Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I look forward to seeing them (1) trying to climb the hill up to our house, especially in the snow (2) trying to right themselves when someone has turned them on their backs.
There's seems to be an assumption in the spec that all routes have footpaths. I live on a lane that's not only steep but also has no footpath.
At present encryption is an added extra to email. It needs to be built in to the protocol and hence into every application involved.
Until that's the case it will always be a minority sport. You can set up your PGP-equipped client and your key-server but how do you get your bank, your insurer and your aunt Mabel to make any use of them when 99.99% of their other correspondents (100% in case of aunt Mabel) have not only no interest but no knowledge?
At the very least we need extensions to SMTP to make it near invisible:
1. Your mail server is also where you hang out your public key.
2. Your server & client nag you until you click the button to generate a key & put it out there.
3. If your correspondent has published a key your client automatically uses it to encrypt outbound mail.
4. If you have generated your own key your client automatically uses it to sign outbound mail.
5. Your client automatically uses the key(s) as appropriate to decrypt and/or check signatures.
As an interim step new versions of S/W would have the features but tolerate their interlocutors not having them or their users not having published keys but the next generation would refuse to deal with unencrypted mail.
Yes, I know it's not as good as privately exchanged keys but it ensures that the infrastructure is there for those who want to go the extra mile. And no it doesn't do much for anybody who just wants to use webmail unless the decryption is built into the browser rather than the webmail server - but then they're not exactly bothered by security anyway. Actually that second point might not be as bad as it seems if the existence of routinely secure mail by other means were to prompt the webmail users to think again.
Or maybe you have a better method of moving to universal encryption in mind.
Years ago we were just APs (analyst-programmers for the youngsters who've never heard the term). We didn't have a methodology, we just talked to the users at different levels in the business to find out what they wanted & did it.
As the team varied in size from 1 to 4 we didn't have separate sysadmins or DBAs, we just did the lot. If you have to administer what you write what you write tends to avoid admin problems.
I can't remember what shape I was then but whatever it wasn't the shape I am now - things have filled out & sagged a bit.
If this is going to be a regular Monday slot I must remember to avoid it.
"Educate"
How? There are thousands of contributors and many thousands of contributions. Would you have time to give individually written feedback educating them.
" and inform."
Well, they've just been informed, haven't they?
"If their skills or approach does not improve then remove them."
How? Remember he doesn't employ them. He doesn't call them into his office for annual reviews which will be sent up to HR.
@ Donkey Molestor X
"this is why you are all being replaced by Indians who do the work for 1/10th the salary and 0/10ths of the ego."
But are probably better than you at starting sentences with capital letters.
Seriously, consider your use of the word "boss". Nobody who submits code is managed by him. Either they do so off their own bat or they're employed by other organisations where he has no managerial role. The number of individuals submitting is far, far greater than any conventional manager would have to deal with. How would you cope with the situation?
"In any professional organisation he'd have been fired for bullying"
I take it that by "professional organisation" you mean a company. In any company the coders would have annual - or even more frequent - reviews. There would be more formal disciplinary approaches. People not meeting standards would eventually cease to be paid.
The Linux kernel team isn't a company. Some contributors may be being paid by various companies to take part but even so, unlike a manager in a company, Linus has no influence on this. The only influence he has is to accept or refuse code according to his standards* and to make clear why code is being refused. With so many contributions coming in he can't simply afford to be deluged with sub-standard code and with such a large and loosely aggregated population of contributors and would-be contributors he needs to get the message out loud and clear.
So how, given the realities of the situation, would you deal with substandard code?
*I have to say I don't agree with all his decisions, lack of raw devices being one.
"And if your software is designed for controlling low-level hardware and therefore requires direct hardware access (which neither WINE nor a VM can provide) AND requires Internet access?"
Buying internet-connected smart fridges is not a good idea. And you're probably out of luck if you're trying to find a W10 driver for it.
" no other browser can do Flash on Linux without incompatibilities and open security holes."
I'm not sure about the incompatibilities but IFAIK Adobe are OS agnostic in their supply of open security holes. However the the Mozilla browser family makes it possible to run Flash on a case-by-case basis so if you want it for some site you're reasonably confident about you can just turn it on as you need it. This is on Linux, of course, I'm not familiar with the situation on Windows.
But for iPlayer I prefer to run get_iplayer which downloads and saves to mp4 which I can the punt over to a box connected to the big screen.
'Officers in the east-of-England city, population 185,000, will grapple with Microsoft's video-chat software in lieu of face-to-face visits.
