Posts by A J Stiles

TERRORISTS IN SUBMARINES menace the Free World!

Hmm

20 knots per hour is about about g / 3500, by my reckoning. That's hardly going to push you back in your seat.

Yeah, but

We can't have people enjoying themselves.

That's what it's really about, when all's said and done. Always has been, always will be.

Smiley face, because it annoys the puritans.

Sony tweets 'secret' key at heart of PS3 jailbreak case

Serves 'em right

What Sony are doing, basically, is preventing other people besides them from releasing games which can be played on the PS3; which surely meets anyone's definition of anti-competitive behaviour.

The only way Sony have a legal leg to stand on, is if it's possible for third parties to make PS3 games without the key. (And the method for doing this would have to be disclosed in court.) Otherwise, it is necessary for a PS3 owner to know the key in order to make full use of their own property (i.e., by creating their own games for it; it is true, not everybody will want to exercise that right, but it *is* their right) and therefore the key is *not* Sony's secret.

The fact that knowing the key makes it possible to play illegally-copied games is neither here nor there. All Sony have to do, if they are bothered about this, is sell legal copies of games cheaper than the "pirates" can make their own copies for. They have economies of scale on their side, after all. And if this doesn't fit in with their business model, well, I believe the phrase you're looking for rhymes with "rough pit" -- they can either adapt to the changing environment, or go the way of 95% of all species that ever lived on Earth.

Employer settles with Facebooker who called boss 'dick'

Hmm

Separation of personal and professional lives, anyone?

Microsoft finally says adios to Autorun

Muddy Mildred

And they said /etc/asterisk/extensions.conf was hard to understand.

Android goes virtual

No it doesn't

Oracle's patents are null and void in most civilised countries.

Photo loss blogger to Flickr: You're f*cking kidding

What would Nye Bevan have done under the circumstances?

Maybe it's time to start thinking in terms of a nationalised IT infrastructure? This would have to be based on 100% Open technology, of course, so that no single vendor could hold whole countries to ransom.

Nobody remembers the days before the National Grid was completed, when electrical supplies were not standardised and as likely as not your appliances would be unusable if you moved house -- different areas might well be on different voltages and/or frequencies.

Grenade, because I know I just dropped the N-bomb.

US lawmakers eye internet 'kill switch'

Exactly -- I saw this one coming awhile back.

Radio may soon be nobody's bomb.

Building a MW / LW radio receiver is not hard — years ago, nearly every schoolboy did it. Building one that works well under all circumstances is tricky, but amplitude modulation — which is used on the medium and long wave bands — is basically easy. You have a high-frequency carrier signal, which you make get weaker and stronger in time with the audio signal getting weaker and stronger. You feed this into an aerial system, and invisible electromagnetic waves travel away from it in all directions. The person listening has a tuned circuit, which lets through just the frequency of your carrier signal; a rectifier, which converts the high-frequency alternating current into direct current (which is still rising and falling in time with the audio signal); and an amplifier, which boosts the signal enough to move a loudspeaker cone. That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but I don’t want to lose my audience.

Frequency modulation is a little bit harder. This time, instead of varying the strength of the carrier signal, you vary the frequency Where your oscilloscope trace is above the zero line, you move the peaks closer together; where it goes below the line, further apart. So the frequency of your carrier signal is changing. This isn’t as big a problem as it sounds, because most tuned circuits aren’t perfect; so the one in the receiver will let through frequencies that are within a certain tolerance anyway. You also need a different kind of detector, which responds to changes in frequency as opposed to amplitude; but once you have built that, you can make use of the same power supply, amplifier and loudspeaker as before.

Doing it with pictures involves another layer of complication since there is no single, universally-accepted way of representing a picture as an electrical signal. And that’s just in mono — don’t get me started on the various ways people have actually transmitted colour pictures. In practice, though, agreements were thrashed out between governments, broadcasters and setmakers on a country-by-country basis, so all the TV sets in any given country worked on the same broadcast standard. And home video equipment works to national broadcast standards precisely so that an ordinary television set can be used to view home recordings.

