Posts by A J Stiles 2669 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Apr 2006
Y2K was mainly a non-issue all along, although a few scam-artists managed to make a quick buck out of it. (And a company I worked for at the time had to certify some fully analogue modules -- none of them bearing any semiconductor device more sophisticated than a triac-- as "Y2K compliant".)
"The majority of potential issues" are going to happen in 2038, when the 32-bit Unix timestamp rolls over.
According to my understanding, the date (written in ancient Mayan numerals: base 20, but with the last-but-one digit in base-18, thus giving a 360-day year) overflows from 4 to 5 digits on 21 December 2012. The calendar monks (or whatever their proper title was), being able to make several days' worth of predictions per day, soon got ahead of themselves; so the rollover afforded them a convenient excuse to take a well-earned break.
However, before they could resume writing predictions for the 5-digit dates, a few dozen pissed-up Dagoes arrived, slaughtered all the Mayans and nicked their gold. They didn't predict that .....
Modern practice is always to specify the oxidation state explicitly where a substance can exist in several. So one would write what used to be "nitrate" as "nitrate (V)", and what used to be "nitrite" as "nitrate (III)". So one could quite legitimately write "pentyl nitrate (III)" ("amyl" also being discouraged).
Been there, done that. I lived happily without a TV set from 1995 to 1998 (though I did have a play-only VHS wired up to an Amiga monitor, for watching movies from the local video shop -- remember video shops?); only eventually being persuaded to purchase one by a young lady. (Although said young lady was only 2 years old at the time, so is forgiveable under the circumstances.) Seeing as the licence was still valid after my ex and her daughter moved out, and any refund on the time remaining would have been swallowed up in admin costs, I hung onto the TV. Then added a VCR ..... then satellite ..... You get the picture.
Since the switchover required effectively the replacement of every TV receiver in the country (a set-top box is a receiver, it just doesn't have a display) one has to ask why did they not mandate the ability to use a viewing card from day one? Scrambling all the broadcasts on a simple "no payment, no pictures" basis would have stuffed it to the freeloading chavs and removed the need for poison-pen letters and bully-boy tactics, in one fell swoop.
The last big TV switchover in the UK (from 405 to 625 lines -- remember 405 lines?) began in 1964 with the launch of BBC2 (on 625 only) and wasn't completed until 1985 (when the last of the 405-line transmitters was turned off), so that's 21 years.
That's still the blink of an eye compared to how long it's taken for SI to catch on, though -- hence the pint of beer.
Yes, you're missing something.
You're missing that there is a *lot* of data which suddenly needs to be exported in a format that some other software package can make proper sense of; otherwise, there is going to have to be one mother of a retyping exercise. (Disclosure: When the stock control system at an electronics factory where I once worked was changed from a minicomputer system to a Windows-based system, we had a succession of temporary staff retyping data from printouts into the new system. This operation took several weeks, and nobody who actually used the stock control system considered it an improvement.)
All data storage formats should be published and available to everyone, precisely so that no software supplier has the ability to inflict such an exercise on their customers, nor hold their customers' data to ransom. Software vendors may not like the fact that they can no longer lock out their competitors so easily; but no doubt, there was a similar outcry when first laws were enacted against putting addictive drugs into food products to keep the customers returning (yes, this sort of thing really did happen).
The fact is, vendors of proprietary software are in a position of disproportionate power over their customers; and it is only fair for people in such relationships to be bound by different rules than people in more equitable relationships.
The "silver bullet" would be to have a clearly-defined, mandatory standard for interoperable file formats, unencumbered by "intellectual property" restrictions (so anyone can create a royalty-free implementation). The NHS should be smart enough to be able to draw up a specification that suits their needs, and big enough to be able to insist on it.
The real failure here is that there wasn't a law passed requiring all software suppliers to document all file formats, for the express purpose of enabling interoperability, 30 years ago -- before they could come up with arguments about "why should we be obliged to help our competitors".
No. Software vendors should not be allowed to leave their customers in the lurch like that.
