Posts by SImon Hobson 2539 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Sep 2006
At a previous job, I once had a little moan to the senior dev that the web based timekeeping system we used (written in house) only worked in IE6 - and as a Mac user, it was a PITA starting up a Win VM every day to do my timesheet. His answer was that the customers only use IE6, so he only builds to IE6, and it's my fault for being an awkward git.
How I chuckle at how he's had to change his tune since.
No, Microsoft did not start this, they did not even promote it, and they certainly don't practice it even 3 or 4 decades after it was "normal" in some places.
When the Mac came out, there were three volumes to the developer's guide - with one of them dedicated entirely to the user interface. it laid out if great detail how menus should work, what should be on them, how dialogs should work, etc, etc. I don't doubt that some of it was copied form others - a lot of the Mac UI came from Xerox PARC - but they did do a fair bit of their own research.
For example, they initially had "Cancel" and "Do It". Then they observed that people were cancelling at unexpected times. Turns out that they'd misread "Do It" as "Dolt" and didn't like the inference - for anyone who doesn't get it, calling someone a "dolt" in the US is quite an insult.
Because the standards were so clearly laid down, anyone ignoring them (such as MS when it ported Office) faced massive user complaints and fell into line.
But in the MS world, it's a different matter. MS can't even be consistent across it's own software. And BTW, it only adopted ctrl-C for copy etc after users got used to cmd-C etc on the Mac. I now have to use Windows on my work laptop and it's a completely flippin annoying mess of inconsistency. Ctrl-W closes windows (or tabs), some of the time. it doesn't in Outlook where it does something completely different. It doesn't in Explorer if it's displaying a PDF file. In explorer, closing the last tab closes the window, in Adobe PDF viewer, it leaves you with a list of recently viewed files.
THERE IS NOT A LOT OF CONSISTENCY in the Windows world. And I agree completely with the "lets redesign the UI again, people have got too used to the old one" approach MS seem to apply.
And can I add a special mention for the ****ing clueless ****ard who thought it a great idea to put a tiny little "x" into text fields - so you need to edit the text you've entered, then click at the end of the text to add more text ... and it's all just f***ed off.
Not being on WhatsApp just means that my children are likely to miss out on informal activities arranged through it.
So in practice you are being required to use WA in order for your children to take part. That's illegal.
The PTA does not make it a requirement but for some discussions outside of formal meetings WhatsApp does get used.
Ditto. That's illegal. Actually, depending on what is being discussed on WA, the actual use may well be illegal regardless of the "use it or miss out" issue.
You said that you'd allowed WhatsApp access to your contacts.
WhatsApp is owned by FaecesBorg and had steadily changed it's T&Cs to the detriment of anyone but FaecesBorg. It's proven that you cannot trust any statement by FB regarding privacy - after all, it's most senior person has no problem lying to the US government about what it does !
So by allowing WA access to your contacts, you have broken the law - simply because you cannot have any confidence in that information remaining confidential. That's the case even if not a single piece of information did end up with FB - which I would doubt anyway.
Unless, for every single contact, you got their informed consent to allow their details to be given to WA.
EDIT: Oh yes, whether or not you think you have a FB account is largely irrelevant. Max Shrems demonstrated that you have an account with them whether you like it or not - that was in a large part the substance of his original complaint, that they were building shadow profiles of people without the consent of the data subjects.
Point out that nearly all of these groups are almost certainly acting ILLEGALLY by using WA. It is ILLEGAL to require consenting to something not necessary in order to use a service - so if the dance class effectively doesn't allow you to use the service effectively without using WA then they are breaking the law. The PTA may or may not be acting legally - but if any one of them, even just once, passes any personal information then the law has been broken.
Perhaps rather than just saying "you're breaking the law", act for their privacy policy. If they don't have one - fail. If they have one, but it doesn't mention the issues with WA - fail.
You broke the law in allowing that access.
And FB will have harvested that and merged in into their data warehouse a long time ago.