Still, the fact remains that anyone with the right knowledge can build a radio transmitter. (Actually using it is another matter; if your signal travels far enough to interfere with other users, you can expect to end up in court. Not much is likely to happen if you build a small, low power transmitter and nobody finds out about it. And if the Rule of Law has already broken down …..)

But digital broadcasting is a whole other kettle of fish. Even building a digital receiver requires access to proprietary technologies (and this includes mathematical operations over which some people claim to hold patents!), although they may be available under what appear to be generous licencing terms. This is only because the big corporations are aware that in order to sell transmitters, receivers need to be almost given away. Building a transmitter is what requires access to the seriously expensive stuff, and that’s what they aren’t going to let Our Sort near.

Call it paranoia on my part if you like, but there’s no denying that wholesale adoption of digital broadcasting will end up making it nigh-on impossible to start an underground radio station — and in so doing, will deprive The Population At Large of a potentially extremely useful weapon against a corrupt government.

Kaspersky plays down source-code leak

I'm the sane one -- everyone else is mad

There is no such thing as "intellectual property". All the fruits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humanity.

What's insane is Microsoft continuing to sell an OS where it's easy and normal to circumvent privilege separation; anti-malware firms competing for a fixed-size and dwindling pool of potential customers; and worst of all, users putting up with all this (although many are beginning to see that there are alternatives).

Your Source Code is not special. If you can write a program to do something, so can I -- and I don't even need to see your Source Code, just what it does. Your richer competitors, meanwhile, are probably spending time and money poring over your compiled binary at the machine instruction level. If you're too cowardly to show me your code, that just suggests to me that you're embarrassed about something in it (Schoolboy errors? The kind of plagiarism you profess to despise in others?) I, on the other hand, am proud to nail my colours to the mast. I wrote this program; it is the best of its kind, and I will even show you exactly why nothing anyone else does is ever going to come close. Bite my shiny metal arse, I double-dastardly dare you!

Keeping secrets from me about products I am expected to use is neither tenable nor justifiable; the rightful owner of an artefact should automatically be privy to any secret embodied within that artefact by simple virtue of ownership. It is also unsustainable, because Source Code can only be concealed from users until someone perfects a decompiler.

Oh, one final tip for anyone who wants to keep their Source Code to themselves: keep your binaries to yourselves as well.

Hmm

If your business depends on keeping your Source Code secret from users (a position which is untenable, unjustifiable and unsustainable in the long term) then you deserve to fail.

Let's have more Source Code leaks!

Court orders seizure of PS3 hacker's computers

"Anonymous Arsehole"

Love it :)

Yes, running requires copying, but .....

..... in the UK at least, making that copy is considered Fair Dealing. Otherwise, there would be no way you could use the product you own for its rightful purpose, and you would have redress against the retailer under the Sale of Goods Act 1979 As Amended (Goods not fit for purpose).

Locking-out third party developers as Sony do will in all probability be found to illegal in mainland Europe (where DVD players now have to be multi-region by law) if and when tested in the courts.

virii?

What is a virius?

Oracle retains open source dictatorship

Except

That would be far too close to a Bill of Attainder for many people's liking.

Crematorium to heat council swimming pool

Good idea

I always said I would like to be cremated in a power station, after any useful bits have been cut out and stashed ..... this definitely sounds like a step in the right direction.

It's frankly obscene burning *anything* and not reclaiming the energy.

Mozilla plans 'Do Not Track' bottle-stopper for private surfers

Alternatively .....

Alternatively, use DNS-based blocking of known tracking sites and a cookie-filtering proxy server. I might even make the next version of my cookie-cruncher return "doctored" versions of known tracking cookies, so as to poison the analytics data thus gathered.

Pirates: Good for Microsoft, great for open sourcers

Cry me a river

Why do you think someone deserves to get paid *just* for writing a program?

There isn't a lot of money to be made catching and importing shellfish to make purple dye anymore either, since the invention of artificial mauve. Adapt or perish!

Piracy not good for MS Competitors

If Windows and Office weren't so easy to pirate, Microsoft would never have achieved the market penetration they have.

