Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The W3C, unable to reach agreement on how vulnerability disclosure should be handled, responded with something less than that, offering only voluntary guidelines instead a requirement."
Presumably this means that some DRM vendors will be sensible and some will make life difficult. In due course the latter will get their reward - a reputation for being a cess-pit of malware. Sadly, past experience shows that that won't do them as much harm as one might hope.
"Back in the day when PC cases were made by Gillette."
I once had the good fortune to have a couple of PCs made by a firm who clearly hadn't got that message. The lids wrapped round to form the sides, were hinged at the back and had stays to hold them open. They were just held shut be a couple of catches - press to release and lift. All PCs should be made that way - at least those intended for IT folk and lab users.
"The bean counters wouldn't stump up for a replacement, so for the next year or so we had to make do with the backup unit which dripped continuously into a large refuse bin that had to be dragged out and emptied every few days."
Just have frequent precautionary shutdowns of any systems the beancounters rely on. After all, it's not good for the business to have no backup - which you don't if the intended backup has become the primary.
It's one thing promising perfect performance on "business as usual" activities. The problem with that is, accidents aren't business as usual. They're edge cases and that's just what software has always had trouble in handling. And these are not just simple edge cases such as off-by-one that can be tested for. They're going to be "we never saw that coming" events. They're going to be events that require much more processing than normal to deal with an unexpected set of circumstances.
If a designer reckons there might be enough processing power to cope then maybe the "run down the lone pedestrian" option gets hard-coded as a would-be damage limitation short cut. And then that gets triggered by some freak set of circumstances when an accident wasn't threatened and the car goes out of its way to run one down.
Another issue is certification. That's going to be a difficult one to test. Will there be a temptation to code to the test? Remind me, who was it who wrote the code for the VW emission control?
"I wonder if DAFNI will use Virtually Enhanced Logistical Machine Analysis in the project?"
It'll use GIGO.
The water company seem to know more or less where their underground assets are round here. Gas and electricity have been rather puzzled.
Good luck with building a reliable database on that.
"That's the thing with patents, they're so easy to get"
Is it too much to hope that the US patent system collapses under its own weight? Perhaps someone could patent something the USPO depends on* and refuse to license it to them.
That would make it prior art, you say? That seems to have very little to do with it.
"I would shed a tear, but the sooner that bollocks Poettering stops being such a clown and takes his abomination systemd with him the better."
I wouldn't and if he actually did split from the Linux community I wouldn't care whether he continued to be a clown or not. But an upvote for the general sentiment.
"Red Hat. Red Hat controls enough of the commercial enterprise Linux market that nearly everyone's applications have to be compatible with them."
They also still support just about the only enterprise Linux without systemd, RHEL6. So if you want to escape the stranglehold of one of Red Hat's least favoured contributions to Linux you can do so by becoming a Red Hat customer. That's irony or something.
"Universal human rights are a product of Enlightenment"
Magna carta (1215) made such a good start at this that it took about 800 years before May managed to remove the concept of due process. The presumption of innocence didn't actually come from there but was introduced, I think from France, also in medieval times (maybe this is a further reason why May is in favour of Brexit - all these foreigners with inconvenient principles of law).
" People creating things as a hobby who just don't quite 'get' all those older principles us grey hairs used to live by and enterprises"
Poettering isn't doing this as a hobby. AFAIK he's employed by Red Hat and Red Hat is certainly big enough to be classed as an enterprise.
"We talk about, say, RHEL 5 or CentOS 7, but each of these versions has sub-versions and they do fall out of support over time.... Now, there's a difference between applying patches for, say, version 6.2 and updating from 6.2 to 6.3: in-version patches will generally not affect applications, but minor version upgrades have a higher risk. "
I don't know about RHEL and derivatives but for Debian regular patching brings it up to the current version number. e.g:
cat /etc/debian_version
7.11
and yet it started out at 7.0.
"All I get is the option to remove it - that's not making it better, is it?"
Don't you have an Edit button alongside the reply?
ElReg comment interface can do strange things, however. I can reply to a post, retaining the title and get it rejected because the title's too long. And no, that isn't because a "Re:" has been added.
"When a car pulls out from a turning on your side of the road, for example, many people will instinctively swerve to avoid it, ignoring oncoming traffic with double the impact speed. "
Depending on the road the oncoming car has the possibility of swerving out the way.
What's quite possible, of course, is that the car pulling out will accelerate and catch them both. I've seen something like that except that it was the car that was pulling away from the lights accelerated towards a car that had, through no fault of the driver's, been stranded in the middle of a cross-roads.
