Posts by Missing Semicolon 2149 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013
To which the answer is "if common sense was good enough, we'd not need the training".
The whole point of carefully set up emergency protocols is that common sense (without knowledge of the special circumstances) may mislead you into doing something dangerous - aka "shut all this off now, just shut it off!". (Twinkie)
As previously mentioned, he had an industrial policy. No government since has had one. It's too hard, involves pissing off too many international interests, and people don't like the price rises. Anything since has been looking at events and calling it "policy". "Knowledge Economy" anyone?
So, supposedly having the OS "immutable", and the apps isolated, will prevent insecurity. Just like it does on Android. /s
But, to be useful the apps must communicate. So there still exists the possibility that an app could be malicious, or that an app might be compromised by externally sourced content, and exfiltrate information. You simply move the hacker's target from the underlying OS to the user application subsystem.
Cheaper devices structure the power system as charger-to-battery-to-device, with no charger-to-device path. This is bad, as the battery is now being float-charged all the time the device is on, and connected to the charger. Float charging == death for LiPo cells.
Got several Thinkpads, and you'll prise my X230 from my cold dead hands. But..
I'm experimenting with a Framework. Treating myself to an AMD one, so still waiting.
The lower-specced Intel devices are quite reasonably priced.
Yet to find out how terrible the keyboard is, but the display looks like it's going to be sweet.
Not really. Bad news for the poor ordinary folks who will now have to watch their finances for pretty well "for ever' (I bet the data thieves know to wait until the free enhanced monitoring expires), but basically no effect on lucrative future contracts.
Cloud. That's what kills the consulting/support market. Everybody's stuff is on the cloud now, so, given the requirement for a robust, backed-up database service, do you pay a bunch of consultants to set you up a HA mariadb cluster, with a backup scheme, or just pay AWS/Azure for their offering. The cloud providers famously grab all the open-source they can and re-sell it as a service, with no payback to the authors.
Even more moons ago. We have VT220 terminals on our desks. Whilst colleague (who had it coming, believe me) was away we pulled the case of his off, and reversed the polarity of all of the scan coils to the CRT. Result - upside down display. We then placed the monitor upside down on his desk. He comes back, sees the monitor,puts it right way up, goes "ha-ha", and switches on. To be greeted by the login prompt in the bottom right corner. Delicious.
An announcement that was not followed by "so we have redeployed all of the workloads to europe-west9-q (a bunch of containers in a car-park} so that service is maintained". Odd that. Almost as if they don't have to give a s**t.
ISPs do charge for internet access. I have a bill here. The problem is that the ISPs business model is based on there being nothing to do with said bandwidth. Well, now there is, and the amount of data has exploded. If the ISP cares to renegotiate their peering charges, that's up to them, but the fact that there are now businesses selling content over the internet is simply the new reality, not some kind of crime.
Yes, it would be good if as well as reputational damage, it could be expanded to "stress caused by knowing that at any point, you could be scammed out of your life savings". If that was worth, say, a few grand per person, cases where millions of people are affected would indeed bring down the company responsible (TalkTalk, for example). Once that is a possibility, shareholders will start asking hard questions - which was the point of GDPR in the first place.
Python now does have typing! Mypy will do code inspection based on type decorations in your code. Done properly, it makes it much easier to catch misuse of dynamic typing.
It forces you to say "ok,l this parameter can be anything, what kind of everything do I mean" so that all of the callers are checked. And also, if you have handling a variety of types, to pull you up on "but *this* type doesn't implement 'foo'!".
Having said that, "doing it right" can be a right mare. I both hate its baroqueness and "don't-you-have-a-CS-degree"-ness (the definitions required for generics and polymorphism can get mind-bending), but love the way that code ends up with far fewer hard-to-find bugs, particularly when refactoring.
OpenAI have slurped *everything*. With no regard as to copyright, with the old "if it's on the web, it's public" nostrum. Books, code, news articles, everything. It has been copied and "stored in an electronic retrieval system", to quote the notice in the front pages of many books. And then published, if you can get ChatGPT to regurgitate great chunks of it.
So why haven't they been sued into a smoking hole in the ground?
A bunch of engineers at Microchip got fed up with the lack of impetus to improve the venerable and inefficient 4-clock-per-instruction PIC architecture, and went off to found Scenix. The SX-series where pipelined 1-clock per instruction devices that went (for the time) blazingly fast (up to 75MHz), that, whilst sharing no hardware elements, nonetheless used the same instruction set. I seem to remember that Microchip got very sniffy about it, and the line didn't last long. I still have a few, with the sx-key, in a box.
Not a secure solution. Ok, with 100% testing, and fuzzing, and wotnot, the debug build will trigger an error on a vulnerability. But with always-on checking (for free with Rust) means that even an imperfectly-tested app will quit at runtime, instead of allowing data leakage or arbitrary code execution. Denial-of-service, but not compromise.
C has had valgrind and friends for ages, to perform these checks. Heck, I wrote a horror that overrode malloc() and new() in the late 90's that used the Windows allocator (originally PharLap286/386 on DOS) to detect array overruns and use-after-free.
"Especially reputable internet publishers who have an in-house team that polices the ads shown, cough, splutter."
I don't run an ad-blocker. I run Privacy Badger. Which blocks sites that implement tracking, despite being sent a "do-not-track" header. Which mysteriously nukes 99% of ads on this site. There was a time a bit ago, where the occasional advert appeared - presumably because it was not trying to track me.
You need to police your advertisers to stop them attempting to steal information from the site users - plainly they are trying to find out (without asking you) where else the typical Commentard goes on the internet. Not cool.
Still no subscription option?
"And this, boys and girls, is why open source exists.", and why, inch by inch, "open Source" will get edged out of the business arena by legal risk, copyright, patents, interoperability, censorship, liability, anything that the Big Corps can lobby for, until once again, they get to charge what they like for what they like, with no pesky competition.
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