Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The fact is, Windows is and always has been a failure that needed re-writing but Microsoft has spent 2 decades trying to cover it up."
Somebody will be along shortly to tell you that you can't say things like that because Windows is wonderful, object-oriented, more modern in design than all these Unix-derived OSs and that drive letters aren't in the least clunky.
Nevertheless you might have a point.
"Corresponding with The Register, Sir David explained how in his experience such bulk hacking powers were necessary for law enforcement purposes on the internet, rather than just being necessary for national security reasons."
His experience clearly doesn't include such legal concepts as the presumption of innocence or due process of law. Bulk surveillance runs counter to both. If we chuck them away just what sort of society are we supposed to be protecting? Not a free one.
"I don't think there's anything wrong with pointing to a previous winning streak of 1500 days of 100% uptime. It's not the same as promising 100% uptime in future."
It's also not the same as continuing to claim 100% uptime after that streak had come to an end even though it might have been a far better record than some others. And then there's always the traditional "small number of customers affected".
"That only happens when senior manglement is capable of looking beyond its own nose."
Been there too. Repeated requests for more memory turned down until an OS upgrade put the system into severe thrashing at which point the vendor was summoned to add more memory PDQ and promises made to be more responsive to requests in future. Yeah, right.
"Of course some argue that the informal, ad hoc approach is perfectly adequate, and that getting too ‘procedural' is more trouble than it's worth. Fair enough if you have a modest and relatively slow-moving IT environment, and a small IT team in which everyone always knows what everyone else is up to."
I once had a gig providing 2 weeks holiday cover in a very small DBA team with a week either side handing over. Most of the 2 weeks was spent on the paperwork to add another 2Gb chunk or two to the database. As far as I know the entire machine was devoted to running the database and the applications running on it. I don't suppose the operations team which had to add the space from the LVMS was any bigger than the DBA team but I never set eyes on them. I don't think that buseiness exists any longer.
"Unfortunately the party that wanted brexit is not in power"
The EU has divided both major parties for decades. Cameron's problem, as with his predecessors, was a bunch of vocal anti-EU MPs who had been threatening to split the party for years. The vote was an attempt to silence them which back-fired.
Now they've got what they ostensibly wanted. The more senior of them have now been given the task of fronting it. Personally I think a few more of them should have been added to the punishment squad. So although there isn't an anti-EU party as such (other than UKIP) the anti-EU faction of the governing party has been given the job of clearing up its own mess which is about as close as you can get.
@Commwsonk
As you seem to realise, there are areas where business and workers' interests align and some where they don't. On the whole EU membership belongs to the former - it has brought businesses and hence employment into the UK which might otherwise have been located elsewhere. To vote against that as an expression of justified dissent against zero hours contracts brings to mind sayings about nose & face.
"What has this do with factories?"
ITYF that the letter from which the article quoted selectively dealt with this issue as well.
Brexit affects industries across the board and Japan has investments in many of them. What Leave voters have managed to ignore is that those investments, and others, were made on the basis of the UK being in the EU. Once the UK is no longer in the EU that is no operative. The question then becomes how closely the UK shadows the way the EU does things and how good an access it gets to the single market (which, of course, is going to mean accepting things like free movement of labour).
The letter is a reminder of this. The irony, for want of a better word, is that some of those investments were in the heartlands of Vote Leave. All those Leavers there who thought they were sticking to the EU are apt to find they were sticking it to themselves.
" I am really sure that all the people which voted Leave in Sunderland will love being shown the door when the Nissan plant there shuts the doors. Because that is _EXACTLY_ what Leave means economically."
That's OK. They'll be able to get seasonal work in Lincolnshire picking potatoes when all the eastern Europeans have been thrown out.
"Like it or not .doc and .xls are the defacto standards and have been for, what, 20 years now."
Apart from the move to .docx & .xlsx these formats have been a moving target, ensuring that users had to keep repurchasing what they'd already bought if they needed to open files of allegedly the same format written by later versions of the S/W.
They never were open standards. Open standards for files are even more important than open source for the applications that use them.
"Seriously, save yourself some time and a lot of trouble and just go get a subscription to Office 365"
No thanks, I'll just stick with standard formats that won't be rendered obsolescent by the software vendor every few years. That really does save time and trouble.
"So the Irish Government are forcing austerity on the public, and refusing to take due taxes from Apple."
The Irish government may have calculated that the Irish economy might benefit more from having Apple operating in the country and maying minimal direct taxes than not operating there at all and paying none.
"As I said nobody is even taking Ireland to task on this (they should be though) - just simply that it's anticompetitive for companies in their own state."
You've almost got it. They're not taking Ireland to task on tax evasion. You've nailed it in one word: anticompetitive. Anticompetitive for companies in another state is state aid and that's exactly what they're being taken to task over. I said "almost" because you still think they should be being taken to task for something different.
"One state is sponsoring tax evasion in other states."
In what way? Apple aren't being accused of evading taxes, not even in Ireland so how can anybody be "sponsoring" them to do so - whatever that might mean?
"State aid" and "tax evasion" have specific meanings in law. You can't successfully accuse someone of one thing when the circumstances that define it don't fit that particular case. You should at least consider the possibility that the EU's lawyers understand the definitions better that you do.
"Think about this with great care. Taxation is unjust, in and of itself."
We've thought about it and as you can see we disagree with you. Perhaps it's you who should do more thinking about it. Two questions to think about:
1. What is it that you can do for yourself as an individual better than you could do as part of the larger community or, to turn it round, what are all the other things that you can't do better for yourself that are better done collectively?
