Posts by Doctor Syntax 40484 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain."
Not so funny if you were already an adult and were paying for it.
The engineering involved a great deal of precision. It had to do to ensure it lasted exactly long enough to get to the other side of the factory gate.
"except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services."
Your ISP is even more basic of course.
But I download all email. I might then delete it (the deleted folder is set up to really delete stuff after 6 months) but otherwise it's cheaper than having extensive storage on the paid for service and safer than a free service.
"The consumer doesn't see it that way at all. "
And sooner or later one of the consumers who doesn't see it that way is going to get mad and take it to a small claims court to get their money back - and win. What happens then?
The new CFO is going to be in for a shock. Once other consumers get wind and start emulating that, then the original sales income starts bleeding away. There's no point in sending a fancy lawyer to defend each claim; it will cost more than the claim and, given the nature of the small claims route, they can't recoup the costs even if they win so it just bleeds money faster. If it was a class action they could afford to get the lawyers involved and limit the losses. It might be cheaper to back pedal and resume support or just liquidate the company.
"Sometimes I even get the feeling that the articles themselves have more purpose in seeding these discussions than anything else."
This one seems to have been very sparsely seeded. How did they get from looking for a connector to discovering the typewriter and then the rest of the furnishings were hot?
"I'll just pick on the poorly-chosen example and ignore the significant points."
Whoooosh!
edakka saw the point even if you didn't. The print-out might not be for the user who generates it, it might be for someone else in a different place. They don't want to walk 2000 miles over here to pick it up.
Fair enough, the use case might be a picking list to be sent to the warehouse printer but it might still be 10 miles away. Even if it's just next door they don't want to walk over to collect it.
The job TCP was designed to do, has done and continues to do is to provide what looks like a reliable connection over a wide-area network which was not necessarily reliable and just fired packets around which is not a connection-oriented thing. There was always UDP as an alternative, relying on higher level protocols to fix up the reliability bit if it was needed.
In an environment where the connectivity can be taken for granted TCP isn't necessary so they could have been using UDP anyway although I doubt that that's what he's suggesting.
We use TCP/IP on our LANs because it's there and easier than having to worry about whether your printer is local rather than in head office 2000 miles away. It's worth remembering that your LAN's TCP packet, inside which your data sits, itself sits inside an IP packet which is designed to be routed over a WAN even though it's delivered locally inside and that sits inside an Ethernet packet. If this is using point-to-point fibre it won't need the IP packet or the Ethernet packet.
Before that there were other networking protocols for local networks so in a sense it goes back to those days.
Having a Linux kernel there may be convenient to those instances providing additional Android or Debian addons. But from the PoV of the basic architecture is it any more than a shim that could be replaced by something else such as FreeDOS if it suited Google? Although much is said about Microsoft wanting to take Windows users into their cloud a Windows PC is still very much more obviously a Windows box than a Chromebook is a Linux box.
"as is suggested by the strong sales of Chromebooks in recent years"
I'm not sure this isuggests anything. AFAIK ChromeOS is basically a browser with whatever minimum support (Gentoo, last I heard) is neededt. That it happens to be Linux is purely convenience. If they could run Chrome on bare metal that would be good enough.
As to the rest of the ideas multiplying like fleas on a dog's back they seem to be variously ways to run as many individual services on one server as possible (in some cases bizarrely passing them of as serverless) or somebody's solution in search of a problem. They're all trying to become the Next Big Thing. As running S/W on other people's computers has become a huge market there's scope for monetizing the NBT if you can score it and there, I think, we can see the reason for it all.
I doubt the money-grubbing is going to improve things for those of us who just want a decent desk/laptop system.
"But I’m sure some politicians will do well out of the deal"
They already got what they wanted out of it.
Having been embarrassed by being shut out of EU space ventures as a perfectly foreseeable but surprisingly unforeseen consequence of Brexit they now had an announcement as to how they obviously didn't need to be in the EU for a space venture (by spending a few hundred million of taxpayers' cash).
Selling out to Eutelset isn't quite consistent with that. Keeping One Web HQ in London (at least for the time being, of course) has saved some face and the egg on it will go largely unnoticed in the current political upheavals.
"those in the know credit him and Alistair Darling for an amazing response to the Global Financial Crisis."
Responding is one thing. Having been a component is another.
Consider this:
Policy: tie interest rates to a measure of inflation.
Make the measure one which excludes the cost of housing.
Outsourcing of manufacturing to China lowers inflation.
Low interest rates lead to lots of cheap loans.
Cheap loans raise demand in housing market.
House building doesn't keep up so prices rise.
People living in houses whose value has gone up take out more cheap loads are taken out against the increased value just because they can.
Politicians: "Nothing to do with us, banks set interest rates & make loans. Never mind the interest rates, just look at the low inflation (excluding house prices)."
Meanwhile outsourcing leads to people losing their jobs.
People who lose their jobs can't service the loans they took out irrespective of how cheap they were.
?
Even as a non-economist bystander I could see this wasn't going to end well. How on Earth could anyone who adopted this policy in the first place be reckoned as anything short of a disaster. Admittedly he wasn't the only one who did so but he was one who did so and in an influential economy.