Suppose for a second that piracy was non-existent. Given the choice between paying £500 for a legit copy of MS Office or paying £50 for a legit copy of Cheapo Office 2011 (which does an admirable job of typing letters, organising CD collections and keeping track of bank balances), most punters out there are going to elect to save £450. If and when those users get jobs, they will already be familiar with a non-Microsoft alternative to MS Office, and might even persuade their new employer to purchase it in preference to upgrading all their MS Office licences.

But in the real world, piracy is rampant. The average punter is writing letters, organising their CD collection and keeping track of their bank balance using a pirate copy of the latest version of MS Office; and if and when they get a job, that is what their new employer will use because the general public already have (some kind of) experience of it. (Not even very good experience; I've seen documents laid out using spaces for formatting, and people adding up columns in spreadsheets using a calculator and then typing in the total.)

This means nobody could earn £50 selling an inexpensive office suite, because they would effectively be competing with a £0 office suite. And while piracy was what killed the £50 office suite, nobody ever had to make a single pirate copy of it.

Will Windows on ARM sink Windows Phone 7?

Doomed to failure

It isn't going to work.

As a Linux user, I know that when I download a package, it isn't tied to a specific architecture. It will Just Work on x86, x86-64, ARM, MIPS, PowerPC or anything else that will run Linux. It might even Just Work on BSD or Solaris.

Windows on multiple architectures will require architecture-specific packaging, sophisticated auto-detection and still get it wrong when someone downloads an app for their phone using their PC intending to transfer it via SD card.

How I saved the Macintosh

Some of us .....

Some of us still write PostScript by hand.

Although, I'm writing a Perl module to do it for me.

WikiLeaked US cables link China to Google hack

What WikiLeaks do is important

What Wikileaks do is important.

Our elected officials -- and the officials we voted against but got limbered with anyway -- work for us; and as the people who pay their wages, we have a right to know *everything* they do while on the clock.

If they need a reminder every now and again, so be it.

Money for nothing – and your (gambling) kicks for free

Wow

So that's why the banks needed billions of pounds of our money, then .....

You lost me at ISA

*No* savings plan, whatever they call it and however generous the terms may appear to be, is *ever* going to pay more interest to investors than borrowers pay to lenders. Otherwise, how do the banks make money? (Government billions notwithstanding.)

If you've got a mortgage, or other outstanding debts, you shouldn't be saving anything anywhere. Just use any spare money to make an overpayment on your mortgage. You will bring down the interest and be able to close it sooner. But when you are in a position to make that closing payment, leave just £1 outstanding for the whole of the rest of the term; that way, the bank will look after the deeds for you, and the interest on the £1 you still owe is much cheaper than a safe deposit box!

If you're afraid that the bailiffs might come knocking over a measly £1, simply keep that much cash in your house at all times.

MS drops drive pooling from Windows Home Server

Ah, but

Microsoft have thought of that! The current version of WHS will have some inherent limitation that will make it incompatible with something to come in future.

That's why you have to upgrade Microsoft Office every time they launch a new version. They purposely change all the file formats, so your old copy can't load anything saved out of a new copy, and if you want to read any of your friends' documents then you have to upgrade your version. Or explain to each of your friends how to save in a format which is compatible with yours, and yes it's OK to lose some formatting and so forth.

Of course

Of course it's a good feature. Unix-like systems including Linux and BSD have had something like it since forever.

It's the computer's job to remember which physical disk a file is on. Not yours.

Google 'Instant Previews' hit Google Analytics with fake traffic

So what?

According to my nameserver, google-analytics.com is 127.0.0.4. And I have a little proxy that quietly swallows cookies matching /^__utm/i .

I do not exist to help you make money.

Wiseguy ticket scalpers used botnets to outwit Captchas

..... And how to fix it

Back in the late 80s / early 90s, before the World Wide Web, purchasing gig tickets was done by going to a local record shop; and priority for tickets unofficially went to regular customers and partners of employees. This distributed distribution network meant there was no single point of failure. If one shop sold out, you could find tickets at another within a bus journey. And even if it was economically viable for touts to buy up all the tickets in a region, the record store owners -- who were in contact with one another -- would never let them.

