloads from Nokia, in case you managed to miss the commercials) so you don't need Internet access while finding your way. I still prefer Mappero though and simply zoom in to the required detail level and go over the route I intend to take in advance, so that Mappero downloads and caches the maps and I can do without Internet access again. Only if I get truly lost, i.e. when I am outside the cached maps in Mappero, do I switch over to the Nokia Maps application. Now if we could have the wonderful Mappero combined with the pre-downloaded Nokia Maps map database, it would be perfect.
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