When WA went e2e encryption, FB quietly changed things behind the scenes so that FB and WA shared the same sandbox on your device - giving FB access to all the WA data unencrypted on your device. Basically, as they could no longer slurp it in transit, they made it so they could slurp it from either end.
And have you made an official complaint to work about this enforced abuse of your PI ? No, then do it, and make sure you have a record of having made the complaint. After that, if they do nothing then they have no defence whatsoever if/when they find themselves in trouble.
It is ILLEGAL for an employer to insist you use a privacy invading thing like WA.
But then, if they decided to chose it as comms platform for business
She could point out to the bosses that it's infliction on her is illegal - yes illegal and they are setting themselves up for some very expensive trouble.
Unless that is, they furnish her with a "dirty" device that can be used for absolutely nothing else but WA, and they do the same for everyone else, and they absolutely 110% ban all users from using WA on anything but these dirty devices, and rigidly enforce that ban. In other words, they run a parallel infrastructure of mobile devices just for WA that's "clean" of any PI information at all.
Also, their choice was probably
You missed off the other option ... sell to us or watch as we kill you off. That's the other tactic used by these big players - if you make a successful product/service then hope that one of the big players does offer to buy your out vs just grinding you down through various illegal moves.
Search around here ...
WA implemented e2e encryption so the data is safe in transit. But at the same time, they changed things so that FaceBook app and WhatsApp share the same sandbox on your phone. So the FB app has access to all the WA data - and so is free to send it to FB behind your back.
So yes, WA can honestly claim e2e encryption - but that doesn't mean what they intend you to think it means.
Electrical fires are "interesting". I had an interesting conversation some years ago with someone who's job was designing fire alarm & control systems - that's bespoke systems designed to suit individual sites. At the time, they were just finishing the commissioning of a fire detection system onboard an NGO ship. Most of the below is extracted from that conversation.
You have a source of energy (heat). You have a source of oxygen (unless the room is very sealed). You have a source of fuel (the "whatever is on fire).
Gas drench systems (Halon or modern equivalents, CO2, oxygen depleted atmospheres) only prevent the combustion - but leave the source of heat in place. The problem with this is that a large proportion of materials involved contain chlorine - that's the C in PVC. If it can't combust because of the suppression system, then it will still decompose and the components will float around as free radicals - which will react with anything they can. So unless you remove the power as well, then you might as well not bother as the chlorine will have destroyed anything exposed such as all the contacts on connectors.
As most equipment is (or should be*) made with self-extinguishing materials - e.g. PVC has additives to make it self-extinguishing - then all you need to do is to remove the power source and the fire will go out on it's own.
So a reliable way of putting out the fire is to ... remove the power quickly. That's not "trigger an orderly shutdown so things are powered off in the next 10-20 minutes, but "pull the plug, NOW". Naturally, you then get into a situation of trying to balance the risk from fires with the risk of damage to data and service outages of doing unintended uncontrolled shutdowns.
* AIUI modern electrical/electronic equipment is supposed to use self-extinguishing materials. You can easily tell if (e.g.) a sample of cable is self-extinguishing. Just take it to a well ventilated area and apply a flame. It'll probably burn and will emit horrible black smoke. But remove the flame and it should just go out on it's own. Older PVC cable will carry on burning. And I strongly suspect that some "cheaper materials imported from certain countries" will also carry on burning.
Sadly the realities of raising money would mean that such a demand would simply guarantee that no-one got it.
What might work would be to parcel up bits of the country, rank them, and pair them - to the "tastiest" bits to put a service into would be paired with one of the worst. That way, providers would have to use the profits from the profitable customers to provide a service to the unprofitable ones - rather than allowing them to promise to do it but just pocket the profit instead.
I suspect that even this would not be palatable to industry. The unpalatable truth is that large parts of the country just aren't profitable to supply with this sort of technology - so you either have to force cross-subsidy (e.g. with my idea above), or publicly subsidise the non-profitable areas.
