Re: The secret formula
We wouldn't want it to go pear-shaped, would we?
1143 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Feb 2013
"A credit card or payment method should be requested only at the time I have decided to purchase goods or services, and only saved as necessary for processing the transaction."
Indeed. Fortunately, there is a good number of retailers, who do not save full card information. They authenticate the current transaction right away, and if it passes, they'll retain only last 4 digits from the card number for reference. Just like a long-standing practice with printed receipts - only a card issuer and last 4 digits can be seen there.
Three famous examples:
- Passetto in Vatican, about half mile long. It provided an escape route for at least two popes. Alexander VI Borgia escaped during a French siege, and somebody else (Clement? Julius?) escaped during the Sack of Rome.
- Marie Antoinette escaped from the palace of Versailles, when the palace was overrun by the angry mob.
- Nottingham Castle has a passage which was used for breaking into the castle. To rescue king Edward III, if the memory serves right. And intruders had help from the inside.
So you are quite right about that part - secret passages are definitely a security weakness. To counter this they were cleverly hidden, rarely used, only a handful of people had the knowledge. Pure obscurity.
This model wouldn't possibly work for crypto backdoors. There has to be a wide circle of people with an official need to know, thus it's bound to leak sooner or later. Worldwide access - millions of people banging on the doors, some of them are quite bright and well equipped. Hopeless.
"Real castles do not have secret passages"
Quite frequently they do. In times of yore, security by obscurity had somewhat better chances, as geographical distances imposed a considerable limit on the number of adversaries, and there were no automated scanning tools available.
"The Thinkpads that changed the charger connector when we went from T4 series to T6 series and now again with T440's?"
16V/56W thin barrel was good from Thinkpad 360 to T43/R52, 1995-2005. Lots of generations and models in between.
20V/90W thick barrel from T60 to T430, 2006-2014. About six generations.
There were some exceptions, like 135W adapters for hungrier beasts, but as a generalisation, 8-10 years with one connector type isn't bad at all.
"because you plugged the cable into the wrong Scart socket on the telly."
For the younger generation: decent TV set had to have 2 or 3 SCART sockets on the back. All of them were somewhat universal. Or rather having slightly varying values of universal.
From the look of it, USB-C is going down the same path.
"turned powerful technology into tools that were easy to use"
Funny indeed. Companies wriggle like hell to avoid their products being seen as tools. To the point of designing the products as non-utilitary and intrusive as possible. These days it's all about the "experience", "lifestyle", "vision", "technology" and other BS-bingo material. With "ease of use" moniker serving as a warning label.
Gosh, I'm getting ranty. Need a coat, quickly.
"The new X-Trail to my eyes looks very very similar to Qashqai, so much so they will be competing against each other?"
As +2 version of Qashqai disappeared from the lineup, new X-Trail had to fill that niche. Basically it's a blend of old X-Trail and Q+2.
About 10 inches longer than normal Q, has 7 seats, and 4WD (which +2 didn't have).
"But I have no fucking idea how a transistor works."
If used as logic gates, it's not that hard to understand. They'd be either almost open or almost closed. Everything inbetween is an unholy mess. But for some strange reason this mess seems to be a preferred state for the analogue folks. Go figure.
/joke.jpg/
...right next to the pile of dead flash. Once so glorified, almost deitified, so full of hype, starring in countless powerpoints, having a future oh-so-bright. Yet there they are. Mere mortals like everybody else.
Oh, well. Back to work. Gotta keep the blinkenlights flashing.
You can, but it's not easy. You'd have to swim against a lot of tides.
Firstly, do not rely on HR. Qualities you're looking for do not show up in their keyword lists, because these qualities are nigh impossible to define in HR terms. You'll recognize The Knack when you see it. Others probably won't.
Secondly, start the search early. In the schools. Best chaps tend to avoid the job market if possible - once they get the job they like, they'll stay there indefinitely. So it's pretty much a matter of being first to spot a young talent.
Thirdly, you should start in the schools, because the education system does not work in your favour. There's a huge lot of anti-patterns, academic navel-gazing and other cruft to be learned, that has to be unlearned later on. If it's not too late by then.
OK, the last one was a radical statement - please do not take it as an absolute, but as a problem for your specific use case. Once the younglings have got several years of treatment to the finesses of Academically Approved Ambitious Architectures, they'd probably have a hard time to get their minds back in shape for doing the embedded stuff. Unless they've had it as a side hobby all along.
Yes, the fun factor. It may be a bit underestimated at times - small skunkworks projects may unexpectedly bring about a major breakthrough, and a motherlode of other goodies to go with it. But sometimes it turns out to be nothing but a twattery. Apparently it has to be a delicate mix of playfulness, skill, determination, luck, and deity-knows-what-else. Pegasus really doesn't give advance warnings about his next visit.
Oh dear, oh dear. This reminds me - I may have forgotten to pick up that fancy smart TV from the store. Come to think of it, I also forgot to swipe the credit card.
With my old memory failing like that, I'll never be a model citizen. [sob]
So Ballmer & Sinofsky behaved pretty much like they appeared to.
That's sad. Because cynical viewpoint can't be always right, could it? There should be a bit of hope, if only a fool's hope, that behind the curtains there's more valour than meets the eye. That the emperors are more decently clad than they appear to be. That affairs of their courts are less petty than they seem to be.
But in the end it's just another night in the circus. Lots of smoke and mirrors, loud noise, pretty costumes, carefully staged performances - and after the show, somebody has to clear up all that elephant dung.
"OK, we agree up to a point - great."
Good call. It's an interesting discussion, and there's no need to get too emotional about it, because everybody had valid points to make.
Please consider two topics that were not mentioned yet:
1) PRML encoding method, which was introduced around 1991, and has been prevalent ever since. With major updates of course.
PRML means that reading bits off the magnetic media is not a straightforward process, it's a highly sophisticated guesswork. So an uncertain amount of uncertainty is to be expected.
2) T10-PI is a system of additional checksums that is designed to combat silent corruption problems discussed here. PI-capable drives can be formatted with 520-byte sectors, 8-byte checksum is kept inside the same data frame as 512 bytes of payload, and consistency checks are performed along the whole data path.
Yup. Most of them are blocked by my very own Great Firewall, painstakingly construed by finding a checkbox named "Enable JavaScript" in the browser settings, and hitting it with a fury of the thousand winds. What a marvel of technological achievement.
"Give me a well built virtualised platform"
Hah. Dream on.
While we're at it, can we finally have those flying cars and frikkin-sharks-with-frikkin-lasers? Plus some nice unicorns for the tenderer species in the profession.
And, if it's not too much trouble, a new box of bingo cards, because this topic has been quite taxing on the supplies. 15 instances of the word "legacy" in a short article...there should be a law against that, or at least a fair warning for the unsuspecting readers.
"Our favorite rag just wouldn't be the same if it didn't show contempt for everybody and everything, especially itself."
Well met. Everyone should get bitten fairly and equally. It's kind of implied in the mission statement.
We, the commentariat, shall not tolerate any discrimination on this count.