Posts by shayneoneill

The passive aggression of connecting USB to PS/2

Re: *!$#&@ Bluetooth

Considering that PS2 has been more or less a dead protocol for 20 years, you'd think it would support USB.

My guess is "incorrect combination of invocations to eldrich deities in CPU settings"

Critical PostgreSQL bug tied to zero-day attack on US Treasury

DB education is hopelessly absent.

Can I please , one day, stop having to flag sql interpolation bugs from jr or stupid developers. No, "but I escaped it" is not enough. Theres a reason there are multiple escape implementations in PHPs mysql escape code, because its always been a risky approach.

All modern DB libraries (And by modern I mean "More recent than 25 years ago") support prepared queries. Use it. Its not a complete guarantee (theres all sorts of ways you can goof an SQL insert) but it makes 99% of SQL injection bugs moot.

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

Even human decision making would disturb folks without the full context,

The reality is on this one , theres no way not to disturb at least some people, even outside the context of AI.

Transplants, for good reason, run on a Triage, similar to the way Battlefield triage works where they look at all the candidate recipients and rate them mostly on the metric "How many years of life do we gain by giving this guy a transplant. This favors children (I think most people would be cool with that), healthier people (a little harder, but understandable) and people most likely to comply (this one is obvious, but a surprising amount of people have beef with this). One controversial result is folks who are antivaxers get shunted down lower on the list. This isn't political or a moral judgement, just a reflection of the fact that if your not fully vaccinated and prepared to stay on top of vaccines, your life will be *significantly shorter* if you have an immune system critically impaired by rejection supression drugs. Given the choice between giving it to someone whos going to die anyway because the first flu that comes around will kill them and someone who at least stands a chance thanks to vaccination, its obvious the decision to be made. More years of life can be saved by giving it to the guy who will listen to the doctor instead of the shouty man on youtube.

Its a brutal calculus, doctors dont WANT to work that way, but with limited available kidneys, they dont have much choice, like the fabled battlefield medic who says "GI Joe is not gonna make it, give him some morphine and make him comfortable while I try and save Private Gomer Pyles leg over here" its just the reality of the job.

I cant imagine anyone feeling happier that a bot made that decision instead of a human.

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence

Re: Reminds me of the time...

We had a bit of an old game at work where we see how long we could keep the scammers on hold for.

The game was basically, they'd call up and ask for "Albert" (For some reason scammers think the person on my phone is named that) and I'd say "Sure, let me go get him", and put them on hold and go off and do something else.I had the record at work of fifteen minutes before they hung up Most usually only lasted a minute or twoa

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

Re: Here we go...

"As long as they err equally on the side of caution"

They have no obligation to do that.The founding fathers where adamant about that.

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

"Newspapers don't get section 230--they get the 1st amendment. Choose one."

Fortunately the constitution overrides all laws, which means recipients of section 230 don't have to choose. They get both.

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

You'd be surprised at how often I come across linux systems where the root password is either the name of the company , the bosses name, or the name of his wife. Sometimes with 1 and an esclamation mark at the end.

Apple's Pegasus lawsuit a 'declaration of war' against offensive software developers, says Kaspersky director

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

I kind of hate this reasoning.

We don't want a world where only tech savy people can organize for political action. Thats just replacing old power heirachies with new power heirachies, and if the alt-right taught us anything, its that the extremists have tech savy people. I would still like my parents to also have a say in how their world goes, and my arty neice. And the vietnamese couple who sell me groceries each week.

And we have to assume that Farad the mechanic, whos also secretly a dissident in Iran who wants to overthrow the religious council and have a nice secular democracy probably knows about as much on how to secure his iphone as my grandmother did.

Its incumbant on the tech giants to secure that phone so Farad doesn't end up swinging from a crane in a public square because he doesnt know what a "Tor" is.

Why Python's pip search isn't working: We speak to infrastructure director about ongoing traffic overload

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

This is an XML-RPC endpoint, and its an *ancient* one. Yes it uses Post, but this comes from an era prior to Rest (as we know it today), which means the server isn't deciding whether its a get/post/delete or whatever from the HTTP method, but rather from the implementation of the RPC function.

