Posts by Doctor Syntax 40413 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The busines reason for using Andriod and Google's services is the business reason for shipping PC's with Microsoft Windows."
True, but the reason is that this is what customers have been trained to expect by the efforts of large, dominant corporations imposing their will on the H/W suppliers. The customers are so well trained thet you hear squeals of horror from some of them any time you suggest the alternatives.
I can't help visualising HP's management over the past many years as being like a group of children who've wandered into a control romm full of switches and buttons which they don't understand going "I wonder what happens if we press this".
Alternatively it may be a consequence of the fact that, as most of us know, the reliability of an HP product is proportional to its age so they're trying everything they can to make it difficult to drive the older stuff because that's the only way they'll force us to replace it.
A very quick fix would be to make the legal costs for an invalidated patent recoverable from the USPTO. With a good case the defendant would know their costs would be covered, the plaintiffs would be aware that the cases would be fully defended, there would be far fewer patents granted and the USPTO would have a great incentive to go through the back catalogues, checking each one even if it meant handing back fees. In the meantime the USPTO would probably keep popping up with amicus curiae briefs to stop the expense getting out of hand.
It's not the effort or even lack thereof. It's the niggling worry of what will be broken when it comes up again.
In my case it was the upgraded release refusing to recognise the camera when I plugged it in. It might have been fine with a thousand other camera models but I only had one and it didn't work. Subsequently I read something that suggested it was just a type in a config file. By that time I was long gone, put off, ultimately, not just by the minor typo that should never have been there (the file was working, don't fix it) but also by the process that allowed it to happen undetected.
For all I know Fedora may be have a far more rigorous release process now but I've no great reason to go there (do they even have a systemd-free version?) so I'm never going to find out.
"I was in a supermarket earlier and was stuck six feet away from a dozy old unmasked couple picking up and putting down dozens of ready meals in front of the product I was after. Then an other old dozy unmasked mare shoved her trolley between us and did the same thing. I just left. Most supermarkets have a special hour for NHS workers and old folk when I am barred. I'd like an hour when NHS workers and old folk when are barred."
Rather than the casual ageism (& what do you have against NHS staff) perhaps your ire should go the supermarket for not requiring better behaviour.
Actually the original article didn't do that at all: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-54586897
I don't know when the official announcement was mad but by the time the Beeb had their article written (they'd have to spend time getting reactions) it went live about half-past 10 on Saturday evening, well in time to get buried under later stuff by Sunday morning.
Note also that the later article is about the App. The original article deals with sharing data from the test and trace system. The difference being that the App doesn't collect personal data so Dido hasn't got anything to share.
It's a difficult position for T&T given that there is widespread avoidance. However making it a police matter, at least in the first instance, is not the way to go about it, neither is sharing data.
Part of the problem is that T&T for Covid-19 is a centralised operation whilst in the past such operations have been done locally. A local operation could have its own staff going round to check in the first place and only calling on the police if they didn't have the powers to enforce. As it is, the best they can do is to try ringing the contact to see if there's no response in the case of a landline or trying to make some judgement from background sound if it's a mobile.
Another part is that all this depends on a system which determines whether the subject might be infected; I haven;t seen any figures for it but wouldn't be surprised it it were quite low. It's not to be wondered at if members of the public are reluctant to self-isolate on a possibility and even less so if some of them are getting the message several times. Nor is it to be wondered at if the police themselves are unhappy as the Beeb article suggests. A test, trace and test approach would be better.
I suspect there might not be a problem sharing data from border records. It was reported that Burnley had a substantial spike resulting from someone returning from holiday and, instead of self-isolating, going on a pub crawl.
Copyright exists automatically. You don't have to do anything.
That's something that's caught out the unwary by posting something on github or wherever without a licence. They think they're making it public domain by doing that. In fact they're making it unusable because there's no legal way to copy it.
A very quick search reveals that Ace Books used a loophole in US copyright law.
I wonder how many commentards have read the Apache licence. As far as I can make out from it, unlike the early BSD permissive licences, there's no requirement to to credit the author(s) but there is a term against applying their trademarks. That might be seen as an inhibiting crediting authors.
I might have misread it, of course, so I'm open to correction.
