Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Erm you download the software to your computer. Then it's all available even if you are unable to log-in to MS for any reason."
What did people do before there were online services? Oh, just what you said (substitute "stick a disk in the drive" for "download"). So just what has been gained by going online/to cloud?
"I would imagine that constraining the the frequencies would increase coherence"
I interpret "Stable for up to 10x the distance from Earth to Moon" as referring to the coherence length so that appears to be the case.
The irony is, of course, that a laser should be unnecessary for reading CDs & DVDs. Interference contrast ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_interference_contrast_microscopy ) microscopy resolves similar phase differences with white light.
"And just at the moment it seems that Linux security is in a bit like a mess; it doesn't seem to be a major focus of the kernel community."
While any monoculture isn't a good idea I suspect the comment about the kernel community is a misunderstanding of an attitude that all bugs are bugs so security bugs are no different to any others. But your response to this depends on whether you think some bugs don't need to be fixed.
"many developers don't have a Linux client"
If their sales office received a call from the NHS saying "We're reviewing the market, do you have a Linux client?" that might not be something they'd admit to. It might be followed up by a flurry in development involving Wine so they could put up a plausible demo.
"someone else's hacked and undocumented spaghetti code?"
Citation needed as to your assumptions.
However let's look at what might be involved. As research is so difficult I've taken the liberty of cutting and pasting this from their website:
Our customisations are as follows:
-NHSbuntu wallpaper!
-A look and feel similar to a well known desktop…
- NHSmail2 compatability
--Email, calendar, address book
--Messager, with file sharing!
- N3 VPN compatability
--RSA token supported
-Remove games packages (sorry folks, no Minesweaper!)
-Added Remmina, a Remote Desktop client for VDI (or whatever it’s called these days)
Yup, maintaining that is going to be far too much of a challenge.
"I mean, there are several distributions which could be up to this task as they stand even some which could be highly tuned (Gentoo, Arch anyone?) surely the better way forward would be to use an existing distribution and add any required packages/features as an additional repository/ppa?"
s/Gentoo, Arch/Ubuntu/ and you seem to have described what's described here.
"Clinical systems developers will simply charge more for developing systems on linux, since all they typically develop for just now is browser or Windows."
For a start those who develop for either are going to have to move on from XP only. That's unsustainable and they shouldn't have been allowed to get away with it.
Secondly, the NHS is a big customer. For many their only customer. Giving the customer a reason to review the market is a really, really bad sales strategy.
"In fact there are very few of the computers in an NHS trust that dont use software unavailable on linux , if you can unpack that string of negatives."
I think I've unpacked it correctly.
But let's make a slight change:
there are very few of the computers in an NHS trust that don't use functionality unavailable on Linux
As an example, if we discount Wine IE isn't available under Linux but other browsers are. It may well be that there are web-based applications that are tied to ancient versions of IE. That's something that has to be faced anyway, otherwise the NHS would be stuck on XP forever. When these are replaced there should be an insistence on cross-platform support so any browser can be used. The same insistence could be applied to any new web-based applications: if they're not sufficiently generic to run across multiple browsers the bid goes in the bin.
"it will become difficult to hire a different company to maintain it."
Why on earth should that happen? The source is available. The upstream, Debian>Ubuntu is already maintained. If NHSbuntu makes any more widely applicable code contributions - such as smartcard ID - they can also be passed back upstream and integrated with it. So what you'd be looking at would be a collection of userland add-ons which could be maintained separately. You (a) wouldn't need a single company to do that and (b) iit could be competitively tendered. This is a different world to what you're used to in Microsoft.
Great for delivering a most scathingly ad hominem attack on some deserving public figure (which'll get you into jail normally)?
Why wait?
The immediate thought that occurs is "how will they know you're dead?". Obvious: someone has to tell them. Next thought: "how do they know who you are?". Obvious: you have to tell them.
