Posts by Doctor Syntax 40470 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"An ISP bricking a device is not unheard of and is likely much more common than we know."
Mine partially bricked their router for me by disabling the administrative login from the LAN side. As I had allocated pert of the DNS range for fixed IP/MAC mapping I discovered that the hard way - I couldn't revise or extend it for replaced devices.
Replaced it because, apart from anything else, leaving an admin port open exposed it those even less trustworthy then the ISP who did this.
We also write in C or C++ instead of assembler, let alone machine code.
The entire art and science of programming is to present the requirement in as high a level way as possible. Indeed, that's been the way since assembler replaced writing binary by hand and binary replaced plug-boards and the like. The computer is very good at doing all that parsing and translating. Composing your logically structured object directly would be much harder and more error prone than letting the engine parse your SQL for you.
A dial-in modem would have obviated the need for a visit. Your problem probably wasn't an absolute running out of space as a long transaction that ate the available log allowance.
By logging the dial-in port I discovered that what they did was upload the source for a program that did that, compiled it on the local box and ran it. I suppose your magical floppy might have had the source or possibly a executable. I believe that was eventually fixed by enabling the system to add its own emergency temporary log, probably because nobody liked allowing remote access any more.
Informix, originally Marathon, was there in the early days alongside Oracle. In fact I heard of it and used it well before I heard of Oracle. You may guess at some of the ways in which Oracle came to dominance although it has to be said that Informix also made some pretty silly errors in buying up other businesses which didn't fit and presumably took money and management attention away from the main product.
Marathon was a relational wrapper around C-ISAM access (pairs of data files and B-tree index files) with the choice of access via a C library and command-line tools very much oriented to teletype including the report generator ACE plus, IIRC, a rudimentary TUI program called, IIRC, Informer. With the change of name from Marathon to Informix (could have been worse!) there was a TUI replacement for the main query tool and the original Informer replaced with a much better product, Perform. Perform providing some high-level programmability and a good deal more with the ability to enhance the run-time interpreter with C functions callable from the higher level Perform code.
Informix 2 introduced SQL, the ESQLC pre-processor to embed SQL into C and 4GL. 4GL was vaguely like structured BASIC with embedded SQL and event-driven menu handling which compiled down into ESQLC. 4GL programs could replace ACE or Perform. The consequence was that for a considerable period the combination of SCO and Informix was the backbone of many small businesses and the likes of HP-UX, AIX or Solaris and Informix ran larger businesses. They also supported the development of packaged applications.
In the end they lost out to Oracle and were bought up by IBM, probably because IBM wanted some aspects of their technology. If they hadn't fumbled as few times would they have remained competitive? Would we have seen all these Birmingham type situations? Who knows. It would have been a different and perhaps better alternative reality. As it was it supported me for most of the second half of my working life.
The other thing about human vision is the ability to place the identified objects in 3-dimensional space and compute their trajectories, primarily relative to oneself. I suppose we have to thank a long evolutionary history of hunting, being hunted and swinging through treetops for helping us to drive and, of course, play cricket.
I'm lucky in that my telephone lines pre-date that stuff. However the 3-phas in the road must have been an aluminium era replacement. Not the main conductors, just the sheaf which carries neutral. The failures are getting more recent. A few have affected the entire cable, the rest just individual households' connections.
The latest, a couple of weeks ago was fun. A more recent gas main replacement had been laid over the top of the cable. In places the road is built up over solid rock and nobody wants to dig it up. The replaced gas main had been fun too. Contrary to all the records it turned out that the original had been brought across what had been fields from a parallel road. Because nobody knew it was there it had acquired someone's conservatory built over it. GIS is great but only when it's correct.
I'd hope their employers don't expect them to sign on with their private email addresses as IDs which is what is likely to be harvested along with the password. Also require a minimum password complexity greater than what they'd use elsewhere.
Also an easily guessed users ID such as initial and name is not good for more than one reason http://www.bloodwolf.org/~rulnak/jdr/jokes/Dilbert/Dilbert_pictures/dilbert_BrendaUtthead.gif
One biological system well known to be sensitive to gravity is plant growth. A very old experimental trick is to grow the subject in a horizontal pot being slowly rotated around its axis. If the mechanics of tissue culture can be suitably handled I'd have thought this could e used far more cheaply and conveniently than in space. But then I suppose "on the ISS" or "in Earth orbit" in the title gets a paper more attention.
" It hopes to avoid a crackdown by getting lawmakers, policy wonks, and officials to understand what the community sees as the subtle difference between open source and an open specification."
Good luck with that. The people they're trying to persuade are either identical wit or from the same batch as those who think an encryption scheme can be back-doored so the good guys and only the good guys can intercept it. Some of them may think that mathematicians have made an error by not having π equal to 3.
One possibility is that when a search result is clicked and the user then clicks on links within it these, otherwise invisible clicks, would be reported back to base to boost the relevance of these links. For someone using it for research that could be a useful thing. However, given that it could be following a user making purchases, linking to their bank or whatever this is not necessarily reassuring.
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