Posts by The Evil One 10 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Dec 2009
Looks as if IBM is back to its bad anticompetitive behaviour of old when the problem was manufacturers of plug compatible mainframes.
Maybe the court has come to a correct decision, but in that case the law is encouraging bad commercial behaviour by monopolists.
I still remember the days when we used to REIPL (IBM mainframe speak for REBOOT) the mainframe daily and within 10 minutes of a problem such as a memory leak occurring. That was the era when people who wanted robust systems bought fault tolerant boxes, not IBM or its clones.
However IBM mainframe software and hardware has advanced. By 2003 one would expect the IBM/390 machines to stay up for at least a month without problems. If we wanted to make changes we would have to collect them all and schedule them for the monthly IPL.
The obvious way to steal an election where computerized voting terminals are used is to design into the hardware a backdoor allowing insiders to take control of the machine and alter the code after the real election has started and pre-election verification has been completed. the best place to do this would be in the microprocessor although it could also be implemented by circuitry external to the microprocessor on the CPU board.
The Brad Blog archives contain many articles on the possibity of hacking US elections and the possibility that some elections may already have been stolen.
The obvious way to steal an election where computerized voting terminals are used is to design into the hardware a backdoor allowing insiders to take control of the machine and alter the code after the real election has started and pre-election verification has been completed. The best place to do this would be in the microprocessor although it could also be implemented by circuitry external to the microprocessor on the CPU board.
The Brad Blog (http://www.bradblog.com) archives contain many articles on the possibility of hacking US elections and the possibility that some elections may already have been stolen.
Authoritarian politicians love moral panic/witchcraft laws such as those against drugs, terrorism and pornography. The beauty of these laws is that anyone can be made vulnerable to them. If you are an official and dislike someone, then email some kiddie porn to them and anonymously notify the police that he/she has it in their possession, it is even easier than planting heroin in someone's house or car.
Probably her sex is not now noisy enough to justify an ASBO but the niighbours have been sensitized and the ASBO has given the power to send this woman to prison whenever they like if they hear the slightest sound from her.
The ASBO law is an appalling law thought up by authoritarian politicians to harass the underclass.
Probably her sex is not now noisy enough to justify an ASBO but the neighbours have been sensitised and the ASBO has given the power to send this woman to prison whenever they like if they hear the slightest sound from her.
The ASBO law is an appalling law thought up by authoritarian politicians to harass the underclass.
An obvious solution is to have continuous recording but to delete recorded data when space runs out unless the "start recording" button has been pressed. The start recording button would cause the recording to be flagged non-delete from a time 5 or ten minutes before the button was pushed until a time 5 to 10 minutes after the stop recording button is pushed. Failure to press the start recording button after an interaction with a criminal perpetrator, aka the public has started should be considered as suspicious.
In fact with terrabyte sized hard drives being available today and petabyte size in a few years time I think the argument of server overload is a furphy. Perhaps the recorded images should be kept for at least 48 hours, button press or no button press and perhaps made available world wide on the internet so interested persons can monitor the behavior of police without having to await the arrival of a camera carrying observer. Or perhaps recording could be activate by such actions as turning on a siren, opening a card door or putting a hand to gun or taser.
Why can't ebooks be stored in a PC or laptop and displayed on it.
The PDF format is already available. IBM has for years been distributing its manuals as book reader files on CD. Now I believe they are switching to PDF. I have several IBM mainframe libraries on sets of CDs that would if printed use up all the wall space in my house as bookshelf space.
Perhaps some people would like a more compact device but why can't it be PC based, the still to arrive tablet PC.
If publishers restrict their e-books to particular hardware format then they are shooting themselves in the feet. The fact is that no one will want to lose his e-book library when the proprietary reader breaks down, everyone will want to be able to transfer libraries from one device to another perhaps made by a different manufacturer. if someone makes e-books that will not work on my PC, I will not be buying them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