And look at the collateral damage: interest rates influence the value of pension funds. Pension schemes developed black holes, The black holes affected the share values of the companies that ended up diverting revenue to plugging them. Share values affect the valuations of pension funds invested in them so everyone's repairs widened everyone else's black hole. Just to make things worse the feedback loop had been given an additional kick downhill by removing pension funds' tax allowance on dividends. Final salary schemes became history. Pension funds are still trying to plug their black holes.
But he could bask in the reputation of presiding over a period of low inflation.
Given the hoo-hah about the great UK venture into satellite comms that was announced when HMG bought into OneWeb I doubt there'll be any great bragging about this one. At most it'll be passed off as a merger which is the Beeb version although it looks more like a takeover by Eutelsat. It's probably the best they could have hoped for.
"Was any of that proven in court?"
The sentence before the one quoted starts with "It was alleged in evidence". In that case it seems likely that the allegation of theft was given as a sworn statement. In the absence of anything to the contrary I think this needs to be accepted as proven, especially in the view of the outcome.
This page lists media from LO under CC0: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Category:Content_licensed_under_CC0
It's not a clear statement that there are no other files under that licence but there but it seems that devs are encouraged to use CC0 for media so it's not surprising that so many CC0 files are found.
"All patents are a terrible idea"
Not necessarily. In theory, at least, it protects an inventor with a genuinely original idea from cheap knock-offs.
The problem with S/W patents is an over-ready willingness to see something as non-obvious to someone skilled in the art. Programming is so often a case of the developer being asked to write something for a particular situation and just rolling out what seems obvious. If the solution is novel because the situation was novel then there's no difference between that outcome and yet another order-processing scheme. The experiments which led up to the ideas around software patterns should have underlined that - given a problem developers will tend to solve it in similar ways.
What should be required is evidence that the problem has been looked at in the past with no previous solution. Something such as published papers in the literature as evidence of that (and not a series of straw men published by a team who suddenly pull their rabbit out of the hat). An example of that would be hypertext. It had been proposed and discussed with no practical solution before TBL. By such stricter standards that might have been a suitable development for a S/W patent. And what is really the killer blow for patents is that it became a success not because it was patented but because it wasn't and was actually released untrammelled by patents and with open source code for both client and server.
I'd guess some or maybe many were licenced as CC0 in good faith in the belief that it was the least encumbered licence available. The first step should be for the Document Foundation (LibreOffice) and distros to ask those authors who can be traced to relicense or add a patent waiver. That should identify the scale of remediation needed.
Given the number in LO perhaps el Reg could ask the Document Foundation for their comments and report back.
Perhaps the condition of release for such criminals should be that for the next 20 years they always introduce themselves with the words "I am a convicted fraudster and you should not trust me with your money.".
Even then they'd probably get some takers but at least they couldn't say they hadn't been warned.
If I get spam from someone I've dealt with previously, check its route & find it came from Mailchimp* and complain that PII has been passed on to a third party without my permission the response is usually mystification. They don't even realise that that's what they did.
* Other "trusted third parties" are available.
"It's fairly easy to get a telescope tube in space to radiate down to a pretty cold temperature - enough that it has no background at JWSTwavelengths"
Only if you shelter it from the sun. That would very likely require a larger shield, requiring larger supports, more mechanish to fold out. Both tube and larger suhshield means more volume. More volume means a bigger nose cone. Still more mass. More fuel to get them into orbit. More mass yet.
"Webb gets around Hubble's primary limitation of having a limited observational wavelength [by] It doesn't lock its mirror in a tube"
I'd have thought that it was more a case of being a big lump to get into space as it is without the added complication of a tube. Even more significantly the tube itself would have to be protected from solar heating, otherwise its IR radiation would dazzle the instruments.
The Infrastructure and Projects Authority hasn't really grasped that big projects are things for ministers to announce, not for anyone to do. Productivity in government terms is about inputs (projects announced, taxpayers' money spent, bums on seats*) rather then outputs such as projects completed, results achieved or work done.
* Hence Moggy's mewing about not being able to see Civil Servants at their desks when they're working from home.
"Cariad has to be much faster to deploy basically on a weekly basis"
As opposed to when it's ready, fully tested and good to go?
How about concentrating on the basics what makes it go and what makes it stop without all the fiddly bits that should be the driver's concern but end up as distractions?
On tin but clearly not original tin.
One thing that surprised me - and himself - in his account was that he spent 5 hours remotely rebuilding his rescue system, an ancient 2Gb USB device. I think I'd have just built a new one, posted it off to the colo and asked them to plug it in. (OTOH would I be happy with a colo that just plugged in a USB drive they were sent?)
Contractual matters are subject to civil law. Unless it constitutes fraud it won't come under criminal law at all. But if the contract doesn't allow it then it would appear to ba a breach of contract and the client should decide how to deal with it. Letting it slide might be one way. Not a good way unless "good" includes covering the our-sourcing protagonist's blushes.
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