Posts by Doctor Syntax 42029 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Just release the Linux Kernel under the BSD license."
Easier said than done. There are contributions by thousands of contributors in there. You'd have to find and get the agreement of every single one, including the heirs of those who are now dead.
Maybe not enough thought was given to the license in the first place but that's too late now.
Firstly, imagine you're the leader of a project with a project team of thousands of participants - it varies a bit as people come and go. You don't, either personally or on behalf of a company employ any of them. They're volunteered, wither in their own right or by the companies who do employ them. You don't select them. You don't hire or fire them. You don't do their annual appraisals. You can't give them pay rises or bonuses. You can't have a word with their line managers. In short you have absolutely none of the normal management resources you'd have in a company. How would you manage that situation?
Secondly, although for most of my career bad language wouldn't have been part of normal office life. Towards the end however there were a few sweary youngsters and maybe not so youngsters showing up in development teams. Similar folk also show up here. Is this the norm for people of his generation in development shops now? I don't know, maybe someone out there can tell me. But if it is then you need to remember that what goes onto the public mailing list is the conversation between developers that would normally be verbal within the office. Where the work is distributed over the world the mailing list replaces the air that would carry sound waves in the office.
OTOH, Linus has put together a team that has put together an OS kernel that runs on everything from a mobile phone or a Pi Zero to the top N of the world's supercomputers. And Kieren?
OTOH again, not all his ideas have been great:
He's excoriated RDBMS developers for preferring to deal with raw disk rather than go through the file system. The reason they do this, of course is that plus or minus any buffering in smart interface boards or the drives themselves, they know that when a write call returns the data's on disk. As a sometime DBA that's the way I liked by database engines to work. Eventually, as available memory grew he realised that file system writes could be buffered a long time and the data was at risk if the machine failed in the interim. It provoked a comment about "what moron did that". One might reasonably have asked what moron allowed it in the kernel.
I also had an experience with Linux on a Cyrix board filling the log with messages to the effect that that particular processor didn't support speed throttling. Googling for the error message brought up a comment by Linus that the worst that could happen would that it would write that particular error message in the log. Yes it did. About once every second.
"Why do charities need access to medical data?"
They're probably charities such as http://www.cruk.manchester.ac.uk/
I think it's reasonable that they may require medical data.
But as for data processing firms who can't be bothered to comply with the T&Cs under which they have access, it should be end of contract for good. Once one or two discover the hard way that the T&Cs aren't just collections of black marks on paper or screens the rest will get the message.
'The trouble is, a lot of teen girls (and boys, definitely) don't immediately associate the act of procreation with the end result, so "OMG babies!" is not something that goes through their mind at the time...'
The thought often seems to arrive the following morning along with the hangover. At that point (caution, my knowledge of this is 30+ years old) the rape complaint gets made. The police surgeon offers a morning-after pill. Job done.
Yes, eventually you get cynical but it was one of two patterns commonly observed in case work.
"Turn the table for a moment."
Turn the table again. You're a corporate buyer who's been stung a couple of times with EoL, rollouts of new versions and all the accompanying hassle. What are you going to say to the next salesman trying to flog you more where that came from?
Sure, you're going to be told this is the last Windows ever. What that really means is that bits of it are going to be EoLed every few months. All you can do is delay that for a few months at a time. The rollouts are going to be ongoing.
"The expert group was also clear that there are a number of serious diseases, including certain cancers, which can occur even when drinking within the weekly guideline. Whilst they judge the risks to be low, this means there is no level of regular drinking that can be considered as completely safe in relation to some cancers."
In other words, you can get some diseases even if you don't drink at all.
The magical thinking comes in several forms:
1. Thinking that govts. wouldn't justify the distrust by abusing their holding the keys.
2. Thinking that govts. would be able to secure this huge tempting target.
3. Thinking that this would make use of encryption much less convenient for everyday use (e.g. there are extra steps involved in going to the escrow store each time an encrypted communication is made).
4. Thinking that this doesn't introduce single point of failure for all everyday use, i.e. ecommerce but see:
5. Thinking that who holds the key issues can be resolved for international communication.
6. Thinking that people who are already breaking or planning to break the law are magically going to obey this one.
Source code for strong encryption escaped into the wild a couple of decades ago. That genie is not going back inside the bottle. Whatever legislation is brought to bear on legitimate companies there will always be the ability for sufficiently knowledgeable individuals to roll something out.
You do not inhibit those who are already breaking the law by providing them with more laws to break.
Nobody who cannot grasp this simple fact is has adequate intelligence to create new laws.