You want to sell software, fine; but you have to understand that in deciding to sell software, you have accepted a responsibility towards your customers. Abdication of that responsibility costs those who put their faith in you significant amounts of time and money, and should not go unpunished.
If you cease selling or supporting a software product, you should be obliged to release the complete Source Code and Build Instructions, in order that others can step into the market you have vacated. Otherwise, you are obliged to support it as long as anyone is using it. If for some reason (e.g. loss of Source Code due to poor backup practices) you are unable to supply the necessary Code in full, a hefty fine should be applied.
"Thats already been in Windows for years, and can be controlled down to the port / protocol per application level."
The problem with the fine-grained access permission system of Windows NT is that it's too elaborate for the function it is trying to perform -- and as a consequence, it ends up seeing about as much use in practice as a pay toilet in a forest. The much simpler Unix permissions model (user, group and others; read, write and execute / explore) may not do as much, but at least people use it.
Of course, I might be unfairly blaming Microsoft for the bad decisions of a bunch of self-taught "developers" working out of their bedrooms with pirate copies of Visual Studio and no official documentation.
Microsoft are in trouble whatever they do.
If they continue to support badly-written legacy software (which breaks on more secure systems precisely because it relies on the exact same unfettered system-wide access used by malware to do its stuff), they will also be supporting malware.
If they stop supporting legacy software so customers have to get their important apps rewritten from scratch, then there's less of a reason for said customers to continue buying Microsoft operating systems on which to run the rewritten apps.
About the only thing they can do that will stand any chance of working and being secure is to have each legacy application run in a separate, firewalled and chrooted virtual machine.
"The touch-event patent is the same one that a UK court cleared phone-maker HTC of infringing, and also declared invalid anyway ....."
Then Apple were acting under false pretences when they tried to sue for infringement in the first place (since they knew not only that the patent was not infringed, but the patent did not even exist in the first place). If this is not a criminal offence (and it damn well should be) then Google and Samsung should countersue Apple.
Well, a good working definition of an explosion is "any rapid process, the final products of which take up significantly more space than the initial ingredients".
Quickly heating a lot of liquid nitrogen above its boiling point inside a closed vessel made of a (now) brittle substance definitely qualifies under this definition.
Fossil fuel energy, on the other hand, is an exercise in shitting on your own doorstep.
Not investing in renewable energy generation might eke out the free ride we're getting from fossil fuels for a little bit longer -- but then we're stuck with whatever renewable generating capacity we do have when they run out, and no possibility to increase it. If that thought doesn't scare the arse off you, you're not paying attention.
P.S. Thumbing me down will not change this.
"I guess every mining operation, whether for coal or raw materials, is subsidised."
Yes, it is -- that's the point. There's only so much in the ground and when it's all gone, it's all gone.
If it helps, consider the difference between living from an inheritance (you don't have to work, but the cash pile keeps getting smaller) and working for a living (you get paid the same amount every week, as long as you keep turning up for work).
"In fact every physical (non wooden) object you buy must be subsided since the material to make it has been taken from somewhere and not replaced."
Except that for non-fuels, you can often melt down a used article to make new ones. At some point, the cost of extracting a raw material ends up exceeding the cost of recycling it from used stuff.
Two rather well-known database servers were very conspicuous by their absence from those benchmarks.
Anyway, I bet the licensing ends up costing you more than simply buying faster hardware to run PostgreSQL or MySQL (with whatever compile-time optimisations you might choose to apply) on. Particularly as said hardware will still be running just as fast when a licence comes up for renewal.
Does German patent law include a prior art / non-obviety test? Are the claims outside the scope of patentability?
If so, Motorola can launch a two-pronged attack. (1) Try to get the patents overturned as falsely-granted and (2) Sue Microsoft for damages on the basis that they should have known all along that the patents they were using were bogus.
This is all good, but there's something else we need to think about.
Why not mandate for PSUs to be housed in screwed-together, rather than glued-together or welded cases?
This way, if (read: when) the cable fails at the unavoidable concentrated stress point where it exits the housing, the power pack can be opened up, the cable shortened by 10 cm. or so, and then re-soldered to the output. Screw it back together and the job's a good 'un.