Ah, memories.
When I was at uni, the computer club met in the physics lab, and one week I noticed a DEC thing sat on a stair landing with a notice on it "free to good home". Not long afterwards, I was re-introduced to it in a friend's room - yep, he'd grabbed it. I think that was a PDP-8.
The story i was told was that this had been declared redundant many years before, but one particular lecturer refused to let it go as is was so good for teaching computing fundamentals - the ability to toggle switches, single step it, and see what was going on by watching the lights. This lecturer was on holiday for a couple of weeks, so the rest fo the department took the opportunity to get rid of it while he wasn't there !
So whenever I visited that friend, we'd always end up sat rewinding rolls of tape while we talked !
I still remember some of the details. The processor alone was about 3feet of 19" rack, it had not just punched tape - but .... drum roll ... hard disks, two of them. I believe each disk held something like 32k words of data. And as well as the slow punch and reader on the floor standing teletype (ASR33 ?), this beast had both high speed punch and reader - so it could create chad far more effectively. Two full height 19" racks, and just enough room to still get his bed in.
It's like saying you can't own a shop or even a market stall and sell stuff there.
I think you missed the point. Amazon don't have "a shop" or a "market stall" - it's more like Amazon own the whole shopping mall or market, rent out units/stalls to various buyers, but ...
If you rent a shop in Amazon's Mall then you are forced to use Amazon's processing systems. Amazon analyse the data from all the shops in the mall, and use that to guide what it sells in it's own shop - in the same mall, in competition with the other shops. Basically it gives Amazon a massive advantage in that the others pay it for the benefit of giving it all their sales data, which Amazon then analyses in order to work out how best to compete with them.
So it's not about saying that Amazon can't sell stuff from a shop or market stall that it owns. It's more a case of Amazon need to decide whether they want to be a shopkeeper in the mall/stall holder in the market and compete on equal terms with the other shops/stalls - or whether it wants to own the whole mall/market and not run a shop/stall in competition with it's tenants.
So a possible anti-trust settlement could be that Amazon has to split itself - one division can own and run the mall/market, another can run a shop/stall. BUT there must be a complete and effective wall between the two so that the bit running the shop cannot gain any advantage whatsoever over any other trader just because it's part of Amazon - basically it must be treated exactly the same as any other trader.
For a single cable, not a lot - it won't be worth the guy's time to weight it and write you a check for a few pence. But get a few together and you'd be surprised how quickly it adds up.
According to https://scraplocal.co.uk/scrap-metal-prices/ the current price is £1,215/ton (or £1.22/kilo) - though you get a bit less than that if there's a high PVC/copper ratio. From my experience weighing in cable I've collected, you get the best prices for the likes of T&E house cabling, and a significantly lower price for phone/network cabling because there's less copper and more plastic.
In any case, make sure it's free of things like connectors etc. Similarly with copper piping - make sure you remove all the soldered and/or brass fittings and keep them separate (the solder/brass would contaminate the copper when it's melted down and so it has a lower value).
In the past I've saved up all the cable I've removed when doing (legitimate before anyone questions it !) work. By the time you've a few large boxes and 10's of kilo it's well worth weighing in. As hinted at in another comment, lead-acid batteries are well recycled - currently around £440/ton and you find that the weight soon adds up (especially when replacing batteries in lots of UPSs ;-)).
For reference should you decide to start collecting what some consider "rubbish" ... Scrap dealers are no longer allowed to pay cash, and must instead pay by cheque (or I think, bank transfer). They also have to see photo ID which they will copy for their records. This is all to stop the black market trade in stolen cable by making the payments from the scrapyards traceable - i.e. someone reports metals (e.g. a load of cable) stolen, and identical material is spotted in a scrapyard, then the scrapyard owner is up the creek without a paddle if they can't account for who it came from.
