I remember hearing about Singularity a few years back - it sounded promising. Looking at the linked page, there doesn't seem to be anything published or presented since 2009. Anyone know what's going on with Singularity these days?
The "qualified buyer" requirement is interesting. I understand the intent but wonder how it would work in practice. The linked blog post suggests using a program that needs to be modified and submitted to inquire. A qualifying test like that seems too easy to cheat. I imagine the modified program would quickly become available online for anyone who cares to look.
What tests could you design to verify a hackers proficiency and acknowledgement of the product's quirkiness that's practical to verify but can't easily be cheated?
Perhaps when you initiate an inquiry you could be given a unique function that makes a set of randomly generated non-destructive transformations to a string. Your task is to submit a string that will be transformed by that function into your email address. If not your email address then the output string "I will not ask Bunnie for help, I will fix problems myself and share my fixes"
does it really matter? the goal is just to discourage mass market consumers. if somebody wants one so badly they're willing to cheat on a test to get one, that isn't really mass market.
and isn't cheating sort of the spirit of hacking that projects like this want to encourage? if you want something, you make it happen without worrying about the "right way" to do it. nothing wrong with a bit of cheating - this is reality, not school.
Don't underestimate mass market consumers' readiness and ability to use a search engine. The small effort to find the answer online will not deter anyone who comes along
wanting a laptop.
What I have seen called cheating by hackers are things like exceedingly clever shortcuts. Cheating by using someone else's answer in a qualification test is not in any sort of spirit of hacking that I'm familiar with.
We've had a number of US-based law enforcement bodies over
the year try to get hold of our data without going via the
appropriate Australian bodies, and it doesn't work out for
them. In the end, they have always ended up submitting a
request for cooperation via the Australian Federal Police,
as they are required to do, and we respond to that request
in line with Australian law.
Even so, as an Australian I decided to use a hosting company whose servers are physically hosted in Australia.
Fair enough. Hosting in Australia is something we consider occasionally, but the bandwidth pricing is just so much higher. It's always worth looking at demand of course - are there enough people who would be willing to pay a premium to have their email in Australia to justify running up a full instance here.
This from a piece by RMS in The Guardian "Is Android really free software?" [0] explains his reasoning behind accepting hardware with permanently embedded firmware.
In any case, the phone network firmware in an Android
device is not equivalent to a circuit, because the
hardware allows installation of new versions and this
is actually done. Since it is proprietary firmware, in
practice only the manufacturer can make new versions
– users can't.
Putting these points together, we can tolerate non-free
phone network firmware provided new versions of it won't
be loaded, it can't take control of the main computer,
and it can only communicate when and as the free operating
system chooses to let it communicate. In other words, it
has to be equivalent to circuitry, and that circuitry must
not be malicious.
The author seems to claim that is is implausible for a router vendor to sell a router that drops more packets.
The marketing plan is that the because router
vendors are unwilling to say ‘has less memory!’ as a
marketing tactic, maybe they’d be willing to say
‘drops more packets!’ instead. That seems implausible.
Yet he concludes by suggesting the router should drop all the packets.
The best way to solve that is for a router to notice
when the queue has too much data in it for too long,
and respond by summarily dropping all data in the
queue. /snip/ Of course, I’ve never seen that proposed
anywhere…
Based on his earlier reasoning, that would also be implausible.
That's what you would do IF you were going to be serious about making the router drop packets in a way which actually helps. I don't expect it to happen any time soon.
There are a few instances of unnecessarily keystrokes in this exercise. Moves to the start of the line for a command that will act on the whole line (0shift-D, 0shift-V, 0dd). The 0's aren't required for those. Also a few times it switches to command mode when the editor is already in command mode based on the last step. 0shift-V2j selects 3 lines, not two.
Is shift-d supposed to effect the whole line? Default 7.2 vim on winxp shift-d goes from the cursor to the end of the line making 0shift-d the correct thing for me to delete a line.
The 3wcw to change a misspelled word is also incorrect(for me at least it should be 03wcw)
You're right, the 0 is required. Now I think about it a little more, if you want to delete all the characters on the line, but not remove the line, then 0shift-D might is good. I tend to do ddO for the same operation.
