khedoros

25 years ago, I'd be right with you. 15 years ago, too. Since then? I think your anecdata are outdated. Things just aren't going to be caught by signature-based scanning anymore. In terms of automated detection, the bad guys won. "Good" AV detection, if there is such a thing these days, are the tiny vendors that infections aren't designed specifically to fight against. All the big names get disabled, or otherwise rendered non-functional.

About how I feel whenever someone's holding up an actual camera, filming. It's obnoxious, but it's not the end of the world, and it's not going to make me want to punch someone.

It's kind of funny to listen to people get over-dramatic about this stuff. It'll be really funny to watch them get arrested for assault if they do actually get themselves worked up enough to punch someone.

The impression that I get from comments like yours is that you're almost picturing someone following you to film you, or getting in your face, or something. That would piss me off. But seriously, someone hanging out with friends and posting pictures online where I happen to be in the background? That already happens almost daily. I don't think it's worth getting worked up about.

Do you agree that there's a difference between collecting information from spherically-broadcast radio waves, to which most building walls are nearly transparent, and collecting other electromagnetic waves by putting a detector in a place where most people wouldn't assume it would exist? I'd argue that using opaque building materials to block emission of radiation in directions that one might an observer to be located shows a clear intent to establish a degree of privacy, and that someone flying a quadcopter into unusual places to take advantage of holes in peoples' reasonable expectations should be counted as a violation.

The types of radiation that you're comparing have two very important differences that influence people's expectations: First, they're blocked by very different sets of substances. Second, we've got a detector for one of those ranges built into our heads. I don't think it's reasonable to treat the two segments of the spectrum in the same way.

I expect vehicles to drive by my home. I expect people in those vehicles to have wifi devices that can see the broadcasts from my AP. I expect their devices to capture that data, possibly store it, and possibly transmit it to another device. I think it's unreasonable to assume that someone won't do that. I don't have a strong argument for how capturing and publicly indexing that information is harmful to me.

Ditto, Nexus 5, Android 6.0.1. That's how I interpreted it: as a relocation and rewording of a setting.

Interesting. I can look in the corporate address book, and we've got people in Burlington, Ontario who have titles like "SW Quality Engineer" and "Group Leader-SW Engineer". I wonder if that means that they can't put their official titles onto business cards.

Coming from a US perspective, I feel like "engineer" on its own is a descriptive word. "Professional Engineer" is a trademarked title, and that seems reasonable. Do I have certification as a PE? No. Do I think it's reasonable to describe what I do as software engineering? Yes. To me, it implies that I take part in planning, designing, implementing, supporting, and retiring software. "Programmer" connotes that I took someone else's design, wrote to that spec, and handed the results off to someone else, rather than taking part in the entire lifecycle.

For RAID hardware, it's not that unusual to have a device that isn't supported by standard Windows install media. To install Windows, you'd put the Intel-provided driver on another medium (or slipstream it into the Windows one), and click "load driver" in the installation GUI.

Lenovo apparently wants to treat that computer as an appliance; if someone borks their installation enough that even a system restore won't fix it, it's a call to Lenovo support, and a bill if the machine's out of warranty.

For customers whose Windows installations are working correctly, it's access to a faster, more power-efficient driver. That's how it makes sense, IMO.

Do they, though? Everything I've read over the past 5 years has claimed an 80-90% miss rate. On the other hand, often the first sign I see of an infection is that the virus scanner is disabled, so I suppose it acts as a kind of canary, in that sense.

Are you more interested in actually writing to PC VGA registers, or just the idea of writing a pixel-by-pixel renderer? There are bindings for SDL and SFML in a lot of languages, and the web technology option mentioned by the sibling comment.

If you like the idea of "DOS-based VGA programming" (taken literally), you could also find a DOS compiler or assembler and run it in DosBox. All of IBM's hardware-level documentation can still be found online: http://www.mcamafia.de/pdf/pdfref.htm

> Where?

I was imprecise. The chipset supports a Linux-compatible option, were it not explicitly disabled in the firmware.

> Lenovo has issued a formal statement denying it.

They deny purposefully disabling Linux, and I don't have any evidence against that denial. They don't deny disabling AHCI, because they clearly did. In the disassembly of the code: https://lnv.i.lithium.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/76843...

Intel's RAID is implemented in their driver. Switching the option from AHCI to RAID switches the disk controller's ID so it doesn't bind to the OS's standard driver (whichever OS that is), and binds to Intel's instead (assuming it's present). Intel provides its driver (and only for Windows), Lenovo locks the option so that hapless users mucking about in the UEFI settings don't make their machines unbootable.

Lenovo can deny "deliberately blocking Linux", but they can't deny "practically blocking Linux".

I agree completely with that. I responded because I partially disagreed with your earlier statement; I think it misses the point.

It's a locked UEFI setting causing a problem: true. The setting is causing a piece of hardware to behave in a mode not handled by the current Linux driver: also true. So there are two ways of looking at it.

First: It's a software issue that Lenovo should clear up (i.e. remove the locks on the appropriate parts of the UEFI configuration)

Second: It's a hardware issue that the Linux community can address by writing a driver for the alternate hardware mode.

The laptop supports a Linux-compatible option, and effort was expended specifically to disable that option. If some hardware isn't supported by Linux drivers, that's understandable. If software is added to restrict the modes that the hardware is allowed to operate in, and the restriction wasn't disclosed at the time of sale, I'll return the hardware, because the product doesn't match what I thought I was buying.