Or wouldn't it be great if there was a process that could make a liquid fuel (lets say, methanol) from hydrogen and atmospheric CO2 - hint, there is and it's proven to work. Only problem is that until we have an excess of carbon-free lecky (lets get some nuclear plants built pronto) then you don't have a zero/low carbon source of hydrogen.
I’d go with the simple solution: cut the damn cable
I was wondering whether Dabsy was "accidentally" a bit clumsy while moving his own car - the cable could so easily have been trapped between wheel and kerb and cut (or sliced open so that the rain got in and the earth leakage would make the charger point trip). Or so much worse, the cable could have snagged on his car and been pulled ... hard. Such a shame the connectors on each end aren't designed for towing parked cars about.
Not that I would ever advocate wilful damage - but if you trail a cable in the street, it's going to get run over.
Yes, it's trivially easy to store different classes of data in different places - but that offers zero help to the fundamental problem. If a business has a US presence, then the US authorities can tell that business to hand over any data held anywhere - and that includes the data held in (e.g.) the EU.
The Microsoft case demonstrated that perfectly - once the cloud act was passed, MS just handed over the data stored in Ireland and proved beyond doubt that MS services are not GDPR compliant<period> Yes you can specify that your O365 data is stored and process in the EU - but MS demonstrated that the US parent company has access ot the data, therefore it's not safe, therefore anyone using O365 cannot be GDPR compliant. Something that I think will catch people out when they find out the truth - because MS are busy selling it as GDPR compliant, and resellers are selling it as GDPR compliant, but the small businesses buying it don't have the tech nouse to know how vulnerable they are. In fact, due to the convoluted way the DNS works to prop up O365, even if the data centres were truly out of reach of MS US, the data would not be safe.
The ONLY way for a US based business to legally operate with EU citizens data is for them to operate an EU presence over which they have no technical control. So when the US TLAs ask for information, the US business has to ask the EU business for it (they cannot access it directly by any means) - and the EU business will turn round and tell them they can't have it. The risk there is that the US authorities then label the managers of the EU business as criminals who then cannot ever visit any US territory (or friendly nation) without fear of arrest.
her system picked up my internal address instead of his external one the first time and kept reusing it as default autosuggest
I would have a specially toasty place in hell for the f**ktard who came up with the idea of actively hiding the actual email address from users. Mind you, they'd be sharing that toasty spot with the originators of quite a few features inflicted on us by MS.
it's a "feature" well designed to assist scammers and spammers, apart from the general inconvenience when it gets messed up by non-nefarious activities.
What people need to realise is that BT & OpenRetch have a natural advantage of having the infrastructure already in place. Yes, they have built a lot of it themselves, keep extending it, etc - but they have the core network in place and that gives them a massive advantage. Any new development is going to be somewhere near exiting infrastructure - so the cost of connecting it up is only going to be incremental to what's already in place.
For anyone else, to provide the whole backhaul, they have to provide the whole backhaul. AFAIK there is no-one* anywhere near here with any infrastructure at all - so if I wanted to get a circuit that wasn't provided by OpenRetch then someone would have to build (rough guess) something in the order of 30-40 miles of infrastructure to get to the nearest point where anyone else has anything. So I'm not going to be buying anything that needs that, not when the cost of laying new ducting is priced in the order of four digits per 100m (last price I saw from BT was many years ago, and was £1000/100m, or £10k/km). So the infrastructure isn't going to get built, so it's not there to sell to others - and the vicious circle continues. You could rent duct space from openRetch - but then you are still paying rent to them, and who knows what excuse they will come up with in the future for charges for "the wrong kind of usage" ?
If you look at the altnets building their own networks, they generally start from a hub where it's cost effective, and slowly build outwards. It's massively expensive, even if like B4RN you largely rely on volunteers and generous land owners. So it tends to go very slowly, and only to areas where it's cost effective. Anywhere outside one of these patches is going to be near enough reliant on OpenRetch.