Meeting people in their homes takes up too much valuable police time, we're told.
...
"It will allow officers, who use a large proportion of their time traveling[sic] across the city to and from appointments, more time to patrol their neighbourhoods."'
Why not just get them to visit whilst they're patrolling the area. They are actually patrolling the area aren't they?
"At least she had fronted up and faced the press. A lot of CEO's woul hide behind some faceless PR Hack."
No, she should have been clearing her desk & leaving a replacement CEO to deal with it. Being the CEO in place before the hack should have been an opportunity for any media interviewer to rip her to shreds the morning after.
Having the head of an organisation accept responsibility & quit after such a balls up is the first step to avoiding the balls up in the first place. It provides a massive incentive to understand what's happening day-to-day and avoid a culture that doesn't pass stuff that should be need-to-know up the line. At worst it eliminates the muppets by Darwinian selection. She has overall responsibility. It's what she's paid for. Accepting that responsibility for what goes wrong goes with the territory. So far her contribution seems to be being in denial of the magnitude of what's gone wrong.
"I think they need to leave her in place right now. She's the lightning rod and drawing the ire and fire."
No, had she taken responsibility & quit she'd have taken some of the heat off the company.
The CEO's job isn't management of avoidable crises, it's avoiding those crises in the first place. By not going she's showing that she doesn't know what her job was or that she doesn't realise that the crises were avoidable which in turn shows that she's not up to her job.
She shouldn't go now for the simple reason that she shouldn't still be in post.
"But base 10 is a dreadful system"
Quite true. The metric enthusiasts mock our old ponds and ounces. But given a pair of scales (just scales, no weights) would you prefer the task of dividing a pound of sugar into 16 ounces or a kilo of sugar into 10 lots of 100gm?
Metric is so nineteenth century.
"The company is also offering "every single external contributor" a free, lifetime licence
Again, they are not obligated to do that."
OTOH unless those external contributors agree to its being closed surely they have an obligation to either continue to provide source for their contributions, assuming they can sensibly disentangle them from the rest of the code or to remove them.
"the Attorney General's advice was very clear. It would be totally irresponsible of government to allow the legal system to dictate to us on matters as important as terrorism. Not only would they tie things in knots very quickly, but they are not elected and answerable to nobody."
Translation: "We're above the law"
"> But the question was about Win10, not Windows Phone.
The question was about phones."
The question was about Windows 10 on phones.
And MS is positioning W10 as being the same on all its platforms so the question was a good one.
Of course in practical terms running Windows on different PC hardware often requires the hardware manufacturers to ensure drivers are available so the same thing would apply with phones so such an idea would still require MS & Sammy to cooperate.
"> Is there any practical reason why Microsoft can't do a deal with all of the major phone suppliers to allow Win10 to be installed as an alternative to Android?
Yes. Each model of phone is unique in having one of a large variety of SoCs complemented by different system components such as screens, audio, buttons, etc. This is not a problem for Android because the source code is available and the integrator can modify as required to suit.
Windows Phone is built by Microsoft to suit a limited set of SoCs"
But the question was about Win10, not Windows Phone. And Windows 10, like their other desk top OSs runs an a wide range of hardware by having installable drivers. If they are really set on providing this platform agnostic user experience than Win10 should surely work the same way. In fact it should be a test case for how well they've done that or whether they've simply applied the same interface over different foundations.
"Why not? It's been working well with Linux for years."
The interfaces differ and that's the layer which needs to respond to form factor. My laptop runs KDE4 with keyboard & mouse. My MythTV box interface is menu based with a remote control. My router has a web interface or alternatively a command line for better customisation.
First there's an assumption that computing is now in a post-PC phase. This is the view from people who sell stuff as opposed to people who use stuff. If you've got a PC that works you use it but tough for the people who want to sell you another. The market is more or less saturated so people flogging PCs and their bundled software have either got to put up with it or offer something new and desirable. In order for it to be desirable they really need to pay attention to the users and I'm not convinced they're doing that.
As to the idea of a unified experience that reminds me of icons on a lot of consumer hardware - designed to be equally incomprehensible in all languages.
There's an implicit assumption here is that if you want to build expertise in a big company you buy in a company that already has that expertise. What about just going out and recruiting people? apart from anything else the people you recruit must have at least a vague preference for working for you. The people you buy in? not necessarily.
"We removed all illegally uploaded pages as soon as we became aware of the breach. Next, we changed all the passwords and increased their encryption to avoid such mishaps in the future. A thorough investigation to make sure the breach does not exist anymore is in progress."
Translation: we bolted the stable door.
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