Posts by Alan Mackenzie

Buggy app for insulin-delivery device puts diabetes patients at risk of hypoglycemia

Re: Artificial pancreas?

The problem _is_ insulin. It doesn't cure the disease. We've had insulin, as a drug, for over 100 years now, and we're _still_ having to use it. There have been no advances in insulin (and its analogs) formulation in the last 50 years. What we have now is no better (and in many cases dangerously worse) than what we had then. Where, for example, is the insulin formulation which works more strongly when blood glucose is high than when it's not? All the new insulin analogs are merely me-too drugs which replace their predecessors when their patents are about to expire.

Your proposed solution of "more effectively treating diabetes" by wiring diabetics up to machines 24 hours a day would merely exchange metabolic problems for severe psychological ones. It is in no way a cure.

Artificial pancreas?

> Diabetes devices have really come a long way , we have insulin pumps, finger prick glucose monitors,continuous/flash glucose monitors that go on your skin and pierce the interstitial layer of your skin and last for upto 14 days or are implantable and last longer. When you combine the two you get an artificial pancreas system like ÀPS or openAPS.

That's a marketeer's misuse of the term "artificial pancreas". What you're talking about is merely an insulin pump with some automation. Scary.

A real artificial pancreas would be an implantable device which produces (the right amount of) insulin. Trouble is, that wouldn't make obscene profits for the pharmaceutical companies, so they won't develop it.

And we haven't come a long way at all in Type 1 diabetes treatment. There have been no Earth shattering developments in the 58 years I've been in this game. I needed one injection a day then, I need three now. So much for progress. The expectation then was that insulin injections would soon be a thing of the past. Hah!

Meta sued by privacy group over pay up or click OK model

Re: I may be wrong but...

From my point of view, you are wrong.

The violation of privacy does not happen at the time advertisements are blasted at you. It happens when your data are slurped, regardless of what, if anything, is then done with them.

YouTube cares less for your privacy than its revenues

Security

Correction: if some adverts are a security risk, then because you don't know which ones and haven't the means to treat them differently, ALL of them are security risks.

Imagine a world without egress fees or cloud software license disparities

What's the point?

There would be a point if such matters could be resolved in weeks.

The behaviour of the large cloud providers is blatantly anticompetitive. Why is there a need to spend several years "investigating" it? By the time remedies come into force, the lesser cloud providers will have been forced out of business. And Microsoft and co. will be onto the next antisocial prank, which will take another 5 years or so to resolve.

And how come there are no gaol sentences for such behaviour?

Mars helicopter to try for new speed record on Thursday

Re: I know my maths isn't great...

There is no mention of any dissent, and there is no hint anywhere of indecency.

Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement

Tschüss, copyright!

I think it's clear that copyright, certainly for books at least, has run its course and should be replaced by something more in tune with modern technology.

It was OK when copying was difficult and expensive, but when the capabilities of every modern computer include cheap and easy copying, it is perverse to tell the World's population they may not use their computers to their full capabilities.

What should replace copyright, so that authors can make a living? I would suggest some sort of tax on each internet connection, and some sort of metering of downloads of books. The payment to each author, funded from this tax, would be in proportion to the number of downloads of his works. Or something like that.

Judge greenlights $5.9M unpaid overtime Citrix wage deal

Here we go again. Yet another big company allegedly breaking the law, and there's no penalty.

When, in these matters, are we going to see a proper investigation and company directors gaoled?

US AGs: We need law to purge the web of AI-drawn child sex abuse material

There's a bit of a contradiction, here.

If no actual children are involved in the production of AI child porn, then it isn't "child sexual abuse material". There is no rational groud to prohibit this stuff. The actual reason would appear to be a desire to make life difficult for people who are (supposedly) different from the norm.

It must be very difficult, being a paedophile (by which I don't mean child abuser). Now that technology looks like being able to satisfy, to some extent, the sexual urges of these people without hurting others, lawmakers are looking to ban this use of technology.

It seems clear that the motivations of these lawmakers is not to protect children, but to punish paedophiles for the "crime" of simply being. In so doing, they can only be harming real children, not protecting them.