* technically that's not quite correct. In the town where I work, aprt of it does have ducting that was installed by Norweb (remember them ?) - but it only covers a small area of the town and was put in as an old ironworks was being redeveloped into a business area. That's been de-commissioned by Vodamoan who now own it, presumably because it's such a small patch of odd-ball infrastructure that they don't want the hassle. And there's also a network owned/run by Global Crossing, which used to be BR Telecoms - yes there's a fibre network running along the railways. But that suffers from the same problem as the network run along the electricity grid - if you aren't right next to the network, then it's prohibitively expensive to get connected to it, and agin, it's too "not our core network" for most operators to bother using it.
And there you demonstrate exactly why, for decades, BT has done all it can to block progress.
When ISDN came along, they crippled certain features (that were standard in other countries such as Germany) so as not to damage their cash cow leased lines business.
When ADSL came along, they did all they could to cripple it so as to not damage their cash cow leased lines business.
Now, through their independent subsidiary sock puppet OpenRetch they are doing all they can to nobble competition.
It's ingrained into the BT culture. maybe not at the lower levels where there are some very good people - but when it comes to business policies, it's always been policy to do all you can to nobble any competition.
Leased lines generally offer symmetric speeds. It's mainly marketing* that dictates differential speeds once you get onto fibre. For xDSL there are technical reasons - as in, you have to split the available spectrum of signals into upstream and downstream, and the split is set to suit "typical users". With ADSL2, you can get Annex M which trade off downstream (less of it) for upstream (more of it) and we've used that for some customers where it's made sense for their usage patterns.
* Mainly, marketing says that only people running business services need symmetry, and they will pay more can be fleeced for more for a "business" product.
You forgot the business rates issue that's designed to make building your own backhaul "uncompetitive". Basically any infrastructure you have will attract business rates that (AIUI) are calculated somewhat differently to how BT's are. At a previous job, we had customer affected by this as the altnet's supplying a number of our customers simply shut down those bits of the network rather than pay the massive hike in business rates.
Correct.
What it seems to be is you rent a leased line with a specific capacity - it should "cost what it costs". Instead, OpenRetch are saying that if you use it for "the wrong sort of thing"* then they'll add on random extra charges. It shouldn't matter what you use it for - if you've paid for (say) 10Gbps, then you should be free to use the 10Gbps for whatever you want. And unlike in the heavily contended xDSL market, for leased lines you do actually pay for the capacity you are suposed to be getting and there should be zero saving for BT if you don't actually use it all**.
* Where "wrong sort of thing" == "competing with BT" in a way Bt doesn't like.
** For leased lines, you are sold a guaranteed bandwidth - and most of the reason for the high cost (and yes, the cost is eye wateringly high) compared to (e.g. xDSl circuits) is that BT then have to guarantee that bandwidth through every path and node the circuit is routed through.
If after all this years we still have people defending the GPL under false premises
What false premises ?
Does the GPL somehow hide what you can and can't do with code released with that licence ? No
Is it in any way unclear ? No
Does it in any way stop you using it in any way you want ? No
Does it in any way say what you must do with YOUR OWN CODE ? No
What is does say is very clear. You can use, or not according to your choice, GPL code. You can modify it, you can create derivative works, you can incorporate it into other works. The ONLY thing it (well GPLv2 at least) says is that you cannot grant anyone you distribute that GPL code to any lesser rights than those. Put another way, what you cannot do is take GPL code, modify it/derive from it/incorporate it onto other works and redistribute it without giving anyone you distribute it to the same rights<period>.
Of course, what that does mean is that you can't take a load of GPL code, build a closed commercial system with it, and then sell it as a closed proprietary system. If you want to do that then you have choices - but don't moan that people have decided not to allow you to make a fast buck by using their hard work without passing on the benefits of that in the same way that they were given to you. So either do your own work, approach the original creators and negotiate a licence that allows you to do what you want, or work out how to correctly link to the GPL'd modules ina way that leaves your own code separate (depending on what you want to do, that may well be practical).