By the way: The way to put a ticket tout out of business is simply *not to pay the prices they charge*. After the gig, they will be left with so many worthless pieces of paper.

Top Ten Arcade Classics

Some you missed

GORF. Moon Cresta. Phoenix. Scramble. Time Pilot. Hunchback.

And how could you possibly leave out Track and Field?

Angry Birds struggle to take on Androids

Alternatively .....

..... the BBC could just use an Open protocol, for streaming data in an Open format.

It's the *same* data they already broadcast over the airwaves in a fully-documented analogue form, which must meet anyone's definition of Open, for crying out loud.

US may disable all in-car mobile phones

No, because

Front seat passengers can see the same road as the driver, and usually interrupt the flow of conversation on seeing a hazard.

Many a true word spoken in jest

Well, that's pretty much going to happen sooner or later anyway.

I have a book which says "there are about 30 years' worth of crude oil left in the ground". It was printed in 1972. And although they've found more oil since then, one fact remains: When it's gone, it's gone forever, and invading more countries will not make any difference.

Royal Wedding: Prince Charles is a ZX81, Wills is an iPad

Not quite

I think he just wanted to be Camilla's RAM pack. Or something like that.

Prof to drill camera into own skull

He would have got on with my old newsagent

I think he would have got on famously with my old village newsagent, whom everyone thought had eyes in the back of her head.

If she spotted you shoplifting, she would say nothing to your face -- just quietly add the amount onto your parents' newspaper bill, to be dealt with later. Nobody ever tried it more than once, except one kid whose parents were especially bad at maths.

Xbox Kinect costs just £35 to build

Mark-ups

While we're on the subject of mark-ups, Walkman cassettes used to cost more to manufacture than CDs.

If you don't like the price, don't buy one! It's not as though anything terrible will happen to you if you don't; you've already managed without one for this long, anyway. If only more people would just *not buy stuff*, manufacturers might get the hint.

Fanbois howl as OS X update bricks PGPed Macs

Hmm

You've obviously never tried to upgrade from Sarge to Etch, then.

Apache threatens Oracle with Java exit

Ah, but

Open Source grants rights to users of software. Not all software users are programmers. Therefore, not all software users can exercise their rights to study the inner workings of software, or adapt it to their purposes, in practice.

But -- and this is the important bit -- they can delegate these rights to a third party whom they trust. Someone who has no connection with the original authors has no reason not to tell the truth about bugs in software, nor have they any attachment to its user interface and workflow paradigm.

The day someone comes up with a decompiler (and the abstract mathematics underlying decompilation is very similar to that underlying face recognition, so watch that space for an idea of what's about to happen), the practice of denying users their rights by not supplying Source Code will effectively cease forever.

Grenade, because the decompiler is going to be THE biggest game-changer since the start of IR2.

Not this canard again

You are allowed to sell Open Source software for money, if you want, you know. You just have to remember that other people are allowed to sell it cheaper than you, or give it away.

Anyway, so what if you can't earn a living writing software? You can still earn a living by auditing other people's software to make sure it won't damage the intending user's system, or modifying it to suit an existing workflow (both of which activities depend on access to Source Code). Or -- gasp -- doing something else altogether instead of writing software.

Just because something was hard work, doesn't mean you have a right to get paid for it.

That's why it went GPL

That's precisely why Sun used the GPL: to ensure that all Java derivatives would themselves be Open Source. That way, nobody would be able to force anyone to use their own "improved-but-incompatible" version of Java by making it closed-source.

Look up Joseph Whitworth sometime .....

Maybe Stallman was right

RMS was certainly right when he said pretty much the same thing about BitKeeper.

Oracle might yet lose, even if Apache walk. There is a proprietary implementation of SSH, but nobody actually uses it. How much clout have the OpenBSD project got? Not two out of three web servers, and that's a fact .....

Ofcom clears way for iPhone apps for TV voting

Nice bit of forward thinking

"The app can't add features either; everything must be possible without the app to avoid it turning into an advert for a specific platform"

Oooh! Now, this is the sort of forward thinking I like.

How about a law requiring all software applications to be supplied in Source Code form, so they can be compiled and run on any OS and any architecture? Well ..... doesn't hurt to dream, does it?

