Posts by Doctor Syntax 40432 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"Wow, that is old!"
No it isn't. It's GSM. Before GSM was TACS. And as the guy who had the (TACS) Steel pointed out in another post, before that was System 4 which ran in parallel with TACS for a while being shut down in the early '90s IIRC. I assume before that there must have been 3 previous generations. So much for 2G, 3G etc.
I don't know about the 9210 but the 9110 had a VT100 emulation mode - 80x24 in minuscule characters.
Back in the day I had the box I was minding email me reports from all the overnight runs so in the morning I'd normally check them through to make sure everything was running OK.
The IIUG (Informix user group) was organising a chapter in the UK. They called for interested parties to a meeting with a couple of US members to set up a local committee so I went along. After the meeting we somehow ended up sitting round a table in a pub's beer garden. I opened the phone dialled into the modem in the back of the server (you could get away with such things in those days), fired up elm & rather belatedly ran through the reports. One of the US guys was sitting next to me & could hardly believe it; shouted to the other "Look here. He's DBAing his box on his phone!". Nice to get one over on the Yanks.
"Cloud&Heat believes it can save on data center facility and cooling costs."
Given that their rent is effectively negative and paid up front they're saving more than that.
" Once the installation fee is paid... for a period of fifteen years."
And what if C&H goes permanently titsup in significantly less than 15 years? That's €12,000 down the drain for their landlords - and maybe the German equivalent of the bailiffs knocking at the front door to demand the racks.
Agreed. Fraud, Computer Misuse Act, probably a few others. This didn't get passed far enough up the prosecution food chain. At the very least it should have got him a conviction that would result in him being blocked as a company director along with any other penalties.
You're right in that it comes down to the programmers in the first place. Round the programmers there's an environment with attitudes ranging from "It compiles, ship it" to "Only release when we're sure it's right". And those attitudes can be found in organisations writing closed or open source.
You're also right in saying there are few eyes and brains willing (and, I'd add, able) to review code.
OTOH you say "It's not strange that all discoveries come from professional researches who have an economic incentive in hunting them". Are those professional researchers going to have an easier job with source they can read or with black boxes?
"BT has been elbowing its way back into the consumer mobile space it abandoned in 2002 with the sale of Cellnet, which later became O2."
IIRC Cellnet, originally only part owned by BT, & BT Mobile were merged to become O2 which was then hived off as a separate company for which Telefonica made a takeover bid and won.
It always seemed to me to be a daft move for a major telecoms business to get out of mobile. But understandable; within BT Mobile the rest of BT was known as "Big BT" and it wasn't a term of affection.
What seems to have been forgotten by TPTB is that in a democracy policing must be by consent, at least of the majority. It should also be in accord with the law including the presumption of innocence.
To put it bluntly, if random stop and search mostly affects black inner city youths the more one differs from that demographic the less one is likely to object. As the majority are sufficiently different there is so little objection as to amount to consent.
However, surveillance by mass trawl with no effective oversight puts everyone's privacy at risk. In those circumstances it would be wrong to assume consent and no legal cover by way of PATRIOT or DRIP can substitute for that.
And if I hear "if you have nothing to hide..." being trotted out I take it as a sure sign that the presumption of innocence is being abandoned. Apart from anything else, it would be fair to ask anyone coming out with that one what their bank account, PIN login credentials etc are - after all, if they've nothing to fear why should they hide them?
'Rodoy said she thought the service offered a "trusted, safe storage medium"'
Did the fact that it was someone else's computer not register?
Still, she's getting some benefit of the Streisand effect.
Personally, I'd not think twice about laser eye surgery; I'd think an infinite number of times. No surgery, no contact lenses. You only get one pair of eyes & it's not worth risking damage when specs are so much safer.
"we know what caused this particular megadisaster, and it wasn't a senior manager; as mentioned in the article, it was an inexperienced member of IT staff screwing up a batch job."
