Posts by A J Stiles

Linus calls Linux 'bloated and huge'

@ Edwin

"So what do we want - a universal kernel that will run on pretty much anything, or some form of hideous hardware scanning autocompilers that recompile the kernel as soon as you plug in a new USB device?"

Actually, that's got legs.

Put a bloated catch-all kernel on the install disc, but also provide an advanced "super racing tune-up" installation option that will compile a brand new kernel with support for the auto-detected hardware and any more that the user selected (either from a menu, or just by having the user plug in their USB devices one at a time and auto-detecting them). After all, we know which modules we loaded in the first place, and which ones go with the new devices ..... well, they're obviously the ones we need to compile. Display a warning that this will take a long time and this is the last chance to bail out. Use a bootloader that supports multiple kernels, so you can start up in "super fast" mode (with your custom kernel) or "failsafe but slower" mode (with the stock one).

Now, if the user later acquires a new piece of hardware for which they didn't compile a driver module but the Source is in the Tree, the required module can always be built at a later date. Even if it is some device that needs its driver to be compiled "hard" into the kernel, or requires a new Kernel Source Tree to be downloaded, it will only be necessary to boot failsafe and rebuild the custom kernel.

This whole process can of course be almost fully automated, perhaps with a progress bar or even an amusing slideshow, for the sake of people who presumably have difficulty remembering how to spell "make".

What everyone is missing

The Linux kernel comes in Source Code form. If you're really desperate to squeeze every last trace of performance out of it, you can trim it right down to just the bits you need. And as recently as five years ago, that's exactly what people were doing. With 2.2 and 2.4, it was entirely normal to compile your own kernel: you compiled the filesystem and chipset drivers hard into the kernel, and built modules only for the hardware you actually had (or thought you might acquire).

Now that Linux is mainstream, and now processors are riduculously fast (probably due to the demands made by other operating systems), it's simply got past the point where anybody can be bothered to strip it down anymore and reached the point where you can spend more time deciding what not to include in the kernel, than you actually save by leaving it out. It probably isn't helping that hardware manufacturers all insist to make products that are largely incompatible with one another, thus requiring separate kernel modules, either.

But one thing is certain: If there's a gap in the market for a stripped-down Linux, it *will* be filled, one way or another.

This is one thing Apple actually got right. By controlling the hardware on which OSX runs, they at least know what they need to put in the kernel and what they can leave out.

Dot Hill starts Software RAID

So .....

How is this different from the "md" devices that have been included in the Linux Kernel since 2.4, and which consistently outperform proprietary (therefore, non-verifiable) software RAID?

Undead COBOL celebrates (another) 50th birthday

@ AC 11:04

It's the right way round. "Divide into" and "divide by" are opposite actions, not synonyms. So you might legitimately

DIVIDE 2 INTO DIAMETER GIVING RADIUS

If you remember doing long division in school, you'll understand. Suppose you were dividing 203 by 7 ..... 7s into 2 don't go, 7s into 20 go 2 remainder 6, 7s into 63 go 9, no more digits, answer is 29. You're dividing 7 *into* 203.

Mine's the one with the crude chalk drawing on the back.

Facebook hack service smells fishy

Hmm

I remember a similar scam involving a service claiming to be able to hack other people's AOL accounts; you just had to provide the hackers with your screen name, password and the screen name of the intended victim.

There's a saying they use from time to time in The Big Blue Room: "Nobody would ever be stupid enough to fall for that."

It obviously doesn't apply on the Internet.

'Do You Want To See My C*ck?' asks budding author

Cocks?

Surely when you've seen one cock, you've seen them all ..... haven't you?

Tory surveillance backlash: Worthy, but is it workable?

Politics has been poisoned

Politics has been well and truly poisoned; to the point where even if an honest person were to stand for election, nobody would believe a word they said anyway.

It's going to take something a bit more drastic than a general election to sort out this situation.

Beer, because that's just one of the ways out.

Australia mulls botnet takedown scheme

Better idea

Better idea: Mandate that no two computers may have the same instruction set and/or addressing schema. This would ensure that code compiled for one computer could never be run on any other computer; and thus malware could never spread, except in Source Code form where it could easily be dealt with.

Swayze death exploited to serve up fake anti-virus

So, how long .....

..... until someone is killed deliberately *just* to punt malware to lusers?