Instead of complaining nobody will do it for you commission someone to provide software to do this. It must, of course, stand up to expert infosec inspection to ensure it actually does keep out miscreants, including ensuring that collected data can't get leaked or misused.
When you've cracked that you can go ahead and get it used.
If that was the idea it's taken a long time for them to get round to it. It was a good while ago so I might have retained the wrong impression but AFAICR there was a lot of who-ha about Oracle not doing much with it, alienated devs and the like so the release under the Apache licence was made so that it could be forked which enabled the dissatisfied devs to do that. If that's a reasonable summary then I think it ill-behoves them to complain about the continuing existence of something that was set up for their benefit.
Stealing is taking with intent to deprive the owner of it and without the owner's permission. Basing a commercial product on a permissive licensed one in no way deprives the world of the original version. I don't know about current windows but earlier versions used, and, in keeping with the licence, acknowledged they used, the BSD networking stack. That in no way prevented the same stack being used in other OSs.
If someone contributes to a permissive project they presumably do that in full knowledge of the possibility of someone basing a commercial product with it so the commercial product has the contributors' consent. The commercial product might be feeding back changes to the product. It might even fund the entire product.
On neither basis can the accusation of stealing stick. The only difference is that the permissive project can be shared in binary without any obligation to provide source code. Even then there's only a real difference if the commercial version has made changes that aren't fed back. And what's at issue here is one project forking a permissive project and making changes that can't be fed back due to the difference in licensing terms. If you want to consider a commercial closed version as stealing from the original project then you must surely apply the same label to the fork under the more restrictive licence.
From the PoV of the original project it's just sharing, as the licence facilitates but don't you think it just a little ill-mannered, to put it no stronger, to take the freely shared code from an original project, ensure that your changes can't be shared back and then claim some sort of moral high ground over the project from which you've taken it?
As I remember it the plan for Leave was to let Cameron deal with it because he'd foolishly said he would. Having discovered that the result actually was Leave he did the sensible thing and bailed. That left Leave scouring the woods for unicorns. Come January we'll discover whether they found any.
"until you have Irish citizenship you are still a Brit as far as the eu is concerned."
No problem for my children (born NI), my grandchildren (mother born in Ireland) and any great grandchildren (grandmother born in NI), my sister-in-law (as per my wife) and her husband (Irish mother) and at least some have their passports to prove it. It's just me who doesn't qualify.
"Actually, there's quite a good record of third-party applications picking up data provided by Network Rail"
It will necessarily need some sort of hole in the systems perimeter to get access to the API and there's a good - or bad - record of miscreants taking advantage of any possible weakness. Those holes had better be well defended.
"Force them to incorperate in each nation, then force them to declare how much money they trade and how much profit they make and tax them accordingly (with the stick in the background of a tax per trade system if they try any shifty IP purchasing stuff to try and reduce local profit)"
The present system makes it possible for a country with what might be called a natural economy to attract in a few big multinationals with low tax rates which also give local companies the same advantage. As long as the IP stuff is possible that can be used to shift the profit to such countries whether they incorporate in each country or not.
Countries trying to do impose trading taxes will simply get bullied by the US with sanctions, at least as long at the current incumbent's there. Getting multiple countries to work together would be a problem as the smaller ones trading on this would raise objections as might HMG as a means of trying curry favours from the US.
In addition trying to devise a system to hit the FAANGS wouldn't be easy - at the very least it would probably generate more hoops for Real Businesses to jump through to escape it whilst trying to handle their imports and exports. From the UK's PoV we're just about to discover how much of that sort of red tape will affect our businesses once our existing EU arrangements end; the last thing they need will be more of the same.
From item 6 of the summary in the report: "Since we last reported, the Superfast Programme has moved increasingly to gigabit-capable full-fibre solutions in
place of copper telephone wires from premises to a local cabinet."
So they've switching from an approach where the individual premises connections are handled by existing infrastructure to one where the existing infrastructure has to be replaced. Is it surprising that things have slowed?
For the more widely scattered farms it may well be that a direct fibre connection is the only effective one and if the sites suitable for FTTC have all been supplied this is reasonable and inevitable but I do wonder if this is a matter of selecting those who already have a good service and replacing it with better whilst those without hang on for longer and longer.
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