But don't falsely accuse the GPL of being something it isn't just because it doesn't allow you to make a fast buck on the back of someone else's work. You absolutely ARE allowed to make money writing code. You just aren't allowed to make money by ripping off others' code in a way they aren't happy with. Anyone complaining that the GPL prevents them making money from their code is wanting to do exactly that - rip off others' work.
As to ZFS. I'm pretty sure Linus isn't complaining - he's simply stating an opinion that the licence the ZFS code comes with isn't compatible with how Linux works. In fact, he's supporting the principle that the originator of a piece of code can decide what licence terms they want to apply to it - and honouring that choice. That the two are not compatible is indeed unfortunate from the PoV of incorporating ZFS into Linux, but then it's also unfortunate that if I buy a piece of equipment from (say) North America then it probably doesn't come with the right voltage requirements and plug to plug it straight in in the UK.
With that analogy, you could say that I could simply buy (or make, perhaps even starting making and selling them) a converter that provides a US style socket with the right voltage on it. Then the US equipment can just plug in - and that's what some people have suggested, a "converter shim" that takes one plug on one side (with one licence) and converts to a different plug on the other side to plug into the Linux kernel (with a different licence). By that analogy, Oracle have shown that they consider details of the interface (e.g. dimensions of the socket, and how a plug interacts with it) as being under their non-permissive licence - c.f. the ongoing case with Google about interface header files. That may or may not be valid - we'll have to wait and see. But what Linus has said is that given the cost of dealing with "Oracle parking it's tanks on your lawn", he doesn't want to take any risk. I can see his point, it is very expensive to successfully defend such an action, even more expensive to lose.
A good rant - based on a false premise.
To be clear, you as a programmer can do what the hell you want with YOUR code. If you want to contribute that code under GPL to a project then that's fine - it does NOT stop you using that code elsewhere or licensing it under commercial terms to someone. So, for example, you can contribute code to a GPL project under GPL, and also licence it to be used (not under GPL) to someone who wants to build it into a closed and proprietary system. Or you could build that same code into a non-GPL project of your own.
Putting something out under GPL does not in any way whatsoever stop you also putting it out under any other licence you want.
But what it does stop you doing is taking someone else's work that's under GPL, and using it/re-licencing it under lesser terms than the GPL. History is littered with examples of commercial companies taking software that's been made freely available by someone, and then (with zero payment and possibly zero credit) building that into a commercial closed offering.
And of course, what this comes down to is that you have the freedom to ignore the GPL and not use it. But if you choose not to contribute into the (GPL) pool, don't be offended if those that do contribute choose not to let you steal their work. Or put another way, you are only obligated to have anything whatsoever to do with GPL code if you choose to use someone's efforts which they chose to GPL.
And if you do see a bit of GPL code that you would like to use not-under-GPL then that is also possible. All you need to do is ask the copyright holder for permission - which they are free to grant or not (it's their software remember), and they may or may not charge you for that (it's their software remember). So there isn't actually a block on using GPL code in your proprietary software - you just have to legally licence it from the copyright holder, in just the same way as if it was commercial code. The difficulty comes when it's a non-trivial bit of code and it's hard to work out who owns copyright on which bits.
Surely it should be number of instructions per line of code?
There's a well known purveyor of business computers that used to assess coder productivity simply by lines of code written - more lines of code == more productive. That's one reason why, when they were fighting off the attack on their stranglehold of business computing by Apple and Commodore et al, they had to buy in an OS from some guy called gates - their own people didn't know how to write code to run on small machines. Compact code simply didn't fit the corporate style.
Couldn't he call his CC company and have them re-activate it and just left the clearly fraudulent Ticketmaster charge blocked?
Think a little bit more. Some scum have installed skimming software on TMs payment page - so they have your card details. It's not TM purchases you need to worry about, but all the other purchases that can be made with those card details. Put another way, someone has what is effectively an electronic copy of your card - so there's no way to automatically flag up fraudulent transactions and the only way to stop them is to cancel your card and make that electronic copy of it useless.
