Posts by Doctor Syntax 42407 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Because it can deliver quicker, cheaper and easier than slogging over to a shop that might not have it and will be more expensive. "
Two out of three ain't bad. It might be cheaper and, if they don't mess up delivery, easier but quicker, when you need it now might well be slogging over to a shop. RIP Maplin shops; still, CCL's within driving distance for me.
"There I was thinking that the current Government were promising investment in the North of England"
Investment needs money. Where's that going to come from? I know, the taxes from those businesses, including manufacturing plants (largely in the Midlands and north of England) located in the UK because .. the UK ...provided .... foreign investors ..... with .... an EU base ......oh dear.
"A common reason is that developers trying out some new ideas hardcode credentials into applications and then publish the code without thinking through the implications."
Even if these are new ideas being tried out if that's the mindset of the developers it doesn't inspire much confidence in the security of the finished product.
"The richest companies in the world are the tech giants - Apple, Google, Microsoft itself - all borne aloft ultimately on open hardware, open software and most critically, open networking."
And Oracle itself. That's the biggest irony of all. Actually the best way of tackling this would be for everyone who has an API Oracle might be using to serve writs to that effect a couple of days before it goes to court.
"The fact that he was one of the large team at Bletchley Park would not have been well known of course, but that wasn't his major achievement."
His role at Bletchley Park is the one which is better understood outside of the computing community. I suspect if you ask the general public what a Turing Machine is they'd most likely describe an Enigma Machine.
As just about every website with basic anti-adblocker capacity is so keen on reminding us, "these sites rely on adverts to remain free for users".
But not relevant to the topic which is MS putting advert in an application which is part of the OS that has been paid for directly or indirectly as part of the purchase price of the PC.
Then you've got to factor in the interest and repayments on the borrowed capital and all the fees from the vultures advisors who'll flock to the kill. The resulting zombie will stagger on under the debt burden until somebody else comes along with another leveraged buyout adding more debt until it goes the same way as Maplin.
Be prepared to write "design defence" documentation to defend your decisions
Or perhaps start out by having at least an initial plan, what's in scope, what you envisage the structure to be, the rationale behind this and document that. The document can evolve. Anyone who wants to change scope etc gets invited to explain how and why they think this could/should happen.
"At what point does a member of staff with valid network credentials become known as a hacker?"
When he accesses something he's not entitled to or,as the story puts it, commits an offence under section 1(1) of the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
It looks as if Royal Stoke Hospital might have got ahead of the curve with single sign-on.
"companies in the UK want to do business with the EU"
Who cares what companies think? "We" voted to leave. The fact that we (without the quotes) will depend on a functioning UK economy is neither here nor there although it might turn out to be a surprise to "us" when that's discovered.
Just in case - ths GPIB isn't the GPIB sitting on Raspberry Pi boards.
The Commodore interface bus was GPIB or sort of but with a much - umm - simpler connector. I have vague recollections of playing about with a piece of kit which had been built to use the Commodore version and discovering that it wasn't just the connector that had been simplified but also the functionality.
Of course. Provided they provide their own code to reimplement the S/W that goes behind it if that's proprietary. They'd also be selling would be the CPU cycles, storage and connectivity. If it's FOSS then the CPU, storage & connectivity is all they're selling.
"The copyright ship has sailed."
Yup. Right into the Supreme Court. And that can turn it round and sail it right back. That's how appeals to a higher court work.
The fact that huge swathes of Google's competitors in the software industry are presenting amicus briefs in support of Google should tell you something about how dangerous they think the Appeal Court decisions were.
2To clean up that mess, you'd have to amend the copyright law in order to define what an API is made of."
A win for Oracle would certainly leave us with a mess to be cleaned up.
Ideally it could also leave Oracle's doorstep with a queue of lawyers bearing writs: IBM wanting a word about SQL, whoever now owns Bell Labs' rights to C with a number of bits of the API of which bits of the Java API seem rather reminiscent and doubtless more.
"due to a totalitarian leftist/emotional/brainless subculture"
Whatever you may otherwise think of RMS introducing a distinct political tone into software development opened a door through which too many have crowded who had more interest in the political rather than the S/W aspects. Ironically, he eventually fell foul of them.