Arguably its bad POST, however not using POST would violate the standard.

Asahi Linux devs merge effort to run Linux on Apple M1 silicon into kernel

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

I can't imagine them objecting. They've never really had a problem with users running windows or linux on macs, as long as they buy the hardware.Though they dont encourage it either.

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Re: wxWidgets

Wx is awesome, although its nowhere near as pretty as QTs almost infinite skinability (specifically with the QML stuff. However with some work a professional looking app is possible although it might make the graphic designers amongst us cringe.

The problem is QT is more than just the widget its an entire VCL/dotNet style framework with a superb networking stack , great IPC apis, and so much more.

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

QT is a deeply frusturating thing from a dev point of view. Its hands down one of the most stress free C++ frameworks out there. The QML can create beautiful UIs, the infrastructural stuff is extremely well designed, even a C++ beginner ought have no troubles building software in it.

But the company itself has apparently no interest in the open source world that gave birth to the very thing they are profiteering from. They've removed small/one-man-band developer licenses and have priced things in a way that absolutely no rational business case could be made for using it for mobile dev (an area where the market is incredibly dicey). I've recently abandoned a big project just because the business modelling I did simply could not make the sums add up once QT licensing fees are introduced into the equation.

Nokia and Microsoft did something horrifying by allowing QT to be purchased by the people that purchased it.

'It's really hard to find maintainers...' Linus Torvalds ponders the future of Linux

Re: The next generation will attempt to port the kernel to Javascript...

I think part of the enthusiasm for Rust is that its basically C with an angry preprocessor that throws chairs at people when they do stupid things with poimters. You definately *could* write a kernel in Rust (something you couldnt do in ,say, Go or f**ing javascript.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw: Well, lookie here! For once a space game that doesn't promise the universe

The Original Rebel galaxy was genuinely fun. It was the ultimate friday-night after the pub whiskey shooter game for me.

I don't even like country rock, but country rock with a head full of whiskey behind the cockpit of a ridiculously over-gunned battlecruiser slogging it out with space police? Yeah thats fun as heck. The naval broadside style combat is perfect. It felt like I was in some blessed mutant between firefly and battlestar galactica. Lots of guns and whiskey. Did I mention whiskey?

When this is released in August on steam, I'll definately be picking this one up.

Embrace, extend – and kill. Microsoft discontinues RoboVM

Re: Meh, Just Use Codenameone

"If you want to keep dong cross platform mobile dev using Java just use Codenameone. It was always more mature and a better solution than RoboVM IMO."

wut. Codename one is a hot mess of a product. I mean I wish them the best and all, but it was never as feature complete or as well polished as RoboVM.

Turnbull's NBN is startup-land's litmus test

I'm not sure your objection to the overbuild argument is coherent. If we take it as given that building an NBN is expensive, then it surely means we do it right the first time or we'll be stuck with a network thats going to become a chain around our neck when things like 4K TV become a reality, or more fanciful but still possible things like VR telepresence and the like. And of course cloud computing, etc.

25meg is awful for the task of cloud computing. We're a big-ass country and particularly in the mining sector we're often quite distributed in the way we do business. In some respects we've been doing cloud before it was even a word, because we had to. But it also has never been an entirely satisfactory technology because it has required ridiculously expensive fibre roll outs to businesses that have kept it out of the reach for smaller consultancies and the like, especially for the mining sector where large datasets need to be transfered around by small , often one man spare-room companies doing metalurgy, and the like.It just doesn't work well.

So we either do it right the first time, or face the very real possibilty we'll need to start pulling it out before we've even finished putting it in. The turn around here is not in decades , but in years as far as capacity is concerned. ADSL2 is only maybe 7-8 years old (for widespread use) but its already painfully slow for most people and in desparate need of upgrading. So adding 30-40% extra speed seems like its not going to last that long. Assuming the curve of things, its probably fair to say 25mbit is going to be redundant in 5-6 years. We won't even have finished this damn network and we'll be needing to pull it up and.... go fibre.

So why not just cut the nonsense and go fibre, like, right now.