And whose responsibility is it to ensure that inexperienced members of staff aren't in a position to make such a big screw-up and to ensure that there are robust fall-backs in place?
The buck stops - has to stop - with senior management. If they want big pay then they should earn it by ensuring that this stuff can't happen. And the best time to do that is before it happens, not after.
"Corprorate penalties are useless, they're just passed on to customers and employees."
Fairly simple solution. The fine must be paid from the senior management bonus fund. And if a particular year's fund isn't big enough, just roll it on.
OK, only fairly simple because it needs a mechanism to stop the fund being inflated by the amount of the fine.
The same could be applied to all those "here's a few quid and we'll just keep keeping on" responses to complainants. Those few quid should come out of staff bonus funds. When they get depleted enough the staff learn to be more careful.
"(b) Government does SFA to prevent overheating and it all collapses in a pile of shit (2007 - Northern Rock)"
This was the result of the brilliant idea of using interest rates to manage inflation and then using a measure on inflation that excluded cost of housing. As if housing was just an insignificant part of household expenses.
"From my reading (I haven't finished CI21C, obviously) Piketty's most stimulating point is that capital/wealth concentrates until war destroys it. If we want to create a society without war we must find other ways to constantly redistribute capital/wealth or else bad things."
If this is what he says then he has a very poor grasp on history and logic.
Firstly there are a number of other ways in which wealth is destroyed - fire, flood, drought, disease, lack of maintenance, spendthrift heirs ... history has seen them all.
Secondly the implication here seems to be that there is something happening that requires such concentrations to be destroyed and that invokes wars to do it so that wars are an inevitable consequence of those concentrations. Even given the curious leap of logic which come up with that requirement the other means of destroying such concentrations doesn't require wars.
Finally, even if we accept the first sentence the second is a non sequitur. Aggressive behaviour in humans appears to be innate. Even with an equitable distribution of wealth we would find things to fight about.
To: randomemailname@randomemailprovider
From: aparentanglosaxonname@woulrbeseo.com
(paraphrased)
We are so expert in everything internet-related that we're the dogs bollocks in SEO. We don't send spam. Just send us money and tell us the site you want promoting because it would be a waste of our time using our vast skills to work it out.
Signed with a distinctly un-Anglo-Saxon name
The strange thing is that one of these landed in my internet /dev/null - AKA Hotmail/Live/Outlook/${this year's favoured brandname} addressed to someone else completely with absolutely nothing in the headers to tell how it got there apart from the fact that it originated from a Hotmail/etc user & possibly their internal routing has gone wrong.
It's worth actually reading what this report is about. ICO have had penalties overturned by a tribunal which is making it difficult for them to proceed on other cases because they're concerned that that could happen again (it's not stated but I expect they're worried about having their budget bled by having costs awarded against them). They're wanting to have the criteria for level of nuisance reduced so they don't get tribunals finding against them in future.
"I expect that they would lose in court,"
Why? If the fakes have FTDI's logo etc on them then it's just the sort of thing trademark legislation is intended to deal with. I don't know about your jurisdiction but in the UK Trading Standards legislation could be used to protect customers.
"Accurate simulators have been helping people learn for a long time. Flying instruction has used these since the 1960s. I would put a medical simulator in the same category.
Gamification means something completely different."
Are you sure? If it works they'll want to claim it.
"Hard working people have had their wages stolen from them by torrenting etc. That is theft."
When someone gets a conviction in court for that I'll believe you.
It's just that when a case gets to court you need to get the law right. And I don't think you have because when it comes to "track down the burglars and prosecute them" I used to be involved in that for a living.
Any way, I hope you're being paid for all your hard work here. But you really should register and get yourself a proper handle. Can I suggest Humpty Dumpty? Then you'll be more convincing when you insist that words mean exactly what you want them to mean.
"You semantic word play is so amusing"
No it isn't semantic word play. It's the law. Go and read up about it. Not hard, is it?