These lawmakers need to get a grip on reality.

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

This sounds like moderately fast suicide.

What exactly is meant to protect the astronauts from cosmic rays and solar winds? The International Space Station is within the Earth's protective magnetic field. Gateway, in Lunar orbit, will be far outside of it.

The Apollo astronauts made it back again after about 1 week's exposure, and wasn't that when Solar radiation was at its 11 year minimum?

Or, is Gateway going to be lined with lead?

South Korea 'puts the brakes' on Google's app store dominance

Justice?

> Soon afterwards, Google told developers they were free to sell their wares in OneStore – but doing so would see them removed from the Play store.

How can things like this happen, and nobody end up in prison?

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Vast majority??

> Eptura said the vast majority of those it surveyed (73 percent) have always lived within commuting distance of their office...

Since when has 73% been a vast majority? I would class it as a moderate majority (and 52% as a wafer-thin majority). 95% would be "vast".

GNOME project considers adding window tiling by default

Re: So DEs are catching up with Emacs, are they?

[Author here]

Hello, Liam.

>> Emacs has had this "tiling" behaviour for well over 20 years

> Indeed it has. You didn't write this, did you?

No, I didn't. (Neither Emacs's "tiling" nor the following web page.)

> https://howardism.org/Technical/Emacs/new-window-manager.html

That's a splendid demonstration of Emacs's versatility. I use Emacs quite differently.

> But the thing is, where it can do many wonderful things, it doesn't use the keyboard controls that have been standard for 30+ years now. It doesn't even call windows "windows".

Emacs can't afford to use these standard key bindings. They may be standard, but they're a bad standard. I've just counted up the commands in Emacs, and they number around 13,500. Each one of these potentially wants a key binding. The short key bindings are exceptionally precious, and need to be kept for frequently used commands. Wasting, for example, C-s on "save file" would be an absolute wrench in the gearbox. In Emacs, C-s is actually used to start an incremental search (as contrasted with the excremental search which is still common in other applications).

Yes, it's a shame that the original developers of GUIs failed to use the established terminology, way back then. The subject of changing the terminology of "frame" to "window", and "window" to something else (what?) comes up every now and then on the Emacs developers' mailing list. But considering the hundreds of hours of work that would take, combined with the months/years of inevitable bugs and confusion ("do you mean "old" window or "new" window?") that would occur pretty soon puts a dampner on such proposals. It's really not hard to get used to "window" meaning what Gnome plans on it meaning.

> I'm sorry but I just don't have time for that.

That's fine, Emacs isn't for everybody. It may be the most user friendly program there is, but it definitely isn't beginner friendly. You've got to put a _lot_ of effort into learning it and configuring it to become your own Emacs. Once you've learnt it to a reasonable degree (the process never stops), your productivity shows the benefits.

> In the 1980s I knew a dozen different editors, with totally different keystrokes and sets of terminology... but then standardisation happened and it all went away and it was _great_.

> The standard is called CUA, and most GUIs in the world today follow it:

It may be a standard, but it is inappropriate for programs with 13,500 commands competing for key bindings.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

> There is a less than half-hearted stab at it in Emacs, called `cua-mode`, but it's not worth having.

I don't think it's widely used, no. It doesn't appear frequently in bug reports, for example.

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/CUA-Bindings.html

> This is a much better effort but it needs integration and being made the default _for new users_.

That's another topic which arises every now on then on the developers' list. Yes, it would ease the learning for newcomers, but such newcomers would be deprived of the benefits of Emacs's systematic key binding schemes for a long time, possibly for ever.

https://ergoemacs.github.io/

That's one approach, yes, and is yet another demonstration of Emacs's versatility. :-)

So DEs are catching up with Emacs, are they?

Emacs has had this "tiling" behaviour for well over 20 years, possibly nearer 50 years.

Inside each Emacs frame (GUI "window"), the Emacs windows are optimally positioned. When one is resized the others are correspondingly resized to match, etc.

This was true before there even were GUIs, when terminals were just character terminals.

It's nice to see Gnome et al. catching up with 50 year old technology. ;-)

North Korean satellite had no military utility for spying, says South Korea

What was this satellite for?