So set up the app with an entirely fictitious person and then report their death. All the company can do is point to an apparently dead customer. (Point of order - should this be an ex-customer?)
"They are almost certainly bugs in Windows, why wouldn't Microsoft want to buy them up and fix them ASAP. "
More to the point, why wouldn't the NSA release them to Microsoft? It's time for the rest of the world's governments to start giving US ambassadors serious grief each time their infrastructure or businesses are hit. For a start May could make it clear to Trump that his invite is cancelled and a new one will only be made once that's done.
"Regular ransomware authors must be terribly frustrated that NotPetya did damage to their reputation of 'pay and you'll get your files back'," joked Martijn Grooten
I'm not sure that was a joke. For ransomware to work victims have got to trust they'll get their files back. So, odd though it might seem, victims need to rely on crooks being honest. A few episodes like this and the entire ransomware business model is destroyed. "Frustrated" probably understates it by an order of magnitude.
However, the assumption that it wasn't intended to be ransomware without further evidence violates the principle of never attributing to maliciousness that which can be attributed to stupidity and underestimates criminals' aptitude for screwing up.
"That's a problem decent public transport can solve cheaper and better."
In this context decent public transport borders on being an oxymoron. Stop crowding all the work into cities which need 1,000 square miles or more to house their workers. Don't take people to work, return work to where people live. It means reversing a life-time's planning policy but that's because it's taking more than a lifetime for planners to work out their policies were wrong.
"Don't blame those of my generation if said government has frittered away that money."
It wasn't so much frittering away the money as spending as intended. You were paying into a Ponzi scheme just as the rest of us have done. None of the money we paid in is left over because it was spent on pensions, healthcare and other benefits as we paid it in. It's been that way for a long time.
It's not a good scheme and not easy to break out of. Grey vote aside, a generation that decides to break with it will simply grow old to find itself unsupported.
What should have happened was to start off, back when Lloyd George set up old age pensions, with a fraction of the money paid in being invested. With time that investment could have grown so that gradually the income from it could have replaced contributions. Of course that would have meant public money favouring some investment targets at the expense of others, opportunities for corruption, putting undue power in Civil Servant's hands etc. So it didn't happen and here we are.
"Increasingly, as autonomous(ish) vehicles can take public transport passengers the last mile or so, it will be private transport that fades away."
How does that work? Is public transport going to invest in fleets of autonomous vehicles that will be used for an hour or so at each end of the working day? Private owners do so because they have to. Public owners won't because it's SEP.
"Public transport is conceptually flawed, based on the weird assumption that everybody has the same requirements."
Which usually comes to the conclusion that everyone wants to commute into the centre of $city in the morning and back out at night.
This starts to fail when you have clusters of towns & cities such as Manchester, Oldham, Huddersfield, Bradford, Leeds/, Wakefield and Sheffield (plus a few others on t'wrong side of t'Pennines) or the equivalent in the Midlands & the North East. You then find that the only public transport offered is $home to $(centre you don't want to go to) to $(centre nearer where you want to go to) to $(where you want to go to) and it takes 2 hours each way with one connection involving a 40 minute wait and another just 40 seconds. It doesn't help to move house because different members of the household commute in different directions.
"time for you to do some much needed research into systemd"
Maybe it's time for you to realise that many of us have been using Unix and Unix-like systems for decades without systemd. Those systems have done sterling work for us and for those who've paid us over those years. We have not experienced any problems that systemd would have been needed to solve. We therefore see no more need to install systemd to our systems than, say, a mechanical apple-picker (unless, of course we were to work in the cider* industry in which case the apple-picker might well be of use).
In short systemd is irrelevant to us. If the word irrelevant is unfamiliar to you look it up in a dictionary. Systemd does nothing useful for us that its predecessor didn't do. And, by long experience, we know better than to install something more complex than it needs to be.
We do not argue from ignorance. We argue from experience.
*Mmmm- cider ->
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