2. For those things that are better done collectively, how do you (as a member of the community) finance them?
"It walks and quacks like state sponsored tax evasion."
That's an oxymoron.
The state says what the tax is. Evasion is the taxpayer failing to pay that. If the state sets the tax at a low level which is then paid there's no evasion. The EU seems happy that the tax as set was paid. They're classifying the low tax rate as (illegal) state aid.
"It's not even a question of the fact that what is going on being massive tax evasion."
Of course not. That wasn't even what the EU were looking at and would have been none of their business. It was a matter of state aid illegal under EU rules. What's odd about this is that the arrangement was in operation for a long time before any investigation started.
"Or should I not be reading techstuff after midnight on a Saturday"
Your problem is that because it contains techy words you think it was written by a fellow tech who should be expected to think logically. It was written by a PR person who probably gets stuck at "think" and for whom "logically" is far beyond reach.
"End users are no longer important MS customers (at least wrt OS sales). System builders are the OS customers that matter, and it's been that way for years."
But system builders don't build systems for the purpose of hoarding them in warehouses - at least they don't intend to. So if MS's antics put potential end users off buying their product they're going to let MS know about it at some stage. Alternatively they might build more chromebooks, or maybe something else. I wonder what Fuschia is going to be aimed at...
"Seems to be the case with Linux, OSX, Android and iOS as well. If this is standard industry practice, why point at Microsoft?"
I can't speak for the rest - and as they are tied to H/W vendors in some degree there could well be other shenanigans in place there - the thing about Linux is that there are distros which range from bleeding edge to conservative. Nobody is forced onto any particular one. Users who want to be beta testers will choose the former, those, like me, who just want to get stuff done will be on the latter. The Microsoft strategy seems to be that if you're a not able to pay for enterprise licensing (and that includes SMBs and professionals) you're a beta tester for those who are.
" Enterprise customers have been immune to all of this; it's the home customers that get the worst of it."
And the SMBs and professionals. The standard line trotted out here by the MS supporters has been that they have to fork out for enterprise licences whether they meet the enterprise volume or not.
"THE prime reason for the public to refresh their PC was for new game support."
Citation needed.
Presumably you're a gamer. I have news for you: many people have not the slightest interest in playing computer games. They do use computers for other stuff, all of which worked better on new hardware during the decades when performance was improving but not reached "good enough". Now they're not going to replace stuff which is good enough and for many phones, tablets and chromebooks are also good enough. And even during those years when PCs were selling well most users neither needed nor bought whatever was then the top end stuff that hardcore gamers bought.
“you cannot control crime through the criminal justice system.”
This is a self-defeating attitude to take. Looking again at that quote "for every 100 crimes committed only 50 are reported to police, even fewer of those reports are recorded and a mere two per cent of crimes are successfully prosecuted."
A serial offender may only be successfully prosecuted for those crimes where he leaves sufficient evidence to support a prosecution. In practical terms the police are justified in concentrating effort on those crimes so a 2% successful prosecution rate may, in effect, be clearing up rather more than 2% of crimes. However to ensure that potentially prosecutable crimes get the attention they deserve there needs to be some form of triage for all reports. The fact that not all reports are recorded is a worry and there probably needs to be a serious review to remove as much administrative burden on reporting as possible so that resources are freed up to triage and then investigate.
For physical crime extending triage would probably require more SOCO resources. For cyber-crime possibly this could be automated which I presume the new national unit is doing but I'd guess there are a lot of police counters who don't know what to do if someone does report such a crime. That needs to be attended to with 100% forwarding of reports.
As to prevention perhaps the biggest step would be re-engineering of email. At one level ransomware is delivered by email and at higher levels social engineering via email seems to be a way in for bigger frauds. Sender authentication needs to be baked into the system so that faked email doesn't get moved through the system. However, given that the PGP underpinnings for digital signing also provide a basis for universal encryption, I can't see TPTB encouraging the uptake of this any time soon.
For crimes where the perpetrators are on UK soil there is a well-established route for getting such powers. Go to a magistrate & ask for a warrant. If there are reasons why this doesn't work for what they need then there's a case for updating. But with all the RIPA stuff I'd have thought that there was over-provision for this.
For international crime there probably are problems. Put simply, a nation's police powers stop at its borders. Any warrant issued in one country doesn't give the police of that country the right to attack a computer in another (the US might have a little difficulty comprehending this). If a police force were to hack a computer in another country without clearance from that country then it would be as much of an offence there as if it were done by anyone else.
OTOH because crime can be so easily committed across national boundaries there needs to be a means of investigating it and bringing cases to trial in an appropriate jurisdiction. To do so within law requires provision in international law. Some such framework needs to be put in place but that need can't be met simply by telling local police to just go ahead as they see fit.
"Google autonomous cars exist, and currently are tootling around with a human ready to take over when the AI gives up."
Which, when you think about it, tells you a good deal about the confidence currently placed in the ability of the AI. When the situation is reversed we can maybe start thinking that autonomous cars might be a good idea.
"The only question is who is responsible for deciding. Apparently Secretary Hart believes only meatbags should be granted divine authority to decide"
How does the machine decision get made? Ultimately, by a programmer or someone directing the programmer. So how do you characterise that programmer or other someone? Or maybe the programmer is directed by a committee so that responsibility for any decision, however bad, doesn't actually fall on any particular person. A committee decision - what could possibly go wrong?
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