Posts by Rich 2 688 posts • joined 24 Jun 2009
“ For all that it's a mature OS, it has a lot of rough edges, far more than any modern Linux.”
I also disagree. I used OpenBSD for a long time and configuring and administering it was massively simpler than Linux. And it just works. No rough edges at all
“…Musk objected to: he felt that figure should be a lot higher.”
So if Musk originally made his offer in the belief that the figure was “a lot higher” than 5% then what is he complaining about? Even if the 5% figure is wrong and should be higher then he’s still getting what he expected
This makes no sense at all and sounds like a straw argument
The article cites the problem of a host web page telling the ad server who is viewing the page. This then allows the ad server to link the user to the ad it’s slinging.
But this problem still exists with Googlies “solution”; the host ad can just tell the ad server the IP address of the client and so the ad server will still be able to associate the ad with the page and vise versa. Just an IP address is not a perfect identifier but it will work most the time.
Of course none of the above addresses Googlies’ next attempt to abuse its users
“Does it prevent buffer overflow exploits?”
It’s up to the programmer to avoid buffer overflow exploits. No technical solution can fully protect against human incompetence.
If you are writing code that runs off the end of your buffers then you need to go back to school. That would help much more than blaming your tools
“ GPL is only horrible if you want to take free (libre) code and make it not be free any more”
Well that’s just plain bollocks.
BSD (to name but one other license) is more “free” than GPL and yet the horrible viral nature of GPL makes it difficult to use GPL code in a BSD context.
“ Sacrificing replaceable memory in pursuit of ever-thinner devices has never been a good thing for this writer.”
I have never understood the fixation with making everything so thin. If it’s credit card sized then fine; you may as well make it credit card thin as well so you can keep it in your wallet. But for everything else it’s pointless. Just think how much more battery life your average phone could have if it was just a bit thicker. And how much easier to hold it would be!
On a laptop, it’s even sillier. Within reason, who gives a monkeys how thick it is? Laptops started off being about 50mm or so thick and nobody complained then. Make it lighter, fine. But so thin it bends? No thanks
Rather than forcing Intuit to change their advertising and stop saying the product is free, they should be made to make the product genuinely free.
That would (a) mean that the people stuck in this situation will be sorted and (b) it would piss off intuit enough for them to (maybe?) change their business practices in the future (and even they didn’t, they would still be pissed off)
@ST
No - the only licence compatible with GPL is GPL. You can’t even link GPL code with something else without that something else being Borg’d into being GPL. It’s a horrible license that actively prevents many use-cases. Not bad for a licence that pretends to be “free”.
And over the last 40 years, I have written more software than I can shake a stick at, thanks very much.
“ If a need to change such code does not turn up on its own Oracle can create the need by adding a feature that requires such a change”
Yes they could. But even if Oracle change the spec of Oracle ZFS, OpenZFS doesn’t have to follow it! And yes, this would make OpenZFS incompatible with oracle’s version but so what? Nobody uses both implementations together on the same drive array, so the incompatibility is irrelevant.
“… they deliberately chose to base CDDL on a license with GPL incompatibility”
The ONLY license that is compatible with GPL is GPL. I really dislike GPL - it’s an arrogant licence (which should come as no surprise considering who thought it up) that causes much more trouble than anything else. The GPL people will say that the intention is to prevent exploitation without giving back. In the meantime, it cripples lots of use cases.
Consider that FreeBSD have no issues at all using ZFS and the BSD licence is free as a bird and the computing world (including Linux) would be much poorer without it. It’s entirely the fault of GPL if Linux is unable to use something like ZFS - it’s nobody else’s fault. Not even Oracle’s.
20 million quid for what is a pretty straight forward database application that someone familiar with this type of thing could probably knock up on a couple of months?
How could anyone spend more than a few 10s of thousands on this - even if they tried REALLY hard? Who the f***k comes up with these ridiculous budgets?
Amazing that Windows is the only OS in existence (as far as I know) that uses this super-duper ultra-secure thingie….
…. And yet still remains the pile of steaming insecure Swiss cheese shite that it is - in fact, probably the LEAST secure OS in common use. Every other OS is MORE secure without it! What is the f***ing point?
The point is probably to implement some DRM or other that someone is cooking up. I can’t think of any useful (or likely) application for it.
I’m not defending Apple at all here but if the campaign is successful then what we’re talking about is replacing the “monoculture” of webkit with the monoculture of chrome. Because that’s what has happened everywhere else.
