Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"This is a problem of design, or rather, a lack of design thinking with respect to the security and privacy of the individual."
The real problem here isn't the design. That's simply meeting the requirement. The problem is the individual users who choose to make public so many details of their lives and the requirement is to fulfil that choice. Or maybe the problem is the vendors who sell them on the idea.
"Maybe knowing which companies are subcontracted to work at These places could be useful (but even that seems a bit of a stretch). But knowing who has Access."
The thought does occur to me that, just possibly, access, in this context, might mean companies subcontracted to work there and in particular, outsourcers. Wouldn't that be a more practical interpretation as well as being essential to the plan of holding those with control responsible for security?
"Reproduction is not copying yourself."
What's this self that you'd be copying? Yourself today may look very much like yourself of yesterday or even of a few moments ago. But yourself is a dynamic object.
However still you may try to stay your heart pumps, blood circulates, sugars are broken down into simpler organic acids, oxidised, electrons pumped, adenosine phosphorylated, transported and dephosphorylated, your ribs and diaphragm move to pump air in and out of your lungs and that's only the basic respiration providing energy to the rest.
Over the slightly longer term hair grows slightly from day to day and gets lost :( skin grows and flakes of it are also lost. Internally cells die and their remnants scavenged to form new cells. Food is taken in, digested, used and waste excreted.
Germane to this thread, pulses pass through the nervous system.
You're not a static object that can be copied. Come to that, neither is something as apparently simple as a glass of water - an ice cube, maybe and the glass but a mass of fluid, no.
Nevertheless, living organisms have been reproducing new instances of these complex arrangements for a very long time now. We may not be able to characterise such chaotic entities in complete detail but, like every other species, we can reproduce without the need to of such characterisation.
" based on the contents of their commentary, never make programming blunders, are expert at all kinds of programming, and have a flawless knowledge of business execution as well."
On the contrary, we're well acquainted with what can go wrong. That's why at least some of us hope not to ever find our lives entrusted to autonomous road vehicles.
"There is such a thing as test-driven development, where you write a test, before you even write any code to make the program pass this test. And of course, all of these tests stay in the program, so that every time you make a change in the program, then you run these tests again to make sure that you haven't broken anything that was working before."
It's a solution to Brooks' definition problem: is the product defined by the document or an actual example? It can be defined by the tests instead. Brooks' example which posed the problem was the first shipped model of the 360 which left undocumented data in registers after an operation, developers started writing code that used that data so that future models had to behave in the same way; that wasn't intended. If the tests define the product then what the test says happens has to happen but anything the test doesn't cover has to be taken as undefined.
Which brings us to the problem of test-driven development for critical stuff: how do you know the set of tests is complete and correct?
"Shame they didn't learn that lesson and just started stuffing Firefox with unnecessary features instead."
You mean the product that became Seamonkey. That's my preferred option - all the bits I want in one box. I just keep Firefox around for the occasional job when I need a site that doesn't work with everything firmly bolted down in the way I have Seamonkey set up. And there are very few that pass the "need" threshold.
<e."It would have taken me about 30 seconds to figure out how to get big discounts on stuff from that store. Print my own bar-code labels!"
Which is exactly what happened and resulted in a number of prosecutions for fraud.</em>
I can vaguely remember, back in the days when price labels were human readable and the checkout operator had to key them in, being presented with a case of alleged attempted fraud. IIRC it was alleged a store detective had observed a customer trying to pick the top label off a can with multiple labels, presumably on the basis that the price had been marked up and the first label would have been cheaper. Carefully peeling off the top label I found the original price was higher. I never got called to court on that one.
"you normally no longer look inside the component."
But as you then go on to say it might be a good idea to check. It's the job of QA to keep a tight reign on the quality of components being used. It can't be an easy job if your company doesn't assemble the final product nor, I suppose do Apple route all supplies to the assemblers via themselves. The umpteen things that can go wrong in such a situation mean that they really need to put the effort into managing their supply chain.
"I suspect the batteries may come from an outfit that delivered good batteries when they were asked to supply a small number for development and QA, but immediately started cutting corners once they had the big order in."
You may well be right but wasn't Tim Cook supposed to have been a supply chain specialist before he was elevated? This is the sort of thing such a specialist should be in control of.
"I sometimes wonder if a really secure system will appear, written from the ground up"
From the ground up would be essential. Then there's the question of putting convenience secondary to security. It would be a hard sell without a few major disasters to existing OSs to help it on its way. It would also be a good idea to think in terms of a pair of complementary systems for client and server functions so that neither carries unwanted baggage from the other.
From Wikipedia:"Julie Larson-Green (born 1962) is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) of the Office Experience Organization at Microsoft,[1] where she has worked since 1993."
"Experience" is one of those warning words. Finding it twice in the same, introductory sentence simply underwrites just how bad things she can make things.
Having said that I've recently been looking at KDE 5. It's almost as bad with endless widget styles with the same flat button look and themes with squiggles for icons. With any look the nadir may be reached if someone introduces a Big Jules theme leaving all the buttons and icons blank* and then things can start improving.
*PCLinuxOS has almost achieved this, the default window buttons are simply coloured spots which only display an icon on mouse-over.
"Upgrades are not always improvements."
Quite so. That's a good reason to stick with LTS systems as far as possible. It reduces the number of occasions you have to spend time chasing after someone's failure to maintain backwards compatibility. Bleeding edge distros are fine if you want to play with them. If you want to get stuff done use an LTS for as long as possible.
"This gets really, really bad when you consider that a lot of distros keep the kernel version stable and just backport security fixes."
If I use version N of the kernel because it supports my hardware and has the features I need why would I want more than security update providing those come at regular intervals? I'm old enough to remember that upgrades all to often means breakage and have no intention of having to keep fixing things because someone somewhere couldn't be arsed to pay attention to backward compatibility. That's why I like Long Term Support versions.
So here's Debian 7, not at LTS (staying pre-systemd) and the current version is Debian 9 (equivalent to 10 in Microsoft numbering ;). What's the kernel number and what's the date the last version arrived? 3.2 and just over 2 weeks ago on 20th of September.
"They have over 2 decades worth of experiences of dodging that one. That's why they have these exabyte-sized conditions you have to agree to."
Whether these EULAs are worth the paper they're not written on depends on your jurisdiction and status (consumer vs professional).
Try to remember, this Khosla dude will be just as upset at a lone jogger on "his" beach at sunset as he would a major twelve-dozen keg barn burner with The Who's sound system cranking multi-genre, multi-decade rock&roll for three days
Not saying you're wrong but it sounds like a statement that could be tested.
