Posts by Doctor Syntax 42400 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"People don't reboot."
One thing I've noticed on Linux is that after a kernel replacement the machine won't hibernate, it has to be shut down. Perhaps if reboots weren't built into the Windows update the same thing would happen. That would mean users would be forced to reboot but only at a natural break in their work - other than those who'd simply leave the thing running overnight.
"There's no evidence that's the case and the joys of an actual democracy rather than a pretend one"
Really? You can't have been paying attention.
We've had a series of Acts of Parliament attempting to legitimise HMG's spying on us, all ending with the words "Investigative Powers Act": Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014 and most recently Investigatory Powers Act 2016. The reason for these is that the govt activity in this respect keeps getting struck down by courts and the govt then insists on a new Act to legitimise their activities.
The most reliable courts in this respect are the European ones; basically a UK court will ultimately hold Parliament sovereign whilst an EU court will enforce EU legislation and the European Declaration of Human Rights. The only Parliamentary check in recent years has been the Lib Dems in the coalition who held back the govt during that period.
Maybe there's a chance that we could get a Lib Dem govt in a few years time when the backlash against what Brexit eventually does to the economy hits both the current major parties but that's a fairly long shot.
"Chances are the clock in a mechanical timer is an electric one."
Ha. A few weeks ago the clock on the CH boiler had a little problem. It would run until it came to the start of an on period. It's an electric clock so I'd expect it to work unless the mains went off but with mains behind it why should it fail like this? Replaced under warranty and I took the old one apart. It's a battery operated quartz clock with the battery charged, as far as I could see, by a diode & dropper from the mains. Presumably when the battery goes on the blink it doesn't have quite enough voltage to trip the switch.
As a price for the clock not stopping when the mains goes off - I can live with that as it would be just another clock to reset - I have a timer that fails to work at all after a few years service.
"If an S3 region becomes unavailable, S3 itself should route applications to another region that hosts a redundant automatic copy"
That would make things simple for users. Chris Mellor's article points out that S3 stands for Simple Storage Service. So now we know that's simple for Amazon, not for the user.
" Someone complaining they couldn't change their mouse sensitivity?"
From the Razer site:
Razer Synapse is our unified configuration software that allows you to rebind controls or assign macros to any of your Razer peripherals and saves all your settings automatically to the cloud. No more tedious device configurations when you arrive at LAN parties or tourneys, as you can pull them from the cloud, and get owning right away.
As I've said before, patent offices should bear all defendants' costs when stupid patents like this are successfully challenged with compensation for any other costs incurred, for instance by not being able to make use of whatever it was while the case was pending.
Yes, I know the objection, it's taxpayers' money. Well, it's up to the taxpayers to stop it. Make some compensatory savings in the patent office; chuck out the patent examiners who were responsible, claw the money back from them, whatever.
"I got in a minicab recently and asked for Harrow on the Hill station. I got dropped off at North Harrow tube station"
And if you ask to be taken to the Ritz the hotel thinks you might get accidentally taken about a couple of hundred miles out of your way to Brighouse instead.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/londons-ritz-hotel-orders-namesake-yorkshire-ballroom-to-choose-new-name-after-80-years-a3472671.html
"If you want a backup system, it will cost you what the real system cost, again, and a bit more for whatever tech to make it fall over."
There are different degrees of the extent to which you might need to provide resilience. What you describe is a full-fat failover. However, it might be satisfactory to have a DR contract which is much cheaper - you have access to a system which might actually be bigger than your own on which to restore your backups. If your DC is in your normal premises the time to get the DR contract invoked and running might be of the same order as the time taken to get your staff established in whatever temporary offices they've made provision for. OTOH this wouldn't suit a business which has to be running 24/7. But one size doesn't fit all.
"It worked in the XVIII century when the government didn't have tanks and bombers, and soldiers had mostly the same weapons, and artillery was slow to be deployed."
I assume the US gun lobby would be quite happy to be able to restore that balance.
"paralyse the constitutional court (or put your lackeys in it)"
A good safeguard is to have your head of state appoint the court who can then keep the head of government in check. The US's problem is that they vest the same roles in one person.
You may not have noticed but there's also some pretty draconian stuff already in place here whilst this stuff is only at a proposal stage. The ECJ would almost certainly have something to say about the proposal if it got into law. Sadly it's not going to get much of a chance to do much about our situation: even if we do get a ruling before Brexit it will very quickly cease to apply. The ECHR might do something useful as I'm not certain May can wriggle out of that. Actually GDPR is likely to shoot this down as it would effectively make compliance impossible.
I don't see on what basis you dragged the Euro into this as the UK isn't in it and was never likely to have been and is quite irrelevant to encryption and/or back doors.
If you think it's possible to build a back-doored but secure system then why not demonstrate it with a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is test.
Build it. Use it to secure all your personal details, passwords, banking access, everything at an online location which you publish. If it remains secure for a couple of years we might begin to believe you. And the best of luck, sucker.
We can't expect them to handle the complex mathematics on which encryption is based (neither can most of us, I suspect; certainly not me) but maybe we could devise a simpler mathematical model to play with. I suggest a block with a 5-sided hole labelled "Back door" and a 6-sided peg labelled "Security Fit For Internet Banking". The objective is to fit them together.
"Doesn't mean people do though."
Maybe because it's been sold as cheaper than running your own data centre.
When IT try to persuade the business to make provision for this sort of thing it's probably dismissed as IT being profligate again or even IT trying to bump up costs so their own service is still competitive.
"I'm not surprised they haven't finalised the keyboard, which will be the hardest part to get right."
This is being designed by the original Psion designer. The original keyboard was one of the features that earned praise (never having used one I can't confirm its quality). So why should it be a problem to get right?
