Posts by Doctor Syntax 42396 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"The thing that made Github great (and will likely keep it going for a while) was the network effect "
The network effect is positive feedback. It accelerates ravel in the current direction. That works both ways. Once the movement elsewhere starts it becomes unstoppable.
"My options for doing that are to drop all addresses in the .uk namespace or to not. I do not get to pick and choose."
And if you're a whimsical US president who decides on a whim to drop all country domain addresses in a country that's upset him today, then that would suit you fine. You just pick and choose that country domain.
What do you propose should happen when we, or our children run out of non-renewables? You realise, don't you, that that's what non-renewable means? Wouldn't it be a kindness to leave a little for them, not necessarily as an energy source, but as feedstock for manufacturing?
Living within our means is a requirement for humanity to continue to have a future on this little blue blob.
"The reason Copeland created this default admin user "ONEDAY" with a predictable, daily password was due to customer demand, Weaver explained, because it made it easier for refrigeration contractors to remotely access and control the systems. "
Ah, yes. Convenience. It will be so convenient for service to remotely access the systems to fix them after they've been so inconveniently shut down by miscreant who found it so convenient to log in remotely to break them.
Convenience beats security every time.
"most people who actually did it will tell you that it was an utterly pointless waste of their life "
I'm just young enough to have missed it and was quite happy it turned out that way. OTOH I have some cousins who were caught up. One had a couple of years in, I think, the merchant navy and one in the RAF (non-flying) The both enjoyed it, the RAF one was involved with the reserves running the local air cadets for most of the rest of his life. Another was in the army and a bit younger. He ended up in the Korean war and was, I think, affected by it for the rest of his life. It doesn't pay to generalise.
"Yes, Derek should have RTFM. Has failing to do so led you into trouble?"
The real trouble starts when the manglement read the sales lies blurb and believe it.
No, take a step back - when the vendor reads their specification and believes it. Works in test is not the same as works in production. Works in production on original platform and works in test on ported platform is not the same as works in production on ported platform.
We're dealing with an essentially chaotic system. The really worrying thing is that sufficient change makes prediction unreliable which the even more frightening aspect. If the northern landmasses get colder does longer snow-lie reduce the Earth's albedo sufficiently to push us into a new ice age*? Or does it stabilise a new, intermediate state? Or oscillate between various states over a period of a few decades?
* AKA ending the current inter-glacial.
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
A long time ago when XML was brand new my client had a client that wanted to send them jobs to process in XML.
Up until that time work might have been received in fairly simple formats, maybe even as simple as CSV. They would take apart the various elements of data and store them as separate columns in a database that probably only needed a single table. They'd accumulate enough jobs to run a production batch. The data that was slated to arrive by XML was more complex than previously. It was going to require more tables. But they wanted to keep the same approach. We were to optimise for familiarity at the expense of complexity.
My solution was to use XSLT. A style sheet would read the XML and write SQL to add the data. XML was new at this time and there were no existing tools for shredding it into a database. This worked fine in a quick PoC. The trouble was that they were planning to send XML documents with op to 1,000 jobs in them. XSLT used the Microsoft DOM and that would require at least one order of magnitude more memory than the XML it was transforming. Testing this at production scale burst the available memory. We also needed to optimise for memory.
The solution to that was to add a SAX parser as a front end to spilt the incoming documents into individual jobs. It needed only to recognise the beginning and end of the element that enclosed the job. Each job could then be wrapped up and sent to the existing code one at a time. It didn't need to recognise anything in between, just shove it in the bag. Actually it recognised one or two other elements which represented housekeeping information and passed those on as well. We were optimising for memory at the expense of a little more complexity.
Realising that there would be more like tike in the future I wrote the SAX parser to use a simple name-space I devised for my client. I added a further step using SAXON to transform the client's name space into my client's name-space. All it needed was a new style sheet for a new client. I was optimising for re-useability at the expense of a little more complexity.
The next problem was that the database design used multi-column keys to stitch the tables together. It wasn't fast enough. I had to re-do it using surrogate keys. The XSLT had to insert strings which would then be substituted by s sort of macro-processor. We were optimising for speed by adding some really complex code. It was also a maintenance problem for my client because the client kept adding more stuff to the jobs that required adding ore tables, more code to handle the loading and, consequently, more code to get the data out again to format the output for production. We were optimising for speed at the expense of complexity.
As expected the client had a new contract. Even from the start it would have to handle a variety of types of job (more were added later). The answer was to chuck out all the detail tables and replace them with a single text column. The style-sheet would simply generate the appropriate format directly from the XML. It only required the selection of the correct style-sheet for the job-type and writing the style sheets was straightforward. The re-usability optimisation meant that only a new style-sheet was needed for the first transform and the SAX parser needed no changes at all. The horrible macro-processing stuff was chucked out as was all the code to compose the production format from the multiple tables. We had optimised for flexibility by making it simpler overall because of, not despite, that extra step at the front to transform the name-space.