I’m still totally baffled why anyone would want to install chrome so that it can spy on oneself but that’s another issue.
I cannot think of JavaScript as anything other than a hacky abortion that is an unfortunate necessity to get some useful website functionality, but putting that aside for a moment I am amazed that the use of a “framework” for a language is so prevalent and deemed acceptable. It says a lot about the language that such a framework is considered by many to be a standard requirement. Compare this to a language such as C - no frameworks here!
As an aside, I have written some quite clever JavaScript websites - you don’t really need any “framework” at all - just a lack of lazyness and some patience.
My understanding is that it’s not against WTO rules because National security interests trump them. (no pun intended)
Mind you, China seems to completely ignore any WTO rules that are inconvenient to it - I read the other day that the US has made 27 complaints to the WTO about China and has won every one. Not that China will take any notice of course
“… it involves a blockchain and, with a certain inevitability, a digital wallet…”
So what you’re saying is that nobody will actually use it because it’ll be flaky and difficult to use and be viewed as a gimmick?
Come back in a couple of years (after all the money has been pissed away) and tell me I’m wrong
“ There are working, usable, graphical web browsers that don't support JavaScript”
While I applaud this idea - everyone here knows just how awful the average website is when it comes to the huge piles of crappy js that they use - I wonder how far you can get with this. More and more websites I have visited lately simply display a blank page if js is disabled. Or you get text but no pictures (or more baffling, you get a few pictures but not the rest - try bing picture search for an example). It’s a shite state of affairs but I can’t help thinking the ship has well and truly sailed on this. I think the idea of a simplified web is fantastic and I wish it all the very best. I’m just not confident in its success - it needs considerable buy-in by many many people, and I think the inertia of a crappy js-chocked web is just too big now
“ Apple has a great deal of respect for Korea's laws and….blah blah bla”
Why do companies still bother to release such completely meaningless and vacuous statements? They would be better off saving everyone’s time and energy and say nothing at all. Or (heaven forbid!) be honest and say “We were happy screwing you over but unfortunately the law disagreed with our methods”
I don’t think there is anything old fashioned about XFCE. If it isn’t broken….
I use i3 - similarly “old fashioned” - for the same reasons.
There are countless years of people’s lives invested in developing whizzy desktop widgets and other crap that nobody ever uses. The only purpose of such nonsense is to fill up your disk and slow down the machine. Sad really.
…. You need to be bringing something new to the case in order to make an appeal? You can’t just make an appeal and present the original evidence again but shout louder.
At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it works in the UK - I’m assuming the US has a similar rule - it strikes me as likely it does
I have no particular issue with Rust - never used it but keep promising myself I will one day - but let’s face it - the world runs on C. With a bit of C++ sprinkled around (*)
Instead of constantly bashing C because it lets you shoot yourself in the foot, why not just learn how to bloody use it properly and stop writing buggy code. I can’t remember the last time I wrote some C that had a memory error. It’s not bloody rocket science - you just have to apply some common sense and a dose of discipline to what you’re doing. It annoys me how so many people complain about C because they are fuckwits who can’t learn how to use it.
The article also mentions the difficulty Java (etc) people have with Rust. Well that’s because Java and Python and (god forbid) JavaScript abstract away the machine so much that the users of these languages often have no clue at all about what is going on under the hood. This is also why we have obscenely inefficient libraries written in these abhorrences and calls to big fat inefficient routines with no appreciation of how heavy they are. This is a fault of our education system rather than the languages, of course.
(*) Of course there are still systems out there happily running Fortran and COBOL code, and while they are being replaced as time goes by, they are still there
“ Both consumers and GIPHY are better off with the support of our infrastructure, talent, and resources”
You could substitute “Both consumers and GIPHY” with any phrase you care to come up with and it’s still impossible for that sentence to make any sense. The only exception is the phrase “Nobody”
Looking down the list of commitments G is apparently prepared to make, I notice that most of them don’t come close to “we promise not to be complete and utter bastards and continue to abuse everyone’s data” and the couple that sort-of touch on such an idea are vague and weasely enough for G to ignore them anyway.
Why don’t the gov just pass a bloody law on the lines of “don’t use anyone’s personal data for shit like advertising” and “don’t track anyone” and lock the bloody company directors up when (not if) they fail to comply? If the directors were made personally responsible then they might finally start to behave a bit. Same goes for the bloody water companies, by the way. It’s not f***ing rocket science
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