Complexity and confusion drive Microsoft's licensing

Easy way to stay compliant

There's a very easy way to stay compliant with all your software licences.

That is, insist *only* on OSI-accredited licences (so you can make and deploy as many copies as you like); and whenever you allow anyone to make copies of software, give them the Source Code (not all licences require this, but some do; and even if they don't, it's only polite).

It's surely just a matter of time anyway before a court rules that using software you paid for is fair dealing, and the whole "end user licence agreement" house of cards comes tumbling down.

Beer, because I can get more of them in when I don't have to worry about licences.

Linux webserver botnet pushes malware

Hmm

Sounds like there's a market for a distro where you can *only* run locally-compiled software -- anything that was not compiled on that machine falls over.

All you need to do then is have your development toolchain on a USB external drive, which is kept unplugged while it's not in use. Then, anything running on your box either was compiled by you, or is running through an interpreter (so at least you must have the Source Code, and therefore a fighting chance of understanding what it's doing).

No more premium rate numbers for docs

"local rate" ?!

0845 numbers, when they were originally introduced, were supposed to be charged at the same rate as a local call.

Nowadays, there is no such thing as a "local call" anymore -- even on a landline, it costs the same to call from Land's End to John O'Groats as it does to call Handsworth from Perry Barr. There is just one single rate for all inland calls. Yet, for some reason, companies are allowed to say these numbers "cost the same as a local call".

Except, of course, they don't cost the same as a local call. And your inclusive calls often don't cover them.

Word nemesis: Microsoft deliberately 'destroyed' our business

@ AC 14:21, ffinlo

I'll bet you a used iTunes song it was done using a pirate copy of Word as well.

Not the only ones

i4i aren't the only people whose business has been destroyed by Microsoft.

If anybody was selling an inexpensive but well-featured office suite aimed at home users, Microsoft have effectively ruined their business too, by not locking down Office against unauthorised copying. Who can compete on price with a pirated copy of MS Office? You can't even offer features that MS don't, otherwise you run into file format limitations.

Let's face it, if it was harder to pirate Office, it would never have become so popular.

Ubuntu's Koala food arrives on shelves

dropbear

Use dropbear instead of openbsd-sshd? Don't give them ideas! They already changed the default shell from bash to ash .....

Pesticides fingered in UK honeybee wipeout

If they used fewer chemicals

If farmers used fewer chemicals on their crops in the first place, they might not exceed their quotas and as a consequence would not be obliged to drive a tractor over their excess production.

Custard Creams can kill: Official

The whole "cakes vs biscuits" thing

The whole "cakes vs biscuits" thing was just an unfortunate side-effect of a stupid tax régime.

If the rate tax had been the same on cakes and biscuits in the first place, it would never have mattered. But I suppose that would have been far too sensible .....

Labour calls for free Wi-Fi on trains

Bah

Anybody can see that this isn't going to work. Mobile broadband is bad enough when you're sitting still; but in a moving vehicle, where the connection keeps getting lost and re-established, and with more than one person trying to use the bandwidth, it's going to be a disaster.

When are people going to realise that the Internet is not the answer to everything?

If they really wanted to find out how to improve public transport North of the Border, what they need to do is ban all Ministers in the Scottish Parliament from owning a car for a year, so they can see how people have to manage.

EchoStar ordered to pay TiVo (another) $200m

Excuse me

Recording one programme while watching another ought to be blindingly obvious -- you just need two receivers. Remembering where things are on a disk also ought to be blindingly obvious -- it's called a file system. There is nothing new in this "invention", and plenty of prior art.

EchoStar should carry on regardless. It is clear that the "patent" in question was falsely granted. TiVo are not only being vexatious litigants, but are also in contempt of court as they are using the court system to subvert the law by attempting to enforce a patent that they are fully aware should never have been granted in the first place, on grounds of obviety, prior art and excess of scope.

Grenade, because that's what the patent system needs.

Firefox to warn users of insecure Adobe Flash

Better one innit

What's *really* needed (short of a simple ban on closed-source software) is for someone to sponsor an Open Source equivalent of the Flash player.

The words "This would never have happened if you had the Source Code" (TWNHHIYHTSC) are as true today as they ever have been.

Conficker borks London council

Huh

CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=n

That was easy, wasn't it?

Which part of "do not compile anything into your kernel that you really don't need" do people not get?