"no military utility as a reconnaissance satellite."

Then what? Having captured the hardware (which surely still belongs to North Korea) and analysed it, all they seem to be able to decide is what it's not for. Pull the other one!

If this satellite was intended for weapons systems, these experts would have said so. Maybe it's a weather satellite.

Inclusive Naming Initiative limps towards release of dangerous digital dictionary

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

">> This committee would appear to have similar aims

>Rubbish. Almost completely the opposite."

So you trim the context, so that people reading your post can't see what you're arguing against.

Yes, this committee wishes to suppress freedom of expression and freedom of thought. In this particular case, they wish to suppress the analogy between a human slave, and a slave device, or slave process, etc. Such analogies are helpful to learning, and to clear expression. Substitutes like "secondary" for "slave" and "primary" for "master" just don't cut it. As I have said elsewhere on the thread, they lack the immediate conceptual appeal of "master" and "slave", they're abstract to the point where they're difficult to remember, and they're likely confusing, too.

What's wrong with "master" and "slave" used in technical communication? I've read this thread from top to bottom several times, and not spotted a single poster who said (s)he was offended by the usage. The nearest was from a teacher, who noted that the usage "raised hackles" amongst his students. It would appear that any offence taken is almost vanishingly rare, certainly amongst Register list posters.

I and, I think, many others here are highly offended that some self appointed committee is attempting to suppress our technical vocabulary and freedom of expression. I think the general attitude is that this committee is trying to solve a non-existent problem.

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

OK, I've heard of it now, thanks!

The next question which has been begged is how important is it? The words "master" and "slave" are important words to be able to discuss the topic of slavery. The word "master", in particular, is important in many contexts in English, for example as contrasted with "mister", "copy", "subsidiary", "merely competent", or "apprentice". Or something electronic which controls something else electronic.

Primary and secondary cannot IMHO replace master and slave. They are too abstract and probably already have too many connotations. They lack the immediate conceptual "Ah-Ha!" that master and slave have. The terms make some people uncomfortable and or resentful. To what degree? To a great enough degree to justify an enforced change in the English language? That will also cause discomfort and resentment, as is clear from the posts on this list.

Why have we not had a black contributor to these lists expressing her/his own resentment of "master" and "slave"? Or a neurodiverse person (whatever that means) saying how much (s)he resents "sanity test"?

The Novel "1984" by George Orwell had as a central theme the emasculation of the English language in order to prevent people being able to express concepts, and as a final aim, to prevent them being able to think independently at all. This committee would appear to have similar aims, if less in magnitude.

Re: And by "solving" a non-problem ...

".... list of words which mean something society agrees is intolerable".

Intolerable to whom? The (few) people who find master and slave processes intolerable are doing so on imagined other peoples' behalf.

I've yet to hear of, say, a black USAmerican, whose ancestors were subjected to actual slavery, taking offence at the technical usage of the words. As others have written, context is everything.

I hope these people trying to enforce their lack of toleration on others fail. At worst, they will succeed in part, and leave lots of technical terms which currently have well understood meanings much more ambiguous and their mealy mouthed replacements only half understood.

I know what a slave process is, and I know what a sanity check is. I've no intention of using any other terms for these.

Microsoft cries foul over UK gaming deal blocker but it's hard to feel sorry for them

Why?

Just what sort of jurisdiction does the UK Competition and Markets Authority have over such a proposed takeover?

For the purpose of argument, just what would happen if Microsoft and Activision ignored the CMA and went ahead with the transaction anyway? It was surely not about to proceed under English law. Just what sort of sanctions could the UK apply to Microsoft afterwards?

What is stopping the two companies simply ignoring the CMA? I'm not in favour of this takeover, but I'm puzzled.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

I'd buy the car. :-)

Google's Dart language soon won't take null for an answer

Re: Why pass a pointer when you can pass a reference?

References in C++ are a poor man's pointer. You can't use them to indicate null node pointers in a tree structure, for example.