" Your agenda (your emplyer's agenda) is showing."
Fair cop.
a) I'm retired, I have no employer to have an employer's agenda but
b) I realised when I came back to it that I'd worded it very badly. Of course Linux installs aren't esoteric (except maybe to the Windows habituated who probably assume there must have been something wrong & they haven't spotted it).
Nevertheless my next OS will be a BSD - Linux is looking less Unix-like than I'm happy with these days.
As to installing W7, over the last few weeks I've had the task of bringing a new W7 laptop up to current, avoiding the undesirable stuff. Trying to find the appropriate patch that would allow the rest of the updates to run before the heat death of the universe (this patch fixes it; no, this patch supersedes that patch; no this new patch supersedes the superseding patch) plus the stuff in the post I was replying to seems reasonably esoteric.
"But I would not inflict Linux on an ordinary user, either family/friends or in a business, would be a support nightmare."
I've got news for you, at least as far as family and friends are concerned.
It isn't.
Being retired I've never had to try installing across an enterprise. Back in the old days, however, I used to run stuff on Unix servers for multiple business users.
"Supposedly, an organization learns from its mistakes."
Supposedly. In real life, often not. Too many organisations seem to have a top layer that doesn't even recognise the existence of mistakes. Others iterate through top management so that any learning that does reach the top is regularly wiped out. And as the big mistakes are those that percolate down they get repeated.
"No, average people still aren't contemplating changing their PC to Linux, no matter how much people here might wish that was true."
Neither are average people who've been forcibly updated to W10 reloading their own W7 nor installing NTLite or DAZ Loader (which I'd never heard of).
Getting back to a nice stable (as far as these things go), spyware-free W7 is going to be every bit an esoteric art as installing Linux or Unix. And with the arrival of monolithic patches from this autumn avoiding spyware whilst remaining current in other respects might be a bit of a problem.
The problem here isn't specifically Excel or Microsoft. It's autocorrect. When it works it's a time saver. When it doesn't it can require considerable effort to get what you want into the data. That can distract whoever's entering the data and lead to other errors elsewhere. We end up with something that's supposed to save time and avoid errors costing more time and introducing more errors than if it hadn't been there. And yet the little blighter insists on elbowing its way in where it's not wanted.
" Nanny Microsoft knows more about what you are trying to do than you do."
It's not just Microsoft. LibreOffice Calc has similar problems - although it might be that they're trying to be bug-compatible with Excel. The real problem is with any dev who decides to try to double-guess what the user's going to do has put a foot on a slope which is far slippier than they ever imagined.
"What I can say is that nobody in their right mind would accept the boilerplate terms that these providers start the negotiations with."
That's what we've been saying. But how many potential customers are big enough to have them changed?
"If you are an affected customer and running stuff critical to your business then I would hope you already had a resiliant plan in place to mitigate something like this, if you haven't then more fool you."
The reality is that such customers will be using cloud because it's supposed to provide that resilience.
"The cloud can facilitate this in an amazing way which having multiple redundant DCs can't - you don't need to worry about invoking DR plans, failing over storage replication, and restarting things, they just keep running."
You read the article? Scale brings its own set of problems.
It seems fairly common for tax authorities to forget that there are multiple countries in the world, each setting their own tax rates. Entity with an option to trade in different countries are essentially buyers in a competitive market. HMG found itself in competition with France in regard to duties on alcohol and tobacco for private purchasers. The US is obviously in competition with other countries for corporation taxes. In both cases we have authorities charging more than the market rate and bleating about it being so unfair when they have no takers.
This is not to say that the Apple situation is right but this is business which they have chosen to take to Ireland because of the market in taxation rates. If, above and beyond that, they're taking the piss then it's a matter for the EU, not the US and the EU are indeed looking at the situation.
"It is their business if it is American companies that are avoiding tax."
From the Grauniad article you referenced:
"During its investigations, the subcommittee found that Apple considers three key subsidiaries, all based in Ireland, to have no tax jurisdiction at all."
Given that these are subsidiaries based in Ireland that makes them Irish. Ireland is not, as far as I'm aware, a US state. It is, however, part of the EU so they are European companies. The EU should get first dibs at looking into this.
"Thumb it down, Hillary voters."
Nothing to do with Hilary voters. This is the EU reviewing the conduct of an EU company (Apple's EU subsidiary) on EU soil (Ireland) and and EU government (Ireland again).
It's reminiscent of US authorities demanding access to data of servers run by another EU company (Microsoft's EU subsidiary) on EU soil (Ireland yet again).
Neither are any of your business. Non-players off the green, please.
