Posts by Doctor Syntax 40485 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
"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.
"What's more, the better quality LED's aren't going to need recycling for the fat end of two decades anyway."
Not my experience on a very small sample. A work light with two GU10s in it had one fail in about a year. Nothing wrong with the LEDs but the associated electronics started switching on & off at about 1 Hz. And there's the problem, any LED run from a voltage source more than about 3v is going to need some sort of converter. Even if it were impossible to produce LEDs with a shorter life than the heat death of the universe you'll have no indication that the manufacturer sought to source the lowest possible quality converter components until it goes titsup.
They're driving with EEG kit on their heads, they also have to watch for an LED in peripheral vision and respond to that by pressing a micro-switch. Yup, that simulates normal driving conditions OK.
It's interesting that in Phase 1 there seems to be little difference (maybe none; there were no error indications) between talking to a passenger, talking on a hand-held & talking on a hands-free. If the differences are significant the hands-free was slightly less distracting than the passenger.
"sysvinit, upstart, and even openrc are alternatives to systemd."
The problem is that systemd is gradually being introduced as a requirement for other stuff. Sure in theory you could just fork the other stuff providing "other" is a small integer and "stuff" is a small codebase. As these get bigger this becomes less & less practical.
From my own PoV I came into being a Linux user via a whole lot of other Unix flavours from V7 onwards so, providing what I need to run is available on it it will cause me no great upset to move on to some BSD (and I've got an ISO image downloading right now to evaluate that option). But I can see why Linux users who have become emotionally invested in their preferred operating system will be upset.
"If systemd is so bad ... why hasn't somebody "better" come and written something to replace it?"
Systemd is being shoe-horned in to replace what was there already. And a lot of very experienced users of Linux & other Unices view what was already there as being better. They don't like being given new problems by something put in to fix other problems they don't have.
"You havent won a prize in a lottery you never entered.
There can't be a problem with a ticket for a journey you booked."
But a small proportion of the recipients will have entered the lottery or bought the ticket. If they can't spot the fake they'll reasonably respond and that small level of response makes it worthwhile for the spammer.
"A well-crafted phishing spam email doesn't prey on greed, and doesn't fall under what most computer users would understand as "common" sense. An email which appears to come from your bank and has a link which looks legit (but isn't if you look at the actual URL) can easily deceive those who did not grow up with the internet... which is still most of us."
Unfortunately banks send emails, or have other companies send them on their behalf, which look like well-crafted phishing spam. Only the "From:" uses the bank's domain. They're training their customers to respond to being phished.
"his file suddenly becoming encrypted"
That sounds more like vim than Real Vi.
My first encounter with vim was trying to do something that I'd done many times with vi - clean up a file from the DOS world. And the thing was pre-configured with some set command to hide them. I quickly came to the conclusion that if it could do that it might hide other things I might need to see.
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 12 Jul 11 2013 /etc/alternatives/vi -> /usr/bin/nvi
"Well, 'Volcanic Activity' can be .. a tiny little sulfur fart from between some plates."
I'm not sure the Welsh would appreciate that.
Seriously, I don't think there are any old plate boundaries under Wales. From what I recall of my geology the Welsh slates are related to the closing of the Iapetus & that boundary runs under the Solway & across under Ireland. And the closure took place a long time ago* - Welsh sites gave the Cambrian, Silurian and Ordovician their names.
So the placement of those red blobs is a bit odd.
Allowing for the fact that there was a tremor on or near that line on Boxing Day, 1974.
"If the information is defamatory the site where the information is written and the person who wrote it are surely the ones breaking the law, not a search engine that indexes what is publicly available on the internet?"
The linked report suggests that the plaintiffs went after Google on the right to be forgotten basis. If they only cited Google and not the original page publishers then the court can only rule against Google. Maybe the plaintiffs thought that RTBF was an easier case to prove than libel against the original sites - and maybe less likely to invoke the Streisand effect.
"- You have a change to the service which in theory means the only difference for the average punter is they don't get to change the paper disc displayed in their window. "
In which case you weren't thinking of it from the punter's point of view. Previously the punter had to renew in advance to allow for postage and those "in advances" varied sufficiently to spread the load over a reasonable part of the month. Now the punter doesn't have to so his behaviour changes; if he doesn't have to very likely won't. Even under the old system you probably saw that the normal load actually varied and was higher in the last half of the month. You should have realised that that monthly peak is now going to come in a couple of days at the turn of the month.
"So why has every man and his dog rushed to the website today? Is it vaguely curious types who haven't seen anything in the news about it until today, or people saving up to 20p in bank interest by not taxing their car until it's actually overdue by one day?"
1. Never do today what you can put off doing until tomorrow.
2. Never pay today what you can put of paying until tomorrow.
3. With big fleet owners those 20ps add up. Big companies will have bean counters who can do that addition especially where takes are concerned; if you haven't noticed that you haven't been paying attention recently.
Under the old system people will have allowed a little time to allow the disk to be delivered, now they don't so all those factors come into play. Even under the old system it seems unlikely that renewals would have been distributed anywhere evenly over the month which should have been something of a warning.
I'm sure there must have been someone on the project who worked all this out & probably pointed it out or asked how to scale up for such a peak. And I'm even more sure that the reward would have been to an accusation of being negative.
"The trouble is, you really don't want to get notified every time one of packages that's installed on a typical Linux system is updated in one of the main repos. The signal-to-noise ratio would render such notifications useless."
Why not? There was a batch of Debian updates this morning. Open a terminal, apt-get upgrade, check what it was - latest version of Chromium, OK it, download and install, job done in a few seconds, close terminal. It's not like the monthly Win 7 updates which seem to take hours and need a few reboots along the way.
Agreed servers are another kettle of fish entirely but that's because you'd need to check the updates don't break anything and the occasional kernel upgrade would need a reboot but in general distros aimed at servers have quite conservative attitudes to upgrades.
The whole point of the NHS (pace Sir Humphrey) is to provide medical treatment to patients. The providers are the doctors, nurses, physios, dentists, etc. The jobs of the rest of the staff, every last one of them, have no logical justification other than to support to that function.
To put it another way, if you're admitted to hospital with severe abdominal pain who do you want to decide on your treatment - a doctor or a bean-counter?
It doesn't help that UK financial institutions have a habit of sending email indistinguishable from phishing attempts. "Fill in this survey." "Download our mobile phone app." And all sent by contractors using the contractors' own domains for both the email and the response URLs. These idiots seem either oblivious of the fact that they're training their customers to fall for phishing emails or they just don't care.
"While the US government would say it can't be released because of national security interests, that law doesn't apply in Germany. So now you have a precedent set; it doesn't matter where the data is actually stored (foreign or domestic)."
The precedent won't be set until the appeal process is exhausted. If the appeal goes the Fed's way the precedent will only apply in US law. If the case you envisage were to be raised in Germany it would be tried under German law which might come to a different conclusion.
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