References also make the meaning of C++ source code obscure. In C, the syntax makes it clear whether a passed parameter is by value or by pointer. So when debugging you know when an argument can't be overwritten by the called function. Not so in C++, where you've got to look at the called function's signature to know this. As if debugging isn't difficult enough anyway.

States label TikTok 'a malicious and menacing threat'

Comparison

Just how is what TikTok is allegedly doing any worse than what Google or Facebook does?

Is it just because TikTok is Chinese?

India’s retail digital currency pilot launches on December 1st

RBI said .... like trust, safety and settlement finality......but what about ....?

But what about anonymity and freedom from surveillance in general?

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

What about the nitrogen?

Burning hydrogen at high temperatures in the atmosphere is surely going to produce Nitrogen oxides, otherwise known as acid rain. This is not green.

If hydrogen is to be used to fuel aeroplanes, would it not be better to generate electricity from fuel cells, and power the propellers that way?

Europe wants Airbnb and pals to cough up rental property logs

Re: It had to happen

Here in Germany, there is, thankfully, a limit on how much rent can be increased. Trouble is, it's been at 20% every three years for so long, when inflation's been at 2+% per year. Result: rents have been increasing towards the point where only the well off can afford them, everybody else scraping every last non-rent Euro together just to pay essentials.

There's no such thing as a "market" in rents. Once somebody is settled in a rented property, the costs and disruption involved in moving somewhere else are so high that it rarely happens. But the fact that all landlords increase their rents by that same 20% every three years creates the illusion of a market mechanism.

Incidentally, here, at the end of a tenancy, it's the responsibility of the tenant to restore the property to the state it was in at the start of the tenancy. That includes things like new wallpaper as well as a comprehensive clean-up. That's a further cost and disincentive to moving.

The solution, of course, is to build enough rental property until there is a surplus, such that a genuine market mechanism might take hold. Hah! Given how many politicians are private landlords exploiting the current situation, that'd be like turkeys voting for Christmas. It'd be interesting to know how much of the housing shortage is due to AirBnB and the like. I suspect it's substantial.

Brit data regulator fines five cold-calling fiends £405k

Oh, here we go again. :-( What's the betting that these "firms" will go bankrupt, failing to pay the fines, and then they will start up again, very soon, with new names and the same (lack of) faces?

These people were intimidating the old and vulnerable, according to the report. Why do they not receive prison sentences?

Brocade wrongly sacked award-winning salesman who depended on company insurance for cancer treatment

Re: A timely reminder

> "Health insurance is private in Germany for example".

Whilst that may be true, it is a grossly misleading way of stating it. The monthly fees you pay to a Krankenkasse in Germany are determined solely by your income and circumstances. OK, that's simplified a lot but is true in essence.

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

What's the man actually alleged to have done which is wrong? Claiming to be Elvis Presley or Jesus Christ is normally regarded as evidence of mental disturbance, not crime.

So why is claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin any different? How have the people persueing this legal action lost anything?

I just don't understand this.

Open-source projects glibc and gnulib look to sever copyright ties with Free Software Foundation

Re: Why assign copyright?

"Still, I don't think the policy is at all necessary, ....."

Oh you don't do you? Are you a lawyer experienced in the field of copyright? If not, what you think about the policy is of no consequence and no value.

Before instigating the policy of copyright assignment, the FSF took advice from such experienced lawyers, and doubtless get such advice revised at suitable intervals.

Those who dislike the idea of Free Software will be rejoicing at these moves - damaging Free Software as part of a personal vendetta against Richard Stallman by an unthinking hate mob.

FSF doubles down on Richard Stallman's return: Sure, he is 'troubling for some' but we need him, says org

Re: The world keeps turning

"So we have GCC with it's deliberately non-modular structure and Emacs which is an utter mess."

Oh, really? Emacs is _not_ an "utter mess". It is not an exemplary piece of well written software, but for crying out loud, it's 45 years old. It was superbly well designed, and decades later is still in use, maintainable, and maintained. (i'm an Emacs maintainer.) Emacs is also superbly user friendly, if not learner friendly, and was for decades one of the very few serious editors there was.