Ubuntu demotes Gnome for Unity netbook look

My favourite config tool

"I installed UBUNTU server last week and wanted a quick config job. The default install did not include a single tool that could be used for a quick config"

What, you mean it didn't install nano?

List-makers battle to keep football fixture lists protection

Hmph

They used to produce the fixture lists just fine without computers in The Olden Days. (But then, they didn't have television to think about, either.)

Anyway, just because something took a lot of effort on your part, doesn't mean you have an automatic right to be paid for it. I don't dispute that list compilers have to eat; but they don't have to compile lists.

I look forward to the reversal of this judgement.

IBM Java defection leaves Apache sourcers shellshocked

Well, this will be interesting

This is going to be *very* interesting.

Does anybody remember the dBase vs FoxPro lawsuit? That was essentially over who had the right to implement a programming language; and by the time Borland swallowed up Ashton-Tate, the latter wasn't worth much.

Microsoft's fear of an OpenOffice

Not a big deal for most users

Excel macros are beyond most users.

I've caught enough people adding up figures with a calculator and typing the answer into a spreadsheet cell, to realise that *formulas* are beyond most users.

Dead baby taunting troll feels wrath of law

Maybe

But however much someone needs locking up, a bad law is *never* *ever* the right way to go about it.

Better to have the Internet become totally unusable due to trolls (and figure out its own way to recover), than to have laws like this on the statute books.

OOo's put the willies up Microsoft

Absolutely.

Absolutely spot on!

Ease of piracy of MS products effectively prevented anyone else from getting a look in. Why spend £50 on an inexpensive office suite, when you can get MS Office for nothing? And home users already trained on (pirate copies of) MS Office will want their employers to use (and therefore pay for) MS Office if and when they get jobs.

A pirate copy of MS Office isn't a lost sale for Microsoft. It is a lost sale for anyone else trying to punt an alternative, inexpensive office suite. Nobody actually has to make a single pirate copy of "Cheap Office 2010" for the vendors to end up going out of business, thanks to piracy (though that isn't what it will be blamed on, of course; it'll be blamed on them producing an inferior product).

Unfortunately for Microsoft, OpenOffice.org (and decent Open Source software in general, for that matter) is immune to this effect. And if Microsoft clamp down any harder on piracy, there will be somewhere else for users to turn.

WordPad

WordPad is *not* a "basic word processor". It is a *fake* *prop* word processor -- a text editor that has grown in the wrong direction. You can apply bold, underlining and italics, change the font even; but there is no spelling checker!

Maybe I'm old-fashioned, preferring what's on the inside over how it's presented; but I'd sooner have a correctly-spelt document in a single, fixed-spacing font with no emphasis than a badly-spelt document with bold, underline, italics and proper proportional spacing and kerning anyday.

Then again, if WordPad was good enough for serious use, they wouldn't sell so many copies of Office.

Bgeh

We were visited by FAST once, coincidentally (?) just after ordering enough parts to build two dozen PCs ..... and one copy of Windows XP Home Edition.

They were most put out that we were unable to accept their offer of reduced price licence compliance checking software as (1) it would not run on any of our (all Linux) machines and (2) for us, "licence compliance" invariably means handing over the Source Code when asked politely.

Mail Merge?

I would write (have written, even) a Perl script to read a MySQL database (or CSV file) and perform some regular expression substitutions on a hand-crafted PostScript document. But maybe that's just me.

Most "normal" people -- if they even realised there was actually an alternative to retyping each time -- would simply write the letter with obvious placeholders; do a search-and-replace with the correct details for each recipient in turn (copying them from a spreadsheet and pasting them straight into the search requester if they were *really* savvy); then ctrl+Z undo all the search-and-replaces, rinse and repeat.

I have actually seen people adding up figures on a spreadsheet with a calculator, then entering the total into a box. They thought it was magic when I shew them how to enter a formula! Advanced users are very much in the minority.

Windows to Linux defections to outpace Unix shifts in 2011

Sounds like you're well shot of that place

Just try to keep your voice steady as you cash in your shares in the company.