Boffins: Earth will be habitable for only 1.75 BEEELLION more years

"Nonsense. Current science (though not the biased IPCC) clearly shows that extra CO2 changes little, and that little is likely to be beneficial."

Just like how current science tells us that theres ALSO a conspiracy of scientists to lie about evolution and how current science tells us we didnt really land on the moon?

"current science" is what the scientists say currently. And of that point, there is no doubt. Climate change is a real thing, confiirmed by thousands of separate data sources and almost the totality of the climate science research community.

Re: but what about us?

"On the other hand, so far humanity has a 100% success rate at not getting extinct."

That would depend if you factor Neanderthals and other non Homo sapien into the definition of "Human", being we are the only remaining species of Hominid. Arguably in fact we're rather bad as a species (Homo sapiens species including homo sapien idaltu, Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and arguably Homo rhodesiensis would come under the homo sapien species too).

Australia threatens Adobe, Apple, with geo-blocking ban

Re: Make VPNs legal?

Well labors sent senator conroy off to the retirement farm for failed assholes when rudd came monstrin' back in. Friends in labor tell me the guy was literally the only guy with non grey hair in the party who thought it was a good idea so perhaps labors amenable to fixing that vote-murdering mess of a policy.

Key evidence in Assange case dissolves

Re: Was this information about the contents of the condom posted to...

Leaky wicks

Google Go strikes back with C++ bake-off

Delphi

Yeah there was a delphi for Win16, and it ran like the clappers. We used to actually use it for writing little device driver dlls for our hardware because Object Pascal was paranoid as all hell about type and pointer safety and would throw up all over its shirt then tell you to f*** off if you even looked at your structs in an unhealthy way. The compiler itself produced amazingly fast code and was comparable to borlands C++ compiler which at the time was up there with microsoft and intel's offerings , back in the day when borland actually gave a damn about developers.

I actually miss Delphi a lot, it had a fantastic developer community that cared about its code, and open sourced a shit tonne of libraries to make devs jobs easier, but we where always at the whim of a company that seemed to be slowly losing touch with its developer base and increasingly pricing its dev tools out of reach even for many professional developers, let alone the student base thats utterly vital for keeping a language alive. Such a shame too.

Son of AV tycoon rescued following 'stupid' kidnapping

Was going to end up bad for the kidnappers either way.

At the highest levels theres quite a few connections between the IT security and Physical security world, including Mercenary companies. Tangling with the family of a billionaire in that industry could be very damn life shortening.

These kidnappers are lucky the cops got them first, cos there was probably a damn good chance the next move involved a group of heavily armed former Spetsnaz commandos kicking the door in and filling the kidnappers with lead.

Nokia reckons its Symbian^4 UI will leapfrog the rest

Just let it die already nokia!

As a mobile phone developer, I really wish Nokia would let symbian die already. Its a bloody awful platform to develop for and nokia really are in a position to make the linux phone that people wanted android to be.

And WinMo too. Good god Microsoft, go away. Programming for WinMo is like pulling teeth. pulling teeth multiplied by n subtly yet annoyingly different platform variations. Ugh.

Microsoft predicts Linux will fail mobile 'quality' test

When will WinMo hurry up and die already.

Oh good grief. Microsoft proclaiming that the problem with linux smartphones is that all the different variants are hard to support.

Has this daft suit ever actually tried to develop for Winmo? Good Grief. Windows mobile somehow actually manages to be *harder* than even symbian to develop for because the sheer difference even between simple model numbers in mobile handsets can be so perplexing. As a developer , Android and the wonderful touch cocoa toolkits (Technically not linux, but darwin/bsd) have been amazing to work with. Cocoa has precisely two targets to work towards, fast (3GS) handsets and slow (3G) handsets, both are exactly the same, bar performance. The Androids slightly more fragmented, but the SDK does at least a respectable job of making that difference not TOO onerous to work with.

Man I remember working in embeded robotics in the 90s when a microsoft sales rep tried to convince us to move from eTrax ucLinux to Window CE because it had signed drivers. We didn't bloody need signed drivers , we where *writing* them for our own hardware. A decade and a half later , Microsoft still does not understand the embedded market at all.