"Theft of movies costs jobs"
Theft of movies would be someone taking the film and not giving it back. You were challenged to find an example of that happening via a download. We're still waiting.
You keep complaining of people being deprived of their rightful dues. It's a fair complaint to make. It's simply that you'd have an easier row to hoe if you made the effort to take notice of what you're being told. And your industry would find it easier to make money if they actually took the trouble to find out what the market wants in terms of accessibility and what it's willing to pay. At present they seem to have an outsize sense of entitlement based on an outsize sense of their own worth.
Disclaimer. I have no interest in watching your industry's product by download or any other means. I haven't read of any film I'd want to see for a long time.
"Oh, so you work for free do you? Out of the goodness of your heart?"
Hello there, astroturfer. You need to brush up your reading skills and maybey your knowledge of the law. The OP simply pointed out that the correct term is copyright INFRINGEMENT.
Theft is the taking away of something in a manner that permanently deprives the rightful owner of it. Theft is a criminal offence and if the theft is reported and the culprit detected could result in a criminal trial. Pursuing the criminal is at the state's expense and, of course, whether and how vigorously that happens would depend on available resources.
You download a copy of something? It's only a copy, the original is still in the possession of its owner. You've infringed the copyright but not committed theft. That, in most of the civilised world, is a civil offence. The copyright owner is entitled to pursue you for damages - at their own expense, initially.
There are remedies for the injured party in copyright infringement. The OP said nothing about working for free. Now you've been told about the differences between theft and infringement go back, read the OP and try to find anything that justifies your comment.
And then consider this. The French have set up an agency to take action on infringement - a civil matter at the state's expense. Who's working for free? The state is working for free on behalf of the copyright owners. If you don't think people should work for free you should complain about that.
"FFS.
- They aren't destroying any hardware.
- They are changing a setting in an EEPROM. You can change it back.
- They have a tool that allows one to change the settings on their chips which you can use to put it back."
If this comes to court I look forward to your giving expert testimony to try to persuade a jury of that.
"Maybe they don't want that reputation to be spoiled by fakes?"
They don't need fakes to do that. They're doing it themselves.
They've engineered a situation in which any device which claims to contain their chip could be a fake which will be bricked. Getting bricked or not seems to be the only test available to the user to determine the good from the bad. That's not a test which will appeal to the user so the safest thing for anyone who's in a position to check what their device claims to contain will simply avoid it if it claims to be theirs.
It matters not that this is reversible if you download some tool from their site (remember that's the site of a manufacturer who has just bricked your gadget) and then find something else on which to run that tool (because unless you've been able to back out the new driver there's no point). All the average punter is going to see is a bricked device. And if it came to court that's more than likely that that's how the jurors would see it.
Then there's Microsoft's POV. How will they react? If the driver is distributed via their upgrade users are likely to consider them responsible. Surely they're going to have to come down on this like a ton of bricks, replace the driver with the old one, probably issue a tool to fix bricked devices, give FTDI a stern talking to and forbid this sort of thing as part of the T&Cs of getting drivers distributed by them.
"The reason maths is incorrectly believed to be not equal to fun is crap teaching and contagion from adults who believe it is not fun."
Non-mathematician's view of maths teaching:
A long explanation of the perfectly obvious situation the teacher is about to render into mathematics.
A sudden flurry of equations being rearranged with maybe a new notation being thrown in on the side. If this were taken a little more slowly it would be perfectly easy to follow it but it's done at such a speed as to appear to be sleight of hand.
The teacher then adopts one of two attitudes. Either the pupil is being wilfully stupid because it's obvious or else extra coaching is required which takes the form of explaining the obvious at even more mind-bending length followed by repeating the conjuring trick at double speed.
Those who can follow the shuffling may go on to become mathematicians, those who can't won't so maths becomes something practised by those who selected for their ability to understand other mathematicians who can apparently write with both hands at the same time. (I'm a biologist so I understand natural selection).