All they need to do is to pop up a notice, get your permission, and then it's legal. Not really much work to do to make it so that updated devices don't enable this until after you next sign into your account, then offer you the ability to enable all these lovely and useful new features (see page 157 of the small print for gory details).
There could be arguments about whether consent was informed, but IIRC that's not actually a requirement of CMA. GDPR doesn't apply as long as no personal data is involved - or it's sufficiently encrypted as the report makes it sound like it is.
But as I write that first para, I realise another issue. What about where a device is in one home, but is signed into the account of another person ? That's not all that uncommon - so that, for example, multiple devices can share (e.g.) an Amazon Music account. In that case, someone else could authorise devices to use a network - so very grey legal area there.
But you are missing two important points :
1) In the US, they have different rules, and anecdotally it seems to be more a case of guilty unless proven innocent with this sort of thing. In any case, especially if there's only one person living there - it will be assumed that connection used == connection used by the sole occupier - "it wasn't me" not being accepted as a defence without some supporting evidence.
2) Even where there isn't that assumption of guilt, just the accusation is enough to ruin your life. Potentially the police can come along, based with the evidence that "equipment in this property was used to commit an offence" and seize all your IT kit, which you may get back a couple of years later, and which may or may not still work. That is going to cause you problems ranging from "really inconvenient" to "so there goes your business down the drain". Search ElReg for some examples.
Apple is the guilty party, mostly for the 30% fee, if it was a smaller amount ...
It's not really about the 30%, though that does feature heavily. What it's really about is that if you buy an iDevice, then you can only install apps from Apple's store - there's no other route without jailbreaking the device which for the vast majority of users is not on the table. Thus Apple can act as a gatekeeper and effectively control what you do with the device you bought and paid for.
Secondary to that is the issue of parting providers from the users - the "no outside payments" bit. It's all designed to keep providers of services (for example newspapers) from being able to a) offer their own deals to users, and b) know who the users are.
And of course, turning this walled garden into a cash cow by taking a significant slice of everything.
There is a valid argument that 30% is a reasonable fee for some of the services provided. For a small developer, not having to worry about distribution, payments, piracy, etc, etc is probably worth that 30%. But the issue is that there is no choice - some businesses (such as Epic) might be happy doing it all themselves, but Apple won't let them.
But they charge you an arm and a leg!
And there you demonstrate part of the problem.
Yes the standards exist - but the vendors don't support them, or grudgingly support them but "dissuade" you from using them, because - like faecesborg - they want to lock you, and everyone you want to communicate with, into their ecosystem. The money is in locking people into your ecosystem and making sure there's no room for annoying little upstarts to come and steal your income streamcustomers.
Until customers start turning round in sufficient numbers and telling the vendors "no I'm not paying for your sh*t until I can use it to talk to other people" then the vendors won't do anything towards interoperability. It's in the vendors' interests to not interoperate. But at ${day_job}, they seem very content to suck at the teat of MS offerings - even subscribing to the MS "evergreen" policy of updates whenever MS decide something should be upgraded.
It's not hard to download your favourite email client/web browser
Actually, with iThings that is exactly the problem. Apple policies are to not allow replacements for built in functions like email and browser. Even where an alternative is available, such as with browsers, Apple still screws them over by prohibiting the use of any rendering engine other than it's own - making an alternative browser little more than different lipstick on the pig.
It would appear that some authorities have decided that this is "not on" and so Apple are relaxing their grip to fend off regulatory action. I think we can be certain that they are doing the absolute minimum they think they need to.
That doesn't sound like a useful thing to me
As said, there must be uses for it.
Without thinking very hard, you may have a large network where you want to run a scan quickly. bear in mind that the network didn't crash - one device that the traffic ran through crashed. From memory, nmap will scan across a network - i.e. spread it's probes across many IP addresses rather than doing all the probes for one IP at a time. If you don't have a firewall that will crash with that level of traffic, then there isn't a problem running a fast scan against a large address range.