TL;DR If you know what to add and what to take out the general-purpose solution can be simpler than that dedicated to a specific task.
The institutions where the research is carried out could take the matters into their own hands. Instead of papers sending a new paper to a journal the author(s) submit it to their libraries. A library then decides on its merit, probably by consulting the department head or maybe the institution has a publishing committee. If it's OKed it goes on the library's website. The journals are cut out completely.
It might cost the libraries to do that but it's offset by the saving on journal subscriptions.
"A questionable journal is one that violates best practices"
With "best practice" being a link to a site that's supposed to tell me about best practices. Blazoned across the bottom of the site's front page is "This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience. Learn more about DOAJ’s privacy policy." with a button to click. It's not even an opt out option. Somehow I lack confidence in their notion of what might constitute best practices.
As it would be using BigCo's logos etc. A copyright writ on the hosting company could have got their attention PDQ. Possibly the fake site could have been linking direct to BigCo to get the logos. In that case there a slightly trickier option to achieve what Zakspade did without hacking the site at all. First set up a new set of logos, ensure all BigCo's sites linked to them and then replace the original logos with messages saything "We're spammers ....". That's trickier in that (a) you have to be sure you've updated all the old links and (b) some eejit in BigCo's marketing won't have got the message and will send out emails with the old URLs.
Even Trump should have been able to predict this.
His thinking (sic) is that by restricting imports to the US (by tariffs) he can encourage home production. It must follow that by restricting imports to China (by sanctions) he can encourage home production there.
The only remaining question is which country will get in gear faster and the answer to that is the country with most effective existing manufacturing economy.
I've just spent about 10 minutes going through the KDE apps I use regularly and a whole lot I don't. All have traditional menu bars, none have hamburger menus. Possibly there are some that default to a hamburger menu that allow for further customisation - some non-KDE apps are like that - in which case I must have forgotten about them. KDE is a rather broad church and there seem to have been a few side hustles so I couldn't be sure of all of them but for day-to-day it's almst entirely the non-KDE stuff which insists on looking like it doesn't belong. Krita, admitedly looks weird but it's aimed at the coloured pencil department.
There was just one miscreant: Kexi. It rsulked because it couldn't find the Breeze icon set. Naughty Kexi.
"Microsoft designed its policy of using staff based behind the Great Firewall to comply with government contracting rules"
The letter but not the spirit it seems. Even so, they should have realised it couldn't possibly be acceptable.
I suppose anyone but Microsoft would have found it galling to be lectured on common sense by Mr Signal Leak with him having the right of it.
I never said there was binary compatibility. Intal and ARM do not use the same instruction set and hence their native binaries are different.
If you have "binary" compatibility being marketed then either you have a dual weight "binary" that eats your download and disk and the OS picks out the correct half to run or you have an emulation layer that eats some of your CPU on one of the architectures. Done properly there's no problem. You install the correct flavour of OS and the rest works without wasting resources on your computer.
I didn't read that line the way you did. I suppose I take a rather old-fashioned dictionary approach to fetish as an obsession. and the reason it is an obsession is because it is common sense. As a result Linux doesn't have problems and doesn't even have to resort to abstraction layers to provide cross-platform portability.
Unix-style OSes have also been ported to many platforms. It's not so much a matter of having control over the full stack, it's a matter of having a stack designed with distinct layers and well defined interfaces.
As a consequence I can run the same distro on an Intel laptop of a Pi and the same apt install command will install the Intel or ARM version of the application and its dependencies as appropriate, I'm not sure Windows could manage that.
"It's hard to predict but even code and concepts from Lyons LEO, ICL.. live on in todays tech world so I would say that provided we don't destroy the planet Windows will live on and evolve rather than die out."
Windows had been built around a single platform. Unix was built with multi-platforming in mind. It's not surprising that OSes with a Unix background (I count Apple's offerings in that) find it easier to adapt.
At some point, "cloud computing" will just be "computing." Or maybe, reaching back further in time, we will call it "data processing" as the nerds from the 1960s did.
When that happens we'll be due for a return of the personal computer. (No, phones and tablets don't count. They're half-arsed thin client that can't even manage a decent keyboard.
For instance, I ought to be able to "lock" my credit using 2FA linked to my phone (by that I don't mean SMS) so even if someone gets their hands on my info that they can't open credit cards in my name and I would need to unlock my credit using my phone before I'm able to do that, or take out a mortgage or whatever.
Then your phone gets stolen...
When your phone becomes your avatar whoever has your phone becomes you.
