Posts by Doctor Syntax

Relying on plain-text email is a 'barrier to entry' for kernel development, says Linux Foundation board member

Re: Plain text is king

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." also applies to women

Re: Keep stupid out

"It's always bunch of teenagers who *believe* they know everything."

Not just teenagers unfortunately.

@A/C

You'll find a shift key or two somewhere on your keyboard. Just don't overuse it.

Re: Faintly ironic

Even more ironic in that it was MS in the person of Gates who resisted the WWW until it was top big for even them to ignore.

Re: And he also couldn’t do it from Apple Mail.

"But that was then..."

Exactly. It's developers who grew up in the last 5 to 10 years who are the problem.

Re: "plain old ASCII text is a barrier to communications"

Is it that there are too many management types coming into the set-up?

Re: "they don't know how to send a plain-text email"

"The risk is that if she leaves, others may follow and soon there aren't enough people to maintain the beast."

I don't see any suggestion in the article that she's a maintainer. She's MS's representative on the Linux Foundation. Her leaving would not decrease the maintainers in any way. Neither would others in similar positions leaving.

It's possible that top-level politics is inhibiting people taking on maintainer roles.

“moving from a more text-based, email-based, or not even moving from, but having a text-based, email-based patch system that can then also be represented in a way that developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years are more familiar with."

Developers who have grown up in the last five or ten years need to become familiar with text-based email. They'll then find it a lot easier to deal with text-based source code editors and text-based compilers.

The truth is, honest people need willpower to cheat, while cheaters need it to be honest

Can we make it compulsory to use it to screen candidates for public office?

Start Me Up: 25 years ago this week, Windows 95 launched and, for a brief moment, Microsoft was almost cool

Re: One of the most important bits missing from the article...

It was another import from elsewhere. I think the copyright declarations cited UCB.

"And the biggest [Microsoft idea] was the Start"

Or, to look at it another way, it consolidated the several menu buttons of CDE and its predecessor, VUE, into one. I'd been using Windows 3 to run VisionWare's X server to run VUE for since about '91.

In fact W95 had a lot of HP ideas in it. It directly incorporated stuff from HP New Era; it was right there in the copyright declarations if you looked.

MS repackaged stuff that had been going on for some time in the Unix world - X, Motif, VUE/CDE and others. The likes of Gnome and KDE picked up on the W95 interface PDQ and continued the evolution. Because of the way the GUI is layered on top of the kernel in Unix-like OSs it's been possible for them to develop in several different directions.

The aspect of the GUI that was a real innovation to my mind was an unwelcome one.: adding the X button to close a window. Previously an application was closed from the system button, the one at the left of the title bar. Now there was a button that did that right next to the maximise button, just waiting for a misplaced click. Previously closing an application couldn't be done accidentally like that so there was less need for a confirmatory dialog box so quite a few old Windows applications didn't have one. I'm sure every W95 user must have lost work when a mis-click closed the application immediately. And it still galls me that the buttons are in the wrong order - minimise, maximise, zeroise.

'There is no way we can keep coding local': GitPod's cloud development platform released into sunlight of open source

Solution

in

search

of

problem.

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Presenteeism. The cyberwarriors sit in the office where MoD managers can keep their eye on them. Who knows what tank crews are doing out there? Playing cards & sleeping on the job most likely. An uneven contest.

This PDP-11/70 was due to predict an election outcome – but no one could predict it falling over

Re: The elevator did it

Looking back on it it seems we trusted to luck that the speaker polarities matched. I suppose the advantage of a portable would have been that you could just turn it round if they didn't.

Re: The elevator did it

Maybe it depended on your TV - Droitwich is a long way away from Herne Hill. Where I lived was about 2 - 3 miles of open air to Holme Moss which, according to my cousin-in-law who worked there, had its own MW transmitter for Third, something low powered, 20 watts sticks in my mind, with the aerial suspended from one of the guys.

Our radio was pretty ancient. Does anyone remember the trick of having the choke of the HT filter double up as a speaker magnet?

Re: Field engineers...

Nothing new under the sun.

Imaging is probably more sensitive. We were just doing spectrophotometry.