If I buy some hardware, I've done research on whether all of its chipsets and devices have Linux driver support just as a matter of course, because I don't expect that Linux will run on every PC. But I feel like I have a right to know if a company puts a non-standard artificial restriction on their hardware. Apparently in this case, Windows 10 doesn't even have the driver included by default, so I can't even reload the software that the machine was designed to run, on my own. That sounds like a defect in the product, to me.

Yes, but it's a setting that causes the hardware to behave differently, and which would need driver support to function.

Don't feel too bad. I had to read it twice to get the meaning, myself. The fact that it's used in a literal sense outside of the U.S. isn't something that I would have considered. I suppose that my viewing of foreign media has had a dearth of references to optometry.

> Or perhaps this is one of those things where people assert that the existence of things they don't want to use is somehow offensive.

It could be related to the signal-to-noise ratio. If I'm a non-dev looking to throw something together and 98% of the information I find is about some pro-level frameworks, it'll be hard for me to sort through that and find information appropriate to my skill level, level of interest, and needs.

Maybe it's still a net-gain for the world as a whole, but it's certainly a loss for the non-dev. It makes the learning curve (perhaps needlessly, perhaps not) more regressive.

I think it's more like if I said "90% of Narnians are bankers and bankers statistically give less to charity; here's the data supporting each statement" or "Kilrathi are statistically 47% more likely than Dothraki to end up in jail", they may be factually-supported statements, but they can be reasonably interpreted as having deeper meanings than just the numbers.

The facts themselves aren't racist, but the things I'm expecting the reader to infer from them are.

It'll just have different design decisions and flaws. Expecting anything else is unrealistic. Bit-rot means that X isn't as well-suited to today's environment as we'd like, but I'm sure that some things in X that are regarded as mistakes now were trumpeted as great advancements when they were introduced. Similarly, Wayland will someday be in the same position.

That doesn't mean that it's not a net-positive to develop and start using it, of course.

The way I see it, Wayland will implement interfaces that make sense the way things are now. Compared to X, development will be quicker (because deprecated interfaces won't be implemented), and the code will be cleaner and more secure. We'll have a generally-working system, with a couple little warts, here and there.

The way I read the previous post, with its mention of "second-system thinking", is that X is currently just about good enough for just about everything, and that while 90% of the necessary features will fit cleanly into Wayland, it's the last 10% that will introduce 90% of the ugly complexity, and take man-centuries to realize the need for, and then produce.

Ditto, because most things I use online load in the >10 second range and don't "install" in any meaningful sense of the word.

If you've got space for 2 machines, you can increase energy efficiency by using the specialized machines.

Fair enough. I'm accustomed to reading 200 character lines, so I guess I don't notice as much. Making the window narrower to force the lines to wrap at 40 or 60 chars feels constricting/claustrophobic to me, and I'm not a big fan of the sites that display text in a thin column, about 1/3 the width of the screen.

There were a few years that I configured my work machine to have dual monitors in portrait mode. That helped my feeling of constriction, while giving shorter lines of text. As a bonus, it matched pretty closely to the 1280 width (at 1200 pixels), and often allowed more of the text to be shown at once.

> I suggest you find a better forum cause imho fb just sucks in general

"Better", for what I use Facebook for, is equivalent to "has more people that I know". I don't expect much from it, and I get what I expect.

What's uncomfortable about browsing with a full-size window? I usually find it slightly more painful not to have the browser maximized.

If you need to maintain a certain level of performance, and the system has early indications that you won't be able to reach that by continuing with the current implementation, then that's hardly "premature" optimization.

When people use that phrase, they're usually talking about the nit-picking, obfuscation-inducing stuff that'll get you a 3% increase in speed, that you'd generally do at the end of the development cycle.

A standing directive that I've got is "get your work done; other than that, I don't care how you spend your time". I regularly put something like "researched current code-signing best practice" into my status reports (and have for the past 8 years, when appropriate).

My time at home is mine. If I'm reading a technology book, it's usually something I'm curious about and don't have a direct use for in my professional life.

You could be right. Reading the original comment again, they might have meant that Facebook has a level of influence that is exceptional for a private-sphere entity, rather than that they aren't privately-held.

> In what sense? Legally they are, they act like one so I am not sure in practice what makes that distinct.

Facebook, Inc. is a publicly traded company. An example of a private company would be Dell Technologies.

We've got the example of places like Finland, that are supposed to be much more successful than U.S. schools. They've got the same distractions, technological and social, that are available in the rest of the world.

It's a very different country than the U.S., but it gives me hope that there's a better way to structure our school system.

Me, every time I do an install. I've got a ton of DVDs left around. I've had USB devices designated as OS install devices, but those always end up repurposed or given away in the months/years between OS installs...but I don't have much other use for the DVDs anymore, so they're always available.

> The problem with school is that most of the consumers of said education are unmotivated slackers whom you practically have to beat the information into.

So, we agree there's a problem. It's immaterial if the issue is in the school itself or in the students. The material fact is that the tool you're using (the current educational system) isn't having the effect that you want (imparting useful information and useful ways to think about it).

Say that I've got a polished, high-quality product, heavily advertised, easily available, and cheap. But: sales numbers are terrible. Is it the potential customers that are the problem, or is it something about the product? Put another way, is it more useful to fight against the nature of the customers, or to modify the product into something that will convince them to buy and use it?

If most people are unmotivated, I don't think it's reasonable or constructive to just say "all well, they should've just tried harder". I think it's more useful to assume that they aren't inherently slackers and diagnose and fix the problems in the system to improve the experience for the students and the outcome for society, overall.

Heh. Well, they failed at teaching that, then. I've learned to quickly do the things that interest me and leave the rest languishing on a "to do" pile for as long as I can justify.