Swedish bloke attempts lactation

Evolution in action

Gender diamorphism in humans actually serves little purpose since the Industrial Revolution -- arguably, since the Agricultural Revolution even. In a few thousand years' time, the sexes will be barely distinguible.

Even before that, people will get sex-change surgery for a job interview the way they get a haircut today -- and if they get it done privately, it'll all be fully fuctional.

Yes, it works

Yes, it works. What are you getting so surprised over? Breast tissue is breast tissue. It produces milk when given the correct stimuli. In a man, it just doesn't usually get those stimuli.

Men and women have 45 out of 46 chromosomes in common, for crying out loud. We are not different species!

Brit inventor wants prison for patent crims

Hmm

The patent system does not exist for the purpose of allowing inventors to make money: it exists for the purpose of encouraging inventors to contribute their inventions to the Public Domain.

What is long overdue is to re-examine thoroughly whether granting temporary monopolies to inventors in exchange for a promise that their inventions will be released to the Public Domain in due course is still the best way to achieve the objective of enhancing the Public Domain -- and, if it turns out not to be so, to replace it.

Dole bludger fined for BNP leak

@ sooty

Exactly. Fining someone who is on benefits is just going to encourage them to commit crime in order to survive.

It'd be a much more fitting punishment to give him a job -- one of the jobs that "economic migrants" are "stealing from British workers", of course. See how he likes picking fruit for 12 hours a day, sharing a damp two-up, two-down terraced house with 19 other people, and working for a gangmaster who deducts so much of his minimum-wage earnings to pay for accommodation and sundry expenses that he will barely be able to afford the interest accruing on the fine.

Sony explains PS3 Slim's loss of Linux option

Sony missed a trick the first time

Backward-compatibility means that you can't gouge people for brand-new copies of all the software they already own. If you're in the business of selling software and hardware, it's a millstone.

Even back when the PS2 was launched, I was fully expecting that it wouldn't be backward-compatible with existing PlayStation games. I expected Sony to remake all their games and offer a "new discs for old" trade-in. This would have ensured that there were no second-hand games out there to compete with new ones, and rendered used consoles even more worthless (as the only games available would be the ones that people couldn't even be bothered to trade-in for newer ones).

NZ woman sacked for SHOUTY EMAILS

Easy solution

Wouldn't have affected me. I have HTML turned off in my email client by default, and so probably would never even have seen the red or the bold.

Now all it needs is for someone to create a font with all lower case and no capital letters ..... probably not me, though, as it's marginally less effort to ignore the capitals.

Interoperability eludes Office and OpenOfffice

Simple solution: get tough

Standardise on using OpenOffice.org within your business. Send out documents as .odt and .ods.

If people ask you for .doc or .xls files, just tell them politely but firmly to download OpenOffice.org. It's free, and it works on anything that's got a C compiler. (And if anybody sends you a .doc or .xls that wasn't out of OO.org, shop them to FAST -- most copies of Office in existence are pirated.)

There's simply no excuse for allowing Microsoft to hold your data to ransom through proprietary file formats -- it's probably already illegal under some country's laws anyway.

Reg bean counter in charity cycling towerathon

@ Kevin Dwyer

I have often joked about almost exactly that.

But never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined for a split-second that anybody would be foolhardy enough to attempt it in real life.

Let alone that half a dozen would actually survive it.

Beer for Charlie.

UK.gov revives net cut-off threat for illegal downloaders

What happened?

Once upon a time, people in Britain used to stand up for what they believed in. We hand the miners' strike, the Poll Tax riots, Castlemorton Common, the protests against the CJB, and the protests against road building.

Where is that spirit today?

What happened, in the last 10 - 15 years, that made us just bend over and take it like good little martyrs?

@ AC 11:55

No, if someone is using too much water, the best response is to cut off their *sewage*.

Parallels woos Apple cult converts

Hmm

As one of those evil penguin-shagging communists, tempted by a Mac, I have a couple of things I want to ask:

Can I use Parallels to run Ubuntu instead of Windows?

Can I build my favourite applications from source and run them natively under OS X?

Handset makers, the criminal's friend

Good

It's better for a few criminals to get away with it, than for law enforcement to have access to our phone calls. Beside which, there are plenty of other ways criminals could communicate. Spying on mobile phones won't help in that case.

After all, there's no guarantee that something fairly ordinary and innocuous that you do all the time won't become an offence one day.