It's called field-maintainability; and it's most of the difference between old-fashioned industrial (and semi-industrial) equipment which is still in use after 20 years or more, and nearly-new equipment which is festering in landfill sites for want of some awkward, piddly component which seems to cost as much as a new one.
In any subnet, at least two addresses are unusable: the one with all the low-order bits zero (network address, e.g. 51.0.0.0) and the one with all the low-order bits one (broadcast address, e.g. 51.255.255.255). And by convention, the one with just the lowest-order bit one (e.g. 51.0.0.1) is reserved for the router.
A single /8 wastes just 3 potential IPv4 addresses. 65536 separate /24s would be wasting 196608 potential addresses; while 1048576 separate /28s would be wasting a whopping 3145728 addresses!
"I'm sure it's not beyond the wit of man to have a system where you can transfer your "SIM ID" between phones through a web interface, a USB cable, NFC, iTunes, a text message, bluetooth, or a million-and-one alternatives."
But why bother with such a faff, when there is already a low-tech, universally-comprehensible way of doing it? When you swap a SIM card between two phones, you aren't dependent on yet another piece of proprietary technology (which always ends up being used to enforce what you can and cannot do with something). Of course the SIM itself is proprietary technology, but at least it has to conform to a published standard. You don't require power (which is nice if the device in which the SIM was located has a flat battery), let alone an Internet connection (and you might conceivably want to swap the SIM to a phone with a better antenna, in order to get a voice or even text message connection).
Let's look at your perceived disadvantages of the SIM card:
"has to be cut up to swap between phones" -- only if manufacturers try to define their own standards rather than just, you know, working with them the way they always used to.
"is easy to lose if you swap regularly" -- sorry, you're just careless.
"requires taking the phone apart or the use of a fiddly little tool each time you want to change it" -- again, that depends on the manufacturer. Some phones are designed to make SIM-swapping easy.
I see two counts of "blame the manufacturer" and one of "blame the user"; none of which are as bad as some of the potential failure modes of your million-odd alternative suggestions.
Knew it was one or the other. Either made sense. Sometimes you take a punt, and get unlucky. *shrug*
Anyway, in most of Mainland Europe, phones must be unlocked by law. In the UK, they only need to be capable of being unlocked -- thus creating a business opportunity for third parties to unlock phones, charging such a price as the market can bear, and that way everyone gets a slice of the pie. (That the pie ends up sliced so finely that nobody's slice is very satisfying, is a separate problem ..... )
The concept of a removable SIM which can be inserted into any compatible device is the whole point of the GSM specification. Any proposal to eliminate the SIM breaks the subscriber's (crucial) ability to install their SIM into any phone.
Remember, it is a Subscriber Information Module. It carries information about the subscriber (the poor sod who pays the bills) to the phone (which conventionally is also owned by the subscriber, but it doesn't have to be). Whatever phone I put my SIM into, can answer calls dialled to the number associated with the SIM, originate calls appearing from that number and send and receive text messages for that number.
That surely is the only fair way for the system to work: this interchangeability explicitly means that the subscriber, and not the telecommunications network, gets to choose the phone they use -- and the handset manufacturer cannot force the use of a particular network.
There may be other ways of achieving this besides mandating a physical artefact that can be transferred from one phone to another; but the swappable SIM probably is the simplest and most effective safeguard against abuse of the system by either networks or handset manufacturers.
Debian Iceweasel, from the "stable" suite.
It's based on Firefox, but has enough Debian-specific patches to have lost the right to wear Mozilla branding. It might be a few versions behind Mozilla Firefox, but you can be sure it will have had all known security patches applied.
The thing about migration is, once you know there is no painless upgrade path, all bets are off anyway.
If a web app needs to be rewritten to make it work with IE10, then it's precious little extra effort to rewrite it to work with Firefox. And when the question "What could we have done all those years ago to avoid this happening today?" comes up, as it's bound to; and the answer comes back, "Insist to have a copy of the Source Code so we can make changes in future and aren't dependent upon the original programmer who wrote it", maybe someone will take notice this time.