Re: Performance Upgrade

"you would normally get a new cabinet door badge as part of the upgrade though."

I remember someone discovering that the numbers on the VAX doors could be swapped around so they did the nominal upgrade themselves.

Been there although it was XBOs (xenons) that we used rather than HBOs. It was actually the spike needed to fire them up that was the problem so it was just a matter of switching them on before boting up.

Re: The elevator did it

"People nowadays have no idea how sensitive electronics used to be."

Or how electronically vicious they could be.

Back in the '50s the Beeb experimented with stereo broadcasts on Saturday mornings. One channel was broadcast over TV sound (don't bother to ask which channel - the Beeb and ITV only had one each) and the other over the Third Programme. Unless you were rich enough to have one of the new-fangled FM radios the Third was a weak signal on medium wave AM.

TVs were CRTs and the EHT was generated by a whacking big transformer driven by the sawtooth (more or less) waveform of the horizontal scan. The harmonics generated by that mess extended will into the medium wave so the sound on that channel was swamped by the howl the interference generated despite being only a couple of miles or so as the signal flies from the transmitter.

Xi Jinping again urges China to home-grow more ‘core’ tech, faster

Perhaps he should have ended by thanking Trump for his encouragement.

The Viking Snowden: Denmark spy chief 'relieved of duty' after whistleblower reveals illegal snooping on citizens

"In the Land of the Free, if he had contacted the Intelligence Oversight Committee, he would have been quietly disappeared, and his information not acted on."

In Yes Minister terms that sentence manages to combine two examples of getting rid of the difficult bit in the title.

North Korean hackers pwned cryptocurrency sysadmin with GDPR-themed LinkedIn lure, says F-Secure

Re: Really?

And they use the same PC for mail, or at least a PC on the same network, as the stuff they're administering.

Malware is a fact of life. Computers as production machines are a fact of life. Letting one get through to the other doesn't have to be.

If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn't. Bad news: It's working as intended

I wonder if the removal of add-ons is related to this https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/

I find it an alarming account of Mozilla development. At one level is could be read as the consequence of abandoning the discipline of making architectural changes with major release numbers with minor numbers for more incremental changes. On another level it's maybe a description of the corner they'd painted themselves into which forced them to abandon that.

"Rolling out an entirely new product to a large group of users is a complex process that can easily result in issues when executed too quickly."

There's the problem. Users want to be able to decide whether they want an entirely new product. They don't want it foisted, let alone forced, on then as a routine upgrade.

Mysterious metadata monster swamped Google’s blobs and crashed its cloud

When it was just disks and memory we used to call it thrashing.

I think there's a law of computing here:

When you build a more complex system by adding layers of indirection you still get the same types of failure but with Murphy also taking advantage of those layers of indirection.

IT blunder permanently erases 145,000 users' personal chats in KPMG's Microsoft Teams deployment – memo

Re: Another great Microsoft idea

OTOH if you want to make retention a feature put a safety net under it.

Re: make deletion routine

And make sure the "record" button isn't on.

Unless you need it on...

Re: What the . . . ?

"The whole point of retention policy is to delete data after X days so it can’t be recovered (even from backups)."

OTOH it's quite predictable that there would be an Oh Shit moment like this and that should have been planned for. Move the data into a holding silo. Sent the timer on that to something like an hour, just long enough to apply the emergency brake. It's the reason why your mail client has a Deleted folder and your desktop has a Wastebin or Trash.

Predictable user errors should, as far as possible, be remediable.

Now the predictable has actually happened no doubt it'll be in a release Real Soon Now.

A bridge too far: Passengers on Sydney's new ferries would get 'their heads knocked off' on upper deck, say politicos

Re: Thinking outside the box

Nah, take some water out of the river.

‘IT professionals increasingly define themselves by capabilities they excel at managing’ says Atlassian chap

Re: Recruiters still want technology experts

You're probably well out of it.

"No more downtime to install updates"

Just unscheduled downtime when the cloud provider goes down.

If I just leave that there some cloud apologist will be along to explain that despite the usual shtick about cloud taking care of resilience the punter has to arrange for multiple clouds yada yada yada to look after that.