And yes, Richard Stallman is still involved in Emacs's development, and I'm happy that he is. His behaviour on the developers' mailing list is entirely correct, and he has this habit about being right in difficult questions to do with software. Maybe this is why powerful forces wish to marginalize him.

Do bullies like Red Hat, ever consider where their billion dollar per year turnover came from? It didn't appear out of thin air, it resulted from the vision, talents, and hard work of RMS and the people he inspired. It may well be that such a project could only have come from somebody like Stallman. It would seem that gratitude, and not just a little, is called for.

Popular open-source library SDL moving development to GitHub despite 'calamitous design choices' in git

Calamitous design decisions in git

In git, basically the internal structures are fantastic and the UI is utterly undesigned.

Mercurial has the same power as git, roughly speaking, but has a single well written comprehensive man page whose .bz2 file is a little over 100 kB.

git has a man page for every command (around ?150, I think), and their total bulk, again as .bz2s, is over 800 kB. Some of these git man pages are 2000 lines long, containing descriptions of reams and reams of parameters the commands take. The corresponding sections in the hg manual are perhaps 40 to 60 lines long. The ghastly state of the git documentation is the stuff of legend.

As somebody who uses both, I say Mercurial is by far the better piece of software.

Openreach engineers vote to strike amid changes to job grading structure

Re: Two sides shouting

I think it's fairly clear. Openreach's statement evades the issue, so it's them that're at fault. The CWU's point is that _future_ employees are going to be disadvantaged, a point that Openreach choses not to address. Reading between the lines, one can surmise that Openreach in their meetings with the CWU regard future emplyees, future members of the CWU, as none of CWU's business. It would appear that the coming strike is wholly justified, and I wish the union all the best.

Right-to-repair warriors seek broader DMCA exemptions to bypass digital locks on the stuff we own

> A barrage of lawyers for Apple (and many others) are even as we speak drafting a response about how this law is necessary to protect their intellectual property.

Yes, they're fiends in misdirection. Their so-called "intellectual property" isn't in any danger, thus taking about "protecting" it is a nonsense.

Git your ass to the cloud! Gitpod hooks up with GitLab to take on GitHub Codespaces

Back to the 1980s.

I remember working on developing code on mainframes, back in the 1980s. It was slow and frustrating, and the mainframe was prone to crash. The user interface to the editors of the time wasn't that brilliant, either.

Then we got PCs, which were little more than toys to begin with, but steadily improved to the supreme software development environment they are today. Even Windows rarely gives the BSOD nowadays.

Now, it seems we're going to be devloping code on central servers. Expect them to be slow and frustrating when there're enough simultaneous users, and expect them to go down every now and then. The user interface via a browser isn't that brilliant, either.

What comes around, goes around.

We're not getting back with Galileo, UK govt tells The Reg, as question marks sprout above its BS*

Re: Hard Brexit

Britain is NOT heading towards a "hard" brexit. It's heading towards a crash out. A hard brexit is what Teresa May attempted to negotiate. A soft brexit was rejected by "our" politicians the moment the referendum result was declared.

Top 5 billionaires find that global pandemics are good for business – and their wallets

Re: true story

Ha ha! The irony!

Half crowns (2 shillings and sixpence) ceased to be legal tender in 1971 at the time the pound was decimalised. Eight of them would have been worth a pound, at a time when a pound was a lot of money. I hope you got your gift _very_ early in the 70s. ;-)

This NSA, FBI security advisory has four words you never want to see together: Fancy Bear Linux rootkit

Modules in Linux?

What are these "high value" targets doing, using a Linux kernel with modules? It's perfectly possible to build Linux without modules (I do). A mechanism like modules is bound to introduce security risks. So why do it?

Developers renew push to get rid of objectionable code terms to make 'the world a tiny bit more welcoming'

Re: Shut it

Green and orange will cause you trouble in Ireland.

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

How many IP addresses do we actually need?

> ... and those alterations are exactly the same as the ones we'd have to make if we only added the 16 bits you seem to be suggesting we should've added -- which, incidentally, would be by far insufficient for the internet and would lead to needing to replace the IP protocol a second time.