You can repeat this, with appropriate modifications, for any subject you care to name; we can't sense that there are difficulties, let alone what they are, for those whose aptitudes lie elsewhere. Yes, that includes you, and maybe me before I retired, training up users with the new shiny S/W. Lull them to sleep with a long power-point presentation and then lose them by typing all the text & clicking the buttons faster than they can follow because you know it so well by now that you can do it with your eyes closed.
"Others thought that compulsion would put people off. Others challenged this, saying that you could make that argument against teaching anything. Physics can be badly taught - that doesn't mean you should scrap Physics. It was more of an observation about our lack of faith in the education system."
I think success in learning a subject is a function of the ability of a teacher to teach well - which includes a personal enthusiasm - and the aptitude of the pupil. To some extent deficiencies in the one can be made up for by performance of the other. In particular a pupil with sufficient enthusiasm and aptitude may bypass an indifferent teacher if other resources are available. OTOH a pupil who doesn't have an aptitude for the subject is unlikely to make good progress with even the best of teachers. And compulsion is only likely to reinforce negative reactions.
In my case:
Games & PE compulsory. I have spent the remainder of a long life detesting pretty well all sport especially anything which involves groups of people chasing bags of wind around a field.
Latin compulsory. The chief characteristics of the senior Latin master, as far as I could tell, was that he wore a Homburg & was reputed to have been a jazz trumpeter in his youth. Neither seem to have been qualifications for a good Latin teacher but as I was virtually never in his class I don't know if he had additional abilities. Certainly the rest of his department were also-rans. Failed O-level Latin; my knowledge of the subject is mostly botanical.
Science not compulsory beyond Gen Sci but well taught, especially physics and biology. I ended up as a botanist before moving into IT in my forties. But to be fair I arrived in school with an interest in science from way back.
IMV a compulsory core curriculum should be extremely restricted - the clue is in the name - and should be well taught. There need to be extremely compelling arguments for getting any subject into it and simply being a political fad de jour is neither compelling nor an argument.
Outside the core there needs to be a chance for the child to get exposure to other subjects but with freedom to drop the worst and spend more time on the best.
I don't know if things have changed since my time but my experience was that teachers - who presumably had an aptitude in their subject - couldn't grasp where the difficulties lie for those who didn't have it and were thus unable to help. This isn't particularly related to teachers - how many of those here who have to support non-ITers, either in work or in family, really understand what gives those supportees their problems?
In order to teach coding in schools TPTB need
1. To devise a curriculum
2. Recruit potential teachers with an aptitude for coding (and a salary structure that would make teaching as opposed to industry worth their while).
3. Train those potential teachers to teach the subject and to be able to help their pupils a good deal better than many of my teachers helped me.
That isn't something a government can decide to introduce at a whim; it will take time.
Only once that is up and running and proven to be effective as a non-core subject should it be considered as a core subject. And then rejected.
I was with you until you got to the audio player bit. Not on my list.
Back in the day I'd have added a cellular modem complete with VT100 emulation & workable keyboard. My old Nokia Communicator brick did that. And it had rounded corners!
Now I would add Bluetooth with remote SIM - the built-in hands-free phone in my car is much easier on the ear than any hand-portable I've ever used.
"BTW, I don't agree with all the examples given in the second link."
I think there are rather more exceptions than you allow.
Taking the first one, iPhone 3G, once you get past the shape about the only striking resemblance in detail is that they both have an icon of a phone handset on a green background on the bottom left. The shape? They're both rectangles with a similar size & shape with rounded edges. Why? I don't suppose Fanbois & Samdroids have different proportions or sizes of hands & face and people have been rounding off edges at least since the neolithic when they started applying retouch to the edges of flint blades.
Next, the iPad2: different aspect ratios, totally different screen layouts - where's the dock on the Sammy?, bits & pieces in the bezel.
And so on.
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