64-bit Chrome takes centre stage in Linux land

@ AC 11:34

This may come as a bit of a surprise, but you do not actually need to use Adobe's nasty closed-source POS just to read PDF files. Try any of xpdf, evince, kpdf or okular. For watching YouTube vids, there is a "youtube-dl" script which downloads them; and they can be played back using ffmpeg. There is also a "get-iplayer" script which downloads BBC iPlayer vids.

Also, once you have put a 64-bit processor into 64-bit mode, some 32-bit instructions are no longer available. If anyone used those instructions in a closed-source program, you're shafted.

US magazine to display Harry Potter-style moving images

@ AC 11:17

Your maths is correct, but you're forgetting that there are somewhat less than 25.4 millimetres to the inch when describing television screens and the like.

Paris, because she's probably heard a few tales of exaggerated inches too.

Beer drinking model to get caned in Malaysia

@ dunncha, AC11:31

@ dunncha

"I was 'strapped' in school and it never done me any harm" -- Really? It seems to have taught you that violence is an acceptable way of solving problems. I call that harm.

@ AC 11:31

Agreed 100%. The EU should get together as a trading bloc and insist that no goods may be imported into any EU country unless they were manufactured under conditions that would be acceptable within the EU.

Caned for drinking beer?!

Which part of that is remotely compatible with humanity?

Soviet military-surplus manned spacecraft to fly again

Sexist language

How hard is it to write "staffed spacecraft" ?

Researchers forge secure kernel from maths proofs

@ vincent himpe

Others have already corrected you on the bartender problem, so I'll refrain from pointing out that there's no reason why the amount originally paid by the customers minus the change returned to the customers (= price charged for goods plus amount retained by bartender) plus the amount stolen by the bartender (already accounted for) should add up to the amount originally paid by the customers. I should know, I've got an engineering degree (from the days when that entailed more maths than a maths degree) and I've worked in a bar. It's a bit like Abbot and Costello's proof that 13 * 7 = 28.

Your comments on languages also miss the point. How do you know that the compiler for your latest fancy-arsed language is mathematically correct? At least C instructions can be mapped to machine instructions; and the ARM architecture on which they intend to run it is famous for its hardwired instruction set (no microcode). Meaning that there's a mapping from C instructions to logic gates. That's about as verifiable as you can get!

Drizzle for Christmas - year-end-prediction for MySQL fork

Good

Many people are using MySQL more as a sort of array persistence abstraction layer than the proper relational database it's growing into. If they don't need all the bells and whistles -- just SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and REPLACE, and do all the rest in the application layer -- then more power to them.

What would be really interesting would be direct Java integration without SQL (which has always struck me as a bit clunky; it's a necessary evil if you want the ability to swap out the database engine, but it still gives the impression of not quite fitting with any programming language).

Bug exposes eight years of Linux kernel

@ AC 13:09

"So this affects any Linux based machine?? Routers, NAS drives, media players etc??? Oh dear..."

No, because bottom memory (the only bit you can modify through this exploit) on routers and similar devices is ROM. Has to be that, see, 'cause the program counter is initialised to all zeros at power on, so the first instruction to be executed has to be at that address. Which means it has to be ROM for obvious reasons.

Unintended Consequences

Surely part of the problem is that the code gets optimised by the compiler? Which means that what's actually running isn't necessarily what the programmer wrote. So a clever trick employed by a programmer who knew exactly what they were doing might end up on the cutting room floor as a result of the optimiser thinking it knows exactly what it was doing.

If that's what happened here, it is really just a case of Unintended Consequences. It might actually be better if kernel code had to be hand-optimised. We fell into a trap when computers became cheaper than humans .....

Hmm

If Windows had something like this, the first person to spot it would in all likelihood be a blackhat, and there would be several pieces of really nasty malware out there.

At least all we have to do now is recompile our kenels. I've lived through 2.2 and 2.4, so I'm not afraid to do that!

Better to make a mistake and learn from it, than to pretend you never make mistakes.

Microsoft catches 11 UK pirate retailers

Good

This is good.

When Microsoft tolerate piracy, it harms their competitors. Given the choice of Microsoft Office for £500, Cheap Office for £50 or OpenOffice.org for £0, there is no way John Thomas is going to choose Microsoft. But when Microsoft Office can be had for £0, it becomes much harder to sell a £50 office suite; so the vendors of Cheap Office end up going out of business due to piracy, even without anyone making a single pirate copy of Cheap Office!