You'll be restricted by the speed of you single link to the switch, and the performance of your own machine - once the traffic is spread across multiple IPs (and almost certainly across multiple hosts on different links), then the traffic to any single host shouldn't be too bad. If your switches aren't a pile of poo, then they will quite happily pass all the packets - as should routers.
And of course, if you are doing a scan during a maintenance window, then getting it done quickly is a benefit. Some scans can be quite slow.
Ah, the good old Grey Fergie - I learned to drive on one of those, though it was a diesel. Farm also had a TVO model with a loader on it that was "interesting" to drive as it had an underneath exhaust and the silencer box was rotten - so a glowing hot pipe directly under your left foot whenever it was on the clutch, a place it spends a fair bit of time when using the loader to transfer the midden into the muckspreader. And to think of how much you could adjust or repair with nothing but the "Fergie spanner" :)
It was always a good trick to get someone who'd never driven one before to start it - without telling them where the starter was. They could be looking for ages :D Same looking for the parking brake on the old MF 35 (it's a spring loaded ratchet on the brake pedal).
Have to admit, for all the benefits of the newer ones, the older ones can be just as good - and if you have to work in similarly vintage buildings with restricted headroom, the only way to get things done.
Bit late replying, but they should not go in the shredder - they should go to the ICO so the ICO can deal with them ... eventually ... if they ever get around to it.
And if there's enough information to identify the data subjects, you could drop them a line telling them what's going on so they can kick up a stink about it.
Actually you'd be surprised how much of this sort of equipment is networked so that the designer sat in his office can generate a machine program from the CAD file and send it directly to the machine down in the workshop - definitely a step up from sneakernet with 3.5" (or even 5 1/4") floppies, or 9600bps serial links.
Without going into the heavy machinery market there are problems. At my last job I recall a client upgrading their phone system, and after well under a decade they were down to keeping a laptop around un-updated just to be able to manage the system.
Might have been the same one I got taught as an impressionable apprentice - but back then you could just about get away with saying it if you were careful who was around you. These days I'm not sure it's even safe to think it - just getting as far as "1" could get you in trouble these days !
But in the next 18 years, we will not be running 32 bit processors (support for 32 bit Intel is due to be removed from the kernel quite soon, if it's not already)
I wouldn't count on that - I am currently designing an 8 bit (yes, EIGHT) bit system. As it's for the heating controls in the house, I won't be throwing it away and replacing it with something newer and shinier in 2 or 3 years time - but then it won't be handling dates at all. I'm also involved at work with systems where they have to consider the possibility of components becoming obsolete between the design being frozen and actually going into service (could be getting on for a decade, with any changes needing a very expensive refresh of the safety case), and having a planned service life of several decades. I strongly suspect (I'm not involved in that side of things) that since "more complex" means "much harder to prove safety", these won't be using the latest processors available.
The main difference being that in the western world you can still criticise TPTB and still have an expectation of still having a job/home/life afterwards. In many countries - China included - you have to be very careful or very brave as criticising TPTB can land you in prison (or just "disappeared".) And it would seem that prison in some of these countries is designed very much to be a punishment. And for good measure, some regimes think nothing of punishing the families of "enemies of the state" so when someone is deciding whether to be brave or to toe the line, they have to consider whether that will put their loves ones in danger.
It's not just about calling your head of state silly things, it's about the right to say what you actually think where that differs from the official line on what you are allowed to think. That really is a great freedom.
I don't know about the specific for this model (in terms of where the switches are), but there will be an electric trim - it's exactly what MCAS uses to trim the aircraft. The problem is that disabling MCAS is by turning off power to the electric trim system. So MCAS goes wrong, you have to power off the very system you need to recover from MCAS having gone wrong.
That alone should have raised warning flags to those designing the system.
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