Microsoft are gambling a lot on this -- and vendors of alternatives to Microsoft products are in a position to win.
Two reasons I can think of, off the top of my head:
1: Gluten intolerance. The human digestive system is not adapted to eat cereals. Some are lucky, others not so lucky.
2: Taurase deficiency. This is a rare* genetic condition; which leaves sufferers unable to produce an enzyme required to manufacture taurine from other protein fragments, and therefore unable to survive on a vegetarian diet. Sufferers first go blind; then their internal organs fail slowly, one by one, over a period of many years.
* Rare in humans, anyway.
"Crypto systems have a critical weakness: private keys have to be kept secret. If they fall into the wrong hands, the cryptography is broken."
Well, yes, that's kind of the entire point with crypto.
The best technique is still to keep messages as short as possible, in order to give the enemy as little leverage as possible. If the key contains at least as many bits as the message, then any plaintext is equally plausible.
Panasonic bread (other makes of bread machine are available, but will produce noticeably inferior results) sliced at 20 mm., or a cob from a bakery (ideally a proper local one, but most supermarkets' instore bakeries have an offering that will do).
Just avoid anything made using the Chorleywood process. (How they are even allowed to label it "bread" is beyond my understanding.)
..... and that's fossil fuels running out.
A lot of businesses are built on subsidised energy (subsidised, not by government handouts, but by the fact that it isn't going to be replaced) and they are going to come crashing down when the true price of energy is revealed.
At last, someone gets it!
The Penny Post was created after someone did the maths and worked out that charging a "fair" price based on distance would actually add more to the cost of sending an item, when allowing for the work done deciding what was a fair price, dealing with over- and under-payments and all that sort of stuff, than the actual cost of delivering the item.
In other words, a flat rate saves on administrative costs.
Remind me again how it's the Mageia's fault, when some manufacturer refuses to release proper documentation for their hardware that would enable any competent programmer to write a driver?
This is exactly the sort of thing about which you should be complaining to your elected representatives, because it ought to be illegal.
Because (1) that would be far too much like doing real science, and (2) it might turn out to be their equivalent of Arago's Bright Spot.
California has the Unruh Act, which is supposed to guarantee equal protections. One of its provisions is that clothing which would constitute Proper Attire on a member of one sex is deemed to constitute Proper Attire on a member of the other sex.
So it must either be legal for a woman to be topless in CA, or illegal for a man to be topless.
Oh, and in Britain, we form compound nouns using gerunds, not infinitives; so that would be "changing rooms". You'll be saying "Girl swim team" and treating them as a singular entity next.
In at least one version of IE, there is a very nasty bug in the JavaScript interpreter which can only have been put there deliberately.
It refers to the string.split() method, when you split against a regular expression (the way Perl and PHP do). IE behaviour deviates counterintuitively from Mozilla and Webkit behaviour by silently dropping empty elements from the returned array.
If you have an AJAX backend which returns something like
20 High Street|Smalltown|Countyshire|CY5 6ZA
then you try to split it with something like
aa = at.split(/\|/);
then you quite rightly expect
aa[0] == "20 High Street"
aa[1] == "Smalltown"
aa[2] == "Countyshire"
aa[3] == "CY5 6ZA"
On the other hand, should your AJAX backend return something like
129 Acacia Avenue|Bigcity||BC2 0PC
then when you call the same
aa = at.split(/\|/);
what you find with Mozilla or Webkit is, as you would expect:
aa[0] == "129 Acacia Avenue"
aa[1] == "Bigcity"
aa[2] == ""
aa[3] == "BC2 0PC"
But IE, on the other hand, gives
aa[0] == "129 Acacia Avenue"
aa[1] == "Bigcity"
aa[2] == "BC2 0PC"
Call me paranoid if you like, but I cannot see any way for that behaviour to be accidental. For that matter, I cannot see any way for that behaviour even to be useful if implemented on purpose, other than to break code already tested against the popular Open Source browsers.
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