I'd really love to see a piracy clampdown against home users, but I bet that's never going to happen. John Thomas is never going to pay £500 for Microsoft Office, and Microsoft know that -- so it's no skin off their nose to let him pirate it. And as long as John Thomas is already used to Word and Excel, any company where he gets a job will buy Microsoft Office rather than a competing product, because "it's what their staff already know".

If most home users had got used to OpenOffice.org, businesses would want that instead. Pirate copies of Office are providing free Office training. Microsoft are doing well out of rampant piracy.

Sequoia e-voting machine commandeered by clever attack

@ ZenCoder

Adding a paper trail doesn't change a blind thing.

You can press button A on the machine, have it print A on the till roll, and still record a vote for B. This is an inherent problem with any system that relies on counting a hidden *copy* of the votes, as opposed to the actual votes themselves.

Making the design open doesn't change much, either.

For a start, only a minority of the population at large can make sense of it. And for another thing, you can't be sure the machine on which you cast your vote is the same one you've examined, nor that it hasn't been altered in the meantime.

I have designed a direct-recording mechanical vote counter which is as close as you can get to universally comprehensible. Almost every part of the mechanism is visible through the transparent polycarbonate housing, only the number wheels of the individual candidate counters are obscured by distorting lenses, and you can see your counter and the total counter -- and no others -- increment as you press the button for your candidate. (No copy is made here: pressing the button directly increments the candidate's counter and the total counter together.) You can't vote multiple times, because the machine has to be primed (remotely, using a Bowden cable) by the presiding officer for each vote. At the close of polling, the machine can be locked unprimeable. Counting is then a matter of subtracting the "after" figures from the "before" figures, which were recorded before the polls opened and left in plain sight throughout.

But to be honest, you may as well just use pencil and paper, which *is* universally comprehensible and is not limited to first-past-the-post. Also, as long as the candidates themselves do the counting, there is a built-in system of checks and balances: none of the counters trust any of the others, so the only way they can agree on a result is if it is the correct result.

Sex Offenders returns to iTunes

Why this is a Bad Idea

Once upon a time, I went to an electrical retailer in my home city to buy a new washing machine. This was a highly-urgent life-or-death mission, as my then-partner needed a washing machine for her daughter's nappies ..... and my old one had just self-destructed spectacularly in mid-cycle.

I dashed to the store on auto-pilot, unable to dare to contemplate failure: a washing machine was needed, and needed now. But all seemed to be going well once I got there; having exactly one thing to think about is good that way. I soon found the machine I liked: a reliable brand, mechanical timer, adjustable thermostat to save powder by washing as hot as possible, 1000 rpm spin speed that struck the right balance between getting enough water out of the clothes and shaking itself to bits.

Then the time came to arrange payment. In those days, a washing machine represented more than a month's wages for me, and I had not had time to scrimp and save. I was refused finance because some previous occupant of my address had failed to keep up their repayments. In front of a store full of people, I was forced to telephone my mother, who came to the rescue with her credit card. It was embarrassing, but hardly the end of the world.

And you don't usually get angry mobs going after suspected credit defaulters with pitchforks and blazing torches.

Prof develops football-match scheduling software

Big Meh

How does the prof think they used to schedule football matches before computers?

We really need a Kaczynski icon.

Apple blueprints warranty Big Brother

Hmm

Disabling something I bought and paid for because I opened it up for a quick butcher's inside sounds a lot like criminal damage to me.

Google polishes another Chrome beta

@ Ty

And Apple's Webkit is based on KHTML, which is the rendering engine of my favourite browser. So if I'm running Konqueror from within a chroot, have I pretty much got Chrome and sandboxing already too?

Wasted billions of government IT spending exposed

This has got to stop

This. Has. Got. To. Stop.

Now.

We need a Ministry for IT. We also need (unless we are going to make Open Source mandatory; which would be no bad thing, but realistically is probably a demand too far) a standard procurement policy that unconditionally demands full Source Code, Modification Rights and the specifications of saved file formats alongside any software supplied to any Government department. Such measures are necessary, in order that the Government's data -- and **our** money -- shall never be held to ransom by a private corporation.

Note that that in no way excludes the likes of Microsoft from supplying the Government; it just means they will have to supply Source Code and documentation explaining saved file formats, along with more generous licencing terms permitting modification and inspection of the code. Almost like Open Source, in effect; only more expensive.