Well there are ~10^14 48-bit addresses. That's of the order of 10,000 addresses for every person living on the planet. That would surely be an adequate number of them.

But, just in case, we could have expanded to 64-bit addresses. There are ~10^19 of these - around a(n American) billion per living person. That would certainly suffice up until the Sun turns into a red giant and starts boiling off the Earth's oceans.

But, no. The IPv6 designers went for 128-bit addresses. Why?

UK government puts IR35 tax reforms on hold for a year in wake of coronavirus crisis

Re: One-nation Barmy

If employment rights are to mean anything, there needs to be a criminal process and jail time for anybody who violates them.

Human-rights warriors crack on with legal challenge to UK's lax surveillance laws

Re: Pragmatism

"If the objective is to detect and prevent crimes before they occur,", you say, as though that were something reasonable. That is a pretext for putting a telescreen in every room of every house, and on every street corner in the country.

Crime is an essential part of any modern society, it's one of the things which keeps society moving. It must be kept at a reasonable level, yes, but its impact is less than that of the total loss of privacy you seem to favour.

Personally, I would rather risk being at the sharp end of a terrorist's bomb than have my privacy eviscerated.

If servers go down but no one hears them, did they really fail? Think about it over lunch

"EU" plugs

These "EU" plugs (they vary from country to country), at least the German version, stay put so well, you can hardly get the damn things out of the sockets. Unlike the well designed British plug which you can get a full hand "power grip" on, the German plugs only permit a delicate finger grip on them. And the force required is much higher than for a British plug. Often you end up wiggling the thing side to side to get the socket to relinquish its death grip.

Irish data cops are shoving a probe right into Google's ads

Here we go again. :-(

"We [ICO] have been engaging with representatives of the adtech industry and recently hosted an event to discuss the data protection implications of current and future industry practices."

Yet again, supposed regulators treating scoundrels like honourable gentlemen. I bet these scoundrels are really afraid - they'll run rings round the ICO. It's a good job the public prosecutor doesn't treat armed bank robbers like this.

These advertisers have been knowingly breaking the law for a year now. How about some prosecutions instead of "engaging" with the criminals?

Bug-hunter reveals another 'make me admin' Windows 10 zero-day – and vows: 'There's more where that came from'

Being a decent human being

Just being a decent human being doesn't pay the rent, nor buy food. I don't know, but I'm guessing that finding these vulnerabilities takes weeks and months of research. Couple that with the fact that much of this research will be speculative and yield no fruit. Maybe it's Microsoft and friends who should start "acting like grown ups" and start paying these researchers properly for their results.

Let adware be treated as malware, Canuck boffins declare after breaking open Wajam ad injector

No wonder we have this trouble

> It (Canada's data protection regulator) made a series of recommendations to remediate violations, only to have the company sell its assets to Hong Kong-based Iron Mountain Technology Limited.

No wonder we have this trouble. The directors of that company knew full well what they were doing, and that they were breaking the law. What other type of fraud, when detected, is just met with a polite request to stop? When are such directors going to start getting substantial gaol sentences, like lone teenage crackers do?

US: We'll pull security co-operation if you lot buy from Huawei

Re: Really a case of reaping what you don't sew ...

Er, haven't we been here before?

You wear what you sew, you reap what you sow.

Two Arkansas dipsticks nicked after allegedly taking turns to shoot each other while wearing bulletproof vests

How come it's assault?

The two idiots _consented_ to be shot by eachother. Just as in a boxing match, the two contestants consent to being punched in the face.

So how come they're being charged with assault?

Bloke thrown in the cooler for eight years after 3D-printing gun to dodge weapon ban

Re: Because

So, in the USA, there's a right to own nuclear bombs, is there? Surely that is covered by the right to bear arms too.

Now, hold on. This may shock you... Oracle allegedly juices its cloud sales with threats and shoddy on-prem support

Re: Reap What You Sew

No, you _wear_ what you sew.

You reap what you sow.

Brit hacker hired by Liberian telco to nobble rival now behind bars

Re: Trial in the UK

The crime was committed in England, even if the effect was felt elsewhere. Therefore the English courts, correctly, had jurisdiction.