And there goes this guy's argument that IT professionals no longer define themselves by the technology they manage. They now have to manage those aspects of cloud technology.

“But it’s increasingly more common for IT professionals to define themselves by the capabilities they excel at managing, like recruiting, marketing, finance and accounting, or sales tech.”

It sounds more like the way HR and agency pimps want to define them.

Microsoft sides with Epic over Apple developer ban, supports motion for temporary restraining order

I'm not sure I understand this. At first it looks like my enemy's enemy stuff. But then couldn't this damage Apple's market share of gamers?

Accenture scores £20m contract extension with UK pensions department: Competition? We've heard of it

Re: One wonders

What else would you expect? This is DWP.

Google says Australian pay-for-news code means it can’t quit the country

Re: Murdoch

"the supercorps all seem to believe they are above government meddling of any kind"

They certainly don't seem to think government meddling is beneath them.

TikTok takes to the courts to challenge US ban

I rather think his concern isn't that information might be going to China, rather that he can't get that information himself because it's beyond the grasp of the CLOUD Act. He'd like to find out who was responsible for messing up his Tulsa rally and charge them with party pooping.

I can't imagine either Oracle or MS doing anything but lose money if they buy it. Would either of them be capable of running something that appeals to Tik Tok's market?

FYI: Chromium's network probing accounts for about half DNS root server traffic, says APNIC

I'd have thought that by now Google should have a good handle on which servers are run by bar stewards. Minimise the probing to a level needed to keep an eye out for ones ones or changes in existing behaviour. At start-up the browser can then query Google to find out whether its resolver address can be trusted.

Re: Better Browser

If you use a browser that does not implement all the misfeatures of Chrome, you will not get the "full experience" of a growing number of websites.

That's not necessarily a bug but a feature. At the very least it enables the worst marketing departments driving the site development to self-identify.

Trucking hell: Kid leaves dad in monster debt after buying oversized vehicle on eBay

"However, if I understand correctly, the issue a lot of people commenting here seem to be missing is that the buyer didn't actually have the money to pay for the truck."

I'm sure people here do realise that. The people who don't are PayPal and eBay and it's they who are getting slagged off.

Re: Christ, what assholes

"Oh, sweet summer child. You've never had a dispute with PayPal, have you?"

This is why taking it to the court of public opinion is the better choice. It's likely to be seen by an actual human being who realises it's not good PR and something needs to be done.

Anything that improves security is a "hindrance". That's why every week, no - every day, brings news of more security breaches, businesses taken down by malware and all the rest.

Chromium devs want the browser to talk to devices, computers directly via TCP, UDP. Obviously, nothing can go wrong

"Sounds like this is going to be a problem for IoS makers."

IoS makers don't have problems

It's their products that are problems for everybody else.

Re: Yet

Poettering is probably livid that they got there before him. Not to worry, webapid will be along shortly.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

"- https://github.com/WICG/raw-sockets/issues/14 - suggesting the spec will allow connection to port 25 to send mail"

There used to be a saying that no application was mature until it included an email server.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

"This is pure, unadulterated feature creep"

Creep? Headlong gallop. To be followed, if it happens, by belated closing of stable doors.

Re: I have a bad feeling about this

"a potentially useful development for those who know what they're doing"

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Even if you think your know what you're doing.

Checks calendar. Yes, the only April involved here is April King, who's obviously no fool (thumbs up for that priceless tweet). And it's not even the first of the month.

Putting the d'oh! in Adobe: 'Years of photos' permanently wiped from iPhones, iPads by bad Lightroom app update

Re: "No excuse"

Let me reiterate: "A buggy release from a major software corporation should not need to be one of them."

Let me give you a car example: if someone drives into the car you're in they are not exonerated if you don't happen to be wearing a seatbelt.

No joke, just an excellent addition. I may use it in future.

Utes gotta be kidding me... University of Utah handed $457K to ransomware creeps

"After careful consideration, the university decided to work with its cyber insurance provider"

I hope the insurers in these cases are adjusting the claimants' future premiums to levels that will encourage them to be a bit more careful and impose conditions that, if not met, could result in claims being refused in future.